A Passionate Man (13 page)

‘Bosh,' June said.

‘Too true.'

June thought for a moment, chewing, and then she said, ‘Of course, it's very isolated here for a boy used to a city, so I suppose you can't blame him for daydreaming. But I absolutely refuse to believe that Liza Logan encourages him in any way. She might be kind to him but she wouldn't let him take a single liberty. I am quite sure of that.'

‘I think,' Dan said, spooning up his gravy with loud slurps, ‘I think you should ask her if Blaise is being a nuisance. And see if she blushes.'

‘I'll do no such thing! She is a valued member of staff and I wouldn't insult her. But I will keep an eye on Blaise. Can't you take him up to London with you sometimes?'

‘The whole point about London,' Dan said weightily, ‘as you well know, is that nobody knows where I go or what I do. Blaise tagging along would be a nightmare.'

‘Where is he now?' June said suddenly.

‘Gone to the pub. He's a great hit at the pub. Why? Did you fear he'd gone to moon about under Mrs Logan's windows?'

‘Certainly not.'

‘I'd keep an eye,' Dan said, tipping the decanter to pour wine inaccurately into both their glasses. ‘It's your school and your staff and all that, but I'd keep an eye, if I were you. Young men can be so – so
rapacious
.'

On one of her days off school, while Sally oversaw Mikey's homework and put Imogen to bed, and Archie was still doing evening calls, Liza went round to see Diana and Simon Jago. She did not tell Archie she was doing this and she did not yet know what she would say when he discovered she had been, but neither consideration deflected her. Diana Jago was a friend, a true friend, and Simon, inaccessible behind his carapace of English public-school blandness, was always very gallant to her, and she did not doubt her welcome.

The Jagos lived at Stoke Stratton House: pink brick and long sash windows and porticoed porch in the best eighteenth-century tradition. Inside, it was furnished and decorated with expensive confidence, particularly at the windows, which were hung with heavy silks and chintzes under elaborate pelmets of swags and tails. Diana's horsiness gave way indoors to a penchant for great splendour and great whimsicality so that in the drawing room, nestling in the rich folds of the yellow silk curtains, crouched a family of American porcelain frogs as big as small cats, their backs patterned with daisies.

Diana Jago did not take Liza into the drawing room but into a small red sitting room with a sophisticated carpet and an immense fire. In front of this, Simon sat in an armchair with the newspaper and a drink, and, when Liza came in, he got up and said, ‘I say, my reward for coming home early,' and kissed her with a blast of gin and British Rail.

‘She's come to bend our ears,' Diana said. ‘You start on him,' she said to Liza, ‘and I'll get you a glass of wine.'

Liza sat on the club fender.

She said to Simon, ‘It's about Richard Prior and his development.'

‘Ah,' Simon said. ‘Then it depends upon which way my ear is to be bent.'

‘Away from letting him build.'

Simon took a gulp of drink.

‘Good girl.'

‘Heavens,' Liza said. ‘I thought I'd have to argue.'

‘So did we,' Diana said, coming back into the room with a glass of white wine and a dish of peanuts. ‘Here. That do? Liza, I had a smallish dust-up with the divine Archibald in the surgery this morning because he's all in favour, so I assumed you'd be too.'

‘No,' said Liza, very decidedly.

‘Can't understand it,' Simon said. ‘Hybrid piggies keep the Priors more than comfortable and the village is quite big enough as it is. And if he's going to build cottages on the cheap, they'll be frightful to look at. Probably look like the piggeries.'

Liza turned her glass slowly round.

‘I thought you'd be
pro
it for the same reason as Archie is. I see what he means about helping the village young, but I think the price is too high.'

‘It's the thin end of a very nasty wedge,' Diana said, sitting on the arm of Simon's chair. ‘Next thing you know, we'll be a suburb of Winchester. It drives me witless to have to agree with Mrs Betts, but I do. Got a cigarette?'

‘No,' Simon said. ‘Buy your own.'

