A Passionate Man (9 page)

‘Don't, darling.'

Imogen clung harder.

‘Imogen, let go.'

Gripping the folds of brushed cotton in limpet hands, Imogen buried her face and shoved it hard against Liza's thigh.

‘Stop it, Imogen. Let go and don't be such a stupid baby.'

Imogen pretended she could not hear. She breathed a hot damp patch through the fabric against Liza's thigh. The telephone rang. Dragging Imogen crossly behind her, Liza limped across the room.

‘Hello?'

‘Liza? My dear. It's Marina. I have to thank you for possibly the best Sunday ever. I detest Sundays but yesterday I adored.'

‘We adored having you.'

Imogen opened her mouth wide, braced her teeth against Liza's skirt and bit as hard as she could.

‘Ow—'

‘My dear,' Marina said in alarm. ‘What is happening?'

‘My horrible little daughter. Wait a moment—'

Liza put down the receiver, seized Imogen and ran with her out of the room. Imogen was bawling now, her face scarlet and furious.

‘Stay out there,' Liza said. ‘Stay out, you beastly little girl.'

She shut the kitchen door and wedged a chair-back under the handle.

‘I'm so sorry,' she said to Marina. ‘Imogen suddenly bit me. I suppose it's her revenge for my going out to work.'

‘Imogen? That angelic baby?'

‘Not angelic,' Liza said. ‘An angelic-looking fiend.'

Imogen was crashing some object on the far side of the door.

‘Stop it!' Liza shouted.

There was a pause while Imogen considered the effect she was having, and then the crashing began again.

‘Excuse me,' Liza said desperately.

She put down the telephone, moved the chair, opened the door and seized Imogen, running with her down the hall towards Sally. As she ran, Imogen tried to bite her again.

‘Sally, I'm on the phone and she's being frightful—'

Sally, with whom Imogen was seldom frightful, put down her duster and took the child from Liza.

‘Heading for a smacked bottom, I see.'

Liza ran back to the telephone

‘Hello? Oh, I'm so sorry—'

‘What would you say,' Marina said, ‘to a day in London with me? Lunch, and perhaps an exhibition. Or a movie. I'd come down to you, but I'm sure it would be better for you to come up to me. I just feel—' She paused and then said with great warmth, ‘I just feel you and I have a great deal to say to one another.'

‘I'd love it,' Liza said, smiling into the telephone.

‘Would you?'

‘Oh yes—'

‘Then,' said Marina, ‘go get your diary. Right now. And we'll make a date.' She paused again, and then she said, ‘It's time you had someone spoil you.'

Archie did not come in until twenty past ten. He had telephoned to say he would be late, and so Liza had eaten her share of supper after she had put the children to bed, and put the rest in a low oven for Archie. Then she took her marking in by the sitting-room fire and corrected seventeen dictées and fourteen comprehensions. When those were done and stowed efficiently away in the red canvas bag she used for school books, she made herself a mug of coffee and settled down to think what she would wear to go to London and have lunch with Marina. She had reached the guiltily excited conclusion that she had nothing suitable, and must therefore go shopping, when Archie came in, having organized an emergency ambulance to take a child with suspected meningitis into Winchester hospital. Having announced this, he pulled Liza out of her chair into his arms and said he was sorry about this morning. Liza said so was she. Then Archie kissed her and said he was starving, so Liza went away to the kitchen and returned with his supper on a tray.

Archie said, ‘Why are you looking so pleased with yourself?'

‘Am I?'

‘Yes. Something nice happened?'

Liza thought of Blaise and of Marina.

‘No. The reverse really. Imogen was ghastly while I was on the telephone and Mrs Betts told me Richard wants to build on the field next to us. Scared me, rather.'

‘Why?' Archie said with his mouth full.

‘Why?'

‘It wouldn't affect us. We've got the trees between us.'

‘Archie—'

He cut a canyon in his potato and wedged in a piece of butter.

