A Passionate Man by Joanna Trollope

me wasn’t as exciting as chasing me. So he went off to chase someone else.’
    â€˜That’s too bad,’ Marina said. ‘I hope she made him perfectly miserable.’
    â€˜She does. But he likes it. I suppose it’s a sort of permanent chase.’
    Marina turned to Archie.
    â€˜And are you a chaser?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜With all these women patients Andrew tells me of, feigning illness like crazy for two seconds of your undivided attention?’
    â€˜Even,’ Archie said composedly, ‘with all of them.’
    He stood up to carve second helpings. It looked to him as if Marina was going to throw him another challenge, so he said deliberately, ‘I like being married.’
    â€˜You and your father,’ Marina said, ‘are remarkable men.’
    She turned to Mikey, diligently eating beside her.
    â€˜And will you be a doctor, too?’
    â€˜I’m going to be a cook.’
    â€˜A cook?’
    â€˜And live here always,’ Mikey said.
    â€˜You are a very unusual boy. Boys commonly can’t wait to leave home. I have eleven stepgrandsons in America and they leave home all the time.’
    Mikey thought about this. He thought about his bedroom and the picture of Superman over his bed and the torch he had under his pillow to flash signals on the ceiling with, after his light had been turned off. And he thought of Thomas.
    â€˜If I leave, you see, I mightn’t like it so much.’
    â€˜So,’ Marina said, ‘will you bring your wife back to live here, too?’
    â€˜I don’t want a wife. I want a dog.’
    â€˜I’m not sure that’s quite the same,’ Clare said quickly.
    Marina waved a hand.
    â€˜He’s on to something, you know. Louis de Breton’s dogs had a much better time than his wives. Archie, if you were going to offer me more of that sensational lamb, I shall save you the trouble and say yes please. And I never have second helpings. Never in this world. Do I, Andrew?’
    And she looked across the table at him and together, wrapped in some intimate and delightful joke, they began to laugh.
    Much later, Liza said she and Clare would do the washing up, and why didn’t Archie make a bonfire? Sir Andrew had driven Marina de Breton away with mysterious indications of pressing things to be done in London, and Archie had not uttered since their departure which inhibited Liza from saying all the things she was bursting with. When she suggested a bonfire, Archie just nodded and collected up his children and the spaniel and old newspapers and matches and went out into the dying afternoon. From the kitchen window, Liza watched him with a mixture of sympathy and exasperation. Clare, struck by the effortless glamour of his appearance in tall Wellington boots and an immense and dishevelled Aran jersey, felt his evident dejection to be almost tragic.
    Archie himself was chiefly consumed with self-disgust. His own view of love was founded upon generosity, and, while he was well aware that clumsiness and pure maleness often prevented him from fine-tuning this outlook, his every basic instinct in love was bent upon giving. A colleague of his, whose wife had become entirely swallowed up by her Open University course in psychology, had said fretfully once to Archie, ‘In my view, the least she owes me is a decent dinner at night.’ Archie had been both struck and shocked by this. Obligation did not come into his emotional scheme of things – responsibility, yes, contributions from both sides, certainly, but never a feeling of being beholden, of being in someone’s debt. Looking at Imogen now, picking up spiky beech nut shells and putting them into a broken flowerpot, made him realize the extent of her dignity and, even at three, her separate valuable power to love without abasing herself or compromising herself. He, her father, wished to give her emotional space. He wanted her love, but he wanted it freely