‘Darling,’ Archie said, ‘shall I carve?’
Sir Andrew was enormously happy. He looked about the dining-room table and felt a rich pleasure in everyone round it and everything on it. To him, each person, each dish, each glass and fork, seemed to have an extraordinary value and vitality, reflecting his own sudden and miraculous sense of not just being alive, which he was used to, but of living, down to each last nerve end, which he was not. He had been disconcerted, even embarrassed, by this uncharacteristic exuberance at first, had been afraid he was going to make a fool of himself, and, in the process, destroy the sober esteem in which, he knew perfectly well, the world held him. But his confidence had grown with the realization that he was not, as he had feared, a victim of elderly and absurd folly, but, rather, one of the chosen; a man – a little late in the day, perhaps – chosen to have his half-empty cup suddenly filled until it brimmed and spilled. All over his mind and body and heart, doors, long shut, some never even opened previously, were swinging wide. Looking down at his plate of lamb and vegetables, Sir Andrew was shaken with a shudder of unquestionable ecstasy at the recollection of being in bed with Marina de Breton.
‘Oh dear,’ Liza said anxiously. ‘Are you cold? I’ll get an electric fire. The radiator in here never works properly—’
‘I’m not cold in the least,’ Sir Andrew said, turning upon her a radiant smile.
She said in amazement, ‘You look so happy!’
‘I am.’
She blushed. He did not. He continued, with great dignity, to look unabashed and radiant.
‘Liza,’ he said teasingly, ‘have I shocked you?’
‘Not shocked—’
‘Your stiff old Scots pa-in-law shouldn’t fling his cap over windmills, eh?’
‘Don’t,’ she said.
He was laughing gently. Suddenly furious with him for not having the decency to be self-conscious, she looked away and briefly caught Archie’s eyes across the table. He raised one eyebrow.
‘More peath,’ Imogen said, beside her mother. ‘Heapth and heapth more peath.’
‘Only when you have eaten everything else.’
‘This,’ Marina said to Archie, ‘is some of the best lamb I have eaten in my life. And being Greek, I do know about lamb.’
‘Greek?’
‘Greek. I only put the accent on for customs officials and traffic wardens and inattentive shop assistants and anyone else tiresome. I left Athens when I was three. I had charming and unsatisfactory parents who thought New York was simply waiting for them with bated breath, which of course it was not. I do believe outrage and disappointment killed my mother. She was an early dope fiend, in the days when it was still chic. Ikons and cocaine and Fortuny evening dresses – the last word in dated debauchery. Poor Mamma.’
‘You are making it up,’ Archie said.
‘My dear. It is far too outrageous for that.’
She gave him a quick glance. He was looking away from her, towards Clare on his other side.
‘Do you believe her?’ Archie demanded.
Clare, whose susceptibility to male physical charms, even the familiar ones of her sister’s husband, always threw her into confusion, said, ‘I – I think so.’
Marina burst out laughing.
‘That’s adorable!’
Archie took Clare’s hand.
‘Don’t be bullied—’
‘You see,’ Clare said, gathering courage from his grasp. ‘Liza and I had such an unutterably boring upbringing that we can never believe it when other people tell us how fascinating theirs was. I used to pray and pray to be kidnapped and then, lo and behold, Liza was. By Archie. So unfair.’
‘And did nobody kidnap you later?’
‘Oh yes,’ Clare said, looking down. ‘Robin did. But having me wasn’t as exciting as chasing me. So he went off to chase someone else.’
‘That’s too bad,’ Marina said. ‘I hope she made him perfectly miserable.’
‘She does. But he likes it. I suppose it’s a sort of permanent chase.’
Marina turned to Archie.
‘And are you a chaser?’
‘No.’
‘With all these women patients Andrew tells me of, feigning illness like crazy for two seconds of your undivided attention?’
‘Even,’ Archie said composedly, ‘with all of them.’
He stood up to carve second helpings. It looked to him as if Marina was going to throw him another challenge, so he said deliberately, ‘I like being married.’
