A Passionate Man (30 page)

‘I feel awful about it,' Liza said. Her chest was bursting with the desire to be free of her shame. ‘I'm so sorry. I've been horrible.'

He didn't move. He said, smiling, ‘No, you haven't. It's been a bit rocky for everyone. I've been a pain, too.'

She bent her head. It was as impossible to stop tears as it was to stop breathing. Perhaps she shouldn't stop them, perhaps they would, as they invariably did, bring him over, bring him to her, make him put his arms round her, hold her.

‘Archie,' Liza sobbed.

‘Don't cry,' he said kindly, from across the room.

She put her hands up to her eyes. They smelled of onion. They made the tears worse.

‘I've refused to listen,' Liza said. ‘I've refused to talk. I've belittled you.'

Archie put the paper down.

‘Look,' he said. ‘It doesn't matter. I said so. A lot of the things you said have been quite justified. I'm sorry, too.'

He was still smiling, a kind, impersonal smile.

Liza said, desperate to reach him, ‘And there's Thomas—'

‘I know.'

‘You said we could talk, when we're alone.'

‘Do you really think this is the moment, with you in tears?'

‘Archie!' Liza cried. She ran across the kitchen and flung her arms about him, pressing herself against his side. Against her hip, in his jacket pocket, something snapped sharply.

‘Oh, God,' Liza said. ‘What's that?'

‘It doesn't matter—'

She dropped her arms and put one hand into his pocket. She brought out half a pair of pale tortoiseshell spectacles, broken cleanly across the bridge.

‘Dior,' Liza said. ‘Christian Dior.' She did not look up at Archie. ‘Marina's glasses.'

Neither of them moved. Liza gazed down at the broken spectacles.

‘Why?' said Liza, sick with a sudden new fear. ‘Why should Marina's glasses be in your pocket?'

He lay awake, long after she had exhausted herself into sleep. It wasn't a good sleep, he could tell, because she gasped and drew shuddering little breaths and every so often her feet moved convulsively, or her arms. He had made love to her. She had wanted him to, begged him to, but it had not been a success for either of them and it had left her weeping worse than ever, beside herself with weeping.

It was both strange and horrible. Strange because she had not uttered one angry word, and horrible because she had seemed alien to him, pitiable, but not significant, not central. He had tried not to be rough with her, but then had been afraid that, if he were not rough, if he did not goad himself on with a spur of violence, he would not be able to climax and he did not know how he would deal with her, if that happened. As it was, he had dealt with her very badly. He had hurt her, all over. There was not an inch of her body and mind he had not hurt. He could hardly comprehend the damage he had done.

He stared into the darkness. There was no wind, only the faint far sound of owls and across that, cutting sharply now and then, the imperious scream of a vixen wanting a mate. It must have been three o'clock. Perhaps even later. They had talked until almost one, on and on, round and round.

‘I don't understand,' Liza said over and over again. ‘I don't understand about sex. Not like that. Not when you've known it with love, for making children. Didn't you think of me?'

He had not, while he was with Marina. Before Marina, he had thought of her so much, but then he had been almost a different person then, another man.

‘Don't work it out,' he'd said. ‘Don't even try. There isn't logic, there isn't a pattern. The changes are like the shifting shapes desert sand gets blown into by the wind. I wasn't deliberate. I'm not now. You weren't.'

‘But Marina. Why Marina?'

‘Oh, Liza,' Archie said, shaking his head. ‘You know why Marina. You know that yourself.'

There had been a long, long silence then, which she had broken by saying flatly, ‘You see, I thought she was mine.'

Then she turned on him.

‘Is that why? Is that why you chose her? Because she loved me?'

‘No,' he said truthfully. ‘It never crossed my mind.'

A double betrayal, Liza had said, repeating it again and again, a double betrayal. Both of you. I can't believe it, I can't believe this has happened, but it has, hasn't it, it has.

‘Could I have stopped it? If I'd been looking—'

‘I don't know.'

‘Will you stop it now? Will you? Did you mean to go on, if I hadn't broken her glasses?'

‘Yes,' he said.

