She held her breath. It was such a risk she was taking, such a test of her power. Archie pushed his chair back and stood up. She waited for him to lunge at her, seize her wrist, grab her shoulders, even kiss her. But he did not. He simply stood for a moment looking quite impenetrable and not at her, and then he went out of the kitchen and she heard his steps along the polished boards of the hall, and then up the stairs to bed.
Archie reached London in the early afternoon. It was a sudden, soft, fair day, a false herald of spring, and his overcoat, a doughty tweed affair acquired ten years before in Inveraray, felt a cumbersome nuisance. He took it off and slung it round his shoulders and decided, in order to postpone his arrival in Victoria, to walk from Waterloo, across the river. Marina did not, after all, know that he was coming. He had told Liza that he had telephoned, because she had asked him, but he hadn’t. He did not know why he hadn’t, he had just felt unable to. It might well be that Marina would be out, and he did not know what he would do then. He did not know, in fact, what he was going to do at all except go there, and see her. And, for some reason he could not fathom, the prospect of seeing her filled him with all kinds of feelings, but not with dread. It did not cross his mind that she might refuse to see him.
It had not crossed Marina’s mind, either, that he might come. She had resolved that her next move was to be some sinking of pride and then to speak to Liza; no, not speak to her, ask her. Ask her advice as to what she should do next, about Archie. She would dearly have liked to ask what she should do next about the rest of her life, too, but her pride, so carefully nurtured over more than half a century, drew the line at some things, and showing herself too vulnerable and helpless before Liza was one of them. She was, in fact, sitting by the window in the quiet dead time of mid-afternoon, making a list of things she might say to Liza, and trying out ways of saying them, when her intercom down to the building’s front door rang imperiously. Going to answer it, and supposing it to be the young man from the estate agency who had said he might be round on Thursday but more likely Friday, she discovered that it was Archie.
He did not take the lift. She stood on the landing by her front door and watched his head come up the stairs, steadily round and round the lift shaft. He was wearing a big coat, like a cloak, with the collar turned up around his neck, and his hair, Marina thought, had grown longer and looked very thick. As he came up the last flight, she took a pair of large spectacles framed in pale tortoiseshell out of her jacket pocket, and put them on. He stopped two steps below her.
‘I’ve never seen you in glasses.’
‘I only wear them,’ Marina said, ‘when I want to see particularly well.’
She led the way back into the flat, into the sitting room where Mikey had hidden in the sofa cushions and declined to look at his dead grandfather.
Archie pulled his coat off his shoulders and said, ‘I’ve no business to ask you to help me, but I’ve no idea how to begin.’
‘I wish I smoked,’ Marina said. ‘It’s so useful for such moments as these. Les mauvais quarts d’heure are one thing, les mauvais moments quite another and almost worse. Why did you come at such an impossible time of day? What can I offer you at three in the afternoon? Too late for lunch, too early for a Martini.’
‘Is it?’
‘Is that what you want? A Martini?’
‘No,’ Archie said. ‘No. I don’t want anything.’
‘In that case,’ said Marina, sitting down at one end of the sofa and turning her spectacles on him, ‘why have you come?’
Archie put his coat down on an armchair and crossed to sit the other end of the sofa.
‘You know why.’
‘I’d like you to explain, however.’
He looked at her. He spread his hands.
‘It’s so odd,’ Marina said. ‘I’ve been so sorry for you, so desperately sorry, even to the point of feeling I should apologize to you for marrying your father, for being there when Andrew died, for making – yes, goddammit – for making Andrew so happy. But now you are here I don’t feel abject at all. Nor contrite. I feel very strong and pretty determined. So you tell me, Archie Logan, all that’s been going on and see if you can’t make a better fist of it than you have done up to now.’
Archie put his head back into the cushions. He felt weirdly at ease.
‘Liza thinks – at least I think she thinks – that I am having a very tiresome, extreme form of male menopause.’
‘And?’
‘And I expect she is right.’
