Cruel Legacy (41 page)

'No...'

Across the table he saw the looks his daughter and son-in-law exchanged, and he wondered if Ian had heard the gossip on the medical grapevine that the Northern was favourite for getting the unit. He liked his son-in-law and got on well with him, but his loyalties lay in a different direction from Richard's own, and Richard was reluctant

to discuss the General's budgeting problems with him in case he inadvertently mentioned it to his partners, who might in turn pass it on to their contacts at the Northern.

Not that he would be telling the Northern anything they did not already know, he acknowledged sourly. He suspected that David had already made it clear where his support really lay and why.

'Grandpa. You're really, really old, aren't you?' Katie suddenly piped up.

'Katie!' Sara protested.

'But he is,' Katie insisted. 'Because all grandpas are old... Will you soon be dead?' she asked Richard cheerfully,

'Not as soon as you,' Ian told his daughter threateningly.

Somehow Richard managed to laugh along with Elizabeth as she insisted to Ian that no doubt to Katie at four years old they did both seem 'really old'.

'Mum, what on earth's got into Dad? I've never known him be so tetchy and irritable.'

Richard paused outside the kitchen door as he heard his daughter's voice.

'He's worried about this new Accident Unit,' he heard Elizabeth responding.

'No...it's more than that,' Sara protested. 'You don't think... well, you don't think he's put out about your success, do you...?'

'Put out...?
Jealous
of me, you mean?'

'Well, yes...' Richard could hear the discomfort in Sara's voice. 'Well, it can't be easy for him, can it...? He's always been used to having you at home and now here you are going off on conferences, making an independent life for yourself,..'

'Oh, Sara, no. I'm sure you're wrong,' Elizabeth answered. She said the words firmly enough, but Richard caught the note of uncertainty that underlay them and it hurt him.

He was proud of Elizabeth, proud of her and pleased for her, and if he had started to contrast the upswing in her career with the threatened downswing in his own it wasn't because he was jealous of her. Surely she knew that, even if Sara didn't?

He could hear Sara walking towards the half-open kitchen door, and quickly he stepped back from it. The last thing he wanted now was for his daughter to realise be had overheard what she had been saying.

He could tell that Elizabeth was surprised when he cut their visit short and said that he was tired.

'You were very grumpy this afternoon. 1 think Sara was hurt by the way you behaved.'

Sara was hurt... Richard paused in the act of removing his shoes.

Elizabeth was already undressed and ready for bed. Unlike his, her hair was showing little signs of greying. Wrapped in a towel, with the light behind her as she padded round the bedroom, she looked almost as young as Sara.

She paused, bending to open the drawer and remove a clean nightdress.

'Richard...' He could bear the tension in her voice as she closed the drawer and then turned round. 'This... this grumpiness.. .it isn't anything to do with me, is it...with the fact that I...?'

Angrily Richard threw down the sock he had just removed.

'With the fact that what? That you're an up-and-coming successful career woman while I'm just an old has-been, fit for nothing other than being pensioned off?

'What are you trying to ask me, Liz? If I'm jealous of you... Is thai what you think?'

'No, of course it isn't.' He could hear the shock in her voice. 'Why on earth should I think anything like that?' she asked him.

'I overheard you and Sara talking in the kitchen,* he told her flatly. 'It's almost a classic case history, isn't it? Ageing husband's jealousy of his dynamic independent wife, his fear that her independence will mean that he loses control of their relationship, his inevitable decline through anger to depression and then impotence as his wife's power and authority rises. Odd, isn't it, how sensitive a barometer a man's sexual organs are of his sense of self-worth and his status in a relationship, in society itself?'

He felt the bed depress as Elizabeth sat down beside him. 'Richard, what is it? I
know
you're not jealous of me...'

'Do you?' He turrled to look at her. 'Liz, I heard the doubt in your voice this afternoon when you were talking to Sara...'

'Yes,' she admitted, 'but the doubt wasn't because I thought she was right. I know she isn't.'

'Then what was it for...?'

