Water Theatre by Lindsay Clarke

daughter stuck their tongues out at one another in affectionate scorn, before Hal grinned at Martin again: “Hal to my friends, all right?” There was an eager, masculine warmth in Hal’s gesture, a desire to be liked, to be approved, that took Martin by surprise. “My daughter likes to pretend I’m a tyrant,” he said.
    â€œYour daughter
knows
you’re a tyrant,” said Marina, “even if you have convinced everybody else you’re a champion of liberty.”
    Martin swallowed and said, “Adam tells me that you and Emmanuel are planning to overthrow the British Empire.”
    After a quick glance between father and son, Hal grinned. “That moth-eaten old lion’s already weak at the knees. What interests us is what comes after it.”
    â€œThe difference between freedom
from
and freedom
for
,” said Emmanuel.
    â€œThat’s right. We’re talking about people being free to make their own future through choice and action. We’re talking about how the world gets changed.”
    Adam pushed his plate away and leant back on his chair. “If you’re trying to get him excited about politics,” he said dryly, “you’ve got an uphill struggle. Martin is a bit of a mystic.”
    â€œIs he now?” Hal cocked a wry eyebrow, more amused than surprised. “Not many of those in Calderbridge.”
    Amazed that his friend should expose him like this, Martin sat excruciated, until Adam prompted him with an inciting smile. “What was it you said about the clouds talking to you? Or was it that they’re waiting for a word from you?”
    â€œThat’s not what I meant.”
    â€œThen what?”
    Martin glowered at the tablecloth. To hear his thoughts distorted this way left him mortified. He could hear the blood in his ears. He thought about the many times he had come out onto the tops alone, relishing the sharp stink of a fox’s den in some abandoned quarry, listening for the curlew’s cry above the cotton grass. Yearning for that kind of freedom now, he looked up with a hot glare in his eyes. “I was talking about the landscape round here and the way it makes me feel.” They were looking at him, waiting for more, and he saw he could not leave it at that. “I mean, politics isn’t the only important thing. Our life goes deeper than that, doesn’t it? Politics always seems to be about what divides us. It sets us against one another. But at root we’re all the same. That’s how I see it, anyway – we’re all part of the natural world, and it’s part of us… maybe the most important, the sanest part.”
    â€œIf only it was that easy,” Adam said without any edge of sarcasm now, “but either it’s too obvious to be worth saying or you really are a mystic, you know. Not so much a Godbotherer by the sound of it, but a sort of nature mystic, right?”
    Watching Martin suffer in his chair, Grace Brigshaw was moved by an intuition. “My guess is that Martin might be a poet,” she said, beginning to collect the plates, “which is a noble and difficult thing to be.”
    â€œIndeed it is,” Emmanuel smiled, reaching to help her, “and a true poet is even as much the enemy of oppression as some of us poor politicians are.”
    â€œ
Do
you write?” Marina asked with new interest.
    â€œI’ve done a few things,” Martin admitted.
    â€œGood for you,” said Hal. “Grace is usually right about people. And there’s nothing wrong with nature for a theme – so long as you hold on to what Emmanuel said. All the Romantic poets knew that. What was that thing Wordsworth wrote for Toussaint? ‘Thou hast left behind powers that will work for thee…’ He faltered there, frowning after memory. “‘Powers that will work for thee…’ How’s it go?”
    When he saw no one else about to help, Martin