‘That’s a cop-out,’ Marina said. She smiled. She had not smiled for days. Archie turned his head sideways to look at her.
‘Shall I tell you how I feel?’
‘I think you’d better,’ Marina said. ‘I think it will relieve both our minds.’
Archie said, ‘I despise people who do this.’
Marina waited.
‘I don’t know much about Dante,’ Archie said. ‘Except for that lovely picture, and one other thing. It was something to do with being banished from Florence for trying to rule with justice and finding himself wandering alone in the countryside, in a dark wood, without companions or possessions or a map. I seem to remember that that was a metaphor for how he felt inside, as if he had lost the centre line, after fighting for it, and was completely at sea. Didn’t know where he was going or what he was looking for. Just felt a great tearing yearning for what he had lost and also for something more, something that would illumine the rest of life and give it vitality.’
He stopped.
After a while Marina said, ‘There is an interesting theory about such crises. They are thought to affect creative people particularly and I would class you as creative. The theory is that at this halfway point in life a crisis does occur, a crisis such as Dante had, and what it represents is the first confrontation with death, now that half one’s life may be presumed to be over. And that prospect of death paralyses the victim – he sees death as a kind of helplessness. Sometimes it paralyses him almost literally. Look at poor Rossini.’ She looked sideways at Archie. ‘Do you buy my theory?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I buy it. But I think it is only part of the trouble.’ He looked about him. ‘Poor Marina. What a horrible room this is.’
‘I’ve had too much time to think that. Also to think how incongruously redolent of Andrew it is.’
‘Sell it,’ Archie said. ‘Just sell it.’
‘I began. But I feel it’s yours.’
He turned his head again.
Marina said, ‘I know he left it to me. I know that. But I don’t need it, I don’t want it. I can’t recognize him here.’
Archie gazed at her. Then he turned his head away from her, very slowly, and said in a voice thick with tears, ‘I was with a brave old patient when she died three nights ago. I was there all the time, and afterwards. I’ve been at plenty of deaths but I’ve never understood a death before, not like that, not suddenly knowing death. I can’t remember it now, but I knew then and I’ll know for ever that I knew. That’s one reason I’ve come. I thought I could only know such a thing with my father. I thought you had deprived me of that. That’s why I wrote – one of the reasons I wrote.’
‘I know,’ Marina said. ‘You made yourself perfectly plain.’
He whipped his head round and leaned sideways to seize her wrist.
‘I’m so sorry. Oh, my God, Marina, I’m so sorry.’
‘Dammit,’ Marina said. ‘Dammit. Do not make me cry.’
‘Please cry—’
She bent forward over his hand.
‘I didn’t know one could be in such pain as this. I didn’t know what it was like to miss someone so much. I’m just ripped to pieces, Archie, and I can’t stand it and can’t stand your seeing it.’
She took her hand away from his and fished in a pocket for a handkerchief and blew her nose fiercely.
‘I like it,’ Archie said.
She shook her head.
‘We weren’t talking about me. W
e were talking about you. You said Dante’s dark wood was part of the trouble. What was the rest?’
He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees and stared down at the carpet.
Then he said without looking at her, ‘I want you.’
He raised his head and stared across the room at a formidable Edwardian chiffonier, its fretted doors lined with leaf-green silk.
‘I was jealous of my father. I still am. And, now that he is not here, and like you I am shaken to the core with missing him, I want you more than ever.’
There was a little pause, and then Marina said, ‘Now, you look here. Just you look at me. I’m almost old enough to be your mother, I’m a granny in specs.’
He turned his head and looked at her over his shoulder. She had not moved from her sofa corner.
‘Marina,’ he said.
He stood up and stooped over her, taking her hands and pulling her to her feet. Then he took off her spectacles and laid them on a nearby lamp table.
‘Archie—’
‘Shhh,’ he said.
He put his arms around her and held her hard against him and kissed her hair and her neck. Then, like someone at the top of a helter-skelter, Archie took his steadying hands away from the sides and let himself go.
‘I want you,’ Archie said to Marina, and bent to kiss her mouth.
