For Better for Worse

by Penny Jordan

  ‘She’s stable, at the moment. They’re keeping her in for observation.’ He sounded tired and tense. ‘Ma’s in a bit of a state. Apparently she and Sharon had had a row and she feels responsible for what’s happened, although the doctor said that it was a physical problem and nothing at all to do with their quarrel. I’m going to have to stay up here tonight, Zoe. Could you ring the restaurant for me?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ she assured him. ‘There hasn’t been any news from Clive yet, but I’m sure we’ll hear something soon.’

  ‘I hope so.’ She caught the sound of tiredness and pessimism in his voice. ‘If it falls through it looks as if I’m going to be out of work. I think Aldo suspects that something’s going on…’

  ‘It won’t come to that,’ Zoe comforted him. ‘And even if he did fire you, we can live off what I earn for a few weeks…’

  She heard the small explosive sound Ben made and gripped the receiver tightly. Some views became so entrenched in the human psyche that nothing would remove them, and she already knew how Ben felt about any suggestion that she should support him financially.

  Ten minutes later, after she had replaced the receiver, a wave of nausea struck her.

  When she emerged from the bathroom, her stomach empty and her head dizzy and light, she leaned against the wall, closing her eyes.

  Of course she was doing the right thing. Of course there was no real choice… even less now than before, if Ben actually was made redundant and they had to live on her salary.

  Of course there was no question of her getting all sentimental and silly about a baby she had never planned or wanted to conceive in the first place, but that did not stop the hot salt trickle of tears piercing the barrier of her tightly locked eyelids, nor the dull ache of loneliness and sorrow welling up past all the positive and determined thoughts she was trying to focus her mind on.

  She wouldn’t be feeling like this if Ben were here with her because she wouldn’t be able to wallow in self-pity and self-indulgence, or dwell on things. She would have been far too busy worrying about Ben and making sure he didn’t guess what had happened.

  But Ben wasn’t here. Ben was in Manchester. Ben was with his pregnant, dependent sister.

  What she needed right now was some company, she told herself firmly. First thing in the morning she would ring the clinic and make the necessary appointment and arrangements, but now… She would drive over and see her mother, she decided. That would take her mind off things.

  She was not a child, she did not need Ben with her to hold her hand and give her reassurance and comfort. She knew, after all, what had to be done. There was no choice to be made, only a simply logical sequence of events to be followed.

  No choice… She shivered as she let herself out of the flat. Was that what was disturbing her so much, making her feel so uncharacteristically full of nebulous, difficult-to-understand emotions and needs? The fact that she had no choice?

  The sight of her father’s car parked in the drive of her parents’ house lifted her spirits and, on impulse, instead of knocking on the door as she normally did, she decided to do as her mother was always urging her to do and use her key, give them both a surprise.

  As she unlocked the door she was smiling, for the first time since she had realised she was pregnant, but then her smile disappeared, to be replaced by a cold chill of shock as she walked into the hall, her arrival masked by the sound of her parents’ angry raised voices.

  They were quarrelling! But her parents never quarrelled. Never!

  Through the half-open kitchen door she heard her mother saying bitterly, ‘Don’t you understand… I want to work, to do something with my life other than sit around here waiting for you to come home? After all, it isn’t something you do very often these days, is it?’

  Zoe heard the sound of a chair scraping back over the tiled kitchen floor and then her father’s voice, unfamiliarly sharp and edged.

  ‘You, work? Don’t make me laugh. What would you do? You don’t have any qualifications…’

  ‘And whose fault is that? Who was the one who always insisted that you needed and wanted me here? You complain now that I’m too dependent on you, that you don’t have time to run the business and to entertain me, but you were the one who always insisted that you wanted me here at home. At home…’ Zoe heard her mother laugh acidly. ‘This place isn’t a home any more. It hasn’t been since Zoe left and we both know it. She’s the only thing that really held us together. Oh, I’ve gone along with the pretence, made sure the rest of the world believed we were happy…’

  ‘We were happy, dammit. We are…’

  ‘You may be, but I’m not. I need something much more in my life than a husband who complains he’s too tired and too busy to spend any time with me. Who says he’s too tired to make love to me, who lies about where he is and with whom…’

  As Zoe stiffened in disbelief she heard her father slam his hand down on the table and protest, ‘Look, I’ve already told you that was a mistake. I was there, the receptionist had changed shifts and…’

  ‘It’s always the idiotic wife who’s the last to know about these things, isn’t it? The classic situation… The affair…’

  ‘I am not having an affair.’

  ‘Whether you are or not doesn’t make any difference. Not to my plans. I still intend to go ahead with this training programme. I need to do it; I need to feel that I’m of value to someone. Even if I’m no longer of any value to you.’

  Quietly Zoe turned round and slowly reopened the front door, letting herself out, her movements jerky and filled with tension as she hurried back to her car.

  Her parents, quarrelling. Her parents betraying a side to their relationship, their marriage she had never ever dreamed existed; she had laughed at them so many times for their devotion to one another, never guessing… never dreaming… She was shivering as she started her car and reversed out into the road.

