A Passionate Man (10 page)

After eight years of this curious life, Louis de Breton died of a heart attack, and Marina could then confront the fact that he had wished to leave her for a Filipino beauty queen. The immense and infinitely complex will took almost four years to disentangle as past wives and mistresses emerged from the woodwork in a seemingly endless stream of claim and counterclaim, but Louis de Breton's wishes for his fifth and last wife were one of the few unequivocal elements in it. Marina was left with a substantial apartment on the Upper East Side, a sizeable income, and the administration of the Louis de Breton Foundation, which its founder had originally set up as a tax dodge but had then become irrationally fond of and had wished to be used for its true purpose. It became, for Marina, her first real career. It brought her occupation, preoccupation and a chance to exercise both her administrative skills and her long-unrequired benevolence. Then, in quest of Sir Andrew Logan, it brought her to London.

She telephoned him and asked him to dine with her. He said he would be delighted, and suggested the Savoy Grill. They met at eight, drank a glass of champagne together and dined at Sir Andrew's usual table. They talked of everything except the purpose of the dinner which had been for Marina to suggest the funding of a
Meeting Medicine
series. When the bill was brought, Sir Andrew deftly removed it to his side of the table and extracted his cheque book.

‘If you are going to behave like this,' Marina said, ‘you will make talking business impossible.'

‘Exactly.'

‘Then please give that check to me.'

‘If I give the bill to you,' said Andrew Logan, who had never made such a remark to a woman in his life before, ‘then I shall not have a clear conscience about taking you to bed.'

She had blushed.

He finished writing the cheque, capped his fountain pen, put it away in an inside pocket and looked at her over his half-moon spectacles.

‘Is there anywhere else you would prefer?'

She shook her head. She was speechless. He rose from the table, came round to move back her chair and offered her his arm.

‘Then we should waste no more time.'

He had needed, as Marina put it to herself, a good deal of relaxing. But once relaxed, he had, in one of Louis de Breton's phrases, moved a mountain or two. Marina had arrived in London in late August and two months later she was still there. As far as she could see, there was no incentive to return to East 62nd Street and every incentive to remain in London. She moved out of her room in the Connaught and took a small serviced flat off Eaton Square where she and Andrew Logan conducted an infinitely pleasurable love affair, only interrupted by his work and visits to his flat in Victoria to take the telephone messages on his answering machine.

When he proposed marriage to her, he did it with none of the assurance with which he had first proposed bed. It had been a most unhelpful time of day, just after breakfast, and it was plain that he had not meant to say anything so momentous, but she had inadvertently alarmed him, as she took away the coffee pot, by saying casually that she thought she ought to go back to New York and see how things stood.

He seized the coffee pot from her and then, still clutching it absurdly, said, ‘You would not go for long—'

She looked surprised.

‘No,' she said. ‘I shouldn't think so.'

‘And you would come back.'

‘Andrew—'

‘I must tell you that I could not bear it if you did not come back. I should not know how to live any more. Don't go, Marina. Don't leave me. Marry me. I beg of you, marry me.'

She reached out and gently took the coffee pot out of his hands and set it on the kitchen counter. It was a tiny kitchen, as efficient and flexible as a ship's galley, with scarcely space for two people to pass. So Marina hardly needed to move a step to put her arms round Andrew Logan.

‘Of course I'll marry you.'

‘You will?'

His eyes were closed.

‘I'm afraid,' she said, ‘that I've assumed I was going to for at least the last month.'

He began to laugh. He said, ‘Thank God. Oh, thank God,' and then he said he must take her down to Hampshire and introduce her to Archie.

‘But not as your fiancée.'

‘Not?'

‘No,' Marina said. ‘One shock at a time.'

Privately, she thought she would tell Liza first. Even, remembering the rumblings of emotional thunder she had heard in Archie's presence, ask Liza how to break the news. There was a strong possibility of a particular bond between herself and Liza, a chance of the kind of intimate female friendship that enriches all the other relationships the participants have. Marina thought, with wonder, that she was about to be very blessed, and, when she thought that, it made her cry. Andrew Logan, who had shrunk from women's tears all his life, adored it when she cried.

