For Better for Worse

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.

She thought back to when they had first met and admitted their mutual attraction for one another, how eagerly she had looked forward to her dates with him; the way she had saved up all the interesting and funny happenings of her day to relate to him; the way no day seemed fully complete without his goodnight phone call… Phone calls which had often extended well into the early hours, especially when either of them was working away.

There had been more real contact between them then than there was now that they were married and living together.

How had that happened? When had it happened? she wondered unhappily.

Take this evening, for instance… the way Marcus had made her feel so irritable and on edge that she had felt unable to discuss Vanessa with him, afraid of being unfairly critical of the girl, because of the lack of harmony between herself and Marcus.

The last thing she wanted to do was to try to alienate him from his daughter. She knew how much Vanessa needed her father and, even if Marcus himself did not realise it, he needed her too. Fatherhood did not come easily to him, Eleanor recognised, and he had confided to her once that he suspected himself of lacking the necessary gene to be a good parent.

Eleanor suspected that what he had lacked was more likely to be an example of good parenting set by his own parents.

Both of them in their different ways had suffered from that, and she appreciated that Marcus very genuinely did his best for both sets of children.

As she got into bed beside him, Eleanor hesitated, wanting to reach out and touch him, to reassure herself that, despite the brusqueness he had exhibited this evening, Marcus still loved and wanted her; but then she remembered the self-destructiveness of that kind of conciliatory behaviour and the way it had ultimately led to the break-up of her first marriage, and reminding herself instead of how difficult her day had been, and how Marcus did not like her to have to combine the pressures of career, family and running a home. All she had wanted was for him to listen while she confided her anxieties to him and yet instead he had cut her off with irritation and impatience, plainly not wanting to listen to what she had to say.

As she turned her back on him, her mind was ignoring the small forlorn voice that questioned whether standing on her principles was really worth the loss of the warmth of his arms, and the pleasure of snuggling up next to him; the sensation of the soft furriness of his body hair against her skin; the delicious friction it caused when he breathed; the smell and warmth of him; the lovely male solidness of his body… the giveaway instinctive male possessiveness with which he would in his sleep sometimes throw one leg across her body, holding her against him as though he wanted to keep her securely there next to him even while he slept.

When she felt tears unexpectedly prickling the backs of her eyes, she blinked them away irritably. She was a woman, not a child; a woman moreover who was surely old enough to accept that even within the best of marriages and relationships there were bound to be points of conflict. Perhaps she had been a bit thoughtless in rushing straight into a list of problems and complaints almost before Marcus had walked through the door, but she was not about to turn into the kind of woman who felt she had to pander to a man’s need to have his ego soothed and cosseted, and Marcus was too mature and intelligent to want her to do so.

She would ring the surveyor in the morning and get him to supply her with a list of all the essential work the house needed, and then she would ask him to recommend some suitable builders, she comforted herself.

And perhaps she had been a little bit over-sensitive to be so hurt when Marcus had demanded accusingly earlier, ‘For God’s sake, Nell, can’t we discuss… can’t you think about anything bar that damned house?’

Just before she fell asleep, she reminded herself that she would have to ask Mrs Garvey if she could give them a couple of extra hours tomorrow. Because of all the problems and delays she had had today, she had not had time to move the boys’ things up into the attic, and Vanessa was due to arrive after school for the weekend.

* * *

Eleanor was halfway through the delicate negotiation required to persuade Mrs Garvey to work the additional two hours when the telephone rang.

She answered it, expecting her caller to be the surveyor who had promised to ring her, but instead it was Marcus.

‘Nell, can you do me a favour? I’m going to be tied up in a meeting on a case all afternoon. Could you pick Vanessa up from the station for me?’

She had already promised to take Tom and Gavin to McDonald’s after school, but when she explained this to Marcus she could hear the impatience and lack of understanding colouring his voice as he demanded, ‘Well, can’t you take all three of them after you’ve picked up Van?’

How could she explain to him, especially with Mrs Garvey within earshot, that the visit to McDonald’s had been both a conscience-soother and a small unadmitted bribe to her own sons to make up for the upheaval the arrival of his daughter would inevitably cause them?

Even if Mrs Garvey had not been there, could she have explained? Would Marcus have understood?

It was obvious that in Marcus’s eyes her children’s visit to McDonald’s rated far far lower in his list of priorities than his meeting.

Curtly agreeing to his request, she replaced the receiver and reflected half an hour later that, in view of the way her life was going at the moment, it was perhaps not surprising that Mrs Garvey had announced that it was impossible for her to work over.

Which meant that she would have to clear out the boys’ room, Eleanor acknowledged.

Why was it that all members of the male sex seemed to share the same habit of misplacing one of a pair of socks? And why, additionally, was it that half a dozen pairs of grey socks all bought at the same time and all washed in the same way should ultimately end up in so many varying shades, so that each sock could only be matched to its own specific partner? Irritably she surveyed the three very definitely off-grey socks she had found beneath Tom’s bed.

Of the two of them, Gavin was definitely the neater; his possessions, unlike Tom’s, were not strewn haphazardly all over the room but stacked neatly in his ‘half’.