A Passionate Man (20 page)

‘You must ring me,' Stuart said, ‘if you're at all worried. About anything. It wasn't – a usual relationship.'

‘No.

‘So very close. Most fathers and sons get on, all right. But not like that.'

‘Perhaps,' Liza began and then glanced at Thomas's shaking back, and stopped. She went over and put her arms round him. ‘Darling.'

‘Perhaps,' Stuart said, understanding her.

She looked at him over Thomas's head.

‘It's this quiet, quiet sadness. So out of character.'

Whose quiet sadness? Thomas thought, calming down a little. And what was out of character? Characters were people in plays. Cartoon ones were Mickey Mouse. He snuffled a bit against Liza's shoulder and felt descend upon him the terrible weariness that followed the bouts of weeping.

‘The one thing I've learned from doctoring,' Stuart said, ‘is that the exceptions exceed the rules. A hundredfold. And trauma invariably creates exceptions.'

‘I'm keeping a close watch—'

‘I've no doubt of it, my dear. Just let me know if you notice anything disturbing.'

Thomas disengaged himself and rubbed his face vigorously with his anorak sleeve. Stuart put a brief hand on his head.

‘Well, your father has plenty of people to comfort him, that's for sure.'

‘But the trouble is,' Thomas said, ‘that we're the ones who need comforting. And Marina.'

Marina. At any mention of her name, they felt filled with awe and pity and love. At least, Liza and Thomas did, and so, in his unformed gawky way, did Mikey. She had wanted them all to come to London; she had wanted them all to be as close to Sir Andrew – the last living second of Sir Andrew – as she could get them. So Liza had left Imogen with Sally for the day – ‘Come too!' Imogen had bellowed, but not for long, with Sally there – and they had driven up to London on New Year's Eve and found Marina in the Victoria mansion flat, alone in the sitting room full of towering Edwardian furniture brought down from Scotland.

She did not weep although she had plainly wept earlier. She held each one of them hard, and then Archie and Liza had gone into the big, gaunt bedroom where Sir Andrew lay, in new blue pyjamas, wearing an inscrutable expression, neither happy nor sad, merely absent. Liza had never seen anyone dead before and was a little afraid of that, but very much more afraid of what the sight of his dead father might do to Archie. But it seemed to do very little. He was, after all, more than accustomed to it. He simply stooped and kissed his father's forehead, and so Liza thought she had better do so, too. The flesh was soft and cool; remote but not particularly dead. She took Archie's hand, but he did not grip hers, merely let their palms lie together. He longed for Liza to cry. She did not because it did not seem necessary; there was no reality for her at that actual, real moment of standing by the body, looking down into that familiar, dead face.

When they came out, Marina and the boys were sitting on the sofa close together.

‘Would you like to see Grandpa?' Archie said.

Mikey flung himself back into the sofa cushions.

‘No.'

‘Thomas?'

‘A bit,' Thomas said.

Marina took his hand.

‘From the doorway?'

He nodded. He stood up and Archie took his hand and led him along the passage to the bedroom. Thomas halted in the passage and looked through the open door into the bedroom, and saw his grandfather lying very neatly, with bare feet. The bareness of his feet shocked Thomas deeply. It was improper, rude to leave his feet bare.

He said roughly, ‘He ought to have his slippers on.'

‘Yes,' Archie said. ‘Of course he should.'

Thomas pointed.

‘They're there.'

Archie went across to the chest of drawers, which bore exactly the boxes and brushes he remembered from boyhood, and picked up the slippers. Thomas did not move. Then Archie went over to the bed and fitted the slippers on to his father's feet.

‘There,' he said. ‘Do you think that is more suitable?'

He turned. Thomas had gone. He was back in the sitting room, saying to Mikey in a voice harsh with boasting and bafflement, ‘He only looks asleep.'

Mikey hid his face in the sofa cushions.

Thomas said to Liza in an incompetent whisper, ‘Let's go home. I want to go home.'

‘Of course you should,' Marina said. ‘Of course. But you'll be glad you came.'

Liza began to pick up her handbag and look for Mikey's jacket.

