over to the answering machine, running back the tape and then playing it. There was a message from the funeral parlour and as she listened to it she wondered idly how long it had taken the speaker to develop that deeply sepulchral note to his voice. Which had come first, the voice or the job?
As she allowed her thoughts to wander she acknowledged that she was using them as a means of evading pursuing what she had been thinking earlier.
The second message was from the bank manager asking her to make an appointment to call and see him, to discuss her own private affairs and those of the company. She frowned as she listened to it. Why would he want to see her about the company’s financial affairs? She knew nothing about them.
Perhaps it was just a formality.
The tape came to an end. She switched it off and almost immediately the phone rang. She picked up the receiver.
‘Philippa … it’s Mummy …’
Mummy. How falsely affectionate that small word was, making it sound as though the bond between them was close and loving. In reality Philippa doubted that her mother had ever allowed herself to love her. Like her father, her mother’s attitude had been that love was something which had to be earned. Love and approval had not been things which had been given freely or from the heart in her childhood home, and Philippa was bitterly conscious of this now as she caught the thread of disapproval running beneath the soft sweetness of her mother’s voice.
When Philippa had been growing up she had never been punished by smacks or harsh words as other children had been; that was not her parents’ way. An icy look, the quelling words, ‘Philippa, Daddy is very disappointed in you,’ and the withdrawal of her mother which accompanied the criticism had always been enough … More than enough to a child as sensitive as she had been, Philippa recognised, and her reactions to them were so deeply entrenched within her that just hearing that cold disapproval in her mother’s voice now was enough to make her clench her stomach muscles and grip the receiver as she fought to control the answering anger and pain churning resentfully inside her.
‘Robert has been telling us how foolish Andrew was. Your father and I had no idea he was behaving so recklessly. Your father’s very upset about it. No one here seems to have heard anything about it yet, but it’s bound to get out, and you know that he’s captain this year of the golf club——’
Philippa was trembling again. ‘I doubt that any of his golfing cronies are likely to hear about Andrew,’ she interrupted, trying to keep her voice as level and light as she could, but unable to resist the irony of adding, ‘And of course Andrew wasn’t Daddy’s son …’
‘No, of course there is that,’ her mother allowed patiently, oblivious to Philippa’s sarcasm; so oblivious in fact that she made Philippa feel both childishly petty and furiously angry. ‘But he was your husband and in the circumstances Daddy feels that it might be a good idea if you didn’t come over to see us for a while. Poor, dear Robert is terribly upset about the whole thing, you know. I mean, you do live almost on his doorstep and he’s held in such high esteem … Have you made any arrangements yet for the …?’ Delicately her mother let the sentence hang in the air.
‘For the cremation, you mean?’ Philippa asked her grimly. ‘Yes. It will be on Friday, but don’t worry, Mother; I shall quite understand if you don’t feel you want to be there.’
‘It isn’t a question of wanting …’ her mother told her, obviously shocked. ‘One has a duty, and Andrew was after all our son-in-law, although I must say, Philippa, I could never really understand why you married him, nor could Daddy. We did try to warn you …’
Did you … did you really, Mother? Philippa wanted to demand. And when was that … when did you warn me? Was it after you told me what a good husband Andrew would make me, or before you pointed out that I would be lucky to find another man so suited to me … or rather so suited to the kind of wife you had raised me to be? If you really didn’t want me to marry him, why wouldn’t you allow me to go on to university; why did you insist on keeping me at home, as dependent on you as a pet dog and just as carefully leashed?
‘But then you always were such a very impetuous and stubborn girl,’ her mother sighed. ‘Robert was saying only this morning how much both Daddy and I spoiled you and I’m afraid he was right.
‘Have you made any plans yet for after … ?’
‘Not yet,’ Philippa told her brusquely. ‘But don’t worry, Mummy; whatever plans I do make I shall make sure that they don’t cause either you or Daddy any problems.’
Philippa replaced the receiver before her mother could make any response.
Her palms felt damp and sticky, her body perspiring with the heat of her suppressed anger, but what, after all, was the point in blaming her parents for what they were, or what they had tried to make her? Hadn’t they, after all, been victims of their upbringing just as much as she was of hers? This was the way she had taught herself to think over the years. It was a panacea, an anaesthetic to all the pain she could not allow herself to feel.
‘THE trouble with long weekends is that they just don’t last long enough,’ Richard grumbled as he drained his teacup and reached for the pot to refill it. Elizabeth laughed.
‘Fraud,’ she teased him affectionately. ‘You know as well as I do that you can’t wait to get back to your patients. I heard you on the phone to Jenny earlier.’
Jenny Wisden was Richard’s junior registrar and as dedicated to her work as Richard was to his. She had married the previous year, a fellow medic working in a busy local practice.
‘Poor Jenny,’ Elizabeth had commented at the time.
Richard had raised his eyebrows as he’d asked her, ‘Why poor? The girl’s deliriously in love; anyone can see that.’
‘Yes, she is, and so is he. She’s also a young woman on the bottom rungs of a notoriously demanding career ladder. What’s going to happen when she and Tony decide they want children?’
‘She’ll take maternity leave,’ Richard had informed her, plainly not following the drift of her argument.
‘Yes, and then what? Spend the next eighteen years constantly torn between conflicting demands and loyalties, knowing that she’s got to sacrifice either her feelings as a mother or her desire to reach the top of her profession.’
Richard had frowned then.
‘What are you trying to say? I thought you were all for female equality … women fulfilling their professional potential. You’ve lectured me about it often enough …’
‘I am all for it, but, once a woman has children, biologically and materially the scales are weighted against her. You know it’s true, Rick: once Jenny has children she won’t be able to go as far in her career as she would if she were a man. She’ll be the one who has to take time off to attend the school concert and the children’s sports day. She’ll be the one who takes them to the dentist and who worries about them when they’re ill, feeling guilty because she can’t be with them.
‘No amount of paid substitute care, no matter how professional or good it is, can ever assuage a woman’s in-built biological guilt on that score.’
‘Mmm—damn waste it will be too. Jenny is one of the best, if not the best junior registrar I’ve ever had.’
‘Well, perhaps in future you should remember that and when you’re lecturing your students you should remind them all, but especially the male students, what sexual equality really should mean—and I’m not referring to a token filling up and emptying of the dishwasher now and then.
‘Do you realise, Rick, that, despite all this media hoo-ha about the “New Man”, women are still responsible for the major part of all domestic chores? Sorry,’