A Passionate Man (23 page)

‘But it wasn't like that. Liza came straight down to the surgery, she came to find you—'

Archie dropped his hands.

‘I'm not blaming Liza.'

‘It seems to me,' Diana said, ‘that you are determined to blame somebody.'

‘Only myself.'

‘Well, it doesn't sound like that.'

‘No,' he said, glancing at her. ‘No, it doesn't, does it? Home you go, Mrs Jago. Enough humouring of impossible men for one afternoon.'

‘You aren't impossible. It's just this damned grief. So unpredictable.'

‘It's more,' Archie said. ‘More than grief. That's what's so damnable, really.'

Diana put her hand on the door.

‘Will you be all right? Are you safe to drive?'

‘Perfectly. I shall go straight back to the health centre and be a good little doctor.'

‘I'm not patronizing you, you know—'

He leaned across and briefly kissed her cheek.

‘I know. You are a kind woman, an excellent friend and a knockout on a horse.'

She got out of the car and closed the door carefully. Archie watched her climb into her own car and start it. She waved to him briefly, put the car into gear, pulled out of the gateway and drove off, her hand involuntarily on her cheek where he had kissed her.

‘More thtory,' Imogen said.

She lay under her flower-patterned duvet with her hair brushed and her thumb poised for plugging in.

‘No,' Liza said. ‘You've had your story. Why do you always ask me things you know I must refuse so that I am forced to say no all the time?' She leaned forward and kissed Imogen's bath-scented cheek. ‘You make me into a nag and it isn't fair because I'm not.'

‘Thall I love you?' Imogen said unfairly, putting her arms round Liza's neck.

‘I'd rather be loved than exploited,' Liza said, thinking not only of Imogen.

‘Kith, kith, kith,' said Imogen, rubbing her face against Liza's and then, after a minimal pause, ‘More thtory.'

‘You're outrageous. No. No more story. I'm going to read to Mikey and then I'm going to telephone Mrs Jago. Let go.'

Imogen released her arms and put her thumb in. Then she turned on her side and closed her eyes and shut Liza out of her life.

‘Sleep well, darling.'

Imogen said nothing.

Mikey was sitting up in bed with his dinosaur book. He had brushed neither his hair nor his teeth, and, despite his bath, still smelled of grey wool and school and socks. He gnashed his teeth at Liza.

‘I'm a pterodactyl.'

‘Must you be?'

‘This is my big jaw. And my wing stuck to my finger.'

‘I'd like to read
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
.'

Mikey flung himself back on his pillow.

‘That's a girls' book.'

‘It most certainly is not.'

‘There are no guns in it.'

‘Nor are there,' Liza said quickly, ‘in dinosaur books.'

Mikey sat up again.

‘But there are teeth.'

‘They didn't all have teeth. Some of them had beaks.'

Mikey seized his book and began to riffle urgently through it.

‘No, no, listen—'

‘Mikey,' Liza said. ‘I spent all today with children. I've had enough of children. I don't know why I bother to argue with you, really I don't. If you won't let me read something civilized, I'm not reading at all.'

‘You read to Imogen,' Mikey said sternly. ‘You read her
Thomas Goes to the Doctor
and you said you would never ever read her that again and you did.'

‘But there's nothing to read in your dinosaur book. It's all pictures, and very bad pictures at that.'

‘You hold the book,' Mikey said, consolidating victory, ‘and I will talk to you about the pictures.'

‘They win all the time,' Liza said on the telephone to Diana Jago. ‘They argue on and on and then they win.'

‘Don't argue back—'

‘I know. I get caught up before I know where I am.'

‘It's the penalty of having clever children. Ours were so dense it was no problem to outwit them. Liza, I wanted to talk to you about this field.'

‘Yes. It's awful. I'd no idea it was happening so fast.'

‘I want to twist your arm,' Diana said. ‘Simon thinks you'd have a great effect if you went to see the Chief Planning Officer in person, as a representative of the family most affected.'

‘It's too late! He's got planning permission—'

‘Outline. The developer has yet to consolidate it. If he gets it, then we can't appeal. We have got to make sure he doesn't.'

