A Passionate Man (8 page)

‘Today,' June said, ‘we are going to pray to St Anthony of Padua. He liked pigs and he is the patron saint of lost things. I am tempted to rename the lost property cupboard The Cave of St Anthony. Close your eyes and pray for something you have lost. I have lost this morning's prayer.'

And I, Liza thought, putting a restraining hand on the restive small boy beside her, have lost something, too. Something I did not much want. I have lost some of my inadequacy. The small boy twisted himself free and hissed in a stage whisper that he had lost his recorder.

‘We'll find it after prayers,' Liza said softly, sure that she would.

‘Now,' he said. ‘
Now
—'

‘No. After prayers.'

He subsided against her and put his thumb in his mouth. She put her arm round him and thought of his parents, a tough self-confident pair who ran a small racing stable and were friends of Simon and Diana Jago. Her arm round their child, Liza reflected that today she could cope with them too with perfect assurance.

‘Our Father,' June Hampole said. ‘Which art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name—'

The familiar rhythms rolled round Liza: the daily bread and the trespasses, the temptation and the forgiveness. From now on, she would forgive Archie, she would be very understanding about his attitude to Marina, she would make a huge imaginative effort to put herself in his shoes. This was difficult since she could not imagine caring much, one way or the other, if her own father produced a substitute for her mother, but not, she told herself, impossible.

‘Amen,' said June Hampole and the staff and children with emphasis.

They rose, whispering, to their feet.

‘No talking!' Commander Haythorne bellowed.

They began to shove each other instead until the neat lines of children bulged and swerved like serpents.

‘No pushing!' shouted Commander Haythorne.

‘Isn't this,' Blaise O'Hanlon said, materializing at Liza's side, ‘just your best moment of the day?'

‘I always rather want to join in—'

‘Exactly. We are doing break duty together. I have engineered it with Gaelic cunning. What is your first lesson?'

‘A passage from
Lettres de mon Moulin
with the sixth form.'

‘Isn't that dreadfully advanced? Why aren't they allowed
Madame Bonnard Va au Marché
 ?'

‘My
recorder—
' a voice pleaded, three feet from the floor.

‘Justin, I'm coming to look for your recorder. Because sometimes I simply can't bear her. Little dollops of Daudet and Fournier and Verlaine keep me sane and stretch their tiny minds.'

Two girls flattened themselves elaborately against the frame of the chapel doors to let Liza and Blaise go through.

‘Thank you, Sophie. And Tamsin.'

‘What I'd really like,' Blaise said as they emerged into the school hall floored in forbidding, gleaming squares of black-and-white marble, ‘is to be in your class and be ticked off by you.'

‘Go away,' Liza said. ‘Go away and don't be creepy.' But she was smiling.

In the lost property cupboard Justin's recorder lay where Liza had visualized it, in a box among other recorders, hockey sticks, pens, pencils and a butterfly net – the principle at Bradley Hall being to sort lost objects according to shape rather than category.

‘There,' she said. ‘What did I tell you?'

He blew into it experimentally to see if it remembered him.

‘What do you say?'

He glared. He was at an age when manners seemed almost an hypocrisy.

‘Thank you,' he said, but he was scowling. Then he went scuffing off down the passage, tooting intermittently, and Liza withdrew to the drawing room.

The sixth form liked their Daudet, after the initial and ritual complaints. For most of them, their only contact with the French was quarrelsome little episodes in queues for ski lifts in the Trois Vallées and thus they were incredulous of Daudet.

‘Are you sure he was French?' one of them said.

‘Absolutely.'

At break time, Liza made them all zip up their parkas before they lined up with the rest of the school in the orangery for milk and a biscuit and were subsequently released into the damp grey air. Herding them towards the old orchard – where they were not permitted to eat the apples since a seven year old had bitten inadvertently on a sleeping wasp – Liza was joined by Blaise O'Hanlon, wearing round his neck the whistle he used for football coaching. He simply walked beside her, saying nothing but listening to what she was saying to the children around her.

‘Our baby's come home. Mummy brought it. It's got no hair and red feet.'

