Water Theatre Read Free

at first, but a closer look showed them to be more recent, handled in an archaicstyle that somehow finessed pastiche and found simplicity. The Marina I’d known would have lacked patience with such obvious narrative intent. Yet if she hadn’t painted these pictures, who had?
    The boy smiled up at me and crossed the room towards the fireplace, where he pointed out a picture unrelated to the rest. A cheap, unframed reproduction, printed on board, it was a head-and-shoulders portrait of a jug-eared monk with hooded eyes and an unsatisfactory beard.
    â€œSan Francesco,” he announced. I took in the golden nimbus around the tonsured head. The local saint, of course, St Francis of Assisi. Now the boy was pointing at his own chest. “Franco. Franco Gamboni.”
    I nodded, tapped my own chest. “Martin. Martin Crowther.” Neither sound meant much to him, so I tried a variation – “Martino” – which elicited a nod. I opened a door onto a little kitchen. “Well, Franco Gamboni,” I said, “I can’t think there’s a restaurant in this village of yours, so let’s see if we can get some grub together.”
    Remembering forgotten instructions, the boy drew in his breath, gestured widely across the paved floor. “
Attenzione, ci sono scorpioni!
”
    â€œ
Ah, grazie, grazie
.”
    â€œ
Prego
.” He stood, smiling, with both hands clasped on top of his head, swaying from side to side. Then he turned and ran back up the track through the gloom.
    Generations of olive growers must have scratched a living here before the house fell empty and Marina purchased it for next to nothing. She had intended to use it as a holiday cottage, but once life in England became intolerable to her, she had settled here in Fontanalba, living simply and cheaply, painting outdoors, content to be alone with her child. Then, much later, when he had nowhere else to turn, her brother Adam came to join her there.
    The chimney corner of the frescoed living room had become a small study alcove. Beside it, an upright piano stood against one wall, its panels inlaid with fretwork patterns of foliage and masks. The trellised backs of two chairs were painted in peeling gold. A blue throw covered an old couch. On the desk in the alcove stood a paraffin lamp, a portable typewriter, a pencil case with a brass hasp and three books.
A New Pronouncing Dictionary of the English & Italian Languages
had been published in 1908 when, according to the table on page iii, a twenty-lira piece had been a gold coin worth fifteen shillings and ten pence farthing. Next to it leant a
Rough Guide to Italy
. It occurred to me that an entire civilization had vanished down the gap between those two volumes. Beside them lay the only other reading matter in the room – a skimpily bound book with the title
Umbrian Excursions
stamped on its spine.
    The alcove would have been the obvious spot for a telephone if Marina had not refused to have one installed. Thinking of this, I took out my mobile phone and was about to dial Gail. But I was tired and fractious, the conversation would too easily go wrong, so I put the phone away again, knowing the call might now prove all the harder when I came to make it.
    In the small kitchen at the back of the house I found the wine rack and enough bits and pieces for a scratch meal. I sat puzzling over those anachronistic frescoes as I ate. Surely monks and angels had no role in Marina’s universe? If she had rejected everything else about her father, his atheism had gone unquestioned. Like oxygen or sex, it was a fact of life with which it made no sense to quarrel. So what were these paintings doing here along with an image of St Francis? They reminded me of the illustrations to the copy of Grimm’s
Fairy Tales
that my mother had bought for me when I was small. In the stillness of the room I recalled the smell of that book and the way its pictures were like windows on a world