‘I do. And then you smoke them. Liza, I hate to quarrel with the blessed Doc, but I simply have to. Think who'll get those cottages. Probably that hopeless Durfield boy the Army threw out for drugs, and a dreaded Vinney or two. The whole thing is all too easy for Richard, stuck up there at the farm out of sight, sound and smell.'

‘That's what I said to Archie,' Liza said.

‘Christ,' said Diana, kicking a slumbering Labrador by the fire. ‘If you're going to fart like that, for God's sake go and do it in your basket.'

The dog sighed but did not stir.

Simon said, ‘I fear the whole thing might be rather unpleasant. Feelings running high and so on. Liza, have the other half.'

She shook her head.

‘I must go back and grill a chop.'

‘More than I'll get—'

‘Too right,' Diana said.

Liza stood up.

‘I wish you'd ask us to dinner again soon,' Simon said. ‘It's the only decent food I get. Correction. It's the only food I get.'

‘Take no notice,' Diana said, ushering Liza towards the door. ‘Nobody got a paunch like that on a starvation diet. Give Archie my love. I thought he looked a bit crestfallen this morning.'

When Liza got back, Archie was in the kitchen, on the telephone.

‘Look, darling, it's only until Sunday. We'll see you on Sunday. And if you're in the rugger team and second in French, it really cannot be the end of the world.'

There was silence, and then a faint cheeping began, the far end of the telephone line. Liza mouthed, ‘Thomas?' and made a movement to take the receiver, but Archie motioned her away.

‘What do you mean, picking on you? Oh. Yes, that is rather horrible, but if you are having a dormitory fight, you do get a bit bashed up; it isn't necessarily deliberate. Are you sure? I mean, are you sure someone has taken him and you haven't just lost him? I see. Look, we'll be down on Sunday and we'll see Mr Rigby. Yes. Yes, Mummy is here. All right, darling. Chin up. Bye, Thomas—'

Archie passed the receiver to Liza.

‘Darling? Thomas—'

‘Someone's stolen Blue Rabbit. I know I didn't lose him. He's always on my bed. And then they got me on the dorm floor and pulled my hair and when I went to cry in bed Rabbit wasn't there and they laughed. Mummy,' Thomas said, his voice catching in his throat, ‘I really am trying to bear it, but bits of it, I can't.'

‘Oh, darling—'

‘I've only got one more 10p. If it goes pip-pip, will you ring back?'

‘Thomas, love, we'll be seeing you in three days—'

‘That's so long—'

‘Look. I won't ring you, but we will ring Mr Rigby. How's that?'

‘No!' Thomas shouted.

‘But if you feel bullied—'

‘No! No, you mustn't!'

The telephone pips began, and over them Liza called, ‘Only till Sunday, darling. Only till Sunday!' and heard Thomas saying urgently, ‘Don't go, don't go, don't go—'

She turned to Archie.

‘Should we ring back?'

He opened his mouth to say he thought that ringing Thomas's form master would be more constructive, when the telephone rang again and Liza snatched it up.

‘Thomas?'

‘I'm afraid not,' Sir Andrew said. ‘Only your old pa-in-law.'

‘Andrew!'

‘Do Thomas and I sound so alike?'

‘We've just had Thomas on the telephone in rather a state, and then his money ran out and I thought he had found another ten pence and rung again. How are you?'

‘Extraordinarily well.'

‘I'm so glad. Would you like Archie? He's actually right here.'

Archie came over to the telephone with uncharacteristic reluctance.

‘Dad?'

‘I'm sorry about Thomas. Is it something serious?'

‘Impossible to tell, particularly over the telephone. But unnerving enough.'

‘Of course. Poor little fellow. Archie, I shall be in Winchester next Monday. Could you have lunch with me?'

‘Lunch?' Archie said in amazement.

‘Yes. Lunch. Don't you eat lunch?'

‘Of course I do. But why are you asking me to have lunch with you in Winchester? Why not here?'

‘Archie,' Andrew said patiently. ‘Will you have lunch with me in Winchester on Monday?'

‘Yes,' Archie said. ‘Of course I will—'

‘And you see Thomas on Sunday?'