‘You and your father,’ Marina said, ‘are remarkable men.’
She turned to Mikey, diligently eating beside her.
‘And will you be a doctor, too?’
‘I’m going to be a cook.’
‘A cook?’
‘And live here always,’ Mikey said.
‘You are a very unusual boy. Boys commonly can’t wait to leave home. I have eleven stepgrandsons in America and they leave home all the time.’
Mikey thought about this. He thought about his bedroom and the picture of Superman over his bed and the torch he had under his pillow to flash signals on the ceiling with, after his light had been turned off. And he thought of Thomas.
‘If I leave, you see, I mightn’t like it so much.’
‘So,’ Marina said, ‘will you bring your wife back to live here, too?’
‘I don’t want a wife. I want a dog.’
‘I’m not sure that’s quite the same,’ Clare said quickly.
Marina waved a hand.
‘He’s on to something, you know. Louis de Breton’s dogs had a much better time than his wives. Archie, if you were going to offer me more of that sensational lamb, I shall save you the trouble and say yes please. And I never have second helpings. Never in this world. Do I, Andrew?’
And she looked across the table at him and together, wrapped in some intimate and delightful joke, they began to laugh.
Much later, Liza said she and Clare would do the washing up, and why didn’t Archie make a bonfire? Sir Andrew had driven Marina de Breton away with mysterious indications of pressing things to be done in London, and Archie had not uttered since their departure which inhibited Liza from saying all the things she was bursting with. When she suggested a bonfire, Archie just nodded and collected up his children and the spaniel and old newspapers and matches and went out into the dying afternoon. From the kitchen window, Liza watched him with a mixture of sympathy and exasperation. Clare, struck by the effortless glamour of his appearance in tall Wellington boots and an immense and dishevelled Aran jersey, felt his evident dejection to be almost tragic.
Archie himself was chiefly consumed with self-disgust. His own view of love was founded upon generosity, and, while he was well aware that clumsiness and pure maleness often prevented him from fine-tuning this outlook, his every basic instinct in love was bent upon giving. A colleague of his, whose wife had become entirely swallowed up by her Open University course in psychology, had said fretfully once to Archie, ‘In my view, the least she owes me is a decent dinner at night.’ Archie had been both struck and shocked by this. Obligation did not come into his emotional scheme of things – responsibility, yes, contributions from both sides, certainly, but never a feeling of being beholden, of being in someone’s debt. Looking at Imogen now, picking up spiky beech nut shells and putting them into a broken flowerpot, made him realize the extent of her dignity and, even at three, her separate valuable power to love without abasing herself or compromising herself. He, her father, wished to give her emotional space. He wanted her love, but he wanted it freely given. He wanted his father’s love in the same way, and he had always had it. He had it now. His father had, today, been demonstrably affectionate. But he had also shown that he was full of another kind of love, full of it. Archie plunged his fork into a mound of garden rubbish and flung it to the top of the bonfire.
‘Jealous bastard,’ he said to himself. ‘Childish, shameful, jealous bastard.’
Thick, unecologically s
ound, blue-grey smoke uncurled itself slowly into the air and filled Archie’s eyes with the blessed excuse for tears. Mikey came drifting up through the gauzy air and held out his closed fists.
‘What have you got?’ Archie said, smearing his jersey sleeve across his eyes.
Mikey opened his fists and revealed a pound coin in each.
‘One for me and one for Imo. I’m holding on to hers because she thought it was chocolate.’
‘From Grandpa?’
‘No,’ Mikey said. ‘From Mrs de Breton.’
Archie looked unhappily down at the fat golden coins.
‘Did you like her?’
‘Of course,’ Mikey said.
‘Why?’
Mikey looked away, his face contorted with the impossibility of describing his susceptibility to her charm.
He said uncertainly, after a while, ‘I liked her earrings.’
Archie held his arms out.
‘Come and give your old da a hug.’
He lifted Mikey up so that his rubber-booted toes bumped against his knees. Mikey put his arms out stiffly behind Archie’s head, still gripping the money.
