A Passionate Man (26 page)

She took her hands away and looked at him.

‘What are you going to do about it? Poor Marina, it's unthinkable—'

‘I – I must speak to her. She tried to telephone and I wouldn't take the call.'

‘You must go and see her,' Liza said with energy. ‘You must go up to London at once and see her. And—' She shut her eyes. ‘Archie. What can you say?'

‘I shall have to hope,' Archie said, ‘that I'll know when I get there.'

Liza got up and went to fiddle with things on the dresser: two oranges in the fruit bowl; a ragged pile of opened, unanswered letters; a pair of sunglasses with one lens missing that Imogen liked to wear, her face turned to the ceiling so that they wouldn't fall off.

‘You scare me,' Liza said. ‘You really do. Your reaction to some things seems so unhinged, you're so obsessive, so relentless.' She looked round at him, swinging the sunglasses from one hand. ‘It doesn't seem to make sense, the way you behave. One minute you're being really imaginative and sweet with Granny Mossop; the next you're writing horrible letters to poor Marina. And Thomas. What did you say to Thomas? I wish I'd stopped you going. I don't trust you, Archie. I can't. You make it impossible for me to trust you. Suppose everybody felt they could just let go, like you do? How do you think we all feel, living with someone so unpredictable, so immature?'

Archie, gazing at the hard yellow of the infant daffodils, said nothing.

‘I don't know what I feel any more,' Liza said. ‘I really don't. I'm worn out by you.'

Archie raised his face.

‘Is it really all my fault? All of it?'

‘I don't want a row,' Liza said.

‘So I may not defend myself?'

She came back to the table and began to rearrange the books on it.

‘I really must finish these. And it's late.'

She held her breath. It was such a risk she was taking, such a test of her power. Archie pushed his chair back and stood up. She waited for him to lunge at her, seize her wrist, grab her shoulders, even kiss her. But he did not. He simply stood for a moment looking quite impenetrable and not at her, and then he went out of the kitchen and she heard his steps along the polished boards of the hall, and then up the stairs to bed.

Archie reached London in the early afternoon. It was a sudden, soft, fair day, a false herald of spring, and his overcoat, a doughty tweed affair acquired ten years before in Inveraray, felt a cumbersome nuisance. He took it off and slung it round his shoulders and decided, in order to postpone his arrival in Victoria, to walk from Waterloo, across the river. Marina did not, after all, know that he was coming. He had told Liza that he had telephoned, because she had asked him, but he hadn't. He did not know why he hadn't, he had just felt unable to. It might well be that Marina would be out, and he did not know what he would do then. He did not know, in fact, what he was going to do at all except go there, and see her. And, for some reason he could not fathom, the prospect of seeing her filled him with all kinds of feelings, but not with dread. It did not cross his mind that she might refuse to see him.

It had not crossed Marina's mind, either, that he might come. She had resolved that her next move was to be some sinking of pride and then to speak to Liza; no, not speak to her, ask her. Ask her advice as to what she should do next, about Archie. She would dearly have liked to ask what she should do next about the rest of her life, too, but her pride, so carefully nurtured over more than half a century, drew the line at some things, and showing herself too vulnerable and helpless before Liza was one of them. She was, in fact, sitting by the window in the quiet dead time of mid-afternoon, making a list of things she might say to Liza, and trying out ways of saying them, when her intercom down to the building's front door rang imperiously. Going to answer it, and supposing it to be the young man from the estate agency who had said he might be round on Thursday but more likely Friday, she discovered that it was Archie.

He did not take the lift. She stood on the landing by her front door and watched his head come up the stairs, steadily round and round the lift shaft. He was wearing a big coat, like a cloak, with the collar turned up around his neck, and his hair, Marina thought, had grown longer and looked very thick. As he came up the last flight, she took a pair of large spectacles framed in pale tortoiseshell out of her jacket pocket, and put them on. He stopped two steps below her.

‘I've never seen you in glasses.'

‘I only wear them,' Marina said, ‘when I want to see particularly well.'

She led the way back into the flat, into the sitting room where Mikey had hidden in the sofa cushions and declined to look at his dead grandfather.

Archie pulled his coat off his shoulders and said, ‘I've no business to ask you to help me, but I've no idea how to begin.'

‘I wish I smoked,' Marina said. ‘It's so useful for such moments as these. Les mauvais quarts d'heure are one thing, les mauvais moments quite another and almost worse. Why did you come at such an impossible time of day? What can I offer you at three in the afternoon? Too late for lunch, too early for a Martini.'

‘Is it?'

‘Is that what you want? A Martini?'

‘No,' Archie said. ‘No. I don't want anything.'

‘In that case,' said Marina, sitting down at one end of the sofa and turning her spectacles on him, ‘why have you come?'

Archie put his coat down on an armchair and crossed to sit the other end of the sofa.

‘You know why.'

‘I'd like you to explain, however.'

He looked at her. He spread his hands.

‘It's so odd,' Marina said. ‘I've been so sorry for you, so desperately sorry, even to the point of feeling I should apologize to you for marrying your father, for being there when Andrew died, for making – yes, goddammit – for making Andrew so happy. But now you are here I don't feel abject at all. Nor contrite. I feel very strong and pretty determined. So you tell me, Archie Logan, all that's been going on and see if you can't make a better fist of it than you have done up to now.'

Archie put his head back into the cushions. He felt weirdly at ease.

‘Liza thinks – at least I think she thinks – that I am having a very tiresome, extreme form of male menopause.'

‘And?'

‘And I expect she is right.'

‘That's a cop-out,' Marina said. She smiled. She had not smiled for days. Archie turned his head sideways to look at her.

‘Shall I tell you how I feel?'

‘I think you'd better,' Marina said. ‘I think it will relieve both our minds.'

