For Better for Worse

by Penny Jordan

  Unfortunately life just did not happen like that, Eleanor acknowledged wryly as she waited for Marcus to make some acknowledgement of her comment other than the brief automatic grunt she had already received.

  ‘Marcus,’ she repeated more insistently. ‘Did you hear me? I said I think I’ve found us a house.’

  ‘What? Oh, yes… sorry.’ He smiled at her as he raised his head from his papers.

  ‘I’ve made arrangements for us to view it this weekend.’

  ‘This weekend?’ He was frowning now as he looked at her.

  ‘We’ve got Vanessa the weekend after,’ Eleanor reminded him. ‘And you did say you might have to go to The Hague.’

  ‘The Hague… Oh, that’s had to be postponed now. I need to clear up one or two things first. This Alexander case is proving a bit more complicated than we first thought. This view—what time…?’

  ‘One-ish,’ Eleanor told him. ‘That will give us enough time to drive down there—’

  ‘Drive down there? Drive down where?’ Marcus questioned her.

  ‘Wiltshire,’ Eleanor told him.

  ‘Wiltshire! I thought we were looking for something in London!’

  Quickly Eleanor agreed. ‘Yes, I know that’s what we originally discussed, but I’ve been thinking it over, Marcus, and there are just so many advantages of moving out into the country that I’m surprised that we didn’t think of it before.

  ‘I’ll be able to work from home for one thing, which means I’ll be there full time for the children. The boys will be able to go to a local school… become part of a real community. No more ferrying them halfway across London.

  ‘We’ll be able to have all the space we need… not just for Vanessa but for friends as well, and Wiltshire isn’t that far. The agents tell me there’s an excellent train service into Waterloo from Salisbury, and best of all is the fact that we’ll just get so much more for our money.

  ‘I’ve got the details here… if you…’

  ‘Eleanor, I…’

  Marcus stopped speaking as the phone rang, getting up to answer it and then calling over to Eleanor, ‘It’s Jade for you. Look, I’ve got to go,’ he added as he handed the receiver over to her. ‘But…’

  ‘Don’t you dare say that Saturday is out,’ Eleanor warned him as she kissed him. ‘I’m so excited about this house, Marcus,’ she added softly. ‘I know it sounds silly, but the moment I saw the photograph, I was so drawn to it. It will be a real home for all of us… somewhere where we could be a real family,’ she told him, leaning her hand on his shoulder.

  Against her hand, she felt his muscles flex, and breathed in the sharp muted scent of his cologne. Beneath it she could also smell the warm, musky male scent that was purely his and her stomach muscles contracted slightly, her body signalling a subtle sensual response to her recognition of that scent.

  A small smile of contentment curled her mouth. How many married women of her age could lay claim to that kind of sexual response to their husbands and at seven o’clock on a weekday morning?

  Not that either of them could do anything about it, she acknowledged ruefully as she heard her son’s footsteps clattering towards them and Marcus started to move away from her, saying briefly, ‘Nell, I…’

  ‘You have to go, I know,’ she agreed, wryly adding mentally to herself, and I have to find out what Jade wants, take the boys to school… sort out with the accountant the best way to terminate our office lease, try to make these last few weeks with Louise as amicable as possible…

  Marcus had gone before she was even halfway through her mental list.

  She turned to the telephone and said warmly into the receiver, ‘Jade, sorry about that… Marcus was just leaving.’

  ‘Can you make lunch?’ she heard her friend ask her. ‘I’m off to New York at the end of the week and we haven’t seen one another for ages.’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ Eleanor confirmed, mentally reviewing her diary. ‘What time and where?’

  She smiled to herself as Jade predictably named an expensive and very high profile restaurant, agreeing to meet her friend there at one.

  She took the house brochure to work with her, tucking it away inside her briefcase like a secret talisman, refusing to give in to the temptation to study its promised delights yet again.