‘I’m going to save up for a guinea-pig. One of the ones with whirly bits in its fur.’ He bent his head back to look into his father’s face. ‘You can share it if you like.’
‘He’s wonderful with the children, isn’t he?’ Clare said, rinsing wine glasses at the kitchen sink and gazing out of the window. ‘Perhaps if I’d had a baby, Robin wouldn’t have left.’
‘He would, you know. He’d have left just the same and it would be worse for you, now, with a baby.’
‘Nothing could be worse,’ Clare said.
Liza was stretching plastic film over leftover helpings of lunch.
‘Clare, you are not to talk like this—’
‘I swore I wouldn’t,’ Clare said. ‘I absolutely swore. But listening to Marina at lunch made me so depressed and sick of myself. I mean, you simply can’t imagine her letting life get her down, can you? I thought she was amazing. And she looked so wonderful. How old do you think she is?’
Liza, who was full of the same envious admiration of Marina, said she supposed about her mid-fifties.
‘But she was so sexy. Wasn’t she? I mean, you and I will never be that sexy. We never have been. Have we?’
Liza was impelled to say that she thought Archie found her sexy, but stopped herself in the nick of time because it struck her that, whatever he felt, she didn’t feel herself to be sexy. She picked up a cloth and began to dry the glasses Clare had washed.
She said in a very sensible voice, ‘She’s much more exotic than us. And sort of international. And rich. Being rich is supposed to be very sexy.’
‘And all that suede, and gold jewellery. And her wonderful shoes. I bet they were Italian. Liza, did you notice Andrew could hardly keep his hands off her?’
‘Of course I noticed.’
‘Is that what’s the matter with Archie?’
Liza began to put the polished wine glasses on a tray.
‘Well, it is a bit unhinging—’
‘Telling me,’ Clare said. ‘She filled me with dissatisfaction. You’re so lucky, she might become your mother-in-law and give you lunch at the Connaught and lovely presents. She looks that sort of person. Robin’s mother can’t see anything wrong with Robin. It has to be my fault he left. That’s what she thinks.’
‘Marina understood about Thomas,’ Liza said. ‘She offered to speak to Andrew and my first reaction was to say no, but I wonder—’
Privately, Liza thought there were other things Marina might understand about, too. ‘The first of many meetings,’ Marina had said to Liza before she was driven away. And she had smiled. There had been an edge of female complicity to that smile.
‘I’m taking a rice pudding down the lane to old Mrs Mossop,’ Liza said. ‘Want to come?’
‘Not really. But I don’t want to go home either.’
‘Clare,’ Liza said warningly. She opened the bottom oven door and took out a Pyrex dish.
‘I’m three years older than you,’ Clare said. ‘And we might almost be different generations. Look at you. All this domestic bliss and a job and village life—’
Liza wrapped a clean dishcloth round the Pyrex dish.
‘Hold that.’
On the way down the hall, they passed through a lingering breath of Marina’s scent and stopped to sniff.
‘Honestly,’ Clare said. ‘It’s like having a crush at school.’
Liza began to giggle.
‘Aren’t we idiotic?’
‘No, no, I love it; I love this carried away feeling—’
‘Me, too.’
‘Think of what life is like for Andrew, I mean, just think—’
‘I know. I simply didn’t know where to look at lunch.’ Liza opened the front door. ‘Do you think they just drove straight back to London to go to bed?’
‘Yes,’ Clare said, ‘of course they did. And left us all here, years younger, simply green with envy—’
‘Speak for yourself!’
‘Can you,’ Clare said, stepping carefully down the drive because of carrying the pudding, ‘can you talk to Archie about it?’
Liza thought.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think I can. Not about that.’
‘But I thought you talked about everything. Sex and everything—’
‘But not Andrew and sex.’
‘No,’ Clare said, ‘perhaps not. But will Archie think about it?’
‘Yes,’ Liza said slowly. ‘I don’t see how he can help it,’ and then she took the pudding from her sister and they went away with it down the lane to old Mrs Mossop’s cottage, and found her there, alone in her darkening room, watching the empty Sunday lane.
