A Passionate Man (29 page)

‘Do you suppose,' Archie said, not listening, ‘do you suppose that I am likely to give you up the moment I find you? Do you really think, after all that battling through the fog, I'm going to go back into it? Are you? Do you want to feel as you did a week ago?'

‘Never again,' Marina said.

He took his shoulders away from the door and stood upright.

‘I'm not a marriage wrecker either.'

‘But you cannot have both—'

‘I can,' Archie said. ‘I have.'

She looked up at him, through her spectacles.

‘But I won't let you. Don't for a moment mistake what I want. But I've lived long enough not to believe in melodrama any longer. Nor in the staying power of deception. Truth always works its way to the surface somehow. Wives have a nose for truth.'

Archie stepped forward and put his arms around her.

‘Go catch your train.'

‘In a minute.'

He took off her spectacles and put them in his jacket pocket.

‘I don't believe you can stop any more than I can.'

He kissed her.

He said, laughing a little, ‘I know just how women feel.'

She stiffened,

‘How can you know such a thing?'

‘You see?' Archie said, delightedly holding her away from him. ‘You see? Instant outrage. Women have the monopoly on feelings, don't they? Women are the ones whose lives are limited by frustration, burdened by society's refusal to let them fulfil themselves, women are the ones trapped by stereotype. Right? That's it, isn't it? I'm not allowed inside that sacred personal life, am I, because I'm a man. I've got my work, I'm the breadwinner, that must satisfy me. But I've got it, whether you like it or not. I've broken into the circle where emotional life colours everything, conditions everything.' He pressed Marina against him. ‘Everything is better because of you. Everything. I'm richer, stronger. I found you. I discovered myself. If this is what women have been battling for all these years, I'm with them, all the way.'

‘How you do talk,' Marina said.

He laughed.

‘I do, don't I? I can, now. That's another thing, isn't it, talking? Women think men can't talk, won't talk. Reticence is some sort of male plot to frustrate them of their emotional dues. What about men—'

‘Archie,' Marina said. ‘Beloved, beautiful Archie. Go home. Go
home
.'

She could hear him laughing, all the way down the stairwell, and when he reached the street door she heard him yell out, wild and exultant, ‘Marina!' Archie shouted, ‘Marina!' and his voice came spiralling back up to her. ‘Marina!'

Chapter Fifteen

Dan Hampole said gently, ‘There was no need for this, you know.'

He held Liza's letter out to her. They were standing in June's study, the three of them, and some pale, uncertain spring sunlight was falling through the tall windows and lying pointedly on all the dust.

Liza blushed.

‘My dear,' Dan said. ‘What harm came of it? What harm to the school?'

‘Much more harm,' June said, fidgeting with her cardigan buttons, ‘much more harm if you were to resign. Blaise will go at the end of the summer, anyway. It was all planned.'

Liza looked down. She had been compelled to write that letter. It was the only expiation she could think of, the only source of even the faintest consolation. If she had felt lonely before, all those months, she had felt doubly so, all weekend. Everything in her, accustomed over long years, had cried out to confide in Archie, to be comforted by Archie. Her secret weighed upon her like an albatross. Writing the letter had, briefly, lightened that burden. She, who had for so long jealously cherished her private fantasy, now longed for frankness. Values that had temporarily seemed an imposition on her freedom had acquired a sudden, fierce poignancy. Thomas, on Sunday, had at intervals appeared too vulnerable to be borne.

‘Can't he leave?' she had begged Archie. ‘Can't he leave now, and come home?'

‘We'll talk about it,' Archie said. They were in the car, in the discouraging Sunday-evening dark, driving home. Mikey and Imogen, subdued by the day, were quiet on the back seat. ‘We'll talk. Really. When we're alone.'

Liza said now, ‘I don't know what happened. I wish I could explain. I seemed – to get disorientated, somehow, blown off course—'

‘It's over,' June said. She hated confessions. ‘Don't tell me,' she would say to transgressing children. ‘I don't want to know. All I want to know is that you are sorry.' She looked at Liza. ‘Closed chapter. Really. All forgotten.'