  She knew them off by heart by now anyway, from the allure of the dusty lofts above the garages, which in her mind’s eye she had already turned into a spacious work area for herself plus a large study-cum-playroom for the boys, an ideal refuge for them on wet winter days, somewhere where they could study in peace—she smiled to herself again, mentally picturing their dark heads bent over their books, a cheerful fire crackling warmly in front of them, solid desks standing on a dark polished floor, dormer windows overlooking winter-furrowed fields-right through to the elegantly proportioned ground floor drawing-room where she and Marcus would entertain their friends.

  The house had seven bedrooms, all of them large enough to allow for the addition of private bathrooms. A must both for guests and to keep the peace between the needs of a teenage girl and those of her stepbrothers.

  Vanessa would choose her own décor, of course. As a teenager Eleanor herself had been an addict of historical novels and had dreamed secretly of a huge old-fashioned four-poster bed.

  She had never had one, of course, and the kind of bed she had dreamed of was a world away from the over-fussy modern versions swathed, flounced, draped and beribboned in sugary sweet pastel fabrics.

  Downstairs… A small, happy breath escaped her. Downstairs there would be the drawing-room, a sitting-room, a dining-room, a study for Marcus, and then there would be the kitchen. The kind of kitchen that was the whole heart of the family. It would be a large rectangular room with sensible solid wooden cupboards, and a large wooden table… the kind the children could sit round while she was cooking.

  The sudden blaring sound of someone’s car horn brought her sharply back to reality and the fact that the lights had changed.

  There were few traffic lights in the country, she reminded herself as she ignored the other driver’s impatience and set her car in motion.

  As she parked her car and headed for the office, she was conscious of her walking pace slowing down. She paused, frowning slightly. Things had not been easy at work since Louise had made her announcement; the friendship and closeness they had once shared and which Eleanor had genuinely believed was something they would always share had gone and in its place was a sense of confusion and, if she was honest, a sense also of betrayal on her part; and Louise was increasingly belligerent.

  Eleanor did not need the services of a psychologist to tell her that Louise’s aggression was probably her way of dealing with the guilt she must surely be feeling at the way she had behaved. Eleanor could not imagine that anyone could act as Louise had done and not suffer at least some pangs of guilt, but Louise had moulded herself so much in Paul’s image that Eleanor suspected she had, on the surface at least, ignored and denied any such feelings, channelling them instead into resentment and anger against Eleanor herself.

  When she was not being smugly self-righteous about her desire to put the health and education of her children first by moving them to a better environment, Louise seemed to be continually making remarks designed to underline her belief that it was her linguistic skills which contributed the most to their business, her languages which were superior to Eleanor’s; and now that her initial shock and distress had worn off Eleanor was finding she was increasingly having to grit her teeth and make a determined effort not to respond to Louise’s petty-mindedness.

  She tried to remind herself that this Louise was not the same Louise with whom she had originally set up in business, the same Louise with whom she had shared so many doubts and worries, so many hours of anxiety and heartache as they fought to establish themselves. And so much laughter as well, she admitted bleakly.

  And it was losing that laughter that hurt, Eleanor acknowledged as she walked into her
own office. There was something very special about the laughter, the feeling of fellowship, of closeness one shared with another woman that was uniquely special, something apart from one’s relationship with a man no matter how good that relationship might be.

  She and Marcus shared laughter as well, but it was a different kind of laughter.

  Eleanor had always valued her women friends, and she had considered Louise to be among the closest of them. Not perhaps as close as Jade, but then she and Jade had known one another since their university days… had met in fact on the train carrying them both to their new lives as students.

  Jade had not been Jade then but Janet Anne.

  When Eleanor had bumped into her seat, jolted by the swaying movement of the carriage, Jade had been scowling over the huge capital letters in which she had written her name on the notebook on her lap.

  Janet Anne Hewitt.

  She had looked up at Eleanor, still scowling as Eleanor hastily apologised to her. Eleanor had spent her final holiday before going up to university with her grandparents and had been wearing the hand-knitted jade-green sweater her grandmother had presented her with.

  ‘That’s it,’ Jade had announced, staring at her.