‘When I want charity,’ Granny Mossop said, ‘I’ll ask for it.’
But she grew cross when Liza offered to remove the pudding and, when the sisters peered back in through the window as they left, she was hunting for spoons.
Chapter Four
On Monday morning, Liza accused Archie of behaving like a child. She did this over breakfast, causing Mikey to weep and remember he had not done his violin practice, and Imogen to refuse, flatly, even to look at her breakfast. They were all late and a faint disheartening drizzle was misting the kitchen windows. Archie, whose provocative crime had been to remark that the sitting room still smelled like Harrods, got up in silence, kissed his children, and went off to his car. Liza was impressed to find that she felt buoyed up by indignation rather than borne down by tears, as was her wont in such situations, and merely said to Imogen as Archie’s car could be heard revving in the garage, ‘Eat that up when you are told.’
The car went down the drive and Imogen picked up her cereal bowl and held it upside down over the floor.
Driving down the lane towards the village, Archie wrenched his mind on to the day ahead. Surgery, visits, an hour or two at the local cottage hospital (saved from the great central state crushing machine only by relentless local effort), a practice meeting, more visits and evening surgery. The practice meeting would, he knew, be about the installation of computers at the health centre. Intellectually he was all for this but emotionally he rebelled. One of his colleagues had described him as a refugee from an A. J. Cronin novel which Archie thought, on the whole, pretty accurate. He also knew, without complacency, that diagnostically and in human terms he was the best doctor in the practice. His colleagues, with varying degrees of good and bad grace, knew this, too, and would in consequence emphasize their own additional roles as, for instance, anaesthetists at local hospitals. Archie had no wish to be anything other than a rural general practitioner and, when it was pointed out to him that he was bound to get the fidgets at forty, he said he was planning a really big break-out then, so as not to disappoint them. The pharmacist at the health centre had overheard him say this once, and had endured several terrible nights subsequently, plagued by impossible fantasies of which she was l
ater ashamed.
Because he was early, on account of the incident at breakfast, Archie paused at Stoke Stratton post office. This was run by Mrs Betts, a formidable widow from a Southampton suburb, who used it as a power-base from which to shape and control the village. She was secretary to the Women’s Institute, founder of the rambling club and organizer of the village fête. She had also revived a gardeners’ group and was Clerk to the Parish Council. Tall, solid and handsome, Mrs Betts had brought to Stoke Stratton a very clear idea of what English village life should be like and a strong determination to impose this vision on the few hundred people who came to buy stamps at one end of her shop and throat lozenges, birthday cards and potting compost at the other. Progress, in Mrs Betts’s view, meant power in the hands of the bourgeoisie and the neatening of sloppy agricultural ways. On her counter stood a homemade advertisement enticing her customers to sign a petition asking the local farmer not to drive his tractors down the main street of the village. As the farm lay above Beeches House, and the lane leading to it was usually liberally strewn with succulent chunks of mud, Mrs Betts was very pleased to see Archie as an early customer.
He asked for a dozen first-class stamps, some brown envelopes and a packet of peppermints.
‘And you’ll sign my petition, Dr Logan.’
‘Sorry, Mrs Betts. No go. I’ve no objection to mud.’
‘Come now, Dr Logan. Think of Mrs Logan. I saw her and her sister coming down your lane yesterday with the greatest difficulty.’
‘It’s a natural hazard of country life—’
‘Only because no-one has thought to do anything about it. Where would we be if we all just accepted things? Dr Logan, there are seven old footpaths now open again round this village thanks to me and my ramblers.’
Archie folded his stamps and slid them into his wallet.
‘Richard Prior is a good neighbour to me, Mrs Betts. I’m not going to provoke him and I don’t mind his mud.’
Mrs Betts laid her large capable hands on the counter.
‘Dr Logan, it’s you professional people who must take the lead. It’s not like the old days when there was a squire to turn to. It’s up to people like you and Mr Jago now to preserve our heritage.’
A Passionate Man Page 5