Eleanor shook her head. ‘Vanessa, it’s perfect… I love it.’ Too sentimental! Her mouth quivered slightly as she looked down at the pretty antique sampler in its cherrywood frame.
Long, long ago some young female fingers had stitched that slightly crooked ‘Home is where the heart is’, but the mother who had received it from her daughter could not have taken more pleasure and emotion in it than she was doing.
‘It will be just right for over the fireplace,’ Eleanor said quietly. ‘Thank you, Vanessa.’
She didn’t attempt to touch or kiss her. To have done so at this stage would have jarred, struck a false note, but neither did she attempt to hide from her stepdaughter the tears which shone in her eyes.
‘Oh, and I’ve brought you two both back a poster as well,’ Vanessa was telling her stepbrothers.
As she watched her handing them to them, Eleanor wondered if Vanessa was remembering as she was the ones she had torn up.
‘And to think I was actually looking forward to coming home,’ Vanessa protested ten minutes later as Tom and Gavin quarrelled over who was going to show her all the work which had been done on the house.
Registering that very natural and heartwarming use of the word ‘home’, Eleanor turned to them and told them equally, ‘I’m sure Vanessa would prefer her father to show her, not you two. Haven’t you both got homework to do anyway?’
‘No, it’s OK,’ Vanessa interrupted easily. ‘They can show me tomorrow. I mean, Dad might forget about the fish, mightn’t he?’
* * *
‘I can’t believe how much she’s changed,’ Marcus said quietly to Eleanor later.
‘She’s growing up. She’s not really a little girl any more.’
‘No, she isn’t,’ Marcus agreed sombrely.
‘She still needs you, though, Marcus…’
He reached out for her, drawing her gently to his side and wrapping her tenderly in his arms, dropping a kiss on the end of her nose before telling her softly, ‘She still needs us, Nell.
‘You are my home, just as you’re Tom and Gavin’s—and Vanessa’s as well… and I think she knows it.
‘One day when she’s older I hope she’ll recognise as I do how lucky we’ve both been to find someone whose heart is big enough for both of us.’
* * *
Upstairs in her room, Vanessa unpacked her things. The first thing to come out of her suitcase, the last thing she had put in in New York, was her photograph wallet. She scanned her new bedroom quickly for a moment and then smiled as she found what she wanted.
Eleanor had protested when she had insisted on bringing it with her, but she had stood firm, and now, as she walked over to the noticeboard Tom had made for her, she tossed her hair back off her face, concentrating as she extracted the photographs from the wallet one by one and pinned them in place.
Her father; her mother all made up and dressed for her film role; the boys; a group of friends from school; some new ones of Jade and finally the last one… one she had filched from Eleanor’s photograph album five minutes before she had left for the airport.
Carefully she pinned it up in the middle of the board. In it, Eleanor was standing next to her father, looking up at him, her love for him shining in her eyes.
‘Who’s this, then?’ one of the boys she had met in New York had asked her, studying the photograph.
‘It’s my father and—–’ she had begun, but he had cut her short, giving her a would-be louche leer and exclaiming,
‘Yeah, your mom’s a good-looking woman. You look a lot like her.’
It hadn’t seemed necessary or important to tell him that Eleanor wasn’t her mother; instead she had treated him to the very female and old-fashioned look she had just perfected.
There was no need for him to think she was taken in by his flattery. She bet he said that kind of thing to every girl he met.
She might tell Nell about him later, she decided, when they were on their own.
Humming under her breath, she opened her bedroom door and ran downstairs.
‘Nell, I’m hungry,’ she complained as she opened the kitchen door. ‘Is there anything to eat…?’