‘I don’t want that,’ Thomas said. ‘I don’t want it. I just want to see my grandmother.’
‘We’ll tell Mr Barnes that. Shall we?’
‘Yes,’ Thomas said dully. He remembered suddenly, ‘Not my mother and father. Not them. My grandmother.’ His voice was urgent. ‘It must be her!’
The sick-room door opened.
‘Thomas,’ said George Barnes, who never called boys by their Christian names. ‘Thomas, here they are.’
He looked up. Matron had put him to bed, for some reason, but he wouldn’t lie down, he simply sat there in his pyjamas and looked without seeing much at Rackenshaw’s newest Dungeons and Dragons magazine, kindly lent as a restorative.
‘Darling,’ Liza said.
Thomas saw she had been crying again.
George Barnes said, ‘I’ll leave you together—’
The door closed with elaborate softness.
Archie came over and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at Thomas. Thomas looked down at the dragons.
‘Can you tell us? Can you tell us why you tried to run away?’
‘Why didn’t you ring? Why didn’t you, darling? I’d have come and collected you at once, you know I would—’
‘You wouldn’t,’ Thomas said. ‘You didn’t.’
Liza was fumbling for a handkerchief. Archie took out his and handed it to her.
‘We can take you home now,’ Archie said. He longed to hold Thomas but every vibe of Thomas’s held him off. ‘For ever, if you like.’
Desolation filled Thomas.
‘Not come back to Pinemount?’
‘Not if it gives you nightmares. Not if you need to be at home.’
Thomas said clearly, ‘I need Marina.’
Nobody said anything. Sensing a powerful advantage, Thomas said rudely, ‘I can’t talk to you.’
‘Darling—’
‘I’m not a baby!’ Thomas shouted. He was so angry with them. Why were they so blind and stupid and unable to see? How could they have all their horrible secrets and be all upset and not tell him the truth about why they were upset and then pretend they didn’t know what they’d done? He turned round and lay down with his face in the pillow.
‘Come on,’ Archie said gently. ‘Come on, darling. We are going home now.’
‘We needn’t talk about it at all. We needn’t talk about anything you don’t want to.’
Fatigue was stealing upon Thomas, the opiating fatigue of emotion, too much fear. He sighed and stirred a little. Archie bent over him and lifted his long, thin, reluctant body out of the bedclothes.
‘Come on, old boy. Give us a bit of a hand—’
They took off his pyjamas and dressed him like a doll, vest and pants and socks and shirt and shorts – silent shorts; where was his money – and jersey?
‘Where is my money?’
‘Here,’ Archie said. ‘Mr Barnes gave it to me.’
‘It’s mine!’
‘Take it, then.’
Elaborately, maddeningly, Thomas counted his money and put it in his pocket. They might be able to lift him bodily out of bed, but they couldn’t lift his mind out and dress it and take it tamely home. Liza wanted to hug him, so he let her, but it only made her cry again.
They went down the main staircase together, Archie and Liza holding Thomas as if he was an invalid. He resented this but could not summon up one ounce of physical resistance. Mr Barnes came up, and then Mrs Barnes appeared and so did Matron, and there was a lot of bustling about and officiousness and then he was put on to the back seat of the car where they made a nest for him with cushions and rugs. The car smelled familiar and Archie’s black doctor’s case was on the floor behind the front seat. Thomas lay down. Liza bent over him, tucking the rug round, murmuring. He heard them both get in and the click of the seat belts and then the engine started and made the car throb underneath him. He put his hand into his pocket and held the money. Then he slept.
They drove in silence. There was, if they spoke, only one subject and if they even dipped a toe in that ocean they would be at once sucked in and whirled about in cataracts and waterspouts. Liza knew Archie had telephoned Marina to say – she had to believe this – that they would never see each other alone again, but she also knew he had not wanted, in any way, to make such a call. He had been reluctant to elaborate the reasons for this to Liza – ‘Don’t ask me, don’t keep asking me for answers you then say you can’t bear to hear’ – but she knew what they were. He was not simply averse to looking at life ahead without Marina, he was also afraid to.
