Cruel Legacy

‘You’ll be having everyone back to the house afterwards, of course,’ her mother had announced when she had rung to discuss what arrangements Philippa had made for Andrew’s cremation. ‘It would look so odd if you didn’t.’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ Philippa had protested. ‘Especially in the circumstances.’ Death was a difficult reality for people to handle at the best of times, but when it came through suicide …

‘You’ll have to do it, Philippa,’ her mother had insisted. ‘People will expect it.’

What people? Philippa had wanted to ask her. She supposed she ought not to have been surprised by the number of people—their so-called ‘friends’—who had rung ostensibly to commiserate with her and offer their sympathy, but in reality to dissociate themselves from Andrew and the taint of his failure just as quickly as they could.

Oh, they would want to be seen to be doing the right thing: they would send flowers, expensive, sterile displays of wealth and patronage. They would talk in public in low voices about how shocked they had been … how sorry they felt for her, and of course letting it be known how tenuous their acquaintance with Andrew had actually been, but she doubted that many of them would be seen at the crematorium.

And after all, who could blame them? Not Andrew, who would have behaved in exactly the same way had he been in their shoes.

Her black suit hung on the wardrobe door. She eyed it rebelliously. It wasn’t new and certainly had not been bought for an occasion such as this. She liked black, and it suited her fair paleness.

The fine black crepe fabric clung flatteringly to her body, or at least it had done; with the weight she had lost since Andrew’s death she doubted that it would do so any longer. The black velvet reveres of the jacket added a softening richness to its simple classic design.

It was really far too elegant an outfit to wear for such an occasion.

A woman … a widow who wasn’t really grieving for the loss of her husband would not have cared what she wore; there could not be any colour that could truly portray to the world what she was feeling.

A surge of contempt and bitterness swamped her. The contempt she knew was for herself; and the bitterness?

She walked into the bathroom adjacent to the bedroom. The bitterness … That was for Andrew, she admitted as she cleaned her teeth.

As she straightened up, she stared at her reflection in the mirror. Her face, wiped clean of make-up, showed beneath the harsh lighting of the bathroom exactly what effect the last few days had had on her. Pitilessly she stared at it, noting the fine lines touching the skin around her eyes, the pale skin and the tension in the underlying bones and muscles.

There, she was admitting it at last: it was not grief she felt at Andrew’s death, not the sorrow and pain of a woman who had lost the man who was her life’s partner, her lover, her friend, the father of her children.

What she felt was anger, bitterness, resentment.

Andrew had known what lay ahead of him … of them … and, unable to confront the situation he had brought upon himself, he had simply turned his back on it … evaded it, leaving her …

Her body started to shake as she tried to suppress her feelings, her hands gripping the edge of the basin.

Anger, bitterness, resentment; these were not emotions she should be feeling … but the guilt, the guilt that went hand in hand with them, that underlined them and seeped poisonously into her thoughts—yes, that was an emotion she could allow herself to feel.

Andrew had been her husband and, yes, she had married him willingly, caught up in a rebounding tide of pride, determined to prove that she was fully adult, fully a woman … and a woman capable of being loved by a man who would treat her as a woman and not a stupid child.

She closed her eyes. She had tried her best to be the wife Andrew wanted, to keep the bargain she had made with fate; she had tried to do it, to infuse into their relationship, their marriage, the warmth and sharing which Andrew could not or would not put into it; but nothing she had been able to do had ever really been able to disguise the poverty of the emotional bond between them, and in her worst moments since Andrew’s death she had even begun to wonder if this was his way of punishing her, if by leaving her in the manner he had … But then common sense had reasserted itself and she was forced to acknowledge that their marriage had come so far down the list of Andrew’s priorities that it would have been the last thing he would have taken into account in making his decision … that she would have been the last thing he would have taken into account?

Oddly, that knowledge, instead of freeing her from the burden of her guilt, only served to increase it. Yes, she had tried, but had she really tried hard enough?

