Cruel Legacy

As a boy he had felt the effects of his father’s careless attitude towards a settled existence and regular, reliable work; his mother hadn’t seemed to care that some weeks there wasn’t any food in the house.

‘Make sure you ask for seconds at dinnertime,’ Beth, one of his older sisters, had instructed him when he first started school.

He had promised himself even before he and Sally married that his kids would never know the indignity of that kind of poverty; that they would never suffer the effects of that kind of parental irresponsibility.

Three years ago, when Sally had tentatively suggested trying for another baby, he had shaken his head and tried to explain to her how he felt.

Six months later, he had had a vasectomy. Was he imagining it, or was it after that that she had started to lose interest in him sexually, as though she no longer wanted him now that he could not provide her with a child … now that he could no longer fulfil his biological role in her life?

And if he lost his job and he could no longer fulfil his role as breadwinner either, would she reject him even more?

He went into the kitchen and made himself a cup of tea, absent-mindedly leaving the empty unrinsed milk bottle on the worktop.

One of the other men had said to him this afternoon, ‘What the hell are we going to do if this place does close down? There’s nowhere else for us to go. Not in this town.’

‘No,’ he had agreed. ‘Nor anywhere else locally either. The engineering industry’s been hit badly by the recession.’

What he really wanted was to have Sally here at home listening to him while he told her how worried he was, he admitted as he switched on the television and then switched it off again.

She never seemed to have time to listen to him any more, and then she complained that he never talked to her.

Increasingly recently at Kilcoyne’s he had worked hard in his role as foreman to mediate between the men and the management, and as overtime had stopped and the men had felt the effects in their wage packets he had had them coming to him complaining that they were finding it difficult to manage.

He was in exactly the same boat, but because he was their foreman he had felt unable to point this out to them and tell them that he had his own problems.

He had never really wanted Sally to go out to work, and she wouldn’t have had to either if he hadn’t been fool enough to take out that extra loan to buy a new car, and then she had wanted a new kitchen—like her sister.

None of them had known then just how high interest rates were going to rise, and, even though now the payments were easier, they were still heavily in debt to the bank. At the time it had seemed worth taking the risk, he had told himself it had been worth it, and that night when Sally had walked in just as he was finishing the kitchen … It had been a long time since they had made love like that, since he had felt her body clench with excitement and need when he touched her. He had felt really good that night. Happy … secure … a king in command of his own small personal world. And then six weeks later the company had gone on to short time, and Sally had announced that, since he was making such a fuss about the cost of the kitchen, she’d pay off the loan herself.

It had been too late then to take back the angry words he had uttered in the panic of realising just what the drop in his weekly wage was going to be.

And besides, Sally had been proved right. They couldn’t have managed without the money she was bringing in.

Knowing that hurt him more than he wanted to admit. He had tried to tell Sally that, to explain, but she just didn’t seem to want to listen.

She had changed since she’d started working, even though she herself refused to admit it, grown away from him, made him feel he was no longer important to her.

‘You’re lucky,’ one of the men had said to him today. ‘At least your wife’s in work.’

Lucky. If only they knew.

Sally hummed to herself as she walked down the ward. She always enjoyed her work on Men’s Surgical. She paused by Kenneth Drummond’s bedside, responding to his warm smile. The forty-five-year-old university lecturer had been very badly injured in a serious road accident several months earlier, and she had got to know him quite well during his lengthy stay in hospital.

She had been on night duty during his first critical weeks under special care and a deep rapport invariably developed between such patients and the staff who nursed them. At times she had felt as though she had almost been willing him to live, reluctant to go off duty in case without her there he might give up and let go of his precarious hold on life.

It was a feeling no one outside the nursing profession could really be expected to understand. Joel certainly hadn’t done so.

‘You’ll have heard my news, I expect,’ Kenneth commented as she smiled back at him.

‘Yes, Wednesday, isn’t it? You’ll be glad to get away from here, I expect.’

‘Not really.’ His smile disappeared. ‘To be honest with you, I’m feeling rather apprehensive about it. Not because of any lack of faith in your surgeon’s hard work,’ he told her. ‘He’s assured me that he’s put enough pins and bolts in me to hold up the Eiffel Tower. No, it’s not that.’

‘Still, you are bound to feel a bit anxious,’ Sally comforted him. ‘It’s only natural.’

‘Mmm. But it’s not so much that. To be honest with you, it’s the loneliness I’m dreading.’ He pulled a wry face. ‘I don’t suppose I should admit to that, should I? Very unmacho of me. We men are supposed to be tough guys who don’t admit to any kind of emotional vulnerability … until we’re somewhere like this. I don’t know how you nurses manage to put up with us. You can’t be left with a very high opinion of the male sex after you’ve heard us crying into our pillows.’