‘But you can’t mean it! You must be exaggerating. How can you be that deep in, in two evenings?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ Archie said, meaning it literally.
‘But I must and you must tell me; you owe it to me to tell me—’
He had looked away from her.
‘If something comes to you as a revelation, a discovery, at the end of a long journey, it can happen in seconds, you can recognize it in an instant.’
‘Rubbish!’ Liza had shouted angrily. ‘Absolute rubbish. What value has anything so selfish beside twelve years of marriage and three children?’
‘It is quite separate.’
It was the separateness that gave Liza such pain, a complicated, many-headed pain, because for so many months, separateness was exactly what she had craved and now it was the last thing she wanted. But had she – oh, these wearisome analyses, she thought, leaning her head back in the dark car – had she instinctively sought comfort from Blaise’s admiration because Archie had withdrawn himself in some way that her subconscious self had recognized and reacted to? Was she in part responsible for Archie’s turning to – no, headlong rushing at was more accurate – Marina, because she had been self-absorbed and had allowed herself to believe the enchantments Blaise had spun about her? Did Thomas’s troubles all stem from his sensitive unhappy perceptions of tension between them . . .
‘Don’t,’ Archie said abruptly.
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t keep looking for something to blame. Or someone.’
‘There must be some kind of explanation, some reason. Life isn’t so arbitrary—’
‘People are.’
Liza thought of Dan Hampole. Without the people who trudged along shoring up the status quo, he’d said, the whole contraption would fall apart at the centre.
She said cautiously, ‘Unhappy people?’
He sighed. He said, ‘Oh yes.’
She waited, staring fixedly at the red tail-lights of the car in front.
‘It’s those who are unhappy who break the rules,’ Archie said. His voice was very quiet and she had to lean sideways to hear him. ‘And it’s those rule-breakers who test the rules to see if they still hold good, and who push out the boundaries. Without them there would be fewer new horizons.’
He waited for her to accuse him of making excuses, of trying to glamorize something hackneyed and squalid, but she didn’t. She didn’t say anything. They drove for a long way again in silence and on the back seat Thomas turned in his sleep and snuffled slightly. Poor Thomas. Poor troubled, muddled Thomas, already beginning to make the fatal human mistake of taking himself too seriously. When George Barnes had rung and described, in soothing, measured tones, Thomas’s abortive attempt to run away, Archie had waited then, as well, for Liza to accuse him of involving the innocent in his seedy trails, of creating confusion and upheaval in blameless lives of order and regularity. But she had not done that then, either. She had been very frightened for Thomas, and about him, but she hadn’t turned on Archie.
He glanced at her. Her face was turned away from him, towards the blank black banks of the Winchester bypass.
‘How is Liza?’ Marina had said on the telephone.
‘Shattered.’
‘Of course.’
Archie had been about to say that there was something withdrawn in her, too, something unexpected and private, but Marina forestalled him.
‘I sha
ll come down and see her, of course.’
His heart had leapt.
‘You will?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then I shall see you.’
‘Archie—’
‘Can you imagine how I am to go on, how—’
‘Stop that!’ Marina commanded, from London.
‘Don’t you feel it? Doesn’t it mean anything to you?’
She had put the receiver down, cut him off. She had left him as she had left him several times before, desperate for more, for revelations and displays of dependence she would not give.
‘Are you in bed with me,’ he had demanded, ‘because you are missing my father?’
She had looked at him without expression.
‘That is none of your business,’ she said.
She had said that to him, too, when he had asked what she would say to Liza. He longed for her to come down to Stoke Stratton, longed for it fiercely, and dreaded it, too. What a bond women had. What power. And yet, looking quickly again at Liza, he knew he had power now, too, power over her as he had had when they first met and he had borne her away to Scotland. The difference now was that he was not sure he wanted it any more and he was very sure he did not know how to use it.
