Cruel Legacy (8 page)

'How?' she had asked him.

He had shrugged impatiently and turned his back on her, walking over to look out of the French windows. 'Well, the bank will have to be informed, of course, if they don't know already, and after that it's their problem...'

' Their
problem...'

He had swung round then, eyeing her irritably. 'Oh, come on—you
must
have realised for yourself that the reason he killed himself was because of the business. I don't know what the exact financial situation is, of course, and in my position I obviously can't afford to get involved—not now. No, your best bet is to leave everything in the hands of the bank. They'll do everything that's necessary. Look, Philippa, there's nothing I can do...'

Nothing you can do, or nothing you
will
do? she had asked herself after he had gone and she was mentally reviewing her brother's assets: the huge house he and Lydia owned, the chateau in France they had bought three years ago which he constantly boasted had now practically trebled its value, not to mention the rental money it brought in from carefully vetted holidaymakers.

What would he have said if she had told him that it wasn't his financial help she had actually wanted, but the help, the support, the sturdy male shoulder to lean femininely and weakly on as she had been conditioned to do since birth?

She had grimaced at herself as she passed the hall mirror.

What good were a pretty face and even prettier manners going to do her now?

And from the past, an echo of a pain she had long ago told herself she had never, ever felt, never mind forgotten, had come the taunting words to haunt her.

'Yes, you're pretty, Philippa, as pretty and prettily packaged as a little doll and just as insipid and lifeless. What I want is a real woman, a woman who laughs and cries, who sweats and screams when she makes love, who is a woman who thinks and feels... a woman who isn't afraid to be a woman, who cares more about what goes on inside her head than on her face, a woman who thinks it's more important to nourish her intellect than her skin—in plain fact, a woman full stop, and not a pretty cut-out cardboard doll.'

A woman who didn't need a man to lean on and turn to... A woman who could stand alone... A woman such as she could never be... Had never been allowed to be.

'So you'll stay here at school until the end of term and then we'll decide what we're going to do,' she told the boys now. She had already made up her mind that they would not attend the funeral. It was a farce to dress them up in black as her family would expect her to do, and to grieve for a father they had never really known, never mind loved.

They were
her
sons, she decided fiercely, her responsibility, and she would bring them up as she thought best; if that was not the way in which her family approved...

She saw the headmaster before she left, pleased to discover that he supported her decisions.

She was a very pretty woman, Henry Carter reflected as he watched her go. The first time he had met her she had been with her husband and the older man had completely overshadowed her. He had thought her pretty then, but docile and slightly boring. Today she had looked different—sharper, more alert, the substance of the woman she obviously was rather than merely a shadow of her husband.

He had never particularly liked the man and had wondered wryly if he had ever realised how much of his real personality and insecurity he betrayed to others with his hectoring manner and his need to ensure that others knew of and envied his material success.

Small wonder that he had felt unable to face life without the support and protection of that success. Henry Carter sighed slightly to himself, he might not have particularly liked him but he would nevertheless not have wished such a fate on him.

The recession was biting deeply into the lives of the boys and the school, with fees unpaid and pupils leaving at the end of one term and not returning at the beginning of another without any explanation. So far Andrew had been their only suicide, but there were other tragedies that went just as deep even if they were far less public.

It occurred to him as he ushered Philippa to the door that almost as strong as his pity for her was his contempt for her late husband.

When she reached home Philippa parked the car and climbed out tiredly. Her body ached almost as though she had flu. It was probably delayed shock, she decided distantly; the doctor had warned her to expect it, even offering to prescribe medication to help her overcome it.

She had felt a fraud then, seeing herself through his eyes, a shocked, distraught wife abruptly made a widow by her husband's own hand, her grief too heavy a burden for her to bear.

She had been shocked, yes, but her grief.. .where was that?

So far her emotions had been a mixture of disbelief and confusion, the woolliness with which they had clouded her brain occasionally splintered by lightning flashes of an anger so intense that she instinctively suppressed it.

The house felt cold. She had turned off the heating this morning when she'd left, economising. She had very little idea what personal financial assets Andrew had had.

Robert had seemed to think that she would be reasonably well provided for, but that did not allay her guilt and concern about what might happen to Andrew's employees. According to Robert the company was virtually bankrupt.

That was something else she would have to do: see the bank. Robert had offered to go with her but after his refusal to help her with the far more worrying problems of the company she had curtly refused his offer.

In the kitchen she filled the kettle and plugged it in.

The hand-built waxed and limed wooden units and the gleaming scarlet Aga had cost the earth; the large square room with its sunny aspect and solid square table should have been the perfect family environment, the heart of their home, but in reality it was simply a showpiece for Andrew's wealth. The only time the kitchen, the house, really felt like a home was when the boys were back from school.

She frowned as she made herself a mug of coffee. She had given up trying to change Andrew years ago, accepting that she would never have with him the kind of emotionally close and loving relationship she had dreamed of as a girl; she had in fact come to realise that such relationships were extremely rare.

And when she looked around her it seemed that very few of her female acquaintances had fared much better. Love, even the strongest and most passionate love, it seemed, eventually became tainted with familiarity and its accompanying disillusions.

