For Better for Worse

‘Nothing,’ Tom told her.

‘No… we don’t mind about the baby any more,’ Gavin piped up. ‘Not now that Marcus has explained to us that Dad wouldn’t stop loving us just because we weren’t there all the time and she was, and that people always made a big fuss about babies but that it didn’t mean they loved them more.’

Eleanor put down the spoon she had been using to stir the sauce.

‘When did Marcus tell you that, Gavin?’ she asked him quietly. Marcus had said nothing to her about speaking to the children. In fact, when she had lost her temper with him and accused him of leaving dealing with the problems they were having to her she had gained the impression that he felt she was making a fuss about nothing and that her concern was simply exacerbating the situation.

‘On Sunday. After he had explained to us about Vanessa being angry with you and tearing up Tom’s poster. He said he knew it was difficult for us when Vanessa came to stay. When he was a little boy he didn’t have any brothers or sisters and his mother would never let him have his friends round to play in case they made a mess. He said that that made him so cross that one day he deliberately broke one of his grandmother’s ornaments.

‘He spoke to you as well, didn’t he, Tom?’

Eleanor turned towards her elder son, who nodded. ‘And to Vanessa,’ he told her. ‘And then he spoke to all of us together. He said that we were a family now and that in families people were allowed not to like one another sometimes and to get angry and that it didn’t mean that we would always be angry and not like each other… I don’t think I’m ever going to like Vanessa, though—’

‘Yes,’ Gavin interrupted excitedly. ‘And then Tom said that he would hate Vanessa forever for what she did to his posters, and Marcus said that that was OK but that he would have to be careful because hating people got to be a habit and before he knew it he could end up hating everyone—even himself.

‘Marcus said that hating people was like carrying a heavy parcel, and that the longer you had to carry it, the heavier it got until it got so heavy that you couldn’t do anything any more.’

‘Vanessa said she was sick of people always telling her what to do, and that she was sick of us as well,’ Tom said.

‘Yes, and then she burst into tears,’ Gavin added. ‘And she said that she knew that none of us wanted her here and that was all right because she didn’t want to be here. She said she wished she’d never been born and then she ran upstairs and shut herself in her bedroom and wouldn’t come out.

‘Marcus said girls did things like that sometimes…’

Why had Marcus said nothing to her about any of this… why had he let her think that he was indifferent to what was going on… irritated and impatient with it?

Perhaps because she had not given him the opportunity to say anything to the contrary?

Marcus was not the kind of man who relished arguments or emotional scenes.

He had never really discussed his family background with her early on in their relationship, and it was only after they had been lovers for some time that he had finally and almost reluctantly told her about his childhood and the confusion… the tug of loyalties he had felt, witnessing the relationship which existed between his parents and the way his mother and grandmother appeared constantly to demean and criticise his father.

‘I used to wonder why he allowed them to do it. It was only as I grew older myself that I realised it was probably because he had discovered, as I was doing, that there was nothing my grandmother in particular loved more than to provoke an argument… that she actually seemed to derive some sort of perverse enjoyment from the verbal battle.

‘Had her arguments been logical I could have understood it, but they never were and she always had to win, no matter what kind of underhand or destructive emotional cruelty she had to use to do so. It was no wonder my father simply gave up and opted for peace and quiet.’

‘It must have been very upsetting for you,’ Eleanor had said gently, sensing that too much sympathy would be construed as pity and knowing that his pride would flinch away from that kind of emotion.

‘It was certainly very educational. It taught me a good deal about human psychology. Men as much as women are equally capable of that kind of em

otional and verbal bullying. One thing it did give me, though, and that was a lasting dislike of emotional scenes and outbursts.’

Eleanor bit her lip fretfully now. She could understand Marcus’s dislike of scenes, given his childhood, but surely he could understand how upset she had been…? Vanessa was not her child. She could not discipline her in the same way she could the boys.

But she could perhaps have stayed a little calmer. If she had not been so on edge about the business and the house…

The house. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Nothing in her life seemed straightforward at the moment.

But it would all be different, better once they had moved house, she promised herself as she tried to quell her feelings of guilt.

Tonight over dinner she would talk to Marcus, ask him why he had not told her he had spoken with the boys and Vanessa. Explain how vulnerable and overstretched she was feeling. She frowned… Would she? One of the things Marcus had always said he admired about her was her calmness, her ability to cope and run her life smoothly. Marcus liked efficiency, calmness and order.

How would he feel if she tried to explain to him that panic she sometimes felt these days… the feeling that her life was running out of control, that she was being swamped by a slow, stultifying tide of calls upon her time, of things she never seemed to have time to do properly? She felt sometimes as though that tide was so oppressive that it was actually squeezing the breath out of her lungs, the life out of her body. She felt cramped, constricted… imprisoned by it to an extent that her need for the space, the peace, the harmony that Broughton House would bring had become as necessary mentally as it was physically.

By eight o’clock the boys had had their supper and were upstairs watching television. The dining-room table was laid with silver and crystal. She had done her face and hair, and when she walked to the wardrobe to get the Jean Muir she caught the tantalising fragrance of the layers of bath oil, body cream and perfume that clung to her skin.

Was it really only such a short time ago that she had taken this much care every evening… that she had spent almost as long getting ready for, anticipating her dates with Marcus as she actually had with him?

That had been in the early days of their relationship, of course. A time of greatly heightened excitement and intensity, which now somehow seemed slightly unreal. She smiled a little wryly to herself, remembering that other Eleanor and Marcus.