A Passionate Man (27 page)

‘Did she understand? Has she forgiven you?'

‘Oh yes,' he said, throwing his shirt down on the floor. ‘She's forgiven me.'

Liza wriggled down into bed again.

‘You don't deserve it.'

‘I know.'

‘Thank God that's over, then,' Liza said, half muffled by her pillows.

‘And you? Did you have a good day?'

‘Oh yes,' she said. She sounded as if she were smiling. I'm a swine, Archie thought, I'm an utter, bloody swine.

‘I'm just going to have a shower,' he said.

‘Leave it. Leave it until the morning.'

‘No. No, I can't do that. You go back to sleep.'

Mikey's speedboats still lay cluttered round the bath plug. Archie stepped in among them, and turned on the shower, hurtling cold needles, deliberately too cold. He wanted to sing and to weep. Whatever he had done, whatever came now, he had never felt so absolutely alive before.

In the morning, Liza did not seem much interested in the details. She wanted to know how Marina had looked and if she had reprimanded Archie, but she did not want to know how he had explained himself. Archie told her that he thought Marina had been wearing trousers and a pale jersey and, as far as he could recall, a checked jacket, but he wasn't sure.

‘And ear-rings?' Mikey said, eating Coco-Pops.

Archie couldn't remember. He did remember about the spectacles, but they now seemed to him so intimate that he didn't mention them. Liza asked several times if Marina had been angry with him.

‘No,' he said, ‘not angry. Just firm and a bit crisp.'

‘Did she mention your letter?'

‘No. I did. I said sorry.'

‘So I should hope,' Liza said. ‘No, Mikey. Those are already covered with sugar.'

She pushed the sugar bowl away across the table.

‘Is this full-time teaching going on much longer?' Archie said. He shamed himself, but he could not help planning.

Liza said, ‘One more week.' And, because she did not want her face to betray anything, leant across and said, ‘Don't
do
that,' to Imogen who was voluptuously licking honey and butter off a strip of toast. Then she summoned up a shred of defiance and said, ‘Why? It doesn't affect you, does it?'

‘Of course not.'

They looked at each other, seeing nothing.

‘Not nithe,' said Imogen, putting down her bald toast.

‘Whose fault is that? You eat it, anyway.'

Liza got up and began to assemble her school bag and car keys.

‘Hurry up, Mikey. My run today.'

‘Can I sit in the front?'

‘No. You can't sit in the front until you are twelve, as well you know. Where's Sally? It's almost ten past. Imogen, eat that toast.'

Archie picked it up and held it in front of her.

‘Come on, now. A bite for your nose. And one for your ears—'

His well-being felt to him as if it were gleaming on his skin, like a healthy dog's coat.

‘Not ear'th.'

‘Neck, then.'

‘No.
Bottom
,' said Imogen and shrieked with rapture.

‘OK,' said Archie, laughing too, longing to laugh. ‘A bite for your bottom.'

Liza said, ‘Oh, Archie, for heaven's sake don't encourage her.'

‘It's only a game. Isn't it, Imo? A silly toast game.'

Liza looked out of the window. Sally, on her bicycle, was coming down the lane, her scarlet muffler a splash of colour against the tired late-winter landscape.

‘There's Sally. Now, Mikey, up to brush your teeth.'

‘And one for your knee and one for your left big toe and look, it's gone.'

Archie leaned sideways and kissed Imogen's packed cheek.

‘Honestly,' Liza said. ‘You do seem happy.'

‘You don't sound very thrilled—'

Liza took a dark-blue jacket off a hook on the door and struggled into it.

‘Of course I am. If it lasts. I suppose your conscience is clear, that's why.'

‘No,' Archie said. ‘No. My conscience is not clear at all.'

Liza shouted through the doorway.

‘Come on, Mikey! Come on—' She turned on Archie. ‘Look, you've said sorry to Marina; that's over, so please, please can we not have a big deal about that, too?'

‘Certainly,' Archie said.

