Cruel Legacy (68 page)

'Right
—have we got everyone...?'

Philippa smiled as she heard the chorus of response to Blake's question.

'I'll take Rachel, shall I?' Anya offered, softly removing one of the sleeping babies from the rear of the car before calling over her shoulder, 'Come on, Rory—you take Simon.'

Over their heads she and Blake exchanged glances. Life wasn't always as harmonious as this, especially when the twins were awake.

They would be one in two months' time, walking and creating even more havoc. A rueful smile curled her mouth.

She had been in the second year of her Open University course when she had discovered she was pregnant. At first she hadn't been sure how Blake would react. After a year of marriage had resulted in her failure to conceive they had agreed that enough was enough; they had three children, after all. Blake was heavily involved in helping to raise finance for the new children's ward they were hoping to open, Anya and the boys were already teenagers, and they shared a happy and fulfilling life together.

She had started doing part-time voluntary work at the hospital in the children's ward and concentrating on her studies.

On her birthday they had celebrated with a small family party; and, as she had told Blake lovingly in bed later that night, she felt she had a lot to celebrate.

Four days later, when she woke up in the morning, she had felt oddly queasy.

Idiotically, she had put it down to delayed stress after the effects of the difficult months before she and Blake had married, when she had struggled to sort out the financial mess Andrew had left behind him.

When the factory had ultimately been sold at a knockdown price nowhere near its real value, she hadn't known whether to laugh or cry. After the house had been sold the bank had decided to write off what remained of its losses. Andrew's personal debts she had managed to pay off herself...after a fashion. Without the salary Blake had insisted on paying her before they married she wouldn't have stood a chance of doing so.

She
had
earned the money, he'd insisted, adding that if she didn't take it he would begin to believe that she did not want to marry him after all.

'Stress?' Susie had laughed when she'd told her how ill she'd felt. 'Sounds more like you're pregnant to me...'

Blake had come home to find her sitting in the kitchen staring into space.

'What's wrong?' he'd asked her.

'I'm not sure,' she had told him. 'Blake.. .do you still want children...?'

He had sighed, taking hold of her and telling her softly, 'I thought we'd agreed that what we've got is more than enough. I may not have fathered the boys or Anya but to me they
are
my children, Pip.'

'So you don't
want
any more children?' she had asked him intensely, plucking at his jacket with her fingertips.

'I have what I want,' he had told her gently.
'All
that I want...Pip, what is it?' he'd asked when he'd seen that she was crying.

'Oh, Blake, Susie thinks I could be pregnant, but you don't want me to be,' she had wailed against his chest.

Later they had agreed that her reaction had probably been caused by her burgeoning hormones. There was certainly no other reason for her to have acted so ridiculously, she had acknowledged.

Blake had been thrilled by her news, doubly so when they learned she could be carrying twins.

'It will mean you putting your career plans on hold,' he had warned her, watching her.

'Mmm,' she had agreed, laughing. 'Looks as if I never was destined to get that degree.'

'I'll push them,' Anya told Rory firmly.

'Are you sure we're not going to spoil your image, turning up
en masse
like this?' Philippa teased Blake. The hospital car park was already almost full.

It had been a unanimous decision by the senior staff that this opening of the combined children's surgical and pys-chiatric ward they had all campaigned so hard for should be attended, not by a mass of local dignitaries, but by those who had done the most to make the ward's opening possible: the staff and their families and those who had done the most to raise the money for it.

The ward was in many ways Blake's baby, the idea born originally out of the success of the Fast Response Accident Unit where they had combined surgical and counselling procedures in an innovative, ground-breaking venture.

Semi-reluctantly the authorities had given in to Blake's badgering for a similar unit for children, with the proviso that they must raise half the money themselves.

On Monday the ward would open officially to its first patients, but today it was empty of beds, and was being used to celebrate the fact that against all the odds they had managed to bring it into existence.

It was worth all those cold, wet Saturdays spent in town with her collecting tin, all those car boot sales, all those fund-raising lunches and other events to see what their efforts had achieved.

The walls of the ward had been painted with bright murals, their design a gift from a talented local artist. The work itself had been done by groups of local children of varying ages, all of whom would be here this afternoon proudly showing their families their handiwork.

The walls of Blake's consulting-room were painted a warm, soft yellow. Philippa's smile faded temporarily as she reflected on the pain that would fill this room as his young patients relived their various traumas.

There was a gymnasium filled with equipment donated by local firms, and—Richard Humphries' pride and joy— a swimming-pool to help children suffering from paralysis and other forms of limb weakness, the entire cost of which had been donated by one single person.

Philippa glanced over her shoulder. Anya was talking to one of her friends, at the same time fiddling importantly with the twins' clothes and safety harnesses while the friend watched slightly enviously. Encouragingly, the twins' birth had seemed to give Anya the confidence she had previously lacked, bringing her out of the shell she sometimes retreated into.

Philippa looked round for Blake to check that the boys were with him. It was perhaps natural that now that they were growing up that they should attach themselves more to Blake than they did to her.

She had wondered at one time if Blake ever felt constricted or that his skills were not being put to their best use here in a small country hospital, but when she had tentatively suggested it to him he had shaken his head.

'Moving to a larger hospital would ultimately mean teaching instead of practising, and that isn't what I want. My career is important to me, but you and the children and the life we have built together here are far more important...'

'You could take us with you...' she had told him.

