A Passionate Man

by Joanna Trollope

  ‘I wish I hadn’t upset Liza.’

  ‘Good,’ Diana said. ‘Excellent. Marriage is a pain in the neck but it ought at least to give you someone to hang in there with. I say,’ she leaned down a little. ‘The tom-toms tell me not a Vinney was there when poor old Granny died. But you were. Lynne Tyler said you went specially—’

  ‘No, no. Chance—’

  ‘Don’t believe you.’

  She smiled down at him with affection.

  ‘You’ve got a rare old daddy, Imogen.’

  Archie looked down.

  ‘Bottom,’ Imogen said.

  She got off the gate.

  ‘Bottom toast!’ she shouted, and ran away shrilling across the field.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘Look,’ Stuart Campbell said, leaning on his desk, ‘look, I know you have been through a deeply distressing time, but I’m afraid I must gently point out to you that life must go on.’

  Archie, standing just inside the door with his hands in his pockets, said nothing.

  ‘It’s six weeks since your father died. I wouldn’t presume to put a time limit on grief, nor to dictate anyone’s personal reaction, but I’m afraid there is a general feeling in the practice that you are beginning to exploit everyone’s sympathy.’ He pushed a piece of paper with Archie’s large hand on it across the desk. ‘I got your note. You say you can’t attend the practice meeting because of a patient’s funeral. Archie, you haven’t attended the last two meetings and, although I applaud your human conscientiousness in wishing to go to Mrs Mossop’s funeral, I cannot help, at the same time, feeling that you have your priorities wrong.’ He looked at Archie weightily and said, ‘Our duty, I should not have to remind you, is to the living, not to the dead. Indeed, and this is something you may have forgotten in the last six weeks: if we allow the dead to preoccupy us too much, we cannot help but penalize the living.’

  Archie said, ‘I know.’

  ‘Well, then.’

  ‘It’s a particular funeral. My reasons are very private and in some way tied up with my father’s death. I am aware everyone’s been carrying me recently and it won’t go on.’

  Stuart Campbell sighed. He rolled a pencil across Archie’s note.

  ‘Can’t your wife go?’

  ‘No,’ Archie said. ‘She’s working.’

  She had also refused to go. He had asked her, the day before, but she had refused even to consider it. ‘But Bradley Hall is utter chaos,’ Archie had said. ‘You’re always complaining about it, how the timetable is only made to be ignored. Why can’t you change with someone?’ Liza had shaken her head. ‘Because I can’t and I don’t want to.’

  Stuart got up and went to the window and stood there, gazing out and chinking the change in his pocket.

  ‘Archie, I admire you. You know that. You’ve been the perfect makeweight in this practice, a standing reminder of our human commitment. But I seem to spend too much time defending you just now, making allowances.’ He turned round. ‘We are the premier practice in this area now, I hardly need remind you. We get a lot of applicants. We can’t carry anyone for too long.’

  ‘Six weeks?’ Archie said, with some show of spirit.

  ‘But it isn’t six weeks, is it, Archie? It’s longer. Much longer. Isn’t it? When did you—’

  He stopped. Then he said, ‘I think you had better come to the meeting.’

  Stoke Stratton church was surprisingly full, not just with its own villagers, but with people from the neighbouring villages who had been to school with Granny Mossop or had helped her look after the land girls when Stoke Stratton House – now so expensively Jagoed – had been requisitioned in the war. Richard and Susan Prior, whose habits over such things were meticulous, occupied the second pew. Archie, coming in a little late, elected to join them.

  ‘Good man,’ Susan said.

  The coffin was as small as a child’s. It stood on an iron trestle and was almost obliterated by an immense cross of yellow and white chrysanthemums tied with purple ribbons with which Sharon Vinney had attempted to assuage her complex and miserable feelings. She sat in the front pew opposite the Priors, in a new black-and-white jacket and skirt, attended by Cyril and her straggling brood of children and hangers-on, all dressed with extreme care, and almost all in tears. The chancel step overflowed with their flowers, extravagant, inappropriate bouquets, stiffly wired and beribboned, which would later be piled in the hearse and driven away to the crematorium with the tiny coffin. There was not a tribute among them, Archie thought, that Granny Mossop would have spared her contempt.

