Cruel Legacy

by Penny Jordan

  ‘Yes, please do. Here’s my phone number… I haven’t had time to get any cards done yet.’

  He wrote down his phone number on a piece of paper he pulled from his pocket.

  The job he was offering sounded ideal for Philippa Ryecart, Elizabeth reflected as she placed the piece of paper in her bag, and in her view Philippa would be the ideal person to take charge of his orphaned godchild. She was the kind of woman who instinctively and automatically opened her arms to life’s waifs and strays, especially when they were children. She possessed that kind of warmth, that kind of genuine compassion for their need.

  ‘What were you and Blake discussing so earnestly over dinner?’ Richard asked her later as they drove home.

  Elizabeth told him.

  ‘Mmm… seems a sound enough sort of chap… Hope he doesn’t find he’s bitten off more than he can chew, though…’

  ‘He’s very enthusiastic about the new Accident Unit,’ Elizabeth told him. ‘I heard him telling David that it would be a good idea to include a facility for trauma counselling within its ambit.’

  ‘Yes. He was saying something similar to me. Sounding me out about how I felt about it. Apparently the Northern isn’t too keen on the idea of someone intruding on what it considers to be strictly its own territory, but personally I think he’s right—it isn’t just people’s broken bodies we need to mend. Mind you, he’ll have a hard time convincing David… he won’t like the idea of any extra expense…’

  ‘Well, Blake struck me as a man who’s more than capable of dealing with the Davids of this world,’ Elizabeth commented sagely. ‘David’s obviously slightly in awe of him, and he won’t want to do anything that might make him think of terminating his contract. You never know, with Blake based at the General that might just be enough to swing David in its favour when it comes to the new unit…’

  ‘Oh, yes… David’s full of himself all right for having Blake at the General, but the only way he’ll agree to our having the new unit is if I leave. You heard him tonight� saw…’ His earlier good humour evaporated as he turned towards her. ‘He wants me out, Liz; he’s making that perfectly obvious.’

  ‘He can’t force you to leave…’

  No, but he knows damn well… The General needs that unit, Liz. It needs it a hell of a lot more than it needs me.’

  ‘Oh, Richard…’

  * * *

  Dinner parties had never been events he had particularly cared for, Blake reflected; they smacked too much of people and places he would rather forget, of a lifestyle and a type of person he had always disliked.

  Dinner parties had not been part of his experience as he grew up; his mother, widowed and working, had not moved in these kinds of circles. When he was a boy, dinner parties and the kind of people of who gave them had been surrounded by an aura of mystique and snobbish exclusivity, membership to a club for which he had had contempt rather than envy. When his mother had entertained, it had been informally, friends who dropped in and stayed on to eat, and in his memory the house of his childhood had always been filled with noise, laughter, conversation, good humour and good food, a home where he had sat silently listening to his mother dispensing advice, listening, talking, challenging.

  Was it there that it had begun—his fascination with people’s hopes and dreams—their minds?

  But of course those happy childhood memories belonged to the time when his father was still alive, before his mother had become ill.

  She was dead now. She had died while he was in the last year of his training, and six months after that… Automatically his thoughts changed path, obedient to his inner silent command.

  These days dinner parties no longer held any mystique for him; they were no longer part of a world and a lifestyle which excluded him; rather now he was the one to exclude them. Their formality and self-consciousness irked and confined him; he considered them old-fashioned set pieces of stereotyped behaviour, show-pieces which brought out the worst aspects of certain types of human nature.

  How, after all, could anyone expect to enjoy his or her food in such an atmosphere of contrived competitiveness? No wonder women like Grace always seemed to have such an anxious look about them.

  It made him smile wryly to himself to recognise how once he would have felt not just slightly uncomfortable in such surroundings, but resentfully defensive as well.

  During his years at university he had had a tendency to treat wealth and success with a certain degree of contempt and suspicion. He still didn’t believe that focusing one’s life on the attainment of money and status was a goal to be lauded and admired, but now his reservations were based on very different foundations.

  In order to live one needed to have money; but in order to live well one needed to have something more, something that came from within the person themselves and which could not be bought.

  It had taken him a long time to understand that, and even longer to be able to put it into practice. There had been years of his life which he had wasted living under a dark, bitter cloud of resentment and anger, refusing to accept that the goals he had set himself, the whole purpose of the life he was making for himself were not really his goals at all.

  With hindsight it was so easy to see how self-destructive his behaviour had been, but then so many things were easy to see… with hindsight… with knowledge… with awareness.

  Bleakly he closed his eyes.

  He hadn’t told Elizabeth the whole truth when he had responded to her interest about what had brought him here, what had made him choose to work at the General. With his connections it would have been easy enough for him to approach one of the major teaching hospitals, to take on a consultancy and go into semi-private practice; it would certainly have been far more lucrative, made far greater financial and career sense.

