A Passionate Man (7 page)

‘Jealous bastard,' he said to himself. ‘Childish, shameful, jealous bastard.'

Thick, unecologically sound, blue-grey smoke uncurled itself slowly into the air and filled Archie's eyes with the blessed excuse for tears. Mikey came drifting up through the gauzy air and held out his closed fists.

‘What have you got?' Archie said, smearing his jersey sleeve across his eyes.

Mikey opened his fists and revealed a pound coin in each.

‘One for me and one for Imo. I'm holding on to hers because she thought it was chocolate.'

‘From Grandpa?'

‘No,' Mikey said. ‘From Mrs de Breton.'

Archie looked unhappily down at the fat golden coins.

‘Did you like her?'

‘Of course,' Mikey said.

‘Why?'

Mikey looked away, his face contorted with the impossibility of describing his susceptibility to her charm.

He said uncertainly, after a while, ‘I liked her earrings.'

Archie held his arms out.

‘Come and give your old da a hug.'

He lifted Mikey up so that his rubber-booted toes bumped against his knees. Mikey put his arms out stiffly behind Archie's head, still gripping the money.

‘I'm going to save up for a guinea-pig. One of the ones with whirly bits in its fur.' He bent his head back to look into his father's face. ‘You can share it if you like.'

‘He's wonderful with the children, isn't he?' Clare said, rinsing wine glasses at the kitchen sink and gazing out of the window. ‘Perhaps if I'd had a baby, Robin wouldn't have left.'

‘He would, you know. He'd have left just the same and it would be worse for you, now, with a baby.'

‘Nothing could be worse,' Clare said.

Liza was stretching plastic film over leftover helpings of lunch.

‘Clare, you are not to talk like this—'

‘I swore I wouldn't,' Clare said. ‘I absolutely swore. But listening to Marina at lunch made me so depressed and sick of myself. I mean, you simply can't imagine her letting life get her down, can you? I thought she was amazing. And she looked so wonderful. How old do you think she is?'

Liza, who was full of the same envious admiration of Marina, said she supposed about her mid-fifties.

‘But she was so sexy. Wasn't she? I mean, you and I will never be that sexy. We never have been. Have we?'

Liza was impelled to say that she thought Archie found her sexy, but stopped herself in the nick of time because it struck her that, whatever he felt, she didn't feel herself to be sexy. She picked up a cloth and began to dry the glasses Clare had washed.

She said in a very sensible voice, ‘She's much more exotic than us. And sort of international. And rich. Being rich is supposed to be very sexy.'

‘And all that suede, and gold jewellery. And her wonderful shoes. I bet they were Italian. Liza, did you notice Andrew could hardly keep his hands off her?'

‘Of course I noticed.'

‘Is that what's the matter with Archie?'

Liza began to put the polished wine glasses on a tray.

‘Well, it is a bit unhinging—'

‘Telling me,' Clare said. ‘She filled me with dissatisfaction. You're so lucky, she might become your mother-in-law and give you lunch at the Connaught and lovely presents. She looks that sort of person. Robin's mother can't see anything wrong with Robin. It has to be my fault he left. That's what she thinks.'

‘Marina understood about Thomas,' Liza said. ‘She offered to speak to Andrew and my first reaction was to say no, but I wonder—'

Privately, Liza thought there were other things Marina might understand about, too. ‘The first of many meetings,' Marina had said to Liza before she was driven away. And she had smiled. There had been an edge of female complicity to that smile.

‘I'm taking a rice pudding down the lane to old Mrs Mossop,' Liza said. ‘Want to come?'

‘Not really. But I don't want to go home either.'

‘Clare,' Liza said warningly. She opened the bottom oven door and took out a Pyrex dish.

‘I'm three years older than you,' Clare said. ‘And we might almost be different generations. Look at you. All this domestic bliss and a job and village life—'

Liza wrapped a clean dishcloth round the Pyrex dish.

‘Hold that.'

On the way down the hall, they passed through a lingering breath of Marina's scent and stopped to sniff.

‘Honestly,' Clare said. ‘It's like having a crush at school.'