Liza shook her head.

‘Not that.'

Dan took her arm.

‘Come on,' he said. ‘No more tears.'

He led her out through the hall and on to the terrace where three William Kent urns sprouted bleached stalks from last summer like wispy hair.

‘In my experience,' Dan said, ‘normal people don't do daft things quite arbitrarily. I do, of course, all the time, but then I am not normal, by normal standards.' He took her arm. ‘You are normal.'

‘I know,' Liza said in despair.

‘Don't you despise it.'

‘It's so dull,' Liza said, ‘being orthodox.'

‘My dear, without the status quo, the whole contraption would fall apart at the centre.'

‘It's easy for you to say that!' Liza cried. ‘You can disregard it, you don't feel it's up to you to push it along. I'm tied to it. I was brought up to it. People like me can't have adventure, don't dare. We don't feel consumed by the huge things, only by the little ones, petty ones, mean ones—'

‘What a dear you are,' Dan Hampole said, patting her hand.

‘It isn't enough.'

She looked away from him. The great stone slabs of the terrace were cracked here and there, and furred with aubretia and weeds.

‘I love my husband, you see,' Liza said.

‘I don't doubt it.'

‘You haven't met him—'

‘I know of him. Everyone round here knows of him.'

Liza said sadly, ‘He knows how to live, you see.' She remembered a phrase of Archie's. ‘Big bites. Life in big bites.'

Dan Hampole gave her hand another pat and let it go.

‘I shouldn't tell him, all the same.'

‘Oh, I won't, I couldn't—'

‘It's one of the few things I've learned, keeping mum.' He looked at Liza. ‘Don't say a word and don't give young O'Hanlon an inch.'

Liza gazed at him.

‘You had your reasons,' Dan said. ‘Nothing's for nothing with good girls like you.'

She drove home slowly in the quiet, sad afternoon. Good girl, Dan Hampole had said, a good girl like you. But her kind of goodness had no virtue in it, she thought; it was merely an absence of badness. Really good people, blazingly good people, were often impossible to live with, fascinating, relentless in their advancement of good. Look at St Francis. I'm not good, Liza thought unhappily, I'm just decent. Marina contradicted me when I said England was full of girls like me, but she didn't really know; her judgements are made with her own vision of style and strength. I look different to her because I'm English, that's all. I'm not different; I'm just a fool.

She stopped the car in the village. Diana Jago was standing by the letter box, tearing stamps off a long strip and sticking them on to a pile of letters with a thump of her fist. She wore tight blue jeans and riding boots and a quilted waistcoat and a silk headscarf.

‘You Logans,' Diana said. ‘Completely gone to earth. Thought you'd emigrated. Where have you been?'

‘Working,' Liza said. She got out of the car and leaned against it.

‘You look worn out,' Diana said.

‘Thanks so much—'

Diana pushed the last letter into the box.

‘There we go. The last of the final demands. Simon appears perfectly able to run a bank and totally, utterly incapable of making anything but a hash of his domestic finances.'

‘I thought bankers like Simon had their secretaries do that.'

‘I don't let his secretary do anything outside the office. I've learned the hard way. Come back for a cup of tea.'

‘I shouldn't—'

‘Ring from my house. Just half an hour.'

‘Oh, Diana,' Liza said. Tears rose and spilled. ‘I was going to buy a ball of string, would you believe, and freezer bags—'

‘Don't cry,' Diana said. ‘You'll start me off and Ma Betts will see. Don't, Liza. Come on, get in my car. You can't drive if you're blubbing. We'll pick your car up later.'

‘We keep crying,' Liza said, bundled up on Diana's front seat. ‘All of us. Archie, me, Thomas. It's frightful. At least when Imogen cries, it's only temper.'

Diana swung her car off the road and down the lane towards the river.

‘You're so kind.'

‘Nonsense.'

‘Diana,' Liza said, ‘have you ever made a really awful fool of yourself?'

