A Passionate Man (15 page)

‘Sorry,' Clare said at once. ‘Sorry.' She pressed herself back into her seat. ‘I only ask you things because you look as if you know.'

Archie said with vehemence, ‘I know nothing.'

Clare lived in a narrow Victorian end-of-terrace house, which stood on the edge of a rough little green below the prison. A low wall and a square of paving divided it from the road in front, and a brick path led up to the door. Archie followed Clare, carrying her basket, and waited while she put the key into the lock and turned it and swung the door open to reveal a narrow hall and a narrower table bearing a letter rack and a china dish for keys and an arrangement of dried flowers.

Clare said, ‘Are you sure about tea?'

‘Quite sure. But thank you.'

‘Give my love to Liza.'

‘Of course.'

‘And thank you for the lift.'

He bent and kissed her cheek. She smelled of L'Air du Temps. Liza used to wear it once. Sweet, schoolgirl scent; the scent, Archie had once said teasingly to Liza, of tennis-club socials in Haslemere. Liza had never worn it since. Clare waited until Archie had walked down her path and closed her gate after him, and then she shut the door and walked along the hall to the kitchen which looked, dispiritingly, exactly as she knew it would, since she had been the last person in it.

Archie drove out of Winchester, endeavouring to fix his mind resolutely on nothing at all but the remainder of his professional day. What was to be gained by letting his mind slip back into that turbulence which seemed, all at once, to freeze him and to churn him up? Better by far to think of things he could affect than things he was powerless to affect. Better, but impossible. Impossible to keep his imagination and thoughts in check, just as it would be impossible to go home to Liza and say, Look, I don't know what is the matter with me but it's acute, and can you help? He had never said such a thing to Liza. He would feel, he told himself, that it was letting her down, to saddle her with his misery. What could she do, poor girl? We all survive, he told himself, on a mixture of self-knowledge and self-image, a balancing act of how things are and how we wish they were. But what, oh what, Archie thought, gripping the wheel, is it that I am so ardently wishing for?

He drove the car into the health centre car-park and brought it efficiently to rest in the rectangle marked out by painted lines and ‘Dr Logan' lettered neatly on the tarmac. There was an hour before surgery, an hour with his dictating machine and then letters to consultants about ruptured Achilles tendons and chronic back pain, malfunctioning livers and nasal washes. He spread his hands out across the steering wheel. They might, at that moment, have been the hands of a stranger. Could it be . . . ?

Someone tapped on the driver's window. The pharmacist was mouthing through the glass at him. He wound the window down.

‘Dr Logan. Thank goodness you've come. There's no doctor here, they are all out on call, and Mr Barrett has just been brought in by his daughter. Why she did not take him to hospital I can't imagine. It looks to me like a heart attack. Could you—'

Archie seized his bag from the back seat and flung the door open, almost knocking her over.

‘Coming,' he said. ‘Coming.'

Blessed emergency, blessed Mr Barrett. Leaving the car door swinging wide, Archie leaped out and ran. The pharmacist closed it behind him gently, and then leaned against it for a moment, and dreamed.

‘Thing,' Imogen said commandingly.

She lay on her tummy in the bath in a flotilla of plastic boats and dolls.

‘Look,' Liza said, kneeling by the bath with a soapy sponge. ‘I've been singing to you for hours.'

Imogen rolled over and lay luxuriously on one elbow.

‘Daddy come. Daddy thing.'

‘Daddy is doing surgery.'

‘Thally thing.'

‘Sally has gone home with a headache. I expect you gave her a headache by screaming.'

Imogen considered this. She had screamed at teatime when Liza's appearance from school had put paid to her plan of playing with the telephone while Sally was occupied with the ironing. Once, she had randomly dialled a number and a woman had answered, so now she dialled and dialled, when she thought no-one was noticing, and whispered fiercely, ‘Hello, lady, hello, lady, hello, lady,' into the receiver. She loved it.

‘Not headache,' Imogen said defiantly, rolling over again.

Liza gazed at her perfect little bottom.

‘You are an awful child, Imogen.'

‘Mummy thing.'

Liza got up from her knees.

‘No. No more singing.'