‘You can’t be serious. You didn’t even know the man; why the hell should you want to see him cremated? It’s ridiculous … disgusting …’

‘Ryan thinks it’s the right thing to do.’ Deborah stared angrily across their bedroom at Mark.

The violence of his objections to the discovery that she intended to attend Andrew Ryecart’s cremation had caught her off guard, and touched a nerve which she herself had not wanted to acknowledge.

She dismissed the thought, reminding herself that she couldn’t afford to damage her professionalism with inappropriate feminine behaviour.

‘It’s a token of respect, that’s all,’ she told Mark, turning away from him so that he couldn’t see her face.

‘What? Don’t give me that … It’s blatant voyeurism and if you really believe anything else … You’ve changed ever since Ryan gave you this commission.’

‘No, I haven’t,’ she denied. ‘If anyone’s changed, it’s you. What’s the matter with you? You’re behaving almost as though you’re jealous.’

‘Jealous … who the hell of?’ he challenged her.

It had been on the tip of her tongue to say, ‘Me’, but suddenly, for no real logical reason, her heart started to beat too fast and she found she could not actually say the word.

‘I suppose you mean Ryan,’ he told her, answering his own question. ‘My God, that only underlines what I was just saying. If you really think I could ever be jealous of a creep like that …’

As he studied her downbent head and the way her dark hair swung over her face, concealing her expression from him, Mark knew that he had over-reacted. The bright morning sunshine highlighted the chestnut shine on her hair and the lissom softness of her body.

His own ached abruptly in a sharp spasm of sexual response. He wanted to pick her up and carry her over to their bed, spread the soft, warm femaleness of her underneath him and make love to her with such passion that she would not be able to suppress her sharp cries of pleasure, her body’s response to him, her need and desire for him. He wanted, he recognised, her recognition of him as a man … as a source of power and strength. That knowledge shook him, disturbing him, making him reject the sexual message his body was giving him.

What he wanted, a cold black corner of his mind told him, was her acknowledgement of his power over her, her subservience to him.

But no, that could not be true. He was not that kind of man; he never had been; that kind of egotistical need was a male trait he despised. Their relationship was one of mutuality and respect.

Or at least it had been. Deborah seemed to have more respect for Ryan these days than she did for him.

Test her, a small inner voice urged him. Let her prove to you that you’re wrong.

‘If you’ll take my advice you won’t go,’ he heard himself saying.

Deborah lifted her head and frowned as she looked at him. ‘I don’t have any option. I have to go,’ she told him. ‘Ryan …’ When she saw the expression on his face, she reminded him quietly, ‘He is my boss, Mark.’

‘Yes,’ Mark agreed equally quietly.

It was only later, when she was actually in her own office, that Deborah asked herself why she had not pushed Mark to explain more rationally why he felt she should not attend the cremation.

Admittedly Philippa Ryecart was not involved with the company in any official capacity and until she had had her first meeting with the bank, who were the company’s main creditors, she would not know to what extent Andrew’s personal assets were involved. It was not unknown in such cases where a man knew his business was failing for him to withdraw as many of its assets as he could, converting them into funds for his private use, and it would be part of her job to discover if this had happened.

Scavenging among the rotting carcasses of the dead, Mark had called it, and she supposed to some extent he was right.

It all depended, though, on what attitude you took. ‘The company’s creditors have every right to try to recover their money,’ she had pointed out to him defensively.

‘Every right,’ Mark had agreed and had then added, ‘How will you feel, Deborah, telling people that they’re going to lose their jobs; that their redundancy money and very probably their pension as well has gone?’

‘I’m not responsible for the company’s failure,’ Deborah had defended.

‘No, but you’re the one who’s going to have to stand there and tell them … you’re the one who’s going to have to look at their faces and see the fear in them.’

‘Stop it,’ she had told him fiercely, asking, ‘Why are you doing this to me, Mark? It’s my job, you know that …’

‘Yes, I’m sorry,’ he had apologised, his face softening as he’d recognised her distress.

They had made it up and she had told herself that it was silly to feel so hurt, but now they were quarrelling again.