Cruel Legacy

She had rung Robert almost immediately after the police had left that fateful morning. He had been in a meeting, his secretary had informed her, but she had rung back later to say that Robert would ring her that evening.

He was going to the factory today, but had already complained to her that he was a very busy man, with his own business to run and that he could ill afford to take time off to sort out the mess his brother-in-law had made of his life.

‘You realise, of course, that the company’s virtually bankrupt,’ he had told her angrily when he had called round after the visit to Kilcoyne’s.

She hadn’t, although she had wondered, worried especially about the money Andrew had borrowed, but years of conditioning, of being subservient to the men in her life, had programmed her into not exposing emotions they did not want to handle, and so she had simply sat silently while Robert told her.

‘This whole mess really is most inconvenient. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time for me—you do know that, don’t you? I’m putting myself forward for selection as our local parliamentary candidate and this whole unsavoury business is bound to reflect badly on me.

‘Of course it’s typical of Andrew; he always was a trifle melodramatic for my taste. He should never have bought Kilcoyne’s in the first place. I did try to warn him. You might have told me he was likely to do something like this.’

Philippa had stared at her brother, willing back the angry tears she could feel prickling her eyes as she swallowed down the huge swell of anger threatening to overwhelm her.

‘I didn’t know,’ she told him quietly.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. You must have had some inkling. You were his wife. An intelligent woman, or so you’ve always claimed. You must have guessed …’

‘I knew he was having financial problems, but he wouldn’t discuss them with me,’ she had told him woodenly.

‘The whole world and his wife knew he was having financial problems. I told him months ago that there was no point in panicking the way he was doing, letting everyone know that he couldn’t hold the business together. I warned you at the time against marrying him, Philippa,’ he had added critically, while Philippa had gritted her teeth and then said as slowly and quietly as she could,

‘No, you didn’t, Robert. You wanted me to marry him. You said he would be a good husband for me.’

‘Rubbish … I never said any such thing.’ He’d given her an angry look. ‘Not that it matters now. What’s past is past, and what we have to do now is to get this whole mess cleaned up as quickly and quietly as possible.’

‘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 château 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.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘THE 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.

Richard had raised his eyebrows as he’d asked her, ‘Why poor? The girl’s deliriously in love; anyone can see that.’

‘Yes, she is, and so is he. She’s also a young woman on the bottom rungs of a notoriously demanding career ladder. What’s going to happen when she and Tony decide they want children?’

‘She’ll take maternity leave,’ Richard had informed her, plainly not following the drift of her argument.

‘Yes, and then what? Spend the next eighteen years constantly torn between conflicting demands and loyalties, knowing that she’s got to sacrifice either her feelings as a mother or her desire to reach the top of her profession.’

Richard had frowned then.

‘What are you trying to say? I thought you were all for female equality … women fulfilling their professional potential. You’ve lectured me about it often enough …’

‘I am all for it, but, once a woman has children, biologically and materially the scales are weighted against her. You know it’s true, Rick: once Jenny has children she won’t be able to go as far in her career as she would if she were a man. She’ll be the one who has to take time off to attend the school concert and the children’s sports day. She’ll be the one who takes them to the dentist and who worries about them when they’re ill, feeling guilty because she can’t be with them.

‘No amount of paid substitute care, no matter how professional or good it is, can ever assuage a woman’s in-built biological guilt on that score.’

‘Mmm—damn waste it will be too. Jenny is one of the best, if not the best junior registrar I’ve ever had.’

‘Well, perhaps in future you should remember that and when you’re lecturing your students you should remind them all, but especially the male students, what sexual equality really should mean—and I’m not referring to a token filling up and emptying of the dishwasher now and then.

‘Do you realise, Rick, that, despite all this media hoo-ha about the “New Man”, women are still responsible for the major part of all domestic chores? Sorry,’ she’d apologised, with a wry smile. ‘I didn’t mean to start lecturing you, but …’

‘I know.’ Richard had smiled, standing up and leaning towards her to kiss her.

‘I saw Sir Arthur yesterday,’ Elizabeth told him now.

Sir Arthur Lawrence was the chairman of the hospital board, an ex-army major, rigidly old-fashioned in his views and outlook, with whom Richard had had so many clashes over the years.

‘Oh, did you? What did he have to say for himself? More complaints about overspending on budgets, I suppose,’ Richard grunted.

Elizabeth laughed. ‘No, as a matter of fact he was very complimentary, praising you for all the work you’ve done to help raise money for the new Fast Response Accident Unit.’

