Penny Jordan - Cruel Legacy

‘What is it, what’s wrong?’ she asked him quietly.

‘Nothing … Look, I’m sorry I have to go but …’

‘I know, you promised Peter, but since when has your department been so busy that you need to go in early?’ she asked him wryly. ‘As I understand it, that side of the business has been hit pretty badly by the recession. You said yourself——’

‘Look, Deborah, I know you’re feeling pretty pleased with yourself, and I’m pleased for you, but just give the gloating a break for a little while, will you?’

Open-mouthed, Deborah stared after his retreating back.

What did he mean, gloating? She hadn’t been gloating … she had simply wanted him to share her excitement, her pleasure … her pride in what she had achieved. Gloating … That was the kind of language men used to put women down, but Mark had never been like that. That was one of the reasons she loved him so much. He had always accepted her equality. He had always praised and encouraged her.

He came back into the bedroom, his thick fair hair neatly brushed into shape, and removed a clean shirt from the wardrobe. He then bent to switch on the radio, turning the sound up so that she would have had to raise her voice to speak to him above it.

What was wrong with him this morning?

As she watched him, the newsreader was announcing a suicide, a man found dead in his car. Deborah heard the item without paying it too much attention. It was a depressingly common event these days, and besides, she was much more concerned about Mark’s comment to her than she was about the death of an unknown man.

‘Bad night?’ Elizabeth Humphries asked her husband sympathetically as he let himself into the kitchen. He had been called out on an emergency at two o’clock, a bad accident on the bypass, a young boy on a motorbike with serious injuries.

‘With luck he’ll make it … just, although for a time it was touch and go … His left arm was severed and some ribs were broken, causing internal injuries. Luckily someone had had the forethought to pack the arm in ice. Twenty years ago, ten years ago even, it would have been impossible for us to reattach it. Surgery’s come a hell of a long way since I first started practising. Not that there’s any way I could have done an intricate operation like that.’

‘Micro-surgery is not your speciality,’ she reminded him. ‘But without all the hard work you put in fund-raising, the hospital wouldn’t have a micro-surgery unit.’

‘I know, I know, but sometimes it makes me feel old, watching these youngsters.’

‘You’re not old,’ she protested. He was three months away from his fifty-fifth birthday. She was five years younger.

They had been married for twenty-eight years and she still loved him as much now as she had done then, albeit in a different way.

‘You should be in bed,’ he told her. ‘Isn’t today one of your days at the Citizens Advice Bureau … ?’

‘Yes.’

No matter how busy he was, how overworked, he always seemed to find time to remember what she was doing. He had been the one who’d encouraged her to do voluntary work when their daughter had first left home.

She had been afraid then, convinced that her services wouldn’t be wanted. Now, with the problems caused by the recession, they were busier than they had ever been, so busy, in fact …

She frowned as she heard him saying tiredly, ‘We had another emergency tonight … not one we were able to do anything about, unfortunately. A suicide.’

‘Oh, poor man!’ she exclaimed, putting down the teapot.

‘You spoil me, you know,’ he told her as she poured him a second cup of tea.

She laughed at him. ‘I enjoy doing it. Sara rang. She thinks Katie has chickenpox.’

‘Oh, lord. Well, a few spots won’t hurt her.’

‘No, but Ian is already panicking. You know what doctors are like about their own families.’

‘I should do … after all, I am one.’

They both laughed.

‘Do you remember the time Sara fell off the swing and broke her arm? You were in a worse state than she was. “It’s broken, Daddy,” she said. “You’ll have to set it."’

‘Yes, I remember … I was shaking so much I didn’t dare touch her and you had to splint it in the end. Some surgeon. Some father.’

‘The best,’ she told him lovingly, rubbing her face against his head.

‘I hope that young lad survives,’ he told her more seriously. ‘It’s always such a damn waste when we lose a young life like that. Sometimes I think I’m getting too old for this job, too emotional. A surgeon shouldn’t have emotions.’

‘If you didn’t care so much you wouldn’t be such a good surgeon,’ she told him fiercely. ‘People trust you, Richard. And with good reason.’

‘I wonder what made him do it?’

‘What? Oh—speeding … the usual thing …’

‘No, not him, the man who killed himself. Such a dreadful thing to do, to end one’s life …’

‘Mmm, it’s ended for him, but for those closest to him … for his family it’s just beginning, poor devils.’

Philippa opened her eyes warily. Andrew’s side of the bed was empty and cold. She shivered slightly, although not because she missed his presence beside her; that side of their marriage had soured into dull habit ages ago, after Daniel was born.

No, it wasn’t his sexual presence in their bed that she missed.

He had been acting so oddly lately. He had never been easy to talk to at the best of times, hating any hint that she might be questioning his decisions … his dictates, as Rory had rebelliously begun to call them. She had hated it when he had insisted on the boys going to boarding-school, but perhaps it had been for the best. When they were at home it was obvious that they were aware of the atmosphere in the house … the tension … Andrew’s irritation.

At half-term he had really lost his temper with Rory. What the hell did he do with his clothes? he had demanded. Didn’t he realise how much things cost? And what about her … ? Why didn’t she see to it that the boys had a more responsible attitude towards their possessions, and why the hell couldn’t she stop them from making so much damned noise? Wasn’t it enough that he provided her and them with every luxury they could want, breaking his back, working damn near twenty-four hours a day? All he wanted when he came home, all he asked in return was a bit of peace and quiet, a home where he could bring his colleagues and clients without feeling ashamed.

Other wives, he had told her bitterly, managed far better than she did. She had stopped herself from pointing out that other wives probably also knew exactly when their husbands were due home … but over the years she had learned the uselessness of trying to argue with him when he lost his temper.

Wasn’t it enough, he had raged, that he worked his bollocks off to provide her with one of the most expensive and impressive houses in the area, a new car every year, and a lifestyle that all their friends envied?

‘He doesn’t provide them for us … he does it for himself,’ Rory had said bitterly when Andrew had slammed out of the house.

Philippa knew it was true, but she had shushed her elder son all the same. Their friends … what friends? she had wondered later. They had no real friends, only people he thought were useful … people he either wanted to impress or who impressed him. Her one and only real local friend he dismissed contemptuously, claiming that she and her husband were simply not their financial equals.

Status was something that was very important to Andrew. It was, for instance, no secret to her that, despite the fact that he never lost an opportunity to criticise her brother Robert and his wife, Lydia, secretly he was eaten up with jealousy of Robert; eaten up with jealousy and bitterly resentful of the fact that Robert’s marriage to Lydia had allowed him to enter a world which remained closed to him.