Cruel Legacy. Penny Jordan
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off …’
‘Oh, Sara, you’re not being fair,’ she had protested. ‘Your father has always encouraged me in my work …’
‘Mmm … but his career has always taken priority, hasn’t it? Oh, I know how pleased he is for you, how proud he is of you, but if he was sitting at home all day while you——’
‘It won’t come to that,’ Elizabeth had interrupted her firmly.
‘No? Ian was saying the other day that two or three of the older, more senior men at the Northern have already been approached with a view to getting them to go, and Dad is only a few years off sixty …’
Now, as she watched him, Elizabeth’s heart sank a little. She knew how much his work meant to him and she knew what a blow it would be to his pride, his sense of self-worth if he was asked to retire before he was ready.
Perhaps if she subtly tried to underline the advantages of his not having to work as hard, just as a precautionary measure. Her mouth curled into a rueful smile. Burgeoning career woman she might be, but in many ways she was still very much caught up in the traditional role of the supportive wife. That was how her generation had been brought up.
‘Oh, did you manage to get over to see Sara?’ Richard asked her, changing the subject.
‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘She’s feeling a bit frazzled. I offered to have Katie for a few days to give her a break; I’ve still quite a lot of holiday leave to take.’
‘You always were a soft touch,’ Richard told her. ‘For all of us …’
‘I’m glad you’re honest enough to include yourself in that comment,’ she teased him.
‘How do you feel about getting out of here and going home?’ Richard asked her urgently, leaning across the table so that the hovering waiter could not overhear what he was saying.
Elizabeth looked at him quickly to confirm that she hadn’t misunderstood the subtle message he was giving her. In the early days of their marriage, when their passion for one another had still been new and exciting, it had been no strange thing for them to leave early from dinner parties and other social events, Richard claiming quite untruthfully that he was on call, when in fact what he had wanted, what they had both wanted, was to go home and make love.
Laughing together, they had hurried back to their small flat, their urgent eagerness for one another as intoxicating as a heady wine, but these days their lovemaking, although still pleasurable, tended to be a far more leisurely and considered affair, its spontaneity tempered originally by the demands of a growing family and more latterly by their individual career demands and a certain natural lessening of the intensity of their desire.
‘Does that mean what I think it means?’ she asked him in amusement, and then laughed as she saw the way he was looking at her.
‘We are not teenagers any more!’ she told him ten minutes later when he took hold of her in the street, kissing her firmly before hurrying her towards their car.
‘Who says we need to be?’ he whispered as he paused to kiss her a second time. ‘Just because we aren’t under thirty, it doesn’t mean that we automatically stop functioning properly, that we aren’t just as capable as our juniors. There are, after all, times when experience and knowledge count for a lot more than youth and enthusiasm …’
Elizabeth touched his face gently.
‘Oh, Richard.’ There’s no shame in growing older, she wanted to tell him, but how could she, when all around them was the irrefutable evidence that there was? Being old and ill and dependent—these were now the taboo subjects that sex and birth had once been.
Richard wasn’t alone in dreading retirement as an acknowledgement of the beginning of his own old age.
PHILIPPA opened her eyes and shut them again quickly as she remembered what day it was.
Outside it was still not properly light, but she knew she would not go back to sleep. She threw back the duvet, shivering as she felt the cool draught from the half-open window.
The cremation was not due to take place until two o’clock—plenty of time for her to do all the things she had to do …
‘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