‘I expect you had red feet when you were that little.'

‘Mrs Logan, Simon's got my Snoopy and when I tried to get it he done bashed me in—'

‘Simon—'

The toy came whirling through the air.

‘Stupid Snoopy, stupid, stupid, stupid—'

‘What is your baby's name?'

‘Oh, it doesn't have a name. It's just a baby.'

‘Our baby's called Oliver—'

‘We had one but it grew up and now it's Naomi—'

‘Snoopy's got a poo-face—'

‘Mrs Logan, Simon said poo—'

The crowd jostled its way through the orchard gate and dispersed to race about and scream in obedience to expectations. Liza and Blaise strolled to a central position and waited for someone to fall off something or be knocked over, and Liza, in addition, waited for Blaise to flirt with her. He did not. He said, instead, rather sadly, that he had been homesick for Ireland all weekend and couldn't seem to stop thinking about it.

‘Not Dublin so much, as the West. My father has a house in Connemara. I kept wanting to be in that house by the peat fire with proper Irish rain outside, not this milksop stuff.'

‘Well, why don't you go? At half-term. Why don't you fly to Shannon and go?'

‘I might,' Blaise said, and looked straight at her.

Two boys, in pursuit of a battered Bramley apple they were using as a football, came careering past, missed their footing in the slippery grass, collided and cannoned into Liza. She staggered back, off balance, and was caught deftly by Blaise.

He said, ‘You idiotic, clumsy little sods,' and restored Liza gently upright. Then he did not take his arms away.

She said, ‘Oh, thank you, Blaise, but really I'm fine.'

He said, ‘Me, too,' still holding her.

She twisted to look in his face and it wore a new and serious expression. He made a tiny movement and, realizing that he was about to kiss her in the midst of a hundred and eighty-three children, she made a sudden and determined effort and broke free.

‘Blaise.'

He said nothing. He merely gave her a long, hard look and then moved away, blowing his whistle to round up their charges. Liza felt breathless and strangely daring, a feeling not unlike the one she had experienced at breakfast when she told Archie he was behaving like a child. The two boys with the apple came up and said, looking at their feet, that they were sorry.

‘It's all right,' Liza said. ‘You slipped.'

They gaped.

‘Didn't you?'

They nodded.

‘Well, then. Off you go. End of break.'

They cantered off, howling. Liza thought of Mikey doing the same thing on his well-ordered Winchester playground. Then she thought of Thomas.

‘What is it?' Blaise said, coming up.

Her eyes were huge.

‘Thomas.'

‘May I comfort you?'

‘I – I don't think you'd better.'

He took her hand. She removed it.

‘No.'

He sighed.

‘Do you think I'm different today?'

Liza shot him a glance.

‘A little gloomier—'

‘The thing is,' Blaise said, ‘that serious lust has turned into serious love. I'm in real pain.'

‘Nonsense.'

‘Liza—'

‘Come on,' she said repressively, but her heart was very light. ‘Come on. We have to get this lot unbooted and into class.'

Driving home after lunch, Liza stopped in the village to buy a postal order for a set of rubber dinosaurs Mikey had saved up for, from the back of a cereal packet. He had taught Imogen a dinosaur song that began ‘Hocus, pocus, I'm a diplodocus' which she sang with the relentless repetitiveness of the Chinese water torture. When Thomas had had his dinosaur phase – as inevitable a part of childhood, it seemed, as losing milk teeth – he had suffered nightmares about a
Tyrannosaurus rex
which he could see circling in the beech trees on windy nights, clashing its leathery wings and gnashing its terrible teeth.

Mrs Betts liked Liza. She approved of her clean, pretty appearance, the deference she showed to senior Women's Institute members, and her suitable, socially responsible job. Liza, in her turn, tried not to be put off by Mrs Betts's refinement, bossiness and mauve mohair jerseys (today's had a pie-frill collar and three glass buttons) and to remember that Mrs Betts encouraged the kind of village community rallying that Colin Jenkins's wife declined to do.

‘Now, Mrs Logan,' Mrs Betts said with an arch smile. ‘I know you're not going to fail me.'

