Read Online A Passionate Man by Joanna Trollope - Free Book Online Page B

be Thy name—’
    The familiar rhythms rolled round Liza: the daily bread and the trespasses, the temptation and the forgiveness. From now on, she would forgive Archie, she would be very understanding about his attitude to Marina, she would make a huge imaginative effort to put herself in his shoes. This was difficult since she could not imagine caring much, one way or the other, if her own father produced a substitute for her mother, but not, she told herself, impossible.
    â€˜Amen,’ said June Hampole and the staff and children with emphasis.
    They rose, whispering, to their feet.
    â€˜No talking!’ Commander Haythorne bellowed.
    They began to shove each other instead until the neat lines of children bulged and swerved like serpents.
    â€˜No pushing!’ shouted Commander Haythorne.
    â€˜Isn’t this,’ Blaise O’Hanlon said, materializing at Liza’s side, ‘just your best moment of the day?’
    â€˜I always rather want to join in—’
    â€˜Exactly. We are doing break duty together. I have engineered it with Gaelic cunning. What is your first lesson?’
    â€˜A passage from Lettres de mon Moulin with the sixth form.’
    â€˜Isn’t that dreadfully advanced? Why aren’t they allowed Madame Bonnard Va au Marché  ?’
    â€˜My recorder— ’ a voice pleaded, three feet from the floor.
    â€˜Justin, I’m coming to look for your recorder. Because sometimes I simply can’t bear her. Little dollops of Daudet and Fournier and Verlaine keep me sane and stretch their tiny minds.’
    Two girls flattened themselves elaborately against the frame of the chapel doors to let Liza and Blaise go through.
    â€˜Thank you, Sophie. And Tamsin.’
    â€˜What I’d really like,’ Blaise said as they emerged into the school hall floored in forbidding, gleaming squares of black-and-white marble, ‘is to be in your class and be ticked off by you.’
    â€˜Go away,’ Liza said. ‘Go away and don’t be creepy.’ But she was smiling.
    In the lost property cupboard Justin’s recorder lay where Liza had visualized it, in a box among other recorders, hockey sticks, pens, pencils and a butterfly net – the principle at Bradley Hall being to sort lost objects according to shape rather than category.
    â€˜There,’ she said. ‘What did I tell you?’
    He blew into it experimentally to see if it remembered him.
    â€˜What do you say?’
    He glared. He was at an age when manners seemed almost an hypocrisy.
    â€˜Thank you,’ he said, but he was scowling. Then he went scuffing off down the passage, tooting intermittently, and Liza withdrew to the drawing room.
    The sixth form liked their Daudet, after the initial and ritual complaints. For most of them, their only contact with the French was quarrelsome little episodes in queues for ski lifts in the Trois Vallées and thus they were incredulous of Daudet.
    â€˜Are you sure he was French?’ one of them said.
    â€˜Absolutely.’
    At break time, Liza made them all zip up their parkas before they lined up with the rest of the school in the orangery for milk and a biscuit and were subsequently released into the damp grey air. Herding them towards the old orchard – where they were not permitted to eat the apples since a seven year old had bitten inadvertently on a sleeping wasp – Liza was joined by Blaise O’Hanlon, wearing round his neck the whistle he used for football coaching. He simply walked beside her, saying nothing but listening to what she was saying to the children around her.
    â€˜Our baby’s come home. Mummy brought it. It’s got no hair and red feet.’
    â€˜I expect you had red feet when you were that little.’
    â€˜Mrs Logan, Simon’s got my Snoopy and when I tried to get it he done bashed me in—’
    â€˜Simon—’
    The toy came whirling through the air.
    â€˜Stupid