In her skirt pocket lay a letter from Blaise. She had not opened it. Half of her thought she would throw it away unopened; a quarter of her thought she would read it the moment Imogen and Mikey were safely in bed, and the last quarter of her thought she would simply carry it about, unread, like a little phial of magic whose potency vanishes when opened.

Mikey, undressed down to his socks, appeared in the doorway.

‘Daddy's come.'

‘He's doing surgery. He won't be back for hours.'

‘I am back,' Archie said. ‘It wasn't my night. I forgot.'

He stooped to kiss her, and then lower for Imogen, dipping his tie in the bath water.

‘Thing,' Imogen said.

‘Thing yourself,' Archie said, and picked up Mikey. ‘If you're going to be a success with the girls, M. Logan, you must always take your socks off first, not last.'

‘Why?'

‘So as not to look ludicrous. Don't fiddle with your willy.'

Mikey lay back against his father's shoulder, and closed his eyes.

‘Willy likes it.'

‘How was lunch?' Liza said.

‘It was what I thought it would be. He is getting married.'

‘Who?' Mikey said.

‘Grandpa.'

Imogen stood up in the bath and flapped her arms for attention.

‘Out, out, out, out, out—'

‘So?' Liza said.

Archie looked at her.

‘Out!' shouted Imogen.

Liza stooped to lift her out into a bath towel.

Archie said to her back, ‘He was very affectionate.'

‘Of course he was,' Liza said, towelling.

Archie peeled off Mikey's socks and lowered him into the bath.

‘It's cold,' Mikey said. ‘I don't want this doll thing. Or this.' He began to throw toys out of the bath.

‘Stop it!' Liza said.

A purple plastic hippopotamus hit Imogen's leg and fell on to Liza's foot.

‘Ow!' Imogen shrieked. ‘Ow! Ow! Ow!'

‘Shut up. It didn't hurt. If your father was affectionate, why are you looking like that?'

‘Ow,' Imogen sobbed, clutching her leg theatrically.

‘Like what?'

‘Gloomy.'

‘And,' Mikey said, ‘I don't want this stupid crocodile.' He picked it up and hurled it over his shoulder. It struck Archie in the groin.

‘There's no point,' Archie said. ‘There's just no point.'

He stooped over the bath and gripped Mikey's arm.

‘Stop that at once.'

Imogen bounced upright on Liza's knee and made the letter in her pocket crackle faintly.

‘No point in what?'

‘Trying to talk to you. Trying to explain.'

Liza began to pull Imogen's nightie over her head.

‘Bath time isn't the perfect moment, certainly—'

‘Not pink one!' Imogen shouted from inside the folds of brushed cotton. ‘Not pink! Not pink!'

Archie, heedless of his sodden tie and his jacket cuffs, began to soap his son. I'm lonely, he wanted to say to Liza. I'm lonely and I'm ashamed of it. Come back, Liza. Come back where I can reach you.

Mikey squealed.

‘Don't tickle!'

‘I have to. Your feet are so disgusting. Why do you have such disgusting feet?'

‘They are sweet feet,' Mikey said stoutly.

‘Now they are. They weren't two minutes ago.' He turned to look over his shoulder. ‘Liza?'

She was buttoning the last of the buttons up Imogen's back. The nightie, to Imogen's disappointment, was blue.

‘Yes?'

‘Hello.'

She smiled at him. It was a kind smile but not a loving, surrendering smile.

‘Hello.'

‘Forget it,' Archie said. ‘I'm being an ass. Just forget it. I won't mention it again.'

‘I do understand,' Liza said, standing up with Imogen in her arms. ‘It's just the difference between mountains and molehills. That you have to see, I mean.'

Archie turned away and looked down at Mikey.

‘Precisely,' he said. Precisely, he thought. Except that our definitions of mountains and molehills are in exactly opposite proportion to one another.

Mikey reared up out of the bath and put wet arms round his father's neck.

‘I just did a fart,' he said and collapsed into peals of laughter.