  But something much more important to him than money and status had brought him here. When he had first seen the advertisement for the post at the General he had merely glanced at it, but when he had realised where it was…

  He grimaced to himself, well aware of how the majority of his colleagues would have responded to an admission from him that he was allowing himself to be dictated to by fate. No, not allowing himself to be dictated to, simply taking advantage of the opportunity fate was offering him; there was a difference…

  His guardianship of Anya meant that his whole life would have to be refocused, and, once he had got over the initial shock of recognising that fact, he acknowledged that it was perhaps also time for him to refocus himself inwardly as well as outwardly.

  For far too long he had lived with too much of himself imprisoned in the past, his deepest emotions buried and denied because of the pain he was afraid they might cause him.

  He had come back now determined to confront that past, to confront it and to lay an old ghost.

  But certainly not in the biblical sense… His mouth curled self-derisively at the thought. No, there was scant chance that he would ever be allowed to do that. Or that he would want to?

  He frowned away the question unanswered. What he had come back for was not to wallow in self-pity but simply to draw a line under a certain section of his life.

  The past, after all, could always be analysed, understood, resolved and forgiven, but it could never truly be forgotten, deleted; and the effects of his past were woven so firmly within the fabric of his personality that to try to pull them free would be impossible.

  His years in America had been good to him… good for him… He had gone there following his mother’s death—a temporary escape at first, a place where by dint of hard work and determination he could totally transform himself and return like some mythological hero, victorious and clothed in gold; only the weight of that gold had oppressed him, its shine tarnished by the emptiness it hid and which only he could see… and then after all there was no point in returning home—what point was there, when there was no one to recognise his success, his magnificence… no one to marvel at and envy what he had achieved?


  And so he had stayed in California, and when one of the new intake of college graduates had made it plain to him that she wanted him he had opened his arms to her and told himself that the sleekness of her suntanned body, the swing of her thick dark hair, the desire in her dark brown eyes, the lure of her sexuality and the skill with which she used it were more than adequate compensation for all that he had lost.

  They had stayed together for three years and then she had left him for a man twenty years her senior, who, she had told him quite candidly, would make her a far better husband than he ever could.

  He had watched from the sidelines the day she married him and had been surprised to discover how very distant he felt from what was happening… how unmoved.

  He had still been living in California the year Michael Waverly came to visit him, but he hadn’t stayed on long after Mike had gone. Somehow by then the Californian lifestyle had begun to pall on him a little.

  He had needed something more nourishing… more sustaining, and so he had moved north and begun a new cycle, but he had still taken the baggage of his old self with him, only this time he had added the heavier weight of guilt.

  And to some extent he still carried it. Which brought him back to Anya and the present and his determination to make sure, as far as it was within his power to do so, that he fulfilled the promise he had so carelessly given her mother.

  Nothing could or would ever compensate her for the loss of her parents, but he was her only living relative and she deserved better, far, far better than that he abandon her to the impersonal care of an already overburdened Social Service.

  Provided he was allowed to do so.

  The situation would have been different had he been married, the social worker had told him, and he had known from her expression what she was thinking. After all, it wasn’t the first time he had seen that look of critical suspicion in someone’s eyes.

  For a heterosexual man of his age to have remained unmarried was, he knew, unusual, giving rise to the suspicion in overly fertile minds that there might be something suspect and dangerous in his sexual inclinations, some refusal to acknowledge what he really was, and causing even the most generous and uncritical observer to question if there was perhaps some flaw in his nature that made it impossible for him to give a firm commitment to another human being, to form an emotional bond with them.

  In today’s modern society one of man’s greatest sins was to remain emotionally detached. It was… interesting how many people confused emotional detachment with the trauma of emotions numbed by intense pain. Emotionally detached people did not live in fear of suffering a second bout of the pain they dreaded so much.

  Men traditionally were not supposed to suffer that kind of pain. Their role was to inflict it and then to walk away from the destruction they had caused.

  Walking away was something his sex were very good at, but, as he knew both from his work and personal experience, as a form of emotional management it wasn’t very effective. You could walk away from people but you couldn’t walk away from your own feelings; they went with you… and stayed with you.

  He sat down on the edge of his bed and closed his eyes.

  Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea, coming back to Britain. It had brought back far too many memories, sharpening the focus that only years of careful self-control had managed to dull. It was pointless telling himself what he already knew: that once it was set in motion there was no turning back of life’s clock, and even if there were… what could he morally have done differently…? Put his own needs first? What would that have gained him? A few brief hours of intense pleasure and the burden of years of guilt. Then he would indeed have been playing God, and with potentially fatal consequences.

  Odd that he hadn’t realised until it was too late how very vulnerable he was. Even when it had happened he had assumed that the pain, although intense, would eventually go, that eventually he would love more appropriately and wisely.

  He could have told Anya’s social worker that his unmarried state was the result of his being distrustful of his ability to find someone to love.

