For Better for Worse

by Penny Jordan

  He had not recognised then that her inability to control those moods might have as devastating an effect on his daughter as it had had on him. Had not realised, or had not wanted to realise?

  Of course he was aware of Vanessa’s hostility towards Eleanor and her sons, but this idealistic, sentimental belief Eleanor had developed that somehow by moving to Broughton House everything would miraculously change and that they would somehow be welded together as in some sickening sentimental pastiche of perfect family life…

  Marcus was very wary of sentiment. His marriage to Julia had taught him to be. She had loved sentiment, had wallowed in it, manipulated it, projected and promoted it until she had grossly deformed and abused it, until he had felt as sickened by it as by a surfeit of sticky, cloying chocolate. Sentiment had no substance, no reality; it was simply a tool Julia had used to get her own way.

  When he had first met Eleanor she had seemed like a breath of fresh clean air, bracing, invigorating in her honesty and naïveté, a woman who combined a very special kind of strength and self-worth with a disarming aura of femininity and sexuality.

  He had known from the first moment they met that he wanted her, but he had also known that she was oblivious to that wanting, untouched by it, unaware of it in a way that Julia would never have been.

  She had been recommended to him as an excellent language teacher, and he had approached her with a view to polishing up his schoolboy French and German, for the business law in which he specialised was increasingly taking him to the European courts, especially The Hague and Brussels, and he had decided that it would be no bad thing to become far more fluent in both languages.

  He remembered the first time he had made love to her: she had been hesitant at first and slightly uncertain. He had soon discovered that it was a lack of self-confidence that inhibited her and not a lack of desire.

  She had been divorced for five years and in that time had made love with only one other man, she had confessed, adding ruefully that the experience had not been a success.

  ‘It was too soon after the divorce,’ she had told him, ‘and I was too anxious. I wanted to reassure myself that I was still desirable, I suppose, and so I made the classic mistake of going to bed with the first man who asked me.’

  ‘And he was such an inadequate lover that you decided to be celibate?’ he had suggested.

  She had laughed then, that free, uninhibited laugh he loved so much.

  ‘No,’ she had admitted.

  She had never made any conscious decision not to have sex. It was simply that the occasion and the desire had never arisen simultaneously.

  ‘And now?’ he had asked her, bending to caress her nipple with his mouth, amused to discover how quickly he wanted her again and filled with an unexpected tenderness at the way she trembled against him, her eyes closing, her teeth tugging on her bottom lip as she made no attempt to conceal from him what she was feeling. What she had given to him had been given totally freely and generously. And she had never made any attempt to use his feelings or her own to manipulate or coerce him. It was that honesty about her which had first made him love her; but marriage demanded more than love, more than desire. It demanded… What?

  That he give up his comfortable London house to move out into the country?

  He looked at Eleanor again.

  There were a dozen or more reasons why this house was unsuitable, not least of them the fact that she was expecting it to perform impossible miracles. He did not particularly like the country and he certainly did not relish the travelling that would be involved in such a move, but as he looked at Eleanor’s sleeping face he knew that he didn’t want to be the one to have to disillusion her and point out the truth.

  Even so, surely she must have sensed his lack of enthusiasm? She was normally an acutely sensitive person.

  He frowned, irritated with himself for his attitude, for the awareness it gave him of a certain male streak of resentment and almost selfishness that she should not be aware of his feelings. And not just aware of them, but intent on putting them first?

  His attitude was both illogical and unfair, he told himself.

  Eleanor was so caught up in her own excitement about the house, it was only natural that she had missed spotting that his enthusiasm did not match her own. She was not, after all, a mind-reader, and could not be expected to know what he was feeling if he did not tell her. What did he want—for her to make it easy for him by recognising what he was feeling? And if she didn’t he would have to tell her how he felt, he admitted.

  She would be disappointed, but, being Eleanor, she would strive to understand. She would certainly not, as Julia would have done, attempt to force his hand with emotional blackmail, tears and scenes.

  He could understand her desire to promote peace and harmony—after all, he shared it too—but this implausible idealistic idea she had that somehow… He shook his head. They would have to sit down and talk. He knew they needed to move; the Chelsea house was obviously too small for them, especially now that Eleanor was going to have to work from home.

  Knowing they needed to talk was one thing, he admitted; finding the time to do so was another. His workload at the moment was such that finding time for anything else was virtually a luxury.

  Take today; by rights he should have been working on the Alexander case. He had several cases coming to trial over the next few months, none of them simple and straightforward. International law never was, which was what had attracted him to it in the first place.

  His frown deepened. From his point of view, all this upheaval with Eleanor’s partnership and Julia’s prolonged visit to America could not have come at a worse time.

  He enjoyed his work, thrived on the challenges it gave him, and, if he was honest with himself, a part of him actively needed the tension-induced highs it gave him.

  Sondra Cabot had said much the same thing when she had called round at his chambers yesterday to collect some papers.

  He had seen the American girl on several occasions since his initial meeting with her at the Lassiters’.

