A Passionate Man Read Free Page A

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.
    â€˜Do you know, I don’t think it’s poisoned. I think it’s gout.’
    â€˜Archie. Don’t be idiotic . Gout—’
    â€˜Could be. Long-term side effect of the diuretic you take.’
    â€˜But I’m a woman. And I never drink port.’
    â€˜I’m afraid neither have anything to do with it.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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