‘I've no objection to Richard making a bit of cash. And why shouldn't more people have the chance to live in the country?'

‘Archie, it would ruin living here. Horrible little houses and horrible suburban people keeping themselves to themselves—'

‘You little snob,' Archie said without heat.

She was pink with indignation.

‘I'm not! How dare you? How can you be so obstinate? It would be awful to have the field built over. It – it would devalue the house—'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Archie,' Liza cried, standing up. ‘Why don't you care?'

‘I do,' he said. ‘But not about this sort of thing. I care about people.'

She shouted, ‘You are so bloody pleased with yourself.'

He put his knife and fork down and looked at her.

‘You know I'm not.'

‘Yes, you are. You are! Well, I'm sick of it. I'm sick of doing everything
you
think is right. I'm sick of being treated like a child. I'm sick of you being so patronizing and I'm sick of doing every damn blasted thing to please you all the time!' She paused for an angry breath and then she shouted, ‘And I'm spending the day with Marina next week. In
London
.' And then she rushed out of the room.

When she had gone, Archie took two more increasingly unenthusiastic bites of supper and put the tray on the floor. He sat with his elbows on his knees and stared at the rug between his feet, half-thinking about Liza and half-wondering why these curious shapes and patterns should occur so naturally to the Afghan mind. After a moment or two the spaniel, who was called Nelson after an enthusiasm of Thomas's, inspired by seeing the Admiral's tiny embroidered swinging cot aboard the
Victory
, pushed the door open and began to take a powerful discreet interest in the remains on Archie's plate.

‘Leave it,' Archie said.

Nelson sat down two feet from the tray and longed for it with every fibre of his being. Archie picked the tray up and carried it out to the kitchen, pausing on his return to listen up the stairwell. There was silence. Part of Archie had hoped for the excuse of hearing Liza crying, but there was no sound of any kind. He went to the telephone and rang Winchester hospital and was told that his child patient was about to have its lumbar puncture. He said he would ring back in an hour. Then he went back to the kitchen and made a mug of coffee and carried it back to the sitting room. As he crossed the hall, the bathroom door above him shut with decision.

He turned on the television, and then he turned it off again. He read the leader and letters page of the newspaper without absorbing any of it. He drank his coffee. He had a conversation with Nelson and disentangled several burs from his extravagant ears. Then he leaped up, crossed the room and bounded up the stairs two at a time, bursting into their bedroom to find Liza sitting up composedly in bed with her hair brushed, reading an article on the Church of England's neglect of the successful, in a Sunday paper. She did not look up.

‘Liza,' Archie said.

‘Mm?'

He sat on the edge of the bed.

‘What is it?'

She looked at him briefly, then returned to her paper.

‘I explained. Downstairs.'

‘But it isn't true. I don't patronize you. I depend on you.'

She looked up again.

‘You make me,' she said, ‘feel limited and suburban and narrow. I might be all those things and I might, too, be fighting like anything against them.' She shook the paper slightly. ‘It would be nice to be given a bit of credit now and then.'

‘But I don't think these things. I don't think the same way as you about this development, but I can't see what that has to do with all these accusations.'

‘That's exactly what I mean,' Liza said.

He put his hand out to her.

‘Liza.'

‘No,' she said. ‘Just because you have the upper hand in bed—'

‘But you like me to have the upper hand in bed—'

She turned her face away.

‘Perhaps you shouldn't take so much for granted.'

He stood up.

‘Jesus,' he said. ‘This conversation might be happening in Hebrew for all I understand it.'

Liza said nothing. He lifted his fists and beat them lightly against his temples.

‘Can you tell me, very simply, what we are talking about?'

Liza laid down the paper and folded her hands on it.

‘You and me. Your attitude to me. Your assumptions about me. My self-knowledge telling me that many of those assumptions are unfair.'

‘I see,' Archie said. He walked slowly round the bed, thinking, and came to a halt, looking down on Liza.

