Cruel Legacy (44 page)

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...

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.

She put down her cup of tea. Was it really Joel she wanted, or just someone to cling to, someone to transfer her troubles to, someone to make her feel that her life had a viable purpose to it? Was she really so weak, so
afraid?

Even if Joel were free to form a relationship with her, she was not free to have one with him, she acknowledged honestly; there was too much other unfinished business in her life.

And besides, she mocked herself wryly as she stood by the window and watched the first pale lemon warming of the spring sun lightening the grey sky, didn't she need to learn to love herself before she could start trying to convince herself that she loved someone else?

Five hours later, when Susie called round to irvite her to go out to lunch with her, she found her halfway up a ladder cleaning windows.

'Spring-cleaning,' she commented ruefully. 'You're making me feel very guilty; I haven't touched mine yet.'

'Mmm. Weil, this is more a form of therapy than good housewifeliness,' Philippa admitted as climbed down the rungs and pushed her hair off her face. She looked tired and thin, Susie noticed, but at the same time there was a new determination about her, a new energy.

'Therapy?' Susie quizzed her and then added teasingly, 'What you need is a new man in your life, not—>-'

She broke off, appalled by her own lack of tact when she saw the look of pain that crossed Philippa's eyes.

'Oh, Pip, I'm sorry,' she apologised. 'I didn't mean to he so tactless—I know Andrew was...'

'It isn't Andrew,' Philippa stopped her. She made a faint grimace. 'Even I can't be that much of a hypocrite. You know how Andrew and I lived, Susie, what our relationship was.' She got up and walked over to the sink, keeping her back to her friend as she told her, 'It never really bothered me that Andrew and I didn't have much of a sex life; to be blunt about it, I was almost glad.

'It's odd, isn't it, how things change? Ten years ago the worst thing you could possibly admit to was having a low sex drive. Any woman who couldn't manage to have an orgasm to order, never mind admitting that she didn't even want to, would have been classed by her peers as an oddity— a complete failure.

'I was almost grateful to Andrew for not wanting to discuss the lack of sexual desire between us; it made it easier for me to pretend that I was just like everyone else.

'Fashions change, though, don't they, and now it's almost acceptable for a woman to lay claim to a certain amount of loss of libido, provided she can back it up with the combined demands of a high-profile career, motherhood and if possible half a dozen other balls to juggle in the air as well?'

She turned round and gave Susie a smile that was half rueful and half sad. 'The trouble with me is that I never seem to quite make it in step with fashion...'

Susie digested and unravelled her small speech and then said carefully, 'If you're trying to tell me that you've met someone else and that you want to have sex with him '

'Wanted to and have done,' Philippa interrupted her, and then added gravely, 'But that's as far as it goes. He's married and if I'm honest with myself I know that at least half the reason the sex between us was so... so explosive was because of our joint need...

'That's the trouble with our sex, isn't it, Susie? We have sex with a man and suddenly we have to invest what is really only a physical act with a full battery of emotional baggage.'

'You mean he took you to bed and then dropped you?' Susie demanded angrily. 'What a rat! He...'

'No... It wasn't like that. I... he... I was the one who said that it couldn't go any further. It shouldn't have gone as far as it did.'

Her eyes filled with tears as she said softly, 'He was so tender, Susie, so loving, so giving; he made me feel so... so sexually strong and powerful. He made me realise something that all those years of marriage to Andrew never did. I woke up last night aching for him... wanting him...

envying, hating his wife almost, wondering how on earth she could be so indifferent, so unmoved by a man who is such a wonderful lover...'

'He could be lying to you, Pip,' Susie warned her gently. 'Men do, you know, especially when...'

'When they want to get you into bed. Yes, I
know...'

Susie's expression lightened as Philippa laughed.

'No... it wasn't like that. It wasn't planned or contrived and I already knew, despite his gallant attempts to deny it, that he loves his wife.

