A Passionate Man (3 page)

Only when he came out of the surgery did Archie think again about his father. Their bond was both strong and of long standing, because the Welsh girl whom Andrew Logan had found when on a walking holiday in Betws-y-Coed and had persuaded to come to Glasgow with him, and to marry him there, had been killed in a car smash on the A80 going out to Garnkirk to look at a dining-room table – golden mahogany, the advertisement had said, not red, and about 1820 – advertised for sale in the
Glasgow Herald
. Archie had been a baby, in a carrycot in the back of the car, from which he had been plucked by a policeman, with no more than bruises. His mother had died at once, from the impact of crashing into a van which had stopped in front of her without warning. She had broken her neck.

She had been married to Andrew Logan for three years, and, if he had ever opened his heart to anyone, she was the only possible person. He took her body back to her family in the Vale of Conway, and endured with difficulty the emotional Celtic fervour of her burial service. Then he resigned from his job at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, sold his flat in Park Terrace, and brought his baby son south to London and a narrow Georgian house in Islington, convenient for public transport to the Middlesex Hospital. Once settled, he gave himself over to his boy and to his work on the secondary circulation of the heart.

Odd, Archie thought now, turning the car out of the health centre car-park and into the dark lanes of the Hampshire countryside, odd to think that his father's work on the heart had made him an international figure while leaving, quite literally, his own heart untouched. Sir Andrew had lived now for almost forty years without a woman. Archie's childhood had featured a number of housekeepers of whom only one, a strong-minded widow with a passion for Pre-Raphaelite painting, could he recall with either affection or distinction. She had taken him once, by train, to the city gallery in Birmingham to show him the wealth of her enthusiasm, and he had adored the paintings with a kind of adolescent lust, and been badly thrown by his father's disapproval of the whole expedition.

‘Great painting,' Andrew Logan had said to his son, ‘really great painting, is without self-indulgence.'

He thought that, Archie came to learn, about life, too. Great lives, however visionary, must be underpinned by diligence and self-denial. Extravagance of feeling or behaviour would only dissipate those precious energies that were there precisely to enable a man to make his life of value. It was often hard for Archie, in whom a powerful sensual appetite had been planted along with a measure of wayward emotional and mental powers which he sometimes suspected owed their being to the more eloquent and excitable air of the Vale of Conway. Archie had ardour; his father, as far as he could possibly perceive, had not. His father had instead balance and judgement and, in addition, honour and a most effective compassion, a compassion that achieved results for its objects.

But no woman. My lifetime almost, Archie thought, flicking up his headlight beam so that distant objects, trees and bushes, seemed suddenly to leap out at him. And his father was so sweet to Liza, had been so from the beginning, from that first meeting at the Savoy Grill, where he always liked to eat, where they kept him a secluded table and where he was looked after by a waiter of great experience who owned a cigar cutter once given to him by Winston Churchill. They had sat Liza between them and persuaded her to eat the first oysters of her life and, at the end of dinner, Andrew Logan had picked up Liza's little hand, and kissed it and said, ‘I'm a grim old stick, but you'll find me very steadfast.' She had adored it. Adored him. He had made a point, from the beginning, of including her in every way in his love for Archie. Indeed, he spoiled her. He seemed to like it. When Liza sometimes got angry now and declared furiously that grown men, real
mature
men, grew out of this nursery dependence on their fathers, she never accused Andrew of favouring Archie, because, even in a temper, she knew it wasn't true.

And when the bizarre chance happened, and it was discovered that all the inhibitions Andrew Logan had about people simply fell away before the television cameras, Liza was quite as proud as Archie. That first series of
Meeting Medicine
, when half the nation, it seemed, stayed in on Tuesday nights to watch those quirky, humorous, fascinating explanations of their bodies to themselves, had had them both rejoicing, quite spontaneously.

Very occasionally, as his father's fame grew and he was photographed in groups that invariably included lovely women, Archie would say to Liza, ‘D'you think he has a secret girlfriend?'

