For Better for Worse

by Penny Jordan

  ‘Worse,’ he assured her grimly.

  Zoe had chosen the melon for her first course, not out of any preference but because, apart from a pate which she didn’t want, it was the only other thing on the menu, the other items no longer being available.

  The melon was thinly sliced, and garnished with a sticky red sauce into which what looked like an uninspiring selection of small pieces of fruit had been thrown.

  For her main course she had ordered coquille St-Jacques, much against Ben’s recommendation.

  ‘Have the duck,’ he had suggested. ‘You know you’ve got a sensitive stomach—look at that bout of sickness you had only a few weeks ago.’

  Zoe had shaken her head and pulled a face. ‘I couldn’t… not after this afternoon…’

  Ben had ordered the vegetarian dish for his main course, mainly to see what was being offered, and when their food finally arrived and he saw that he was being served with a very indifferent omelette Zoe could see the disgust curling his mouth.

  So, it seemed, could the waitress because she flushed a little and apologised, explaining, ‘It’s because of the conference… We’re very short-staffed.’

  ‘I’m getting rather tired of hearing about this conference,’ Ben commented when she had left them.

  He reached over and picked up Zoe’s plate, sniffing at it.

  ‘Don’t eat it,’ he warned her. ‘I think the fish is off.’

  Zoe pulled a face at him, and laughed. ‘Oh, come on,’ she teased. ‘That’s taking rivalry a bit far.’

  ‘Mmm… Well, I could be mistaken,’ Ben admitted, ‘but, if my soup was anything to go by, that fish has probably spent more time in the freezer than it ever did in the sea.’

  Having discovered that his omelette had the texture of rubber and that the side-salad produced with it was boringly uninspirational, Ben was content to do nothing other than give a disbelieving shake of his head when they discovered that the sweet trolley contained nothing more than chocolate fudge cake and fresh fruit and ice-cream.

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ he told Zoe in awe.

  ‘Believe it,’ she assured him. ‘I’ve just seen the trolley.’

  After they had finished their meal, Ben summoned the waitress and told her placidly that they had been rather disappointed in their meal.

  ‘Your restaurant is advertised as recommended,’ he pointed out gently.

  The girl flushed and looked unhappily over her shoulder, but no one appeared to rescue her.

  ‘Yes, but… Well, I’m afraid the chef left last week and as yet… Well, he hasn’t been replaced, and then there’s—’

  ‘The conference… yes. You’ve already said,’ Ben agreed.

  But it was jubilation and not criticism that warmed his voice half an hour later when he and Zoe were sitting in the bar discussing their meal.

  ‘They could always replace the chef with someone even better,’ Zoe warned him, for once playing devil’s advocate and taking on his role.

  ‘They can, but something’s got to be wrong for their chef to have left in the first place.’

  ‘Mmm… Shall we see if we can find out what?’ Zoe suggested, glancing over her shoulder towards the deserted bar and the teenager behind it.

  It took her less than half an hour of skilful questioning to elicit the full story.

  There had apparently been a clash of objectives between the chef and the hotel owner. The chef had been under the impression that he had full control in the kitchen, and this apparently included control of his own budget. The hotel owner had had other ideas, ideas which apparently consisted of budget-cutting to an extent which meant that the chef was having to make do with poor quality produce and was therefore unable to produce the kind of meals on which he had based his reputation. The kind of meal which had earned the restaurant its award, Ben commented wryly to Zoe.

  The hotel owner had also apparently disapproved of the unusual sauces and flavourings the chef wanted to use, and had insisted on sticking with a nouvelle cuisine-type menu. ‘Small portions, you see, and therefore cheaper to produce,’ the boy told them.

  ‘The chef, Armand, didn’t want to do that, though. He said that nouvelle cuisine wasn’t nouvelle any more and that it certainly wasn’t cuisine either,’ he told them with obvious relish at having remembered this part of the quarrel he had obviously overheard.