‘You meant to keep it secret.'

‘I meant not to tell you.'

‘But now? What now?'

‘I don't know,' he said.

‘But why can't you stop? Why, why—'

‘Because,' he said, ‘I am afraid to.'

I am afraid, he thought now. I am afraid of doing without this, now I have found it. He rolled on to his side, away from Liza, clenching his fists between his thighs. It was a different kind of fear to any he had known before, involving neither heart nor muscle, but more the possible death of the spirit, the loss of light. What had Liza said to him, all those months ago? ‘It's me that's changed.' She did seem to have changed. She had been sharper with him, more impatient, superior. And then tonight none of those things; just abject, pitiful, childlike.

The door opened six inches. A head came round it three feet from the floor.

‘My toadthtool'th gone out—'

Archie raised himself on one elbow.

‘Imo—'

‘It went ping,' Imogen hissed, coming in further.

‘Shhh. You'll wake Mummy.'

He slid out of bed and pushed Imogen out of the room.

‘Where are your pyjamath?' Imogen demanded. She looked at his nakedness with reproof.

‘I'll get a new bulb. Get back into bed.'

He padded down to the kitchen. The vegetables still lay forlornly on the chopping board, the newspaper on the table. Three twenty-five, the clock said inexorably. He found a miniature bulb in the cupboard – Liza did not forget things, run out of things – and carried it upstairs to Imogen. She was not in bed. She stood beside him until the toadstool glowed again in the dark room, and then she climbed in and lay there looking up at him with Liza's face framed in Liza's red curls.

‘Put your pyjamath on,' Imogen said, and turned on her side, plugging in her thumb.

Liza woke in the dawn. There was no natural light, but a yellow glow came in dully from the landing. Someone had not shut the door. Swimming wretchedly to the unwelcome surface, Liza cast a glance at Archie. He was asleep, turned away from her, and for some reason he had put on his only pair of pyjamas, pyjamas they had bought once while staying in a country hotel in Scotland where the lavatory was half a league down public passages from their bedroom. Why on earth had he put them on? Liza could only suppose, pulling her aching body out of bed, that he had put them on to make himself yet more separate from her.

Everything ached, inside and out. She found her dressing gown and the espadrilles she used as slippers and went out on to the landing. A small metal aeroplane lay against a skirting board and over the banisters hung Mikey's school tie, needing mending, spewing a pale woolly tongue of lining out of its split sheath. She picked it up and put it in her dressing-gown pocket and went slowly downstairs, her espadrilles slapping roughly against her heels.

In the kitchen, Nelson stirred in his basket out of token politeness. She filled the kettle and put it on, scraped the cut vegetables into the rubbish bin – oh, my God, she thought in despair, isn't it just typical of me that I should think, even on a morning like this, that I ought to use the bloody things for making stock? – folded up the newspaper and put it, with all the other newspapers whose life was not yet exhausted, in a square willow basket. The half of Marina's spectacles lay under the newspaper. Liza picked it up and ran a finger over the tiny golden CD on the earpiece. Then she carried it across the room and dropped it through the swing lid of the rubbish bin, on to the carrots and the onions. Last night – she stopped. She would not, at this fatal low-ebb hour before life began again, allow herself to think of last night.

But what else was there to think of? Last night stood there, mammoth, immovable, blocking her path to any other thought. What was to be gained by refusing to confront not only the fact that Archie had been to bed with Marina, and that he had wanted it and she had allowed it, but also that Marina had real power, the power of her personality and her sexuality which could make such a difference to Archie? And when those facts had been confronted, Liza thought, spooning China tea into a pot and adding boiling water from the kettle, then she had to go on, resolutely, and face the additional fact that Marina's power did exist and that the power Blaise O'Hanlon had tried to persuade her she had did not. Marina, schooled by her interesting, unsatisfactory upbringing and her peculiar, unhelpful life, had made something of herself. She did not, as Liza did, see herself always comparatively, and mostly at a disadvantage.

