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,’ she’d apologised, with a wry smile. ‘I didn’t mean to start lecturing you, but …’
‘I know.’ Richard had smiled, standing up and leaning towards her to kiss her.
‘I saw Sir Arthur yesterday,’ Elizabeth told him now.
Sir Arthur Lawrence was the chairman of the hospital board, an ex-army major, rigidly old-fashioned in his views and outlook, with whom Richard had had so many clashes over the years.
‘Oh, did you? What did he have to say for himself? More complaints about overspending on budgets, I suppose,’ Richard grunted.
Elizabeth laughed. ‘No, as a matter of fact he was very complimentary, praising you for all the work you’ve done to help raise money for the new Fast Response Accident Unit.’
Richard grunted again. ‘You should have told him not to count his chickens. We need government funding if we’re to go ahead with it, and we haven’t heard that we’re going to get it yet. The Northern is putting up a pretty good counter-claim to ours. They maintain that they’re closer to a wider range of motorway systems than we are …’
‘And we’re closer to the centre of the region and we have better access to the motorway,’ Elizabeth reminded him. ‘And you’ve got a much better recovery record.’
‘Mmm … well, that’s no thanks to Sir Arthur; you should have heard the objections he raised when we opened our recovery ward …’
‘Admit it, you enjoy fighting with him.’ Elizabeth laughed.
Richard pulled a face. ‘He’s twenty years behind the times … more … Hell, is that the time? I’ve got to go. You’re at home today, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. I thought I might drive over and see Sara. She sounded a bit down when I spoke to her yesterday.’
‘Yes, it’s no picnic being a GP’s wife—nor being a GP, either.’ Richard kissed her, smiling at her as he suggested, ‘Why don’t we go out for dinner together tonight … Mario’s? Just the two of us,’ he added.
‘Just the two of us,’ Elizabeth responded, emphasising the ‘just’. ‘Mmm … that would be lovely.’
‘I’ll get Kelly to book us a table,’ he promised her as he picked up his briefcase and headed for the door.
After he had gone, Elizabeth made herself a fresh cup of coffee and picked up a buff folder from the dresser. The dresser had been an antiques fair find, which she and Richard had stripped of its old paint, a long and laborious job which she suspected had cost far more in terms of their time and paint-stripper than had she bought the ready-stripped, polished version from an antique shop.
There was a sense of satisfaction in having done the work themselves, though, and she had enjoyed those hours in Richard’s company. They had reminded her of the early days of their marriage, when it hadn’t seemed so unusual to see him wearing old clothes and getting dirty. ‘You’re so lucky, you and Richard,’ her friends often told her enviously. But their marriage had suffered its ups and downs just like any other. Where they had been lucky perhaps had been in that both of them shared the same deep commitment to their relationship, so that, at times when both of them might have viewed their individual roles within it from opposing and conflicting viewpoints, their joint desire to keep their marriage alive and functioning had continued to survive.
She had not always experienced the same contentment in their relationship, the same pleasure in being herself as she did now, Elizabeth admitted. There had been times, when Sara was young, when she had felt Richard growing away from her … when she had felt threatened by and resentful of not just the claims of his work but his evident involvement with it.
It had been an article in the local newspaper absently flicked through in the hairdressers which had initially sparked off her interest in community work. With a twenty-year-old degree and no professional skills whatsoever, she had humbly approached the local community liaison officer, explaining that she would like to give her services and that she had time on her hands with her daughter living away from home, but that she had no skills she could put to use.
‘No skills?’ the other woman had queried. ‘You run a home, you’ve brought up a family, you drive a car. Don’t worry, we’ll soon find something for you
