A Passionate Man Read Free Page B

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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