Sally opened the door and came in. It struck her that, in some indefinable way, the atmosphere was not only better than usual, but exhilarating, like the first autumn morning of frost.

Before he went down to the surgery, Archie took Imogen and Nelson out into the field where the yellow wooden stakes now stood everywhere in the rough grass. He had not seen Richard Prior for several weeks, and Mrs Betts's impotent fury at the prospect of defeat had caused him to buy his stamps at any post office he passed, rather than endure her tirades at Stoke Stratton. The last time he had been in, she had dropped his change into his palm so that she need not contaminate herself by touching a traitor, and he had felt a dull rage at her stupidity and obstinacy. Now he felt gentler. In fact, watching Imogen weave in and out of the line of stakes that represented the bigger house's front wall, Archie was sorry he had been rude to Mrs Betts, and even sorrier that he had opposed Liza, had belittled her objections. It was too late, for any practical purpose, to be sorry, with the stakes so menacingly there, and the developer's board up loudly by the gate, but it wasn't too late to say sorry to Liza for more intangible things. And yet, he thought, caught breathless by a sudden wild leaping of his heart, if he started saying sorry to Liza now, where in heaven's name would it all end?

Diana Jago, on her handsome hunter, hailed him from the gateway. Imogen and Nelson began to race across, squealing and barking. The horse displayed admirable indifference.

‘Sorry,' Archie called, running up. ‘So sorry—'

‘It's excellent training,' Diana said. ‘I reckon if a horse is Imogen-proof, it's bombproof. Hey, Imo?'

Imogen climbed up two bars of the gate and pushed her face through, blowing at the horse. Diana looked down at Archie.

‘You look better.'

‘Do I?'

‘I've been worried stiff about you. Frightful bore. I hate worrying. And the lovely Liza looks less peaky.' She waved her crop at the field. ‘I think you are unspeakable to back this. Really I do.'

‘I wish I hadn't upset Liza.'

‘Good,' Diana said. ‘Excellent. Marriage is a pain in the neck but it ought at least to give you someone to hang in there with. I say,' she leaned down a little. ‘The tom-toms tell me not a Vinney was there when poor old Granny died. But you were. Lynne Tyler said you went specially—'

‘No, no. Chance—'

‘Don't believe you.'

She smiled down at him with affection.

‘You've got a rare old daddy, Imogen.'

Archie looked down.

‘Bottom,' Imogen said.

She got off the gate.

‘Bottom toast!' she shouted, and ran away shrilling across the field.

Chapter Fourteen

‘Look,' Stuart Campbell said, leaning on his desk, ‘look, I know you have been through a deeply distressing time, but I'm afraid I must gently point out to you that life must go on.'

Archie, standing just inside the door with his hands in his pockets, said nothing.

‘It's six weeks since your father died. I wouldn't presume to put a time limit on grief, nor to dictate anyone's personal reaction, but I'm afraid there is a general feeling in the practice that you are beginning to exploit everyone's sympathy.' He pushed a piece of paper with Archie's large hand on it across the desk. ‘I got your note. You say you can't attend the practice meeting because of a patient's funeral. Archie, you haven't attended the last two meetings and, although I applaud your human conscientiousness in wishing to go to Mrs Mossop's funeral, I cannot help, at the same time, feeling that you have your priorities wrong.' He looked at Archie weightily and said, ‘Our duty, I should not have to remind you, is to the living, not to the dead. Indeed, and this is something you may have forgotten in the last six weeks: if we allow the dead to preoccupy us too much, we cannot help but penalize the living.'

Archie said, ‘I know.'

‘Well, then.'

‘It's a particular funeral. My reasons are very private and in some way tied up with my father's death. I am aware everyone's been carrying me recently and it won't go on.'

Stuart Campbell sighed. He rolled a pencil across Archie's note.

‘Can't your wife go?'

‘No,' Archie said. ‘She's working.'

She had also refused to go. He had asked her, the day before, but she had refused even to consider it. ‘But Bradley Hall is utter chaos,' Archie had said. ‘You're always complaining about it, how the timetable is only made to be ignored. Why can't you change with someone?' Liza had shaken her head. ‘Because I can't and I don't want to.'

