Cruel Legacy

by Penny Jordan

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she agreed firmly. ‘Just as yours is to you. We’ve both of us always known that—and always accepted it until now…’

  Mark looked at her. What she had said was true. Until now they had both accepted the importance of the other’s career; until now… until hers had suddenly and unexpectedly overtaken his. He pushed the thought aside quickly. His takeaway meal tasted sour in his mouth—or was it the mean bitterness of his thoughts that was turning his stomach over? How could he admit to her that it was jealousy that was fuelling his fear and sense of failure? How could he admit it to her when he dared not even admit it to himself?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he told her wearily. ‘I suppose I am overreacting. Even though I had guessed what might be coming, it was still a bit of a shock…’

  ‘The recession won’t last forever,’ Deborah comforted him.

  He gave her a twisted smile. ‘Don’t tell Ryan that,’ he advised her.

  ‘What exactly did Peter have to say?’ she pressed him, ignoring his comment.

  He told her, while she listened carefully.

  ‘You’ll only be working in tandem for a year,’ she consoled him when he had finished ‘and by then——’

  ‘The recession will be over?’ he interrupted her wryly. ‘Stop trying to play Pollyanna, Debs. As a career move it’s hardly likely to show up as a highlight on my c. v., is it, unlike your promotion? Ryan stopped me in the corridor this morning to commiserate with me because I wouldn’t be getting a new company car this time round. He laughed when he told me I could always pretend to people that I’d been allocated yours. A top-of-the-range job, so I hear. Clever girl… What colour have you chosen?’

  Deborah stared at him.

  ‘I haven’t…’ Ryan had mentioned to her that she’d be getting a new company car, but other than register the information she hadn’t given it another thought. She’d been far too busy thinking and worrying about how she was going to handle all the complications of the liquidation…

  ‘Why don’t you choose one?’ she suggested, trying to lighten his mood.’

  ‘There’s no need to humour me,’ Mark told her. ‘I’m not a child, Debs…’

  No… but you’re coming dangerously close to behaving like one… The words hovered dangerously on her tongue, but she suppressed them. It was natural that he should be feeling upset, and Ryan hadn’t helped, needling him like that. Why did men always have to take such things personally? If their positions had been reversed she knew she would have been just as disappointed as Mark at having her promised promotion withdrawn, but…

  She frowned over that mental ‘but’, shying away from the implications of it, the questions it raised.

  ‘I was looking forward to our having dinner together tonight,’ she said instead, dismissing the thought that she was deliberately trying to placate him, to smooth away his bad feelings in the same way her mother used to take on the responsibility of smoothing away her father’s bad moods. As though she had somehow been responsible for them… as though…

  ‘I felt awful when I was at the factory today, telling them that they were out of work.’

  ‘I hope you didn’t tell Ryan that?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. My work is something I discuss with him, but when it comes to my emotions…’ She gave him a direct look and got up and went over to him. ‘When it comes to those, you are the only person I want to share them with.’

  Guilt touched Mark’s heart. She was so open and honest, shaming him with her generosity and her love.

  He reached out and pulled her down on to his knee, tucking her head into his shoulder and smoothing her hair back off her face. She moved against him, rubbing her skin sensuously against him, her movements as soft and pliant as a cat’s.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve been such a pig,’ he told her gruffly. ‘I wanted to tell you about my job, but I didn’t want to spoil your pleasure in your promotion.’

  He knew as he said it that it wasn’t strictly the truth; and that he was not only editing his real thoughts, but upgrading them as well, washing them clean of his real and much less admirable feelings.

  As she listened to him Deborah expelled her breath on a small sigh of relief. Earlier, listening to him, she had come perilously close to suspecting that he actually resented her promotion. Now she was glad that she had resisted the temptation to say as much. She was beginning to let Ryan influence her judgement too much, she told herself; in future she must guard against letting his little digs at Mark get to her.

