For Better for Worse

by Penny Jordan

  Over lunch it was Zoe who skilfully controlled the conversation and who then, as a penance for not confiding in her mother about her own and Ben’s hopes for the new restaurant-cum-hotel, allowed Heather to take her into her favourite dress shop and buy her a new outfit.

  Her mother had pulled a slight face over her choice of brilliantly patterned Lycra cycling shorts and a top which she claimed clashed appallingly with it, but Zoe had smiled indulgently, refraining from pointing out that her generation had its own fashions and its own tastes and kissing her mother affectionately as they waited for her purchases to be wrapped up.

  When her mother announced uncertainly that it was her evening for her bridge lesson, Zoe heroically concealed her amusement and gravely assured her that no, she did not mind at all.

  ‘Ben will probably be home by the time I get back,’ she assured her mother, hugging her warmly.

  Only when she got back, Ben had not returned, and after the warmth of her parents’ home, with its unpretentious and unfussy but oh, so discreetly expensive décor, the flat seemed even more unwelcoming than ever.

  Here on the tatty basic furniture there were no carefully treasured silver-framed photographs, no pretty pieces of Chelseaware… no cleverly chosen objets d’art… no paintings. No, there were none of those things, but there was love, Zoe reminded herself, and then she stood still, frowning, the forefinger halting that she had been dragging lazily through the permanent film of dust on the black ash table which Ben had assembled and which had joints which were nothing like true.

  There was love in her parents’ home as well, wasn’t there? Of course there was, she reassured herself. All through her childhood and then her teenage years she had been aware of that love, and had taken it for granted. Too much for granted? After all, among their generation her parents were unusual in remaining together.

  On her way up the stairs she had collected the post. Two bills, a bank statement and a thick white typed envelope which she was dying to open.

  It was addressed to both of them, and she was nearly sure it was something from their backer. What did it contain? News about the property he intended to purchase? She could feel the excitement starting to uncoil and fizz up inside her.

  Hurry up, Ben, she pleaded silently. Hurry up. She could have opened the letter, of course, it was after all addressed to both of them, but like a little girl she wanted to share the surprise with him… to share the pleasure… or the disappointment.

  It wasn’t going to be a disappointment, she assured herself firmly. Ben was the one who was the pessimist, not she…

  It was almost midnight before he came back, and she knew immediately when she saw his face that whatever his mother had wanted to tell him could not have been good news.

  ‘Ben!’ she cried out in sympathetic alarm. ‘What’s wrong? Is someone ill? Is…?’

  There were dark shadows under his eyes, and his skin looked drained and sallow, his blue eyes which could glow warmly with love and tenderness bleak and empty.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked him gently.

  He sat down heavily on the old sofa they had inherited with the flat. Zoe’s mother had wanted to have it re-covered for them, grimacing at the unknown identity of its many stains, but Zoe had firmly refused, flinging over it instead a richly patterned rug she had picked up from one of the street markets.

  Now she sat down next to him, not touching him… waiting…

  ‘It’s Sharon,’ he told her emptily. ‘She’s pregnant.’ He turned his head and looked at her, but he wasn’t seeing her, Zoe recognised, not really; his expression was too controlled, too hard and full of starkly bitter bleak despair.

  Uncertainly Zoe waited, instinct telling her not to speak… not to touch… not to do anything; and then abruptly he seemed to focus properly on her, the blood surging into his face, burning it with a heat that left stains like bruises against his cheekbones.

  ‘She’s sixteen years old, for God’s sake, and she’s pregnant.

  ‘Mum thought she was on the Pill, but apparently she forgot to take it and Sharon, of course, like the little fool that she is, didn’t say a word to Mum about anything until she was just about bursting out of her school uniform.

  ‘My God… hasn’t she learned anything? Hasn’t she seen from Mum? Doesn’t she realise?’

  Zoe swallowed painfully, knowing that his anguish was something private, something beyond the bonds that the two of them shared, caused by his knowledge and experience of a way of life that was totally alien to her.

  Even so, she tried to reach out to him, asking hesitantly, ‘And the father… the boy?’

  ‘The boy…’ The face he turned towards her was white now… not with exhaustion but with a bitter savage fury, the expression in his eyes one that made her shiver; one which she thought would always haunt her.

  ‘The boys, not the boy,’ he corrected her thickly. ‘Sharon told me that she isn’t sure just who is the father. And of course the stupid bitch has left it far, far too late to have an abortion. Mum can look after it, she told me. Either that or the council can rehouse her.’

  Not knowing what to say, Zoe reached out and touched his arm gently.

  ‘It might all work out for the best,’ she began unsteadily, only to recoil in shock as Ben threw her hand off his arm so violently that she fell back against the settee. His eyes blazed fury and, even worse, contempt.

  ‘What the hell do you know about it?’ he demanded savagely. ‘It might all work out for the best.’ She winced at the hatred in his voice as he mimicked her voice, her accent. ‘How? Like it did for my mother, with three kids under five by the time she was twenty, an unfaithful husband… no income, no home, and no hope of ever doing anything but watching your life slide away from you, with no hope of ever getting out of the mess you’re in; with no hope of anything, just the sickening reality of snotty-nosed kids dressed in other kids’ cast-offs, and perhaps the odd few days of sex from some man you might happen to meet in the pub, who if you’re lucky won’t leave you with another unwanted and unsupported brat on your hands when he walks out on you. Is that what you call things working out for the best?’

