by Penny Jordan
Tears had burned her eyes then. Tears of anger and frustration, and tears of pain as well, because her father could never love her as he did Saul and because he could never accept her as she was. In the end it had been Saul who had persuaded him that she be allowed to train as a doctor, and it had been Saul who had supplemented her meagre grant.
Those years of young adulthood had been very difficult for her, very chaotic, the pain and confusion of her father’s attitude towards her still sharp and sore. With hindsight she often wondered if the main thing that had attracted her to Cathy’s father had been the fact that he was somehow a substitute for her father, and that initially in seeking his approval what she had subconsciously been seeking had been the approval of her uncaring parent.
David hadn’t been her first lover; there had been the usual teenage forays into sexual exploration, during which she had quickly learned to feel contempt and resentment for teenage boys’ apparent belief that she was there to please them.
With David it had been different.
She had been a student when she’d met him. He had just been appointed to the hospital. He specialised in heart surgery and was spoken of in tones of awe by those who knew him.
Forty-two to her twenty-two, he had dazzled her more quickly than she could have believed possible. She had always prided herself on her judgement of others and on her ability to see people for what they really were, but David had very easily deceived her, or had she simply deceived herself?
Since he was devastatingly attractive in that way that a certain type of mature man could be, she had been overwhelmed and tongue-tied when he first started singling her out from among the other students.
She had known, of course, that he was married. It was no secret that he owed at least some of his meteoric career rise to the influence of his wife’s father, an eminent Harley Street surgeon, but he had very quickly and subtly given her the impression that his marriage was little more than a worn-out legality. His wife was presently living in America, he told her carelessly, as were his two sons, and she, besotted fool that she had been, had not had the wit to question him further. She had thought he loved her and she had certainly believed that she loved him. Sexually he had dazzled her into dazed disbelief that it was possible to feel such intense pleasure. That was how naïve and inexperienced she had been. She was on the Pill, of course. Pregnancy, a child, had no part in any of her plans.
Being loved by David acted on her like an adrenalin-boosting drug, increasing not just her physical desire for him, but also her enthusiasm for her work. It was doubly important for her to succeed now. Now she wanted to show David what she could do. She wanted him to see how different she was from his spoiled socialite wife who never did anything other than shop or sit on charity committees.
‘I love women with brains,’ he had told her once as he entered her. ‘They’re always such a challenge.’ And she, infatuated as she was, hadn’t realised until much, much later that what he had meant was that he loved reinforcing his own belief in his male superiority by reducing her to a mass of aching, pleading flesh—by, in fact, short-circuiting the brain he claimed to admire so much. But of course that knowledge had come a long time later. After Cathy’s birth, in fact.
High on the euphoria of being with him, of the intense pleasure of discovering her sexuality, of knowing how much he wanted her, it had been easy to ignore the future, to live simply for the present.
Of course one day she would want far more of him than the brief secret meetings they presently shared. Of course one day she expected to be able to stand proudly side by side with him … of course in her rare moments of leisure she indulged in daydreams where the two of them, hand in hand, stood solemnly to receive the plaudits of their colleagues … a renowned surgical team. But she was too content living in the present to dwell overmuch on the future, and then had come the moment she had been waiting for.
David told her that he had arranged to borrow a friend’s cottage for the weekend. He’d collect her. He’d meet her after work on Friday, he told her, picking her up at their usual place, which was a discreet half-mile from the students’ home where she lived. He himself would be away for the rest of the week, since he had some business to conduct. ‘What kind of business?’ she asked him innocently.
He seemed to pause for a long time before answering, ‘It’s nothing. Nothing that need concern you,’ he told her, and then went on to describe to her exactly what he planned to do once they were alone, and as her body tensed and ached with excitement she forgot all about his unimportant meeting.
A whole weekend together … She closed her eyes, leaning blissfully against the wall. She could hardly wait.
She almost didn’t make it. On Friday morning she woke up with a stomach-ache and was violently sick, but she forced herself to get dressed and to attend the morning lecture. Throughout the morning she felt distinctly ill, and at lunchtime, unable to face the sight and smell of food, she went outside for some fresh air.
It was at further classes in the afternoon that she learned that there had been an outbreak of food poisoning among the students. Grimly she told herself that nothing … nothing was going to stop her being with David, and headed for the pharmacy to get a prescription made up for a calming drug. Luckily she only seemed to have a mild version of the poisoning and, although she still felt shaky and weak, by the time she finished lectures the nausea and stomach cramps seemed to have ceased.
She mentioned nothing of her illness to David when he picked her up; already instinctively she was mimicking the behaviour patterns of her mother.
The weekend, so much anticipated, so much longed for, somehow didn’t quite live up to her expectations. Her fault, she told herself, for being unrealistic, and yet it still hurt when David had to drop her off out of sight of anyone who might have recognised them, reinforcing the awareness she had had all weekend of how important it was to him to keep their relationship a secret. Too important? She didn’t have time to dwell on her unease; this was her final year and she was studying hard.