  She and Mark were equals, playing their own individual roles in their relationship. There was no question of either of them wanting to be superior to the other in any way.

  ‘I suppose Ryan made a pass at you this evening?’ Mark commented, tugging gently on her hair.

  ‘Only a half-hearted one.’ Deborah laughed. ‘He knows that he’s not my type and the man I’m interested in is you.’

  Because he wasn’t like Ryan… because he wasn’t all the things that Ryan was… because he wasn’t as much of a man?

  Deborah frowned as Mark got up and moved away from her.

  ‘Mark…’

  ‘Not tonight, Debs… I’m not exactly in the mood. Unlike your superstud of a boss, I can’t deliver sex on demand.’

  Deborah said nothing, but there was a note in his voice that upset her. Because Mark was unnecessarily comparing himself to Ryan or because he might have been insinuating that she was ignoring his emotional needs in favour of her own sexual ones?

  ‘Still hungry?’ she heard Mark asking her. ‘You said that Ryan hadn’t fed you,’ he reminded her.

  ‘No—no, he didn’t,’ she agreed.

  ‘Right, you stay here and I’ll go into the kitchen and make you my famous and incomparable cheese omelette.’

  As he went into the small kitchen he wondered if Deborah could hear the false heartiness in his voice as clearly as he could himself. He had never had to pretend with her before, to conceal what he was really feeling.

  She was so generous… so warm… so giving and loving. He had seen the look in her eyes when he’d told her he didn’t want to make love.

  How long was it going to be before in bed was the only place she still actually needed him? Ryan was her professional mentor now, not him… He paused, staring out of the kitchen window into the darkness. His own emotions confused him and made him feel uncomfortable and guilty.

  He ignored them, turning his attention to the omelette. When he took it into the sitting-room Deborah smiled at him sleepily.

  ‘Mmm, that smells wonderful,’ she told him appreciatively. As he watched her eat it he remembered something he had meant to ask her earlier.

  ‘Who’s the new little blonde clerk?’

  Deborah frowned thoughtfully. ‘Oh, she’s taken Myra’s place while she’s on maternity leave.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘I know I’m being prejudiced but she is a bit bimboish, isn’t she? Short skirts, dyed hair and that “helpless little me” act…’

  ‘Bimboish… I thought…’

  ‘You thought what?’ Deborah prompted him, suppressing a yawn.

  ‘Nothing,’ Mark told her, removing her plate. He had thought the little blonde had been very soft and feminine. Her clothes weren’t as elegant as Deborah’s, of course, but there had been a shy, admiring sexual speculation in the way she had smiled at him that had made his hormone level rise abruptly…

  ‘Don’t let Ryan get to you,’ he heard Deborah saying gently to him.

  She had followed him into the kitchen, and as he turned round she put her arms around his neck and pulled him close to her, nuzzling her face affectionately into his neck.

  ‘Mmm… all right, I won’t; I’ll let you get to me instead, shall I… ?’ he suggested as his hand slid over her body, cupping her breast; she felt him harden unmistakably against her.

  She lifted her head, giving him a surprised look.

  ‘I thought you didn’t want…’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he told
her, taking hold of her and starting to kiss her. After all it didn’t really matter, surely, that it was the memory of another and very different woman that had suddenly aroused him? After all, it was Debs he was holding now, her body he was caressing, her mouth he was kissing, her familiar scent filling his nostrils, her soft little moan of pleasure…

  CHAPTER TEN

  RICHARD frowned, glancing at his watch as he parked his car in his designated spot. It had taken him ten minutes longer than usual to get to the hospital. The traffic on the bypass was becoming increasingly heavy with the closure of a local school and its amalgamation with another.

  He was still frowning as he strode towards the hospital entrance. He was due to attend a meeting this morning at the Regional Health Authority’s head office, about the siting of the Fast Response Accident Unit.