Richard grunted again. ‘You should have told him not to count his chickens. We need government funding if we’re to go ahead with it, and we haven’t heard that we’re going to get it yet. The Northern is putting up a pretty good counter-claim to ours. They maintain that they’re closer to a wider range of motorway systems than we are …’

‘And we’re closer to the centre of the region and we have better access to the motorway,’ Elizabeth reminded him. ‘And you’ve got a much better recovery record.’

‘Mmm … well, that’s no thanks to Sir Arthur; you should have heard the objections he raised when we opened our recovery ward …’

‘Admit it, you enjoy fighting with him.’ Elizabeth laughed.

Richard pulled a face. ‘He’s twenty years behind the times … more … Hell, is that the time? I’ve got to go. You’re at home today, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. I thought I might drive over and see Sara. She sounded a bit down when I spoke to her yesterday.’

‘Yes, it’s no picnic being a GP’s wife—nor being a GP, either.’ Richard kissed her, smiling at her as he suggested, ‘Why don’t we go out for dinner together tonight … Mario’s? Just the two of us,’ he added.

‘Just the two of us,’ Elizabeth responded, emphasising the ‘just’. ‘Mmm … that would be lovely.’

‘I’ll get Kelly to book us a table,’ he promised her as he picked up his briefcase and headed for the door.

After he had gone, Elizabeth made herself a fresh cup of coffee and picked up a buff folder from the dresser. The dresser had been an antiques fair find, which she and Richard had stripped of its old paint, a long and laborious job which she suspected had cost far more in terms of their time and paint-stripper than had she bought the ready-stripped, polished version from an antique shop.

There was a sense of satisfaction in having done the work themselves, though, and she had enjoyed those hours in Richard’s company. They had reminded her of the early days of their marriage, when it hadn’t seemed so unusual to see him wearing old clothes and getting dirty. ‘You’re so lucky, you and Richard,’ her friends often told her enviously. But their marriage had suffered its ups and downs just like any other. Where they had been lucky perhaps had been in that both of them shared the same deep commitment to their relationship, so that, at times when both of them might have viewed their individual roles within it from opposing and conflicting viewpoints, their joint desire to keep their marriage alive and functioning had continued to survive.

She had not always experienced the same contentment in their relationship, the same pleasure in being herself as she did now, Elizabeth admitted. There had been times, when Sara was young, when she had felt Richard growing away from her … when she had felt threatened by and resentful of not just the claims of his work but his evident involvement with it.

It had been an article in the local newspaper absently flicked through in the hairdressers which had initially sparked off her interest in community work. With a twenty-year-old degree and no professional skills whatsoever, she had humbly approached the local community liaison officer, explaining that she would like to give her services and that she had time on her hands with her daughter living away from home, but that she had no skills she could put to use.

‘No skills?’ the other woman had queried. ‘You run a home, you’ve brought up a family, you drive a car. Don’t worry, we’ll soon find something for you to do!’ And so they had.

Elizabeth smiled to herself now, remembering how terrified she had been that first day, manning the reception desk at the Citizens Advice Bureau, and then six months later when she had been asked if she would like to train as a counsellor. She had protested that she was not experienced enough to give advice to others, that her life, her relationships were very far from perfect, and certainly did not justify her handing out advice to others.

‘The more problems our counsellors have faced in their own lives, the better they are at listening compassionately to the problems of others,’ she had been told crisply.

She sat down and opened the folder.

She had recently attended a national conference on the effects of long-term unemployment and redundancy on people. She frowned as she read through the notes she had made. They were certainly getting an increased number of people coming to them for advice on how to cope with their unemployment—women in the main, anxious not just about the loss of income but the effects of their husband’s redundancy and consequent loss of self-esteem on the men emotionally, and on the family as well.

If the gossip going round following Andrew Ryecart’s suicide was correct in suggesting that it had been caused by financial problems with Kilcoyne’s, it seemed likely that the town would soon have more men out of work. The company was one of the town’s main employers, one of the last light engineering companies left in the area. There would be no alternative jobs for people to go to.

Elizabeth nibbled the end of her pen. She had suggested at last week’s general staff meeting that it might be an idea to put together a special package formulated specifically to help such cases. People were individuals, of course, with individual problems, but …

‘It’s a good idea,’ her boss had agreed. ‘But we simply can’t spare anyone to work on it at the moment, unless …’

‘Unless I do it at home in my spare time,’ Elizabeth had offered wryly.