  In many ways she reminded him a little of Eleanor, or rather Eleanor as she had been when he first met her, a younger Eleanor, of course, and not quite as softly feminine as Eleanor; a little more forceful and spoiled. Used to having her own way, but not less attractive because of it. He smiled to himself.

  She was quite obviously a young woman who was not only used to male admiration and appreciation, but who expected it as well.

  She wore her sexuality with all the confidence of the very young, a bright, enticing banner that proclaimed her innocence of life rather than her experience of sex, even though she herself did not know it; there was an appeal about that kind of youthfulness, that kind of freshness, that kind of enthusiasm and optimism that was dangerously engaging.

  She had lingered in his chambers for a while, hotly debating with him the contentious issue of ‘date rape’. Her vehemence had amused him… and excited him?

  His frown returned, deepening slightly as Eleanor stirred in her sleep and turned towards him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘DID you manage to get the time off?’ Zoe asked anxiously as Ben came in.

  He nodded his head, grimacing a little as he did so.

  ‘Aldo didn’t like it, of course, but he owes me some time from last year, so…’

  Zoe shook her head. ‘He takes advantage of you, Ben. You are that restaurant—without you…’

  ‘I’m the chef, that’s all. Or at least, that’s the way he sees it,’ Ben reminded her. ‘Chefs are ten a penny these days.’

  ‘Not ones like you,’ Zoe argued loyally. ‘Do you think he’s guessed that… ?’

  ‘No,’ Ben told her. ‘If he had, he’d have sacked me.’

  He knew that he sounded curt and he could see some of the excitement and pleasure fading from Zoe’s face as she listened to him. He knew that she thought he was being over-pessimistic in cautioning her to wait before getting too excited abo
ut the new restaurant.

  In reality, he was just as keyed-up and excited about it as she was herself, probably more so; after all, this kind of opportunity had been his most secret and protected dream ever since that moment in that small back-street eating place in Manchester—to call it a restaurant would have been an insult to the name—when Henri Fontanel had walked into the dingy, ill-equipped kitchen and offered him an opportunity, opened for him a door into a world he had never dared dream he might enter.

  The simple truth was that, unlike Zoe, he was not used to trusting fate, life… and yet in many ways both had been generous in their favours to him.

  As a boy his main interest in food had been the feeling it gave him when it filled his stomach; eating had been a necessity rather than a pleasure. His mother was no cook and no nutritionist either. Fast foods and takeaways, biscuits and sweets, those had been all Ben had known of food until that fateful day he had walked home with David Bernstein.

  Manchester had several large Jewish communities, but the area where Ben lived was not one of them.

  David Bernstein was a thin, asthmatic boy who stuck out from the rest of the class like a sore thumb and was roughly tormented by the bullies among them because of it.

  Ben neither liked nor disliked him, having more important things to worry about, like collecting the baby from the babyminder on his way home from school and making sure she didn’t try to overcharge his mother, who seemed not to notice when the money she claimed was owed her amounted to more than the hours she actually minded the child. He had his other siblings to care for as well; the habit of taking charge, of being responsible had been instilled in him very early; it was an automatic habit, a reflex action, something which he neither directed nor controlled, but something which was so intrinsically a part of him that when he found David Bernstein sniffling outside the school gates, his clothes torn and blood staining the knees of his jeans—immaculately clean jeans, unlike those that most of the others wore—despite his irritation with the boy for allowing himself to be so tormented, Ben stopped beside him, chivvying him to his feet with the same brusque firmness he used towards his siblings, commanding him to ‘stop skriking’ and telling him that there was nothing really wrong.

  David Bernstein seemed to think otherwise, though. He was afraid to walk home in case they attacked him again, he told Ben miserably, and, more out of irritation and impatience than anything else, and because it would not take him much out of his way, Ben announced that he would go with him.

  David Bernstein lived not in the flats like Ben and most of the others, but in a small terraced house, in one of the few streets left undisturbed by the planners. His father worked in a delicatessen on the other side of the city and the house, Ben discovered later, had been left to his mother by a relative.

  As he firmly marched David up to the front door, it never occurred to Ben that David’s mother would interpret his actions as those of a rescuer and protector, a saviour who had been sent specifically to guard her precious son.

  Ben was a solid, determined child, independent and stoical and reserved to the point that some adults found off-putting and unsettling.

  Sarah Bernstein saw none of this. When she opened the door and saw her bedraggled, precious only son being firmly pushed in her direction by a pugnacious-jawed and very obviously non-Jewish boy, her first thought was that Ben was the one who was responsible for David’s appearance; but David, who a little to Ben’s surprise proved far more adept at dealing with his mother than he was with his peers, immediately corrected her, so that, instead of being castigated for his brutal attack on her defenceless child, Ben found to his horror that he was being swept up in a smothering embrace and hauled inside the house, despite all his protests and his attempts to regain his dignity and his male supremacy.

