‘Why can’t people ever, ever manage to stay in one piece for a single hour?’ Liza said, looking up from the paper.
‘The surprising thing,’ Archie said, ‘is that so many of them do. All their blessed lives.’
Then he kissed Liza’s hair and went out into the black darkness. She put his plate and glass into the dishwasher, let Nelson out, laid breakfast, retrieved Nelson, toured the ground floor shutting and locking and switching off, and then went upstairs to run herself a bath.
Archie was away for almost an hour. Liza heard his car, and then a familiar sequence of doors and footsteps and then he appeared in their bedroom doorway and looked at her.
‘Was it serious?’ she said, glad of something she could ask him.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. He’s caught a vein. He’s gone into Winchester to be stitched.’ He paused. ‘I’m just going to write a letter.’
‘A letter?’
Archie never wrote letters.
‘Yes. A letter. I won’t be long.’
‘To Thomas?’
‘No,’ Archie said. ‘Not to Thomas. To Marina.’
Liza turned towards him, delighted.
‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘Oh, Archie! I’m so glad!’
Chapter Twelve
The flat in Victoria was not an agreeable place to be. Sir Andrew had bought it out of a mild nostalgia for the tall red sandstone houses of his Glasgow youth, because it was on the first floor of such a building. But he had had little aesthetic eye for his surroundings, and, since the building was heavy with competent Edwardian stonework and joinery, he had been satisfied, untroubled by the gaunt height of the rooms and windows. He had observed the solidity with pleasure and was impervious to the atmosphere.
The atmosphere added to Marina’s suffering. The flat faced west, so that the only sunlight was the tired low light of late-winter afternoons, which came filtering through gauze curtains with difficulty and fell unenthusiastically upon the surfaces of the heavy, alien furniture that had belonged to her long-dead, never-known parents-in-law. There were almost no pictures, merely a handful of dim sepia drawings of buildings and a mountainous landscape or two, purple with heather. The books were numerous and entirely factual except, Marina discovered, for one Alistair MacLean novel, a paperback, lurking embarrassedly at the end of a shelf of august political biography. She took it out, before Morley’s Life of Gladstone crushed it utterly, and thought how it added to her sudden isolation to realize that this man, whom she had loved so much, clearly never read fiction. If she hadn’t known that, what else had she not known?
She had too much time to speculate about such things; too much time while she simply waited. It was unlike her to wait, unlike her not to act and begin to push life, however wretched it might be, forward again. But she could not act. She attempted to do all kinds of things to force herself to act, like making inventories of all Andrew’s possessions, or having an estate agent round to value the flat or even, on one particularly bad day, to buy herself an air ticket back to New York which was clearly, she told herself, what she must do. But she could not bear, in the end, to do any of those things. She could not bear to do anything that seemed to separate her from Andrew. She could tell herself, a thousand times a day, that he was dead and gone, gone for ever, but she simply could not bring herself to perform a deed that proved the reality of that insupportable fact.
She understood, she thought, why Archie was so stone silent. He had not been in touch since the funeral and she guessed that he, too, was in the cold-turkey state of suffering before grief becomes assimilable. Sometimes she talked to Liza on the telephone, but she didn’t like to do that too often until she had recovered something of her self-possession. Her pride, as well as her heart, was tormented by grief. So, while she waited for herself, she also waited for Archie. The flat would be his, so would the contents, so would all Sir Andrew’s money, and the Scottish cottage she had never seen; she had no doubts as to all that happening, eventually, when she could come to life a little again. In the meantime, all she could manage to do was wait. I’m just waiting, she told herself, over and over again, I’m just waiting for something to happen.
At Bradley Hall School, influenza arrived with the first snow. It was unsatisfactory snow, thin and wet and disobliging about being moulded, but the flu was much more wholehearted. The classrooms thinned out dramatically; Dan Hampole took to his bed with a bottle of whisky, a kettle and a brown paper bag of lemons, and then Mrs West, usually dauntless in the face of child-spread infections, telephoned to say she could not even raise her head from the pillow.
‘I’ll do extra,’ Liza said to June Hampole. ‘Sally won’t mind coming in more often for a while. I’ll take some of the English classes.’
The garnet pin still lay in the glove compartment of the car, and Blaise O’Hanlon had as yet been no more than polite and friendly.
‘I’d like to be here more,’ Liza said truthfully. ‘I’d like to help. It’s sad at home just now.’
June Hampole said it would be a godsend, just for a week or two.
‘Fine,’ Archie said that night. ‘Do. We’re all better busy, just now.’
More snow fell, snow with greater purpose. The garden at Beeches House disappeared under its uniform white blanket and Imogen became imperious to be out in it for hours at a time, mesmerized by her own tracks and, even more, by the faint arrow-headed ones sketched out by birds. Sally came every day without complaint, and Archie and Liza left, often at the same time in the morning, their car tyres creaking up the hard-packed lane. The house grew tidy and a little impersonal in Liza’s long absences so that when she returned to it after dark on the short winter days it felt pleasurably unfamiliar, as if the domestic responsibility was no longer all, heavily, hers. Just now, that suited her. Her romantic imagination, thirsty for relief from Archie and his father’s death, was quite taken up in persuading Blaise O’Hanlon that he need not obey her stern instructions to behave himself to the letter. In such a frame of mind, it was a relief to leave so much domestic administration to Sally.
