For Better for Worse

by Penny Jordan

  * * *

  ‘Nell? What are you doing up here?’

  Eleanor tensed as Marcus walked into their bedroom.

  ‘You said you had some work you wanted to do,’ she reminded him. ‘And that you’d appreciate being allowed to get on with it in peace and quiet.’

  She was sitting on the bed, brushing her hair, but now she stopped, watching him. Couldn’t he see her anger and tension?

  She saw from his face that he could.

  ‘All I wanted was for the boys to turn the television down a bit—you’ve got to admit they do tend to have the volume turned up too loud…’

  ‘Well, at least you can talk above it, which is more than can be said for Vanessa’s radio,’ she retaliated acidly. She saw the irritation tensing Marcus’s body.

  ‘Look, Nell, I know it isn’t easy for you having Vanessa here, but what am I supposed to do? She’s going through a bad patch at the moment.’

  ‘And because of that the rest of us have to suffer? Don’t our feelings and needs matter at all, Marcus… Mine and the boys’? I’ve tried my best to be patient and understanding with her. Do you think I’d ever stand by and let Tom or Gavin speak to you the way she did to me the other day?’ she demanded bitterly, switching tack. ‘Do you think I’d let them manipulate you… us… our relationship… or try to come between us?’

  ‘Don’t you, though?’ Marcus challenged her quietly. ‘Look at the way you’re behaving now just because I asked them to keep the noise down. I told you before we married that I’m not the paternal type, Nell.’

  ‘So what am I supposed to do, turn my back on my sons, abandon them? You can see the effect Vanessa is already having on Tom.’

  ‘Is it Vanessa, or is it you?’

  Eleanor stared at him. ‘What do you mean…?’

  ‘Think, Nell. Tom is a very sensitive child, too sensitive perhaps. Don’t you think he’s picked up on your ambivalent feelings towards Vanessa? Add to that the fact that he sees me as a rival for his mother’s time and affection, and he’s bound to feel resentful and confused.’

  ‘Tom is not resentful,’ Eleanor denied. ‘Both he and Gavin were very happy when I told them we were getting married.’

  ‘When you told them we were getting married perhaps. Look, I’m not saying they don’t like me personally, but obviously they’re bound to feel some resentment and apprehension—any child would. You do tend to look at relationships through rose-coloured glasses sometimes, Nell. I think I understand why, but there’s nothing wrong with accepting that all of us at times have negative feelings about situations and people. In attempting to deny that, in not allowing Tom and Gavin the chance to admit and accept that there are times when they resent me and want to go back to having you exclusively for themselves, you’re teaching them to suppress feelings it would be far healthier to acknowledge.’

  ‘Like the way Vanessa acknowledges her dislike and resentment of me, do you mean?’ Eleanor asked him bitterly. ‘Is that what you think I should do, Marcus? Encourage my children to behave like your daughter?’

  She was so angry that she was shaking, Eleanor recognised as the pressure of the last few days built up inside her, exploding into a fury she could scarcely control. ‘And what makes you such an expert on childcare all of a sudden?’

  She stood up, brushing vigorously at her hair and then wincing as it got tangled up in her brush, tears of anger and pain blurring her eyes.

  ‘Vanessa’s right, this place isn’t my home. It’s yours! Is it any wonder that the boys play up? They can probably sense that you don’t want them here…’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  Eleanor tensed as Marcus caught hold of her. ‘Look, Nell, I know how difficult things are for you at the moment, but can’t you understand, I’m under a lot of pressure as well. The last thing I need right now is…’

  ‘The last thing you need?’ Eleanor interrupted him. ‘What about what I need… what about what Tom and Gavin need? They’re unhappy, Marcus. They think we don’t love them… that I don’t love them.’

