A Passionate Man

About the Book

The Logans are an enchanting and admirable couple who have lived a charmed life ever since Archie snatched Liza from her engagement party to someone else. Now, bedded firmly into country life with everything comfortable, funny, affectionate, they await the arrival of Archie's father, the brilliant Sir Andrew Logan, a widower for over thirty years.

But when Sir Andrew arrives, he is not alone. Beside him is a golden lady in caramel suede, a warm, witty, desirable widow whom everyone - except Archie - adores at once. Archie sees his father's mistress as the worm in the bud of his perfect life - a life that is to be wrenched apart before he and Liza can recreate their world.

Table of Contents

About the Author

Joanna Trollope is the author of many highly-acclaimed bestselling contemporary novels. She has also written a study of women in the British Empire,
Britannia's Daughters
, and a number of historical novels.

Born in Gloucestershire, she now lives in London. She was awarded the OBE in the 1996 Queen's Birthday Honours List.

Also by Joanna Trollope

THE CHOIR

A VILLAGE AFFAIR

THE RECTOR'S WIFE

THE MEN AND THE GIRLS

A SPANISH LOVER

THE BEST OF FRIENDS

NEXT OF KIN

OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN

MARRYING THE MISTRESS

GIRL FROM THE SOUTH

BROTHER & SISTER

SECOND HONEYMOON

FRIDAYS NIGHTS

THE OTHER FAMILY

and published by Black Swan

By Joanna Trollope writing as Caroline Harvey

LEGACY OF LOVE

A SECOND LEGACY

PARSON HARDING'S DAUGHTER

THE STEPS OF THE SUN

LEAVES FROM THE VALLEY

THE BRASS DOLPHIN

CITY OF GEMS

THE TAVERNERS' PLACE

and published by Corgi Books

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN: 9781409011545

Version 1.0

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA

A Random House Group Company

A PASSIONATE MAN

A BLACK SWAN BOOK : 9780552994422

First published in Great Britain

in 1990 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Black Swan edition published 1991

Copyright © Joanna Trollope 1990

Joanna Trollope has asserted her right under the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Addresses for Random House Group Ltd companies outside the UK can be found at:
www.randomhouse.co.uk

The Random House Group Ltd Reg. No. 954009

For Tobit

Chapter One

Old Mrs Mossop always put her teeth in for the doctor. She did not accord this honour to the vicar because the vicar was too much in earnest, and physically unprepossessing with it. But the doctor had sex appeal and to that Mrs Mossop responded, never mind being over eighty and in the process of dying slowly from a secondary cancer. So when the doctor's mud-splashed car pulled up outside her cottage – she was always on watch from her chair by the window – she would fish about in the tumbler on her windowsill where her teeth swam, and slot them into place.

This little ritual was never lost upon the doctor.

‘All the better to eat me with, I see.'

Granny Mossop gave a high laugh.

‘Spit you out again sharpish!'

Archie Logan smiled. He was very fond of Granny Mossop and he found her fierce gallantry in the face of her slow inexorable dying extremely moving. The room in which she sat smelled like a mouse's nest, crammed in every corner with cuckoo-clock furniture and ornaments and crocheted mats. Over the fusty muddle the great grey face of the television set presided calmly. Granny Mossop only turned it on to watch boxing and football and disasters on the news. She didn't mind blood, she told Dr Logan. Her father had been a gamekeeper. She'd grown up with blood.

He put his bag down on a fat armchair full of knitted cushions and rummaged in it. He had to toss questions nonchalantly at her or she would say, ‘That'd be telling,' and they would get nowhere.

‘Holding on to what you eat?' he said, his back to her.

‘More or less. Don't fancy much.'

‘I hope your daughter's looking after you.'

Granny Mossop snorted.

‘Indian muck'n rubbish. I won't touch it.'

He bent over her to begin his examination. She was as small as a sparrow. While he was occupied, she peered into his thick hair and observed a scattering of grey hairs.

‘You forty yet?'

‘No,' Dr Logan said equably, listening to her heart.

‘I didn' have a grey hair till I were fifty-three.'

‘Ah. But you are made of sterner stuff than me. Back pain?'

She hated confessing, so she said nothing.

‘Back pain,' he said, stating it.

He straightened up to write something down, dwarfing the little room and the littler woman.