  ‘She… she could have the baby adopted,’ Zoe suggested shakily, trying not to let him see how much his reaction had hurt her, how much it had excluded her… how much the starkness of the picture he had drawn for her contrasted with the home she had just left, the life and world her parents inhabited.

  ‘She could, but she won’t… girls like “our Sharon” don’t. They haven’t got that much sense… they love them, you see, the poor bitches, or at least they believe they do, and they can’t even see that by loving them they’re destroying them, submitting them to empty, wasted, dragged-out lifetimes of sterility and apathy. If they really loved them, they’d have them aborted.’

  The ugliness of his comment took Zoe’s breath away.

  ‘And if they really loved themselves they wouldn’t get pregnant in the first place. And who’s to blame for that, do you think, Zoe…? The stupid little tarts for whom sex is about the only pleasure, the only excitement they’ll ever have in their lives, if in fact it does give them any pleasure, or the middle-class liberals like your parents whose liberality took away the only things that used to protect them.

  ‘Before your parents and their destruction of “the rules”, girls like Sharon got married when they fell pregnant, or at least most of them did.’

  ‘And was that any better for them?’ Zoe asked him in a low voice. ‘To be married at sixteen to someone they probably didn’t love and to have to stay in that marriage for the rest of their lives? Were they really any happier?’

  ‘Happier?’ He looked at her in disgust. ‘People like us, like me… like Sharon… like my mother… all my family… happiness doesn’t come into our lives, Zoe. It isn’t an option or a choice. No, Sharon might not have been “happier”, but she’d have been a darn sight better off. She’d have a husband to support her, her child would have had a father…
her children would all have had the same father. She wouldn’t have been living alone in some grotty tower block isolated from her friends and family, driven to drink or depression, to drugs and sex… driven perhaps to abusing her children as much as she would be abusing herself.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ Zoe cried out, horrified.

  ‘No, it doesn’t have to be,’ Ben agreed. ‘Maybe some fairy prince will ride up on a white charger and sweep her off to happy-ever-after land. Is that what you think?’ he asked her in disgust.

  There was nothing Zoe could say, no comfort she could offer.

  ‘Do you know that when she was eleven Sharon was the top of her class… a clever girl, her teachers said, capable of going far, doing things; and then came puberty and suddenly Sharon wasn’t clever any longer. Clever girls don’t get pregnant and ruin their lives and the lives of everyone around them with unwanted babies. Only stupid, selfish girls do that.’

  ‘And boys,’ Zoe pointed out huskily to him without looking at him. ‘It does take two, you know.’

  He gave her a thin, bitter smile. ‘She was supposed to be on the Pill, remember…’ He got up abruptly, turning his back on her. ‘I’m tired. I’m going to bed.’

  As he walked into the bathroom, Zoe realised that she hadn’t shown him the letter. She picked it up and stared at it and then slowly put it down again.

  Perhaps tomorrow, when he felt a bit better. Tomorrow, when she had had time to forget how suddenly and frighteningly he had become a stranger to her, a stranger who it seemed almost hated and despised her.

  But Ben didn’t hate her and he didn’t despise her. He loved her. She knew that.

  Right now he was upset and shocked. She looked at the letter again and sighed quietly, blinking back the tears threatening to fill her eyes.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ELEANOR frowned as she thought she heard a sound coming from the boys’ room. She put down the text she had been studying and got out of bed, reaching for her robe. The Vivaldi tape she had been playing in the background as she worked was not on loud enough to have disturbed her sons, and, still concerned about Tom’s bout of sickness, she hurried into their room.

  Both of them were fast asleep and when she leaned over to place the back of her hand against Tom’s forehead it felt reassuringly cool.

  Straightening up, she watched them both for several seconds.

  Both of them had been much wanted and dearly loved, by her at least. Allan, her first husband, had not really snared her joy in their conception, and had certainly never wanted her to have a second child. He had deeply resented their claims on her time and attention, half wanting to be mothered himself.

  Things were very different now, and he was a far more responsible and participating father to his daughter with his second wife than he had ever been with his sons. But then, when they had married, he had been very young, and very ambitious, and with hindsight, and the calm detachment that came from recognising that both of them in their separate ways had been victims of their totally different perceptions of what marriage should be, she acknowledged that he had perhaps been justified in claiming that she had put the children before him, had loved them more intensely and more exclusively than she had him.

  He still kept in touch with them, and she had been scrupulous about ensuring that they saw as much of him as was feasible. His new wife, Karen, was a maternal woman who made it clear she had enough love for everyone, and she and Eleanor got on very well, surprisingly. In fact, it had been Karen’s idea that Tom and Gavin come to them during the day in the school holidays now that she was at home with her young baby, instead of rather impersonal childcare arrangements. Eleanor had even begun to pride herself a little on the way things had worked out, on the way both her sons had adapted so easily and contentedly to her marriage to Marcus.

