A Passionate Man (22 page)

‘I really, really hate cabbage. It's my worst thing. Do I have to eat it, Mrs Logan? Do I really, really have to eat this cabbage?'

‘Simon, I think you should eat two bites. To do you good. Then you can leave the rest.'

‘But I'll be sick. I promise.'

‘Eat it with something. Eat it with a bit of sausage.'

‘I love cabbage,' Laura said.

‘Then,' said Simon, looking at her with pure contempt, ‘you can eat mine.'

The afternoon was long. The chill of the day had settled down into real, penetrating cold, and the novelty of a new term had worn off in the face of universal recollection of what school was like. Liza's classes dozed and fiddled, sucking their gloved fingers and then trying to poke woolly filaments off each other's tongues with pencil ends. They were bored with French, bored with trying to concentrate after a month's freedom. At twenty to four, the first cars appeared and the mothers got out of them to stamp about on the drive and bellow at each other about the hell of the weather and the double hell of Christmas. When the last bell went, a gasp of relief ran round the class like a gust of wind. Banging their desks and scraping their chairs, they stampeded past Liza back into their real lives.

She went slowly out to her car. She, too, was extremely cold, and fumbled to get the door open with rigid fingers. In the glove compartment lay the garnet pin. She had planned to return it to Blaise and she had planned exactly what she would say. She looked about her. Mrs West was backing her car out carefully from the corner she always used, and the part-time mathematics teacher, who found Bradley Hall's unorthodoxy quite bewildering, was loading piles of exercise books into her boot. Prep already! The first day . . . There was no-one else. No Blaise. Liza waited a little. The mathematics teacher and Mrs West drove slowly past her and turned towards the main gates. Liza started the engine. She backed her car and turned it, switching the fan and the heater on to full so that the interior roared like a train in a tunnel. She drove out on to the main drive and turned for home. Across the lawn, and halfway across the adjacent field, a man was walking, away from the school. He wore Blaise's yellow muffler.

There was a notice on the door of Stoke Stratton post office. ‘Appeal!' it said sternly. ‘Don't give in! Lobby all officials!' It was written in thick black ink on one of the large sheets of blossom-pink paper Mrs Betts favoured for her edicts.

‘What's happened?' Liza said.

Because of the cold, Mrs Betts was encased in a home-knitted Aran cardigan which gave her the contours and solidity of a hot-water cylinder.

‘We shall not give up,' Mrs Betts said. ‘I shall go to the House of Lords if necessary.'

Sharon Vinney, intermittently dusting the postcard rack, gave an audible snort.

‘What is it?' Liza said. ‘Is it the field?'

‘He,' said Mrs Betts with deadly emphasis, ‘he thinks he has got planning permission.'

‘He has,' Sharon said. ‘It's final. It'll make all the difference to our Trevor. He'll be first on the list. Somewhere for him and Heather to set up home at last.'

Trevor Vinney, a pale, resentful young man who worked, without enthusiasm, as a mechanic at a Winchester garage, had a small dark girlfriend and a smaller darker baby. The girlfriend spent a good deal of the day sitting in the village bus shelter, with the baby beside her in a pushchair, smoking cigarettes she rolled herself and staring at passing traffic with an angry longing.

‘Your new neighbours, dear,' Mrs Betts said to Liza. She raised her eyebrows almost to her richly tinted hairline.

Liza said, ‘But that's so quick. I mean, we only heard about it two months ago—'

Mrs Betts leaned forward.

‘Quite frankly, Mrs Logan, it isn't all as it should be. Something's been going on.'

Sharon stopped dusting. She put her hands on her hips and waited. Mrs Betts lowered her voice.

‘I intend to find out. My friend—'

‘You'll find nothing on Mr Prior,' Sharon said clearly. ‘He's straight, is Mr Prior. Dad worked for him since he came and he said he was a right bugger but he was straight.'

Mrs Betts adjusted the cuffs of her cardigan.

‘Don't use bad language in the shop, please, Sharon.'

Sharon glared. Then she turned and went to the far end of the shop where blue packets of aspirin and yellow bottles of disinfectant and scarlet boxes of sticking plaster comprised what Mrs Betts called ‘my first-aid corner'.