‘You're nothing short of a miracle for Andrew,' Liza said, spearing a radicchio leaf out of her salad. ‘It's written all over him. I've never seen him like this. I thought he was a dear, right from the start, but such a buttoned-up Scot. You know. And now—' She put the radicchio into her mouth and waved her fork. ‘Now he's absolutely illuminated.'

Marina said, ‘It's quite miraculous for me, too.'

Liza, full of excellent gnocchi and Soave and a beautiful morning of watercolours in a Cork Street gallery and taxi rides and being given a green cashmere jersey that Marina said was entirely made for Liza and which she insisted on buying (‘Well, if you won't take it now, I shall simply wait and give it to you at Christmas'), said generously, ‘I do hope you will marry,' and then blushed.

‘Oh, we will,' Marina said. ‘As soon as we can tell everyone.'

‘Archie?'

‘Archie.'

Liza picked up her wine glass and held it by the rim and looked down into it.

‘It isn't personal, you know,' she said. ‘It isn't you. It's anyone. It's having his father all to himself, all his life, and no mother.'

Marina said, ‘I wouldn't dream of mothering him. Or depriving him of his father in any way that is his.'

‘I know. I don't think it has anything to do with logic.'

‘Of course not.'

Liza looked up.

‘He's frightfully emotional, you see. He takes things to heart so much. When he loves people, he really loves them.'

She could feel silly, faintly tipsy tears pricking at the thought of Archie's loving-heartedness.

‘I can see all that,' Marina said.

Liza bent her head. She was filled at once with remorse at her recent behaviour towards Archie and a simultaneous and sudden recollection of Blaise O'Hanlon saying to her, ‘I'm in real pain.' Marina watched her.

‘What is it?'

Liza said, ‘Oh. Oh, nothing really. Just some stupid cross-purposes—'

‘Your little boy?'

‘Thomas? Partly. And other things.' Liza raised her head and said boldly, ‘Sometimes, I feel so inadequate. Archie's so – so wholehearted, he lives so generously, he—' She made a little negative gesture. ‘He's such a thorough human being, if you know what I mean. And then I feel that I can't measure up to the size of him. I am so much bolder away from him; I feel so much more confident. It's almost as if he is—' She stopped, and after a tiny pause said more firmly, ‘I know he isn't judging me. I don't mean
that
.'

Marina made a competent sign to a waiter for coffee.

‘What I don't see,' she said, ‘is why you should want to be like him. Why you aren't pleased and proud to be yourself.'

Liza said, flattered, and thus without complete conviction, ‘England is absolutely full of girls like me.'

Marina said, laughing. ‘Don't be absurd,' and reached out and took Liza's hand. ‘I think maybe you just need your husband to yourself. Maybe it's time Archie was weaned off his father.'

‘Espresso,' the waiter said, in caricature Italian, putting a tiny cup in front of each of them.

‘It isn't that they aren't both kind to me,' Liza said earnestly. ‘It's more—' She paused, anxious to be quite fair and entirely honest. ‘It's more that Archie feels his father understands everything about him so instinctively and, vice versa, that he doesn't really need to try completely to understand me.'

Marina drank her coffee and wondered what it really was that Liza was trying to say. She knew from long experience what it was like to live with someone who baffled you, or denied you access to vital areas of themselves, and perhaps there were parts of Archie he had never transferred from his father's guardianship to his wife's. Perhaps, too, those things were in better hands with Andrew than with Liza? But Liza, Marina thought, watching her unwrap an almond biscuit from its tissue paper, wasn't greedy; she just wanted what most humans wanted, to be loved and also to be acknowledged.

Although she perfectly well knew the answer to her next question, Marina leaned forward a little and said, ‘Do you think all this would be helped if I were to marry Andrew?'

Liza nodded vehemently.

‘Good,' Marina said. ‘So do I.'

‘Does he talk about Archie much?'

‘Not an abnormal amount.'

Liza said with a tiny pride, ‘I was engaged to someone else when he met me.'