He swung the car up Beeches Lane, flicking up the headlamp beams. They caught, at once, the huge gleaming developer’s board by the field gate. It was painted cream, with a wreath of daisies and poppies and ears of corn around the border, and, in the left-hand corner, a fatuous tabby cat lifted a paw towards the lettering. ‘Home At Last’, it ran. ‘Beeches Lawn, a luxury four-bedroomed house of distinction’. And underneath, in smaller letters, ‘Beeches Close. Starter homes of character’. Beyond the board, in the field, an immense pile of bricks loomed like a factory, and straw from their packing blew about in the dark air and scratched against the windscreen.
‘Richard’s putting those on the open market,’ Liza said.
‘What?’
‘I heard in the post office. He’s offered them at twenty-five thousand with mortgage help to anyone under thirty-five born in the Strattons. There’s only been one taker. The rest are muttering about the money.’
‘Prefer to sulk in rented cottages—’
‘Yes,’ Liza said.
Archie said awkwardly, ‘I’m sorry about that, all that—’
She wanted to laugh.
‘That!’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Oh, Archie. As if any of that mattered now!’
From the back seat, Thomas rose, instinctively wakened by the approach of home. He was unable to prevent feeling pleased.
‘I’m hungry,’ Thomas said.
Clare was not impulsive. Or rather, she was afflicted by impulsive feelings which she was afraid to implement in case she could not carry off the consequences. But, emboldened by her dinner at Chewton Glen – her solicitor, though hardly prepossessing to look at, had turned out to be a good companion and more than easy with the wine list – and a further invitation to a point-to-point at Hackwood Park, Clare thought she would simply drive out to Stoke Stratton, without telephoning first.
Liza had not telephoned since she had sobbed all over Clare’s kitchen. That episode had left Clare feeling quite indulgent and, at the same time, less dissatisfied with her own life, a state of affairs rather assisted by the solicitor. Being early March, the evenings were growing lighter, and, if she left her office dead on five, she could be in Stoke Stratton before half-past, while the children were still up and could prevent her visit looking, in any way, too tremendously enquiring. She was fond of the children in a bleak, half-hearted way, but she believed them to be spoiled, particularly Imogen, and was too apt to see them as part of the list of assets that Liza possessed and she did not.
She arrived, as she had estimated, at twenty-five past five. Archie’s car was gone, but Liza’s was parked in the drive with the tailgate up and a box of groceries inside, waiting to be carried into the house. Clare made a quick mental check of what the box contained – packs of white lavatory paper (Archie, Clare knew, had taught Liza to despise pink or blue, or, worst of all, peach), tins of dog food, cereals, an immense bottle of liquid detergent of a size no single person ever aspired to, rafts of fruit yoghurts, loaves, nets of oranges – before picking it up and carrying it round to the kitchen door.
‘Yoohoo,’ Clare said, pushing the door open with her knee. ‘Delivery man!’
Liza was standing at the kitchen table, laying sausages for the children’s supper on a baking sheet. She had not taken off her jacket since coming in from school, and looked tired and drawn.
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Clare. Oh, how nice of you—’
‘I met it sitting there, on my way in.’
She put the box down on the table and kissed her sister.
‘I went to Sainsbury’s,’ Liza said. ‘I forgot that box.’
The door from the hall was pushed open and Thomas, in a Batman sweatshirt, came in with half a model aeroplane.
‘Thomas!’
‘Hello,’ Thomas said indifferently.
‘You’re back early. It isn’t the end of term, is it?’
‘He wasn’t well,’ Liza said, opening the oven door and banging the baking sheet inside. ‘Were you?’
Clare and Thomas kissed without fervour.
‘You look fine now.’
‘Mikey’s hidden the glue—’
‘He’s a lot better. Aren’t you, darling?’
‘Will you make him find it?’
‘Thomas, not now. Clare’s just come.’
‘Please, please—’
‘Five minutes,’ Liza said. ‘Five mintues’ peace.’
‘Mum—’
‘Thomas,’ Liza said, raising her voice, ‘go away or I’ll never help you find your glue.’
The door banged behind him sulkily.