‘And all this grew out of my not sharing your abhorrence at the prospect of new houses in the field next door?'

Liza bent her head.

‘Oh God. Archie, you are so obtuse—'

He waited. She offered no further explanation.

After some moments he said, ‘Clearly,' and then he went downstairs to telephone the children's ward at Winchester hospital once more.

Chapter Five

Marina de Breton took great trouble over Liza's day in London. She explained to Sir Andrew that it was sheer self-indulgence, plotting a treat for someone sufficiently unspoiled to appreciate one. All her stepgrandchildren, a Kennedyesque brood of talent, instability and unceasing problems, had grown up so accustomed to the cushioning effect of the de Breton fortune that they were immune to the luxury of being imaginatively indulged. It had not taken her long to realize that her best gift to them was a brusquely humorous refusal to treat them as moneyed little stars, and an accompanying insistence on speaking to them as if they were both unremarkable and tiresome. This approach had won her a surprising amount of affection, but it did not allow her natural generosity much room for manoeuvre.

She was the only one of Louis de Breton's wives whom he had not divorced and she knew perfectly well that she owed this dubious distinction purely to the fact that he had died before he got round to it. She was quite clear in her own mind as to why she had married him which was that like some gifted, exhausted, moneyless Edith Wharton heroine she was absolutely sick of the brave struggle of managing on her own. Clever but inadequately educated, without family in America after the early deaths of both her improvident parents, she had married once, very young, a law student who had abandoned her a year later for the fellow student who was about to bear his baby. After that, she moved precariously from job to job, usually fund raising for, or promoting, small orchestras and ballet companies, or organizing minor exhibitions in out-of-the-way New York galleries, the unsteady pattern of this being given brief respites by a series of lovers, all of whom she managed to retain as friends after their return to their wives or the discovery of another mistress.

Louis de Breton arrived as a most unlikely fortieth birthday present. Large and overbearing, with all the outward mannerisms of a Tennessee Williams bullyboy, he came to a gallery opening Marina had organized because his oldest granddaughter had contributed the sculpture that stood in the centre of the main room, an angular column of rusting spears and pikes entitled
Woman With Two Horses
and priced at ten thousand dollars. Marina, dressed in narrow black trousers with a scarlet matador jacket she had made herself from a
Vogue
pattern, offered a glass of champagne to the burly man in a tuxedo standing in front of the sculpture. He looked at the champagne and said did she have any bourbon.

Then he waved a hand at
Woman With Two Horses
and said, ‘Is this garbage?'

‘Yes,' Marina said. ‘I am afraid it is.'

‘Overpriced garbage?'

‘That, too.'

‘My granddaughter made it.'

‘In that case,' Marina said, ‘I sincerely regret that it is garbage.'

Louis de Breton bellowed with laughter. Armed with his bourbon, he went round the gallery repeating Marina's remark. Particularly to the sculptor's mother, his daughter-in-law, who, he told Marina later, was a scheming bitch. Next day he sent Marina a coffin-sized box of orchids and asked her to dine with him. She agreed, on condition that he never sent her orchids again. So he sent her roses and lilies and stephanotis in pots and branches of forced lilac and posies of violets every day for six weeks. And then he married her.

She was not in the least in love with him. She found him excellent company, generous, domineering and selfish. His physical appetites were both large and fickle, and he had never troubled to control his temper. For the first year he was willing, and at times even eager, to be both companion and confidant, but, if ever, unlike Scheherazade, her capacity to entertain him brilliantly and with novelty flagged even a little, he grew morose and then took himself off in search of more dissolute pleasures. Marina did not suffer too badly. In her mind, she had made a form of bargain with Louis de Breton, and was well aware that she had deliberately made her bed and must now lie on it. So, as far as possible, she relished her security, got to know as many of his exaggerated family as she could, enrolled herself in art history courses and took herself travelling. On the whole she declined to allow herself to feel lonely.