For Better for Worse

She gave a deep, wrenching shudder. Why on earth hadn’t she had the courage to face up to the truth then, to recognise her real feelings for what they were, to recognise that she was falling in love with Adam, instead of denying those feelings, burying them deep inside her and clinging stubbornly instead to the belief that because Nick said he needed and wanted her she must somehow automatically be able to return his feelings, to respond to them… to reward him by loving him?

‘I want you, Fern,’ he had told her. ‘I want you to love me. You are going to love me. Do you understand…?’ he had told her fiercely and she had nodded, solemnly accepting what he was saying, believing what he was saying, just as she had believed the lies she had told herself when she had denied that she loved Adam.

It was all her fault, she told herself. She was the one who was to blame… the one who carried the guilt.

Perhaps Nick was right when he said that she had driven him to being unfaithful to her, although in those early days of their marriage she had still been clinging with desperate sincerity to the belief that she loved him.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

‘BUT why have we got to sleep in the attic? I hate sleeping up there. It’s too hot and Gavin keeps waking me up.’

Guiltily Eleanor stifled the small urge of irritation caused by the half-whining tone of Tom’s voice. He had started doing that lately. Was it a mannerism he had unwittingly picked up from someone else at school, like the term when all the children in his class had started to subconsciously copy the child who lisped slightly, or, more dangerously, was it perhaps a warning of some deeper dissatisfaction and unhappiness?

‘Tom, please don’t be difficult. You know why. Vane

ssa is coming this weekend.’

Tom wasn’t looking at her, his face averted as he scuffed the toe of his trainer along the floor. She had an appointment with the agent from whom they had rented the offices in half an hour; she had had to ask her if she could come round to the house and had sensed from the cool disdain in the other woman’s voice as she’d explained that she had her sons at home for a ‘Founder’s Day’ holiday that the agent was not herself a mother.

‘Get yourself an au pair or a nanny,’ Jade had suggested when Eleanor had mentioned to her how increasingly difficult she was finding it to juggle her home life and her work. She couldn’t always rely on Karen’s kindness in taking her two sons in. ‘Or are you worried that she might discover it’s more rewarding looking after Marcus than looking after the kids?’ Jade had teased her.

‘No, of course I’m not,’ Eleanor had denied. ‘It’s just that we don’t have room for someone to live in.’

It would all be different once they had moved to the new house, Eleanor promised herself. Then she wouldn’t feel so irritated, so pressured and overwhelmed somehow by all the things she had to do.

It wasn’t, after all, Tom’s fault that she had forgotten about Founder’s Day, and really Louise was the one who ought to have been seeing the agent, but Louise was in France, having left Eleanor a hastily typed note in the office announcing that she would be gone for two weeks and conveniently forgetting to leave any number or address where Eleanor could get in touch with her.

‘Tell the agent that you can’t see her until Louise gets back,’ Marcus had suggested mildly, when Eleanor had expressed to him her anger at being left to cope with the winding up of the partnership on her own. ‘Louise is, after all, jointly responsible for the business,’ he had added.

‘But the agents are pressing us to finalise everything now and then the accountant wants to go through the final partnership figures, and I’ve got to arrange to have the office emptied and the services…’

Marcus had not been as sympathetic towards her as she had expected. In fact he had been almost dismissive of the burdens she was having to carry… impatient and irritated by them… and by her?

It was all very well for Marcus to say leave it until Louise gets back and thus oblige her to share the responsibility for winding up the partnership; he wasn’t the one being subjected to the subtle and not so subtle pressures that were being put on her. Like Louise, she too wanted to get on with her new life, but, unlike Louise, she was not selfish enough to simply walk off and leave someone else to sort out the loose ends of the old one for her.

And she had hoped to have time to talk to the surveyor this morning. He had promised her that he would give priority to inspecting Broughton House, although he had warned her that it could be several days before he could get a written report to her.

She also needed to discuss financing the purchase with Marcus, but he had been so tied up with his work recently that she had not really been able to talk to him very much about the house, and was therefore having to do most of the organisational work herself.

Not that she would have minded that, if only she had had a little more time.

It was her frustration in not being able to be free to get on with their plans for the future that was making her so irritable and tense, she admitted.

To the point where her own sons were an intrusion? Guiltily she looked down at Tom.

‘I know how difficult it is for you when Vanessa comes to stay,’ she sympathised. ‘But it won’t be for much longer, Tom. We’ll soon be moving to the new house.’

‘I don’t want a new house,’ Tom told her angrily. ‘I just want it to be like it was before, when it was just us!’

‘Oh, Tom…’ Eleanor dropped to her feet and put her arms round him, giving him a hug and ruffling his hair. ‘I thought you liked Marcus…’

‘He’s OK, but I don’t like her. I hate her and she hates us. She hates everyone. Why does she have to come?’

How was it that children seemed to know by instinct how to pick the very worst possible time to demand one’s attention? Eleanor wondered despairingly, mentally pushing to one side her own problems and abandoning the small luxury she had promised herself of fifteen minutes before the agent arrived to ‘do’ her face and hair and get changed into something a little bit more businesslike than the jeans and sweatshirt she had put on to move the boys’ things up into the attic.

Gently she again went through the reasons why he and Gavin had to move into the attic when Marcus’s daughter came to stay with Tom, sensing that, while he already knew them, it might help to reassure him to hear them again and to understand that being moved into the attic was in no way a reflection of any lack of love for them, or in any sense a matter of putting Vanessa first and them second.

‘Vanessa is a girl,’ she told him quietly. ‘And because of that she needs a room to herself.’