A Passionate Man Read online

  ‘You’re being a fool,’ Liza said to Archie. Mikey was watching them both with troubled interest. ‘Your father says may he bring one harmless woman to lunch and you behave as if she was a – a—’ She broke off, at a loss for an analogy.

  ‘A wicked witch,’ Mikey said, and then added, because his suggestion had fallen into a complete silence, ‘I expect.’

  Archie shrugged.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Liza said, ‘even if she is someone special, you ought to be pleased. For him, I mean.’

  Archie looked at the clock above the cooker.

  ‘Lord. It’s ten to six. Liza, I’ve a few calls to make after surgery so half-past eight, maybe—’

  ‘Maybe.’

  He took her arm and pulled her to him so that he could kiss her, and while he was doing it, it occurred to Liza that if Sir Andrew really did feel something particular for this de Breton person then she could have Archie back all to herself. Thinking this, she responded to his kiss with enthusiasm.

  ‘Wonder bird,’ he said to her and, stooping to kiss Mikey as he passed, went whistling out to his car.

  In the waiting room of the local health centre, a couple of dozen people sat about on green-painted chairs among the rubber plants and the low tables for magazines which were exactly the right height for toddlers to create mayhem on. It was a new health centre, with swooping roofs like a Swiss chalet, and immense windows to the floor which, at night, patients avoided sitting next to. Cork notice boards afforded plenty of space for exhortations about obesity, alcohol abuse, Aids and drug addiction, and, behind sliding panels of pine and glass, the receptionists and pharmacist sat like bank clerks.

  When Archie came through, at a run, there was an affectionate murmuring. Dr Logan was always late, always, but then he was never too busy to see you and always had a smile and he was wonderful with children and the old people. The health visitors and district nurses were keenly conscious that the place had a different atmosphere on Dr Logan’s days off, less energetic, less, well, less fun, really. He came in for a good deal of tolerant, maternal cluckings, except from the pharmacist who was clever and sharp and divorced and who cherished for him much stronger feelings than those of amused affection, and therefore kept herself aloof from him and was rigorously courteous when they spoke. When Archie and his rush of apology had disappeared through the double doors at the far end of the waiting room, the senior nurse on duty went off after him with quiet officiousness, to check that the slats of his venetian blind were discreetly pulled vertical and that the examining couch was suitably shrouded in a clean, disposable paper sheet.

  ‘There we are, Doctor. Everything all right?’

  He was hastily riffling through the buff packs of patients’ notes on his desk.

  ‘Yes,’ he said absently. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’ve put out a clean roll of towel by the basin. And fresh soap. And I moved the disposable gloves nearer the bin. Seemed more logical.’

  ‘Don’t move things,’ Archie pleaded. He looked up at her. She was a suburban little woman who was determined to reform the muddle and mess of this country practice into something altogether more trim.

  ‘I only thought—’

  ‘I know.’ He flapped some notes at her. ‘Not your fault. But I can only work in chaos. Ask my wife.’

  Nurse Dillon allowed herself a little smile to show that she was not in the least disappointed that she had failed to please him. He had mud on his shoes, she noted. She looked at it penetratingly for a second and then went away to summon the first patient.

  Archie liked taking surgeries. Long ago, long before Liza, he had had a raven-haired girlfriend who had demanded to know if he was going to be a doctor because he liked bodies. Yes, he said, he did like bodies, and, after a pause, he had added that he particularly liked women’s bodies. This had given the raven-haired girlfriend the perfect opening for a great deal of predictable abuse which he came to see was an attempt to make him admit that he liked her body better than any other. He did, for a week or two – or perhaps it was really her lustrous waterfall of black hair that was so weirdly erotic – but then he became repelled by the rapacity of her character and her body ceased to interest him. But the bodies of the sick were another matter, a matter of extraordinary interest: how and why this delicate, complex and individual human machine should develop strains and faults, and how those, in turn, were dependent upon the fuel of personality. He wasn’t like his father, who preferred the seclusion of laboratory and operating theatre, and he grew impatient with manuals and books. What he liked was the listening and the touching, the sense of exploration and sometimes discovery that made even the prospect of old Fred Durfield, hobbling in now in a perfect gale of grievance against the arthritis that was gradually doubling him up like a series of human paper clips, an absorbing one.