Marina said to Archie, ‘We'll talk tomorrow. It's all under control today.'

‘Yes,' he said. He went out of the sitting room and back to his father. Marina, after a moment, followed him.

‘I rang Maurice Crawford. He came at once. He is doing the certificate.'

Archie was stooping over his father.

‘I'll go,' Marina said. She craved his questions.

‘You don't have to.'

‘But you might want to be alone—'

‘Too late,' he said.

‘He died in my arms,' she said. ‘Literally. He wasn't alone for a split second at the end. Maurice says he will have known nothing, just a stab of pain and then—' She stopped and put her hand to her face. ‘I'm so sorry. I forgot you were a doctor.'

‘Not at all,' Archie said. He straightened up.

‘I said we could talk tomorrow. But of course we could now, if that's what you want—'

‘No,' Archie said. ‘No, thank you.'

‘I don't want to do anything except the way you want it.'

‘Thank you.'

He came up to her and gestured that she should precede him back to the sitting room. She hesitated, briefly overwhelmed with a longing to be comforted, on the very edge of flinging herself into his arms. But nothing whatever in his face or manner invited that.

So she simply said again, ‘I'll do things just the way you want,' and walked ahead of him.

Liza could see they had not communicated. Archie went across to Mikey and lifted him into his arms.

‘Could I have a hamburger?' Mikey whispered urgently. ‘A London one?'

Liza put her arms around Marina.

‘Would you like me to come up and stay? It would be so easy, with the holidays, and Sally. And I'd love to be with you. If you'd like it.'

‘Dear,' Marina said, shaking her head. ‘Dear Liza. I'll tell you the minute I need anyone. There's no-one I'd rather have than you. But there's so much to do just now and I'm best alone for a bit. I'm used to being alone. More used – more used than not.'

They drove home almost in silence, pausing only to buy the boys two monsterburgers in white cardboard boxes, and two drinks in lidded cups as big as buckets. Once or twice, Liza put her hand on Archie's, on the steering wheel, and he gave a cursory pat with his other one, but apart from that she gazed out of the window at the charmless suburbs and then at the lifeless winter landscape that edged the motorway. In the back seat, heartened by food, the boys tussled mildly together and forgot the morning.

Colin Jenkins paid a pastoral visit. He had done this once before, on arrival in place of his mild, scholarly predecessor who had been an honorary canon of the cathedral and had retired into the heart of the city. On that first visit, Liza had made coffee and talked to him a little awkwardly in the sitting room round the bump that was to be Imogen. He had not met Archie until they had coincided at a hospital bed and he had known, with a small resentment, that Archie had had the upper hand at that meeting. Now, emboldened by the passing of time, Colin rather imagined that the ball, at this interview, would be in his court. It was not supremacy over Archie that he wanted, he told himself, but a chance to fulfil his proper role. He, the unbereaved, would be the stronger, the one able to give.

He called in the evening. Archie opened the door wearing jeans and a dark-blue fisherman's jersey. He had no shoes on, only thick white seaman's socks, and the absence of shoes was, for some reason, disconcerting. He led Colin into the sitting room where there was a fire in front of which Nelson lay on his side. Liza was watching television, but, when Colin came in, she got up and switched it off, and there was the sudden extreme silence that the banishment of television leaves.

‘I've called to offer you both my very great sympathy. And to tell you that I shall pray for you. And your father.'

Archie said nothing. Liza guided Colin to a chair.

‘We opened some wine. Will you have some?'

‘Oh no. No, thank you.'

‘Coffee?'

‘I couldn't put you to the trouble,' Colin said. ‘I only came for a moment or two. I thought . . .' He looked at them both, Liza back on the sofa, Archie still standing up. ‘I thought we might say a prayer together.'

‘Good God,' Archie said.

‘It is,' Colin said firmly, as if proffering an unwanted indigestion tablet, ‘very comforting.'

‘I'm sure,' Liza began, ‘for some people—'

‘But you are Christians. You are churchgoers. You are part of the Christian family.'

Liza looked at Archie.