‘I hope not,' Liza said.

Mrs Betts made a flourishing movement towards her anti-mud notice, and her coloured glass bracelets chinked together playfully.

‘Naughty Dr Logan wouldn't sign this morning. Said he wasn't upset by Mr Prior and he didn't mind mud. All very well for you, I said, but what about poor Mrs Logan, visiting the old people down the lane that looks more like a field? To be perfectly honest, Mrs Logan, Mr Prior is taking more and more liberties with this village. I hear a nasty rumour that he wants to sell off the field next to your house for development. People like that have to be stopped early on, Mrs Logan. And that's where my petition comes in.'

Liza, who didn't in the least mind about the mud, but was alarmed at the threat of development, said, ‘Are you sure about that? About the field next to us?'

Mrs Betts leaned forward.

‘Between you and me, I've a friend on the local planning committee and he,' she paused so that Liza could draw interesting inference from the pronoun, inference flattering to Mrs Betts, ‘gave me to understand that an application has been submitted by Mr Prior. No more than a hint, mind you. Just giving me fair warning.'

‘When did you hear this?'

‘Saturday night.'

Liza thought of Mrs Betts and her friend in the lounge bar of The Keeper's Arms, the pub in King's Stoke, their neighbouring village. It had wall-bracket lights, shaded in red imitation silk, and fake-tapestry cushions, and kept a range of country wines which proclaimed themselves to be made from elderflowers, and wheat and whortleberries. She could imagine Mrs Betts saying, ‘Mine's a small port, please.'

‘Oh dear,' Liza said. ‘Have you told anyone?'

‘Just yourself and Mrs Jago when she popped in for a “Get well” card. I would have mentioned it to Dr Logan but he was in such a rush—'

‘Surgery,' Liza said appeasingly.

‘Of course, Mrs Logan.'

Liza looked at the anti-mud petition. The Jagos hadn't signed nor had old Mrs Mossop's family, but everyone else down her lane had spelled themselves out in capital letters. Mrs Betts held out a menacing pen.

‘Thank you, Mrs Logan. Such a help to have your support.'

Uncertainly, Liza signed. Mrs Betts pushed the postal order across the counter.

‘I don't know who imagines we have a quiet life in the country, Mrs Logan. In my view, you can't let up for a minute—'

The door from the road opened and admitted a decisive-looking woman in a waxed cotton jacket and corduroy trousers tucked into shapely rubber riding boots. Mrs Betts smoothed her mohair bosom and braced herself.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Prior.'

Liza gathered up her postal order in panic. Her signature on the petition seemed twice the size of anyone else's.

‘Hello, Susan. What a dreary day. Would you forgive me? I must dash. Imogen—'

The door banged behind her. Susan Prior glanced after her, glanced back at the counter, took in the petition and moved to the far end of the shop to examine, apparently, a rack of birthday cards.

‘It is quite beyond me,' she said carelessly, her back to Mrs Betts, ‘why people with the mentality of garden gnomes ever want to live in villages in the first place.'

At home, Sally was vacuuming the sitting-room carpet and Imogen was rushing at corners with a flamingo-pink feather duster.

‘Thpiders, thpiders!'

Sally switched off the machine.

‘There's two telephone messages on the kitchen table. And Mrs Mitchell says she'll bring Mikey back as she's got to go into Winchester anyway.'

Imogen dropped the feather duster with a scream. A real spider, small but stout of heart, was advancing up the bamboo handle.

Sally said, ‘Don't be silly, Imogen. Spiders are nice. Come and help me put him outside.'

Imogen scuttled behind Liza and buried her face in her skirt.

‘Oh, Imo, what a cowardy—'

Sally carried the duster to the window and shook the spider out into the air. With Imogen still glued to her skirt, Liza hobbled away to the kitchen and discovered that one of the telephone messages was from Marina: ‘Mrs de Breton says she will ring again later.' Good, Liza thought, attempting to detach Imogen with one hand while carrying the kettle with the other. Imogen, in order to show that this was a game, not a spider panic, would not be detached, however, but dragged herself behind Liza, clutching her skirt.