  ‘He said that people, discerning people, were tired of nouvelle and wanted wholesome, nourishing food, food whose origins they could check, food that was wholesomely grown. He prided himself on his sauces being free from additives and fat. He said that if people wanted to clog up their arteries with cholesterol, they could do so over breakfast.’

  The boy gave a small shrug. ‘Mr Patrick, the owner, said afterwards that he had intended to sack him anyway, but he hasn’t managed to replace him yet.

  ‘The underchef is having to do the food for the conference and that means that there isn’t anyone to run the kitchen properly. The food in the restaurant is just bought-in freezer stuff. In fact I think some of it was here when Mr Patrick took the place over… Ella, my girlfriend… she works in the kitchen, she said some of the stuff is so encrusted in ice that they’re having to run the packets under the hot tap before they can find out what’s in them.’

  ‘I warned you not to have that St-Jacques,’ Ben whispered to Zoe as she winced.

  * * *

  Four hours later, when she had got out of bed for the third time within an hour to be violently sick, he followed her into the bathroom, dealing as efficiently with her nausea and consequent weakness as she suspected he must once have done with his siblings’ childhood illnesses, but at the same time he couldn’t resist crowing triumphantly.

  ‘I knew it… I knew that fish was off.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Zoe told him weakly, but she shook her head when he asked her if she would like him to ask the hotel to get hold of a doctor.

  ‘It isn’t that bad,’ she told him.

  ‘Bad? It’s wonderful!’ Ben corrected her with a grin. ‘My God, I can hardly believe our luck. Food poisoning… Let’s hope you aren’t the only one to get it. They’ll close this place down, and if it really is our closest competition…’

  ‘It is,’ Zoe assured him, adding triumphantly, ‘See, I told you not to worry, didn’t I? I told you everything was going to work out… that nothing…’

  She gulped as another wave of nausea hit her, and as he waited for the spasm to leave her, Ben grinned down at her and told her, ‘All right… so you were right. Nothing is going to go wrong. Nothing can go wrong. We’re unstoppable… and we’re going to succeed beyond our wildest dreams… I believe you. All right?’

  ‘All right,’ Zoe agreed weakly, wincing as she told Ben, ‘Stop making me laugh. It hurts…’

  Physically she might feel dreadful, she acknowledged, but mentally, emotionally, she was on the kind of high that made her feel giddy with excitement. She had never seen Ben in such a positive mood, so full of his own excitement, pushing all his doubts and caution aside, for once being the one to buoy her up instead of the other way around.

  It was all working out perfectly, she acknowledged tiredly as Ben helped her back to bed.

  Perfectly, perfectly, perfectly, and Ben was right. She was right. Nothing could stop them now. Nothing!

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘AH, FERN, my dear, do come in.’ Lord Stanton beamed at Fern as Phillips, his butler, showed her into the library.

  Lord Stanton and Phillips; impossible to imagine one of them without the other, Fern acknowledged. Phillips at seventy was Lord Stanton’s junior in age, but in many other ways he was, if not his mentor, then certainly his guardian; not in any custodial sense of the word, for Phillips’s guardianship of his employer had nothing of that about it; it was more that one could not see the two of them together without being aware of how seriously the butler took his responsibilities towards the older man. There was certainly more to their relationship than that of employer and
employee, although Fern had neither seen nor heard either of them ever abandoning the correct and sometimes quaintly old-fashioned manner they had of addressing and communicating with one another, both of them always rigidly correct in their etiquette. Without Phillips to ensure that his household ran smoothly, Fern doubted that Lord Stanton could survive, and she also suspected that, without Lord Stanton to take care of, Phillips would lose the sense of purpose that motivated his own life.

  ‘How delightful of you to call,’ Lord Stanton added as he ushered her towards a chair.

  The library was large and old-fashioned, essentially a man’s room, with a huge pedestal desk, and two large fireside chairs complete with footstools, their covering of green velvet worn smooth on the arms, like the patches in the Turkish carpet which showed the familiar pathways of Lord Stanton’s peregrinations from desk to window and back to the fireside again.