Stuart got up and went to the window and stood there, gazing out and chinking the change in his pocket.

‘Archie, I admire you. You know that. You've been the perfect makeweight in this practice, a standing reminder of our human commitment. But I seem to spend too much time defending you just now, making allowances.' He turned round. ‘We are the premier practice in this area now, I hardly need remind you. We get a lot of applicants. We can't carry anyone for too long.'

‘Six weeks?' Archie said, with some show of spirit.

‘But it isn't six weeks, is it, Archie? It's longer. Much longer. Isn't it? When did you—'

He stopped. Then he said, ‘I think you had better come to the meeting.'

Stoke Stratton church was surprisingly full, not just with its own villagers, but with people from the neighbouring villages who had been to school with Granny Mossop or had helped her look after the land girls when Stoke Stratton House – now so expensively Jagoed – had been requisitioned in the war. Richard and Susan Prior, whose habits over such things were meticulous, occupied the second pew. Archie, coming in a little late, elected to join them.

‘Good man,' Susan said.

The coffin was as small as a child's. It stood on an iron trestle and was almost obliterated by an immense cross of yellow and white chrysanthemums tied with purple ribbons with which Sharon Vinney had attempted to assuage her complex and miserable feelings. She sat in the front pew opposite the Priors, in a new black-and-white jacket and skirt, attended by Cyril and her straggling brood of children and hangers-on, all dressed with extreme care, and almost all in tears. The chancel step overflowed with their flowers, extravagant, inappropriate bouquets, stiffly wired and beribboned, which would later be piled in the hearse and driven away to the crematorium with the tiny coffin. There was not a tribute among them, Archie thought, that Granny Mossop would have spared her contempt.

Even Chrissie Jenkins had come. Granny Mossop had been, after all, as she explained noisily to everyone, their oldest parishioner. She sat in front of the Priors, a dark coat open over her nurse's uniform to make the greater commitments of her life visible to everyone. She turned to smile at Archie, a conspiratorial smile that conveyed her consciousness of the obligation that busy professionals like themselves had to perform those little personal services in life that make all the difference. Archie, who found her a woman of singular unattractiveness, would normally have returned her smile with no more than a nod; but today, with his whole being overflowing with gratitude for being alive, he smiled back. In a moment, on his knees with his eyes closed against the riot of spray carnations and hothouse purple iris, he could, after all, think about Marina.

Colin Jenkins stepped forward. His face bore the marks of inner conflict. An ardent supporter of the new democratic services, with a deep distrust of the English of Cranmer's prayer book, he was forced today, at Granny Mossop's wish, to speak over her coffin the language of archaic and unjustified privilege. He could not even be sure she had not left such a wish just to spite him.

‘“I am the resurrection and the life,”' Colin Jenkins said without enthusiasm, ‘“saith the Lord. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”'

Archie hid his face in his hands. How could it be that such life, such intensity of life, should come out of death? And did he care how it had come? No, that did not matter at all. All that mattered was that it had come. And it had.

In the junior cloakrooms at Bradley Hall, Blaise and Liza were doing after-school duty. Once every departing child had been paired off with the relevant coat, bag, and toy brought to show Mrs Simpson who ran the kindergarten class, the duty consisted of a dilatory clearance of the detritus of boots and shoes left stranded on the concrete floor. The cloakrooms, made out of Bradley Hall's onetime coal and wood stores, were lit by bluish-mauve neon strips and provided as glamorous a setting for an assignation as a public lavatory. Blaise went along the aisles between the rows of pegs screwed into frames of red-varnished pitch-pine, kicking the shoes into lockers with dull fury.

‘Next week,' Liza said from the adjacent aisle where she was painstakingly trying to find mates for stray boots, ‘next week, I go back to part time.'

‘Jesus,' Blaise said, kicking. ‘Jesus, Jesus.'

‘It's probably just as well,' Liza said provocatively.

‘For what?'

‘You know. You know perfectly well.'