‘Yes,’ Richard admitted. He paused and then told her, ‘I think David is trying to get rid of me…’
‘Get rid of you? What do you mean? Sack you? But he can’t do that…’
‘No… not sack me. It’s no secret that he’s already got rid of most of the more senior men. I’m coming up to sixty…’
‘You’re fifty-five, that’s all,’ Elizabeth protested, ‘and they opted to take early retirement…’
‘Did they?’ Richard asked her wryly.
Elizabeth stared at him.
‘He’s beginning to make me doubt my own judgement, Liz… to make me wonder if perhaps I am getting past it. I keep telling myself that fifty-five is no age, that, when I first started out, a surgeon wasn’t considered to reach his peak until he was close to sixty; these days…
‘He wants me out, I know that… All this rubbish about budgets is just a smokescreen. And I don’t want to retire, Liz… I’m not ready for it. I don’t want to be ready for it. Oh, I know it’s always been there, an inevitable fact of life, but somehow it’s always been safely in the distance… something that happened to other people.
‘I don’t want to retire… don’t want to spend the rest of my life playing golf and reminiscing… waiting for death.’
‘Richard!’ Elizabeth protested.
‘Well, what else is it? Limitless free time… empty time with nothing to fill it. It’s a curse, not a gift. When I think of what it means, of what my life will be, I break out in a cold sweat. The thought of it fills me with panic and revulsion… I’m afraid of all that empty time…’
‘Why haven’t you said anything to me before…?’
He could hear the pain in her voice.
‘It’s never been an issue before… I didn’t even realise how I felt about it myself until David began to drop unsubtle hints about my age. I suppose I ignored it because I didn’t want to think about it.’
‘But it needn’t be the way you think,’ Elizabeth told him. ‘There are things you could do… consultancy work… part-time surgery… you heard what Ian was saying about them looking for a surgeon for the practice… Community work…’
‘Doing what? Pushing wheelchairs and then in turn being pushed in one myself? Oh, hell, Liz, I’m sorry,’ he apologised when he saw her face.
‘It’s all right,’ Elizabeth told him.
His retirement was something they had never really discussed; the years had rushed by so quickly since Sara had left school, their lives had become so busy, and, like him, if she was honest, she had somehow assumed that his retirement was something that was still far away in the future.
She knew how much his work meant to him, but the feelings he was expressing to her now, the sense of fear and emptiness… She discovered that for all her training she was at a loss to know what to say to him.
‘Do you know, I always used to feel sorry for men who dropped down dead in harness? The fatal heart attack, robbing them of their right to a well-earned retirement… Now I almost envy them…’
‘Richard!’
‘Oh, it’s all right… David Howarth, for all that he thinks he’s so damned powerful, can’t make me retire, not even if he does bring in these damned compulsory medicals…’
He saw the troubled look she was giving him.
‘But one day you will have to retire, Richard… You can’t…’ She stopped speaking.
‘I can’t what? Run away from the inevitable?’ He smiled grimly. ‘Do you think I don’t know that? I should be making plans, thinking constructively, addressing the issue positively and confronting its challenge… that’s what our new psychiatrist would undoubtedly tell me. My God… I’ve seen them up at the golf club, waiting to die, living on their memories.’
‘Richard, it doesn’t have to be like that…’ Elizabeth protested.
‘I can’t face it, Liz,’ he told her bleakly, ignoring her protest. ‘I can’t live like that, without my work… without any sense of purpose or order in my life. But if the Northern gets the new unit I’ll have no option.’
‘What? But why?’
‘For two reasons. The first is that I’ll be the one who has lost the General the unit. David Howarth has made no secret of the fact that he disapproves of the way I handle my budgets, that he feels that I’m not making enough economies… that I’m not carrying out enough operations. And the second is that, if the Northern does get the new unit, sooner or later all major surgery will be carried out there and the General will degenerate into a second-rate hospital staffed by junior surgeons doing minor operations, and it won’t be able to justify the expense of carrying someone like me. I’ll be too great a financial drain on its resources for it to keep me. So you see, either way I lose out. It’s a matter of either jump or be pushed.’
‘But it hasn’t been decided yet that the Northern will get the unit. I thought the final decision rested with the Minister?’ Elizabeth protested.