A Passionate Man

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘I can’t think about anything else,’ Blaise hissed.

  Imogen began to grizzle and drag backwards.

  ‘Imo, come on. Blaise, I can’t have this kind of conversation here. I can’t have this kind of conversation anyway, I mean. Imogen, I shall spank you.’

  Imogen wrested her hand free and flumped down on the road. Blaise dropped back and picked her up.

  ‘I won’t embarrass you,’ he said, hurrying after Liza with his burden. ‘I won’t hang around. I just had to have a sight of you, that’s all. Couldn’t you just say one nice thing to me to keep me going until Tuesday?’

  Liza said nothing.

  ‘It does seem a bit hard,’ Blaise said, panting slightly. ‘You could spare me a crumb, really you could.’

  Liza said, ‘You’re making a fool of me—’

  ‘No,’ Blaise said. ‘No.’

  He stopped and set Imogen abruptly on her feet.

  ‘Look at me.’

  Liza halted and slowly turned to face him six feet away.

  ‘You’re not just lovely,’ Blaise said almost diffidently, ‘but you’re different. You’re special. And the thing that turns my heart over is that you don’t realize that you are.’ He put a hand on Imogen’s head. ‘If you only knew the power that is yours.’

  Liza gazed.

  After a moment, Blaise sighed and took his hand away from Imogen and said to Mikey, ‘I ought to go, you know. Would you like to look at my car before I do? It’s a Morgan and although I terribly disapprove of showing off, I must tell you that it has wire wheels.’

  Chapter Six

  Stratton Farm lay a few hundred yards up the lane from Beeches House. The farmhouse was an amiable building on to whose Tudor and Jacobean ramblings a prosperous eighteenth-century owner had slapped a graceful Georgian façade. It was constructed of comfortable pinkish brick under a mellowed tiled roof, and, at a respectful distance from it, across a space of admirably kept garden, lay the farmyard and the stables. The whole looked thriving and unpretentious, a working farm whose owner’s chief interests lay in horses and herbaceous borders. Even the pig unit – highly successful and the reason for the briskly authoritative columns that Richard Prior contributed to country magazines – was hidden behind a line of stalwart Victorian barns, and veiled in Virginia creeper.

  The Priors had lived at Stratton Farm all their married life. The house and four hundred acres had been a joint wedding present from Richard’s father and uncle, whose sole descendant he was. Twenty-five years later, the acreage had grown to over seven hundred, and pigs had brought Richard prosperity. Susan Prior had borne him two laconic sons and was an admired horsewoman and trainer of gun dogs. Richard, a lean, lounging man, was renowned for his lack of sentiment. ‘If it doesn’t work,’ he would say candidly at parochial church council meetings, of motions whose inspiration owed more to emotion than pragmatism, ‘then scrap it.’

  The Priors’ social moral code was essentially Whiggish. Their farm workers lived in sound cottages and were expected to return good labour for fair treatment. The Priors could always be relied upon in a crisis and equally to be very plainspoken about any kind of dishonesty or slacking. This paternalistic attitude spread to their view of the village. ‘I don’t mind a few city ponces like you,’ Richard often said to Simon Jago, who was a senior merchant banker. ‘But only a few. Villages are for villagers.’

  ‘Mr Prior,’ Mrs Betts of the post office would confide to her planning officer friend on Saturday nights, ‘lacks what I call common courtesy. He may have been born a gentleman but I’m afraid you’d often never know it. Quite frankly, I wouldn’t address a dog in the way Mr Prior sometimes speaks to the Vicar.’

  ‘Frightful woman,’ Richard Prior said of Mrs Betts. ‘And as for Jenkins, you could wring him out. No wonder the Church of England is going to the dogs, full of lefty wimps like him.’

  When he submitted his planning application for developing the field below Beeches House, Richard Prior knew exactly what his motives were. Half of them were businesslike – the best economic use for an awkward field that had never proved successful for grazing or planting – and the other half were social. Watching the Stoke villages fill up with weekenders and commuters to Southampton and retired people had disturbed him greatly. The miscellaneous cottages, which had once sat realistically and appealingly in gardens where cabbages, dahlias, washing, hens and motorbike spares jostled for space among the nettles, were increasingly being bijoued up into Hansel and Gretel dwellings, gleaming with new paint and fresh thatch and sprouting incongruous carriage lamps and fanciful name-plates. The gardens, fenced, hedged, trimmed up and squared off, were disciplined into anonymity, the flowerbeds dug so assiduously as to resemble chocolate-cake crumbs.