She knew women who complained that their husbands bullied them, and women who complained that theirs were guilty of neglect. Women whose men wanted too much sex and those whose men wanted too little. Women whose men were unfaithful, sometimes with another woman, sometimes with a hobby or sport far more dearly loved than their marriage partner.

She had her sons and the life she had built up for herself and for them; the tepid sexual relationship she had had with Andrew had been infrequent and unexciting enough to cause her neither resentment nor pleasure—and besides she had not married him for sex.

Sex... No, she certainly hadn't married him for that. Nor he her.

She had married him because...

Edgily she put down her coffee-cup and walked over to the answering machine, running back the tape and then playing it. There was a message from the funeral parlour and as she listened to it she wondered idly how long it had taken the speaker to develop that deeply sepulchral note to his voice. Which had come first, the voice or the job?

As she allowed her thoughts to wander she acknowledged that she was using them as a means of evading pursuing what she had been thinking earlier.

The second message was from the bank manager asking her to make an appointment to call and see him, to discuss her own private affairs and those of the company. She frowned as she listened to it. Why would he want to see her about the company's financial affairs? She knew nothing about them.

Perhaps it was just a formality.

The tape came to an end. She switched it off and almost immediately the phone rang. She picked up the receiver.

'Philippa...it's Mummy...'

Mummy. How falsely affectionate that small word was, making it sound as though the bond between them was close and loving. In reality Philippa doubted that her mother had ever
allowed
herself to love her. Like her father, her mother's attitude had been that love was something which had to be earned. Love and approval had not been things which had been given freely or from the heart in her childhood home, and Philippa was bitterly conscious of this now as she caught the thread of disapproval running beneath the soft sweetness of her mother's voice.

When Philippa had been growing up she had never been punished by smacks or harsh words as other children had been; that was not her parents' way. An icy look, the quelling words, 'Philippa, Daddy is very disappointed in you,' and the withdrawal of her mother which accompanied the criticism had always been enough... More than enough to a child as sensitive as she had been, Philippa recognised, and her reactions to them were so deeply entrenched within her that just hearing that cold disapproval in her mother's voice now was enough to make her clench her stomach muscles and grip the receiver as she fought to control the answering anger and pain churning resentfully inside her.

'Robert has been telling us how foolish Andrew was. Your father and I had no idea he was behaving so recklessly. Your father's very upset about it. No one here seems to have heard anything about it yet, but it's bound to get out, and you know that he's captain this year of the golf club-—'

Philippa was trembling again. 'I doubt that any of his golfing cronies are likely to hear about Andrew,' she interrupted, trying to keep her voice as level and light as she could, but unable to resist the irony of adding, 'And of course Andrew wasn't Daddy's son...'

'No, of course there is that,' her mother allowed patiently, oblivious to Philippa's sarcasm; so oblivious in fact that she made Philippa feel both childishly petty and furiously angry. 'But he
was
your husband and in the circumstances Daddy feels that it might be a good idea if you didn't come over to see us for a while. Poor, dear Robert is terribly upset about the whole thing, you know. I mean, you do live almost on his doorstep and he's held in such high esteem... Have you made any arrangements yet for the... ?' Delicately her mother let the sentence hang in the air.

'For the cremation, you mean?' Philippa asked her grimly. 'Yes. It will be on Friday, but don't worry, Mother; I shall quite understand if you don't feel you want to be there.'

'It isn't a question of wanting...' her mother told her, obviously shocked. 'One has a duty, and Andrew was after all our son-in-law, although I must say, Philippa, I could never really understand why you married him, nor could Daddy. We did try to warn you...'

Did you... did you really, Mother? Philippa wanted to demand. And when was that.. .when did you warn me? Was it after you told me what a good husband Andrew would make me, or before you pointed out that I would be lucky to find another man so suited to me... or rather so suited to the kind of wife you had raised me to be? If

you really didn't want me to marry him, why wouldn't you allow me to go on to university; why did you insist on keeping me at home, as dependent on you as a pet dog and just as carefully leashed?

'But then you always were such a very impetuous and stubborn girl,' her mother sighed. 'Robert was saying only this morning how much both Daddy and I spoiled you and I'm afraid he was right.

'Have you made any plans yet for after... ?'

'Not yet,' Philippa told her brusquely. 'But don't worry, Mummy; whatever plans I do make I shall make sure that they don't cause either you or Daddy any problems.'

Philippa replaced the receiver before, her mother could make any response.

Her palms felt damp and sticky, her body perspiring with the heat of her suppressed anger, but what, after all, was the point in blaming her parents for what they were, or what they had tried to make her? Hadn't they, after all, been victims of their upbringing just as much as she was of hers? This was the way she had taught herself to think over the years. It was a panacea, an anaesthetic to all the pain she could not allow herself to feel.

'T
he
trouble with long weekends is that they just don't last long enough,' Richard grumbled as he drained his teacup and reached for the pot to refill it. Elizabeth laughed.

'Fraud,' she teased him affectionately. 'You know as well as I do that you can't wait to get back to your patients. I heard you on the phone to Jenny earlier.'

Jenny Wisden was Richard's junior registrar and as dedicated to her work as Richard was to his. She had married the previous year, a fellow medic working in a busy local practice.

'Poor Jenny,' Elizabeth had commented at the time.