  But today, with his one brief sentence of accusation and unhappiness, Tom had totally destroyed that complacency.

  ‘You don’t want to be with us any more,’ he had told her. ‘You just want to be with him.’

  And even allowing for a certain amount of childish exaggeration; even allowing for the fact that he had been feeling extremely sorry for himself, and possibly subconsciously trying to offload his own share of responsibility for his sickness, there had still been enough real despair and fear in his voice to unleash the spectres of guilt and anxiety which were tormenting her now.

  Marcus had been less than pleased when she had announced that she could not go to the Lassiters’ with him, but he had accepted her decision without trying to pressure her into changing her mind.

  That was one of the things about him which had first broken down her reserve, her doubts about the wisdom of embarking on a second attempt at marriage.

  Allan had been inclined to behave petulantly and manipulatively when he couldn’t get his own way, forcing her to make choices between him and their children, putting such an unbearable burden of pressure on her that in the end his announcement that there was someone else and that he wanted a divorce had come almost as a welcome relief.

  Marcus wasn’t like that, though. He respected her rights as an individual, even while he cherished her as a woman. In contrast to most other men, he seemed to know instinctively when she needed the reassurance of a certain amount of male possessiveness, a certain degree of proprietorial but wholly adult determination to have her undivided attention focused on their own very personal relationship, and when their relationship had to take a back seat to her maternal and professional duties.

  Tonight, though, she had been aware that, beneath his outwardly relaxed calm acceptance of her decision to stay at home with Tom, inwardly he was irritated and annoyed.

  ‘There is nothing really wrong with Tom,’ he had pointed out coolly to her, and that, in giving in to his demands that she remain at home, she was potentially making a rod for her own back.

  Logically he was quite right, Eleanor had admitted, but a small maggoty worm of resentment at his lack of understanding had made her wonder if he would have been quite so logical had it been his own child. Now, having satisfied herself that Tom was comfortably and healthily asleep, she acknowledged that at least part of her resentment had also been caused by her own totally illogical feelings of hurt because he had not recognised that it was more than Tom’s sickness which had made her feel she must stay with her son.

  Men were not like women, she reminded herself as she went back to their own bedroom and got back into bed. They did not possess a woman’s understanding and intuition of emotions and needs that were not directly voiced.

  Marcus was a pragmatist and it was surely unfair of her to expect him to read her mind, to know what she was thinking and feeling. After all, she had not known what was on Tom’s mind, had she?

  She frowned, pausing in the act of returning to her abandoned work. She found it easier to read like this, cocooned in the warm comfort of their bed.

  Just as she liked feeling that she was cocooned in Marcus’s love? But surely that kind of need belonged to someone lacking in maturity; someone who could not accept a genuinely equal partnership… someone who expected her partner to meet all her emotional needs?

  Her frown deepened. She had been increasingly aware lately of a growing imbalance in the way she believed she ought to feel and react and the way she actually was doing. This unexpected chasm of self-doubt and insecurity which seemed to have opened up within her worried and confused her.

  Of course there had been other times in her life when she had suffered from insecurity and lack of self-worth, but those times were behind her now. So why had Tom’s unexpected accusation overset her so much? Why had it filled her with such panic and tension? Why, whenever she was confronted by Marcus’s daughter’s obvious aversion to her, did she feel she had to somehow conceal both the girl’s behaviour and her own reaction to it from Marcus himself?

  The Vivaldi tape had come to an end. She was not, she recognised, going to get any more work done now. She had
too many other things on her mind.

  After Marcus had gone out she tried to talk to Tom, to reassure him that he was wrong to believe that Marcus was any kind of threat to his relationship with her, but when she had gently tried to draw him out, to question him about why he should believe that she no longer loved him, he had clammed up on her, refusing to discuss the subject.

  The antique grandfather clock in the hallway chimed midnight. Marcus should not be much longer, she comforted herself.

  The clock reminded her of the one her grandparents had owned. They had lived in the country and every summer she had spent two weeks of her holidays with them, before flying out to join her parents in whichever part of the world her father happened to be stationed. As a career diplomat, he had been constantly on the move, and as their only child Eleanor had never felt particularly close to her parents. Her father’s career had necessitated her spending most of her childhood at boarding-school, and, while she loved her parents and knew they loved her, they had never had the closeness she had promised herself she would share with her own children… a closeness she had genuinely believed they did have. Until this evening… How could they be close when she had not even known what Tom thought… when it had been Marcus who had correctly diagnosed the cause of his sickness and not her?

  As a child she had looked forward all year to those holidays with her grandparents, to the unchanging security of their pretty house in its sleepy country setting.

  Perhaps because of those childhood memories, she had been determined to maintain her own children’s contact with Allan’s parents. After all, they were their only set of grandparents; her own parents had died in an air crash before she and Allan married. But the last time they had visited, Tom had complained that things weren’t the same.

  She frowned now, remembering how upset he had been to discover that the room at his grandparents’ which he had always thought of as his own was also the one Allan’s new baby from his second marriage slept in when they were there.