‘Yup,' Diana said. She turned the car into her smoothly gravelled drive and stopped it by the white front door guarded by two stone lions bearing shields.

‘And?'

‘And nothing. It's just something you have to live with.'

Liza followed Diana across the hall, hushed by its depth of carpet, and into the kitchen. It was stencilled in blue on yellow, with complicated, unsuitable urban curtains, and on the table lay a sprawling pile of tack.

‘Always clean it in here, in the winter,' Diana said. ‘Much warmer.' She reached for a roll of paper towel, spun off several feet of it and threw it at Liza. ‘Now blow your nose.' The sound of the Jago Labradors, penned in their outdoor kennel, came penetratingly through the closed windows. Diana banged on the nearest one. ‘Shut up! Bloody dogs. Sit over there, it's the only comfortable chair. Chuck the cat off.'

Liza lifted an enormous square tabby off a cushion in a Windsor armchair and sat down, settling the cat on her knee.

‘These deaths knock you for six, you know,' Diana said, getting a catering-sized box of extra-strong tea bags out of a cupboard. ‘I wouldn't be surprised if it's worse for Archie precisely because he thought he was so used to it, and could cope.'

‘It got full of complications,' Liza said. ‘Complications and crossed wires.' She turned her face away from Diana and looked at the yellow wall beside her where a circle of blue-and-white Spanish pottery plates hung like a childish clock. ‘I didn't see,' Liza said. ‘I was so busy with myself. I've always been so used to him being in charge, of himself as well as us. I never thought to look. I was fed up with him. I got carried away by something else.'

Diana put tea bags and boiling water into thick mugs painted with crude lemons. After a few seconds, she fished the tea bags out with a spoon and flicked them approximately in the direction of the sink. One fell short, on to the floor. Diana took no notice. She carried the mugs over to Liza and then went across to the refrigerator and got out a bottle of milk.

‘Milk?'

‘Please.'

‘Look,' Diana said, sloshing it into the mugs, ‘I think Archie feels pretty much the same as you.'

Liza turned her head back quickly.

‘Does he?'

‘I think he'd agree with you about crossed wires. I know he's having second thoughts about Richard's repulsive plan. Here. Drink that nasty brew. If we were in your kitchen, it'd be Lapsang Suchong and a homemade cake—'

‘Don't you believe it. Diana—'

‘Yes.'

‘Diana, d'you really think Archie feels as I do?'

‘I think he feels,' Diana said, remembering Archie's glowing face in the field a week before, ‘I think he feels that you haven't been communicating particularly well recently, and he'd like to put that right.'

Liza said, leaning forward, ‘There's Thomas, you see. We have to do something about Thomas. He looks awful, so strained. But while it was all tied up in Archie's mind with Andrew and Andrew's wishes, it seemed hopeless even to talk about it. Perhaps now—'

‘As Nanny used to say, grasp the nettle.'

‘Yes,' Liza said. She was smiling. ‘Of course.'

She reached across the table and put her mug down.

‘Come on, cat.'

She stood up.

‘Go for it,' Diana said.

Archie was standing in the kitchen, propped against the dresser and reading the local paper. He was humming. Something about him made Liza a little doubtful as to how she should begin. She got carrots and onions out of the cupboard and put them on a wooden board on the draining board and began to chop. She chopped the carrots into tiny dice and the onion into wafery rings.

Then, without turning round, she said uncertainly, ‘Archie—'

‘Yes.'

She looked at her reflection in the night-black glass of the window above the sink. She couldn't see her expression, only her outline, and beyond that, against the lines of plates and jugs on the dresser, Archie, ankles crossed, reading the paper.

‘Archie, I want to say sorry.'

He didn't look up.

‘What for?'

She battled to keep her voice steady.

‘For the way I've behaved. About Andrew. About extra working. About us.'

He looked up. She could see his face, tiny and clear, in the black window.

‘That's all right,' he said easily.

‘No.'

She turned round. He looked absolutely unperturbed.