‘Mum, what on earth’s got into Dad? I’ve never known him be so tetchy and irritable.’
Richard paused outside the kitchen door as he heard his daughter’s voice.
‘He’s worried about this new Accident Unit,’ he heard Elizabeth responding.
‘No… it’s more than that,’ Sara protested. ‘You don’t think… well, you don’t think he’s put out about your success, do you…?’
‘Put out…? Jealous of me, you mean?’
‘Well, yes…’ Richard could hear the discomfort in Sara’s voice. ‘Well, it can’t be easy for him, can it…? He’s always been used to having you at home and now here you are going off on conferences, making an independent life for yourself…’
‘Oh, Sara, no. I’m sure you’re wrong,’ Elizabeth answered. She said the words firmly enough, but Richard caught the note of uncertainty that underlay them and it hurt him.
He was proud of Elizabeth, proud of her and pleased for her, and if he had started to contrast the upswing in her career with the threatened downswing in his own it wasn’t because he was jealous of her. Surely she knew that, even if Sara didn’t?
He could hear Sara walking towards the half-open kitchen door, and quickly he stepped back from it. The last thing he wanted now was for his daughter to realise he had overheard what she had been saying.
He could tell that Elizabeth was surprised when he cut their visit short and said that he was tired.
* * *
‘You were very grumpy this afternoon. I think Sara was hurt by the way you behaved.’
Sara was hurt… Richard paused in the act of removing his shoes.
Elizabeth was already undressed and ready for bed. Unlike his, her hair was showing little signs of greying. Wrapped in a towel, with the light behind her as she padded round the bedroom, she looked almost as young as Sara.
She paused, bending to open the drawer and remove a clean nightdress.
‘Richard…’ He could hear the tension in her voice as she closed the drawer and then turned round. ‘This… this grumpiness… it isn’t anything to do with me, is it… with the fact that I…?’
Angrily Richard threw down the sock he had just removed.
‘With the fact that what? That you’re an up-and-coming successful career woman while I’m just an old has-been, fit for nothing other than being pensioned off?
‘What are you trying to ask me, Liz? If I’m jealous of you… Is that what you think?’
‘No, of course it isn’t.’ He could hear the shock in her voice. ‘Why on earth should I think anything like that?’ she asked him.
‘I overheard you and Sara talking in the kitchen,’ he told her flatly. ‘It’s almost a classic case history, isn’t it? Ageing husband’s jealousy of his dynamic independent wife, his fear that her independence will mean that he loses control of their relationship, his inevitable decline through anger to depression and then impotence as his wife’s power and authority rises. Odd, isn’t it, how sensitive a barometer a man’s sexual organs are of his sense of self-worth and his status in a relationship, in society itself?’
He felt the bed depress as Elizabeth sat down beside him. ‘Richard, what is it? I know you’re not jealous of me…’
‘Do you?’ He turned to look at her. ‘Liz, I heard the doubt in your voice this afternoon when you were talking to Sara…’
‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘but the doubt wasn’t because I thought she was right. I know she isn’t.’
‘Then what was it for…?’
‘Good old-fashioned female guilt,’ Elizabeth told him ruefully. ‘I know how worried you are about the new unit and part of me feels that I should be here beside you, worrying with you, just as part of me felt guilty because I couldn’t be with Sara twenty-four hours a day worrying alongside her when Katie was ill.
‘It’s one of the things that being a woman is all about… Our emotional barometer, if you like—the thing that tells us we can’t be truly a woman unless we’re “there” for people we love… unless we can somehow wave a magic wand and make life perfect for them, take away all their pain and anxiety; that’s how we judge whether or not we’re successful,’ she told him softly.
‘The doubt you heard was because I was asking myself how I could be a good wife and still go away knowing how much you were worrying… and knowing too that you didn’t want to share your worry with me…’
‘Because I didn’t want to spoil things for you. I know how much this conference means to you…’
‘So there is something else, apart from the unit?’ Elizabeth asked him quietly.