‘What was the matter?’ Clare said.
‘Tea?’ Liza said, unbuttoning her jacket. ‘Coffee? Whisky?’
‘Tea would be lovely.’
‘I’m going to have whisky,’ Liza said.
‘But you never drink whisky.’
‘I do now.’
Clare said, ‘Liza, what’s going on?’
Liza said nothing. She took off her jacket and hung it behind the door and put tumblers on the table and a half-full whisky bottle.
‘I almost never drink this,’ Clare said.
‘Nor me. But this is no moment for almost never anything.’
‘Liza—’ Clare said pleadingly.
Liza looked mutinous. She poured whisky into the tumblers and then ran water into a green jug embossed with vine leaves (Clare remembered Archie bringing that jug home, from a junk shop somewhere) and put it on the table.
Then she put her hands to her face and said, ‘Archie’s been to bed with Marina and Thomas tried to run away from school.’
Clare sat there. She stared at the whisky in the glasses.
Liza said, ‘I’m OK, though,’ and burst into tears.
Clare went round the table and put her arms around her sister. Liza, who was always rounded and pleasantly resilient to touch, felt bony and awkward.
‘Marina,’ Liza sobbed. ‘I can’t bear that it’s Marina.’
‘Is it over?’
‘I think so. But he doesn’t want it to be.’
Clare took one arm away and used it to pour water into the whisky glasses.
‘Here,’ she said to Liza.
‘I didn’t mean to tell you,’ Liza said, blowing her nose. ‘I don’t want anyone to know, not anyone. Certainly nobody here; not the village.’
‘But they needn’t.’
Liza took the tumbler and gulped.
‘Oh, Clare—’
‘Poor Liza. Poor little you.’
‘Oh no,’ Liza said, looking at Clare. ‘Oh, not that. You know that’s not true.’
‘Have you told him, told Archie about you and Blaise?’
‘Heavens, no—’
; ‘Don’t you think you should?’
Liza sat down on a kitchen chair and said, spacing the words as if she were spitting them out, ‘I could not bear him to know.’
‘But he has told you—’
‘No. I found out. I put my arms round him and bust her glasses. They were in his pocket, after—’
‘So then he told you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Everything.’
‘Oh yes.’
Clare thought about Marina. She remembered saying to Liza, of Marina, ‘You and I will never be that sexy. We never have been.’ They had been stunned by Marina; they’d got frightfully over-excited about her and pretended they were at school, high on a crush on a prefect. And Archie had been so rude that day, sulky and prickly with hardly veiled insults. Archie. Clare grew hot thinking about him. Faithful, strong-minded, protective Archie, in bed with his stepmother, his widowed stepmother. It was the stuff of Sophocles, not the stuff of a doctor in Stoke Stratton, a country doctor.
She said in a voice choked with bewilderment, ‘Will you part?’
‘I – I don’t think so.’ Liza took a swallow and pulled a faint face. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know if he can go back or come back or whatever it is.’
‘But the children—’ Clare lowered her voice. ‘Is that what was the matter with Thomas?’
‘Partly. And partly Andrew dying and partly, would you believe it, being convinced that, if he saw Marina, everything would be all right.’ Liza raised her tired face to Clare’s. ‘To be honest, I don’t really know what’s the matter with Thomas. I only know parts of it. He’s very angry with us. But he’s slept better the last two nights. And he’s eating. Archie—’ She bit her lip. ‘Archie told him yesterday that relationships were two-way traffic systems and he wasn’t too young to realize that. Rich, really, coming from him.’
‘But what have you had to complain of, up to now?’
Liza sighed.
‘How do you mend trust?’
‘Aren’t you breaking it, too, keeping your secret?’
‘I’m ashamed,’ Liza said.
Clare stood up.
‘That’s something else altogether.’
‘What a mess,’ Liza said, draining her glass. ‘What a mess.’
The door opened. Thomas had added a baseball cap adorned with a golden bat to his ensemble. He hissed at his mother.
A Passionate Man Page 24