‘I can say what I like to her,' Mrs Betts confided to Liza. ‘I pay her the basic industrial wage and I mind her terrible manners for her. She won't leave. Oh no. I'd have to sack her. Where else would she find a job which meant she knew all the gossip in the village before anyone else?'

Liza glanced down the shop.

‘Trevor Vinney—'

‘Precisely. There really is no time to be lost. Do you think Dr Logan might come round to our point of view now that reality is staring him in the face?'

‘I don't know,' Liza said. ‘I'll try.'

She was suddenly oppressed by fatigue and dull despair. This day had promised so much and had failed in everything. The granting of planning permission for the field was merely the last dreary straw. ‘May I have five pounds' worth of first-class stamps?'

‘Mrs Logan,' Mrs Betts said. ‘I really have no wish whatsover to intrude upon your and Dr Logan's personal grief, but there is no time to be lost. Letters, you know, appeals to our MP. Now, Mrs Logan,
now
.'

Liza looked up at her as she slid the stamps over the counter. Her powdered face was smiling, but absolutely implacable. No wonder Mr Betts had run away. Rumour said he had run a long way away, too, to Australia, and not for another woman at that. He had simply fled.

In the kitchen, Sally was giving tea to the children. She had made them sandwiches, whose crusts she had not cut off, and poured out mugs of milk. On the way from the garage, Liza could see through the kitchen window that they were eating and drinking with perfect docility. When she entered, however, Imogen immediately shouted, ‘Not milk! Not milk! Juith! Juith!' and Mikey squirmed off his chair and said he didn't want to eat his crusts.

‘How can you stand them?' Liza said to Sally.

Sally said, with truth, that they didn't do this to her. She got up, retrieved Mikey, took Imogen's mug away from her and put a teapot down in front of Liza.

‘Mr Prior's got his permission.'

‘Thank you, Sally. Yes. I heard. In the post office.' She poured out tea and then, cradling the mug in her hands, looked out of the kitchen window into the dark and doomed field beyond.

‘Seems a shame,' Sally said.

‘I know.'

‘Mrs Jago's been in. Left you a letter. She said—'

Mikey put a crust between his teeth and then blew it to the far side of the table. Imogen immediately did the same.

‘I can't stand it,' Liza said.

Sally reached over and took both the children's plates away.

‘Fine. End of tea. No biscuits.'

‘Bithcuit!' Imogen wailed.

Sally scraped the sandwich remains into Nelson's supper dish.

‘Too late.'

‘No! No!'

‘Yes,' Sally said. ‘Perhaps you'll remember next time.'

‘I'm hungry,' Mikey said.

‘I expect you are.'

Liza said, ‘Sally, I'd propose to you if I wasn't already married.'

‘It's always easier if the kids aren't yours.'

Liza thought of Bradley Hall. Immediately, she wished she had not. She looked at the dresser drawer where her letter and card lay hidden. Did Blaise . . .

‘Bithcuit,' Imogen whined, leaning against her.

‘No. You were silly with your sandwich. Remember?'

‘Pleath. Pleath bithcuit—'

Sally stooped to pick her up.

‘Come on, madam. And you, Mikey.'

‘Whaffor?'

‘I'll give you what for. Just come.'

‘Sally. Thank you so much—'

‘Mrs Jago said would you ring her—'

‘Yes. Yes, of course. It'll be about the field.'

‘Can't imagine anything worse,' Sally said, shuddering, ‘than having all those Vinneys and Durfields next door.'

She opened the kitchen door and an icy blast from the hall bounced in.

‘Cold,' Imogen said at once. ‘It'th cold.'

‘How would you know?' Sally said, bearing her away. ‘How would you know inside all that podge?'

When the door was closed, Liza opened Diana's letter:

Too awful that Richard should get his wretched permission. And simply
whizzed
through – we had to wait nine months for permission to change the garage roof from flat to hipped. Can you ring me? Love, D.

Liza dialled. She imagined the telephone ringing out in Diana's large, warm kitchen where cooking took second place to feeding the dogs. It rang and rang. Liza counted to twenty rings and then she put the receiver down.

