A Passionate Man (2 page)

‘Five stones,' Archie said, sliding the ring on to her finger. ‘For five words: Will you be my wife. Will you?'

‘Oh yes,' Liza said, and then without meaning to, ‘yes
please
.'

It had been like ‘Young Lochinvar'. Fosters, Fenwicks and Musgraves, in the form of Liza's outraged family and friends, unleashed a torrent of disapproval and pressure and objection. Archie put Liza into his car and drove her to Argyllshire where his father had a house on the shore of Loch Fyne, a house without a telephone, and kept Liza there for two rapturous weeks. Then he brought her back south, and married her.

‘When I come home,' he said to her now, his mouth still almost on hers, ‘why don't you get up and wag your tail?'

‘Oh, I do. In my mind. You see, Mikey had just got to this perfectly riveting bit about what a kestrel gives its young for breakfast, and not even the entrance of—'

‘Mice,' Mikey said suddenly. ‘Kestrels eat mice. They like bloody things.'

‘Tho,' said Imogen who had a lisp, ‘do I.'

Archie went round to look at her drawing.

‘Black stars. How very sophisticated.'

Imogen looked at him pityingly.

‘The yellow ith broken.'

‘Of course. I've just been to see Granny Mossop. Not a word of her condition will I breathe to higher authority or it will be hospitalization for her at the double and she will die of a broken heart before her liver does it. Her fucking, bloody daughter—'

‘Archie—'

‘Sorry. Her selfish and heartless daughter brings her garbage from the Star of Agra take-away which her poor old guts can't even begin to cope with. Can you imagine?'

‘I'll make her a milk pud.'

‘You're an angel. But she won't thank you.'

Liza raised her face to him.

‘But you will.'

He bent again.

‘Oh, I will—'

‘Fucking,' said Imogen conversationally to Mikey.

‘Shhh,' he said delightedly.

Sally came out of the utility room with a plastic laundry basket heaped with folded clothes under one arm. Mikey plucked at her as she passed.

‘Did you hear what Daddy said?'

Sally, whose home-life vocabulary was comfortably thick with obscenities, said she had.

Archie said, ‘Sorry, Sal.'

‘It's all the same to me,' Sally said, picking Imogen up deftly with her free arm. ‘What you say about Sharon Vinney.'

Imogen put her arms around Sally's neck.

‘I thaid fucking.'

‘I heard you,' Sally said without interest. ‘And if I hear you say it again, I'll smack your bottom. Come on, bath time.'

‘
Not
hair wash—'

‘Imo,' Archie said, ‘won't you blow me a kiss?'

But the nightmare of probable hair wash had gripped Imogen's mind and she could not hear him. When the door had closed behind them both, Imogen could be heard still pleading urgently as she was carried up the stairs.

‘Even if Sally wasn't a tower of strength,' Liza said, ‘I'd employ her simply to wash Imogen's hair. Archie, your father rang.'

He gave her, at once, his complete attention. As she often remarked to friends, and to her sister Clare who was the only one of her family she ever really saw, she had never known a father and son as close as Archie and Andrew Logan. At first, she had loved it because she had felt taken into a powerful, impregnable male citadel as a precious captive. They had both brooded over her with exciting possessiveness. She had been transformed from being just the third daughter of a Haslemere accountant into someone particular and valuable. But of course, in time, she had grown used to that transformation and now the bond between father and son seemed to her rather more exclusive than inclusive, and to have about it an air of male self-sufficiency which, try as she might, she could not help resenting. She sometimes thought that if Archie had not retained his power to stir her so, she would not have minded his adoration of his father so much.

‘What did he want? Isn't he coming on Sunday?'

‘Oh, he's coming. But he wants to bring someone.'

‘Of course,' Archie said comfortably. ‘Maurice Crawford. It's about the new series—'

‘No,' Liza said, shutting up Mikey's reading book, and rising. ‘It's a woman.'

‘A woman! Good God.'

Liza began collecting up the mugs and plates on the table.

‘She is called Marina de Breton. He sounded quite excited.'

