For Better for Worse

‘Darling, it’s impossible,’ Nick had told her. ‘Don’t you see… anyone we invite could be a potential client? One look at what you’ve done to this place and they’re going to wonder if my professional skills are as amateurish as your homemaking ones.’

His criticism, although perhaps justified, had taken from her all the pleasure and sense of achievement she had felt in what she had done, and when three weeks later Nick had suddenly announced that he had booked a firm of decorators to come and repaint the whole house she had quietly kept to herself her disappointment over the effect of the no doubt practical but very plain woodchip paper with which every internal wall had been covered.

It was obviously Nick’s choice and no doubt he was right when he explained that it looked far better than what she had done.

After that it had never seemed to Fern that the house was really her home; only the kitchen was her domain, and she had tried to make it as cheerful and warm as she could, even though she could tell from Nick’s face that he did not approve of the bowls of spring bulbs; the flowers from the garden, the soft yellow paint and the pretty curtains and chair covers she had made for the room.

From the outside the house looked neat and well cared for, just like all the others in the cul-de-sac, but inside it was empty and desolate of all that made a house a proper home, Fern reflected sadly as she turned into the road into town, her footsteps automatically slowing down slightly as she studied the view in front of her.

It didn’t matter how many times she walked down here, or how familiar the view before her was; she always felt a fresh surge of pleasure at what she saw.

The town had originally been an important stopping-off point for stage-coaches and other carriage traffic, a vital link with the main arterial routes of the day, and although now modern roads and motorways had turned the town into a quiet backwater, bypassing it, the signs of its thriving, bustling past were clearly visible in its architecture.

One side of the town square was still dominated by the coaching inn which was said to date back to the fifteenth century, although its present exterior was that of a late Tudor building, herringbone-patterned brick insets between the beams replacing the original wattle and daub. Adjacent to it ran a line of similar buildings, once private homes, now mainly shops and offices. Next to them was the church crafted in local stone, its spire reaching up dizzyingly towards the sky.

There was a local legend that the original bells had been melted down at the time of the Civil War to make weapons and armour, but as far as Fern knew this had never actually been substantiated.

Like looking at the rings of a tree to discover its age, the various stages of the town’s growth could be seen in the different styles of its architecture.

The third side of the square was lined with handsome Georgian town houses, originally the property of the wealthy tradesmen who had made their homes in the town, drawn there by the business generated from the coaching traffic.

Adam’s office was in one of those buildings, beautifully renovated and lovingly restored to all its original elegance.

When it came to his work, no detail was too small to escape Adam’s careful attention. Even the paint for the walls had had to be specially mixed to an old-fashioned recipe.

It had been Lord Stanton who had unearthed in his library an estimate and recipe for paint originally supplied for the new wing of the hall which had been built at the same time as the houses and by the same builder who had been responsible for the pretty Nash-type terrace of houses in Avondale.

As she crossed the square, heading for the church, and the surgery, Fern deliberately took the longer way round so that she wouldn’t have to walk past Adam’s office. The sun glinted on the leaded windows of the coaching inn, highlighting the uneven thickness of the old-fashioned glass, and picking out the detail on the pargeting decorating the upper storey of the building next to it.

In the centre of the square stood an open-arched two-storey stone building, a relic of the days when the town had marked one of the stopping-off places for drovers taking their flocks from one part of the country to another.

On a clear day from the top of the church tower it was possible to see out over the Bristol Channel to the west and to the spire of Salisbury cathedral to the southeast.

It had been Adam’s gentle coercion of the local authorities, supported by Lord Stanton, that had been responsible for the removal of the square’s tarmac road surface and the uncovering and restoration of the original cobbles which lay beneath it.

Adam’s family had lived in the town since the late sixteenth century. Wheelwrights originally, they had prospered during the days of coach travel.

Fern had never met either Nick’s mother or Adam’s father, both of whom had been killed in a road accident a couple of years prior to her knowing the stepbrothers. However, while Adam had always spoken warmly of both Nick’s mother as well as his own parents, Nick rarely mentioned his family at all.

Fern knew that Nick’s father had deserted his wife and small son when Nick was barely three years old—Adam had told her that—but when she had once gently tried to sympathise with Nick over his father’s defection he had rounded angrily on her.

Fern also knew from comments other people had made that Adam’s father, like Adam himself, had been very highly thought of locally, and had been a very generous benefactor to local charities.

He had also been very good to Nick, treating him if anything more indulgently than he had his own son.

Fern remembered how surprised she had been when she first met Nick to discover that the expensive car he had been driving—far more expensive than the car Adam drove—had been a present to him from Adam’s father.

The money Nick had used to set himself up in business had also come from Adam’s father, via a legacy left to him in the older man’s will, but despite this Nick seemed to begrudge the fact that Adam had inherited a far larger proportion of his father’s wealth than Nick himself had done.

Fern remembered how shocked she had been the first time she had heard Nick voice this resentment, but then she had reminded herself that, bearing in mind the defection of his own father, it was perhaps understandable that Nick should react so badly, perhaps super-sensitively and totally erroneously seeing in Adam’s father’s willing of the larger part of his fortune to his natural son a rejection of Nick, his stepson.

And yet Fern had also heard Nick saying disarmingly how uncomfortable he had sometimes felt about the fact that Adam’s father had seemed to relate far better to him than he had done to Adam himself.

‘I think he felt more in tune with me than he did with Adam. Adam, worthy though he is, can be a bit lacking in humour at times.’

Fern had been surprised by this comment, since she had thought that Adam had an excellent sense of humour, rather dry and subtle perhaps, but he was an extremely perceptive and aware man, who made generous allowances for the vulnerability and frailties of others.

Was it perhaps because Nick had felt he was closer to Adam’s father than Adam was himself that he had been so resentful of the fact that Adam had been left the larger portion of his wealth?