  ‘Jade… Fensham. That’s going to be my new name,’ she had told Eleanor firmly. ‘Jade Fensham. Oh, and by the way, that colour is disgusting on you. What on earth made you choose it?’

  Eleanor smiled to herself as she recalled that first meeting.

  It had been an unlikely friendship; they couldn’t after all have been more different, but it was one which had endured, perhaps because of their differences.

  Jade was now a fashion writer with one of the glossies, a bone-thin, elegant creature who despite all her efforts had never quite managed to tame the wild tangle of glossy black curls which Eleanor remembered so vividly from their first meeting.

  Her olive skin-tone and thick black hair were the result of a secret liaison between her grandmother and a black American blues singer, Jade had once claimed. Whether or not it was true, Eleanor had no idea, but it was typical of Jade that she should lay claim to such a heritage.

  Eleanor grinned now as she thought about her, the thought of seeing her momentarily lifting her spirits.

  She and Louise were due to see their accountant at half-past ten to formalise the ending of their partnership and to sort out all the remaining financial details.

  Their accountant was late, causing Louise to twitch irritably and remind Eleanor that Paul had suggested some time ago that they switch to his accountant, who in his view was far more efficient than their own.

  ‘We’ve been with Charles ever since we started,’ Eleanor pointed out equably.

  ‘And of course he’s a friend—of yours,’ Louise told her shortly.

  Grimly Eleanor refrained from pointing out that their decision to take him had been a joint one, and that it had been Charles who had negotiated the mortgage Paul and Louise had so desperately needed when they had bought their house—a mortgage which Paul’s own accountant had seemed either unable or unwilling to find.

  When Charles did arrive he immediately apologised, explaining that there had been a traffic accident which had delayed him.

  The meeting proved to be every bit as unpleasant as Eleanor had dreaded. Despite the fact that she was the one who wanted to end the partnership, Louise seemed to take pleasure in being as obstructive and difficult as possible, arguing over every single point and making it plain that she felt their partnership had somehow been angled unfairly in Eleanor’s direction and that she was determined in putting an end to it that this should be redressed.

  Several times Eleanor had to bite her tongue and remind herself that it was Paul she was really listening to and not Louise, or at least not the Louise she knew or rather had thought she knew, but when Louise announced that she ought to retain their partnership name for her sole use Eleanor finally rebelled. That name had been her invention, but when she firmly pointed this out Louise erupted into such a flood of invective and accusation that Eleanor was finally forced to acknowledge that she could not have really known her after all.

  Half an hour later, sitting in her own office with Charles, she listened disbelievingly while he told her gently that Louise had always been jealous of her.

  ‘No,’ she denied vehemently. ‘No. We were friends.’

  ‘Well, yes, but you were always the leader, Eleanor, the innovator, while Louise was the follower. There’s nothing wrong with that; the world, businesses need leaders and followers.

  ‘Louise admired you and was quite happy to let you take the lead. The problems probably started when she met Paul. You see, he’s a leader too, and I suspect he didn’t like his follower, Louise, being your follower as well.’

  ‘And because of that he’s broken up our partnership… turned Louise against me? But that’s ridiculous!’

  ‘Is it?’ Charles asked her mildly. ‘You’d be surprised how often it happens. I suspect, though, that Louise is in for a rather unpleasant shock, and so too is Paul. He isn’t the kind of man who takes advice easily. I’ve already tried to warn him that he’s over-committing himself in taking on this château but… He has his own financial advisers and they, it seems, see things differently.

  ‘How’s Marcus, by the way?’

  ‘Fine, but very busy.’ Eleanor chewed on her bottom lip. ‘Actually there’s something else I need to discuss with you, Charles. Marcus and I are thinking of moving.’

  ‘Are you?’ He both sounded and looked surprised. ‘The last time I saw Marcus, he was saying how ideal the house is.’

