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Dinner parties had never been events he had particularly cared for, Blake reflected; they smacked too much of people and places he would rather forget, of a lifestyle and a type of person he had always disliked.
Dinner parties had not been part of his experience as he grew up; his mother, widowed and working, had not moved in these kinds of circles. When he was a boy, dinner parties and the kind of people of who gave them had been surrounded by an aura of mystique and snobbish exclusivity, membership to a club for which he had had contempt rather than envy. When his mother had entertained, it had been informally, friends who dropped in and stayed on to eat, and in his memory the house of his childhood had always been filled with noise, laughter, conversation, good humour and good food, a home where he had sat silently listening to his mother dispensing advice, listening, talking, challenging.
Was it there that it had begun—his fascination with people’s hopes and dreams—their minds?
But of course those happy childhood memories belonged to the time when his father was still alive, before his mother had become ill.
She was dead now. She had died while he was in the last year of his training, and six months after that… Automatically his thoughts changed path, obedient to his inner silent command.
These days dinner parties no longer held any mystique for him; they were no longer part of a world and a lifestyle which excluded him; rather now he was the one to exclude them. Their formality and self-consciousness irked and confined him; he considered them old-fashioned set pieces of stereotyped behaviour, show-pieces which brought out the worst aspects of certain types of human nature.
How, after all, could anyone expect to enjoy his or her food in such an atmosphere of contrived competitiveness? No wonder women like Grace always seemed to have such an anxious look about them.
It made him smile wryly to himself to recognise how once he would have felt not just slightly uncomfortable in such surroundings, but resentfully defensive as well.
During his years at university he had had a tendency to treat wealth and success with a certain degree of contempt and suspicion. He still didn’t believe that focusing one’s life on the attainment of money and status was a goal to be lauded and admired, but now his reservations were based on very different foundations.
In order to live one needed to have money; but in order to live well one needed to have something more, something that came from within the person themselves and which could not be bought.
It had taken him a long time to understand that, and even longer to be able to put it into practice. There had been years of his life which he had wasted living under a dark, bitter cloud of resentment and anger, refusing to accept that the goals he had set himself, the whole purpose of the life he was making for himself were not really his goals at all.
With hindsight it was so easy to see how self-destructive his behaviour had been, but then so many things were easy to see… with hindsight… with knowledge… with awareness.
Bleakly he closed his eyes.
He hadn’t told Elizabeth the whole truth when he had responded to her interest about what had brought him here, what had made him choose to work at the General. With his connections it would have been easy enough for him to approach one of the major teaching hospitals, to take on a consultancy and go into semi-private practice; it would certainly have been far more lucrative, made far greater financial and career sense.
But something much more important to him than money and status had brought him here. When he had first seen the advertisement for the post at the General he had merely glanced at it, but when he had realised where it was…
He grimaced to himself, well aware of how the majority of his colleagues would have responded to an admission from him that he was allowing himself to be dictated to by fate. No, not allowing himself to be dictated to, simply taking advantage of the opportunity fate was offering him; there was a difference…
His guardianship of Anya meant that his whole life would have to be refocused, and, once he had got over the initial shock of recognising that fact, he acknowledged that it was perhaps also time for him to refocus himself inwardly as well as outwardly.
For far too long he had lived with too much of himself imprisoned in the past, his deepest emotions buried and denied because of the pain he was afraid they might cause him.
He had come back now determined to confront that past, to confront it and to lay an old ghost.
But certainly not in the biblical sense… His mouth curled self-derisively at the thought. No, there was scant chance that he would ever be allowed to do that. Or that he would want to?
He frowned away the question unanswered. What he had come back for was not to wallow in self-pity but simply to draw a line under a certain section of his life.
The past, after all, could always be analysed, understood, resolved and forgiven, but it could never truly be forgotten, deleted; and the effects of his past were woven so firmly within the fabric of his personality that to try to pull them free would be impossible.
His years in America had been good to him… good for him… He had gone there following his mother’s death—a temporary escape at first, a place where by dint of hard work and determination he could totally transform himself and return like some mythological hero, victorious and clothed in gold; only the weight of that gold had oppressed him, its shine tarnished by the emptiness it hid and which only he could see… and then after all there was no point in returning home—what point was there, when there was no one to recognise his success, his magnificence… no one to marvel at and envy what he had achieved?
And so he had stayed in California, and when one of the new intake of college graduates had made it plain to him that she wanted him he had opened his arms to her and told himself that the sleekness of her suntanned body, the swing of her thick dark hair, the desire in her dark brown eyes, the lure of her sexuality and the skill with which she used it were more than adequate compensation for all that he had lost.
They had stayed together for three years and then she had left him for a man twenty years her senior, who, she had told him quite candidly, would make her a far better husband than he ever could.
He had watched from the sidelines the day she married him and had been surprised to discover how very distant he felt from what was happening… how unmoved.
He had still been living in California the year Michael Waverly came to visit him, but he hadn’t stayed on long after Mike had gone. Somehow by then the Californian lifestyle had begun to pall on him a little.
He had needed something more nourishing… more sustaining, and so he had moved north and begun a new cycle, but he had still taken the baggage of his old self with him, only this time he had added the heavier weight of guilt.
And to some extent he still carried it. Which brought him back to Anya and the present and his determination to make sure, as far as it was within his power to do so, that he fulfilled the promise he had so carelessly given her mother.