And Liza usually said, ‘God, I hope not. I'd be so jealous.'

But now, faced with the possibility that he had indeed found a woman, Liza didn't seem to mind. You should be pleased, she'd said, pleased for your father.

‘Well,' Archie said out loud, turning the car into a curved drive in front of a solid stone house thickly moustached in pyracantha, ‘I'm not pleased. Not pleased at all.'

From an upper window a curtain moved and the anxious figure of the patient's wife peered down into the drive.

‘In fact,' Archie said to his car as he slammed the door behind him, ‘I'm bloody miserable. So there.'

Chapter Two

The doctor's house was not a pretty building. It was a Victorian brick villa of great solidity, with double bay windows in front whose sashes rose and fell with reliable and weighty efficiency. The house was set on the edge of the village of Stoke Stratton in a wide, shallow trout-stream valley sloping down through the gentle chalky hills to Winchester. Stoke Stratton, a miscellaneous village architecturally, straggled along a minor road parallel to the Stoke river, with path-like lanes running down from it to the water's edge. Other lanes wandered away from the road and the river towards the northern lip of the valley, and on one of these less desirable lanes – the best houses were of course close to the river – Beeches House was set on a gentle bank.

In front of the house a rough lawn dotted with the paraphernalia of children's amusements – a climbing frame, a sandpit, a swing suspended from an immense cherry tree that flowered profusely and pinkly in spring – stretched down to the lane and was separated from it by a post-and-rail fence, patchy with brilliant moulds. Behind the house, and beside it, was a semicircle of beech trees, through which could be glimpsed the fields of plough and pasture rising to the modest skyline. The right-hand sweep of trees also served to screen their only neighbour, a cream stucco bungalow set in a regimented garden, inhabited by a middle-aged couple who lived in terror of being asked to be involved in anything. It was really on account of the beeches that Liza and Archie had bought the house.

Inside, the house had a sturdy, pleasant and practical feel that Archie told Liza was inescapably bourgeois. It was, of course, but it was to Liza a very much more acceptable variety of bourgeois than the refined sort – fringed lampshades and Dralon upholstery – that had permeated the house in Haslemere. Her mother disliked colour, indeed she was alarmed by visual strength of any kind, and Liza's childhood had taken place against a dim background of muted pinks and blues and little lamps and midget ornaments. After that, Beeches House seemed to her to have an exciting and masculine strength, and its position, in open country on two sides, to be properly uncompromising. She had only driven Archie down the residential road where she had grown up – her parents felt they were making some kind of moral stand by refusing to welcome him to The Lilacs – and he had said that he had no idea that families lived in such places, not really lived. And Liza, adoring him, reduced to rubble when he kissed her, said he was right: they couldn't.

They were married five years before they bought Beeches House. Before that, Archie was working as a junior hospital doctor in London and they lived in the basement of Andrew's house in Islington. Then he sold it, to move into a mansion flat near Victoria Station which he said reminded him of Glasgow, and Archie, who had by now decided that general practice was where his inclination lay, found a job with a rural practice in Hampshire, and Beeches House. They brought Thomas to it as a baby, and from it Liza went twice to the maternity unit in Winchester, to give birth to Mikey and then to Imogen. For family holidays, they packed the children into the car and drove up to Argyllshire, to the little house Sir Andrew had bought when he left Glasgow, on the shoreline of Loch Fyne going down into Inveraray. The view from the house was directly across the water to a romantic castle-like mansion designed by Sir Robert Lorimer and backed by a famous pinetum and rearing purplish hills. Liza could never drive there without remembering the sheer glory of her first arrival, literally carried off by Archie and then wooed by him with unblinking intensity, both in bed and out, until, feeling herself to be his treasure, she knew herself also to be his slave.