Chapter Eight

His first wedding ceremony, Sir Andrew recalled, had been a pawky Scottish business. A red sandstone Glasgow church, a scattering of pursy Logan aunts, an apprehensive collection of Welsh relations of the bride's, bemused by the lack of spontaneity and singing, drizzle, and the burden of the participants' double dose of virginity, had made it a day not to be remembered. He had felt so responsible for it all, so much the engineer, so much the one who must create any happiness or security they might hope for, that he had been quite bowed down by his burdens. What a bridegroom, he thought forty years later, what a grim and corseted prospect for a girl! Poor little Gwyneth. Poor, bewildered Gwyneth, trying to find some path through to me, and I couldn't help her because I didn't know the way myself. All I could do was be loyal and hardworking and let her buy things for the house, things after things: cookers and chairs and vases and rugs and pictures. I hope they comforted her. I hope, he thought, tying a silver-grey tie on the morning of his second wedding, I hope she has forgiven me. If she can see me now, I earnestly hope she will understand why this morning, my second wedding morning, I want to sing and sing. If she has kept her sense of humour in Paradise, perhaps she will only remind me that I can't and never could. She sang like a bird; it was agony for her to hear me try. So I stopped. But today I shall start again. To celebrate this day, I shall open my mouth to myself in my dressing-room mirror, now, and I shall sing ‘Jerusalem'. I shall even sing the second verse twice.

Marina lay in her bath. It was her last bath in this bath. Today she would give up the flat and move in with Sir Andrew until such time as she could find them a pretty house, with a garden; a house, she hoped, somewhere near Campden Hill. On the morning of her wedding to Louis de Breton she had showered in her minute, cardboard-walled apartment, then been married, wedding-breakfasted and carried aboard an aeroplane for the Caribbean, all before eleven in the morning. It was eleven now and she was still in the bath, independent rather than dependent, choosing not chosen, a possessor rather than possessed. The dignity I have this morning, she thought, surveying her painted toe-nails pushing above the bubbles of the bath essence, is the result of the indignity I had that other morning. I so disapprove of marrying for money, but I did it. I should have been punished for it, and I have been rewarded. Here I am, about to dress myself in clothes I have paid for myself to go off and marry my perfect companion. That strikes me as a gorgeous combination. That satisfies me through and through. I am my own mistress where I should be, and his mistress where I should be. If I never have such a bath again, Marina told herself, drawing out the bath plug with her toes, I shall always remember this one with gratitude. I shall always remember that, for twenty minutes, an hour before I married Andrew Logan, I felt that the balance of my life was perfect. I control the things that are natural and proper for me to control, and I am at his disposal for the rest.

‘Thank you,' she said out loud, climbing out of the bath and picking up a towel. ‘Thank you very much indeed. And I mean it. Cross my heart and hope to die, I mean it.'

Because it was the first weekend of the Christmas holidays, Thomas was at home for the wedding. He wore his school suit. It was grey flannel and poorly proportioned and he didn't care for its associations, but he saw, after a term's acquaintance with the proprieties, that it was the correct thing for him to wear to his grandfather's wedding. Without being asked, he added his school tie and black school shoes. He thought Mikey, wearing sandals and a new jersey instead of a jacket, looked very wrong. Imogen, in a plaid smock frock with a white lawn collar, looked like a tartan robin. A tartan robin who would steal the show. Thomas hoped she would not get over-excited and out of control. Boarding school had suggested to him that to be conspicuous was pretty terrible. Imogen, with her penchant for screams and somersaults, could do with a dose of boarding school. Now that he was away from it, Thomas could look at his tie in the mirror with something approaching pride. It was a badge, after all, a badge that separated him from younger boys like Mikey, who had to wear sandals and who could not tie a tie properly. The envy with which Thomas had thought of Mikey while he was at school turned to pity now he was away from it. Mikey was so young, such a pest. When Mikey had said, ‘Anyway, you don't know Mrs de Breton and I do, she gave me a pound,' Thomas had been full of rage, but it had soon turned to pity. In a proper suit and a school tie, he, Thomas, could hold his own against Mikey with Mrs de Breton. He had spoken to her on the phone. She had said, ‘Next to marrying your grandfather, the best thing about my wedding day will be meeting you, Thomas. And you must call me Marina.' He had kept that a secret. After a term at school, he had got good at keeping secrets. His head was full of them. And because he was only nine, his privacy was a consolation to him, a refuge, and not yet a lonely burden.