  And with the refinement came price rises. Children born in Stoke Stratton cottages and wishing, in turn, to raise their own children there, were driven by the cost of it to the faceless housing estates on the edges of Winchester and Southampton. Old Mrs Mossop and her Vinney children only remained where they were because Richard Prior owned the cottages and would not turn them out in Mrs Mossop’s lifetime on account of her dead husband who had worked tirelessly at Stratton Farm all Richard’s time there, refusing to take any holiday that did not coincide with those dictated by the Church calendar. Even when Granny Mossop died, Richard did not plan to turn the Vinneys out. He was well aware that their shiftless, expedient way of life was as much a part of the village as old Mr Mossop’s obdurate industry had been; all he would actually draw the line at was employing a Vinney.

  Indeed, in his view, the Vinneys and the Mossops, the Carters and the Durfields, and all the other village families whose ancestors lay in Stoke Stratton churchyard, should all be able to remain living among their roots. It was, in his opinion, both right and natural. To this end, he proposed to build on the controversial field one substantial house which would make a fine profit, and, at the opposite end, half a dozen simple, two-bedroomed cottages to be let to young couples who had not been born more than ten miles from the village.

  ‘It’s the only way,’ he said to Archie Logan, ‘to keep this village going and to defeat the electric lawn mower brigade.’

  They were sitting at the kitchen table at Beeches House, with Richard’s plans spread out on the table between them, weighted at the corners with tumblers, and a jug of water and a bottle of whisky.

  ‘I’m afraid it’ll mean a bit of mess and noise for you for a year,’ Richard said without adjusting his tone to apology. ‘But we’ll try and minimize that.’

  Archie bent over the plans. He was doing his best to ignore Liza, who sat at the other end of the table, sewing name tapes on to Mikey’s new games clothes, and pointedly not saying anything. Richard, who was used to living in a household where people only spoke if they had something constructive to say, was perfectly used to silence and saw nothing sinister in Liza’s. She sewed with little quick jabbing stitches, occasionally pausing to give the plans and Archie a look of contempt.

  The plans showed the big house at the Beeches House end of the field, and cottages clustered at the far end. A belt of trees would screen the one from the other, and all they would share would be the access entrance from the lane. The big house would have an acre of garden and a pleasant, unremarkable view across fields and hedges to the church tower and some jumbled village roofs. The cottages would each have an oblong garden at the back and a communal space of grass between them for their children to play on together.

  Archie said he thought it all looked jolly good. Liza thought it looked horrible. The big house would attract people of the mentality she had grown up with, and now thoroughly despised, and the cottages would blare rock music all weekends and their inhabitants would hang their washing out permanently and let their children scream like a school playground. She did not wish to say any of this in front of Archie or Richard, both of whom would think her very uncharitable and small-mindedly snobbish, and both of whom she might resentfully think were
right. So she sat and sewed and thought, as she did a great deal, of Blaise O’Hanlon, and, as she did only slightly less, of Marina.

  It was, quite literally, spell-binding to have someone so in love with her. She was quite sure she was not in love back but she was absolutely fascinated by Blaise’s feelings. She went over and over them with wonder and, when she looked in the mirror to brush her hair or put on her ear-rings, she tried to see herself as Blaise saw her, tried to see both the freshness and the mystery he said she had. Her consciousness of his infatuation – she was determined to label it sensibly so – made her feel different physically: elated, shining-eyed, powerful. And everything Marina had said to her confirmed these sensations. ‘I don’t see,’ Marina had said to her, ‘why you aren’t pleased and proud to be yourself.’

  ‘Mrs Betts,’ Richard Prior said to Archie, ‘is forming a Stoke Stratton Preservation Society.’

  Archie made a face.

