A Passionate Man (14 page)

‘No.'

‘And do you think it, in some instinctive way, disloyal to your mother?'

‘No.'

‘And do you very much dislike Marina?'

Archie coloured.

‘I hardly know her.'

‘And your every vibration indicates to me that you neither wish nor intend to.'

Archie hunched over his plate. After some seconds he said, ‘You are wrong to suppose that.'

‘Then help me,' Sir Andrew said.

Archie pushed his plate aside. He said with difficulty, ‘I have – always had you. And then I had Liza. Between you, you know me. You know that, despite outward appearances and some very strong convictions, I am not as confident as I seem.'

He stopped.

‘And?'

‘I don't seem to have men friends,' Archie said. ‘I mean, I get on with the members of the practice all right, but I don't need them, I don't want to do jolly boys' things with them.' He broke off and then he said directly, ‘I am afraid of losing you.'

‘How can you lose me?'

Archie began to marshal the stray forks and spoons around his place mat. He was simultaneously stricken by feeling something painful, something enormous and nameless, and by knowing that what he was about to say was but a slim excuse for the truth.

‘You'll belong to – someone else,' Archie said, boiling with shame.

The next table, who had also observed Sir Andrew and were pretending they had not, were startled to hear him say with vehemence, ‘How? How will I? How can Marina's husband cease to be Archie's father when both he and she are bent upon family bonds? How,' said Sir Andrew, growing angry, ‘how can you say such foolish, childish things?'

Archie shook his head wordlessly. The waiter came up and began to slide plates and dishes off the table.

‘What is the matter with you?' Sir Andrew said, when he had gone. ‘How can you object to a situation which will only affect you for the better, because I shall be happy, but will also avoid your having to look after me when I start falling to bits?'

Archie looked up. His father, who had always looked the same to him, restrained, well cared for, controlled, but always, chiefly, his father, now looked different. The outward things were all the same: moustache, shirt-cuffs, breast-pocket handkerchief, were all as precise as usual, but beyond them there was an unfamiliar energy, a new vitality. Gazing at his father, Archie perceived that he suddenly looked not just happy, but blazingly male. Deep in Archie, a profound longing stirred like a long unsatisfied hunger. He bent his head. Tears were pushing behind his eyes.

He said gruffly, ‘I'm so sorry.'

Sir Andrew put a hand out across the table.

‘You'll see. Give it a few months and you'll see how you will benefit. You can't fail to. You know better than I how generous love makes one.'

Archie nodded. He grasped his father's hand. The waiter, appearing with a trolley laden with undesirable puddings, was entirely unnerved by this and crashed his cheesecakes into the neighbouring table.

‘In any case,' Sir Andrew said, taking no notice and smiling at his son, ‘what makes you think I could do without you?'

The cathedral was full of Monday afternoon quiet. By several pillars, the flower ladies were assiduously topping up the water levels in great pyramids of chrysanthemums and the odd subdued autumn tourist drifted round the nave in gentle quest of Jane Austen's memorial. In a side aisle, dwarfed by a baroque monument, a College boy, illicitly away from the sportsfield, was having a tense and unsatisfactory conversation with a girl in black suede thigh boots whose stance alone indicated her desire to get away. As Archie passed them on his way to the choir, she gave him a pleading glance.

The choir stalls were quite empty, except for a solitary man in a mackintosh gazing at William Rufus's tomb. Archie climbed up to the back row on the south side and subsided against the screen to give himself a satisfactory view of the royal chests of the Saxon kings of England. He stared at them for a long time. A woman came up to join the man in the mackintosh.

‘Can't be the real thing. Not
the
William Rufus. Must be a copy.'

‘It's real,' the man said. ‘That's the whole point. It's him.'

‘Doesn't seem possible.'

‘That's the point,' the man said again. ‘It is possible. It's real history.'

The woman straightened up.

‘Can't take it in.' She moved away a little. ‘Coming for a coffee?'

