For Better for Worse

by Penny Jordan

  Marcus had not been as sympathetic towards her as she had expected. In fact he had been almost dismissive of the burdens she was having to carry… impatient and irritated by them… and by her?

  It was all very well for Marcus to say leave it until Louise gets back and thus oblige her to share the responsibility for winding up the partnership; he wasn’t the one being subjected to the subtle and not so subtle pressures that were being put on her. Like Louise, she too wanted to get on with her new life, but, unlike Louise, she was not selfish enough to simply walk off and leave someone else to sort out the loose ends of the old one for her.

  And she had hoped to have time to talk to the surveyor this morning. He had promised her that he would give priority to inspecting Broughton House, although he had warned her that it could be several days before he could get a written report to her.

  She also needed to discuss financing the purchase with Marcus, but he had been so tied up with his work recently that she had not really been able to talk to him very much about the house, and was therefore having to do most of the organisational work herself.

  Not that she would have minded that, if only she had had a little more time.

  It was her frustration in not being able to be free to get on with their plans for the future that was making her so irritable and tense, she admitted.

  To the point where her own sons were an intrusion? Guiltily she looked down at Tom.

  ‘I know how difficult it is for you when Vanessa comes to stay,’ she sympathised. ‘But it won’t be for much longer, Tom. We’ll soon be moving to the new house.’

  ‘I don’t want a new house,’ Tom told her angrily. ‘I just want it to be like it was before, when it was just us!’

  ‘Oh, Tom…’ Eleanor dropped to her feet and put her arms round him, giving him a hug and ruffling his hair. ‘I thought you liked Marcus…’

  ‘He’s OK, but I don’t like her. I hate her and she hates us. She hates everyone. Why does she have to come?’

  How was it that children seemed to know by instinct how to pick the very worst possible time to demand one’s attention? Eleanor wondered despairingly, mentally pushing to one side her own problems and abandoning the small luxury she had promised herself of fifteen minutes before the agent arrived to ‘do’ her face and hair and get changed into something a little bit more businesslike than the jeans and sweatshirt she had put on to move the boys’ things up into the attic.

  Gently she again went through the reasons why he and Gavin had to move into the attic when Marcus’s daughter came to stay with Tom, sensing that, while he already knew them, it might help to reassure him to hear them again and to understand that being moved into the attic was in no way a reflection of any lack of love for them, or in any sense a matter of putting Vanessa first and them second.

  ‘Vanessa is a girl,’ she told him quietly. ‘And because of that she needs a room to herself.’

  ‘So why can’t she sleep in the attic and leave me and Gavin in our own room?’

  ‘Tom, you know why. Your room was Vanessa’s room. She’s always slept there when she comes to stay with her father…’

  ‘We always used to sleep in our room when we went to Dad’s, but now it’s Hannah’s room and Gavin and I have to sleep on bunk beds.’

  Eleanor checked, frowning slightly. This wasn’t the first time that Tom had mentioned the change in sleeping arrangements at his father’s house, but it was the first time she had been so clearly aware of the resentment and anger she could now see and hear.

  ‘Daddy got those bunk beds especially for you,’ she reminded him. ‘You went with him to choose them yourselves.’

  ‘He doesn’t want us any more, not now that he’s got her. He loves her more than he does us. Just like you and Marcus love Vanessa more. Nobody cares about us any more. Not even Nanna and Grandad. All they ever talk about is babies…’

  Eleanor stared at him. When had the idea that he was not loved begun to take root in his mind… and how long might it be before he started to convince himself, and perhaps Gavin along with him, that girls were the preferred sex; that parents loved their daughters more than they did their sons? How long before the anger and resentment he was expressing now became suppressed and hidden, distorting his personality and, with it, potentially his life? A cold chill of shock and panic ran through her.

  In the hall, the clock chimed the quarter-hour and her stomach muscles automatically tensed.

  It was too late now to ring the agent and put her off. She would be here in fifteen minutes, but what Tom had just revealed about what he was thinking and feeling needed dealing with now and could not be pushed to one side.

  ‘Of course I don’t love Vanessa more than I do you,’ she told him fiercely, adding huskily, ‘Oh, Tom, how could you think that?’ her words almost more for herself than for him as she added emotionally, ‘You and Gavin are my children… my sons. No one, least of all Vanessa, could ever change the way I feel about you… or alter how much I love you.’

  ‘Not even if you had a baby?’ Tom questioned her.

  A baby? Where on earth had he got that idea from? She and Marcus had discussed the question of whether or not to have a child of their own and both of them had agreed that neither of them felt any need to bind their relationship in that way; that their love for one another was more than strong enough just as it was.

  ‘I know families where the birth of a baby has helped to bring all the stepchildren together,’ Eleanor had commented.

  ‘Mmm… and I know just as many where it has caused problems. I love you, Eleanor—I’m not a paternal man. I married you because I love you and because I want to spend my life with you, not because I want to start a second family. I’ve got enough problems with Vanessa as it is.’

