Cruel Legacy

‘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.

Robert had married Lydia because of who she was, because of her family connections and their money, he had declared.

Philippa had said nothing. How could she? After all, hadn’t Andrew married her for exactly the same reasons? And hadn’t she, deep down inside herself, known it … known it and refused to listen to the small, desperate inner voice which had begged her to reconsider what she was doing?

She had been too angry to do so … too angry … too proud and too hurt. Since it was obvious that she had no worth, no value as herself, as the person she knew herself to be, since it seemed she was not even to be allowed to define the kind of person she was, then she might as well be the daughter her parents, and most especially her father, wished her to be. That person was the kind of person who would automatically marry someone like Andrew … the other Philippa. Her Philippa … her Philippa no longer existed, had been destroyed a long time ago; she had not been strong enough to fight for survival … not without love to sustain her.

Love. There was certainly no love in the relationship between her and Andrew.

Andrew and Robert had been at school together, Robert the son of the area’s most successful and respected businessman, Andrew the son of elderly parents who had produced him late in life. Both of them, Philippa suspected—Andrew’s elderly, scholarly father whose main interests were his books and his fossil collection, and Andrew’s mother, a timid, quiet woman who had been much in awe of her own mother—had never quite got over the shock of producing a child who was so different in outlook and ambition from themselves.

It was typical of Andrew that when Robert had been appointed chairman of the family company Lydia’s uncle owned Andrew had immediately started lobbying for promotion to the board of his own employers.

When that had proved unsuccessful, the last thing Philippa had expected was that he would suddenly decide to resign from his job and buy his own company, his own chairmanship.

She could still remember her feeling of dismay when he had told her what he was doing. His mouth had started to twist with bitterness and, recognising what was coming, her heart had dropped even further.

‘Of course if that stupid old bag hadn’t gone and left what should have been mine to someone else, I wouldn’t need to work at all.’

Philippa had said nothing. There was no point in reminding him that his great-aunt Maud had had every right to leave her money to whomever she chose, even if that someone had turned out to be a six-foot-odd itinerant, a New Zealander who had knocked on her door one summer asking for casual work and who had stayed on over the winter to nurse her when she fell ill and broke her hip—facts of which they had known nothing until after her death, until Andrew, in his rage and disbelief, had virtually accused Tom Forster, twenty-nine to Maud Knighton’s eighty-odd, of being his great-aunt’s lover and of having seduced his, Andrew’s, inheritance away from him.

‘How could she do this to me … to our sons?’ Andrew had demanded, after he and Philippa had left the solicitor’s office.

‘Perhaps if we had visited her more …’ Philippa had suggested hesitantly.

‘What, go traipsing up to Northumberland? How the hell could we have done? You know how impossible it is for me to take time off work.’

Andrew had, of course, typically, threatened to take the matter to court, to have his aunt declared insane and the New Zealander guilty of forcing or threatening her into dispossessing him, but to Philippa’s surprise and relief Tom Forster had quietly and calmly offered to share his inheritance with Andrew on a fifty-fifty basis.

Andrew hadn’t wanted to accept. He had insisted that the very fact that he had made the offer proved that he knew Andrew would win any court case, but Philippa’s father and Robert had put pressure on Andrew to accept.

Robert’s emerging political ambitions made it imperative that his background, his family and their histories were all squeaky-clean; the last thing he wanted was the full distasteful story of Andrew’s quarrel with Tom Forster splashed all over the less savoury tabloids.

Philippa, sensitive to her father’s reactions, had been aware of the way he had distanced himself from Andrew afterwards, but Andrew, she suspected, had not. He was not that sort of man; other people’s feelings and reactions had always been things outside his understanding.

The last thing Philippa had expected, after all his complaints about how difficult life was going to be for them now that his expectations of what he would inherit had been so drastically diminished, was that he would actually part with some of the money. Not some of it, she reminded herself now, but all of it and more beside: money he had borrowed from the bank, boasting to her about the size of the loan the bank had given him, saying that showed how highly they regarded him and his business ability. She on the other hand had felt sick at the thought of their owing so much money.

‘How on earth will you ever be able to repay it?’ she had asked him.

He had laughed at her, telling her she knew nothing whatsoever about business, reminding her scornfully that she had no aptitude for it. ‘Your father was right; all the brains in the family went to your brothers.’

Philippa had winced. She had borne the burden of knowing she was a disappointment to her parents all her life. Ideally, they would have preferred another boy, not a girl, and then, when they had discovered that their third child could in no way compete intellectually with their elder two, they had turned away from her, concentrating instead on her brothers. She felt that they had been relieved when Andrew had asked her to marry him. She had only been nineteen, inexperienced and confused about what to make of her life.

‘I don’t want my wife working,’ Andrew had told her importantly once they were married, and she had resigned herself to giving up ideas of a career.

All he wanted her to do was to be a good wife and mother, Andrew had told her. He was the breadwinner, the wage earner. He didn’t like these strident modern women who seemed so out of touch with their femininity.

On their first wedding anniversary he had given her a diamond bracelet.

‘For my good, pretty girl,’ he had told her and then he had made love to her with the thing glittering on her arm. He had spent himself quickly and fiercely, leaving her slightly sore inside and unsatisfied. She remembered that when she had opened her eyes he had not been looking at her but at the bracelet.