He caught the last train from Waterloo to Winchester. It was sleepy and seedy, full of tired yawning people with unbrushed hair, and the aisles and tables were strewn with used paper cups and discarded evening papers. It seemed to Archie a glorious train. It appeared to have a reality, an energy quite disproportionate to its appearance and purpose. He found a seat in an empty quartet of four and threw himself into it, pressing his face to the dark glass to see his extraordinary, illuminated countenance reflected there.
It had been so hard to leave her. He had hardly managed it, probably would not have done if she had not ordered a taxi and locked herself in the bathroom. He had stood in the passage outside the locked door, dressing slowly, and laughing, calling out to her, perfectly idiotic with happiness and fulfilment. She had come out at the end when the taxi came, in a white towelling robe with her hair on her shoulders, and he had seized her.
‘I can’t go, I can’t, not now, not after this—’
But he had gone, because she had made him go, walking down the stairs as he had come up them, wrapped in his big coat, except that going down he looked up at her, all the way, and she leaned on the banisters and looked down, all the time, for the very last glimpse of him. In the taxi he had wanted to laugh. Dark, bright streets went by, Parliament Square, Big Ben, the oily glitter of the river, the way he had walked only that afternoon, before he had made his discovery.
This discovery, he thought lying back in the train, was what he had been seeking, this revelation of quite another dimension to himself, almost as if he had only been alive in part before. Marina had not wanted him to be serious, too intense. She had tried to tease him.
‘But you’re a mere boy, that’s all that’s the matter with you. Experience is all. Take it from me. From one who knows.’
Oh, and she did, she did. Archie closed his eyes, but, even with them closed, his head seemed to be brilliant with light.
Liza woke when he came in.
‘It’s after midnight.’
‘I know. I’m so sorry. I should have telephoned.’
He sat down to unlace his shoes.
‘How did it go?’ Liza said. ‘Was it all right? Did you take her out to supper?’
‘We had supper, yes.’
He stood up and began to pull off his tie.
‘But it was all right?’
‘Yes. Yes, it was fine. I’ll tell you in the morning.’
‘Did she understand? Has she forgiven you?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said, throwing his shirt down on the floor. ‘She’s forgiven me.’
Liza wriggled down into bed again.
‘You don’t deserve it.’
‘I know.’
‘Thank God that’s over, then,’ Liza said, half muffled by her pillows.
‘And you? Did you have a good day?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said. She sounded as if she were smiling. I’m a swine, Archie thought, I’m an utter, bloody swine.
‘I’m just going to have a shower,’ he said.
‘Leave it. Leave it until the morning.’
‘No. No, I can’t do that. You go back to sleep.’
Mikey’s speedboats still lay cluttered round the bath plug. Archie stepped in among them, and turned on the shower, hurtling cold needles, deliberately too cold. He wanted to sing and to weep. Whatever he had done, whatever came now, he had never felt so absolutely alive before.
In the morning, Liza did not seem much interested in the details. She wanted to know how Marina had looked and if she had reprimanded Archie, but she did not want to know how he had explained himself. Archie told her that he thought Marina had been wearing trousers and a pale jersey and, as far as he could recall, a checked jacket, but he wasn’t sure.
‘And ear-rings?’ Mikey said, eating Coco-Pops.
Archie couldn’t remember. He did remember about the spectacles, but they now seemed to him so intimate that he didn’t mention them. Liza asked several times if Marina had been angry with him.
‘No,’ he said, ‘not angry. Just firm and a bit crisp.’
‘Did she mention your letter?’
‘No. I did. I said sorry.’
‘So I should hope,’ Liza said. ‘No, Mikey. Those are already covered with sugar.’
She pushed the sugar bowl away across the table.
‘Is this full-time teaching going on much longer?’ Archie said. He shamed himself, but he could not help planning.
Liza said, ‘One more week.’ And, because she did not want her face to betray anything, leant across and said, ‘Don’t do that,’ to Imogen who was voluptuously licking honey and butter off a strip of toast. Then she summoned up a shred of defiance and said, ‘Why? It doesn’t affect you, does it?’