‘I know. I heard. He bore you off.' Andrew had also said, ‘I was so relieved it was little Liza. Archie had had such a turbulent love life, violent enthusiasms followed by violent antipathies, everything from shop-girl waifs of seventeen to a terrifying divorcee of forty-four who prowled about after Archie simply growling with lust—' Marina smiled at Liza. ‘Andrew was so pleased it was you.' She leaned across the table again. ‘Now, my dear, we are going to a movie in a darling little movie theatre I have discovered full of armchairs. And then I shall make you promise solemnly to come and see me again soon. And then I shall let you go home.'

‘It's been
perfect
,' Liza said. She picked up the sleek carrier bag that held her new jersey and peered inside with a little sigh of contentment. ‘Should I tell Archie?'

‘About my marrying his father? No. No, I don't think so. Wouldn't you think it only right that his father should do that?'

Archie had resolved that he would not allow Liza's day with Marina to become an issue. If she wanted to make a private mystery of it, he would let her, and would simply hope that whatever grievance it was that she had against him would become either clear to him, or evaporate. So he asked her about the practicalities of the day, envied the acclaimed French film she had seen, said, ‘Oh, Liza, it makes me think of Lucca,' when she mentioned the gnocchi, and admired the jersey which was, as he said, a dozen cuts above any jersey that had ever entered Beeches House before. Then he kissed her, said, ‘I'm so glad it was fun,' and went away to read C. S. Lewis to Mikey, leaving Liza in the kitchen feeling at once slightly superior and mildly frustrated.

When he came down, they had supper together and the telephone did not, for once, ring at all. They talked about incidents in the practice and incidents at Bradley Hall and not about Marina or Andrew or the threatened development. While Archie was peeling an apple, the telephone did ring at last, unable to contain itself, but it was not a patient for Archie, but Chrissie Jenkins, the Vicar's wife, for Liza, who wanted to know if Liza would stand in for her at Sunday School this week, as her mother at Lymington was ill and she had to go down there for the day. Liza, thinking of the restaurant at lunchtime, the shop where Marina had bought her jersey, the luxurious plushy darkness of the cinema, and contrasting all these with Stoke Stratton village hall on a Sunday morning, and Lynne Tyler playing the sad, damp piano with several vital notes missing, said yes, without much grace.

‘I wouldn't ask,' Chrissie Jenkins said, whose whole life was dedicated to getting other people to do parish work in order to show the world that she was married to Colin and not to God, ‘if it wasn't a bit of an emergency. She relies on me, you see, being a trained nurse.'

‘No, it's fine,' Liza said.

‘We're doing the miracles this term. I expect little Imogen's told you. It's the feeding of the five thousand this week, and we were going to act it out. Lynne says she'll bring brown bread cut into fish shapes, and will you bring white? And a little basket or two—'

‘Yes,' Liza said. ‘Yes.'

‘Thank you ever so much,' Chrissie said. ‘I know how you like to do your bit.'

‘Cow,' Liza said, putting the telephone down.

It rang again at once, and this time it was Cyril Vinney, old Mrs Mossop's son-in-law, to say his sciatica was so bad he didn't know how he was going to make it through the night.

‘And the awful thing is,' Archie said, collecting his bag, ‘that I wouldn't much care if he didn't.'

Stoke Stratton village hall had been built just after the war. It was a wooden-framed hut, gloomily creosoted, with metal window frames painted municipal-green. It consisted of one oblong room from whose ceiling hung, alternately, ineffective electric heating bars and unenthusiastic lighting strips, and, at one end, a grim little kitchen and a pair of institutional lavatories. The Women's Institute, at the instigation of Mrs Betts, had made flowered curtains for the windows and contributed a square of orange-and-brown speckled carpet which swam, isolated, at one end of the polished wooden floor. But for all its charmlessness, Stoke Stratton was proud to have a village hall. Not only were there functions in it twice or thrice weekly – badminton, old-time dancing, Young Wives, Evergreen Club, Mother and Toddler Group, Poetry Circle, Ramblers' Club, Village Preservation Society, Gardeners' Club, jumble sales, Christmas fayres, harvest suppers, P C C meetings, Youth Group discos – but Stoke Stratton graciously rented it to neighbouring King's Stoke and Lower Stoke, neither of whom boasted such an amenity.