  ‘You asked me to call so that we could update the list for the children’s party,’ Fern reminded him gently, shaking her head when he offered her a glass of sherry, knowing that despite the fact that she could see the decanter and glasses on the silver tray within arm’s distance of her chair Lord Stanton would still ring for Phillips to come and perform the small task of pouring it for her, and that the butler would then be despatched to the kitchen to fetch a plate of the small sweet macaroon biscuits which had been Lady Stanton’s favourite and without which Lord Stanton felt it was impossible for any woman to enjoy her sherry.

  ‘Ah, yes, so I did. It’s my age, I’m afraid, my dear,’ Lord Stanton told her ruefully. ‘One tends to find it far harder to recall the present than one does the past.

  ‘Now, where did I put that list… ?’

  ‘I have a copy of it, Lord Stanton,’ Fern told him diplomatically as he started to search through the mass of papers on his desk.

  ‘Have you? My dear, you really are the most marvellous young woman—exemplary, in fact. Have we many more children to add this time?’

  ‘Three,’ Fern told him, ‘but we’re going to lose five; two who are moving away with their parents, and three who will be thirteen this year.’

  ‘Thirteen. Oh, dear. Eugenie always used to say that we should extend the age to fifteen, but children of that age do so hate to be grouped with those younger than themselves. I had to remind her of how much she resented being grouped with the children when we were young.

  ‘She was younger than me, you know, Fern. Ten years younger, and so full of life and laughter. I never thought…

  ‘It’s five years this week since she died, you know. Sometimes I still find it hard to remember that she’s gone. We were married when she was seventeen. We didn’t quite make it to our Golden Wedding…

  ‘We were talking about it the night she died. She wanted to have a big party… to invite all those we’d invited to our wedding, or at least those of them who were still alive…’

  Fern smiled understandingly. She knew how much he had loved his wife. Nick grew irritated when Lord Stanton talked about her, claiming that he was bored with hearing the same old stories over and over again. Fern had tried gently to point out to him that it was the older man’s only way of dealing with his grief that he needed to talk about the woman who had after all shared virtually all of his life with him. They had been second cousins and had spent holidays together as children; she had always been there as part of his life and now he was finding it very difficult to cope without her.

  ‘You must miss her,’ Fern said softly now.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I do…’ He looked at her, emotion replaced by intelligent awareness as he studied her.

  ‘You have a very gentle touch, Fern, very compassionate… very soothing on one’s small sore places. You must be tired of hearing me talk so much about her.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ Fern replied honestly. ‘I know how close you both were.’ Her own eyes shadowed slightly as she withdrew from making the uncomfortable comparison between the Stantons’ marriage and her own.

  ‘We had our difficult times as everyone does, but Eugenie wasn’t just my wife, she was also my best friend, my closest confidante. Oh, not at first, perhaps, in the early years… but later, once we had both settled into our marriage.

  ‘Friendship is a very under-estimated virtue in marriage,’ he added quietly, shaking his head. ‘These days so much attention seems to be focused on other aspects… but, as one gets older, one truly appreciates the importance of being good friends, and it is as my friend that I miss Eugenie the most. As a woman… as my wife, she may not always have approved of what I did; but as my friend she accepted my frailties and fallibilities and made allowances for them.’

  He raised his head and smiled at Fern, shaking his head a second time when he saw the tears in her eyes.

  ‘There, now I have upset you,’ he apologised patting her hand, ‘and I certainly didn’t mean to do so.’

  ‘No, you haven’t upset me,’ Fern assured him, blowing her nose.

  Her own parents had had a long and happy marriage, but they had been in their early forties when she was born, unexpected but very welcome. However, because of the age-gap between them, much as she had loved them and known that they loved her, she had never felt free to talk to them uninhibitedly, had always been conscious of a need not to disappoint them, not to slip from the high standards their own moral code set her. As a teenager and a young woman it had seemed to her that her parents inhabited a very different world from hers, and she had always been anxious not to disillusion them, not to bring the reality of her own life in to disturb the peaceful harmony of theirs.