  And she had fully agreed with all that he had said. It wasn’t that she wasn’t aware of the allure of having his child—she was; what woman could not be?—but she refused to allow herself to be seduced by the mirage of perfect glowing motherhood, or adoring stepchildren clustering round the cradle, and most especially of subconsciously using that child as a means of adding cohesion to all their relationships and perhaps unwittingly making it responsible for being the family’s peace-keeper.

  ‘A baby?’ She focused abruptly on her son. ‘Marcus and I aren’t planning to have a baby, Tom. What made you think we might be?’

  For a few seconds he said nothing, and then, when she had thought he wasn’t going to answer her, he turned towards her and burst out, ‘Vanessa said you would. She said that you wouldn’t want us any more; that we’d have to go and live in a place where they send children who nobody wants. She said that we’d have to do what we were told by the other children there, otherwise they’d beat us up, and that we wouldn’t get anything to eat.’

  Eleanor could feel herself going cold with shock and anger. How dared Vanessa do this to her children? She must have known what she was doing. She was an intelligent girl, aware beyond her years, sometimes to the extent that the calculating, knowing look in her eyes often made Eleanor herself feel slightly unnerved; and fuelling her anger, heating and swelling it, was also her own guilt, her own awareness that somehow in refusing to confront Vanessa earlier, in taking the softer option, the easier line, in trying to placate her, in allowing her in fact to subtly gain ascendancy over her, she herself was indirectly responsible for what she was doing to her sons.

  ‘Vanessa is talking nonsense,’ she told Tom robustly, but she could hear the tremor of anger underlying her words, and knew that, had Vanessa been there, she would have been hard put to it not to confront the girl and demand an explanation for her behaviour.

  Vanessa might not be her child and as such it was not perhaps permissible for her to criticise or correct her—the role of a step-parent was always complex and difficult, fraught with potential hazard and danger—but when it came to Vanessa deliberately trying to hurt and upset her own children… And it was not as though Vanessa had not known what she was do
ing…

  As she felt the anger twist and coil inside her, demanding release, surprising her both with its force and its intensity, Eleanor heard the doorbell ring.

  ‘I’ve got a business meeting now, Tom,’ she told her son as she got up. ‘But you mustn’t worry about anything Vanessa says to you. The next time Vanessa tells you something, just ignore her… and don’t worry about your room. It won’t be long before both you and Gavin will be able to have your own rooms, and I promise you that no one will share them; they will be your rooms.’

  As he smiled at her, she found herself silently cursing Louise for the second time that morning. If she had taken a more responsible attitude towards the ending of their partnership she would have been able to spend more time with her sons, instead of rushing around trying to fit far too many things into far too few hours. Why had she not noticed before what was happening between Vanessa and her sons? She had known that they did not get on, but, as Marcus had pointed out, it would have been odd if they had; at fourteen she had virtually nothing in common with two boys of Tom’s and Gavin’s age. Given the fact that Vanessa was very much her daughter, Julia had told Eleanor once, ‘It’s a pity she’s got Marcus’s nose, though. A strong nose looks good on a man, but not on a woman. I’ve told her not to worry too much about it. I know this marvellous plastic surgeon…’

  Eleanor had been so taken aback by what she was saying that she had made no response, but afterwards she had wondered if some of the disruptive behaviour Vanessa exhibited might not be caused by her mother’s unthinking personal criticism of her; but she had warned herself that it would be wrong of her to criticise Vanessa’s mother, and that it was not up to her to interfere. She only had to think of how she would feel if Julia started trying to tell her how to bring up her sons.

  The interview with the agent took longer than Eleanor had expected, and it was the middle of the afternoon before Eleanor was able to ring the surveyor to ask for his views on the house.

  ‘I would describe it more as an expensive luxury than a good buy,’ he told her. ‘It’s a lovely house, in an idyllic setting, but it needs a lot of money spending on it and then there’s the upkeep…’

  ‘What do you think we should offer for it?’ Eleanor asked him quickly, not wanting to listen to the doubt he was raising.

  He named a figure that was rather more than she had expected and then pointed out that, while at the moment there was no question of any of the land being used for building purposes, no one could guarantee what might happen in the next decade, and that the possibility that the land could be developed was bound to send the price up.

  ‘And what in your view is the essential work that needs to be carried out?’ Eleanor asked.

  ‘Well, the dry rot has to be tackled, the whole place has to be rewired… If you can get it, I would recommend you have gas piped to the house, and then of course you’ll need bathrooms; extensive alterations to provide a decent kitchen…

  ‘Still, with a bit of luck, you could be talking about moving in this time next year. The building trade is quite slack at the moment so you won’t have to wait as long as normal to get a good builder…’

  ‘Next year!’ Eleanor was aghast, her rosy mental images of long, sunny summer days spent enjoying the miraculously immaculate gardens swiftly disappearing, to be replaced by the unwanted and far more prosaic picture of builders’ skips and detritus, of mud and dirt and endless pleading discussions for the work to be finished quickly.

  Disheartened, she thanked him and replaced the receiver.