Cutting through the lanes from the main road to Basingstoke, Diana Jago passed an unremarkable car unremarkably parked in a gateway. This was a common occurrence. Travelling salesmen, particularly, criss-crossing England on their private network of routes and shortcuts, were often to be found parked in gateways, either eating sandwiches and gazing glassily at the field beyond, or asleep against their head rests with their mouths open. It was only when Diana was twenty yards past this car that she realized that the man in it had been neither eating nor sleeping. He had been staring in front of him in a most unnatural way. He was also Archie Logan.

Diana's kindness, which was genuine, was not of a sensitive, delicate kind. The moment the message about Archie sitting staring in a closed car had travelled from her eyes to her brain, she braked, put her car into reverse and shot back to the gateway. Then she got out into the fierce grey air, and knocked on the window six inches from Archie's face. He wound it down. His expression was quite without surprise.

‘What are you doing? Are you all right?'

‘I was thinking.'

‘So I saw. But you don't look the thing at all. You look frightful. Are you ill?'

‘No,' Archie said.

Diana thought for a moment.

‘Wind the window up,' she said.

Obediently, he wound it. She came quickly round the car and opened the passenger door.

‘Now, look,' she said, getting in. ‘It's like a fridge in here. Whatever's the matter won't be helped by freezing. Not even grief. Start the engine at least and we'll get the huffer huffing—'

Archie shook his head.

‘No. No.'

Diana took his hand.

‘Archie—'

He looked away from her, out of the car window, but he did not remove his hand.

‘Archie, dear. Would it help to talk?'

There was a silence.

After a while, without turning his head, Archie said, ‘I'm so angry.'

‘Yes,' Diana said. ‘So should I be in your place. A perfectly wonderful life like your father's cut off quite needlessly while all kinds of utterly useless, intolerable people go on and on—'

‘No,' said Archie. ‘Not that.'

He turned his head to her.

‘Not that. Not his dying. About how he died.'

‘But I thought – I thought it was a coronary.'

‘It was.'

Archie took his hand away and put it, with his other one, on the steering wheel.

Staring straight ahead out of the windscreen, he said, ‘She did it. She caused it. They were in bed, they—'

‘Archie!' Diana said. ‘Stop it! Stop it at once—'

‘I wasn't there!' he shouted, turning to her. ‘Don't you see? I wasn't with him and if I'd been with him when he died, I'd have understood. As a doctor, as a man, there's something that I won't ever know now, that I would have known. Death is so important, so significant, perhaps it is even the key to life, it inspires awe and peace all at once. I know all that. Intellectually, I know all that. But I don't know it in my heart and soul, I don't feel it. If I'd been with my father, I would have felt it, I would have known for ever more what that stupendous, suspended time is like when everything is suddenly clear, comprehensible. That moment of death, that extraordinary, precious moment after death—'

He stopped.

Diana said gently, ‘But you couldn't be there. You were his son, not his wife. It isn't reasonable to think you should have been there. And if he did die while they – while they—' She paused while endless impossibly improper terms thronged unusably through her brain. ‘Well, what could be better? What better last moment could there be for any man?'

‘He wasn't that sort of man,' Archie said. ‘He wasn't impulsive, he was orderly. He liked preparedness. He was made to be different, he was changed. It killed him—'

‘But he probably liked it. People do. He was released, perhaps. I mean . . .' Diana said, floundering. ‘I often think that when I break my neck hunting, as I'm bound to do because I'm such a perfect fool, Simon'll marry someone quite different and he'll become different and probably quite happy. Not too happy, mind you, or I'll haunt him. But it isn't necessarily miserable, making a change. I mean, your father probably felt thirty-five again.'

‘She didn't even tell me first,' Archie said.

‘Who? What? I thought Marina rang Liza at once—'

‘Liza was not my father's son. What right had Marina to tell anyone before she told me? She didn't even try to tell me. She didn't even ask Liza where I was. She just left a message. Hah!' Archie lifted his hands and pressed his palms to his temples. ‘It might have been school-run arrangements. Dear Archie, your stepmother rang to say your father's dead.'