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Nothing could or would ever compensate her for the loss of her parents, but he was her only living relative and she deserved better, far, far better than that he abandon her to the impersonal care of an already overburdened Social Service.
Provided he was allowed to do so.
The situation would have been different had he been married, the social worker had told him, and he had known from her expression what she was thinking. After all, it wasn’t the first time he had seen that look of critical suspicion in someone’s eyes.
For a heterosexual man of his age to have remained unmarried was, he knew, unusual, giving rise to the suspicion in overly fertile minds that there might be something suspect and dangerous in his sexual inclinations, some refusal to acknowledge what he really was, and causing even the most generous and uncritical observer to question if there was perhaps some flaw in his nature that made it impossible for him to give a firm commitment to another human being, to form an emotional bond with them.
In today’s modern society one of man’s greatest sins was to remain emotionally detached. It was… interesting how many people confused emotional detachment with the trauma of emotions numbed by intense pain. Emotionally detached people did not live in fear of suffering a second bout of the pain they dreaded so much.
Men traditionally were not supposed to suffer that kind of pain. Their role was to inflict it and then to walk away from the destruction they had caused.
Walking away was something his sex were very good at, but, as he knew both from his work and personal experience, as a form of emotional management it wasn’t very effective. You could walk away from people but you couldn’t walk away from your own feelings; they went with you… and stayed with you.
He sat down on the edge of his bed and closed his eyes.
Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea, coming back to Britain. It had brought back far too many memories, sharpening the focus that only years of careful self-control had managed to dull. It was pointless telling himself what he already knew: that once it was set in motion there was no turning back of life’s clock, and even if there were… what could he morally have done differently…? Put his own needs first? What would that have gained him? A few brief hours of intense pleasure and the burden of years of guilt. Then he would indeed have been playing God, and with potentially fatal consequences.
Odd that he hadn’t realised until it was too late how very vulnerable he was. Even when it had happened he had assumed that the pain, although intense, would eventually go, that eventually he would love more appropriately and wisely.
He could have told Anya’s social worker that his unmarried state was the result of his being distrustful of his ability to find someone to love.
‘God, Blake, you really are ridiculously idealistic,’ his last love had told him scornfully. ‘People our age don’t fall in love, not unless they’re pathetically dependent…’
She was a New Yorker, glamorous, brittle, witty, intelligent… highly sexed, but intrinsically cold… The kind of woman with whom he tended to form relationships because he knew that they would not look for what he could not give them.
In the end, though, it had not been their lack of mutual love which had driven them apart but his decreasing sexual desire for her.
Sex without love no longer held any appeal for him; it was an appetite he simply no longer needed to feed, and he had let it go without any regret.
She had claimed that it had been the time he had spent in Romania which had changed him, and perhaps she had been right. When he had answered the UN’s call for qualified people to give their time free to help the orphaned victims of the regime he hadn’t really known what to expect. The television footage shown on the news had been harrowing, particularly of the innocent children, but nothing could prepare any human being with any pretension to compassion for the gut-wrenching reality of those centuries-old eyes in the too small baby faces.
He was no stranger to people’s emotional pain, but those children, babies most of them…
It wasn’t so much that it had changed his outlook on life, more that it had reinforced what he already knew and felt, compelled him to accept certain aspects of himself and his own emotional needs.
Which brought him back to Anya.
‘Why do you want her?’ the social worker had asked him scornfully.
Because she needs me, he could have answered, but that response was too simple and too complex. All he could have said was that he had seen in Anya’s eyes that same look as in those children in Romania and that he had known that Anya needed someone of her own, someone who would invest time in loving her, not simply to repair the trauma and damage of losing her parents, but to give her something he suspected she had never known.
It was not that he thought that Lisa and Miguel had been bad parents; it was simply that other things had been more important to them. Physically, after all, they had been there for Anya, but emotionally…?
A foster home, going into care, no matter how good it was, was not the right environment for Anya. He had known that both emotionally and professionally, but Anya’s social worker had also been right when she had pointed out that he could not give her the one-to-one attention he claimed she needed.
He could give her a home, a protected environment, financial security and his love, but he could not be there for her twenty-four hours a day. Finding someone who could was proving to be far more of a problem than he had envisaged—or rather finding the right kind of someone.
But now, thanks to Elizabeth Humphries, it looked as though his search might hopefully be over. She and Richard struck him as a well-matched couple, their relationship healthily balanced.
Richard. He frowned. He was a first-rate surgeon, admired by both his colleagues and his patients, but not evidently by David Howarth. It hadn’t taken Blake long to discover David’s hostility towards Richard, nor to guess at the cause of it.
His frown deepened. The last thing he needed right now was to complicate his life by becoming involved in hospital politics, but, like Richard, he was concerned that too much focus on finance and cost-cutting could ultimately lead to a dangerous and perhaps even life-threatening drop in medical standards.
David had mentioned this evening that the Minister was due to visit both hospitals.
‘Officially she’s the one who will make the final decision about which hospital gets the new unit, but in reality she will be relying on me to take that decision,’ David had boasted to Blake.
Thoughtfully he removed his shirt and padded barefoot into his bathroom.