After a pause he said, without much grace, ‘I may be a religious man – I may have a deep religious sense – but I am not at all sure there is a God. Not your God, in any case.'

Colin smiled. It was his smile of patient understanding.

‘But if you are religious, then surely that implies belief in God?'

Archie sat down on the arm of the sofa and put his head in his hands.

‘I don't think—' Liza said.

‘Christ,' Archie shouted across at her, raising his head. ‘Christ! Don't you even know what religion means? Are you so hidebound by your colourless bureaucratic orthodoxy that religion only means to you this frightful modern Church with its doggerel hymns and playschool prayers?' He got up. ‘Religion, Colin, is an awakened sense of some great controlling force, an awareness that above or beyond there is not just a freedom but a fulfilment. And this awareness of power and possibility makes us strive ever onwards, morally, emotionally, spiritually. What on earth has such a concept to do with the dreary pen-pushing second-rate God you want to offer me?'

And he left the room.

Liza said, ‘Oh, Colin, I'm so sorry, you must forgive him. He's terribly upset, he—'

‘Of course,' Colin said, all indulgence. ‘It's only to be expected. Quite understandable. And I gather they were particularly close. It's a hard blow.'

Liza nodded. She was torn between pity for Archie and fury with him, while at the same time realizing that his speech to Colin was the longest and most eloquent he had made since Andrew died.

‘Perhaps,' Colin said, ‘you and I might pray together now. For Archie, as well as for his father?'

Liza looked at him helplessly. What alternative, but to agree, had Archie left her? Colin Jenkins, victorious, smiled and closed his eyes.

‘Oh, God, our Father—'

‘How could you?' Liza cried. ‘How could you be so rude to him?'

Archie shrugged.

‘It was absolutely gratuitous! He's an annoying little man but he meant well, and he was only doing his job!'

‘It was insulting,' Archie said, rolling away from her in bed. ‘It was insulting to be spoken to like that.'

Liza took a deep breath. She was sitting up against the pillows. She folded her hands in front of her on the duvet. The thing to do was to keep very, very calm.

‘I see. So your grief is special and more awful than anyone else's. Just as your love for your father was special and greater than anyone else's. No-one is fit to help you because you are in this special category. Diana Jago comes to see you and you just stare at her. Richard Prior, of all people, comes to see you and you look at him like a dog that's been kicked and will never trust people again.'

Archie lay listening, his eyes open.

‘It's the same old thing, isn't it? It's the same old arrogance. It doesn't occur to you, does it, what hell Marina is going through or what a nightmare she had? You won't lift a finger to comfort her. Oh no. She took away Archie's daddy so she must be punished. How long are you going to keep this up? How long? Because people will get sick of your self-indulgence, and the first of them will be me.'

Archie did not stir. She looked across at his exposed shoulder and the back of his head.

She said in her most Mrs Logan-of-Bradley-Hall-School voice, ‘And the children are not going to the funeral.'

There was silence. It lasted half a minute and then Archie said, ‘Yes, they are.'

‘Mikey and Imogen are too young. And Thomas doesn't want to.'

Archie rolled over.

‘He does.'

‘No,' Liza said. ‘He's had bad dreams ever since you took him in to see Andrew the day he died. He's had them most nights.'

‘He hasn't said anything about them to me—'

‘He probably knows there's little point in saying anything to you just now. It's like living with someone deaf and blind.'

By his sides, Archie's fists were clenched.

‘Have you quite finished?'

‘I think so,' Liza said.

Archie got out of bed.

‘Where are you going?'

‘To the spare room.'

‘I see,' Liza said. ‘Melodrama to the end.'

Dizzy with rage and misery, Archie banged the door behind him. When he opened the spare-room door, he realized he could not sleep there. It was still waiting for Andrew and Marina, the high white pillows piled up, untouched, virgin. Choking with tears, he stumbled downstairs and cast himself on the sitting-room sofa. Alone in their bedroom, Liza slid neatly down under the duvet, turned on her side and cried and cried as if her heart would break. On the landing, crouched against the banisters, Thomas shivered in his pyjamas and listened.