For Better for Worse

‘I’ve got the details here… if you…’

‘Eleanor, I…’

Marcus stopped speaking as the phone rang, getting up to answer it and then calling over to Eleanor, ‘It’s Jade for you. Look, I’ve got to go,’ he added as he handed the receiver over to her. ‘But…’

‘Don’t you dare say that Saturday is out,’ Eleanor warned him as she kissed him. ‘I’m so excited about this house, Marcus,’ she added softly. ‘I know it sounds silly, but the moment I saw the photograph, I was so drawn to it. It will be a real home for all of us… somewhere where we could be a real family,’ she told him, leaning her hand on his shoulder.

Against her hand, she felt his muscles flex, and breathed in the sharp muted scent of his cologne. Beneath it she could also smell the warm, musky male scent that was purely his and her stomach muscles contracted slightly, her body signalling a subtle sensual response to her recognition of that scent.

A small smile of contentment curled her mouth. How many married women of her age could lay claim to that kind of sexual response to their husbands and at seven o’clock on a weekday morning?

Not that either of them could do anything about it, she acknowledged ruefully as she heard her son’s footsteps clattering towards them and Marcus started to move away from her, saying briefly, ‘Nell, I…’

‘You have to go, I know,’ she agreed, wryly adding mentally to herself, and I have to find out what Jade wants, take the boys to school… sort out with the accountant the best way to terminate our office lease, try to make these last few weeks with Louise as amicable as possible…

Marcus had gone before she was even halfway through her mental list.

She turned to the telephone and said warmly into the receiver, ‘Jade, sorry about that… Marcus was just leaving.’

‘Can you make lunch?’ she heard her friend ask her. ‘I’m off to New York at the end of the week and we haven’t seen one another for ages.’

‘Yes, I think so,’ Eleanor confirmed, mentally reviewing her diary. ‘What time and where?’

She smiled to herself as Jade predictably named an expensive and very high profile restaurant, agreeing to meet her friend there at one.

She took the house brochure to work with her, tucking it away inside her briefcase like a secret talisman, refusing to give in to the temptation to study its promised delights yet again.

She knew them off by heart by now anyway, from the allure of the dusty lofts above the garages, which in her mind’s eye she had already turned into a spacious work area for herself plus a large study-cum-playroom for the boys, an ideal refuge for them on wet winter days, somewhere where they could study in peace—she smiled to herself again, mentally picturing their dark heads bent over their books, a cheerful fire crackling warmly in front of them, solid desks standing on a dark polished floor, dormer windows overlooking winter-furrowed fields-right through to the elegantly proportioned ground floor drawing-room where she and Marcus would entertain their friends.

The house had seven bedrooms, all of them large enough to allow for the addition of private bathrooms. A must both for guests and to keep the peace between the needs of a teenage girl and those of her stepbrothers.

Vanessa would choose her own décor, of course. As a teenager Eleanor herself had been an addict of historical novels and had dreamed secretly of a huge old-fashioned four-poster bed.

She had never had one, of course, and the kind of bed she had dreamed of was a world away from the over-fussy modern versions swathed, flounced, draped and beribboned in sugary sweet pastel fabrics.

Downstairs… A small, happy breath escaped her. Downstairs there would be the drawing-room, a sitting-room, a dining-room, a study for Marcus, and then there would be the kitchen. The kind of kitchen that was the whole heart of the family. It would be a large rectangular room with sensible solid wooden cupboards, and a large wooden table… the kind the children could sit round while she was cooking.

The sudden blaring sound of someone’s car horn brought her sharply back to reality and the fact that the lights had changed.

There were few traffic lights in the country, she reminded herself as she ignored the other driver’s impatience and set her car in motion.

As she parked her car and headed for the office, she was conscious of her walking pace slowing down. She paused, frowning slightly. Things had not been easy at work since Louise had made her announcement; the friendship and closeness they had once shared and which Eleanor had genuinely believed was something they would always share had gone and in its place was a sense of confusion and, if she was honest, a sense also of betrayal on her part; and Louise was increasingly belligerent.

Eleanor did not need the services of a psychologist to tell her that Louise’s aggression was probably her way of dealing with the guilt she must surely be feeling at the way she had behaved. Eleanor could not imagine that anyone could act as Louise had done and not suffer at least some pangs of guilt, but Louise had moulded herself so much in Paul’s image that Eleanor suspected she had, on the surface at least, ignored and denied any such feelings, channelling them instead into resentment and anger against Eleanor herself.

When she was not being smugly self-righteous about her desire to put the health and education of her children first by moving them to a better environment, Louise seemed to be continually making remarks designed to underline her belief that it was her linguistic skills which contributed the most to their business, her languages which were superior to Eleanor’s; and now that her initial shock and distress had worn off Eleanor was finding she was increasingly having to grit her teeth and make a determined effort not to respond to Louise’s petty-mindedness.

She tried to remind herself that this Louise was not the same Louise with whom she had originally set up in business, the same Louise with whom she had shared so many doubts and worries, so many hours of anxiety and heartache as they fought to establish themselves. And so much laughter as well, she admitted bleakly.

And it was losing that laughter that hurt, Eleanor acknowledged as she walked into her

own office. There was something very special about the laughter, the feeling of fellowship, of closeness one shared with another woman that was uniquely special, something apart from one’s relationship with a man no matter how good that relationship might be.

She and Marcus shared laughter as well, but it was a different kind of laughter.

Eleanor had always valued her women friends, and she had considered Louise to be among the closest of them. Not perhaps as close as Jade, but then she and Jade had known one another since their university days… had met in fact on the train carrying them both to their new lives as students.

Jade had not been Jade then but Janet Anne.