For Better for Worse

‘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.