She looked down at the teapot. Heavens, what is the matter with me? Why do I go on making tea in teapots with loose tea when my whole world is falling apart? Why am I such a slave to ritual, to the show of things? Why don't I go and find the brandy or break the glass cases of Archie's stuffed fish or, like the girl jilted by a major newspaper editor, hack the crotch out of all his trousers? Because I'm normal, as Dan said; because I'm designed not to rock boats and, when I try, when I have a dash at it and try, I make a complete and utter mess of it and a fool of myself into the bargain. And I end up whining like my sister Clare.

I want to die, Liza thought, staring out of the window at the dull silver line of new morning that lay along the distant hedge of the doomed field. I just want to die. I don't want to bear this, I don't want to live through bearing this. And I don't even yet know what I have to bear, what Archie will do. What had he said last night? ‘Domestic dramas,' he had said at one moment with distaste. ‘These domestic dramas—' She felt quite impotent with angry misery, remembering that. That was what life was, that was what afflicted everyone. How typical of Archie to believe that his life could be lived on a more thrilling level, for higher stakes, how typical of his exaggerated, greedy appetites for things. And yet, and yet, he knew how to lift his eyes from the ground, he wasn't afraid to push forward, he wasn't alarmed by mad people or bad people or sick and revolting people. Had he turned that vast tenderness of his upon Marina? Had he? Oh, the vicious pain of it, if he had.

The sky was now metallic-grey, and life outside the window, in the hedges and the beech trees, was beginning to clear its throat. Liza found her sewing basket, and took Mikey's tie out of her pocket and began, with small, precise stitches, to confine the lining inside the tube again. M. A. Logan, said the name tape on the tie, in red capitals. Michael Andrew Logan. And Thomas was Thomas Andrew Archibald Logan. Liza's father's name was Brian. It had not occurred to either Liza or Archie to christen either of the boys Brian. They were Logan boys; Liza had felt it to be so, wished it to be so. She wanted Andrew back with a sudden hopeless fierceness, she wanted his sweet affection for her, his Scottish uprightness, his sense of order. If he had not died, none of this would have happened. Or would it? Was something stirring deep in Archie long before Andrew had even married Marina? And, at the same time, had she begun to want something more, to spread her wings, to seem different to herself, and to Archie?

She got up, rolling the tie round her hand and returning it to her pocket. Never had the prospect of a day seemed more distasteful to her, more alarming. She had no idea as to how she should behave, no inclination to adopt one kind of attitude rather than another. Feet thumped overhead. She glanced at the clock. Ten to seven; the alarm had gone off, Archie was going to shave. Slowly, slowly, Liza began to open cupboards and drawers and lay the table for breakfast, bowls and spoons and mugs and plates, boxes of cereal, jars of honey and yeast spread. Nelson got out of his basket and shook himself vehemently, slapping his ears against his head like leather sails. A voice came down through the ceiling, a muffled, steady voice. Archie had turned on the weather forecast, in the bathroom, as he always did, so that he should afterwards hear the news. Then there were thumps and a squeal and quick feet tore along the landing. She must go up, before Mikey put on yesterday's socks again, and give him his mended tie. On it went, on and on. Was that what she and Archie had wanted in their several ways, just to get off the treadmill for a while? Oh, shut up, Liza told herself angrily, shut up, shut up, excuses, excuses.

She went out of the kitchen. The quick feet raced back along the landing.

‘Mikey!' Liza shouted. ‘Mikey! I hope you're dressing—'

A grey wool foot appeared between the banister bars.

‘I've lost my tie.'

‘No,' she said. ‘No. I've got it here. I mended it.'

The foot disappeared.

‘Drat you,' Mikey said. ‘Drat you. I didn't want it mended.'

Chapter Sixteen

It seemed to Thomas a perfectly possible plan. Even if it wasn't, he was going to try it, because it had become necessary. You could, it seemed, signal and signal and the right people took no notice, while the wrong ones noticed every detail and made an embarrassing fuss and so drove you to hide the signals. Matron was a wrong person, the number-one wrong person, and Mr Barnes wasn't much better. Kindness, Thomas had decided, was an awful thing to be saddled with. It made you look like a baby and then, on top of that, you had to say thank you for it.