Cruel Legacy

by Penny Jordan

  ‘Richard, it doesn’t have to be like that…’ Elizabeth protested.

  ‘I can’t face it, Liz,’ he told her bleakly, ignoring her protest. ‘I can’t live like that, without my work… without any sense of purpose or order in my life. But if the Northern gets the new unit I’ll have no option.’

  ‘What? But why?’

  ‘For two reasons. The first is that I’ll be the one who has lost the General the unit. David Howarth has made no secret of the fact that he disapproves of the way I handle my budgets, that he feels that I’m not making enough economies… that I’m not carrying out enough operations. And the second is that, if the Northern does get the new unit, sooner or later all major surgery will be carried out there and the General will degenerate into a second-rate hospital staffed by junior surgeons doing minor operations, and it won’t be able to justify the expense of carrying someone like me. I’ll be too great a financial drain on its resources for it to keep me. So you see, either way I lose out. It’s a matter of either jump or be pushed.’

  ‘But it hasn’t been decided yet that the Northern will get the unit. I thought the final decision rested with the Minister?’ Elizabeth protested.

  ‘It does,’ Richard agreed sombrely. ‘But she is bound to follow David’s recommendation…’

  ‘Oh, Richard…’

  The sympathy in her voice made him smile crookedly. ‘Perhaps Sara was right after all; perhaps a part of me is jealous of you, or envious rather.’

  Immediately Elizabeth went over to him, reaching up to take him in her arms, holding him tenderly. ‘That’s rubbish,’ she told him, ‘and you know it.’

  Gratefully he leaned his weight against her briefly, giving in to his need to brush his cheek against the softness of her hair as they stood silently together, holding one another. And then, as though the emotion of the moment was too much for him, he raised his head and asked her shakily, ‘What do you say, Mrs Humphries? What do you counsel me to do? What’s your solution to this problem?’

  Elizabeth looked at him and shook her head. How could she tell him that the solution lay with him, and in his somehow finding for himself something that would give his life the purpose he obviously believed it would lose if he no longer had his work to harness himself to?

  ‘It’s all about changing one’s attitude,’ she told him gently. ‘And that’s the easiest thing in the world to say and the hardest thing to do.’

  How often had she said those words to other people, preaching them like a litany and genuinely believing them? And yet now, when she said them to Richard, she discovered that they felt as empty and useless as he claimed his life would be without his career.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ‘RICHARD, are you sure you want to go tonight?’ Elizabeth asked, casting a troubled look at his face. He had aged somehow over these last few weeks—not so much physically; it was more as though he had lost his normal appetite for life, the drive and vigour which had always made him respond so enthusiastically to life’s challenges.

  ‘We don’t have any option,’ Richard told her. ‘Any refusal to turn up and socialise with the hospital’s new luminary is bound to earn me another black mark with David.’

  ‘Have you actually met him yet—the new psychiatrist?’ Elizabeth asked him.

  ‘Brian introduced us briefly the other day.’

  Elizabeth frowned as she heard the reserve in his voice and knew the cause of it, just as she knew that there was nothing she could do to help him.

  Oh, she could listen to him, talk to him, offer positive suggestions about how he might try to help himself come to terms with his fear of retirement, but she couldn’t wave a magic wand and make life stand still for him. To comfort him by telling him that he might still have several years of work ahead of him before he did retire was not the answer, only a means of pushing the problem to one side and pretending it did not exist…

  Brian and Grace Simmonds lived six or seven miles away in a neat modern house on a small luxury complex which personally Elizabeth would have found claustrophobically stifling but which suited Grace Simmonds’ neat, orderly personality.

  Despite the differences in their temperaments, Elizabeth got on well with Grace. She was six years younger than Elizabeth and yet behaved as though she were much older; she was, Elizabeth recognised, one of those women who felt most comfortable assuming the protective mantle of a now old-fashioned type of female middle-age. Her life revolved around her three children, her garden and her bridge, while Brian was firmly kept to its periphery and his own male sphere of work, and golf.

  It wasn’t the kind of relationship which Elizabeth would have wanted, but it appeared to suit them and, knowing Grace as she did, she wasn’t totally surprised following their arrival to discover that their hostess had seated her next to the ‘guest of honour’.

  Grace was the type of person who was instinctively defensive and suspicious of anything that involved curing the mind rather than the body. To her a psychiatrist would be someone to be avoided and kept at a distance, and since David was alone and Richard was the next most senior person present it would seem to Grace to be the ‘right thing to do’ to seat her next to the new man.

  ‘He seems quite… normal,’ Grace told Richard and Elizabeth in a nervous whisper as she glanced over her shoulder to where Brian and David Howarth were standing with a tall brown-haired man who Elizabeth assumed must be the new psychiatrist. ‘It’s a pity he isn’t married, though…’ she continued as Richard moved away. ‘It makes things very awkward. I know the numbers are even because David is on his own as well, but…’

  She had a habit of leaving her sentences trailing, which Elizabeth tended to find irritating. ‘I had thought of inviting someone to even things out, but you never know, do you, and since this is more of a business dinner than a social occasion…? Brian is so unhelpful with anything like this,’ she added fretfully, frowning in the direction of her husband.

