‘Glue. Glue. Glue.’
‘Coming.’
A muffled roaring came through the open door.
‘That’s Imogen,’ Thomas said. ‘We zipped her into a sleeping bag. She wanted it, till she was zipped up and then she didn’t.’
Liza moved towards the door.
‘At least with Imogen around we can’t see ourselves as tragic—’ She paused in the doorway. ‘One day,’ she said, looking back at Clare, ‘one day we’ll have a whole conversation which doesn’t even mention us. I promise.’
Clare backed her car out of the drive and turned it away from Winchester. The solicitor had said he would telephone between six-thirty and seven, but she was confident enough to think it quite a good thing if she were not there, as well as being certain he would try later. She drove through Stoke Stratton, past the post office outside which Mrs Betts was talking to the postwoman, a stout, highly made-up woman in a bursting dark-blue uniform, who shared many of Mrs Betts’s aims and prejudices. As Clare drove by, Mrs Betts peered in the fading light to see who it was. It was a severe temptation to wind down the window and call helpfully, ‘Dr Logan’s sister-in-law!’
‘Dr Logan’s sister-in-law,’ Mrs Betts informed the postwoman.
The health centre car-park was full, it being the middle of surgery. Clare parked on the edge and went into the cheerful, heartless waiting room where people sat with the despondency induced by waiting.
‘I wonder if I could see Dr Logan? I’m not a patient, I’m his sister-in-law.’
Her voice carried clearly round the room. The receptionist said that, if she would care to wait, Dr Logan might be free after all his patients.
‘Could you tell him? Could you tell him I’m here?’
The receptionist looked as if this was a well-nigh intolerable request.
‘After the next patient.’
‘I may see him?’
The receptionist looked affronted.
‘Oh no. Certainly not. After the next patient, I will tell him you are here.’
Clare drifted over to a chair beneath a threatening plant with fibrous stems and hideous shining dark leaves, fingered like crude hands. Magazines on yachts and country life and children’s board books entitled Miffy Goes Skating and Watch Me Jump! lay in a ragged heap on the table in front of her. Beside her, a neat old man dabbed forlornly at a streaming eye and opposite, an obese young mother, her tyres of flesh pushing against fancy pink knitting, placidly fed a vast baby out of a bag of onion-flavoured crisps. Their smell hung in the air, fried and synthetic.
It was a long wait. Clare read Watch Me Jump! which seemed to encourage the kind of exhibitionism Imogen favoured, and then a long, earnest article on the few remaining untouched Saxon meadows of England. The old man disappeared obediently towards Dr Campbell’s disembodied voice over the intercom, and then Archie, unseen, asked tiredly for Tracy Durfield. The great pink-knitted girl crushed the crisp bag into the carpet tiles with her foot and, heaving the baby into her arms, shambled towards the door to the surgeries. Clare picked up Miffy Goes Skating. Miffy turned out idiotically to be a rabbit.
It was almost an hour before Archie came to the glass doors, and pushed one open and said, ‘Clare.’
She stood up. He looked no better than Liza.
‘How good of you—’
‘Why?’
‘It’s good of you to come,’ Archie said. ‘Whatever for. It’s good to see you.’
He led the way into his surgery and offered her a chair by a pinboard which bore riotous drawings by Mikey and Imogen among height and weight charts and exhortations to avoid animal fats but cleave unto olive oil. He then sat down in his own chair and leaned his elbows on his knees.
‘I suppose you’ve been with Liza?’
‘Yes. But she didn’t ask me to come. She doesn’t know I’m here.’
‘Ah,’ Archie said. He looked at her. ‘So have you come to say to me what I would expect, in these circumstances, a loyal sister to say?’
‘I hope I’m loyal,’ Clare said. ‘I don’t know. But I think I’m right.’
She paused. Archie waited, polite and weary.
‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ Clare said.