  As she drove back to the flat, the tight knot of tension in the middle of her chest seemed to expand and ache, a hard, threatening ball of fear and confusion that was slowly turning to fierce anger and resentment.

  Her parents… Ben… She was always there when they wanted or needed her, but when she was the one who was wanting, who was in need, where were they? When she needed someone to turn to, to lean on…

  To lean on? But she never needed to lean on anyone. She was the strong one.

  What was wrong with her? Why was she so afraid, so angry; why was she torn between the calm and logical awareness that there was no reason for her to need to share her knowledge with anyone, that it would after all be much simpler and easier if she just went ahead with what had to be done and then got on with her life, and this terrifyingly and illogical sense of injustice and anger that the people who were supposed to be closest to her should be so oblivious to what was happening to her?

  Did she really expect Ben, her parents to somehow possess the ability to see into her mind, to sense intuitively what had happened?

  No, of course not. How could they? She had always been the one who had insisted to Ben that they could not be expected to know what one another felt, who had laughed at the idea of even the closest of lovers being able to read one another’s thoughts. And yet here she was, beneath the smothering blanket of control she had thrown over the panic and fear she had felt earlier, still fighting to suppress an anger whose intensity totally bewildered her.

  But what was she angry about? The fact that her parents were quarrelling… the fact that Ben had gone rushing off to Manchester to be with his mother and sister, when she needed him here with her?

  But he did not know she needed him, did he? And why did she need him? It wasn’t as though she was facing anything particularly traumatic, after all. All she was doing was simply correcting a mistake; putting right something which should not have gone wrong in the first place. It wasn’t as though the pregnancy had any real significance for her…

  And yet here she was…

&nbs
p; Here she was what? Full of anger and self-pity because no one but she would ever know of the sacrifice she was making… The life she was destroying… For Ben’s sake… for the sake of their plans…

  She was making? No, she wasn’t the one making that sacrifice. It was her child who…

  No… As she thumped the side of the steering-wheel with her hand she didn’t even feel the pain of the impact, only the shock caused by the direction of her thoughts.

  This was stupid. More than stupid, it was dangerous and self-destructive.

  What was the matter with her, anyway?

  Nothing. There was nothing at all wrong with her. Tomorrow she would ring the clinic, make the necessary appointment and with luck by the time Ben returned it would all be over and everything would be back to normal. The whole thing over and done with and safely out of the way, so that she could concentrate on their new venture, their new life.

  It would be up to her to provide the optimism and the strength to support Ben through his doubts and pessimism, she had always known that—had in a way almost been pleased by his dependence on her. She could not give Ben and the business the time and attention they needed and have a child as well.

  It was all so unfair—she did not want the complications this pregnancy were causing her, she told herself angrily later as she let herself into the flat.

  Why was life doing this to her… testing her like this? Why her?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘I’M OFF now, Nell…’

  Eleanor paused on the stairs, tensing as she watched Marcus disappearing through the front door. Couldn’t he have waited until she got downstairs and said goodbye properly to her?

  Angrily she walked into the kitchen and started clearing up the breakfast things. There had been tension between them ever since the traumatic events of the previous weekend. The reverberations from the scene Marcus had walked into still echoed uncomfortably in her head.

  ‘Of course you want to move,’ Vanessa had accused her bitterly. ‘This isn’t your home. It never has been…’

  It wasn’t true, of course. Or was it? Had a part of her always perhaps secretly felt insecure of her tenure here somehow—her right to Marcus’s love?

  She frowned, disliking the thought and the doubts, the emotions they aroused.

  Why was it that Vanessa possessed this skilful ability to enmesh her in the trap of her own insecurities and fears… insecurities and fears she did not always even know she possessed until Vanessa underlined them for her?

  Sometimes it seemed as though Vanessa was actually trying to undermine her relationship with Marcus… their marriage. And yet why should she? Her parents’ marriage had been over and their divorce complete long before Eleanor had ever met Marcus, and initially Vanessa had seemed to accept her readily enough.

  Vanessa was a teenager, she reminded herself, and, like all teenagers, she was subject to unpredictable moods and emotions.

  And besides, it was not her relationship with Vanessa she ought to be focusing on but her relationship with Marcus.

  This week they had been treating one another with the kind of careful, almost hostile neutrality which would have seemed laughable at one time.

  Was it really only a month or so ago that she had been congratulating herself on the success of their marriage, fully believing that there was nothing, no one that could come between them? Laughing about the doubts which had initially held her back from committing herself to Marcus.

  It was not the quarrel between their children that was the cause of the resentment she could sense between them now. Not on her part, anyway. What she resented was not Marcus’s irritability with their inability to get on with one another, but the fact that he seemed to assume that she was somehow, if not directly to blame for this state of affairs, then at least remiss in not somehow being able to remedy it. Why, after all, should she be the one to take on the responsibility for solving the problem? Couldn’t he see that his very attitude towards it, towards her was making the whole situation worse? And it wasn’t even as though she was not trying to do something. It was not her fault that Vanessa had taken such a violent dislike to the idea of their moving to Broughton House—a dislike which Eleanor suspected sprang partly from the fact that Tom had announced the news to her so unexpectedly, and partly because she herself had been the one to propose it.

