Ned Hawke seated himself at his desk. He pushed aside the opened books and unanswered letters. His head descended into his hands. Today had been a disaster, a complete and utter catastrophe. He should never have taken Nightingale to that horrible place with its fleas and dust. He had disappointed her, he knew, and in doing so had disappointed himself. He should have felt empty and unfulfilled, having been denied release, but he did not. His heart ached. He thought that he could never feel this way again, after Arabella. He shouldn't feel this way again. It was a game. No emotional response should come into his love-making. It was a pursuit, a chase, a game.
He seduced virgins. He made them love him, just as he had loved her. Then he dropped them from a great height and let them plummet back to the earth, their head no longer in the clouds. It was a game. It made him feel better to hear them moan and cry out as he showed them how to use their bodies. To him they were objects, not people. He did not care who they were or what happened to them after he rejected them, just as long as they were virgins. A whore could lie, a virgin could not.
He shaped them as if they were clay, like some modern day Pygmalion, into his ideals. He kissed them, he touched them, he watched their composure melt. He was the gentleman and the knight, always ready to stop when they asked and listen to tales of their vapid lives. When he made them happy, when he heard them climax, he was fulfilled. At least he could make somebody happy. The feeling was like a drug, the high achieved lessening with every consequent encounter, requiring more and more dosages, until finally he had to find a new one.
Arabella was his Eve, in every sense of the word. She was his first and she was ultimately the poisoned apple. He had loved her. He had given himself to her like some sort of virgin sacrifice. It still hurt to remember how blind he had been to her true personality. Love and chastity had meant nothing to her. She had warped his mind and appetites, so that to this day he found himself reliving those moments repeatedly. It was the only way that he could satisfy himself. Masturbation had lost its novelty long ago. He needed women. Women that could not possibly lie to him, to whom sex was not a mechanism but a new experience. He used and discarded them, following the example of Arabella.
Now Ned had Victoria. Pretty, hostile Victoria. She was older than most women he chose to bed. A virgin, he was sure, yet strangely fiery. He thought too often about her, those eyes tattooed into his mind, the sound of her voice recorded in his ears. He did not see her breasts, nor her hair or face, just the eyes. Eyes that could change from rain to storm in the flicker of an eyelid, that could flash with lightning or glow with warmth. He loved her, he was sure. More than he had ever loved Arabella.
This was not supposed to happen to him. He was supposed to be unattached to his prey. They were supposed to love him, just he had loved Arabella, but he should never feel anything for them. They were objects, they were clay, they were nothing.
Ned Hawke loved Victoria. That was one big problem.
He did not hear the door open or the whiff of trouser-legs rubbing over slow footsteps. It was not until Arthur Hawke senior spoke that Ned realized he was not alone.
Arthur cleared his throat, although it was not foggy. "I saw Stephen today."
"Yes," Ned groaned.
"Why don't you look at me when I am talking to you?" Arthur ran a hand through his sparse hair, as if checking to see if he had lost any more. It exasperated him that his younger brother, Stephen, had a full head of naturally blonde hair, whilst his was grey and coming loose by the handful. There were only two years separating them, and Stephen's job as an insane doctor must surely be far more stressful than that of a banker. So why was it that he was going bald and Stephen wasn't? On the plus side, Stephen was very overweight, whilst Arthur retained the figure of youth (although his stomach had softened and his muscles had begun to sag).
Ned turned to face his father. "You say you saw Uncle Stephen." His blue eyes stared insolently from beneath his dark eyebrows, daring his father to rebuke him again.
Arthur took a deep breath, clearing his throat once more. "Exactly when were you planning on telling your mother and I that you had lost your position as an intern at Stephen's hospital? That really is unacceptable, Edward."
"I've already found a new position," Ned replied, quietly. Why wouldn't his father leave him alone? Couldn't he see that he was busy?
"Doing what?" Arthur asked. "If you had kept your head down, your hands to yourself and your dick in your pants, you would have inherited Stephen's position when Stephen chose to retire. That was the plan, remember? Instead, I discover that rather than performing your duties, you've been indulging your appetites whilst you were supposed to be working. For goodness sake, Edward, do you have no sense of responsibility what-so-ever? What if a patient had walked in? Stephen might have been facing some very serious legal proceedings, had that happened. As it stands, I am deeply ashamed to hear about this. I thought that you had grown out of that mind-set a long time ago. If you want intercourse, you go and pay for it. You do not seduce the nurses, especially not whilst you and the nurse are meant to be performing your duties. It is not professional and it is not acceptable."