When Clare had gone, Archie sat at his desk for a long time and drew on his scrap pad a huge stylized sun with rays like sword blades. He gave the sun heavy-lidded eyes and a sleepy, lazy smile. He wrote ‘Liza’ beside it, several times. Clare had said Liza was too ashamed to speak to him of her non-affair with the young Irishman at Bradley Hall. What do you mean, Archie said, what is there to be ashamed of? And Clare had stumblingly said something about loyalty and Archie had perceived that Liza had humiliated herself, because the affair was never consummated, had come to nothing, had been no more than a brief colliding of two separate fantasies.
‘You won’t be angry with her, will you?’ Clare had said.
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘No. I wouldn’t dream of it.’
He felt no anger. He felt nothing but a dim pity, a mild incredulity that Liza could have been so willing to be deluded. He thought he might have met the man once, on a Sunday morning, when he had come to Beeches House looking for Liza, and he had seemed like a delightful undergraduate, eager and charming, polite; not a threat, not someone of substance.
Archie got up to lock his surgery door. Then he went back to his drawing of the sun and looked at it and felt a stab of pain for Liza, pain about her, pain on her behalf. Then he reached for the telephone and dialled Marina.
‘I knew it would be you. I told you not to call—’
‘Marina,’ Archie said, leaning against the clean grey wall of his surgery. ‘I am desperate to see you.’
She said nothing. He could not even hear her breathing.
‘Just once. Just once more. I must know, I must fully understand, I must get something of you so deep in me that, even if we never see each other again, I will have that, I will never lose the richness you have given me; the gate will never swing shut again—’
He paused. There was another silence and then she said, ‘My dear, you mistake me. You mistake the gate.’
‘Never in this world—’
‘I may have woken you up,’ Marina said more strongly, ‘but I am not the answer. You have to be your own answer.’
‘Do I mean nothing to you?’ Archie said stupidly.
‘Holy shit,’ Marina shouted furiously. ‘What kind of garbage question is that?’
Archie straightened up.
‘Quite right. Sorry. I’m consumed by wanting to see you, be with you.’
‘It wouldn’t help. There’s nothing that will help either of us right now. When you can face that, you’ll have taken the first step through your gate.’
‘Aren’t you afraid?’ Archie said. ‘Aren’t you afraid of the future?’
‘I’m appalled at it. But I’m not afraid. Maybe I’d prefer fear to horror. What a choice!’ She paused and then she said, ‘I’m going to see Liza.’
‘Why?’
‘Unfinished business. Something I want to give her.’
‘Of course,’ Archie said, closing his eyes. ‘I regret saying why—’
‘Why do you Logans have to be such decent men? It’s a killer to—’
‘To what?’
‘I was unwisely going to say self-control.’
Archie began to laugh. His eyes were filling with tears.
‘We would rather be ruined than changed,’ Marina said.
‘What?’
‘I’m quoting. W. H. Auden: “We would rather be ruined than changed, / We would rather die in our dread / Than climb the cross of the moment / And let our illusions die”.’
Archie said, ‘But you aren’t my illusion.’
‘No, my dear, I am not. I am your cross of the moment.’
‘Marina—’
‘You pay heed to Mr Auden, Archie,’ Marina said. ‘There’s no glamour to being ruined. Only a man would be romantic enough to think there was.’
‘There you go,’ her voice suddenly sharpened. ‘And now I’m going, Archie. I’m going back to America.’
He gripped the telephone.
‘When, when—’
‘In a week.’
He turned his face and pressed his forehead to the wall. Then, without another word, he took the telephone receiver away from his ear and replaced it quietly on the handset. Almost at once, someone began knocking on his surgery door.
‘Dr Logan? Dr Logan? Mrs Durfield is on the telephone. Could you—?’
Chapter Seventeen
‘Exposed!’ proclaimed the banner in Stoke Stratton post office. Beneath it, pasted to a sheet of blossom-pink card was a cutting from the local paper. Richard Prior, claimed the cutting, had swindled his village. Those starter cottages he had declared he would insist upon building, and for which he had gained initial planning permission, had proved a smoke screen. They were being advertised as three-bedroomed cottage homes now, with country kitchens, and integral garages, priced at three times the amount he had promised to pin them to. ‘Nobody wanted them,’ Farmer Prior contends. But who has he asked? Not a single villager in Stoke Stratton. ‘It’s a plot,’ a long-standing resident, Cyril Vinney, told the Chronicle. ‘It’s a dirty trick.’