‘In a minute. I'll follow you. I'll only be a minute.'

When she had gone, he leaned forward and laid a hand on the tomb. His eyes were closed. Then he opened them and saw Archie watching him. He smiled. And then he took his hand off William Rufus and put it in his pocket and went slowly out of the choir as if he were reluctant to leave it. As he went into the north aisle, he turned for a second and Archie raised his hand. For a moment, the man remained, looking back, and then he moved slowly away down the north aisle and Archie's hand fell back into his lap.

What, he wondered, was he going to do? How had it come about that he, Archie Logan, liked and loved all his life, should now feel himself to be wandering alone in some darkling place? And, what was worse, a darkling place with no map. He had always had a map. He had always known, with a benign, unpushy certainty, where he was going; he had been conscious, ducking into Granny Mossop's low doorway, that she was truly worth more to him than his father's public glories ever could be. Even now, he knew he did not want those glories, and he knew that, at least, with an energy that was familiar to him.

But, despite that energy, he felt helpless. All around him, those people, those precious people, who had wheeled like planets round his central earth, seemed to have changed. His father, Liza, even Thomas – stoutly declaring on his Sunday visit that they must forget his wound-up telephone call from school – all seemed to him to have found maps of their own, maps that led them away from him and into territory where he was reluctant to follow. In Liza's case, would she even allow him to follow wherever she was going? And, if she beckoned to him, could he come and be the led rather than the leader?

He slid forward until his knees were resting on the low carpeted bench in front of him. He was willing, he told himself, to be taught. He was willing to change. That was not the problem. What was the problem was the sense of being immobilized, as if the understanding of being alive, which had always come to him as naturally as breathing, had suddenly vanished. If he was his own patient, he thought, laying his head on his folded arms, he would tell himself that he was profoundly depressed. But he could not do that, somehow. What was there to depress him? Thomas was not being bullied. His father was, as he said, not removing himself, only adding to himself. Liza had every right to remind him that she was changing and developing; indeed, it shamed him to think she had had to point it out. She had also pointed out, and so had his father, that he was behaving like a child. Was that it? Was some childhood spectre of a lost mother and a thus doubly precious father stealing out of the past and his subconscious to haunt him now? Or was it just being about to be forty? Or was it both, everything?

In the choir stalls below him, a woman slipped into a pew and knelt and bent her head. She had brown hair, held back above her ears with combs, and a dark-blue overcoat whose folds crumpled softly over the pew behind her. She could have been any age between thirty and fifty. Was she, too, Archie wondered, down some cul-de-sac without any idea of how to turn round? Or perhaps her husband had run off with her best friend; or she had a child in hospital; or she had found another man and wanted to be comforted into feeling easy about it. She turned her face a little, towards the altar, and Archie could see that she was in her forties and that she looked quite composed. Perhaps she had just come in to say thank you. Archie reflected with some despair that he had much to be grateful for, but that he simply did not seem able to reach that gratitude. He knew it but he could not feel it. He could feel nothing except that he was trapped, and full of longing.

He stood up. Dim, respectful lights were being switched on down the aisles. The woman in the dark-blue coat rose from her knees, smoothed and shook herself into place and set off towards the west door with the air of a person with the right amount of purpose. William Rufus was sinking into shadows. Why, Archie said to himself, why am I not at peace?

Crossing the Close back to the hotel car-park, Archie was intercepted by his sister-in-law, Clare. She worked for the city archivist, a job she claimed any filing clerk could do. She was wearing a grey flannel skirt and a navy-blue blazer, and was carrying a shopping basket containing files and a tin of cat food.

She said, ‘Oh, Archie!' in the breathless way she usually greeted people, and he kissed her and asked her how she was.

She said, ‘Oh, you know. Dusty and depressed.'

‘Don't always be depressed, Clare.'

‘I know. It's so boring for everyone, isn't it? Have you got time for a cup of tea?'