‘Marina de Breton—'

‘Yes.'

‘What a deeply affected name.'

‘She can't help that. She's the widow of a Louisiana cotton king or something.'

‘American!'

‘No,' Liza said. ‘Greek. Or Italian.' She put the mugs on the draining board and came over to Archie. ‘Darling. Don't look so thunderous.'

‘I'm not—'

‘You look,' Mikey said encouragingly, ‘just simply bloody livid.'

‘Dad doesn't
have
women.'

‘You don't know he has this one. He only wants to bring her to lunch, for goodness' sake.'

‘You said he sounded excited—'

‘Archie,' Liza said exasperatedly, ‘don't make so much of so little.'

He would do this, cling obstinately and exaggeratedly to a mere shadow of an idea and make a whole imaginary mountain of it in no time, and it was one of the things about him that drove her mad. Others were his untidiness and the impulsiveness that throbbed in him as steadily and regularly as a second heartbeat. Perhaps he'd inherited all these disordered qualities from his Welsh mother, because Sir Andrew Logan certainly hadn't passed them on.

‘You're being a fool,' Liza said to Archie. Mikey was watching them both with troubled interest. ‘Your father says may he bring one harmless woman to lunch and you behave as if she was a – a—' She broke off, at a loss for an analogy.

‘A wicked witch,' Mikey said, and then added, because his suggestion had fallen into a complete silence, ‘I expect.'

Archie shrugged.

‘Sorry.'

‘Anyway,' Liza said, ‘even if she is someone special, you ought to be pleased. For him, I mean.'

Archie looked at the clock above the cooker.

‘Lord. It's ten to six. Liza, I've a few calls to make after surgery so half-past eight, maybe—'

‘Maybe.'

He took her arm and pulled her to him so that he could kiss her, and while he was doing it, it occurred to Liza that if Sir Andrew really did feel something particular for this de Breton person then she could have Archie back all to herself. Thinking this, she responded to his kiss with enthusiasm.

‘Wonder bird,' he said to her and, stooping to kiss Mikey as he passed, went whistling out to his car.

In the waiting room of the local health centre, a couple of dozen people sat about on green-painted chairs among the rubber plants and the low tables for magazines which were exactly the right height for toddlers to create mayhem on. It was a new health centre, with swooping roofs like a Swiss chalet, and immense windows to the floor which, at night, patients avoided sitting next to. Cork notice boards afforded plenty of space for exhortations about obesity, alcohol abuse, Aids and drug addiction, and, behind sliding panels of pine and glass, the receptionists and pharmacist sat like bank clerks.

When Archie came through, at a run, there was an affectionate murmuring. Dr Logan was always late, always, but then he was never too busy to see you and always had a smile and he was wonderful with children and the old people. The health visitors and district nurses were keenly conscious that the place had a different atmosphere on Dr Logan's days off, less energetic, less, well, less fun, really. He came in for a good deal of tolerant, maternal cluckings, except from the pharmacist who was clever and sharp and divorced and who cherished for him much stronger feelings than those of amused affection, and therefore kept herself aloof from him and was rigorously courteous when they spoke. When Archie and his rush of apology had disappeared through the double doors at the far end of the waiting room, the senior nurse on duty went off after him with quiet officiousness, to check that the slats of his venetian blind were discreetly pulled vertical and that the examining couch was suitably shrouded in a clean, disposable paper sheet.

‘There we are, Doctor. Everything all right?'

He was hastily riffling through the buff packs of patients' notes on his desk.

‘Yes,' he said absently. ‘Thank you.'

‘I've put out a clean roll of towel by the basin. And fresh soap. And I moved the disposable gloves nearer the bin. Seemed more logical.'

‘Don't move things,' Archie pleaded. He looked up at her. She was a suburban little woman who was determined to reform the muddle and mess of this country practice into something altogether more trim.

‘I only thought—'

‘I know.' He flapped some notes at her. ‘Not your fault. But I can only work in chaos. Ask my wife.'