  ‘You’re no use,’ Fred said. ‘Them damn tablets i’n’t no use. I’m goin’ to die as crippled as my father before me.’

  He thumped a transparent brown plastic bottle down on Archie’s desk. It was almost full.

  ‘How many of these have you taken, Fred?’

  ‘No more’n a couple. Didn’t do no good.’

  Archie began to explain patiently the mechanics of a course of medicine, knowing that Fred would neither listen to nor heed him. Fred’s mother, seventy years before, had fed him her own rural fatalism along with his childhood porridge, a fatalism that ran in a black stream through so many of Archie’s villager patients. He wasn’t sure, however, that he did not prefer it to the helpless rag-doll surrender to ill health and state medicine of another section of his patients, an almost greedy abandonment of self-sufficiency to an endless cycle of pills and self-neglect. A permanent state of not being quite well became as natural and necessary to them as breathing. Children, on the other hand, could only be what they were, well or ill, and among the middle- and upper-class patients there prevailed an ostensible impatience with ill health, a desire to be seen to make light of anything the matter.

  Diana Jago, who occupied the best house in Archie’s village, and who now sailed in after Fred Durfield, began by kissing Archie as if they were at a cocktail party and went on to say with throwaway nonchalance, ‘Too boring, but it’s my wretched foot, that poisoned thing, simply won’t go away,’ and then rushed straight on to ask about Archie’s children.

  Put Diana Jago in hospital, he thought, examining her big and handsome foot, and she’d be demanding at once to know why, in this day and age, the food was still so disgusting.

  ‘Do you know, I don’t think it’s poisoned. I think it’s gout.’

  ‘Archie. Don’t be idiotic. Gout—’

  ‘Could be. Long-term side effect of the diuretic you take.’

  ‘But I’m a woman. And I never drink port.’

  ‘I’m afraid neither have anything to do with it.’

  ‘Archie,’ Diana Jago said firmly, settling her domed velvet hairband more securely on her sleek corn-coloured head, ‘do not be an ass. How do I go home and tell Simon I have gout? He will simply crack up. I’ll never hear the end of it.’

  But she was enchanted at the ludicrousness of the possibility. Archie could hear her at meets – she looked mouth-watering on horseback, particularly in the severe sartorial glamour required for hunting – calling penetratingly across to her friends, ‘You haven’t heard, too utterly laughable, but I have gout, I tell you, no, I’m not making it up – it’s total agony, I can tell you – but, yes, gout—’

  He prescribed her Naprosyn, was kissed again, promised to bring Liza to supper soon and exchanged her breezy, attractive presence for a small boy who had fallen off a shed roof.

  ‘What on earth were you doing up there?’

  But the boy, who had been hiding from his stepfather and who knew that further trouble awaited him for doing to his arm whatever he had done, merely looked at the floor and said, ‘Nothing.’

  Only when he came out of the surgery did Archie think again
about his father. Their bond was both strong and of long standing, because the Welsh girl whom Andrew Logan had found when on a walking holiday in Betws-y-Coed and had persuaded to come to Glasgow with him, and to marry him there, had been killed in a car smash on the A80 going out to Garnkirk to look at a dining-room table – golden mahogany, the advertisement had said, not red, and about 1820 – advertised for sale in the Glasgow Herald. Archie had been a baby, in a carrycot in the back of the car, from which he had been plucked by a policeman, with no more than bruises. His mother had died at once, from the impact of crashing into a van which had stopped in front of her without warning. She had broken her neck.

  She had been married to Andrew Logan for three years, and, if he had ever opened his heart to anyone, she was the only possible person. He took her body back to her family in the Vale of Conway, and endured with difficulty the emotional Celtic fervour of her burial service. Then he resigned from his job at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, sold his flat in Park Terrace, and brought his baby son south to London and a narrow Georgian house in Islington, convenient for public transport to the Middlesex Hospital. Once settled, he gave himself over to his boy and to his work on the secondary circulation of the heart.