  ‘Was,’ Eleanor corrected him wryly. ‘It just isn’t large enough for all of us… and it’s on the wrong side of London for the boys’ schools. And now that I’m going to have to give up the lease on this place…’ She gave a small shrug. ‘We’ve both agreed that I simply can’t generate the kind of income which would support London’s rents, and there’s nowhere for me to work at home so we have to find somewhere else.

  ‘Actually I think we might already have done so,’ she told him. ‘Fingers crossed. We’re going to see it this weekend.’

  ‘Mmm… Which part of London is it?’

  Eleanor shook her head.

  ‘It’s not in London, it’s in Wiltshire—the Wiltshire-Dorset border to be exact, just outside Avondale.’

  ‘Wiltshire?’ Charles gave her a startled look. ‘Won’t that be a bit far out? For Marcus, I mean…’

  Eleanor shook her head.

  ‘No. There’s an excellent commuter rail service. People do commute, you know, Charles,’ she added teasingly as she saw his frown. ‘And from further afield than Wiltshire.’

  ‘Mmm… Look, I must go, and don’t worry too much about Louise. If anything I think you’ve been over-generous, and as for the partnership name…’

  ‘Was I wrong to insist on keeping it?’ she asked him uncertainly.

  ‘No,’ he assured her. ‘Louise can’t have things all her own way. And nor can Paul.’

  Predictably, Eleanor was the first to arrive at the restaurant Jade had nominated.

  The head waiter gave her a bored, slightly irritated look until she mentioned Jade’s name, the deference with which she was then treated causing her to smile slightly to herself.

  It was twenty minutes before Jade arrived, ample time for Eleanor to study the other diners, most of them women, all of them formidably fashionable and, to judge from the snatches of conversation she could hear going on around her, most of them connected in one way or another to the same world which Jade inhabited.

  Jade arrived five minutes later, pausing briefly as though in acknowledgement of the sharp frisson her presence created among the onlookers.

  At just under six feet, she would have drawn attention whatever milieu she inhabited, Eleanor acknowledged, but it was not just her height that drew this crowd’s attention; it was Jade herself, the aura that not merely surrounded her but which she actively projected so that it cocoone
d her like a mini force-field.

  She had always had it, right from the first moment Eleanor had known her, and, Eleanor suspected, even before that; initially perhaps as a means of defence, the tall, gawky girl whose height drew comment and sometimes derision from her peers, but who had learned to use her ‘differentness’, to turn it round and glory in it rather than retreating from it, ashamed and afraid of the way it set her apart.

  Unlike many of the other women present in the restaurant, she was not wearing some outrageously fashionable and to Eleanor’s eye physically uncomfortable, eye-catching outfit, but a simple pale creamy beige suit with a fluidly tailored skirt and an elegant unstructured jacket, the fabric so fluid and graceful that it seemed to hint with covert sensuality at the curves and hollows of her body rather than outline them with blatant sexuality.

  Her hair, her trademark, was as always a wild unfettered tangle of thick curls, a deliberate aberration and deviation from the demands and restrictions of her chosen field, not, as many seemed to think, as an affectation but because, as Eleanor well knew, that hair had the texture and strength of unbreakable wire and could not be styled.

  Eleanor watched her as she made her way between the tables, regally deigning to pause to acknowledge the odd favoured courtier.

  ‘Nell,’ she announced in her deep husky voice as she reached Eleanor. ‘You’re here.’

  ‘You did say one,’ Eleanor reminded her with a smile and then added, ‘I love your suit.’

  ‘Armani. I picked it up in Milan after his last show. I’m afraid I can’t return the compliment,’ she added drawlingly, standing back to study Eleanor. ‘How on earth did you manage to find something so disgusting?’

  She gave a theatrical shudder while Eleanor watched her wryly.

  ‘This is a perfectly respectable outfit, Jade,’ she told her firmly, glancing down at the pencil-slim skirt and toning blouse which looked attractive and were just what she needed for work. ‘Not high fashion, perhaps…’

  ‘Perhaps?’ Jade rolled her eyes. ‘My dear, there is no perhaps about it. Have you ordered yet?’