Nurse Dillon allowed herself a little smile to show that she was not in the least disappointed that she had failed to please him. He had mud on his shoes, she noted. She looked at it penetratingly for a second and then went away to summon the first patient.

Archie liked taking surgeries. Long ago, long before Liza, he had had a raven-haired girlfriend who had demanded to know if he was going to be a doctor because he liked bodies. Yes, he said, he did like bodies, and, after a pause, he had added that he particularly liked women's bodies. This had given the raven-haired girlfriend the perfect opening for a great deal of predictable abuse which he came to see was an attempt to make him admit that he liked her body better than any other. He did, for a week or two – or perhaps it was really her lustrous waterfall of black hair that was so weirdly erotic – but then he became repelled by the rapacity of her character and her body ceased to interest him. But the bodies of the sick were another matter, a matter of extraordinary interest: how and why this delicate, complex and individual human machine should develop strains and faults, and how those, in turn, were dependent upon the fuel of personality. He wasn't like his father, who preferred the seclusion of laboratory and operating theatre, and he grew impatient with manuals and books. What he liked was the listening and the touching, the sense of exploration and sometimes discovery that made even the prospect of old Fred Durfield, hobbling in now in a perfect gale of grievance against the arthritis that was gradually doubling him up like a series of human paper clips, an absorbing one.

‘You're no use,' Fred said. ‘Them damn tablets i'n't no use. I'm goin' to die as crippled as my father before me.'

He thumped a transparent brown plastic bottle down on Archie's desk. It was almost full.

‘How many of these have you taken, Fred?'

‘No more'n a couple. Didn't do no good.'

Archie began to explain patiently the mechanics of a course of medicine, knowing that Fred would neither listen to nor heed him. Fred's mother, seventy years before, had fed him her own rural fatalism along with his childhood porridge, a fatalism that ran in a black stream through so many of Archie's villager patients. He wasn't sure, however, that he did not prefer it to the helpless rag-doll surrender to ill health and state medicine of another section of his patients, an almost greedy abandonment of self-sufficiency to an endless cycle of pills and self-neglect. A permanent state of not being quite well became as natural and necessary to them as breathing. Children, on the other hand, could only be what they were, well or ill, and among the middle- and upper-class patients there prevailed an ostensible impatience with ill health, a desire to be seen to make light of anything the matter.

Diana Jago, who occupied the best house in Archie's village, and who now sailed in after Fred Durfield, began by kissing Archie as if they were at a cocktail party and went on to say with throwaway nonchalance, ‘Too boring, but it's my wretched foot, that poisoned thing, simply won't go away,' and then rushed straight on to ask about Archie's children.

Put Diana Jago in hospital, he thought, examining her big and handsome foot, and she'd be demanding at once to know why, in this day and age, the food was still so disgusting.

‘Do you know, I don't think it's poisoned. I think it's gout.'

‘Archie. Don't be
idiotic
. Gout—'

‘Could be. Long-term side effect of the diuretic you take.'

‘But I'm a woman. And I never drink port.'

‘I'm afraid neither have anything to do with it.'

‘Archie,' Diana Jago said firmly, settling her domed velvet hairband more securely on her sleek corn-coloured head, ‘do not be an ass. How do I go home and tell Simon I have
gout
? He will simply crack up. I'll never hear the end of it.'

But she was enchanted at the ludicrousness of the possibility. Archie could hear her at meets – she looked mouth-watering on horseback, particularly in the severe sartorial glamour required for hunting – calling penetratingly across to her friends, ‘You haven't heard, too utterly laughable, but I have gout, I tell you, no, I'm not making it up – it's total agony, I can tell you – but, yes,
gout
—'

He prescribed her Naprosyn, was kissed again, promised to bring Liza to supper soon and exchanged her breezy, attractive presence for a small boy who had fallen off a shed roof.

‘What on earth were you doing up there?'

But the boy, who had been hiding from his stepfather and who knew that further trouble awaited him for doing to his arm whatever he had done, merely looked at the floor and said, ‘Nothing.'