The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [111]
“All passion is frustration, Mike. Sexual frustration is no different, physiologically, from all the other kinds of stress that eat away at the lining of your gut and pile pressure on your clogged-up arteries. The trick is to deal with it without letting the adrenaline run wild. If you can’t do that, your natural cheerfulness and charm will leach away by slow degrees, until you turn into a middle-aged grouch—just like all the other senior officers.”
It wasn’t intended as a prophecy, but it proved all too true. Mike Grundy’s cheerfulness and natural charm did indeed diminish with every decade that passed and every promotion he gained. The fact that he got stuck at DI didn’t save him, any more than impact with her own glass ceiling saved Lisa from adding the last few twists to her own brand of bitterness. Mike got married too, to his precious Helen of Troy: an unambiguously lovely girl he always considered to be that little bit too good for him.
It was an opinion that the Helen in question inevitably came to share, as Lisa could have prophesied but never did. Where Mike Grundy was concerned, she felt obliged to keep her Cassandra Complex on a tight rein—and she sometimes wished in later years that she had kept it under even slightly tighter control in her relationship with Morgan Miller.
There were times, during the early phases of Mike’s marriage, when Lisa doubted her own judgment of that institution, and she was by no means glad when the passage of time eventually proved her right.
Although they had more than enough in common, Helen Grundy and Lisa never got on well after the marriage. It would have been an exaggeration to say that Helen ever hated Lisa, but that probably had more to do with a policy decision to consider her too contemptible to be worthy of hatred than any lack of passion. In hydrogen-atom terms, Helen had no intention of being switched from a nuclear to an orbital role by any mere ritual. Having given herself in marriage, she expected to become and remain the center of her husband’s existence, and she was intolerant of any distraction beyond the demands of duty. From the very beginning, Lisa could see that Helen was far more career-minded than Mike, and that his lack of impetus in that regard would develop into a nasty bone of contention, but she never told Mike. At least, not in so many words. He would not have believed her, and he would have resented the prediction.
He would have resented it even more when it eventually came true, but the fact that Lisa had never actually spelled it out enabled her to remain sympathetic and steadfast when disaster finally struck.
Helen Cornwell, as she was before her marriage, was a hospital social worker at the Royal United, which had recently been combined with the nearby Manor Hospital into one of the country’s largest healthcare institutions—exactly the kind of institution that a burgeoning cityplex needed. Her duties ranged from abortion counseling to surgical aftercare, and she was constantly under pressure to extend herself even further; she worked hours that were just as long and often as unsociable as a detective’s, and had found that as injurious to her personal relationships as did any policeman.
Helen first encountered Mike Grundy in the context of a delicate series of child-abuse inquiries, and was initially quite comfortable with his friendship with Lisa. The rapid expansion of genetic counseling at the interface of medicine and social services provided them with a ready-made topic of conversation, although Helen never took aboard Mike’s certainty that Lisa was a ready font of infallible information regarding the fallout of the Human Genome Project. As Mike and Helen drew closer together, however, Helen made a concerted effort to draw their atom of community away from all rival attractions.
At first, Lisa had tried to defuse Helen’s anxieties, going out of her way to assure her that she was no threat to their partnership, but her attempts to form as close a friendship with Helen as she had with Mike were always doomed.
Helen was the kind of feminist