'To a city environment where I would spend almost as many hours travelling as I do working? No, that isn't what I want..

Their time together had deepened her love for Blake and his love for her had given her a fertile soil to flourish and grow in; to mature and become far more at ease with herself.

Love, she had discovered, the right kind of love, did not constrain and impoverish, but instead conferred freedom and independence, enriching every aspect of her life.

Smiling to herself, she walked over to where Blake was standing talking to someone, slipping her hand through his arm as he turned towards her and drew her slightly closer while he introduced her to his companion. She listened to their conversation with half an ear while she studied the other guests, her attention suddenly caught by a familiar face.

Quietly she watched as she saw Joel turn towards his wife. His arm rested easily on his son's shoulders, and his wife's mouth was curled into a smile as she spoke to him. Their daughter, taller than her mother, laughed at whatever it was her mother had said.

As though he was suddenly aware of her scrutiny, Joel turned his head and looked at her.

Briefly their eyes met and then disengaged. She had no regrets about what they had shared, at least not for herself. From the desolation and despair which had been, in its different ways, Andrew's cruel legacy to them both, she knew she had come through a stronger, more emotionally balanced woman.

It had after all been a major turning point in her life, a recognition of her right to express herself sexually as a woman. What she had shared with Joel had unlocked the door which had allowed her to step confidently into her new life with Blake.

Without the knowledge of her sexual response to Joel, she might have hesitated, unsure if what she was experiencing wasn't merely a throwback to her teenage crush.

No. She had no regrets. Had Joel?

As Joel turned away from watching Philippa he saw that Sally was watching him, a faint shadow smudging her eyes.

He reached out to touch her, but before he could say anything Neil Saunders came up to him.

'Have you got a minute, Joel?' he asked him.

Excusing himself to Sally, Joel turned to listen to what he wanted to say.

'I wouldn't mind specialising in paediatric nursing.. .once I've qualified,' Cathy commented to Sally enthusiastically. Her decision to train as a nurse had surprised and pleased Sally, and she had encouraged and helped her as much as she could.

She was working part-time again now, a decision she and Joel had made together when he had discovered how uncomfortable she felt with the transposition of their traditional roles.

It hadn't been easy, talking about how she felt.. .for either of them.

There had been times when she had wondered if they or their marriage could survive such painful honesty, but Joel had refused to give up or to let her do so and in his determination she had recognised the same strength which had originally drawn her to him.

It had been Joel too who had suggested that they go for counselling and that it might be easier for them to be open and honest about the sexual problems within their marriage in front of someone else. 'It isn't a matter of blaming or accusing,' he had told her when she had cried and said that she knew he thought it was all her fault. 'I still love you, Sal, and you still love me... but we both know that that isn't enough.'

And he had been right; it had been easier to say how she felt through an intermediary. It had made the whole issue somehow less emotive.

'When we've had a row or a disagreement about something.. .when you've ignored me all evening, I can't suddenly switch off from that when we go to bed and become sexually turned on,' she had told Joel.

'I need to feel that you want me...not just for sex...that you're prepared to take the trouble to.. .to arouse me before we go to bed,' she had told him uncomfortably when the counsellor had invited her to explain her feelings...

'How can I do that when whenever I come near you you push me away?' Joel had countered. 'You complain if I touch you in front of the kids, and the bedroom's the only place where we have any privacy.. .where we're on our own...'

Both of them had almost been equally surprised when she had told the counsellor how ambivalent she had felt about Joel's vasectomy, how although on one level she had known he had made the right decision, on another she had felt almost cheated.

Joel had been openly distressed by her admission. He too would have liked another child, other children, he had admitted, and he had felt guilty at not being in a position to support a larger family. The spectre of his own childhood poverty had haunted him, though, along with his embarrassment over their hand-to-mouth existence and his father's lack of status.

It was only now that he was actually coming to terms with those feelings and becoming able to value his father's good points, rather than to focus on the others which as a child had caused him so much embarrassment.

Listening to him falteringly and uncomfortably revealing how he had felt about his childhood had moved Sally unbearably, rekindling all the tenderness and emotion she had felt for him when they first met.

It had been his offer to undergo a reversal of his vasectomy operation if that was what she wanted that had touched her the most, though.

'No. You were right,' she had told him softly. 'We couldn't have afforded another baby, and now I'm content with the children we have.'

It had taken some months of counselling before she felt able to respond properly to Joel in bed, and it had been a little while after that before, totally unexpectedly and out of the blue one morning, when he was making love to her, she had realised that she was going to climax.

That had been a memorable milestone, but nowhere near as memorable as the afternoon she had paused in her housework, frowning over the unfamiliar feeling flickering through her body, not even recognising it properly for what it was until she heard Joel's voice in the kitchen and felt her stomach twist in reactive anticipation.

She hadn't said anything, almost more alarmed than pleased by what she was experiencing.

She had told Joel she wanted an early night and had then spent over an hour in the bathroom, showering, smoothing scented body lotion on to her skin, looking at herself uncertainly in the mirror, wondering if he still found the sight of her naked body arousing. She never normally initiated any lovemaking between them, and her humiliation by Kenneth had left a small, painful scar which had never quite healed.

She went to bed and lay there tensely waiting for Joel, listening to the quiet hum of the television downstairs.

An hour later, still lying there waiting, she gave in to the anger and, pulling on her dressing-gown, went downstairs.

'Sally, what is it—what's wrong?' Joel had asked her anxiously when he saw her.