‘It isn’t always easy,’ Sally admitted. ‘It hurts seeing that someone’s in pain and that you know you can’t always do anything about it. Mind you, it’s nothing to what you hear down on the labour ward,’ she told him, trying to lighten his mood. ‘Of course it’s the men who get the worst of it down there. Woe betide any male nurse who tries to tell a woman in the middle of her contractions just to remember how to breathe and everything will be all right …’

‘Yes. I’ve always thought that, when it comes to bearing pain, women are far braver than men and far more stoical.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Sally told him with a grin. ‘I cursed Joel, my husband, to hell and back when I was having Cathy. I swore afterwards that nothing would ever make me go through anything like that again.’ She smiled reminiscently.

‘You’ve got two children, haven’t you?’ Kenneth asked her.

‘Yes. I would have liked another, but …’

She stopped, frowning. It wasn’t like her to confide so easily in anyone, especially a patient.

‘Have you any children?’ she asked him directly.

Although he had talked to her a lot during the months he had been in hospital, he had never mentioned any family.

‘Yes and no. My wife and I are divorced. She remarried and lives in Australia now.’ His expression changed. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t either a good husband or a good father. We married very young, straight out of university. Rebecca was pregnant at the time and she blamed me, quite rightly, I suppose, for the fact that her career was over before it had even started. A termination wasn’t an option in those days and neither really was single motherhood. James, our second son, was born following an ill-timed attempt at marital reconciliation. We separated before he was born. They—my sons—are adults now, and anyway they look on their stepfather as their father, and quite rightly, so it’s ridiculous of me to lie here feeling sorry for myself because I’m going home to an empty house when, in truth, it is empty through my own choice.’

‘Have you no one … no family or friend … who could come in and help you out for a few days?’ Sally asked him, concerned. He was making a good recovery from his injuries, much better in fact than anyone had believed when he had first been brought in, but it would still be several months before he was able to move about easily on his repaired leg, despite what the surgeon might have to say about his handiwork.

‘Not really …’ He shrugged his shoulders, powerfully muscled from the exercises the physio had been giving him. ‘My colleagues at the university have done more than enough already. I can hardly expect them to do any more. I suppose I’m lucky that I’m in a profession where this——’ he touched his injured leg ‘—hasn’t meant that I’ve lost my job. Lucky in fact still to have the leg,’ he added, his face suddenly grave.

‘Yes,’ Sally agreed simply.

When he had first been brought in there had been a danger that his left leg might have to be amputated, his injuries had been so severe.

‘You know, lying here these last few weeks has proved something of a double-edged sword. Once the immediate danger is over and you know you’re going to live, you find that you have time on your hands to think about all those things you’ve pushed into the deepest cupboards of your mind, all hidden safely out of sight and then avoided on the grounds that there simply isn’t time to deal with them,’ he told her sombrely. ‘Having a busy life is a wonderful excuse for not dealing with one’s deeper emotional problems, as I’ve discovered.

‘When my wife used to accuse me of being selfish, of living in my own world, I always felt she was being unfair. After all, I had stood by her, hadn’t I? I married her, provided a home for her and the family. It’s only while I’ve been lying here that I’ve come to realise what she meant … I was selfish.’ He paused, watching the effect his words were having on Sally, but her expression reassured him, the sympathy in her eyes encouraging him to go on.

‘I’m a very orderly man,’ he told her. ‘I like neatness and tidiness. It comes, I suspect, of being an only child. She was just the opposite, and when I complained about coming home to the disorder of a household containing a small child she would point out, quite rightly, that she simply didn’t have the time to do everything.

‘I suspect that part of my irritation stemmed from resentment of the fact that she put the baby’s needs before mine. I’ve always believed that she was the one who abandoned our marriage, who broke faith with it by having an affair with another man.’ He paused and gave Sally a painful look. ‘Oh, yes, she managed to find time for that. No doubt the appeal of spending time in bed with her lover was far greater than that of doing the housework …

‘I shouldn’t be criticising her though,’ he added, shaking his head. ‘I realise now that in many ways I had never properly committed myself to our marriage. The family was a duty, a responsibility I shouldered because it was the right thing to do and then, having been seen to do the right thing in the eyes of the world and publicly, I privately turned my back on them by giving to my work, and consequently to myself, my self-esteem, my ego, the time and attention I should have given them.

‘Will you think very badly of me if I tell you that there were many many nights when I deliberately made extra work for myself rather than go home; that I preferred the quiet calm of my work to the noisy, untidy chaos of our home?’

‘No,’ Sally told him honestly, shaking her head. How could she say anything else, when she too knew what it was like to dread returning home, even if it was for different reasons?

‘We should never have married, of course. We weren’t suited; we didn’t even really like one another. I was never the kind of man she wanted, as she proved when she left me. Her lover was all the things I wasn’t and am not …’