A Passionate Man Read online

  About the Book

  The Logans are an enchanting and admirable couple who have lived a charmed life ever since Archie snatched Liza from her engagement party to someone else. Now, bedded firmly into country life with everything comfortable, funny, affectionate, they await the arrival of Archie's father, the brilliant Sir Andrew Logan, a widower for over thirty years.

  But when Sir Andrew arrives, he is not alone. Beside him is a golden lady in caramel suede, a warm, witty, desirable widow whom everyone - except Archie - adores at once. Archie sees his father's mistress as the worm in the bud of his perfect life - a life that is to be wrenched apart before he and Liza can recreate their world.

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Joanna Trollope

  A Passionate Man

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  About the Author

  Joanna Trollope is the author of many highly-acclaimed bestselling contemporary novels. She has also written a study of women in the British Empire, Britannia’s Daughters, and a number of historical novels.

  Born in Gloucestershire, she now lives in London. She was awarded the OBE in the 1996 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

  For more information on Joanna Trollope and her books,

  visit her website at www.joannatrollope.com

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  Also by Joanna Trollope

  THE CHOIR

  A VILLAGE AFFAIR

  THE RECTOR’S WIFE

  THE MEN AND THE GIRLS

  A SPANISH LOVER

  THE BEST OF FRIENDS

  NEXT OF KIN

  OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN

  MARRYING THE MISTRESS

  GIRL FROM THE SOUTH

  BROTHER & SISTER

  SECOND HONEYMOON

  FRIDAYS NIGHTS

  THE OTHER FAMILY

  and published by Black Swan

  By Joanna Trollope writing as Caroline Harvey

  LEGACY OF LOVE

  A SECOND LEGACY

  PARSON HARDING’S DAUGHTER

  THE STEPS OF THE SUN

  LEAVES FROM THE VALLEY

  THE BRASS DOLPHIN

  CITY OF GEMS

  THE TAVERNERS’ PLACE

  and published by Corgi Books

  A PASSIONATE MAN

  Joanna Trollope

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781409011545

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

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  www.rbooks.co.uk

  A PASSIONATE MAN

  A BLACK SWAN BOOK : 9780552994422

  First published in Great Britain

  in 1990 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Black Swan edition published 1991

  Copyright © Joanna Trollope 1990

  Joanna Trollope has asserted her right under the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Addresses for Random House Group Ltd companies outside the UK can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk

  The Random House Group Ltd Reg. No. 954009

  For Tobit

  Chapter One

  Old Mrs Mossop always put her teeth in for the doctor. She did not accord this honour to the vicar because the vicar was too much in earnest, and physically unprepossessing with it. But the doctor had sex appeal and to that Mrs Mossop responded, never mind being over eighty and in the process of dying slowly from a secondary cancer. So when the doctor’s mud-splashed car pulled up outside her cottage – she was always on watch from her chair by the window – she would fish about in the tumbler on her windowsill where her teeth swam, and slot them into place.

  This little ritual was never lost upon the doctor.

  ‘All the better to eat me with, I see.’

  Granny Mossop gave a high laugh.

  ‘Spit you out again sharpish!’

  Archie Logan smiled. He was very fond of Granny Mossop and he found her fierce gallantry in the face of her slow inexorable dying extremely moving. The room in which she sat smelled like a mouse’s nest, crammed in every corner with cuckoo-clock furniture and ornaments and crocheted mats. Over the fusty muddle the great grey face of the television set presided calmly. Granny Mossop only turned it on to watch boxing and football and disasters on the news. She didn’t mind blood, she told Dr Logan. Her father had been a gamekeeper. She’d grown up with blood.

  He put his bag down on a fat armchair full of knitted cushions and rummaged in it. He had to toss questions nonchalantly at her or she would say, ‘That’d be telling,’ and they would get nowhere.

  ‘Holding on to what you eat?’ he said, his back to her.

  ‘More or less. Don’t fancy much.’

  ‘I hope your daughter’s looking after you.’

  Granny Mossop snorted.

  ‘Indian muck’n rubbish. I won’t touch it.’

  He bent over her to begin his examination. She was as small as a sparrow. While he was occupied, she peered into his thick hair and observed a scattering of grey hairs.

  ‘You forty yet?’

  ‘No,’ Dr Logan said equably, listening to her heart.

  ‘I didn’ have a grey hair till I were fifty-three.’

  ‘Ah. But you are made of sterner stuff than me. Back pain?’

  She hated confessing, so she said nothing.

  ‘Back pain,’ he said, stating it.

  He straightened up to write something down, dwarfing the little room and the littler woman.

  ‘I’m going to give you something to slow the machinery up a bit.’ He had said ‘bowels’ to her once and her response was so strong that now he resorted to euphemism.

  She tossed her head.