  ‘I did warn you,’ Marcus had told her almost curtly when she had complained to him that Vanessa seemed to be deliberately trying to poison Tom and Gavin’s minds against the move.

  ‘But they’re the ones we’re doing this for,’ Eleanor had protested. ‘It’s for their benefit as well as ours. Vanessa complains violently about the boys having to use her room. At Broughton House she’ll be able to have her own privacy—’

  ‘I can’t make her like the idea, any more than you can,’ Marcus had interrupted her flatly, his voice impatient and irritated.

  Why was it that suddenly they seemed to be pulling in opposite directions instead of pulling together? It couldn’t just be because of Vanessa, surely?

  In the past, whatever differences they had had they had managed to compromise on quickly and tolerantly, but somehow now…

  Was it because secretly she resented the way that, instead of helping her with the problem of their children’s mutual antagonism, he seemed to be cutting himself off from it and leaving her to deal with it alone… was that why she was almost deliberately allowing the distance between them to harden and grow?

  All he had said to her when she had confided to him her concern about Tom’s fears was a brief injunction to contact both her ex-in-laws and Allan and Karen to discuss her concern with them.

  ‘It’s no good blaming Vanessa for the fact that Tom feels insecure,’ he had pointed out logically.

  Logic was one thing, but where was the compassion, the concern, the love which should have softened his judgement?

  Listening to him, she had suddenly felt as though not just her sons but perhaps she as well had become a nuisance to him, a problem, interfering with the smooth flowing of his life. She had felt, for the first time since their relationship had begun, the cold, destructive sensation of wondering if he did really love her.

  This quarrel between their children had done more than provoke them both into taking a defensive stance to protect their own offspring; it had opened up areas of vulnerability within their relationship she had never ever suspected could exist.

  The phone rang just as she was finishing loading the dishwasher. She picked up the receiver, surprised to hear the sound of her ex-mother-in-law’s voice.

  Despite the problems of her first marriage and its eventual break-up, she had always remained on good terms with her ex-in-laws.

  ‘It’s the boys,’ Mary told her now. ‘You haven’t been in touch to confirm that they’ll be coming to us as usual for half-term, so I thought I’d better give you a ring. Actually, I wanted to have a chat with you anyway… I don’t want you to think I’m fussing, but the last time they were here Tom was very quiet and withdrawn. Not a bit like his normal self…’

  ‘Ring Mary and Jim and talk to them about Tom’s feelings,’ Marcus had told her, and because she had been annoyed with him, and hurt, because she had somehow, almost childishly, felt that he was supporting Vanessa over her, sweeping Tom’s feelings to one side as unimportant, she had ignored his advice.

  Quickly now and half guiltily she explained what had happened and how Tom felt that because of the new baby he and Gavin were no longer important to their grandparents.

  ‘Oh, no… poor little Tom. We thought he and Gavin would enjoy having a larger room. I should have realised how he might feel, though. I feel so cross with myself for being so insensitive. Thank goodness you discovered how he felt… perhaps if Jim and I drove up to London to collect them this time instead of you bringing them down it might reassure him a bit…’

  After they had finished making all the necessary arrangements for Mary and Jim to collect the boys for their
week’s holiday with them, Eleanor rang Karen, her ex-husband’s wife.

  Since they had never been rivals there was no animosity between them. From what the boys said to her and from what she herself had seen until Karen’s daughter had been born, she had established a very good and caring relationship with her stepsons.

  Bearing this in mind, and heartened by what Mary had told her, Eleanor explained to Karen why she was ringing.

  ‘I thought Tom was a bit quiet the last time he was here,’ Karen confirmed. ‘I did wonder if it was the baby. I’ve got a younger stepbrother myself, so I do know what it’s like, but he’s so loving with her that I thought I must be wrong…’

  ‘It isn’t the baby he resents,’ Eleanor told her. ‘It’s more that he’s frightened that he isn’t going to be loved any more. I’ve tried to explain to him that when a new baby arrives in a family, for a while all the attention and excitement is focused on it. I think part of the problem is that he feels there isn’t anywhere he can really call his own. His bedroom here is really Vanessa’s…’

  ‘And we’ve put the baby in the room here that used to be his. Oh, dear… I am glad you’ve told me about this Eleanor. The last thing I want is to alienate the boys from their father. I know myself how devastating that can be for a child.’

  What was wrong with her? Eleanor wondered sadly once she had replaced the receiver. She had thought of herself as a mature, responsible, aware woman and yet here she had been, deliberately refusing to accept the validity of what Marcus was suggesting, almost as though she were a sulky child trying to punish an adult for some imagined crime.

  All right, so she was under a lot of pressure, what with the business and the house and Vanessa, and a part of her did feel resentful that Marcus seemed to be leaving everything to her and abdicating his responsibilities as a partner in their shared lives; but to adopt such a childish and pointless attitude, like a child seeking attention… wanting to be coaxed and cajoled…

  She prowled irritably round the kitchen, trying to come to terms with the discovery she had just made about herself, irritated by her reactions—and afraid of them.