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, A
rchie 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.’
‘But it wasn’t like that. Liza came straight down to the surgery, she came to find you—’
Archie dropped his hands.
‘I’m not blaming Liza.’
‘It seems to me,’ Diana said, ‘that you are determined to blame somebody.’
‘Only myself.’
‘Well, it doesn’t sound like that.’
‘No,’ he said, glancing at her. ‘No, it doesn’t, does it? Home you go, Mrs Jago. Enough humouring of impossible men for one afternoon.’
‘You aren’t impossible. It’s just this damned grief. So unpredictable.’
‘It’s more,’ Archie said. ‘More than grief. That’s what’s so damnable, really.’
Diana put her hand on the door.
‘Will you be all right? Are you safe to drive?’
‘Perfectly. I shall go straight back to the health centre and be a good little doctor.’
‘I’m not patronizing you, you know—’
He leaned across and briefly kissed her cheek.
‘I know. You are a kind woman, an excellent friend and a knockout on a horse.’
She got out of the car and closed the door carefully. Archie watched her climb into her own car and start it. She waved to him briefly, put the car into gear, pulled out of the gateway and drove off, her hand involuntarily on her cheek where he had kissed her.
‘More thtory,’ Imogen said.
She lay under her flower-patterned duvet with her hair brushed and her thumb poised for plugging in.
‘No,’ Liza said. ‘You’ve had your story. Why do you always ask me things you know I must refuse so that I am forced to say no all the time?’ She leaned forward and kissed Imogen’s bath-scented cheek. ‘You make me into a nag and it isn’t fair because I’m not.’
‘Thall I love you?’ Imogen said unfairly, putting her arms round Liza’s neck.
‘I’d rather be loved than exploited,’ Liza said, thinking not only of Imogen.
‘Kith, kith, kith,’ said Imogen, rubbing her face against Liza’s and then, after a minimal pause, ‘More thtory.’
‘You’re outrageous. No. No more story. I’m going to read to Mikey and then I’m going to telephone Mrs Jago. Let go.’
Imogen released her arms and put her thumb in. Then she turned on her side and closed her eyes and shut Liza out of her life.
‘Sleep well, darling.’
Imogen said nothing.
Mikey was sitting up in bed with his dinosaur book. He had brushed neither his hair nor his teeth, and, despite his bath, still smelled of grey wool and school and socks. He gnashed his teeth at Liza.
‘I’m a pterodactyl.’
‘Must you be?’
‘This is my big jaw. And my wing stuck to my finger.’
‘I’d like to read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.’
Mikey flung himself back on his pillow.
‘That’s a girls’ book.’
‘It most certainly is not.’
‘There are no guns in it.’
‘Nor are there,’ Liza said quickly, ‘in dinosaur books.’
Mikey sat up again.
‘But there are teeth.’
‘They didn’t all have teeth. Some of them had beaks.’
Mikey seized his book and began to riffle urgently through it.
‘No, no, listen—’
‘Mikey,’ Liza said. ‘I spent all today with children. I’ve had enough of children. I don’t know why I bother to argue with you, really I don’t. If you won’t let me read something civilized, I’m not reading at all.’
‘You read to Imogen,’ Mikey said sternly. ‘You read her Thomas Goes to the Doctor and you said you would never ever read her that again and you did.’
‘But there’s nothing to read in your dinosaur book. It’s all pictures, and very bad pictures at that.’
‘You hold the book,’ Mikey said, consolidating victory, ‘and I will talk to you about the pictures.’
‘They win all the time,’ Liza said on the telephone to Diana Jago. ‘They argue on and on and then they win.’
‘Don’t argue back—’
‘I know. I get caught up before I know where I am.’
‘It’s the penalty of having clever children. Ours were so dense it was no problem to outwit them. Liza, I wanted to talk to you about this field.’
‘Yes. It’s awful. I’d no idea it was happening so fast.’
‘I want to twist your arm,’ Diana said. ‘Simon thinks you’d have a great effect if you went to see the Chief Planning Officer in person, as a representative of the family most affected.’
‘It’s too late! He’s got planning permission—’
‘Outline. The developer has yet to consolidate it. If he gets it, then we can’t appeal. We have got to make sure he doesn’t.’
‘Why me?’ Liza said, shutting her eyes.
‘Because you are pretty and appealing.’
‘Thanks a million!’
‘Will you?’
I’m too tired, Liza wanted to say. I’m too worn down with Archie and the children and Andrew dying. I’m too
disappointed in today, I’m full of frustration . . .
‘All right.’
‘Excellent,’ Diana said. ‘The Chief Weasel is called Derek Mullins. Quick as you can. Richard’s talking to a developer already, the man who built those nasty little objects on the King’s Stoke crossroads. And Liza—’
‘Yes,’ she said, leaning against the kitchen wall.
‘Don’t be too hard on Archie.’
‘What?’
‘He’s taken quite a knock—’
‘Don’t you start,’ Liza cried, springing upright. ‘Don’t you start telling me how precious and special his grief is and how there was never a father and son like those two. I don’t want to hear another word. All that distinguished their relationship, if you ask me, was that Andrew spoiled Archie rotten!’
‘I didn’t so much touch a raw nerve,’ Diana said later to Simon over supper, ‘as tread heavily on one. She simply flew at me—’
‘What is this?’ Simon said, prodding at his plate.
‘Liver.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yup.’
‘Will she go and see Mullins?’
‘Reluctantly. Things aren’t good there.’
‘They’ll be worse if she doesn’t go and see Mullins.’
‘I’m not given,’ Diana said, ‘to feeling sorry for people. I don’t care for it much and I loathe people for being sorry for me. But I am sorry for the Logans. Aren’t you?’
Simon put his fork down.
‘Tell you something. If I have to eat this liver, I’ll be very sorry for myself indeed.’
‘Suit yourself,’ Diana said. ‘I don’t care and the dogs’ll be thrilled.’ She looked at her plate. ‘Do you know, I think you’re right. It does look pretty filthy. Shall I make a cheese sandwich?’
Archie came in just before nine and Liza, with a faint air of martyrdom, gave him supper. He thought, as he ate it, that however delicious it was – which it was – it was soured by the resentful dutifulness with which it was seasoned, and that he would very much have preferred to have opened his own tin of soup, which came without much flavour, admittedly, but also without emotional strings.
While he ate his goulash – Liza had not, even on the first day of the new term, forgotten the sour cream – she sat the other side of the kitchen table and flicked through the newspaper. She had a mug of camomile tea. Archie had a glass of wine; Liza had declined one. Archie could not tell her about his encounter with Diana Jago and Liza could not describe her disappointing day nor her powerful desire not to go and see the Chief Planning Officer. Neither of them could mention Marina and speculate about Andrew’s will because Archie had said he could face nothing of the kind just now and Liza had declared she could not face Archie’s attitude. So he ate and she rustled and each struggled to endure the misery of their several solitudes. The telephone rang as Archie was finishing and a woman from Lower Stoke said her husband had just broken the fish tank while cleaning it out and had cut his hands and was pouring blood like a river. Archie gave her instructions and said he’d be right over.
A Passionate Man Page 17