Water Theatre by Lindsay Clarke Page A

quietly picked up the verse:
    â€œâ€˜â€¦air, earth and skies;
    There’s not a breathing of the common wind
    That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
    Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
    And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.’”
    Hal remembered the last two lines, and they declaimed them together, ending in a sudden alliance of laughter as Emmanuel and Grace applauded. Then, “Look,” said Emmanuel, wide-eyed in wonder, pointing to the window as he got up to help clear the plates, “look at the snow.”
    While they had been eating and talking, a blizzard had set in. Swift gusts of snow were blowing and twisting beyond the window.
    â€œIt’s been doing it for ages,” stated Marina, pointedly.
    â€œI’d better go,” Martin offered, “while I still can.”
    â€œI can’t possibly let you go cycling out there,” Grace protested. “Not in this weather.”
    â€œThen you’re stuck here for the night.” Marina shrugged her narrow shoulders at Martin. “Like the rest of us.”
    Nobody had quite been prepared for this, least of all the young man who stood awkwardly by the table, gazing out at the thickening snowfall.
    â€œI think you’d better ring your parents and tell them what’s happening,” said Mrs Brigshaw.
    â€œWe don’t have a phone.”
    â€œAh, I see. Well, is there someone who could get a message to them?”
    â€œMy dad might call in at The Golden Lion. I could leave word there. But, look,” – Martin glance dat Adam – “I think I might just make it back before…”
    â€œYou’d better stay,” Adam said decisively.
    â€œOf course you must,” Hal insisted.
    â€œAfter all,” said Marina, “he can always sleep in the haunted bedroom.”
    Grace sighed at her daughter in exasperation. “Oh don’t be silly, darling!” Then she turned back to Martin: “But you must try to get a message through,” she said. “We can’t have your mother worrying.”
    â€œThe phone’s in here.” Marina smiled at Martin with a kind of rueful sympathy as she opened the door onto a spacious sitting room.
    Only rarely had Martin used a telephone before, and he was amazed to have the privacy of a whole room for the purpose. He saw more crowded bookshelves – so many books in this house, there had been stacks of them along the landing andelsewhere. Now here were hundreds more, along with piles of pamphlets, newspapers and magazines. An African mask studded with cowrie shells glowered down at him with steady malevolence from over the stone arch of the fireplace. Its eye sockets were slotted like a goat’s.
    A pile of three new books lay near the telephone. On top was a translation of a work by Leon Trotsky,
Literature and Revolution
. Opening it at random, Martin read how Communist Man would improve on nature’s work, removing mountains and redirecting the course of rivers until he had rebuilt the earth. Man would become “immeasurably stronger, subtler”, he claimed. The average human type would rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx, and “above this ridge new peaks will rise”.
    In that moment Martin felt, by contrast, subterranean. He was worrying that he had come unprepared for an overnight stay – no pyjamas, no toothbrush, nothing but what he stood up in. But then he had been prepared for nothing here. In this ancient place anything might happen. There might well be ghosts – for the house did feel haunted, but as much by the future as the past, and the shades of both agitated him. And to talk with these people left him straddling a gulf between what was said and what was thought. Nor did he see how their hospitality could ever be repaid. When he tried to imagine taking Adam into his own home, his imagination shuddered and baulked.
    Martin thumbed through the pages of the