‘Of course not.’
They looked at each other, seeing nothing.
‘Not nithe,’ said Imogen, putting down her bald toast.
‘Whose fault is that? You eat it, anyway.’
Liza got up and began to assemble her school bag and car keys.
‘Hurry up, Mikey. My run today.’
‘Can I sit in the front?’
‘No. You can’t sit in the front until you are twelve, as well you know. Where’s Sally? It’s almost ten past. Imogen, eat that toast.’
Archie picked it up and held it in front of her.
‘Come on, now. A bite for your nose. And one for your ears—’
His well-being felt to him as if it were gleaming on his skin, like a healthy dog’s coat.
‘Not ear’th.’
‘Neck, then.’
‘No. Bottom,’ said Imogen and shrieked with rapture.
‘OK,’ said Archie, laughing too, longing to laugh. ‘A bite for your bottom.’
Liza said, ‘Oh, Archie, for heaven’s sake don’t encourage her.’
‘It’s only a game. Isn’t it, Imo? A silly toast game.’
Liza looked out of the window. Sally, on her bicycle, was coming down the lane, her scarlet muffler a splash of colour against the tired late-winter landscape.
‘There’s Sally. Now, Mikey, up to brush your teeth.’
‘And one for your knee and one for your left big toe and look, it’s gone.’
Archie leaned sideways and kissed Imogen’s packed cheek.
‘Honestly,’ Liza said. ‘You do seem happy.’
‘You don’t sound very thrilled—’
Liza took a dark-blue jacket off a hook on the door and struggled into it.
‘Of course I am. If it lasts. I suppose your conscience is clear, that’s why.’
‘No,’ Archie said. ‘No. My conscience is not clear at all.’
Liza shouted throu
gh the doorway.
‘Come on, Mikey! Come on—’ She turned on Archie. ‘Look, you’ve said sorry to Marina; that’s over, so please, please can we not have a big deal about that, too?’
‘Certainly,’ Archie said.
Sally opened the door and came in. It struck her that, in some indefinable way, the atmosphere was not only better than usual, but exhilarating, like the first autumn morning of frost.
Before he went down to the surgery, Archie took Imogen and Nelson out into the field where the yellow wooden stakes now stood everywhere in the rough grass. He had not seen Richard Prior for several weeks, and Mrs Betts’s impotent fury at the prospect of defeat had caused him to buy his stamps at any post office he passed, rather than endure her tirades at Stoke Stratton. The last time he had been in, she had dropped his change into his palm so that she need not contaminate herself by touching a traitor, and he had felt a dull rage at her stupidity and obstinacy. Now he felt gentler. In fact, watching Imogen weave in and out of the line of stakes that represented the bigger house’s front wall, Archie was sorry he had been rude to Mrs Betts, and even sorrier that he had opposed Liza, had belittled her objections. It was too late, for any practical purpose, to be sorry, with the stakes so menacingly there, and the developer’s board up loudly by the gate, but it wasn’t too late to say sorry to Liza for more intangible things. And yet, he thought, caught breathless by a sudden wild leaping of his heart, if he started saying sorry to Liza now, where in heaven’s name would it all end?
Diana Jago, on her handsome hunter, hailed him from the gateway. Imogen and Nelson began to race across, squealing and barking. The horse displayed admirable indifference.
‘Sorry,’ Archie called, running up. ‘So sorry—’
‘It’s excellent training,’ Diana said. ‘I reckon if a horse is Imogen-proof, it’s bombproof. Hey, Imo?’
Imogen climbed up two bars of the gate and pushed her face through, blowing at the horse. Diana looked down at Archie.
‘You look better.’
‘Do I?’
‘I’ve been worried stiff about you. Frightful bore. I hate worrying. And the lovely Liza looks less peaky.’ She waved her crop at the field. ‘I think you are unspeakable to back this. Really I do.’
A Passionate Man Page 20