  ‘She’s a powerful lobbyist,’ Richard went on. ‘She’ll rally all her ramblers, you know. I just have to make sure I’ve got quality and leave quantity to her. I thought I’d start with you and Simon Jago. And I might succeed with the Vicar on sociological grounds.’

  ‘I’ll see Simon,’ Archie said. ‘I don’t think Simon will be any problem.’ He looked at Liza. ‘Do you, darling?’

  She gave him a blank look. He raised his eyebrows and shrugged, but said nothing. If Liza wished to score off him – as she so often seemed to, just now – then he would not give her the satisfaction of doing it in front of Richard Prior.

  Liza raised her sewing to her mouth and bit off a thread, saying between her teeth as she did so, ‘I don’t suppose Simon Jago would disapprove of any money-making scheme.’ She emphasized the ‘money’.

  Richard Prior looked at her briefly, and without admiration. Then he said to Archie, ‘I thought we’d plant a hedge the far side of your beeches, to give you a bit of cover. And I’ll stick up some hurdles until it’s grown.’ He stood up and put his tumbler down on the part of the plan where the cottages would stand. ‘I’ll leave these with you for now to ruminate over.’

  ‘I’ll ring you,’ Archie said. ‘I’ll ring you when I’ve had a think.’

  Richard Prior went to the outside door, the steel rims to his brogue heels ringing on the floor.

  ‘Good man.’ He nodded minimally at Liza. ‘Thanks for the dram.’

  ‘Why,’ Liza said when the door had closed behind him, ‘why do you have to be so wet? Why agree? He’s heaps rich enough. Why help him to be richer?’

  ‘That isn’t the point.’

  ‘Oh. Really.’

  ‘No,’ Archie said. ‘No. The point is what he is trying to do for the village.’

  ‘But he doesn’t have to live with the results! He won’t have a Vinney-type slum on his doorstep! It’s easy to be so noble from the safe distance of Stratton Farm.’

  Archie began to fold up the plans with elaborate carefulness.

  ‘The cottages,’ he said in the level voice he used in practice meetings when he was, as he usually was, in a minority, ‘the cottages will be at least a hundred yards away. There will be our belt of beeches, a new hedge, a new house and garden, and a new stand of trees between them and us.’

  Liza said, ‘Don’t speak to me in that awful voice.’

  ‘I don’t know how to speak to you,’ Archie said.

  Liza took a breath. How to tell him, how to reach his true understanding and tell him that she had come to the end of a particular road on the map of their marriage, the road along which he had so far led her – lovingly, generously, but led her – by the hand. She had drawn level with him now and sometimes she wanted to step off the road for a moment and be alone. And she wanted him to recognize this, to recognize that things did not always stay as they always had been, that needs changed and so did capabilities. Liza wanted Archie to recognize her.

  She said, in as gentle a voice as she could manage, ‘You speak to me as if my point of view couldn’t possibly have the validity of yours because I’m me and you are you and all that that implies. Why can’t you speak to me with the courteous interest you speak with to other people?’

  Archie said, ‘I was under the impression that I was being perfectly polite. And of course I am interested in what you think. I just don’t think you have thought far enough or widely enough.’

  ‘And I,’ said Liza, ‘think you are a pompous prig.’

  He waited, out of hope and long experience, for her to cry. If she cried, then he could go round the table, and kneel by her chair and hold her and kiss her bee-stung mouth and comfort her. Comforting her was a way of getting close to her and Archie relied upon being close to her. But Liza didn’t cry. She did not even look remotely as if she might. She folded the last pair of marked socks into a tube, put them neatly beside the others on the pile of shorts and shirts and rose to carry them to a chair by the door, ready to go upstairs.

  Then she walked back to the oven, opened the door and said to Archie without turning round, ‘Perhaps you would lay the table. It’s fish pie and salad, so we only need forks.’

  ‘I love your fish pie,’ Archie said.

  He began to open drawers and cupboards in search of glasses and forks and plates, and then to put them on the table with uncharacteristic precision. Lining up a fork parallel to a plate, he said, ‘Liza—’

  ‘Yes?’ she said, without turning from the stove.

  ‘I don’t quite know how to put this, but I haven’t changed. I love you and I esteem you, as I always have. None of that has changed.’