Cyril Vinney, Marina thought, standing outside the post office, wrapping her coat hard round herself against the wind. Cyril Vinney, dirty tricks, swindles, this dreadful little shop, all part of English village life, all far more part of it now than Anne Hathaway or Gilbert White. She had stopped there because she was early and her visit was enough of a burden to inflict upon Liza without being early, too. She had gone into the post office, and Mrs Betts, spying her cashmere coat, had instantly evolved a new and repulsive manner, at once familiar and egregious.
‘Lady Logan. What a very unseasonal day. How can I help you?’
‘I’d like some candy for the children,’ Marina said.
Mrs Betts began to put jars on the counter, folksy imitation old-fashioned jars containing humbugs and toffee and aniseed balls.
‘I’m afraid the children have no aesthetic taste,’ Marina said. ‘They like garbage.’
Mrs Betts gave a little laugh. Charm bracelets shaking deprecatingly, she pointed out packets of snakes and spiders made of scented jelly and a jar of brilliant balls marked ‘House of Horror Gobstoppers’.
‘Perfect,’ Marina said.
‘Staying long?’ Mrs Betts said.
‘No,’ Marina said. ‘Only a flying visit.’
‘Another time, then,’ Mrs Betts suggested. ‘The village is charming in spring. The daffodils, you know.’
It seemed the moment to seal her own fate.
‘This spring,’ Marina said, ‘I shall be looking at American daffodils.’
Mrs Betts rolled her eyes with mock rapture at the heady, impossible notion of foreign travel.
‘A spring holiday—’
‘No,’ Marina said. ‘Home.’
Carefully sealing up the paper bags of sweets, Mrs Betts pushed her luck.
‘Oh, Lady Logan, how I understand. When Mr Betts was taken, I felt I could not endure Southampton a moment longer—’
Marina snapped two pound coins down on the counter.
‘Is that sufficient?’
Mrs Betts was, momentarily, thrown. She gave Marina her change in silence and then hurried to open the street door. It was only when she was outside that Marina observed the banner. ‘Exposed!’ Horrible word, cruel, suggestive of defenceless things abandoned, precious things laid bare, secrets branded with slurs of squalor and shame. She was still holding the paper bags. What disgusting things she had bought! Their sweet, clamorous, offensive smell rose even in the cold air. There was a little bin close by. Above it, another of Mrs Betts’s hand-lettered signs read ‘In here please. And help us to win the Michelmersh Cup!’ Marina dropped the paper bags into the bin and moved away to her car. With luck, Mrs Betts would find them later.
Liza waited in the hall.
‘Will you stay and see her?’ she said to Archie. ‘Do you want to?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I won’t.’
‘Perhaps you should—’
‘For whose sake? Yours?’
‘No.’
‘Then not,’ Archie said.
He was kind to her, kind and polite. He had told her, the night before, with the same gentle courtesy, that Clare had been to see him and had relayed to him the story of Blaise O’Hanlon’s infatuation with Liza. She had waited in longing and dread for a reaction. There was none. It didn’t matter, he had said, don’t worry, poor Liza, stupid overexcited boy. He had sounded as if the whole affair, which had cost her so dear, had really very little importance, and scarcely any significance for him. It had been the most gigantic anticlimax, and had left her seething with frustration.
‘I can’t touch you,’ she had cried out to him, ‘can I? I can’t, I can’t—’
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Wait.’
‘How long? How long have I got to wait? I’ve been waiting months, years.’
He said, ‘There’s so much to confront, you see.’
And then he wouldn’t speak again. Asking him if he meant to see Marina when she came was a way of forcing him to speak, goading him, trying to get through. And yet again, he was elusive. I’d stay for your sake if you want it, he said. How could that help? How could it possibly help to be in the same room as Marina and Archie and imagine . . .
She had sent Thomas down to the gate. Imogen was not yet back from nursery school. It was a relief to ask Thomas to do something that he would actually do just now, because ever since he had come back from Pinemount he had been naughty, rude and disobedient, not at all the biddable, sensitive Thomas she was used to.