‘Yes—'

‘Then you will be able to tell me what is the matter and what you have been able to do, won't you? What about the hotel in the Close, about one? I'll see you in the bar.'

‘Dad—' Archie said.

‘Love to Liza. And the little ones. I'll see you on Monday, and I'll write to Thomas.'

Archie put the telephone down and turned to Liza.

‘What is going on?'

She was standing by the table, leaning against it with one hip. She was wearing jeans, a blue shirt and a cream wool jersey, and she looked about sixteen. She put a hand out to Archie.

‘Nothing sinister—'

‘He's getting married. That's it, isn't it? He wants to marry Mrs de Breton and he is taking me out to lunch to tell me so.'

He stopped. Liza waited. After a while, she came away from the table and put her arms round him. He did not respond.

She said gently, ‘Be sensible. What could be better for him? Why should he live alone? Why shouldn't he be in love? It's so unreasonable to be so resentful.'

He looked down at her, but not in the least as if he was seeing what he looked at.

‘It's the unreasonable things,' he said, ‘that wrench your very guts.'

Chapter Seven

‘I spent a good deal of your childhood,' Sir Andrew said, pouring Chablis, ‘trying to get married again. I was lonely, certainly, but I was also convinced that you needed a woman about. A woman to relate to. The trouble was that I couldn't find her.'

Archie, sliding his knife along the backbone of a Dover sole, said nothing.

‘And then, after a while, I stopped trying. I suppose it is the usual human ability to adapt to what one has, or hasn't, got. If you cease to look at women simply as potential wives, and instead look at them as women, the field obviously becomes much broader. Yet, at the same time, the emotions involved become much shallower, rather as talking requires much shallower breathing than singing. For long stretches of time, I simply did not sing.'

He picked up his glass.

‘While you were at home or at university, this state of affairs did not seem significant. Indeed, it was not significant. Though anxious not to be a preoccupation to you, I lived a very satisfactory emotional life with you and through you. As you got older, and started to manifest characteristics quite unlike my own, that satisfaction grew deeper. But nobody can, or should, live vicariously through another, particularly not parents. When you fell in love and married, it was with my absolute blessing, but for all that, it reminded me, for the first time in a long time, that I had my own life to live. It was not easy. I was out of the habit.'

He paused, took a swallow of wine and then said, ‘Are you going to sit there in silence, chewing, until the end of lunch?'

Archie sighed.

‘I am listening.'

‘Good. Do you have any comments so far? Does what I am saying seem to ring true and to chime with what you remember?'

‘I don't remember any women,' Archie said.

The waiter, who had recognized Sir Andrew, came up with an air of elaborate discretion and put a dish of potatoes at his elbow. Sir Andrew said, ‘Thank you,' and then to Archie, as if the waiter had already moved away, ‘I seldom brought any home. If I'd met a woman that I had loved enough to propose to, I should have.'

‘And now you have.'

‘And now I have.'

Archie moved his glass of water slightly so that the ice cubes in it clattered together.

‘You have never talked like this before. Not remotely. You have never talked about feelings.'

‘I know.'

‘I thought that you didn't like it. I thought you were contemptuous of people who talked about their feelings.'

‘I am contemptuous,' Sir Andrew said, ‘of people who can't face bearing painful feelings and try to offload them on to others. And I think that the people one discusses one's feelings with should be few, and dear, and the occasions upon which one does it, seldom.'

‘And this is one.'

‘Yes. And you are one of the two people in my life that I would, or could, talk to in this way. The other is, of course, Marina.'

‘Of course.'

Sir Andrew pushed the dish of potatoes across to Archie.

‘I want you to understand me, Archie. I want you to understand both the kind of life I have lived and the kind of life I have found. And, in return, I very much want to understand you. I want to understand your reluctance.'

‘I'm not sure,' Archie said, ‘that I understand it myself.'

‘Sometimes, you know,' his father said with this astounding new ease of his, ‘I was so envious of you and Liza. Not of you having her, love her as I do, but of what you had together. Now I am on the brink of such a relationship myself. Do you think that somehow wrong?'