  Odd, Archie thought now, turning the car out of the health centre car-park and into the dark lanes of the Hampshire countryside, odd to think that his father’s work on the heart had made him an international figure while leaving, quite literally, his own heart untouched. Sir Andrew had lived now for almost forty years without a woman. Archie’s childhood had featured a number of housekeepers of whom only one, a strong-minded widow with a passion for Pre-Raphaelite painting, could he recall with either affection or distinction. She had taken him once, by train, to the city gallery in Birmingham to show him the wealth of her enthusiasm, and he had adored the paintings with a kind of adolescent lust, and been badly thrown by his father’s disapproval of the whole expedition.

  ‘Great painting,’ Andrew Logan had said to his son, ‘really great painting, is without self-indulgence.’

  He thought that, Archie came to learn, about life, too. Great lives, however visionary, must be underpinned by diligence and self-denial. Extravagance of feeling or behaviour would only dissipate those precious energies that were there precisely to enable a man to make his life of value. It was often hard for Archie, in whom a powerful sensual appetite had been planted along with a measure of wayward emotional and mental powers which he sometimes suspected owed their being to the more eloquent and excitable air of the Vale of Conway. Archie had ardour; his father, as far as he could possibly perceive, had not. His father had instead balance and judgement and, in addition, honour and a most effective compassion, a compassion that achieved results for its objects.

  But no woman. My lifetime almost, Archie thought, flicking up his headlight beam so that distant objects, trees and bushes, seemed suddenly to leap out at him. And his father was so sweet to Liza, had been so from the beginning, from that first meeting at the Savoy Grill, where he always liked to eat, where they kept him a secluded table and where he was looked after by a waiter of great experience who owned a cigar cutter once given to him by Winston Churchill. They had sat Liza between them and persuaded her to eat the first oysters of her life and, at the end of dinner, Andrew Logan had picked up Liza’s little hand, and kissed it and said, ‘I’m a grim old stick, but you’ll find me very steadfast.’ She had adored it. Adored him. He had made a point, from the beginning, of including her in every way in his love for Archie. Indeed, he spoiled her. He seemed to like it. When Liza sometimes got angry now and declared furiously that grown men, real mature men, grew out of this nursery dependence on their fathers, she never accused Andrew of favouring Archie, because, even in a temper, she knew it wasn’t true.

  And when the bizarre chance happened, and it was discovered that all the inhibitions Andrew Logan had about people simply fell away before the television cameras, Liza was quite as proud as Archie. That first series of Meeting Medicine, when half the nation, it seemed, stayed in on Tuesday nights to watch those quirky, humorous, fascinating explanations of their bodies to themselves, had had them both rejoicing, quite spontaneously.

  Very occasionally, as his father’s fame grew and he was photographed in groups that invariably included lovely women, Archie would say to Liza, ‘D’you think he has a secret girlfriend?’

  And Liza usually said, ‘God, I hope not. I’d be so jealous.’

  But now, faced with the possibility that he had indeed found a woman, Liza didn’t seem to mind. You should be pleased, she’d said, pleased for your father.

  ‘Well,’ Archie said out loud, turning the car into a curved drive in front of a solid stone house thickly moustached in pyracantha, ‘I’m not pleased. Not pleased at all.’

  From an upper window a curtain moved and the anxious figure of the patient’s wife peered down into the drive.

  ‘In fact,’ Archie said to his car as he slammed the door behind him, ‘I’m bloody miserable. So there.’

  Chapter Two

  The doctor’s house was not a pretty building. It was a Victorian brick villa of great solidity, with double bay windows in front whose sashes rose and fell with reliable and weighty efficiency. The house was set on the edge of the village of Stoke Stratton in a wide, shallow trout-stream valley sloping down through the gentle chalky hills to Winchester. Stoke Stratton, a miscellaneous village architecturally, straggled along a minor road parallel to the Stoke river, with path-like lanes running down from it to the water’s edge. Other lanes wandered away from the road and the river towards the northern lip of the valley, and on one of these less desirable lanes – the best houses were of course close to the river – Beeches House was set on a gentle bank.