Liza began to giggle.

‘Aren't we idiotic?'

‘No, no, I love it; I love this carried away feeling—'

‘Me, too.'

‘Think of what life is like for Andrew, I mean, just think—'

‘I know. I simply didn't know where to look at lunch.' Liza opened the front door. ‘Do you think they just drove straight back to London to go to bed?'

‘Yes,' Clare said, ‘of course they did. And left us all here, years younger, simply green with envy—'

‘Speak for yourself!'

‘Can you,' Clare said, stepping carefully down the drive because of carrying the pudding, ‘can you talk to Archie about it?'

Liza thought.

‘No,' she said, ‘I don't think I can. Not about that.'

‘But I thought you talked about everything. Sex and everything—'

‘But not Andrew and sex.'

‘No,' Clare said, ‘perhaps not. But will Archie think about it?'

‘Yes,' Liza said slowly. ‘I don't see how he can help it,' and then she took the pudding from her sister and they went away with it down the lane to old Mrs Mossop's cottage, and found her there, alone in her darkening room, watching the empty Sunday lane.

‘When I want charity,' Granny Mossop said, ‘I'll ask for it.'

But she grew cross when Liza offered to remove the pudding and, when the sisters peered back in through the window as they left, she was hunting for spoons.

Chapter Four

On Monday morning, Liza accused Archie of behaving like a child. She did this over breakfast, causing Mikey to weep and remember he had not done his violin practice, and Imogen to refuse, flatly, even to look at her breakfast. They were all late and a faint disheartening drizzle was misting the kitchen windows. Archie, whose provocative crime had been to remark that the sitting room still smelled like Harrods, got up in silence, kissed his children, and went off to his car. Liza was impressed to find that she felt buoyed up by indignation rather than borne down by tears, as was her wont in such situations, and merely said to Imogen as Archie's car could be heard revving in the garage, ‘Eat that up when you are told.'

The car went down the drive and Imogen picked up her cereal bowl and held it upside down over the floor.

Driving down the lane towards the village, Archie wrenched his mind on to the day ahead. Surgery, visits, an hour or two at the local cottage hospital (saved from the great central state crushing machine only by relentless local effort), a practice meeting, more visits and evening surgery. The practice meeting would, he knew, be about the installation of computers at the health centre. Intellectually he was all for this but emotionally he rebelled. One of his colleagues had described him as a refugee from an A. J. Cronin novel which Archie thought, on the whole, pretty accurate. He also knew, without complacency, that diagnostically and in human terms he was the best doctor in the practice. His colleagues, with varying degrees of good and bad grace, knew this, too, and would in consequence emphasize their own additional roles as, for instance, anaesthetists at local hospitals. Archie had no wish to be anything other than a rural general practitioner and, when it was pointed out to him that he was bound to get the fidgets at forty, he said he was planning a really big break-out then, so as not to disappoint them. The pharmacist at the health centre had overheard him say this once, and had endured several terrible nights subsequently, plagued by impossible fantasies of which she was later ashamed.

Because he was early, on account of the incident at breakfast, Archie paused at Stoke Stratton post office. This was run by Mrs Betts, a formidable widow from a Southampton suburb, who used it as a power-base from which to shape and control the village. She was secretary to the Women's Institute, founder of the rambling club and organizer of the village fête. She had also revived a gardeners' group and was Clerk to the Parish Council. Tall, solid and handsome, Mrs Betts had brought to Stoke Stratton a very clear idea of what English village life should be like and a strong determination to impose this vision on the few hundred people who came to buy stamps at one end of her shop and throat lozenges, birthday cards and potting compost at the other. Progress, in Mrs Betts's view, meant power in the hands of the bourgeoisie and the neatening of sloppy agricultural ways. On her counter stood a homemade advertisement enticing her customers to sign a petition asking the local farmer not to drive his tractors down the main street of the village. As the farm lay above Beeches House, and the lane leading to it was usually liberally strewn with succulent chunks of mud, Mrs Betts was very pleased to see Archie as an early customer.