'And even if he didn't, the last thing I want is to be responsible for the break-up of someone else's marriage. It's just... it's just that it hurts so much knowing how good what we had together was and knowing that it can never happen again. Logically I know that it's only my body that aches and yearns for him, Susie, but because I'm a woman...'

'And because right now you're far too damned vulnerable,' Susie supplied for her. 'Oh, Pip, I'm so sorry..

Philippa shook her head and gave her a brief smile. 'Don't be. I'm not. Not really. Even while I was lying in bed crying for him this morning, a part of me was..She stopped and shook her head. 'When I was in my teens I had a mammoth crush on a friend of my brother's. When he rejected me and I married Andrew I thought my sexuality was something that only my first love could arouse. Discovering that I was wrong is like being set free from an imprisoning cage.

'It's hard to explain properly, but I feel as though the control of my sexuality, which subconsciously I believed I had handed over to him, has been returned to me. That I am now the one who can choose and decide to whom I do and don't respond.'

'It's all right,' she assured her friend when she saw the way she was looking at her. 'Right now I feel bad, but 1 know that it's something that will pass, like a bad bout of flu.

'Even if Joel were free to have a relationship with me, it's too soon for me. There are things I need to do, problems I need to resolve first, emotionally as well as practically.

'Don't feel sad for me, Susie—I can do that all too well for myself—it isn't pity I need, it's love. Yes,' Philippa laughed now, iove.'

'There, that should be OK now.'

Joel smiled reassuringly at the small tow-headed boy whose bike he had just been fixing, dusting off the knees of his jeans before getting up to watch him ride off.

He was going to be late home—again, he acknowledged as he walked across the leisure centre car park and unlocked the door of his car.

It had felt good knowing that he could afford to pay for things like petrol for his car himself.

'Where did you get the money for these?' Sally had demanded when he had taken her home some flowers. Her voice had been full of suspicion, destroying his pleasure in being able to afford to give her the small gift.

'I earned it,' he had told her. 'Remember I told you last week that one of the parents had asked me to give her little girl some private swimming lessons?'

'Estelle just doesn't seem to be getting anywhere with her swimming,' the woman had confided to him as she'd stood watching him coach her son. 'We've just become members at the new private health club that's opened at Deighton Hall, and I hear they've got a pool there and I was wondering if you gave private swimming lessons.'

He had bought the flowers on impulse on his way home, remembering how Sally's face used to glow with pleasure when she arranged the flowers she had occasionally bought herself, confessing that they were a treat she hadn't been able to resist; but instead of being pleased she had almost thrown the flowers down on to the kitchen worktop, threatening their delicate stems, her face flushed with temper and her mouth tight as she'd criticised him for wasting money.

In the town centre the traffic lights were on red and, as be waited for them to change be glanced to his right and the road which led to Philippa's house.

'We mustn't see each other again,' she had said, and although the firm tone of her voice had told him that she meant it he had seen the way her mouth trembled slightly and her eyes grew shadowed. 'And Sally—your wife—you love her,' she had told him.

The lights changed and quickly, before he could give in to the temptation, he drove straight on.

It wasn't just sex that made his thoughts turn to Philippa at odd times during the day and, even more betrayingly, when he lay awake besioe Sally at night. He had liked her honesty and her humour, the way she sat watching him so attentively while she listened to him.

No, it wasn't just the small throaty cries of pleasure she had given when he had touched her, nor the way she had touched him.

'It doesn't mean anything', she had told him. 'It was just sex', and he had known that she was lying, that what was there between them could, if they allowed it to do so, become far, far more than physical lust.

He could feel his throat tightening with pain and an aching sense of loss. It didn't matter how hard he tried to reach out to Sally these days; all she did was reject him.

In the peace of Philippa's kitchen and in the warmth of her bed he had found a pleasure and sense of relaxation he had long ago forgotten existed, simply holding her and talking to her, knowing that he would be listened to, that his opinions and views were valued, that he was valued; he had felt a sense of companionship with her, of closeness to her, that had brought into painfully sharp focus the emptiness of his relationship with Sally.

'You've got a wife... children', Philippa had told him softly.