  ‘God, Blake, you really are ridiculously idealistic,’ his last love had told him scornfully. ‘People our age don’t fall in love, not unless they’re pathetically dependent…’

  She was a New Yorker, glamorous, brittle, witty, intelligent… highly sexed, but intrinsically cold… The kind of woman with whom he tended to form relationships because he knew that they would not look for what he could not give them.

  In the end, though, it had not been their lack of mutual love which had driven them apart but his decreasing sexual desire for her.

  Sex without love no longer held any appeal for him; it was an appetite he simply no longer needed to feed, and he had let it go without any regret.

  She had claimed that it had been the time he had spent in Romania which had changed him, and perhaps she had been right. When he had answered the UN’s call for qualified people to give their time free to help the orphaned victims of the regime he hadn’t really known what to expect. The television footage shown on the news had been harrowing, particularly of the innocent children, but nothing could prepare any human being with any pretension to compassion for the gut-wrenching reality of those centuries-old eyes in the too small baby faces.

  He was no stranger to people’s emotional pain, but those children, babies most of them…

  It wasn’t so much that it had changed his outlook on life, more that it had reinforced what he already knew and felt, compelled him to accept certain aspects of himself and his own emotional needs.

  Which brought him back to Anya.

  ‘Why do you want her?’ the social worker had asked him scornfully.

  Because she needs me, he could have answered, but that response was too simple and too complex. All he could have said was that he had seen in Anya’s eyes that same look as in those children in Romania and that he had known that Anya needed someone of her own, someone who would invest time in loving her, not simply to repair the trauma and damage of losing her parents, but to give her something he suspected she had never known.

  It was not that he thought that Lisa and Miguel had been bad parents; it was simply that other things had been more important to them. Physically, after all, they had been there for Anya, but emotionally…?

  A foster home, going into care, no matter how good it was, was not the right environment for Anya. He had known that both emotionally and professionally, but Anya’s social worker had also been right when she had pointed out that he could not give her the one-to-one attention he claimed she needed.

  He could give her a home, a protected environment, financial security and his love, but he could not be there for her twenty-four hours a day. Finding someone who could was proving to be far more of a problem than he had envisaged—or rather finding the right kind of someone.

  But now, thanks to Elizabeth Humphries, it looked as though his search might hopefully be over. She and Richard struck him as a well-matched couple, their relationship healthily balanced.

  Richard. He frowned. He was a first-rate surgeon, admired by both his colleagues and his patients, but not evidently by David Howarth. It hadn’t taken Blake long to discover David’s hostility towards Richard, nor to guess at the cause of it.

  His frown deepened. The last thing he needed right now was to complicate his life by becoming involved in hospital politics, but, like Richard, he was concerned that too much focus on finance and cost-cutting could ultimately lead to a dangerous and perhaps even life-threatening drop in medical standards.

  David had mentioned this evening that the Minister was due to visit both hospitals.

  ‘Officially she’s the one who will make the final decision about which hospital gets the new unit, but in reality she will be relying on me to take that decision,’ David had boasted to Blake.

  Thoughtfully he removed his shirt and padded barefoot into his bathroom.

  ‘You’ve got a very, very sexy body,�
�� Holly had told him purringly the first time they had made love. She had used almost exactly the same words, but in a far different tone and with the added rider, ‘Pity all it does is look sexy,’ the last time.

  Wryly he reflected how in the end none of her experienced, knowledgeable caresses had been able to arouse him to any real desire, and yet at night in his dreams, and sometimes even in his conscious hours, all it took to make him ache and throb with intense sexual need was the blurred memory of a certain face… a certain voice, her smile, her scent… her memory… the way he was beginning to ache now…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  FOR four days Philippa managed to convince herself that nothing had really happened and that she had safely dismissed Joel and all that she had experienced in his arms to a small sealed container which could easily be buried beneath all the other detritus in her life, and then, five nights after they had made love, she woke up alone and aching in the dark, her face wet with tears.

  What was she really crying for? she asked herself as she fought to suppress the sharp clarity of the pain that had woken her, the sense of loss, not just of her present and her future as a sexually functioning desirable woman, but her past as well.

  The woman who had responded so passionately to Joel’s touch was not the same woman who had lived so passively for all those years as Andrew’s wife. And now, when it was too late, she could recognise just why she had crouched timidly beneath the protective cover of that passivity and acceptance for all those years; the reality of accepting her needs as a woman was acutely painful.

  Now that the euphoria of expressing her sexuality so freely and so uninhibitedly was over, she was left with the cold, raw emptiness of the loneliness which had taken its place.

  But Joel was another woman’s husband, a woman who he believed no longer wanted him.

  She wanted him, Philippa recognised. She wanted him very badly indeed.

  She got up and went downstairs to make herself a cup of tea. Through the kitchen window she could see the first feeble, pale rays of light trying to break through the darkness. It seemed impossible that they would do so, and yet of course they would.