For Better for Worse

Nick liked his dress shirts to be hand-laundered by her, and starched. It was a laborious job and one which she felt the local laundry could have performed far more efficiently, but she also knew that if she tried to point this out to Nick he would demand to know if she thought he was made of money, and what she did with her time. After all, she did not work.

Because Nick would not let her. Because every time she raised the subject of getting herself some sort of part-time paid work he told her furiously that he was not going to be humiliated in their local community by having his wife pretending that he kept her so short of money that she needed to earn the pathetically few pounds she would earn.

‘And besides, what would you do?’ he had taunted her. ‘You’ve never held down a proper job.’

‘I could train,’ she had retorted. ‘Some of the local shops…’

Nick had gone from contempt to fury, accusing her of deliberately trying to undermine him, his position.

Didn’t she at least owe it to him to at least try to behave as a loyal wife? he had demanded bitterly.

A loyal wife… Her eyes bleak with despair, she turned to look at him, watching the irritation and contempt hardening his face as he studied her.

‘Why the hell don’t you find something decent to wear?’ he demanded.

She could have retorted that she could not afford the luxury of anything other than the most basic of chain-store clothes, but to do so would reignite his grievance against her late parents, for using their modest wealth to purchase annuities which had died with them rather than investing their capital elsewhere so that it could have been passed on to her.

They must present a bizarre contrast, she admitted tiredly, Nick in his obviously expensive dinner suit, she in her shabby, well-worn, dull dress.

‘My God, you love playing the martyr, don’t you?’ Nick accused her as he glared at her. ‘Hurry up or we’re going to be late. I don’t know what the hell you’re doing up here anyway.’ He gave her another disparaging glance.

Comparing her with Venice, Fern wondered unhappily, or was she simply imagining things… looking for them, because…?

As she followed him downstairs, she wondered what Nick would say if she told him that she would rather stay at home.

Get even more angry with her than he already was, she imagined.

There had been a time when she had actually enjoyed going to dinner parties, had looked forward to the stimulation of conversation with other people, but that had been before Nick had pointed out to her on their way home one evening that she was boring people with her silly mundane conversation.

He had apologised to her later, but when she had refused to respond he had accused her of sulking and she had tried to tell him that she wasn’t; that she just felt so weighed down by the burden of realising what people had privately been thinking of her that she simply couldn’t raise the energy to respond to him.

‘Don’t he to me, Fern,’ he had told her bitterly. ‘You’re trying to punish me for telling you the truth. Just as you tried to punish me for having an affair by…’

She had run out of the room then, unable to bear to listen to him any more, knowing that she was behaving childishly and yet unable to trust herself to stay and hear him out.

It had been shortly after that that her father had died, and then her mother, who had suffered ill health for several years, had gradually started to grow worse, and she had had no energy left to do anything other than cope with her mother’s decline.

‘Fern, for heaven’s sake come on,’ Nick demanded irritably. Quietly she picked her bag up off the bed and walked towards the bedroom door.

Well, at least there was one thing she could be sure of about this evening’s dinner party, Fern reflected, trying to resurrect her sense of humour, and that was that Venice would not be dressed in an out-of-date, dowdy black dress.

* * *

She was wrong, on one point at least. Venice was wearing black, but that was the only thing her own dress had in common with the outfit Venice had on, Fern remarked wryly as Venice opened her front door to them.

At closer to thirty-five than thirty Venice was older than Fern; older than Nick too, a tiny, vivacious, fragile-boned creature with a small oval face and enormous eyes. Where another woman might have self-consciously tried to conceal her lack of height, seeing it as a fault rather than an asset, Venice seemed to take pleasure in deliberately underlining the fact that she couldn’t be much more than five feet tall, and Fern, who had in the past suffered several slighting comments from Nick about her own small frame and the fact that short women invariably lacked the elegant grace of their taller sisters, stifled a small pang of envy at Venice’s abundant self-confidence.

The black dress she was wearing might almost have been painted on to her body. For someone so small-boned she had disconcertingly voluptuous breasts. Fern had overheard a couple of other women discussing Venice and her figure, one of them wondering out loud if her breasts might possibly owe more to man than nature.

Whatever the case, they were certainly catching Nick’s eye, Fern recognised.

Had Venice deliberately chosen that trimming of black feathers for her dress, knowing that they not only provided an eye-catching contrast to her skin, but also that the sheen on the feathers reflected the pearly translucence of her bare skin?

The single pear-shaped diamond that nestled between her breasts was so large that it only just escaped being vulgar. When she moved, it blazed cold fire like the matching diamonds in her ears.

Tonight the almost white-blonde hair, which she normally wore in a perfectly shaped shoulder-length bob, was drawn up and back in a contemporary version of a Bardot-type beehive hairstyle, all careless, artful fronds of ‘escaping’ hair and tousled curls, half as though she had just come from her bed and the arms of her lover, piling her hair up carelessly on top of her head, more concerned with the pleasure of their lovemaking than her public appearance.

Only of course that particular type of artless sensuality could only be achieved with the aid of a very expensive hairdresser.