  The suggestion to open such a unit locally had originally been his and he had worked hard to get the scheme off the ground, and, while logically he knew and believed that what really mattered was not where the unit was sited but how well it served its patients, another part of him slightly resented the fact that his idea, once formally adopted by the regional authority, was no longer solely his, and that they were now coming under increasing pressure to compete against another hospital for the unit.

  ‘It’s all these endless bloody meetings,’ he had complained to Elizabeth at breakfast. ‘They waste so much damned time. Committee men, accountants; they might have time to spend sitting around empire-building, but I don’t. All I ever hear from Brian Simmonds these days is, “Don’t forget, we can’t afford to antagonise the committee."’

  He had never liked the subtle behind-the-scenes manoeuvrings, the back-stabbings, the constant battle for power and control. He was a surgeon, that was where his skills lay… his forte did not lie in manipulating people, in being subtly persuasive, in distorting facts so that they showed to his advantage.

  Unlike Christopher Jeffries, the consultant at the Northern, who seemed positively to enjoy the cut and thrust and the back-stabbing that went on at their meetings.

  The issue should have been clear-cut enough, after all. It was simply a matter of deciding which hospital could best serve the needs of the public as the home of the Fast Response Accident Unit. Only that issue now seemed to have become clouded by others, so that it had become not just a battle to win the allocation of the unit, but a battle to determine which hospital would ultimately be superior to the other.

  A morning at the Area Health Authority offices, trying to defend his own hospital’s position and at the same time promote it as being superior to its rival, was far more exhausting than a whole week spent in Theatre, or at least it had been. In every operating theatre there was always some degree of tension; there had to be—the use of the word ‘theatre’ to describe the operation area was almost too appropriate. There, if one had time to observe it as an audience, the full drama of life and death was played out before one’s eyes.

  But that tension did not affect him negatively. It was a part and parcel of his life. A surgeon who claimed that he did not feei or experience it was, in his opinion, a surgeon who had no awareness of the trust and responsibility that others placed in him.

  ‘Ah, Richard. Good—ready to leave. We might as well both travel in my car; it won’t save much for practical purposes, but every little helps. I wanted to have a word with you about the budgets.’

  Richard cursed under his breath. He had hoped to have a few minutes to go through his post before leaving for the Authority’s headquarters, but Brian was making it plain that he was ready to leave.

  The General had been one of the first hospitals to opt to become self-governing under the new government scheme, and, although Brian had been enthusiastic about the changes, Richard was still not wholly convinced. In theory the idea might be a good one, but as a surgeon he had an in-built dislike of equating health with money. It was his job to help people, not to divide them into those who could afford to be helped and those who could not.

  ‘Yes, the budgets,’ Brian announced once they were both inside his car and he was driving out of the hospital car park.

  ‘You know what we’re doing, don’t you, with these budgets and quotas?’ said Richard with concern. ‘We’re forcing some of the GP practices at the bottom end of the social scale to abandon patients who badly need their care. Of course a nice middle-class practice with sensible, healthy patients who take care of their health is going to manage its budget better than one where half its patients are teenage girls with a couple of illegitimate children and the other half pensioners who’ve never had the opportunity, the luxury, of taking care of their own health.’

  ‘I know what you’re saying, Richard, and of course there’s no question of our abandoning those practices, those people… All I need for the time being, while we’ve got this decision hanging over us about the Fast Response Accident Unit, is for you to try to keep within the budgets. The chief administrator is an accountant by profession, and not…’

  He stopped as Richard made a brief derogatory noise in his throat.

  ‘That says it all, doesn’t it?’ he told Brian. ‘We’re here to promote health but we’re run by accountants.’

  ‘It’s the way of the world these days,’ Brian told him. He could see both sides… Sometimes he envied David Howarth, the chief administrator. He had no idea how difficult it could be here at the sharp end dealing with men like Richard, who, for all their dedication and brilliance when it came to their work, all too often stubbornly refused the need for financial discipline. Sometimes he felt as though he was single-handedly performing a balancing act worthy of Atlas himself.