  ‘That all you can do for me?’

  He surveyed her with affection.

  ‘I could always shoot you.’

  She loved that. She flung her head back with delight.

  ‘You’d miss! You’d miss!’

  ‘If you lose any more weight, you’ll pro
bably be right.’

  She ducked her head suddenly and spat her teeth out into her cupped hand. It was his signal to go. When she’d had enough, she made it very plain and, in Archie Logan’s view, her dignity and independence came even before the pace of her dying. Her teeth fell with a splash into the tumbler.

  ‘I’ll give the prescription to Sharon. She can pick it up with the next Indian take-away.’ He shut his case and looked over towards her. ‘I’ll be in again on Friday.’

  She snorted again faintly. He let himself out, stooping through the low doorway that led directly into the cottage’s front garden where the lank remnants of a runner-bean row flapped above an empty rabbit hutch. Over the fence in the next-door garden, Granny Mossop’s grandchildren’s impudent modern washing blew on a yellow nylon line. Her daughter Sharon had taken out the little cottage windows of her front room and replaced them with a single bleak sheet of plate glass, so that the room behind gaped exposed and defenceless to the public view. Archie Logan could see a half-adult boy in jeans and black leather jacket slumped in a chair in front of the television. How long, Archie wondered, slamming the cottage gate with vehemence, how long since that boy had been in to see his grandmother?

  He looked up at the October sky. The sun was just beginning to go down behind some dramatic streaks of grape-coloured cloud and, for no reason that he could think of, Archie Logan was suddenly and poignantly reminded of a holiday he and Liza had had years before, an autumn holiday in Tuscany, when they had been caught in a thunderstorm at Bagni di Lucca, all among the rocks and the river and the chestnut trees. They had been drenched, soaked to the skin, and, while stumbling back to their car, had been accosted by a courteous man with an umbrella who had taken them back to his immense and battered Edwardian villa and given them baths and malt whisky. Archie could see Liza now, wrapped in her host’s mothy old camel-hair dressing gown, sitting on a club fender with her bare feet held up off the marble floor, sticking her tongue down into her whisky glass. ‘The Tuscan winter rains,’ their host had said in his beautiful English, ‘can be long and terrible.’

  The thought of Liza made Archie think he would go home before evening surgery. Liza would be at home because Wednesday was her whole day off from Bradley Hall School, where she taught part time. And Mikey would be back from school and he would see Imogen before she was put to bed. And there might be a letter from Thomas, a letter to heal the wound of his first letter from boarding school.

  ‘I don’t see why I have to be here,’ Thomas had written. ‘It’s awful. I liked going to school in Winchester and then coming home for bed. I don’t like going to bed here. It’s when I cry.’

  Archie got into his car and banged the door shut with unnecessary violence. He drove off at great speed, and old Mrs Mossop, who had been waiting for his farewell wave – although she planned to ignore it – drooped a little in her solitary chair.

  Liza Logan, her red curls tied up in a Black Watch tartan ribbon, was sitting at the kitchen table hearing her second son’s reading practice. Across the table Imogen, who was three, drew uneven suns and stars on the cover of a current parish magazine with a black wax crayon. In the utility room off the kitchen, Sally, a local farmer’s daughter who looked after Imogen while Liza was teaching, and did a lot else besides, was pulling out of the tumble dryer an avalanche of socks crackling with static. A liver and white spaniel, sprawled on a blanket in a corner, was the only creature to rise politely when Archie entered and wag its feathered tail in greeting.

  ‘It’s Daddy,’ Imogen said to her mother helpfully.

  Liza raised her face for Archie’s kiss.

  ‘So it is.’

  Archie kissed her mouth. He always kissed her mouth, however casual the kiss. It had been her mouth with its faintly swollen bee-stung lower lip that had first drawn him like a magnet, across a room at a party, to peer at her with desire and fascination. The party had been to celebrate Liza’s engagement to someone else and Archie had been taken along by a mutual friend who disliked walking into parties alone. The morning after the party, Archie had begun to lay siege to Liza and within ten days he had captured her from Hugo Grant-Jones and, instead of a sapphire surrounded by very bright new diamonds, Liza was wearing a battered old half-hoop of garnets that had belonged to Archie’s dead mother.

  ‘Five stones,’ Archie said, sliding the ring on to her finger. ‘For five words: Will you be my wife. Will you?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Liza said, and then without meaning to, ‘yes please.’

  It had been like ‘Young Lochinvar’. Fosters, Fenwicks and Musgraves, in the form of Liza’s outraged family and friends, unleashed a torrent of disapproval and pressure and objection. Archie put Liza into his car and drove her to Argyllshire where his father had a house on the shore of Loch Fyne, a house without a telephone, and kept Liza there for two rapturous weeks. Then he brought her back south, and married her.