David was away for three weeks, not just one, and then when he came back it was another week before she actually managed to see him.
By then she knew that she was pregnant. The fault of her bout of food poisoning negating the contraceptive pill? It had been a shock, of course. A child wasn’t something she wanted. A termination would be the most sensible answer, but that was something she must discuss with David. It was his child too, after all.
Again it was only later that she could acknowledge to herself how much subconsciously she had been relying on her lover to take the burden of responsibility from her, hold out his arms to her and tell her how much he wanted both her and their child. But of course he had done nothing of the sort.
‘I thought you were supposed to be on the Pill,’ had been his first comment, the shock and anger in his eyes making her stomach muscles clench in misery. ‘If this is some silly trick to blackmail me into marrying you, Christie …’
The words hit her like stones, blunting her capacity to think, pain oozing like blood from her pride and self-respect.
‘You know I’m a married man. I can’t afford the kind of scandal it will cause if this gets out. Are you sure that it’s my child and not someone else’s?’
She must have made some kind of sound, some verbal betrayal of her anguish, because he stopped then and looked at her. Suddenly he looked old, she recognised, old and stripped of the glittering robes in which she had foolishly clothed him. Suddenly she saw him for the shabby creature he really was.
‘Christie … You must be sensible about this. I can help you … arrange a termination.’
She was starting to feel sick and giddy. ‘An abortion, don’t you mean?’ she challenged him, her voice shaking, rejecting the easy clinical term for the harshness of reality.
‘You must be sensible,’ he stressed. ‘Think of your career—’
‘Think of yours, don’t you mean?’ she demanded. She was beyon
d pain now, beyond everything but somehow trying to contain the huge, gaping, life-threatening wounds in her pride and self-respect.
She no longer loved him. How could she after what he had said … after what she had seen in his eyes? Sickened, she stepped back from him and said quietly, ‘It’s all right, David. I understand exactly what you’re trying to say.’ She saw the craven relief in his eyes and her contempt both for him and for herself increased.
‘So you’re going to do the sensible thing. Have a termination.’
She gave him a brittle, proud smile. ‘What I choose to do with my body and my child is my affair, don’t you think?’ She heard him calling her name as she walked away from him, but she didn’t look back.
She knew she couldn’t go back to the students’ home, not in her present state, and so instead she booked herself into a small, shabby hotel, something she could not really afford, where she locked herself in her room and wept out her grief and disillusionment.
Never, ever again would she allow herself to be this vulnerable … this naïve. David had never really loved her. He had merely wanted her … had merely fed his own ego on her innocence and naïveté. Distantly she wondered how many other girls there had been like her in his life before her, and how many more there would be after her.
What hurt her the most was not the discovery that he had not loved her, but the realisation of what he was, of how she had deceived herself, of how she had betrayed herself in believing that she loved him.
She placed her hand on her stomach. His panic … his rejection had been so betraying and so unnecessary. She had already decided to end the pregnancy.
And yet somehow she found herself putting off doing so, and, the longer she put it off, the more frequently she found herself shying away from making any real decision. It was new territory for her, this indecision. In fact, she was suddenly experiencing a good deal of bewilderment at the unfamiliar emotions and tensions that gripped her. She told herself that it was just the trauma of discovering the truth about David, about the prospect of her looming exams, about everything, in truth, other than the fact that she was pregnant.
She did not want a child. She had never experienced any desire for motherhood and, besides, it was impossible. How could she have a child and continue her studies?
She heard the gossip that David had accepted a job in America at Johns Hopkins and that apparently it had been on the cards for some time because his wife had been out there with her father, doing some canvassing on his behalf. The news barely touched Christie. She had other matters to occupy her thoughts.
Later she wondered if she had deliberately made that mistake over the date, which had resulted in her failing to realise that she had left it just that little bit too late for an early termination, but at the time she was filled with panic and despair, blaming the stress of her coming exams for causing her to lose that all-important final week.
And it had been while she was in the middle of that panic that Saul had arrived and quietly but firmly taken charge of everything, including her.
When Cathy was born the intensity of the love that drenched her stunned her. David was forgotten, pushed into the past, where he belonged, his weakness and her own self-deceit merely one more of life’s hard-earned lessons. Cathy, her child, her daughter, was all that mattered now.
Thanks to Saul’s financial support and the pressure he had brought to bear on their father to accept the situation, she was able to continue her training and to qualify.
She was a changed person now, aware, mature, with a keenly honed social conscience. Where once she had wanted to go into surgery and had seen herself rosily successful and admired, now she accepted that for her the patient was a complete whole, not merely an isolated set of symptoms.