  Ten minutes later when the phone rang and the estate agents were on the end of the line asking her if they were still interested in the property since they had several other very keen enquiries, Eleanor suppressed the pessimistic views the surveyor had expressed and confirmed that they were. The sealed bids were not due in immediately, but the agents, never one to miss an opportunity of putting on the pressure, said that they couldn’t afford to delay too long.

  It would be madness to submit a bid without knowing how much they could expect to receive for this house; how much the essential building work was going to cost, and how much loan-finance they could raise to pay for it.

  By the time Marcus returned home halfway through the evening she was in a fever of anxiety to discuss the house with him, rushing into quick speech as soon as he walked into the kitchen.

  ‘Within a few months?’ he interrupted her when she had quickly related her conversation with the estate agent to him. ‘For a moment I thought you were going to tell me the deadline was midnight tonight.’

  Eleanor stared at him, wondering if she had imagined the sarcasm in his voice, but one look at his face assured her that she had not.

  Surprise and confusion were quickly followed by hurt and then resentment. It was not, after all, her fault that Marcus seemed to have less and less time to talk with her these days. She was doing all she could to spare him hassle. She was the one who had sorted out the surveyor… she was the one who was dealing with the agents; and no doubt she would be the one who would have to find builders and other tradesmen… the one who would have to worry about organising the financing, while Marcus claimed immunity from such mundane traumas through the importance of his work.

  What about her work? She had a career too, and she had the additional responsibility of looking after the children full-time.

  When she and Marcus had married, they had both agreed that they wanted their relationship to be as equal a partnership as they could make it; that they would make sure they did not fall into the trap of subconsciously entrenching themselves and each other into stereotyped and outdated roles.

  Later Eleanor tried to put aside her own resentments, but Marcus was so brusque and withdrawn that she found herself retreating into a resentful silence and only just managed to bite back an accusatory reminder of the promises they had made one another on their marriage.

  What kind of equal partnership was this, when she was left to deal single-handedly with all the problems? What kind of mutual awareness of one another’s rights as individuals?

  At bedtime she discovered she was deliberately delaying going upstairs, almost deliberately holding on to her anger and irritation, and when Marcus announced that he was going to bed she told him coolly that she still had some work to do.

  * * *

  As he showered and cleaned his teeth, Marcus wondered tiredly if Eleanor had any idea of the pressure he was under. She was so preoccupied with that damned house that she seemed completely oblivious to everything else, especially him.

  He checked, staring at his reflection in the bathroom mirror.

  Of course she was preoccupied. She had one hell of a lot on her mind, what with the break-up of the partnership and Louise swanning off to France and leaving her to sort everything out.

  He knew that Vanessa had been particularly difficult to deal with recently.

  And he knew how much this house meant to her… how many hopes she had pinned on it.

  Too many? He was still not convinced that it was the right move, but every time he tried to point this out to her Eleanor swamped him with her enthusiastic plans.

  Marcus had grown up in a household where his mother and maternal grandmother, who had lived with them, had totally dominated his quiet father, between them overruling every decision that he tried to make. The garden shed had been his father’s retreat, a place he vanished to whenever the criticism and carping of his wife and mother-in-law grew too much for him.

  Marcus had learned early in his life that the best way to make an easy life for himself was simply not to argue with his mother and grandmother, but to let their forceful opinions wash over him in silence and then to make up his own mind what he wished to do.

  The day he realised that in her way his first wife bore many similar characteristics to his mother, he questioned whether he really had any intelligence at all, and one of the first things that had drawn him to Eleanor—apart from the sharp keenness of his sexual desi
re for her—had been the gentle calmness of her nature; the way she always seemed prepared to listen and accept that he might have views which differed from her own. But suddenly she didn’t seem to be listening to him any more.

  She was under a lot of pressure, he reminded himself.

  But so was he. As he had explained to Sondra Cabot when she called into his office to collect some papers this afternoon, the case he was presently involved with was proving a good deal more complex than he had initially anticipated; and he was due over in The Hague at the end of the month on a long-running case that was being heard by the European court.

  He smiled to himself, remembering Sondra’s enthusiasm as she had asked him about it. The complexity of both British and European law fascinated her, she had told him, and Marcus had seen from the small half-smile she had given him that he was also becoming a part of that fascination.

  It had happened before and no doubt would happen again, but this was the first time since he had met Eleanor that he had felt any tug of answering attraction.

  She was far too young for him, of course, and not really what he wanted. He knew he loved Eleanor. But he seemed to be losing her, or rather he seemed to be losing the Eleanor he had married to an Eleanor who seemed to have more time and emotion for a house than she did for him.

  Just listening to her talking about it this evening, he had seen her face start to glow, and her eyes start to shine. The way they had once done for him. He could hear her coming upstairs.

  Quickly he finished cleaning his teeth, not questioning why he wanted to be out of the bathroom before she could join him.

  When Eleanor walked into the bedroom and saw the humped still shape of Marcus’s body beneath the duvet she felt a mixture of resentment and relief.

  What had happened to them? she wondered uneasily as she prepared for bed. Tonight she had actually felt as though she could no longer talk to Marcus… could no longer share things with him.