‘You can’t make me,’ he’d said to Archie when requested to stop drumming on the table at breakfast with a couple of spoons, ‘can you?’
‘I’m not sufficiently interested to try,’ Archie said.
Thomas drummed louder. Archie got up and went out into the garden and Liza saw him standing by the hedge looking at the poor field, the poor about-to-be desecrated field. Thomas drummed on, his eyes on Liza. After a few moments, she went out, too, and upstairs, and sat on the edge of their unmade bed and stared at the mark on the blue-and-white wallpaper where Mikey had once thrown a toy tractor. In the kitchen, Thomas put the spoons down, and snivelled.
Now, he swung on the gate. Liza could see him, swinging, as was strictly forbidden, on the end away from the hinge. At least his presence would ease seeing Marina. She had almost died, hearing Marina on the telephone calmly saying that she wanted to come down, that she wanted to see her, Liza. ‘Yes,’ she had said blankly. ‘Yes. Thursday. No, I don’t teach that day. Yes.’ And it was arranged, settled, and here she was, jagged with nerves in the hall, waiting, as she and Archie had once waited for Andrew and Marina to come.
Marina drove Sir Andrew’s Rover. She stopped it in the gateway and Thomas flung himself off the gate and into the passenger seat. They paused there a moment, and Liza, peering through the narrow windows beside the front door, could see that they were talking, talking with animation. Then Marina brought the car up the drive and stopped it and climbed out. She wore a camel-hair coat and her hair was loose. She waited for Thomas and then she came up to the house, and he opened the door for her and she walked in and said, ‘My dear Liza.’
Liza stared.
‘It is so generous of you to let me come.’
‘You made me,’ Liza said.
Marina took off her coat and draped it over the newel post of the banisters.
‘I had to.’
‘Thomas,’ Liza said. ‘Will you go and fetch the bottle of wine from the fridge, and two glasses and a corkscrew?’
She went ahead of Marina into the sitting room.
‘I don’t know why you’ve come,’ Liza said. ‘You can’t do anything for my peace of mind and I’m not much interested
in yours.’
She sat down on the sofa. Marina went across to the window and looked out, and then she came back and sat beside Liza.
‘But I hope I can do something for you.’
Thomas came in, carrying the bottle and glasses on a tray. Suddenly he was not an asset but a hindrance.
Marina said, before Liza could invent a ploy, ‘Thomas, you may go and play in Grandpa’s car as long as you absolutely promise not to touch the brake.’
‘He isn’t allowed—’ Liza began, nettled at a more inventive authority than her own.
‘Today he is. For fifteen minutes.’
Thomas, glowing, ready to lie on the drive for fifteen minutes if she asked him to, went dancing out, slamming the front door behind him.
‘Look,’ Marina said. Her voice was not at all steady. ‘I’m not going to apologize. What I did – we did – is too complex for that. Apology isn’t adequate, doesn’t cover enough. And I’m not going to make excuses. It’s all too deep, too complicated, too enormous.’
Liza wound the spiral of the corkscrew down into the cork of the wine bottle and pulled.
‘I’m not interested,’ she said again.
She poured the wine. It was white and cold, unsuitable for the day, appropriate to her feelings.
‘No.’
‘How could you do such a thing to me?’
‘I don’t know,’ Marina said. ‘I do not know.’
‘And I suppose you think you’ll feel better by saying you wish you never had?’
Marina stared at her.
‘Liza, we shouldn’t get started on all that.’
‘You mean, please can we evade confronting what you’ve done?’
‘Liza—’
‘I’m so angry,’ Liza said. ‘I’m boiling with anger. It’s such a relief to be angry.’
She held out a glass of wine. Marina took it by the stem.
‘Have you tried being angry with Archie?’
‘That is no business of yours.’
‘Quite right,’ Marina said more briskly, sitting up, tasting her wine. ‘It is not. Archie is no business of mine in any way. I never thought to take anything that wasn’t mine, never thought even to want it. Pain and grief can scramble your rational mind—’
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