Archie said, ‘I despise people who do this.'

Marina waited.

‘I don't know much about Dante,' Archie said. ‘Except for that lovely picture, and one other thing. It was something to do with being banished from Florence for trying to rule with justice and finding himself wandering alone in the countryside, in a dark wood, without companions or possessions or a map. I seem to remember that that was a metaphor for how he felt inside, as if he had lost the centre line, after fighting for it, and was completely at sea. Didn't know where he was going or what he was looking for. Just felt a great tearing yearning for what he had lost and also for something more, something that would illumine the rest of life and give it vitality.'

He stopped.

After a while Marina said, ‘There is an interesting theory about such crises. They are thought to affect creative people particularly and I would class you as creative. The theory is that at this halfway point in life a crisis does occur, a crisis such as Dante had, and what it represents is the first confrontation with death, now that half one's life may be presumed to be over. And that prospect of death paralyses the victim – he sees death as a kind of helplessness. Sometimes it paralyses him almost literally. Look at poor Rossini.' She looked sideways at Archie. ‘Do you buy my theory?'

‘Oh yes,' he said. ‘I buy it. But I think it is only part of the trouble.' He looked about him. ‘Poor Marina. What a horrible room this is.'

‘I've had too much time to think that. Also to think how incongruously redolent of Andrew it is.'

‘Sell it,' Archie said. ‘Just sell it.'

‘I began. But I feel it's yours.'

He turned his head again.

Marina said, ‘I know he left it to me. I know that. But I don't need it, I don't want it. I can't recognize him here.'

Archie gazed at her. Then he turned his head away from her, very slowly, and said in a voice thick with tears, ‘I was with a brave old patient when she died three nights ago. I was there all the time, and afterwards. I've been at plenty of deaths but I've never understood a death before, not like that, not suddenly knowing death. I can't remember it now, but I knew then and I'll know for ever that I knew. That's one reason I've come. I thought I could only know such a thing with my father. I thought you had deprived me of that. That's why I wrote – one of the reasons I wrote.'

‘I know,' Marina said. ‘You made yourself perfectly plain.'

He whipped his head round and leaned sideways to seize her wrist.

‘I'm so sorry. Oh, my God, Marina, I'm so sorry.'

‘Dammit,' Marina said. ‘Dammit. Do
not
make me cry.'

‘Please cry—'

She bent forward over his hand.

‘I didn't know one could be in such pain as this. I didn't know what it was like to miss someone so much. I'm just ripped to pieces, Archie, and I can't stand it and can't stand your seeing it.'

She took her hand away from his and fished in a pocket for a handkerchief and blew her nose fiercely.

‘I like it,' Archie said.

She shook her head.

‘We weren't talking about me. We were talking about you. You said Dante's dark wood was part of the trouble. What was the rest?'

He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees and stared down at the carpet.

Then he said without looking at her, ‘I want you.'

He raised his head and stared across the room at a formidable Edwardian chiffonier, its fretted doors lined with leaf-green silk.

‘I was jealous of my father. I still am. And, now that he is not here, and like you I am shaken to the core with missing him, I want you more than ever.'

There was a little pause, and then Marina said, ‘Now, you look here. Just you look at me. I'm almost old enough to be your mother, I'm a granny in specs.'

He turned his head and looked at her over his shoulder. She had not moved from her sofa corner.

‘Marina,' he said.

He stood up and stooped over her, taking her hands and pulling her to her feet. Then he took off her spectacles and laid them on a nearby lamp table.

‘Archie—'

‘Shhh,' he said.

He put his arms around her and held her hard against him and kissed her hair and her neck. Then, like someone at the top of a helter-skelter, Archie took his steadying hands away from the sides and let himself go.

‘I want you,' Archie said to Marina, and bent to kiss her mouth.

He caught the last train from Waterloo to Winchester. It was sleepy and seedy, full of tired yawning people with unbrushed hair, and the aisles and tables were strewn with used paper cups and discarded evening papers. It seemed to Archie a glorious train. It appeared to have a reality, an energy quite disproportionate to its appearance and purpose. He found a seat in an empty quartet of four and threw himself into it, pressing his face to the dark glass to see his extraordinary, illuminated countenance reflected there.

It had been so hard to leave her. He had hardly managed it, probably would not have done if she had not ordered a taxi and locked herself in the bathroom. He had stood in the passage outside the locked door, dressing slowly, and laughing, calling out to her, perfectly idiotic with happiness and fulfilment. She had come out at the end when the taxi came, in a white towelling robe with her hair on her shoulders, and he had seized her.

‘I can't go, I can't, not now, not after this—'

But he had gone, because she had made him go, walking down the stairs as he had come up them, wrapped in his big coat, except that going down he looked up at her, all the way, and she leaned on the banisters and looked down, all the time, for the very last glimpse of him. In the taxi he had wanted to laugh. Dark, bright streets went by, Parliament Square, Big Ben, the oily glitter of the river, the way he had walked only that afternoon, before he had made his discovery.

This discovery, he thought lying back in the train, was what he had been seeking, this revelation of quite another dimension to himself, almost as if he had only been alive in part before. Marina had not wanted him to be serious, too intense. She had tried to tease him.

‘But you're a mere boy, that's all that's the matter with you. Experience is all. Take it from me. From one who knows.'

Oh, and she did, she did. Archie closed his eyes, but, even with them closed, his head seemed to be brilliant with light.

Liza woke when he came in.

‘It's after midnight.'

‘I know. I'm so sorry. I should have telephoned.'

He sat down to unlace his shoes.

‘How did it go?' Liza said. ‘Was it all right? Did you take her out to supper?'

‘We had supper, yes.'

He stood up and began to pull off his tie.

‘But it was all right?'

‘Yes. Yes, it was fine. I'll tell you in the morning.'