  He glanced at Richard’s set face and sighed. He would just have to do what he could to keep Richard and David as far apart today as possible. David was one of the modern breed of administrators, the task of administration and financial control of much greater importance to him than the nature of the ‘business’ that finance related to. He had been head-hunted by the Authority from industry and it was common knowledge that in his previous position the spectacular improvement in cash flow he had achieved had been via a cost-cutting exercise which had involved a ruthless reduction of staff.

  David had already hinted that he considered that the General was top-heavy with senior men, some of whom he would like to see pensioned off to open the door to more effective rationalisation and cost improvement.

  ‘But we don’t have anyone even remotely close to retirement age yet,’ Brian had protested. ‘Richard is in his mid-fifties and Leslie Osbourne is fifty-one.’

  ‘In industry these days it isn’t unusual to see men at the top going at fifty,’ David had told him smoothly.

  Brian frowned uncomfortably, remembering that interview. He was close to fifty himself.

  * * *

  Richard grimaced and flexed his muscles tiredly. Strange how sitting in a chair could make his bones ache so much more than operating.

  The atmosphere in the room was tense and slightly dangerous. David enjoyed creating that kind of mental tension and aggression, Richard suspected.

  As he glanced round the table he was aware that of the seven men there he was the oldest.

  He frowned slightly, not wanting to acknowledge what lay behind that awareness. Leslie Osbourne wasn’t that much younger than he—only a handful of years—and Brian was only a few years younger than Leslie, but he still couldn’t help being aware that the three representatives present from the Northern were all younger, closer in age to David than to himself.

  Leslie Osbourne, their senior anaesthetist, was making some comment to him. Leslie had travelled separately to the meeting, having spent the last couple of days at a conference.

  As Richard turned his head to respond to his comment he was aware of David watching him.

  David was a thin, tense man, slightly smaller than average height, which perhaps was at least part of the reason he felt such a need to exercise so much control over others and to challenge th
em to flout his authority, Richard reflected. He had pale blue eyes and a slightly underhung jaw. There was something almost weasly about him, even down to his quick, edgy body movements.

  He would never have made a good surgeon; he was too impatient, too quick. It baffled Richard that anyone could ever have thought that such a man was the right person to head a health authority. He might be a brilliant accountant, but he knew nothing about people, their vulnerabilities, their needs.

  As their glances engaged, Richard saw the dislike flicker briefly in David’s eyes before he looked away.

  No, I don’t like you either, he acknowledged mentally.

  It pleased Richard to see that David was the first to look, away and turn towards Brian. It was petty of him to feel that small sense of victory, he knew, but that was the effect that David had on him.

  ‘Yes, Brian, I agree that you’re putting forward an excellent case for the accident unit to go to the General,’ he heard David saying. ‘And you’ve certainly spoken very emotively about the benefit that would accrue to the public as well as the General. However, in this instance we can’t allow ourselves to be governed by our emotions. There are other things to consider. As chief administrator my prime concern is how effectively we can justify the financial outlay for such a service, and I’m afraid that on its present record the General is not proving to be very good at sticking to its financial targets.

  ‘I don’t want to start making specific criticisms or allocating specific blame. This meeting, after all, is to discuss the siting of the new unit, not to go over the old ground of budgets, but…’ he paused and across the table his eyes met Richard’s for a moment ‘… I cannot stress how important it is that the new unit is run efficiently financially, and I’m worried about the General’s present showing, especially on the surgical side. Of course we’re all agreed that the essence of a good accident unit is speed and efficiency, value for money, especially as far as the Department of Health is concerned. On paper I admit that your figures look good, but with your surgical budget already disastrously overspent… The public needs to feel confident that such a unit can deliver what it promises… How can either it or I have that confidence when you can’t keep your existing departments within their budgets and your operation level up to their quotas?