  Even Chrissie Jenkins had come. Granny Mossop had been, after all, as she explained noisily to everyone, their oldest parishioner. She sat in front of the Priors, a dark coat open over her nurse’s uniform to make the greater commitments of her life visible to everyone. She turned to smile at Archie, a conspiratorial smile that conveyed her consciousness of the obligation that busy professionals like themselves had to perform those little personal services in life that make all the difference. Archie, who found her a woman of singular unattractiveness, would normally have returned her smile with no more than a nod; but today, with his whole being overflowing with gratitude for being alive, he smiled back. In a moment, on his knees with his eyes closed against the riot of spray carnations and hothouse purple iris, he could, after all, think about Marina.

  Colin Jenkins stepped forward. His face bore the marks of inner conflict. An ardent supporter of the new democratic services, with a deep distrust of the English of Cranmer’s prayer book, he was forced today, at Granny Mossop’s wish, to speak over her coffin the language of archaic and unjustified privilege. He could not even be sure she had not left such a wish just to spite him.

  ‘“I am the resurrection and the life,”’ Colin Jenkins said without enthusiasm, ‘“saith the Lord. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”’

  Archie hid his face in his hands. How could it be that such life, such intensity of life, should come out of death? And did he care how it had come? No, that did not matter at all. All that mattered was that it had come. And it had.

  In the junior cloakrooms at Bradley Hall, Blaise and Liza were doing after-school duty. Once every departing child had been paired off with the relevant coat, bag, and toy brought to show Mrs Simpson who ran the kindergarten class, the duty consisted of a dilatory clearance of the detritus of boots and shoes left stranded on the concrete floor. The cloakrooms, made out of Bradley Hall’s onetime coal and wood stores, were lit by bluish-mauve neon strips and provided as glamorous a setting for an assignation as a public lavatory. Blaise went along the aisles between the rows of pegs screwed into frames of red-varnished pitch-pine, kicking the shoes into lockers with dull fury.

  ‘Next week,’ Liza said from the adjacent aisle where she was painstakingly trying to find mates for stray boots, ‘next week, I go back to part time.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Blaise said, kicking. ‘Jesus, Jesus.’

  ‘It’s probably just as well,’ Liza said provocatively.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘You know. You know perfectly well.’

  Blaise put his hands on a pitch-pine bar and swung his head and shoulders through the dangling shoebags at Liza.

  ‘I’m sick of all this. I’ve had enough. I’m going mad, raving mad.’

  ‘But we’ve seen each other every day, I’ve even—’

  ‘Kisses,’ Blaise said derisively. ‘Rotten little kisses. Cock-teasing kisses.’

  Liza stood up, still holding a gumboot.

  ‘I’m exhausted,’ Blaise said. ‘You exhaust me. It’s all games, isn’t it? Little girly games.’

  Liza began to tremble slightly. The blue shadows thrown down by the light made Blaise’s face skull-like in its intensity.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Look,’ Blaise said. ‘I’m sick of being played with. It’s a particularly horrible sort of tease, what you’re doing. Las
t full day, you say to me all smug and prissy: No more treats. Had that. Back to hubby now.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Liza said.

  Blaise took his hands off the beam and vanished from sight.

  ‘Go home,’ his voice said. ‘Just go home to hubby and the kiddiwinks and bloody well leave me be.’

  Liza put down the gumboot and went round to the adjoining aisle. Blaise glared at her.

  Liza said, ‘You started all this. Remember? Never leaving me alone, letters and phone calls and badger, badger, badger. Now you can’t get what you want—’

  ‘What do I want?’

  There was a small highly charged silence. Later, looking back, Liza recognized that silence as the last moment of her fantasy, the final seconds of the extravagant illusion with which she had fed herself for so many months.

  She said, proudly, fatally, ‘You want me to go to bed with you.’

  And Blaise, suddenly exchanging petulance for vengeance, said, ‘Not any more.’