  The first thing he noticed once Sarah Bernstein had released him was the smell coming from the kitchen. His nostrils twitched, his stomach rumbling so loudly that not only did he stare down at it, but Sarah Bernstein actually stopped talking.

  From the moment of his birth, Sarah had been engaged in a losing battle between her desire to nourish her child and his stubborn refusal to do anything more than peck at the food she so lovingly prepared.

  To Sarah, food was love. In giving food, she gave love; and when he rejected her food David rejected that love, but now here was a child… a goy child to be sure… but still a hungry boy-child, whose eyes glistened as he smelled her soup, whose stomach advertised his need.

  Before he could even think of objecting, Ben was sitting in Sarah Bernstein’s kitchen, drinking a bowl of her chicken soup, silenced not just by Sarah’s ceaseless stream of instructions and questions to her son, but also by the discovery that what he had in front of him, what he could taste in his mouth, what was right now filling and warming his stomach, bore no resemblance whatsoever to anything he had previously eaten.

  That discovery was the beginning of his interest in food, and his friendship with Sarah Bernstein, the knowledge and awareness she gave him, were what fuelled and fed it.

  It was from Sarah that he learned that the raw ingredients he had seen in shops but which his mother always ignored in favour of ready-prepared foods could be transformed into meals, and it was also from her that he learned too the value and importance of freshly grown vegetables, of carefully chosen meats and fish.

  Once he had also discovered the difference between the meals Sarah prepared and those his mother provided, as well as their nutritional benefits, there was no stopping him.

  The first time he’d served his version of Sarah’s chicken soup his mother had stared at him open-mouthed, and then she had laughed.

  Ben had refused to be deterred and very soon he had taken over not just the preparation of their meals but the choosing and purchase of their ingredients as well.

  With Sarah he visited the markets, learned to tell the difference between what was fresh and what was not.

  There was no time when he made a conscious decision that food was to be his career; boys, young men like him did not look for careers, they simply found jobs—if they were lucky.

  It was one of his teachers who suggested to him that by borrowing books from the library he could add to and extend what he had already learned from Sarah when she found him in the school yard one day, sternly berating his younger brother for selling off half of his home-made lunch to one of his friends.

  Kevin was indignant and unrepentant. ‘You don’t understand. It’s not fair,’ he had accused his brother. ‘I could have sold that for fifty pence. Everyone wants our Ben’s dinners, miss,’ he had added to the surprised teacher.

  Long before he was sixteen, Ben was working weekends and after school to add to the family income, hard, often poorly paid jobs which Sarah found for him through her family connections, none of them paying much; but Ben was glad of what they did pay; work wasn’t that easy to find. And it was Sarah who, when he left school, managed to persuade one of her relatives to take him on in his restaurant.

  The restaurant was more of a diner really, serving hot meals both to the people who worked in the nearby market and the drivers who brought in the fresh supplies of food.

  The food was cheap and hot, and the diner was always busy. Ben was paid little more than a pittance but at least he was in work, and every now and again, when Solly’s back was turned, he would alter the ingredients of whatever he was preparing, refining and experimenting.

  He had become an avid reader of not just cookery books but magazine and newspaper articles as well, passionately interested in the way that food was changing, experimenting secretly whenever Solly wasn’t around.

  It was the long arm of coincidence and accident which brought Henri Fontanel into his life. The French restaurateur had been on his way to Scotland to hand-pick the first of the season’s game when his hired car had broken down.

  He had seen the diner from the opposite side of the road when he was telephoning for assistance and, rather than wait in th
e car, he had made his way to the restaurant, intending to do nothing more than order himself a cup of what he anticipated would be execrable coffee. But when he saw the meal the two men at an adjacent table were eating, his interest had been sufficiently aroused for him to order the same dish.

  The sauce, although clumsy and unrefined, intrigued him; the vegetables were not the usual soggy overcooked English affair he had expected, but crisp and full of flavour, the meat, although far from an expensive cut, betraying an awareness of at least some knowledge of what was and was not good meat.

  He was interested enough to ask if he could speak to the chef. Solly Bernstein was too astonished to stop him. But when Ben discovered that Henri was actually offering him—him!—the chance to train in one of France’s most famous restaurants, he thought at first that his brain was playing a cruel joke on him.

  Once the euphoria had worn off, though, he knew that it would be impossible for him to accept. How would his family manage without him? The wages he earned would be no more than a pittance, Henri had told him that, but Ben knew that there were many hundreds who would gladly have paid for the chance to learn from such a master.

  How could he live in Paris? He couldn’t even speak French.

  Surprisingly, it had been his mother who had changed his mind, who had insisted that this was his chance and that he must take it; who had reminded him that she was his mother and not his responsibility.

  He had been full of doubts at first… not just about his family’s ability to manage without him, but doubts that he could live up to the promise his mentor had claimed to see in him. What if Henri was wrong and he ended up being sent home in disgrace?

  ‘Listen,’ Sarah Bernstein told him when he confided his worries to her, ‘what problems can this French cuisine give you? You learned how to make my chicken soup, didn’t you?’