  Now she recognised that she had, perhaps naïvely, assumed that their lives had always been like that, not appreciating as she now did from listening to Lord Stanton that that harmony and peace could have been something which had grown with age and might not necessarily always have been there.

  She had always found it difficult, impossible almost, to imagine her parents quarrelling or arguing, involved in the kind of turmoil, the kind of ugliness which sometimes seemed to pervade her own marriage, and certainly neither of them could ever have experienced the kind of guilt and shame which so tormented her.

  But she was here to help Lord Stanton, not to brood on her own problems, she reminded herself sternly as she produced her own copy of the Christmas party list and started to go through it with him.

  ‘Sally Broughton’s presence will be sadly missed by the town this year,’ he commented sadly when they had finished. ‘Especially with the summer fěte.’

  ‘Yes,’ Fern agreed, and was unable to stop herself from adding unhappily, ‘I do hope that Broughton House isn’t going to be demolished.’

  ‘Demolished? Surely not,’ Lord Stanton protested.

  ‘Well, Nick seems to think it’s a possibility, and Adam…’ She stopped and bit her lip.

  ‘Adam what?’ Lord Stanton pressed her.

  ‘Well, I saw him in the grounds of Broughton House earlier and he… he had what looked like a set of plans with him. Nick says that Adam is part of some consortium that’s hoping to buy the house and tear it down so that they can use the land for commercial purposes… a supermarket, shop units, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Ridiculous,’ Lord Stanton told her firmly. ‘I know Nick is your husband, my dear, but I very much suspect that he is wrong. If Adam is involved in some way with the purchase of Broughton House, you may be sure that the last thing he will want is to lend his authority to any plan to demolish it. I’m rather surprised that you should have any doubts on the matter yourself. Adam is a man of great probity and sincerity. I can’t think of anyone who is more committed to doing his best for the town and, in fact, for its residents. However, if you genuinely fear for the future of Broughton House, and if as you say Adam is in some way involved in that future, then I’m surprised that you haven’t discussed it with Adam himself.’

  Fern knew that she was flushing slightly. Instinctively she dipped her head, seeking behind the heavy fall of her hair protection
for the embarrassment and guilt she feared was written in her eyes.

  ‘Adam is very busy,’ she murmured unsteadily. ‘I… I… don’t like to bother him, and besides… Well, I… if he is involved in some kind of speculative purchase, it’s bound to be confidential, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m sure you’re wrong,’ Lord Stanton replied. ‘If he is… but I doubt very much that you need have any fears for the house’s future if Adam is involved with it,’ he assured her. ‘I was pleased to hear, by the way, that he has been escorting that pretty young daughter of George James’s around recently. It’s high time he found himself a wife. I can’t think why he hasn’t done so before.’

  ‘Yes, Lily is very attractive,’ Fern agreed in a small, quiet voice.

  ‘Are you all right, my dear?’ Lord Stanton asked her with some concern. ‘You look quite pale. Let me ring for Phillips and you can have that glass of sherry. It isn’t very warm in here…’

  In the end, it was over two hours before Fern actually left, having given way to Lord Stanton’s insistence that she have a glass of sherry and having waited numbly while Phillips was summoned to pour it and to bring the essential sweet biscuits.

  ‘You’re a very kind young woman,’ Lord Stanton told Fern when she finally stood up to go. ‘And that husband of yours is a very lucky young man.’

  Was he? Fern reflected as she walked home. She doubted that Nick himself thought so.

  After all, if he had, would he need to lie to her, to deceive her, to tell her that he needed her as his wife with one breath, while with the next telling another woman that she was the one he wanted?

  What hurt her the most, she wondered miserably: his infidelity or her own feeling that it was because of her, because of some failing, some lack of something within her?

  Her heart started to beat faster with apprehension and misery, her unhappiness quickly wiping out the pleasantness of the time she had spent with Lord Stanton.

  Was Nick being unfaithful to her with Venice, or was she simply imagining it? And if he was having another affair…