  ‘I’m sure you’ve made the right decision,’ Elizabeth soothed tactfully, moving away to join Richard.

  ‘Dreadful woman,’ Richard muttered under his breath. ‘How Brian has managed to live with her all these years without murdering her I don’t know.’

  Elizabeth said nothing. She knew that Richard’s outburst sprang more from tension than from any real dislike of Grace Simmonds.

  * * *

  ‘Ah, good. I was hoping that you and I might get an opportunity to talk…’

  Elizabeth raised an eyebrow but still smiled as Blake Hamilton politely pulled out her chair for her. He hadn’t waited for Brian to introduce them, but had excused himself to Brian and David and come over to speak to Richard and to meet her as soon as he had seen them.

  His good looks were something that Elizabeth discounted when assessing him—after all, she was married to an extremely good-looking man herself—but the warmth and openness of his manner was something that surprised her.

  She had met other psychiatrists, both socially through Richard and through her own work, and, unlike Grace, she found them neither intimidating nor threatening; what many of them did have in common was a trait she had been told she must develop herself, and that was the ability to distance themselves from other people’s emotions.

  Blake Hamilton, though, was displaying an unexpected warmth and charm which her instincts as a woman told her was neither contrived nor shallow. Despite the years in the States there was no trace of any American accent in his voice, nor was there in his manner any hint of any kind of arrogant awareness of how fortunate the General was to have secured his services.

  It had amused Elizabeth to see David’s almost fawning attitude towards him, and it had hurt her at the same time when she compared it with the manner he adopted towards Richard.

  In contrast, Blake had almost made a point of not just drawing Richard into the conversation, but of talking to him rather than to David.

  ‘Your husband is a first-rate surgeon,’ he commented now as they ate their first c
ourse.

  ‘Yes,’ Elizabeth agreed, knowing that it was the truth.

  On her other side David, who had heard his comment, had started to frown, quite obviously disliking it.

  ‘And a very innovative one as well,’ Blake continued. ‘I was speaking with one of his patients this morning, a woman on whom he had had to perform rather radical breast surgery. She was telling me that Richard had deliberately timed her operation in order to get the maximum benefit from her monthly cycle.’

  To her left Elizabeth could hear David’s derisory snort, but she didn’t turn her head or betray in any way that she had heard him, simply concentrating instead on Blake.

  ‘Richard had read a report which suggested that female patients had a better chance of recovery during certain phases of their menstrual cycle and he wanted to give her the optimum chance of recovery, especially in view of the serious nature of her operation. For a woman to lose her breast can’t be anything but traumatic, no matter how well she is prepared for it…’

  ‘No, I agree…’

  ‘Organising operations by the phases of the menstrual cycle… Now I’ve heard everything,’ David commented acidly. ‘My God, no wonder the General’s having so many problems… Perhaps it’s the staff you ought to be counselling, Blake, not the patients,’ he added with false jocularity.

  Elizabeth knew that Richard must have heard his comment, but she stifled her own anger. In her view it simply confirmed what she had always thought of David, that he should use a semi-social occasion to try to humiliate Richard and score points off him was uncalled for.

  ‘On the contrary,’ she heard Blake contradicting coolly. ‘In my view Richard is to be commended for his farsightedness. Far too many people on the surgical side overlook the fact that a human being is not merely a physical body. And I was very interested to see that Richard’s patient is making a far better and mentally healthier recovery from her operation than a woman at the Northern who had much less radical surgery.

  ‘After all, what are we about if we are not about helping people not merely to survive, but to live well and happily? Curing a patient isn’t simply a matter of cutting away a piece of diseased flesh, and the more far-sighted surgeons, the ones who have the best overall success-rates, are the ones who recognise that fact.’

  On her right David sat silently, but Elizabeth could feel his irritation and she wondered, a little dismayed, how much inadvertent harm Blake’s unexpected championing of Richard might have done.

  Anxious to steer the conversation into less controversial channels, she asked Blake quietly, ‘Have you found anywhere to live yet or…?’

  ‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘But finding a house is the least of my problems. The reason I’ve come back to this country is because I’ve suddenly and totally unexpectedly become the sole guardian of my late cousin’s only child, a girl. I’m afraid to say that until I received the news of my cousin’s and her husband’s deaths I’d virtually forgotten that Anya existed.

  ‘My cousin was always something of a rebel,’ he explained. ‘She dropped out of university when she became involved with a group of South American refugees who had been granted political asylum here. She went out to South America to work for the cause and it was there that she met her husband; in actual fact she helped to break him out of gaol. Luckily for them they managed to get out of the country before anyone caught up with them.

  ‘At first when Lisa married Miguel I worried that he was using her, but in fact they were very much in love with one another. Both of them were inclined to be impetuous… take risks. Both of them thrived on danger and excitement.

  ‘There’s a small enclave of fellow refugees based in Leeds and they went to live there. They are a very tight-knit, wholly politically motivated community whose entire existence is devoted to freeing their homeland. An idealistic and impossible goal, I’m afraid, but one to which Lisa devoted herself whole-heartedly. Luckily Anya was born in this country and has British citizenship.