‘Why me?' Liza said, shutting her eyes.

‘Because you are pretty and appealing.'

‘Thanks a million!'

‘Will you?'

I'm too tired, Liza wanted to say. I'm too worn down with Archie and the children and Andrew dying. I'm too disappointed in today, I'm full of frustration . . .

‘All right.'

‘Excellent,' Diana said. ‘The Chief Weasel is called Derek Mullins. Quick as you can. Richard's talking to a developer already, the man who built those nasty little objects on the King's Stoke crossroads. And Liza—'

‘Yes,' she said, leaning against the kitchen wall.

‘Don't be too hard on Archie.'

‘What?'

‘He's taken quite a knock—'

‘Don't you start,' Liza cried, springing upright. ‘Don't you start telling me how precious and special his grief is and how there was never a father and son like those two. I don't want to hear another word. All that distinguished their relationship, if you ask me, was that Andrew spoiled Archie rotten!'

‘I didn't so much touch a raw nerve,' Diana said later to Simon over supper, ‘as tread heavily on one. She simply flew at me—'

‘What is this?' Simon said, prodding at his plate.

‘Liver.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Yup.'

‘Will she go and see Mullins?'

‘Reluctantly. Things aren't good there.'

‘They'll be worse if she doesn't go and see Mullins.'

‘I'm not given,' Diana said, ‘to feeling sorry for people. I don't care for it much and I loathe people for being sorry for me. But I am sorry for the Logans. Aren't you?'

Simon put his fork down.

‘Tell you something. If I have to eat this liver, I'll be very sorry for myself indeed.'

‘Suit yourself,' Diana said. ‘I don't care and the dogs'll be thrilled.' She looked at her plate. ‘Do you know, I think you're right. It does look pretty filthy. Shall I make a cheese sandwich?'

Archie came in just before nine and Liza, with a faint air of martyrdom, gave him supper. He thought, as he ate it, that however delicious it was – which it was – it was soured by the resentful dutifulness with which it was seasoned, and that he would very much have preferred to have opened his own tin of soup, which came without much flavour, admittedly, but also without emotional strings.

While he ate his goulash – Liza had not, even on the first day of the new term, forgotten the sour cream – she sat the other side of the kitchen table and flicked through the newspaper. She had a mug of camomile tea. Archie had a glass of wine; Liza had declined one. Archie could not tell her about his encounter with Diana Jago and Liza could not describe her disappointing day nor her powerful desire not to go and see the Chief Planning Officer. Neither of them could mention Marina and speculate about Andrew's will because Archie had said he could face nothing of the kind just now and Liza had declared she could not face Archie's attitude. So he ate and she rustled and each struggled to endure the misery of their several solitudes. The telephone rang as Archie was finishing and a woman from Lower Stoke said her husband had just broken the fish tank while cleaning it out and had cut his hands and was pouring blood like a river. Archie gave her instructions and said he'd be right over.

‘Why can't people ever, ever manage to stay in one piece for a single hour?' Liza said, looking up from the paper.

‘The surprising thing,' Archie said, ‘is that so many of them do. All their blessed lives.'

Then he kissed Liza's hair and went out into the black darkness. She put his plate and glass into the dishwasher, let Nelson out, laid breakfast, retrieved Nelson, toured the ground floor shutting and locking and switching off, and then went upstairs to run herself a bath.

Archie was away for almost an hour. Liza heard his car, and then a familiar sequence of doors and footsteps and then he appeared in their bedroom doorway and looked at her.

‘Was it serious?' she said, glad of something she could ask him.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Yes. He's caught a vein. He's gone into Winchester to be stitched.' He paused. ‘I'm just going to write a letter.'

‘A letter?'

Archie never wrote letters.

‘Yes. A letter. I won't be long.'

‘To Thomas?'

‘No,' Archie said. ‘Not to Thomas. To Marina.'

Liza turned towards him, delighted.

‘Oh!' she cried. ‘Oh, Archie! I'm so glad!'

