‘It does,’ Richard agreed sombrely. ‘But she is bound to follow David’s recommendation…’
‘Oh, Richard…’
The sympathy in her voice made him smile crookedly. ‘Perhaps Sara was right after all; perhaps a part of me is jealous of you, or envious rather.’
Immediately Elizabeth went over to him, reaching up to take him in her arms, holding him tenderly. ‘That’s rubbish,’ she told him, ‘and you know it.’
Gratefully he leaned his weight against her briefly, giving in to his need to brush his cheek against the softness of her hair as they stood silently together, holding one another. And then, as though the emotion of the moment was too much for him, he raised his head and asked her shakily, ‘What do you say, Mrs Humphries? What do you counsel me to do? What’s your solution to this problem?’
Elizabeth looked at him and shook her head. How could she tell him that the solution lay with him, and in his somehow finding for himself something that would give his life the purpose he obviously believed it would lose if he no longer had his work to harness himself to?
‘It’s all about changing one’s attitude,’ she told him gently. ‘And that’s the easiest thing in the world to say and the hardest thing to do.’
How often had she said those words to other people, preaching them like a litany and genuinely believing them? And yet now, when she said them to Richard, she discovered that they felt as empty and useless as he claimed his life would be without his career.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
‘RICHARD, are you sure you want to go tonight?’ Elizabeth asked, casting a troubled look at his face. He had aged somehow over these last few weeks—not so much physically; it was more as though he had lost his normal appetite for life, the drive and vigour which had always made him respond so enthusiastically to life’s challenges.
‘We don’t have any option,’ Richard told her. ‘Any refusal to turn up and socialise with the hospital’s new luminary is bound to earn me another black mark with David.’
‘Have you actually met him yet—the new psychiatrist?’ Elizabeth asked him.
‘Brian introduced us briefly the other day.’
Elizabeth frowned as she heard the reserve in his voice and knew the cause of it, just as she knew that there was nothing she could do to help him.
Oh, she could listen to him, talk to him, offer positive suggestions about how he might try to help himself come to terms with his fear of retirement, but she couldn’t wave a magic wand and make life stand still for him. To comfort him by telling him that he might still have several years of work ahead of him before he did retire was not the answer, only a means of pushing the problem to one side and pretending it did not exist…
Brian and Grace Simmonds lived six or seven miles away in a neat modern house on a small luxury complex which personally Elizabeth would have found claustrophobically stifling but which suited Grace Simmonds’ neat, orderly personality.
Despite the differences in their temperaments, Elizabeth got on well with Grace. She was six years younger than Elizabeth and yet behaved as though she were much older; she was, Elizabeth recognised, one of those women who felt most comfortable assuming the protective mantle of a now old-fashioned type of female middle-age. Her life revolved around her three children, her garden and her bridge, while Brian was firmly kept to its periphery and his own male sphere of work, and golf.
It wasn’t the kind of relationship which Elizabeth would have wanted, but it appeared to suit them and, knowing Grace as she did, she wasn’t totally surprised following their arrival to discover that their hostess had seated her next to the ‘guest of honour’.
Grace was the type of person who was instinctively defensive and suspicious of anything that involved curing the mind rather than the body. To her a psychiatrist would be someone to be avoided and kept at a distance, and since David was alone and Richard was the next most senior person present it would seem to Grace to be the ‘right thing to do’ to seat her next to the new man.
‘He seems quite… normal,’ Grace told Richard and Elizabeth in a nervous whisper as she glanced over her shoulder to where Brian and David Howarth were standing with a tall brown-haired man who Elizabeth assumed must be the new psychiatrist. ‘It’s a pity he isn’t married, though…’ she continued as Richard moved away. ‘It makes things very awkward. I know the numbers are even because David is on his own as well, but…’
She had a habit of leaving her sentences trailing, which Elizabeth tended to find irritating. ‘I had thought of inviting someone to even things out, but you never know, do you, and since this is more of a business dinner than a social occasion…? Brian is so unhelpful with anything like this,’ she added fretfully, frowning in the direction of her husband.
‘I’m sure you’ve made the right decision,’ Elizabeth soothed tactfully, moving away to join Richard.
‘Dreadful woman,’ Richard muttered under his breath. ‘How Brian has managed to live with her all these years without murdering her I don’t know.’
Elizabeth said nothing. She knew that Richard’s outburst sprang more from tension than from any real dislike of Grace Simmonds.
* * *
‘Ah, good. I was hoping that you and I might get an opportunity to talk…’
Elizabeth raised an eyebrow but still smiled as Blake Hamilton politely pulled out her chair for her. He hadn’t waited for Brian to introduce them, but had excused himself to Brian and David and come over to speak to Richard and to meet her as soon as he had seen them.
His good looks were something that Elizabeth discounted when assessing him—after all, she was married to an extremely good-looking man herself—but the warmth and openness of his manner was something that surprised her.
She had met other psychiatrists, both socially through Richard and through her own work, and, unlike Grace, she found them neither intimidating nor threatening; what many of them did have in common was a trait she had been told she must develop herself, and that was the ability to distance themselves from other people’s emotions.
Blake Hamilton, though, was displaying an unexpected warmth and charm which her instincts as a woman told her was neither contrived nor shallow. Despite the years in the States there was no trace of any American accent in his voice, nor was there in his manner any hint of any kind of arrogant awareness of how fortunate the General was to have secured his services.