  ‘Lisa was always a very dramatic character, and when she asked me if she could name me as Anya’s legal guardian she dropped a lot of dark hints about political assassinations and so forth, and to be honest I agreed because it seemed the easiest thing to do; she was always very passionate about any cause she adopted, passionate and persistent… I must admit, though, that then I never expected their lives to end so suddenly…’

  ‘Oh, no… how awful,’ Elizabeth began. ‘One reads about such things, but…’

  ‘No, no,’ Blake assured her. ‘The cause of their deaths was not politically connected in any way; it was far more mundane. A car accident. None of the group had two pennies to rub together, and the police said after the accident that it was a wonder the car Lisa was driving had got them on to the motorway in the first place. They had no tax, of course, no insurance—such conventional bureaucratic necessities were anathema to Lisa, even if they had been able to afford them. Needless to say there was no provision for Anya… their flat was rented…’

  Blake was frowning now.

  ‘I suspect that, like me, Lisa had long ago forgotten asking me to be Anya’s guardian and godfather, but in law that is exactly what I am, even if I am virtually a complete stranger to her.

  ‘But if she’s part of such a tight-knit community, surely they…’

  ‘No,’ Blake told her, guessing what she was about to say. ‘As I said, the lives of the whole community revolve around overthrowing the government at home, and their children, while I am sure they are loved and wanted, are left very much to their own devices, and that includes in some cases not even speaking English properly, never mind attending school.

  ‘There’s no way the Social Services people would allow Anya to remain in that kind of environment. That’s why I came home…’

  ‘But you’re not sure you’ve done the right thing,’ Elizabeth guessed.

  He gave her a wry smile. ‘Does it show that much? I reacted impulsively, I have to admit—not always a good or wise thing to do. Legally I am responsible for Anya, nothing can change that, but the authorities, Social Services, have made it clear that they aren’t too happy with the situation. For a child, any child to lose his or her parents has to be a very traumatic experience, and to add to that trauma by uprooting her from all that’s familiar to her and take her to a completely unfamiliar, unknown environment, an unknown country, which is what I’d have been doing if I’d taken her back to America with me…’ He shook his head.

  ‘Fortunately my contract with Johns Hopkins had just come to an end. It would have been impossible for me to deal with the situation here from over there, so I came home… and set about looking for a new job in an environment suitable for Anya…’

  Which explained the personal reasons for his taking a job which on the face of it was beneath him, Elizabeth recognised.

  ‘Things aren’t going to be easy for Anya…’

  ‘Nor for you either,’ Elizabeth commented.

  He paused and looked at her. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘It’s very easy to counsel other people not to make rash emotional decisions, but far harder to apply that advice to oneself…’

  ‘Was there no one else who would take charge of her… someone closer to her?’ Elizabeth asked him.

  ‘No. It’s either me or foster parents, and of the two the social services people have made it plain they consider foster parents to be a preferred option.

  ‘As I said, finding a house was the least of my problems… I now need to find someone to give Anya what I am quite obviously not going to be able to give her… time,’ he explained to Elizabeth. ‘Time, care, reassurance and the security of a day-to-day, night-to-night dependable presence in her life. She needs that more than she needs anything else, which is just one of the reasons why I don’t want her to go either into care or to foster parents. What Anya needs is someone who is prepared to be a mother substitute for her, someone who will love her and give her the security she so badly needs. So far all the agencies I’ve tried have only b
een able to come up with middle-aged housekeepers with terrifyingly formidable qualifications and references—the kind who I suspect will be more interested in keeping the house polished and immaculate than in Anya’s welfare, or au pairs who will inevitably be more interested in boys than in Anya.

  ‘What I need… what Anya needs is a woman who knows what it means to be a mother, someone old enough to be able to be firm and disciplined when necessary, and young enough for an eleven-year-old to relate to. She needs someone warm and loving to whom looking after her will be more than just a job…’

  ‘I think I might know of someone,’ Elizabeth told him quietly.

  She saw the surprise in his eyes as he looked at her.

  ‘A client of mine… She’s all the things you’ve just specified; she has children of her own… two boys both at boarding-school.’ Elizabeth frowned. ‘Would that be a problem? When they’re on holiday, I mean…?’

  ‘No,’ Blake told her. ‘Not if she was the right person; in fact some contact with other children is just what I think Anya needs. But I’m not sure if a woman who sends her own sons to boarding-school…’

  ‘It was her husband’s decision, not hers, and she’s keeping them there for the moment because… well… her husband committed suicide recently and left her with a lot of financial problems, including the threat of losing her home. It’s all right,’ Elizabeth told him with a smile. ‘If you think I’m being interfering and that she isn’t what you’re looking for, please…’

  ‘No. No, to be honest I’d far rather rely on your judgement than on agencies, and to be truthful she can’t be any worse than the people I’ve already interviewed, so if you seriously think she might be interested…’

  ‘I’ll get in touch with her,’ Elizabeth offered. ‘Explain the situation and suggest that she ring you if she’s interested.’