  She looked at him. He looked back, his chin slightly raised.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You blew that,’ Blaise said fretfully. ‘Weeks ago. Stringing me along. Games, games, all the time—’

  ‘But just now, you said—’

  ‘Oh, that’s habit. I got in a muddle. I got so confused and exhausted I couldn’t remember where I’d got to. And anyway, you seemed to expect it.’ His voice grew accusing. ‘You’ve been expecting it all term, haven’t you? Talk about the boot being on the other foot! Well, you’re too late.’

  Liza felt for the top of the lockers and sat down on them. Shoebags bumped round her, redolent of rubber and old sock.

  ‘Just now,’ she said, ‘just now, you said being so near and yet so far was driving you mad—’

  ‘I didn’t mean it,’ Blaise said. ‘I didn’t mean that. I mean having you darting me pregnant glances, lying in wait for me—’

  Liza put her hands over her ears.

  ‘But you kissed me! You said—’

  ‘Of course I kissed you. You kissed me. I could hardly spit you out, could I?’

  Liza looked up at him. His face was black against the bluish light.

  ‘You’re loathsome,’ she said. Her voice shook hopelessly. ‘And you’re mad.’

  Blaise said, ‘Anyway, there’s a girl in Dublin—’

  ‘Coward.’

  ‘I met her at Christmas. She’s my age.’

  ‘Go away!’ Liza screamed. ‘Go on, get out, go away—’

  The door at the far end of the cloakroom opened and let in an oblong of yellow light.

  June Hampole called, ‘Who’s there? Who’s shouting?’

  They emerged sheepishly into the brighter light.

  ‘Oh, Liza,’ June Hampole said. ‘Oh dear.’ She looked at them both. ‘How sordid.’

  ‘Not any more,’ Blaise said angrily. ‘Nothing any more. Nothing.’ He tried to push past June into the lit passage beyond. She put up an arm and stopped him.

  ‘I think we’d better talk,’ June said. ‘Don’t you?’ She looked at Liza and sighed. ‘Please come to my study, both of you.’ She turned and began to walk back towards the school hall, Blaise following. He did not even glance at Liza. There was nothing for her to do but bring up the rear.

  ‘I couldn’t go home,’ Liza said. Her face was blotched with crying. ‘I simply couldn’t face it.’

  ‘No,’ Clare said. ‘No. Of course not.’

  ‘I’ve made such a fool of myself—’

  ‘No,’ Clare said kindly. ‘You allowed someone else to make a fool of you.’

  ‘No!’ Liza shouted.

  There were empty coffee mugs on Clare’s kitchen table and a pink sea of used paper handkerchiefs.

  ‘I’ll never get over it.’

  ‘Of course you will.’

  ‘I can’t believe I could have let it get that far. I can’t believe I was so stupid. How can I face anyone after this?’

  ‘No-one knows,’ Clare said. ‘Do they?’

  ‘I wish I hadn’t come,’ Liza cried, seizing another handkerchief. ‘I wish I hadn’t told you!’

  Clare, magnanimous in rare moral superiority, merely said, ‘I shan’t tell anyone, and I’m sure June Hampole won’t.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have come out! I simply didn’t think, I was so churned up. I should have stayed inside, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Blaise would have split on you.’

  Liza looked at her sister.

  ‘Can you believe how he’s behaved?’

  Clare thought, as she always thought, of Robin.

  ‘Oh yes. Easily.’

  ‘Months and months of besieging me, a year or more, never letting up! And he came round here! Didn’t he? He came round and declared undying love, didn’t he, Clare, didn’t he—’

  Clare got up and took the kettle over to the sink to fill it.

  ‘I don’t want any more coffee. Haven’t you got any brandy?’

  ‘I’ve got sherry,’ Clare said repressively.

  ‘Sherry, then. Clare—’

  ‘Yes?’ Clare said, putting down the kettle and opening a cupboard where her still-intact sets of wedding present glasses stood in shining rows.

  ‘Please, Clare. Don’t tell Archie. He mustn’t know. Not ever. Please, please, don’t tell Archie.’

  Clare put two small glasses engraved with partridges on the table.

  ‘Of course I won’t.’ She put a bottle of sherry beside the glasses. ‘He may just know already, mind you.’

  ‘Did you tell him? Have you? What did you say, what—’

  ‘I haven’t said anything,’ Clare said. ‘To anyone.’

  She filled the partridge glasses and pushed one towards Liza.