‘I'm going to give you something to slow the machinery up a bit.' He had said ‘bowels' to her once and her response was so strong that now he resorted to euphemism.

She tossed her head.

‘That all you can do for me?'

He surveyed her with affection.

‘I could always shoot you.'

She loved that. She flung her head back with delight.

‘You'd miss! You'd miss!'

‘If you lose any more weight, you'll probably be right.'

She ducked her head suddenly and spat her teeth out into her cupped hand. It was his signal to go. When she'd had enough, she made it very plain and, in Archie Logan's view, her dignity and independence came even before the pace of her dying. Her teeth fell with a splash into the tumbler.

‘I'll give the prescription to Sharon. She can pick it up with the next Indian take-away.' He shut his case and looked over towards her. ‘I'll be in again on Friday.'

She snorted again faintly. He let himself out, stooping through the low doorway that led directly into the cottage's front garden where the lank remnants of a runner-bean row flapped above an empty rabbit hutch. Over the fence in the next-door garden, Granny Mossop's grandchildren's impudent modern washing blew on a yellow nylon line. Her daughter Sharon had taken out the little cottage windows of her front room and replaced them with a single bleak sheet of plate glass, so that the room behind gaped exposed and defenceless to the public view. Archie Logan could see a half-adult boy in jeans and black leather jacket slumped in a chair in front of the television. How long, Archie wondered, slamming the cottage gate with vehemence, how long since that boy had been in to see his grandmother?

He looked up at the October sky. The sun was just beginning to go down behind some dramatic streaks of grape-coloured cloud and, for no reason that he could think of, Archie Logan was suddenly and poignantly reminded of a holiday he and Liza had had years before, an autumn holiday in Tuscany, when they had been caught in a thunderstorm at Bagni di Lucca, all among the rocks and the river and the chestnut trees. They had been drenched, soaked to the skin, and, while stumbling back to their car, had been accosted by a courteous man with an umbrella who had taken them back to his immense and battered Edwardian villa and given them baths and malt whisky. Archie could see Liza now, wrapped in her host's mothy old camel-hair dressing gown, sitting on a club fender with her bare feet held up off the marble floor, sticking her tongue down into her whisky glass. ‘The Tuscan winter rains,' their host had said in his beautiful English, ‘can be long and terrible.'

The thought of Liza made Archie think he would go home before evening surgery. Liza would be at home because Wednesday was her whole day off from Bradley Hall School, where she taught part time. And Mikey would be back from school and he would see Imogen before she was put to bed. And there might be a letter from Thomas, a letter to heal the wound of his first letter from boarding school.

‘I don't see why I have to be here,' Thomas had written. ‘It's awful. I liked going to school in Winchester and then coming home for bed. I don't like going to bed here. It's when I cry.'

Archie got into his car and banged the door shut with unnecessary violence. He drove off at great speed, and old Mrs Mossop, who had been waiting for his farewell wave – although she planned to ignore it – drooped a little in her solitary chair.

Liza Logan, her red curls tied up in a Black Watch tartan ribbon, was sitting at the kitchen table hearing her second son's reading practice. Across the table Imogen, who was three, drew uneven suns and stars on the cover of a current parish magazine with a black wax crayon. In the utility room off the kitchen, Sally, a local farmer's daughter who looked after Imogen while Liza was teaching, and did a lot else besides, was pulling out of the tumble dryer an avalanche of socks crackling with static. A liver and white spaniel, sprawled on a blanket in a corner, was the only creature to rise politely when Archie entered and wag its feathered tail in greeting.

‘It's Daddy,' Imogen said to her mother helpfully.

Liza raised her face for Archie's kiss.

‘So it is.'

Archie kissed her mouth. He always kissed her mouth, however casual the kiss. It had been her mouth with its faintly swollen bee-stung lower lip that had first drawn him like a magnet, across a room at a party, to peer at her with desire and fascination. The party had been to celebrate Liza's engagement to someone else and Archie had been taken along by a mutual friend who disliked walking into parties alone. The morning after the party, Archie had begun to lay siege to Liza and within ten days he had captured her from Hugo Grant-Jones and, instead of a sapphire surrounded by very bright new diamonds, Liza was wearing a battered old half-hoop of garnets that had belonged to Archie's dead mother.