'Good old-fashioned female guilt,' Elizabeth told him ruefully. 'I know how worried you are about the new unit and part of me feels that I should be here beside you, worrying with you, just as part of me felt guilty because I couldn't be with Sara twenty-four hours a day worrying alongside her when Katie was ill.

'It's one of the things that being a woman is all about... Our
emotional
barometer, if you like—the thing that tells us we can't be truly a woman unless we're "there" for people we love... unless we can somehow wave a magic wand and make life perfect for them, take away all their pain and anxiety; that's how we judge whether or not we're successful,' she told him softly.

"The doubt you heard was because I was asking myself how I could be a good wife and still go away knowing how much you were worrying.. .and knowing too that you didn't want to share your worry with me...'

'Because I didn't want to spoil things for you. I know how much this conference means to you...'

'So there is something else, apart from the unit?' Elizabeth asked him quietly.

'Yes,' Richard admitted. He paused and then told her, 'I think David is trying to get rid of me...'

'Get rid of you? What do you mean? Sack you? But he can't do that...'

'No...not sack me. It's no secret that he's already got rid of most of the more senior men. I'm coming up to sixty...'

'You're fifty-five, that's all,' Elizabeth protested, 'and they opted to take early retirement...'

'Did they?' Richard asked her wry ly.

Elizabeth stared at him.

'He's beginning to make me doubt my own judgement, Liz... to make me wonder if perhaps I am getting past it. I keep telling myself that fifty-five is no age. that, when I first started out, a surgeon wasn't considered to reach his peak until he was close to sixty; these days...

'He wants me out, I know that... All this rubbish about budgets is just a smokescreen. And I don't want to retire, Liz... I'm not ready for it. I don't want to be ready for it. Oh, I know it's always been there, an inevitable fact of life, but somehow it's always been safely in the distance ... something that happened to other people.

'I don't want to retire... don't want to spend the rest of my life playing golf and reminiscing.., waiting for death.'

'Richard!' Elizabeth protested.

'Well, what else is it? Limitless free time.. .empty time with nothing to fill it. It's a curse, not a gift. When I think of what it means, of what my life will be, I break out in a cold sweat. The thought of it fills me with panic and revulsion ... I'm afraid of all that empty time...'

'Why haven't you said anything to me before...?'

He could hear the pain in her voice.

'It's never been an issue before... I didn't even realise how I felt about it myself until David began to drop un-subtle hints about my age. I suppose I ignored it because I didn't want to think about it.'

'But it needn't be the way you think,' Elizabeth told him. 'There are things you could do... consultancy work... part-time surgery... you heard what Ian was saying about them looking for a surgeon for the practice... Community work...'

'Doing what? Pushing wheelchairs and then in tarn being

pushed in one myself? Oh, hell, Liz, I'm sorry,' he apologised when he saw her face.

'It's all right,' Elizabeth told him.

His retirement was something they had never really discussed; the years had rushed by so quickly since Sara had left school, their lives had become so busy, and, like him, if she was honest, she had somehow assumed that his retirement was something that was still far away in the future.

She knew how much his work meant to him, but the feelings he was expressing to her now, the sense of fear and emptiness... She discovered that for all her training she was at a loss to know what to say to him.

'Do you know, I always used to feel sorry for men who dropped down dead in harness? The fatal heart attack, robbing them of their right to a well-earned retirement... Now I almost envy them...'

·Richard/'

'Oh, it's all right... David Howarth, for all that he thinks he's so damned powerful, can't make me retire, not even if he does bring in these damned compulsory medicals...'

He saw the troubled look she was giving him.

'But one day you will have to retire, Richard... You can't...' She stopped speaking.

'I can't what? Run away from the inevitable?' He smiled grimly. 'Do you think I don't know that? I should be making plans, thinking constructively, addressing the issue positively and confronting its challenge.. .that's what our new psychiatrist would undoubtedly tell me. My God... I've seen them up at the golf club, waiting to die, living on their memories.'

'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 ··"sources fo
^r
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 bis 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.'