‘Not really. I've been playing truant for lunch.'

She drooped.

‘Walk back to the car with me,' Archie said. ‘I'll drive you home.' He took her basket. ‘You and the medieval records.'

‘Saxon, actually. It's amazing how fascinating it ought to be and how boring it is.'

‘What would you like to do instead?'

He began to move away and she took a few quick steps to keep up with him

‘I think Liza's life looks pretty good.'

‘I'm not sure she'd agree with you.'

‘Archie?'

‘Country doctor's wife,' Archie said a little wildly. ‘Village life. Three children. Local job. I suppose it must seem a bit confining sometimes.'

Clare said nothing. A small nausea of apprehension knotted her stomach. Did Archie know about Blaise O'Hanlon? Clare herself did not know from Liza, who had not even hinted at him, but from Blaise, in person. Blaise had turned up at her house one evening the previous week and told her, almost before introductions were over, that he must talk to her about Liza.

‘There's nobody else, you see. And I must talk. I knew you existed because Liza told me, and I thought you would talk to me. I can't talk to Liza because she is so adorably resolute, so please, please can I talk to you?'

He had stayed to supper. Whisking up a soufflé, Clare reflected that it was probably a year since she had cooked for a man, and it was absolutely typical that when she did it was for a man who was not in love with her, but with her sister. He ate ravenously and was full of praise.

‘Oh, this is so delicious. Are you sure there's no more? Not even crumby little edge bits? Wouldn't it be easy if you could be Liza?'

She believed in his love completely. She could not bring herself not to. But even Clare could see that for Liza Blaise was no match for Archie. To Clare, Liza and Archie had one of those rare relationships where mutual roots seemed tangled round each other.

She said to Blaise, ‘There isn't any hope, you know.'

‘Then I'll make there be some.'

‘You mustn't be so destructive,' Clare said, excited in spite of her better sense.

‘I only want to give,' Blaise said, finishing the wine. ‘And I need her. Need is so different from want.'

Clare was alarmed.

‘What are you planning?'

‘Persuasion,' he said. ‘A long, loving campaign of persuasion. I want to persuade her to see how different she is. She has no idea. She's like the Sleeping Beauty.'

‘And is Archie the thorny hedge?'

‘Archie?' Blaise said, briefly bemused. ‘What about Archie?'

‘She's married to him. He's her husband.'

Blaise looked directly at Clare.

‘He doesn't see her as I see her.'

‘You don't know that! You don't know her at all!'

‘I do,' Blaise said. ‘I knew her at once.'

‘Reverting to me,' Clare said now to Archie. ‘Do you think I'm emotionally retarded because I always want what I can't have? Or at least, I think I do.'

They had arrived in the car-park. Struggling to find the right key and to open the passenger door for Clare and to stow her basket on the confusion of the back seat gave Archie a few moments to wrestle with the memory of the jealous longing that had stricken him during lunch with his father.

When he at last answered Clare, he could say with some cheerfulness, ‘Heavens, no. It's only another form of words for striving. If we all liked the status quo, think what a plodding life we'd lead. It's—' He paused, and then said with more seriousness, ‘It's the – dissatisfaction and the hunger that keeps us exploring.'

He started the car and slid it out from the ranks of other cars into the narrow street leading away from the city centre.

Clare said, ‘I think that sounds very insecure.'

‘Of course it does. It is.'

‘Robin was like that. Always exploring. His wasn't striving, it was just self-indulgence.'

Archie said, changing gear to swing steeply uphill towards the prison, ‘That's another thing altogether. That's a fear born of getting to know someone and realizing that they know you.'

‘I thought that was love,' Clare said.

‘It is. At least, it's part of love.'

‘Then—'

‘Clare,' Archie said, fighting with conflicting messages from his head and his guts. ‘I don't think I can quite cope with this topic at three-thirty on a Monday afternoon in heavy traffic.'