"It was only once-" Ned protested.
"It did not occur just once," Arthur snapped. His blue eyes seemed to bulge from his reddening face. The pain in his chest was back, arriving as always in the most inopportune moments. Hurriedly, he cleared his throat. "Stephen had had complaints about your behavior before, but he had dismissed them, mainly because you were his nephew. I know you. I know that you would not settle for just one nurse when there was an entire parade of them concentrated into that small area. The complaints are very likely to be true."
"It doesn't matter." Ned watched his father's cherry-colored face. Arthur Hawke senior was grey-haired, balding, red-cheeked, bulbous eyed and pot-stomached. If this was what he was going to age into, he hoped to God that he died young.
"Doesn't matter? Doesn't matter?" Arthur repeated these words with added emphasis, as if he could not believe his son's arrogance. "It matters a great deal. It was always intended that you would inherit the Hawke Clinic; else, I would never have invested so much money in it. As it stands, Stephen has no successor and you have no occupation. How long did you expect to get away with telling your mother and I that you were on leave from the Clinic? What on earth do you imagine that you are going to do now? I do not have the finances to indulge your every whim. It's high time that you started to take some responsibility for your own actions."
"As I said before, Father, I have already found a new position. I'm going into private practice with another doctor." Ned observed the sweat that trickled down his father's sparse cranium and into his thick left eyebrow. It reminded him of the small drops of tears that used to escape his eyes after a thrashing. Arabella had showed him how to channel has rage, disappointments and shortcomings into areas that were more constructive. She had created his need for sex as a tonic for every ailment.
"And which Doctor would this be?" Arthur asked.
His father might be angry with him now, but he sure as hell could not thrash him across the buttocks anymore. He would not have the strength. Ned was far stronger than his father. He had proved that when he was sixteen. His father had never reprimanded him with his belt again, instead he relied on words. Ned knew very well that sticks and stones could break his bones but words could never hurt him; it was a lie. A few words from Arabella's pink lips had been more painful than any belt strap, buckle and all.
"Doctor Smales, he was at the dinner party at the Stevens' last week. I'm going to join his practice. I put the first deposit from my savings in yesterday. Until we are 50/50, part of my earnings will go back into the practise," Ned said, quietly. This was it. This was rejection on the biggest scale. Gone was the constant pushing to fulfill his father's own aspirations.
Ned played the piano and the violin. He could read and speak French, Spanish, German, Greek and Latin. His childhood tutoring had involved advanced mathematics, languages, geography, science and history. His medical bachelorship was defined by very high examination scores. He had been forced to perform like some puppet for his father, thrashed and beaten by both the tutor and his father for failure. His life had been mapped for him. Now he was rebelling. Stuff family, he would go into practice with Smales. He would not inherit Uncle Stephen's clinic.
After a tirade, the old man departed. Ned could finally breathe easily once more. He counted the heavy footsteps receding down the hallway, mentally estimating how far away his father was. His muscles were tensed in anticipation. Adrenalin pounded through his veins, his heart throbbing in his ears and temples. He had been waiting, as he always was, for the command to lie face down on the bed and to drop his breeches. It had not come, nor had it for twelve years. Yet still he heard the clank of the belt unbuckling and felt the stiff leather whip across his flesh. He had soon learned never to show his pain or let his father know that he was winning. It was the same now.
His face was an impenetrable mask to his true emotions, the out-looking surface changing with his environment so that he gave the appropriate responses when required. He was always playing a role, rather than his own character. He did not even know if he had a character separate from the mask, an embodiment of true self. It was too difficult to separate true emotion from projected emotion. The two were intertwined.
He would like to think that he was strong of character, but in reality he was weak. He hid behind his mask rather than say what he really felt. After the flash of anger toward his father when he was sixteen, he had never felt the need to reassert his dominance. He looked upon the man with distaste and insolence, yet he still allowed the man to push him through medical school and onwards to become Dr Stephen Hawke's successor. He had been rejected by Arabella, but had never told her the way he had felt. Instead, he used other poor, weak souls, as surrogates to punish his own pathetic mistakes. The only way he could derive happiness was by using others.
Then there was Victoria. Ned was not really sure which part of his soul responded to her, whether it be the mask or the feeble soul beneath. They were not that different, he and Victoria, when he thought about it. Both defended themselves with a mental barrier; Victoria's was laced with hostility and morality, whilst his was mannerly and polite. Victoria must have been hurt in the past, for her to display such an outward face of rigorous coldness, just as he had been. Perhaps it was that, and not her body that attracted him to her like some oppositely poled magnet.
