Cruel Legacy (43 page)

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.'

'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, showpieces 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 graduate 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 Caiifornian 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 fee 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.