  Liza said angrily, ‘You fancy Archie, don’t you?’

  Clare said nothing.

  ‘Sorry,’ Liza said.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Clare said, ‘I’m going out to dinner tomorrow night.’ She paused. ‘To Chewton Glen.’

  Liza gazed at her.

  ‘A solicitor in Old Jewry,’ Clare said. ‘I’ve known him by sight for ages.’

  Liza swallowed her sherry.

  ‘I ought to go.’ She looked into her empty glass. ‘Clare. I’m so sorry. I don’t think I’ve ever behaved worse in my life.’

  Clare touched her arm.

  ‘It isn’t all your fault.’

  ‘It is,’ Liza said, getting up and peering under the table for her bag. ‘It is. And, even if it wasn’t, I couldn’t have handled it worse.’

  She straightened up, clutching her bag.

  ‘I hope you have a lovely dinner. With your solicitor.’

  Clare thought of him.

  ‘Well, the food’ll be all right, anyway.’

  Liza leaned forward and kissed her cheek.

  ‘Bye. And thank you—’

  ‘Drive carefully,’ Clare said. ‘And ring me. If you want anything.’

  Thomas stood in the call box. It was a new one, made entirely of toughened glass, and he was afraid that each passing car might contain a master from Pinemount on his way to the Goat and Compasses for his evening drink. They all went there, every night, and got pie-eyed. Bristow said their breaths afterwards were like methylated spirits and that his parents would take him away if they knew that the whole staff got pie-eyed every single night at the Goat and Compasses.

  The call box was, of course, out of bounds. You could make calls home from school, if you got a signed chit from your div. master and Matron timed you, standing by the telephone in the sick-room passage, listening to absolutely every word. If every member of the staff craved drink at the Goat and Compasses obsessively, so Matron craved information. She didn’t like a single thing to happen she didn’t know about. Rackenshaw timed her to see how long she could last before asking where the pretty photo of his mother was, and she had managed two days. Rackenshaw told her he’d put it in the dustbin, but it was under his mattress all the time. Rackenshaw took it out at night and looked at
it under the bedclothes with his torch which he kept hidden in his sponge bag.

  Thomas didn’t want Matron to know anything any more. She had been horribly kind to him when his grandfather died and Bristow had said that was mostly because his grandfather had been famous. Thomas didn’t want anybody to be kind. He didn’t want anybody to know that he was scared of going to sleep, because of the dreams. He had devised all kinds of minor tortures for himself to stay awake, the most successful of which was quite simple and merely involved sitting up in bed in the dark dormitory, cold and alone and determined. He nearly always fell asleep in the end, but could now goad himself awake again before sleep tipped him over the last edge down into the black pit where the mad dreams waited for him, dreams where everything was grotesquely large or small, and imbued with panic.

  Thomas had three ten-pence pieces. He had quite a lot more money, saved from the holidays, hidden in little amounts in various places in his locker and his tuck box and his desk in the div. room. They were given twenty pence each Sunday for church collection – it went on the bill, Bristow said – and Thomas had, luckily, been given his as two ten-pence pieces the last three Sundays, so he had put one in the church collection, and saved the other. He put one in the telephone now, and dialled Beeches House. It was cold in the telephone box and the plastic receiver was even colder against his ear.

  ‘Hello,’ Liza said. She didn’t sound normal.

  ‘Mummy—’

  ‘Thomas! Thomas, darling, where are you—’

  ‘At school,’ Thomas said.

  ‘Darling. Are you all right?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘It’s visiting Sunday, on Sunday. Not long—’

  ‘Your voice sounds funny.’

  ‘Does it?’ Liza said. ‘I expect I’ve got a cold. From school.’

  ‘Are you crying?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Liza said, closing her red eyes.

  ‘Where’s Daddy? Can I speak to Daddy?’

  ‘He’s in London,’ Liza said. ‘He’s helping Marina sort things out. Grandpa’s things.’

  ‘Has he gone for long?’

  ‘No. No, I’m sure he hasn’t.’

  ‘Mummy,’ Thomas said, dissolving. ‘Mummy.’

  ‘It’s two days until Sunday. Only two. Don’t cry, darling, please don’t—’