It was Sally who took the call from Pinemount. She had put Imogen and Mikey to bed and was coming downstairs with her arms efficiently full of the next morning’s dirty laundry, when the telephone rang. A pleasant man’s voice asked to speak to Dr or Mrs Logan and, when Sally said neither of them were back yet, the man said his name was George Barnes, from Pinemount, and that he would ring later. Sally wrote the message down and left it where she usually left messages, and cleared up the kitchen until Liza, bright eyed from the cold and a most enigmatic and exciting encounter, came in from school.
Liza did not look at the messages. Recently she had felt reluctant to, as if they represented in some measure the ordinary shackles of life that part of her at least had managed to shed. She felt a strong disinclination to discover, each evening, that the garage could not service her car the day she wanted; that Chrissie Jenkins had put her on the new Sunday School rota for the third Sunday of each month until the summer and that Mikey’s school runs would be disrupted for six weeks because of parental skiing holidays.
Her inclination instead, that evening, was to go upstairs and look at herself in the mirror in the bathroom where the light was bright and truthful. She wanted to see if she looked different, now that Blaise had kissed her. Or, to be absolutely accurate, now that she had kissed Blaise. She had, at last, after many of the most delicate manoeuvrings, found Blaise alone in his classroom after school, and had attempted to return the pin to him. He had said no. He had been very flustered.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No. Really. It was for you. You must have it.’
She put the box down on his desk. His evident confusion excited her and made her feel both strong and controlling.
‘I can’t take it. It was absolutely sweet of you, but it’s out of the question.’
His face darkened. He looked away from her, at the poster of the Battle of the Boyne where the ragged Irish troops had the faces of gypsy angels.
‘Blaise—’
‘You don’t understand—’
‘Oh, but I do,’ Liza said. ‘I do. Look. I’ll show you that I do.’
And then she had put her arms around his neck, and kissed him.
‘There,’ said Liza, smiling. ‘There.’
And she had walked out of the room and the school and left him standing there with the little box lying before him. She had climbed into her car, and laughed, simply laughed out loud at the adventure she was having, at her power. Hadn’t Blaise said she had power? And now, looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, she wanted to laugh again.
Downstairs, a door banged and Nelson barked, too late as always. There was a pause and Liza began, without hurry, to brush her hair. Archie came upstairs, holding the list of telephone messages.
‘Did you see this?’
Liza watched him in the mirror. She waited for him to kiss her.
‘No. What is it?’
‘George Barnes rang from Pinemount. Why didn’t you ring back?’
‘Because I didn’t see it.’
‘But you were back before me.’
‘Only just. I haven’t done anything yet. I haven’t even been in to see the children.’
Archie said, ‘I’ll ring. I’ll ring now.’
‘He’s probably got flu, poor boy.’
‘Do you want to ring, then?’
‘No,’ Liza said. ‘No. You do it.’
She put down her hairbrush. A tiny shame nibbled at the corner of her pleasure.
‘Thomas—’
‘You go and kiss the little ones,’ Archie said. ‘I’ll telephone.’
Imogen lay asleep on her back in a welter of stuffed animals and open books, illuminated by the dim glow from her toadstool nightlight. She never woke at night except if her toadstool was switched off, when she would wake instantly and roar with rage. Liza piled the toys and books at the foot of the bed, and settled the quilt around Imogen’s stout small body. Imogen opened her eyes.
‘Hello, lady.’
Liza stooped to kiss her.
‘Night night, darling. Go back to sleep.’
But Imogen had never left it. Mikey, on the other hand, lay full of ploys to keep Liza upstairs. He put an arm like a clamp about her neck.
‘I hurt myself at school and I didn’t cry.’
‘Oh, Mikey. What kind of hurt?’
‘My head. On the locker door. Can you write a note saying I musn’t have school fish? Please, Please, please, please. Donovan doesn’t have to have fish—’
‘No. No, I couldn’t.’
She began to disengage herself.
‘I’m sick of Sally putting me to bed,’ Mikey said. ‘Why does she have to? It’s so boring, always Sally. I’ll never learn to read with Sally, only with you.’
‘It’s only for a little while—’
She stood up.
‘Where’s Daddy? I heard him. Don’t go yet, don’t go. If I have to have school fish, I’ll be sick on the floor—’
Liza fled downstairs.
‘I see,’ Archie was saying into the telephone. ‘Yes. Thank you so much. If you’re sure—’ He listened a little. ‘We’ll talk about it and I’ll ring you back. Yes. All right then. Good night.’
‘What?’ Liza said at once.
Archie turned round and leaned on the back of a kitchen chair.
‘Thomas has been having nightmares. He has walked in his sleep on two or three occasions. They don’t seem at all worried. George Barnes said he simply thought we ought to know.’
‘Nightmares!’
‘About his grandfather,’ Archie said. ‘George Barnes wanted to know exactly what happened.’