He asked for a dozen first-class stamps, some brown envelopes and a packet of peppermints.

‘And you'll sign my petition, Dr Logan.'

‘Sorry, Mrs Betts. No go. I've no objection to mud.'

‘Come now, Dr Logan. Think of Mrs Logan. I saw her and her sister coming down your lane yesterday with the greatest difficulty.'

‘It's a natural hazard of country life—'

‘Only because no-one has thought to do anything about it. Where would we be if we all just accepted things? Dr Logan, there are seven old footpaths now open again round this village thanks to me and my ramblers.'

Archie folded his stamps and slid them into his wallet.

‘Richard Prior is a good neighbour to me, Mrs Betts. I'm not going to provoke him and I don't mind his mud.'

Mrs Betts laid her large capable hands on the counter.

‘Dr Logan, it's you professional people who must take the lead. It's not like the old days when there was a squire to turn to. It's up to people like you and Mr Jago now to preserve our heritage.'

Archie gave her an enormous smile.

‘Do you know, I think mud
is
part of our heritage.'

In the road outside, the Vicar was parking his car behind Archie's. Colin Jenkins was a narrow, pale man in his thirties with a passion for committee work, who was to be seen driving into Winchester for diocesan meetings of one sort or another far more often than around his parish. On the rare occasions when he and Archie had coincided at a sickbed, Archie had felt strongly that, should the patient die, Colin Jenkins would regard his soul as one more convert to the egalitarian and socialist bureaucracy which was his evident notion of the hereafter.

‘You can't talk to him,' an unhappy patient of Archie's had once said. ‘When my son was killed, I couldn't talk to him at all. If I'd tried, I'd only have got an anti-government tirade.'

This morning, Archie was in no mood for Colin Jenkins. As the Vicar slid out of his car, Archie gave a preoccupied smile and wave intended to indicate his hurry, and climbed into his own. Reflected in his mirror, he saw Colin standing in the road, looking after him, a figure at once self-satisfied and forlorn. Archie put his foot down. He suddenly wanted a telephone.

He rang from his room at the health centre.

‘Sorry,' Sally Carter said, ‘Mrs Logan's gone. She went twenty minutes ago. If you ring the school, you might get her before lessons.'

He rang Bradley Hall. The school secretary, a kind, confused woman with a sweet telephone manner and an aptitude for muddling bills, said Liza was in prayers.

‘I'm so sorry. They've just gone in, only just. I can hear them singing “When A Knight Won His Spurs'. Shall I ask Mrs Logan to ring you when she comes out?'

‘No,' Archie said. ‘No, thank you. It isn't urgent. It can wait.'

‘But I'll tell her you rang—'

‘No,' he said again. ‘No. Don't bother.' And then he put the receiver down and wondered what on earth had impelled him to say no, and not just once, but twice. A dull misery collected in his throat and settled there. He cleared it decisively once or twice, but to no avail. He leaned forward and pressed his intercom button.

‘Mrs Hargreaves for Dr Logan, please. Mrs Har greaves.'

Liza sang enthusiastically. All around her the children, who liked the hymn and its clear images of storybook chivalry, sang with equal fervour. Above the altar, Albert on his tortured cross seemed to be wincing at the jovial atmosphere of folksy Protestantism in which he found himself, an atmosphere June Hampole was careful to encourage so that no enraged father could possibly accuse her of Popery. Looking across at Liza singing innocently of the death of dragons, June observed how well she looked, how happy. Liza Logan, June Hampole thought, shuffling through her pockets for the prayer she had chosen and now seemed to have mislaid, was a prime example of middle-class excellence, an unshakeable rock of competence and decency and endeavour. As she grew older, her experience would give her authority and she might well, June thought, surprise herself by her own strength. June found her piece of paper and went up to the lectern below the altar.

‘Let us pray.'

The children rumbled to their knees on the floor of the chapel. June put on her spectacles and unfolded the paper.

‘Dog biscuits,' the piece of paper said. ‘Blankets from dry cleaners, gin, telephone tennis court people for resurfacing estimate.'