  ‘When I come home,’ he said to her now, his mouth still almost on hers, ‘why don’t you get up and wag your tail?’

  ‘Oh, I do. In my mind. You see, Mikey had just got to this perfectly riveting bit about what a kestrel gives its young for breakfast, and not even the entrance of—’

  ‘Mice,’ Mikey said suddenly. ‘Kestrels eat mice. They like bloody things.’

  ‘Tho,’ said Imogen who had a lisp, ‘do I.’

  Archie went round to look at her drawing.

  ‘Black stars. How very sophisticated.’

  Imogen looked at him pityingly.

  ‘The yellow ith broken.’

  ‘Of course. I’ve just been to see Granny Mossop. Not a word of her condition will I breathe to higher authority or it will be hospitalization for her at the double and she will die of a broken heart before her liver does it. Her fucking, bloody daughter—’

  ‘Archie—’

  ‘Sorry. Her selfish and heartless daughter brings her garbage from the Star of Agra take-away which her poor old guts can’t even begin to cope with. Can you imagine?’

  ‘I’ll make her a milk pud.’

  ‘You’re an angel. But she won’t thank you.’

  Liza raised her face to him.

  ‘But you will.’

  He bent again.

  ‘Oh, I will—’

  ‘Fucking,’ said Imogen conversationally to Mikey.

  ‘Shhh,’ he said delightedly.

  Sally came out of the utility room with a plastic laundry basket heaped with folded clothes under one arm. Mikey plucked at her as she passed.

  ‘Did you hear what Daddy said?’

  Sally, whose home-life vocabulary was comfortably thick with obscenities, said she had.

  Archie said, ‘Sorry, Sal.’

  ‘It’s all the same to me,’ Sally said, picking Imogen up deftly with her free arm. ‘What you say about Sharon Vinney.’

  Imogen put her arms around Sally’s neck.

  ‘I thaid fucking.’

  ‘I heard you,’ Sally said without interest. ‘And if I hear you say it again, I’ll smack your bottom. Come on, bath time.’

  ‘Not hair wash—’

  ‘Imo,’ Archie said, ‘won’t you blow me a kiss?’

  But the nightmare of probable hair wash had gripped Imogen’s mind and she could not hear him. When the door had closed behind them both, Imogen could be heard still pleading urgently as she was carried up the stairs.

  ‘Even if Sally wasn’t a tower of strength,’ Liza said, ‘I’d employ her simply to wash Imogen’s hair. Archie, your father rang.’

  He gave her, at once, his complete attention. As she often remarked to friends, and to her sister Clare who was the only one of her family she ever really saw, she had never known a father and son as close as Archie and Andrew Logan. At first, she had loved it because she had felt taken into a powerful, impregnable male citadel as a precious captive. They had both brooded over her with exciting possessiveness. She had been transformed from being just the third daughter of a Haslemere accountant into someone particular
and valuable. But of course, in time, she had grown used to that transformation and now the bond between father and son seemed to her rather more exclusive than inclusive, and to have about it an air of male self-sufficiency which, try as she might, she could not help resenting. She sometimes thought that if Archie had not retained his power to stir her so, she would not have minded his adoration of his father so much.

  ‘What did he want? Isn’t he coming on Sunday?’

  ‘Oh, he’s coming. But he wants to bring someone.’

  ‘Of course,’ Archie said comfortably. ‘Maurice Crawford. It’s about the new series—’

  ‘No,’ Liza said, shutting up Mikey’s reading book, and rising. ‘It’s a woman.’

  ‘A woman! Good God.’

  Liza began collecting up the mugs and plates on the table.

  ‘She is called Marina de Breton. He sounded quite excited.’

  ‘Marina de Breton—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What a deeply affected name.’

  ‘She can’t help that. She’s the widow of a Louisiana cotton king or something.’

  ‘American!’

  ‘No,’ Liza said. ‘Greek. Or Italian.’ She put the mugs on the draining board and came over to Archie. ‘Darling. Don’t look so thunderous.’

  ‘I’m not—’

  ‘You look,’ Mikey said encouragingly, ‘just simply bloody livid.’

  ‘Dad doesn’t have women.’

  ‘You don’t know he has this one. He only wants to bring her to lunch, for goodness’ sake.’

  ‘You said he sounded excited—’

  ‘Archie,’ Liza said exasperatedly, ‘don’t make so much of so little.’

  He would do this, cling obstinately and exaggeratedly to a mere shadow of an idea and make a whole imaginary mountain of it in no time, and it was one of the things about him that drove her mad. Others were his untidiness and the impulsiveness that throbbed in him as steadily and regularly as a second heartbeat. Perhaps he’d inherited all these disordered qualities from his Welsh mother, because Sir Andrew Logan certainly hadn’t passed them on.