  She came forward to the table with the fish pie between her hands, swaddled in a cloth. The top was golden-brown and speckled with parsley.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Liza said lightly. ‘I know that. In fact, it’s part of the trouble. It’s me who’s changed. That’s the difference, now.’

  Even though they were brother and sister, it was rare for June and Dan Hampole to eat together at night. For one thing, June preferred a tray on her knee in her sitting room with the basset hounds and absolutely anything that happened to be on television, while Dan, having spent such days as he did spend at Bradley Hall, drifting about tinkering and fiddling with the electrics and the plants in the conservatory, wanted the evening to be something of an occasion. And for another, June liked eggs and baked beans and toast and anything else she could eat without looking at it, and these tastes offended Dan. He liked to take a great deal of trouble over complicated food, and then, having donned an elderly black velvet dressing gown that made him look like a decadent prior, to eat it at a proper table with wine and candles and conversation. As the Hampoles had been brought up to regard cleanliness as suburban rather than godly, these stately evenings of Dan’s, smeared with candle-grease and spilled wine, resembled Miss Havisham’s mouldering wedding breakfast. The food was always excellent but it was imperative that no non-Hampole observed the extreme casualness with which Dan cooked it in a kitchen where cats roamed unchecked across the table tops and mice grew stout and brazen in the unswept corners. Once a month or so, spurred on by something particularly successful he had achieved with a rabbit or a partridge, Dan would invade June’s study and say, ‘Tonight’s a night, old duck,’ and she would reluctantly abandon her burrow and pin some of her mother’s brooches on her jerseys and cardigans, and join Dan in what was originally the dining room but was now given over to history lessons.

  Since Blaise’s arrival, world history had taken on a wild and romantic aspect, with a strong bias in favour of bloodshed and Irish struggles. The long wall that faced the windows had been stripped of its pictures – these were now hanging densely in Dan’s private apartments – and made into a giant pinboard for pictures and posters of great battles with the Battle of the Boyne in prime position in the centre.

  Spooning an orange and port sauce over June’s partridge, Dan waved at the wall above him and said, ‘You’ll have to speak to him, you know.’

  June, who was thinking how comical it
was to be sitting at a Regency snap-top table in a sea of pupils’ desks, before a great branched candelabra and a decanter of claret, said rather absently, ‘Speak to whom?’

  ‘To Blaise.’

  ‘Why must I speak to Blaise? He’s being very peaceable just now. How inky this room smells.’

  ‘He’s being very peaceable because he is up to something.’

  ‘But you’re always up to something and I never speak to you, although I often think I should.’ Dan put a glistening plateful down in front of her. ‘Oh, poor little bird. I do wish partridges didn’t mate for life. Out there, there will be a sorrowing widower.’

  ‘Oh no, there won’t because here he is. June, the things I get up to, I get up to miles away from Bradley Hall. Blaise is getting up to his thing right under your dear but unobservant nose.’

  June stared.

  ‘What thing?’

  Dan settled himself opposite her and flourished open a huge and dingy napkin.

  ‘Darling June, Blaise is trying to persuade little Mrs Logan to fall in love with him.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘Not nonsense. Fact.’

  ‘Perfect nonsense. She is an irreproachable wife and mother and she has far too much sense. Anyway, Blaise is very annoying and not at all seductive.’

  Dan said, with his mouth full, ‘You are not Mrs Logan. You are his exasperated aunt.’

  ‘I think this is all mischief. I expect he has a crush and it will wear off, like all crushes. In any case, what evidence have you?’

  ‘My eyes,’ Dan said, in the voice of Long John Silver. ‘I saw her swoon in the orchard and be clasped in his arms.’

  ‘Swoon?’

  ‘She was knocked flying by some rampaging little toads. But she stayed swooning for far longer than was decent and eluded being kissed by a hair’s breadth. And he hangs about for her and whispers to her and writes her torrid letters.’

  ‘Dan,’ June said, putting down her knife and fork. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because I went to his room on Sunday morning when he had mysteriously vanished, and not to Mass, in search of my field glasses which he had borrowed and not returned, and there on his table lay a letter, which I read, in which he told Mrs Logan that he knew he was in love because he wished for her happiness even more than his own and that this had never happened to him before.’