Water Theatre Read Free Page A

utterly different from the grimy industrial landscape in which I grew up.
    Then I remembered how I’d lain in bed with Marina once, chaste as a fabled knight, telling her one of those stories to still the rage of her grief. That state of almost innocence possessed me again in all its adolescent sensuality as, with a catch of the heart, I recalled the gift she’d given me later – a painting she’d made of a boy riding on a fox’s back. These frescoes were more expertly done, but the same enchanted imagination was active here.
    In the drawer of a bedside table upstairs I found an English translation of Virgil’s
Aeneid
. Propped against a fat pillow, I opened the pages, and an old sky-blue envelope fell out onto the bed. To my astonishment, I saw that it was addressed to Adam in my own handwriting. Its postmark dated from the late ’50s, at a time when we were both second-year undergraduates. During the bitter January of that year, Adam had suffered a brief episode of nervous breakdown. He’d been kept under supervision in a local mental hospital for a few days before being sent home to recuperate. I’d written this letter to him there, telling him how much he was missed by all his friends and trying to lift his spirits with a satirical account of our doings. Its tone was light but caring, even studiedly so in its preservation of a certain northern reticence. Adam had let me know how much it meant to him at the time, but I was both touched and amazed to discover that he had valued the letter enough to preserve it across all the years between.
    My first thought after reading it through was that this mission to Italy might not be quite as hopeless as I’d feared. Then came a second, less optimistic thought. Hailing as it did from a time when things were still good between us, this letter might simply have been tucked between the pages of a book he’d been reading more than forty years ago and then forgotten. Thinking about it further, I could imagine no other reason why it would have escaped destruction.
    I was about to switch out the lamp when a sweep of headlights brightened the bedroom window and a car approached acrossthe valley, pulling to a halt somewhere close by. Unless the night had bounced the sound from elsewhere there must be another house, just below this one, on the side of the hill. A man and a woman got out of the car, laughing together. I caught a shushing sound, and then something muttered in a whispered exchange that ended in a brief contralto giggle. Perhaps they’d been surprised by the light in Marina’s cottage? A key turned. There was more suppressed laughter before the door closed again and the lock clicked shut. Not long afterwards came the sounds of exuberant sex.
    There are few more isolating experiences than that of lying alone in earshot of loudly rutting strangers. My mind illustrated the event, mingling fantasy and memory, and when at last all three of us were done, I lay in the silence thinking about the previous night in the Camden flat with Gail – how after the row over my decision to go to Italy we had struck an unsatisfactory truce and adjusted our plans to allow for time alone together. But that assignment in Africa had sickened my desire. Our lovemaking had been incomplete. It felt wistful as a fall of snow.
    Later, her eyes grave among the mass of her dishevelled hair, Gail had asked me again not to go.
    â€œI’ve made promises,” I said.
    â€œYou made promises to me.”
    â€œI
will
keep them.”
    â€œThey’re broken already.”
    â€œBut mendable. I’ll make them good.”
    â€œIt’s the way you talk about them,” she said after a time. “The people there, I mean. As if you were still in thrall to them somehow. Particularly Marina.”
    â€œIt’s more years than I can remember since I even saw her!”
    â€œBut you were in love with her once? She was the first, wasn’t