She lifted her head, giving him a surprised look.
‘I thought you didn’t want…’
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he told
her, taking hold of her and starting to kiss her. After all it didn’t really matter, surely, that it was the memory of another and very different woman that had suddenly aroused him? After all, it was Debs he was holding now, her body he was caressing, her mouth he was kissing, her familiar scent filling his nostrils, her soft little moan of pleasure…
CHAPTER TEN
RICHARD frowned, glancing at his watch as he parked his car in his designated spot. It had taken him ten minutes longer than usual to get to the hospital. The traffic on the bypass was becoming increasingly heavy with the closure of a local school and its amalgamation with another.
He was still frowning as he strode towards the hospital entrance. He was due to attend a meeting this morning at the Regional Health Authority’s head office, about the siting of the Fast Response Accident Unit.
The suggestion to open such a unit locally had originally been his and he had worked hard to get the scheme off the ground, and, while logically he knew and believed that what really mattered was not where the unit was sited but how well it served its patients, another part of him slightly resented the fact that his idea, once formally adopted by the regional authority, was no longer solely his, and that they were now coming under increasing pressure to compete against another hospital for the unit.
‘It’s all these endless bloody meetings,’ he had complained to Elizabeth at breakfast. ‘They waste so much damned time. Committee men, accountants; they might have time to spend sitting around empire-building, but I don’t. All I ever hear from Brian Simmonds these days is, “Don’t forget, we can’t afford to antagonise the committee."’
He had never liked the subtle behind-the-scenes manoeuvrings, the back-stabbings, the constant battle for power and control. He was a surgeon, that was where his skills lay… his forte did not lie in manipulating people, in being subtly persuasive, in distorting facts so that they showed to his advantage.
Unlike Christopher Jeffries, the consultant at the Northern, who seemed positively to enjoy the cut and thrust and the back-stabbing that went on at their meetings.
The issue should have been clear-cut enough, after all. It was simply a matter of deciding which hospital could best serve the needs of the public as the home of the Fast Response Accident Unit. Only that issue now seemed to have become clouded by others, so that it had become not just a battle to win the allocation of the unit, but a battle to determine which hospital would ultimately be superior to the other.
A morning at the Area Health Authority offices, trying to defend his own hospital’s position and at the same time promote it as being superior to its rival, was far more exhausting than a whole week spent in Theatre, or at least it had been. In every operating theatre there was always some degree of tension; there had to be—the use of the word ‘theatre’ to describe the operation area was almost too appropriate. There, if one had time to observe it as an audience, the full drama of life and death was played out before one’s eyes.
But that tension did not affect him negatively. It was a part and parcel of his life. A surgeon who claimed that he did not feei or experience it was, in his opinion, a surgeon who had no awareness of the trust and responsibility that others placed in him.
‘Ah, Richard. Good—ready to leave. We might as well both travel in my car; it won’t save much for practical purposes, but every little helps. I wanted to have a word with you about the budgets.’
Richard cursed under his breath. He had hoped to have a few minutes to go through his post before leaving for the Authority’s headquarters, but Brian was making it plain that he was ready to leave.
The General had been one of the first hospitals to opt to become self-governing under the new government scheme, and, although Brian had been enthusiastic about the changes, Richard was still not wholly convinced. In theory the idea might be a good one, but as a surgeon he had an in-built dislike of equating health with money. It was his job to help people, not to divide them into those who could afford to be helped and those who could not.
‘Yes, the budgets,’ Brian announced once they were both inside his car and he was driving out of the hospital car park.
‘You know what we’re doing, don’t you, with these budgets and quotas?’ said Richard with concern. ‘We’re forcing some of the GP practices at the bottom end of the social scale to abandon patients who badly need their care. Of course a nice middle-class practice with sensible, healthy patients who take care of their health is going to manage its budget better than one where half its patients are teenage girls with a couple of illegitimate children and the other half pensioners who’ve never had the opportunity, the luxury, of taking care of their own health.’
‘I know what you’re saying, Richard, and of course there’s no question of our abandoning those practices, those people… All I need for the time being, while we’ve got this decision hanging over us about the Fast Response Accident Unit, is for you to try to keep within the budgets. The chief administrator is an accountant by profession, and not…’
He stopped as Richard made a brief derogatory noise in his throat.
‘That says it all, doesn’t it?’ he told Brian. ‘We’re here to promote health but we’re run by accountants.’
‘It’s the way of the world these days,’ Brian told him. He could see both sides… Sometimes he envied David Howarth, the chief administrator. He had no idea how difficult it could be here at the sharp end dealing with men like Richard, who, for all their dedication and brilliance when it came to their work, all too often stubbornly refused the need for financial discipline. Sometimes he felt as though he was single-handedly performing a balancing act worthy of Atlas himself.
He glanced at Richard’s set face and sighed. He would just have to do what he could to keep Richard and David as far apart today as possible. David was one of the modern breed of administrators, the task of administration and financial control of much greater importance to him than the nature of the ‘business’ that finance related to. He had been head-hunted by the Authority from industry and it was common knowledge that in his previous position the spectacular improvement in cash flow he had achieved had been via a cost-cutting exercise which had involved a ruthless reduction of staff.
David had already hinted that he considered that the General was top-heavy with senior men, some of whom he would like to see pensioned off to open the door to more effective rationalisation and cost improvement.
‘But we don’t have anyone even remotely close to retirement age yet,’ Brian had protested. ‘Richard is in his mid-fifties and Leslie Osbourne is fifty-one.’
‘In industry these days it isn’t unusual to see men at the top going at fifty,’ David had told him smoothly.
Brian frowned uncomfortably, remembering that interview. He was close to fifty himself.
* * *
Richard grimaced and flexed his muscles tiredly. Strange how sitting in a chair could make his bones ache so much more than operating.