‘Like your insisting he saw the body and went to the funeral.’
‘I told him Thomas had done both.’
‘I bet you didn’t tell him you—’
‘Shut up,’ Archie said. He took his hands away from the chair. ‘I’m going down to Pinemount.’
‘Why?’
‘I want to see Thomas.’
‘But George said they were coping, that there was no need—’
‘Liza,’ Archie said, ‘I need to see Thomas.’
‘You won’t help, you can’t, you’re too emotional. You just want the drama of it; it’s all a part of this great drama of yours you won’t let go of—’
Archie lunged forward and seized her wrist.
‘No.’
Her eyes were full of alarm.
‘I thought it was going to get better,’ she said. ‘Since you wrote to Marina.’
He let her go.
‘That has nothing to do with this. Will you come with me? I’ll go tomorrow, I’ve a half-day.’
‘I can’t. I’m teaching.’
‘Cut it.’
‘No,’ Liza said. ‘I can’t. And anyway, I don’t think either of us should go.’ She paused and then she said, ‘It isn’t fair. Trust the professionals. Your father always said so.’
‘Please yourself,’ Archie said. He looked at her. There was something in her he couldn’t even recognize. ‘I’ll go, all the same. I’ll go tomorrow.’
The New Forest struggled patchily through the snow with clumps and tufts of bush and bracken. It looked, Archie thought, driving through it, forlorn and shabby with its snow mantle disintegrating messily into smudged blots, a landscape very suited to his mood. It was a relief to have to concentrate upon driving, with the great lorries on their way to Bournemouth and Poole hurling up filthy plumes of slush that made it sometimes impossible to see. It was even more of a relief to have something to do that satisfied him; to have a proper mission.
He had supposed, after he had written to Marina, that he would feel better. He had supposed that it would release him. It had been a dreadful letter. He had written it after brooding on it for days, and then reread it the next morning, and still sent it. An excited horror filled him at the recollection of it, at the memory of the accusations with which he had crammed it. He had been sure that, if he exorcized himself of all the anger and bitter unhappiness he felt, then he would be free again to return to the Archie he had once been, the one he remembered as being both content and purposeful. The satisfaction of being a doctor would return, as would his delight and comprehension of Liza. His isolation would at last be over.
But it was not. The letter was sent and silence followed its sending. He became absolutely neurotic about the post arriving, wrenched apart by both longing for a reaction and dreading one. And in the midst of his divided feelings was a very strong consciousness that the letter had changed nothing, only added to his confusion and his sense of being paralysed. Rather than set him free, his bonds were even tighter. He, who had always supposed himself to be courageous, was terribly afraid.
The grey road, blurred with greyer slush, bore relentlessly on between the stretches of unremarkable Forest – what a poor thing William Rufus would think his Forest had dwindled to – and bungalows, and petrol stations with red plastic canopies and spinning signs advertising videos. How ugly, how temporary, what an utter, utter waste of being alive, of having chances. Why did people opt for the second rate? Was he doing that? Was he letting his life slide and drift into some decent, dreary stagnation?
The sign for Pinemount’s village appeared trimly on the left-hand verge. Thomas. Archie braked sharply and turned down a lane into sudden countryside.
Thomas said he would like toasted tea cakes and a banana milk shake. The Wimborne tea shop was almost empty, furnished in immemorial tea-shop style of wheelback chairs and dim checked tablecloths and imitation horse brasses hanging on straps against walls of cream embossed paper. It smelled of dust and butter. Thomas, who looked perfectly normal, was mildly excited to be allowed out with his father for an hour and regarded the tea shop as the most appropriate place to be. He said Bristow’s parents always gave Bristow tea here which was why he knew banana was the best kind of milk shake to have.
Archie said, ‘Darling. What about these
bad dreams?’
Thomas looked embarrassed.
‘Who told you?’
‘Mr Barnes.’
‘Mr Barnes,’ Thomas said. ‘He’s so interfering.’
‘Not at all. He’s kind. He was worried about you.’
Thomas took a bite.
‘Once I woke up on the stairs.’ His voice was awed. ‘It was amazing.’
‘Could you tell me about the dreams?’
‘Not really.’
‘Mr Barnes seemed to think they were about Grandpa.’
Thomas looked down.
‘I don’t know what they were about.’
‘But you told Mr Barnes that they were about Grandpa.’
‘I told Matron,’ Thomas said, chewing. ‘She kept asking and asking.’
‘Darling Thomas. Do try and tell me. So I can help you. Do you think about Grandpa?’
‘A bit.’
‘Does it worry you?’
Thomas put down his tea cake. He said loudly, ‘I don’t like Mummy crying. Or you. Why do you?’
‘We’re very sad,’ Archie said, too quickly. ‘Because of Grandpa.’
Thomas looked at him.
‘No.’
‘Darling—’
Thomas said in the same loud flat voice, ‘Rackenshaw’s parents are divorced. So are Harris’s. I don’t want you to. I don’t want it.’
Archie put his arms round Thomas.
‘Darling Thomas, don’t be an ass. What on earth put such a thing in your mind?’
A Passionate Man Page 18