Beeches House was the first house of her own that Liza had ever decorated. Her taste, strive as she might against it, tended perilously towards the tidy, so that after eight years Beeches House inside had an unresolved air as Liza's matching curtains and cushions and penchant for crisp cottons strove to hold at bay Archie's relentless acquisition of anything that caught his eye, the more peculiar the better. Birds of prey in glass cases, ancient fowling pieces, a Victorian sledge, threadbare rugs, immense jardinières, huge reproductions of Turner sunsets and Rossetti women, a fifties pinball machine adorned with cone-breasted girls in pedal-pushers, a rug made from a polar bear, old polo sticks and fishing rods, jugs and jars and antique medicine bottles, rioted triumphantly across Liza's stripped and waxed floors and leaned drunkenly against her clean pale walls. Although irritated by the mess they made, she admired them, because they represented a wholeheartedness she was afraid that she did not possess (briefly, when she first met Archie, she had hoped otherwise), but she did not know what to do with them beyond dust and polish and neatly glue back bits of broken moulding. So she left them mostly where they were – trying not to adjust the angles to something more conventional – and thus Diana Jago, coming to supper for the first time, met a suit of armour in the sitting room and a stuffed badger in the downstairs lavatory, and went shouting off to tell her friends that the new doctor couple were an absolute find.

It was Diana Jago who had organized Liza's job at Bradley Hall School. Liza had read French and Spanish at the University of East Anglia, and had then been to a teacher training college outside Cambridge – it was, indeed, at a party in Cambridge that she had met her first fiancé, Hugo Grant-Jones, who had had all the impeccable credentials of a family house in Sussex, a low golf handicap and a fledgling career in a big City accepting house, that had so endeared him to Liza's parents. When Liza and Archie were first married she taught for a dispiriting year in a North London comprehensive school – she concluded she was literally too small to make any impression on thirty fourteen year olds whose every energy was channelled into defeating her – and then got herself a post in the modern languages department of a London girls' day school, where she was extremely happy. She taught until Thomas was born, and then the move came, and two more babies, and it was only when Imogen was almost two that Liza began to feel that she needed to claw back some part of herself and her life that was not devoted to the sustaining of Archie and the children. She also thought she would like some money of her own. Archie was as open as the day about money and perfectly prepared to give her anything she asked for, provided he had it, but oddly, this very generosity put a constraint upon her capacity to ask for much. She found herself accounting to him painstakingly for expenditure, explanations that were perfectly incomprehensible to him because he both trusted her and was not much interested in the first place.

So when Diana Jago came in one day unannounced, as she liked to do, leaving a magnificent bay gelding tethered to Liza's garage wall – ‘No, no, don't fuss, he's fine, it'll give him time to repent over quite appalling behaviour yesterday,
and
in public' – and asked, as she always did, if there was anything she could pick up for Liza in Winchester, Liza said, ‘Well, yes, actually. A job.'

‘Mrs Dr Logan dear, what do you mean? The checkout at Sainsbury's?'

‘No,' Liza said, heating milk for coffee. ‘A teaching job. I am a qualified teacher and I want to go back to it.'

‘And what,' Diana said, ‘does our revered physician have to say to that?'

‘All for it.'

‘I'd no idea. That you taught, I mean. I thought you were simply an all-singing, all-dancing housewife. Brilliant cook. You should hear the carry-on from Simon when we've been to dinner here. I just say to him, come
on
, darling, the nags don't complain so why should you? What do you teach?'

‘French mostly, but Spanish if I'm asked.'

‘Olè,' said Diana Jago.

Two days later, she rang Liza to say she'd been shopping for a job as requested and she'd got one.

‘You don't mean it!'

‘Interview all ready and palpitating for you. Bradley Hall. I've known the Hampoles since I was a child and, although they are madder than hatters, it's not a bad school. At least the children are told how to hold their knives properly and get walloped if they call the lavatory the toilet. June Hampole's waiting for you to ring her.'

‘Oh,' Liza said. ‘Oh, I'm so grateful—'

‘Well, don't be. After one term there, you will probably be cursing my name for even thinking of it. Our two went before they boarded and it didn't seem to do them any harm. Must fly. I've got an appointment in London to have my fangs seen to. Curses, curses.'