  In front of the house a rough lawn dotted with the paraphernalia of children’s amusements – a climbing frame, a sandpit, a swing suspended from an immense cherry tree that flowered profusely and pinkly in spring – stretched down to the lane and was separated from it by a post-and-rail fence, patchy with brilliant moulds. Behind the house, and beside it, was a semicircle of beech trees, through which could be glimpsed the fields of plough and pasture rising to the modest skyline. The right-hand sweep of trees also served to screen their only neighbour, a cream stucco bungalow set in a regimented garden, inhabited by a middle-aged couple who lived in terror of being asked to be involved in anything. It was really on account of the beeches that Liza and Archie had bought the house.

  Inside, the house had a sturdy, pleasant and practical feel that Archie told Liza was inescapably bourgeois. It was, of course, but it was to Liza a very much more acceptable variety of bourgeois than the refined sort – fringed lampshades and Dralon upholstery – that had permeated the house in Haslemere. Her mother disliked colour, indeed she was alarmed by visual strength of any kind, and Liza’s childhood had taken place against a dim background of muted pinks and blues and little lamps and midget ornaments. After that, Beeches House seemed to her to have an exciting and masculine strength, and its position, in open country on two sides, to be properly uncompromising. She had only driven Archie down the residential road where she had grown up – her parents felt they were making some kind of moral stand by refusing to welcome him to The Lilacs – and he had said that he had no idea that families lived in such places, not really lived. And Liza, adoring him, reduced to rubble when he kissed her, said he was right: they couldn’t.

  They were married five years before they bought Beeches House. Before that, Archie was working as a junior hospital doctor in London and they lived in the basement of Andrew’s house in Islington. Then he sold it, to move into a mansion flat near Victoria Station which he said reminded him of Glasgow, and Archie, who had by now decided that general practice was where his inclination lay, found a job with a rural practice in Hampshire, and Beeches House. They brought Thomas to it as a baby, and from it Liza went twice to the maternity unit in Winchester, to give birth to Mikey and then to Imogen. For family holidays, the
y packed the children into the car and drove up to Argyllshire, to the little house Sir Andrew had bought when he left Glasgow, on the shoreline of Loch Fyne going down into Inveraray. The view from the house was directly across the water to a romantic castle-like mansion designed by Sir Robert Lorimer and backed by a famous pinetum and rearing purplish hills. Liza could never drive there without remembering the sheer glory of her first arrival, literally carried off by Archie and then wooed by him with unblinking intensity, both in bed and out, until, feeling herself to be his treasure, she knew herself also to be his slave.

  Beeches House was the first house of her own that Liza had ever decorated. Her taste, strive as she might against it, tended perilously towards the tidy, so that after eight years Beeches House inside had an unresolved air as Liza’s matching curtains and cushions and penchant for crisp cottons strove to hold at bay Archie’s relentless acquisition of anything that caught his eye, the more peculiar the better. Birds of prey in glass cases, ancient fowling pieces, a Victorian sledge, threadbare rugs, immense jardinières, huge reproductions of Turner sunsets and Rossetti women, a fifties pinball machine adorned with cone-breasted girls in pedal-pushers, a rug made from a polar bear, old polo sticks and fishing rods, jugs and jars and antique medicine bottles, rioted triumphantly across Liza’s stripped and waxed floors and leaned drunkenly against her clean pale walls. Although irritated by the mess they made, she admired them, because they represented a wholeheartedness she was afraid that she did not possess (briefly, when she first met Archie, she had hoped otherwise), but she did not know what to do with them beyond dust and polish and neatly glue back bits of broken moulding. So she left them mostly where they were – trying not to adjust the angles to something more conventional – and thus Diana Jago, coming to supper for the first time, met a suit of armour in the sitting room and a stuffed badger in the downstairs lavatory, and went shouting off to tell her friends that the new doctor couple were an absolute find.