She had chosen to go into general practice and she had also chosen to work in one of the most deprived areas of the city of Manchester. The practice’s patients were drawn largely from the dilapidated tower blocks on the outskirts of the city. Christie rented a flat close to them because she felt it was important that as a doctor she should live in the same environment as her patients.
The social and financial deprivation in which the majority of her patients lived appalled Christie. It was the women who suffered, the women and the children, imprisoned in their small flats, isolated from one another by the fear that kept them separated, mothers with small children often living in flats at the tops of tower blocks where the lifts were broken and prams, children and shopping had to be carried up umpteen flights of stairs. Stairs that were often smeared with filth and rubbish, excrement sometimes, the territory of gangs of youths who roamed the tower blocks, jobless and often homeless, living by the only asset they had—the physical domination of others, petty theft their only source of income.
Drug addicts were another hazard, as were drunks both male and female, and, watching the exhausted young mothers who came to her surgeries with their pale-faced, fresh-air-starved children, she ached with compassion. What chance did they really have, any of them?
Those children she saw with the blank faces and uninterested stares, those who were hyperactive and violent, those who showed their frustration by becoming withdrawn—all of them suffered from the same things.
‘What the hell are we doing here?’ she demanded furiously of her colleagues. ‘We give them drugs and send them home knowing that what those children need, what their mothers need, is somewhere decent to live, fresh air and space … stimulation of their senses, something to give them a chance of achieving self-worth.’
‘By doing what?’ one of the men had asked her grimly. ‘We’re living in a world where man is being replaced by machinery. When they grow up there won’t be any jobs, any futures for them, just as there haven’t been for their parents. What we should be doing is persuading them not to have children. They’re not—’
‘Not what?’ Christie interrupted him, fury blazing from her eyes. ‘Not fit to have them? Is that what you were going to say? Perhaps we’re the ones who aren’t fit. Because we’re the ones who are condemning them and their unborn children to this miserable quality of life. Because we’re the ones who refuse to publicise the truth and to make others act on it. So little Tracy has had a cold for the last six months … well, let’s just give her some antibiotics, shall we, and her mum some tranquillisers, even though we know that what they both need is a decent home, a garden for Tracy to play in … security for her mother so that she isn’t so terrified of going out that she and Tracy don’t see anyone but each other for days on end?’
Her despair exhausted her. Her anger left a hard lump inside her chest, but there was so little she could do.
She organised a crèche, a meeting place for the mothers and their children, persuading the council to allow them to use an empty flat. She bullied and coaxed paint and brushes out of a local DIY centre and motivated the mothers out of their apathy, insisting that they were the ones to redecorate the flat, encouraging them to use their own ideas, and then marvelling with genuine humility at the unexpected skills of the women who painted the murals on the living-room walls, watching with growing pleasure and hope as they gradually built up their own and the others’ confidence, watching as they organised themselves into groups to find ways of raising money to equip the nursery.
She found places for three of the women on short-term nursery-nurse teaching courses. She encouraged them to organise outings for themselves and the children; the practice and Cathy absorbed all her time and attention, and when the women teased her slyly about the fact that she had no man she shrugged and told them honestly that she had no need of one.
And besides, they were in fact wrong. She had been having a relationship with someone for several months. They had met through her efforts to persuade the local authority to do more for the tower block inhabitants. He was divorced with two children and a partnership in an architectural practice, which kept him almost as busy as her work did her. He made her laugh and he was a good lover, something
she had discovered was more important to her than she would once have wanted to admit, but she was firm about keeping him at a distance. Their relationship suited her exactly as it was and she did not want any closer emotional commitment with him.
She had learned her lesson with David. When a woman loved a man she lost a very vital part of herself. She had once suffered the pain that went with that loss, that abandoning of self for someone else, and she was not going to suffer it again.
When Peter started to press her for a closer relationship she cut herself off from him completely, refusing to either see or speak to him. She missed him sexually but not enough to change her mind. And besides, she needed her independence. It was very important to her; she recognised that now. With it went her self-respect and her feeling of self-worth, and she was never going to risk losing them again.
Her life was full and busy. She had her work, and she had Cathy, her wonderful, precious daughter. The extent of her love for her child was something that still had the power to surprise her. Never thinking of herself as maternal, she was sometimes shocked to discover just how fiercely protective of Cathy she actually was. There were problems, of course. Twice she had had her car broken into while attending a bogus call to a patient, the thieves patently after drugs, but on each occasion she had been lucky and had had her bag with her. The police warned her not to come out to any night calls unattended, and she was duly cautious even while she was infuriated by her vulnerability as a woman.
Cathy was growing up quickly. She was at playschool now, taken there and collected by a childminder.
There were increasing reports of violence among the local youths and talk of rival drug gangs. Christie began to notice a new mood of fear among her patients, an awareness of them withdrawing from her. The police issued warnings to all local GPs and chemists about the dangers of drug-motivated thefts. Christie observed all the necessary precautions. It was not just herself that she had to consider now. There was Cathy as well.