For Better for Worse

As he followed her towards the stairs, he stopped and Eleanor turned back to look enquiringly at him as the boys went back downstairs.

‘Do you think it’s a good idea to tell them we’re moving here at this stage?’ he asked her. ‘I know how much you like the house, Nell, but don’t you feel that we could be taking on too much? You’ve seen for yourself how much work needs doing, and personally I—’

‘No… don’t you see, that could be a plus point,’ Eleanor interrupted him eagerly. ‘We’ll be able to have the conversions designed specifically to meet our own needs. It’s offers by sealed bid, Marcus,’ she added anxiously. ‘I’d like to get ours in just as soon as we can. I suppose we ought to consult a valuer first.’

Marcus was frowning.

‘We’ve only just seen the place, Nell. Surely you can see for yourself that it will need a thorough structural survey, never mind a valuation. I really think we should—’

‘Marcus, it’s wonderful, isn’t it? I feel as though it’s just been sitting here waiting for us. I feel as though a huge weight’s been lifted off my shoulders. It’s the answer to all our problems. You’re very quiet…’ She smiled up at him. ‘It’s all the driving, I suppose, in the rain.’ She made a face. ‘It’s a pity we didn’t get a better day to view it…’

* * *

Half an hour later, on the way home, his three passengers all asleep, Marcus glanced into Eleanor’s face and frowned to himself.

He had never seen her so excited about anything before—not even him? It was so out of character for her; she was normally so calm and controlled. He could still remember the glow which had come to her eyes when they had come across the pond in the ten minutes he had allowed her to walk him round the grounds in the steady rain. This fantasy she had about them all living in rural bliss, one big happy family—couldn’t she see how improbable it was… how i

mpractical?

He knew she’d been under a lot of stress recently—hadn’t they both? But this need she seemed to have developed to become some kind of earth mother, presiding over an impossibly perfect family… Did she really believe that moving out to the country could actually achieve what anyone in their senses could see was a totally unrealistic harmony?

He had thought that, like him, she enjoyed their London life; and it disturbed him to discover that he knew her less well than he had thought. What else was there about her that he did not know?

He could understand her concern for her sons. She was a good mother, wise and fair as well as loving, and worked very hard to provide them with a sense of security and the knowledge that they were loved.

Unlike Julia, who had always alternated wildly between ignoring Vanessa almost totally when she had more important things to occupy her time and attention, or spoiling her outrageously, showering her with a, to him, nauseating false maternal affection, which was of course why Vanessa…

He sighed under his breath. He loved his daughter, and was increasingly aware that her upbringing was having a detrimental effect on her personality. He acknowledged that it wasn’t easy for Eleanor having to deal with her, but why couldn’t Eleanor see that there was nothing she could do to alter Vanessa’s attitude? Too old to have discipline imposed on her and too young as yet to understand the merits of self-discipline, Vanessa revelled in the power she had to hurt others, too immature to be able either to temper or balance her own feelings and needs against those of others.

How much of that was his fault? He had left his marriage to Julia, driven away from her by the constant seesawing of her moods, the debilitating arguments and theatrical and equally exhausting fits of remorse; the pressure of living life at such a constant high pitch of emotional intensity turned him off rather than on, his need to escape from his increasing loathing of Julia’s moods and demands for attention overwhelming everything else.

He had not recognised then that her inability to control those moods might have as devastating an effect on his daughter as it had had on him. Had not realised, or had not wanted to realise?

Of course he was aware of Vanessa’s hostility towards Eleanor and her sons, but this idealistic, sentimental belief Eleanor had developed that somehow by moving to Broughton House everything would miraculously change and that they would somehow be welded together as in some sickening sentimental pastiche of perfect family life…

Marcus was very wary of sentiment. His marriage to Julia had taught him to be. She had loved sentiment, had wallowed in it, manipulated it, projected and promoted it until she had grossly deformed and abused it, until he had felt as sickened by it as by a surfeit of sticky, cloying chocolate. Sentiment had no substance, no reality; it was simply a tool Julia had used to get her own way.

When he had first met Eleanor she had seemed like a breath of fresh clean air, bracing, invigorating in her honesty and naïveté, a woman who combined a very special kind of strength and self-worth with a disarming aura of femininity and sexuality.

He had known from the first moment they met that he wanted her, but he had also known that she was oblivious to that wanting, untouched by it, unaware of it in a way that Julia would never have been.

She had been recommended to him as an excellent language teacher, and he had approached her with a view to polishing up his schoolboy French and German, for the business law in which he specialised was increasingly taking him to the European courts, especially The Hague and Brussels, and he had decided that it would be no bad thing to become far more fluent in both languages.

He remembered the first time he had made love to her: she had been hesitant at first and slightly uncertain. He had soon discovered that it was a lack of self-confidence that inhibited her and not a lack of desire.

She had been divorced for five years and in that time had made love with only one other man, she had confessed, adding ruefully that the experience had not been a success.

‘It was too soon after the divorce,’ she had told him, ‘and I was too anxious. I wanted to reassure myself that I was still desirable, I suppose, and so I made the classic mistake of going to bed with the first man who asked me.’

‘And he was such an inadequate lover that you decided to be celibate?’ he had suggested.

She had laughed then, that free, uninhibited laugh he loved so much.

‘No,’ she had admitted.

She had never made any conscious decision not to have sex. It was simply that the occasion and the desire had never arisen simultaneously.

‘And now?’ he had asked her, bending to caress her nipple with his mouth, amused to discover how quickly he wanted her again and filled with an unexpected tenderness at the way she trembled against him, her eyes closing, her teeth tugging on her bottom lip as she made no attempt to conceal from him what she was feeling. What she had given to him had been given totally freely and generously. And she had never made any attempt to use his feelings or her own to manipulate or coerce him. It was that honesty about her which had first made him love her; but marriage demanded more than love, more than desire. It demanded… What?