Chapter Twelve

The flat in Victoria was not an agreeable place to be. Sir Andrew had bought it out of a mild nostalgia for the tall red sandstone houses of his Glasgow youth, because it was on the first floor of such a building. But he had had little aesthetic eye for his surroundings, and, since the building was heavy with competent Edwardian stonework and joinery, he had been satisfied, untroubled by the gaunt height of the rooms and windows. He had observed the solidity with pleasure and was impervious to the atmosphere.

The atmosphere added to Marina's suffering. The flat faced west, so that the only sunlight was the tired low light of late-winter afternoons, which came filtering through gauze curtains with difficulty and fell unenthusiastically upon the surfaces of the heavy, alien furniture that had belonged to her long-dead, never-known parents-in-law. There were almost no pictures, merely a handful of dim sepia drawings of buildings and a mountainous landscape or two, purple with heather. The books were numerous and entirely factual except, Marina discovered, for one Alistair MacLean novel, a paperback, lurking embarrassedly at the end of a shelf of august political biography. She took it out, before Morley's
Life of Gladstone
crushed it utterly, and thought how it added to her sudden isolation to realize that this man, whom she had loved so much, clearly never read fiction. If she hadn't known that, what else had she not known?

She had too much time to speculate about such things; too much time while she simply waited. It was unlike her to wait, unlike her not to act and begin to push life, however wretched it might be, forward again. But she could not act. She attempted to do all kinds of things to force herself to act, like making inventories of all Andrew's possessions, or having an estate agent round to value the flat or even, on one particularly bad day, to buy herself an air ticket back to New York which was clearly, she told herself, what she must do. But she could not bear, in the end, to do any of those things. She could not bear to do anything that seemed to separate her from Andrew. She could tell herself, a thousand times a day, that he was dead and gone, gone for ever, but she simply could not bring herself to perform a deed that proved the reality of that insupportable fact.

She understood, she thought, why Archie was so stone silent. He had not been in touch since the funeral and she guessed that he, too, was in the cold-turkey state of suffering before grief becomes assimilable. Sometimes she talked to Liza on the telephone, but she didn't like to do that too often until she had recovered something of her self-possession. Her pride, as well as her heart, was tormented by grief. So, while she waited for herself, she also waited for Archie. The flat would be his, so would the contents, so would all Sir Andrew's money, and the Scottish cottage she had never seen; she had no doubts as to all that happening, eventually, when she could come to life a little again. In the meantime, all she could manage to do was wait. I'm just waiting, she told herself, over and over again, I'm just waiting for something to happen.

At Bradley Hall School, influenza arrived with the first snow. It was unsatisfactory snow, thin and wet and disobliging about being moulded, but the flu was much more wholehearted. The classrooms thinned out dramatically; Dan Hampole took to his bed with a bottle of whisky, a kettle and a brown paper bag of lemons, and then Mrs West, usually dauntless in the face of child-spread infections, telephoned to say she could not even raise her head from the pillow.

‘I'll do extra,' Liza said to June Hampole. ‘Sally won't mind coming in more often for a while. I'll take some of the English classes.'

The garnet pin still lay in the glove compartment of the car, and Blaise O'Hanlon had as yet been no more than polite and friendly.

‘I'd like to be here more,' Liza said truthfully. ‘I'd like to help. It's sad at home just now.'

June Hampole said it would be a godsend, just for a week or two.

‘Fine,' Archie said that night. ‘Do. We're all better busy, just now.'

More snow fell, snow with greater purpose. The garden at Beeches House disappeared under its uniform white blanket and Imogen became imperious to be out in it for hours at a time, mesmerized by her own tracks and, even more, by the faint arrow-headed ones sketched out by birds. Sally came every day without complaint, and Archie and Liza left, often at the same time in the morning, their car tyres creaking up the hard-packed lane. The house grew tidy and a little impersonal in Liza's long absences so that when she returned to it after dark on the short winter days it felt pleasurably unfamiliar, as if the domestic responsibility was no longer all, heavily, hers. Just now, that suited her. Her romantic imagination, thirsty for relief from Archie and his father's death, was quite taken up in persuading Blaise O'Hanlon that he need not obey her stern instructions to behave himself to the letter. In such a frame of mind, it was a relief to leave so much domestic administration to Sally.