  She pulled herself out of his arms, the frustration of what she was feeling welling up inside her as she flung her brush on to the bed and cried out fiercely, ‘I can’t live like this, Marcus. I—’

  She tensed as he took hold of her again, turning her round to face him. Her heart was beating twice as fast as normal and she could feel the adrenalin-boosted surge of emotional reaction racing through her veins. Her senses suddenly seemed so much sharper, her awareness. She could smell the male heat of Marcus’s anger, see the small beads of perspiration dotting the flesh in the open V of his shirt. It pleased her somehow that she had made him as angry as she was herself; that she had jolted him out of his normal calm control.

  ‘Let go of me,’ she told him furiously, pulling sharply back from him, but then, as he did so, her mood changed, startling her with its abrupt switch from hot, almost violent anger to equally uncharacteristic and uncontrollable tears.

  ‘Nell.’ She heard the echo of her own shock in Marcus’s voice as he took hold of her.

  ‘Nell. What is it… what’s wrong?’

  He was brushing the tears off her face, kissing her gently. Too gently.

  She reached up, wrapping her arms around him, opening her mouth beneath his with a fierce urgency which took them both off guard.

  His body responded immediately, challenging and exciting her.

  Somewhere at the back of her mind lay the knowledge that their arousal, and its intensity, for the first time in their relationship had its roots in anger; but the need within her to release what she was feeling wouldn’t let her listen to any warning voices.

  When she touched Marcus, when she kissed him, when she pressed her body demandingly into his, it wasn’t just with the knowledge of what she knew would arouse him but with an unfamiliar, satisfying selfish urgency.

  Clothes were shed, quickly, almost roughly, her teeth impatiently savaging his bottom lip as she tugged at the barrier of his shirt, spreading her hands against his chest.

  His skin felt hot and damp, the rapid hammer-beat of his heart echoing her own urgency.

  He kissed the side of her neck, her breasts, not with his normal slow tenderness but with an intensity, a savagery almost that fell just short of pain.

  In the morning she would be bruised; bruised and just a little shocked by the way they had both behaved. But right now… right now all she wanted was the compelling, urgent thrust of him deep within her body; now… now… not after he had tenderly and carefully aroused her with his loving gentle foreplay, but now!

  Neither of them spoke, both of them caught up in the same explosive physical expression of their mutual anger.

  They fell across the bed, Marcus rolling her beneath him. Eleanor could taste blood in her mouth. Hers? Marcus’s? From when she had bitten his lip?

  As he moved against her, she opened her legs, wrapping them demandingly around him, shivering in her fierce spasm of physical pleasure as he entered her.

  Her nails raked his back, urging him deeper, deeper, her abandonment to her own need and to the release of the furies inside her so total that nothing else mattered.

  Was it nature, some primeval illogical instinct, that caused this fierce need to feel him so deeply inside her, to experience a penetration so intense that when he came it would be virtually right into her womb? Nature’s way of balancing fate in favour of conception rather than against it?

  It was alien to her to want such a deeply physical form of lovemaking—her normal route to orgasm was a much gentler and slower affair; and yet now, fuelled by her anger and by Marcus’s, her body was convulsing in fierce contracting waves so intense that they were almost as much a pain as a pleasure.

  She could feel Marcus still shuddering as he held her in his arms, their sweat-slick bodies rapidly cooling. Just like their physical passion, and yet, as explosive as the physical desire between them had been, it had not really resolved anything.

  The col
d, unwanted thought crept into her brain that in encouraging, wanting him to make love to her like that, to overwhelm him so that he in turn would overwhelm her, she had perhaps been trying to prove to herself that she was more important to him than anything or anyone else… Anyone else… or Vanessa?

  Cold now, she shivered.

  ‘What is it… what’s wrong?’ Marcus asked her tersely.

  She turned to look at him, wanting to explain how she felt and yet at the same time a part of her still feeling angry and resentful that she should need to… that she should feel that she had to somehow justify herself and her feelings, her actions to him.

  ‘Look, forget about our mutual offspring for a few minutes…’

  Irrationally, now that he had recognised what she was thinking, Eleanor felt even more irritated.

  ‘Forget about them? It isn’t that easy, Marcus. Vanessa is doing her level best to come between us, to—’

  ‘Vanessa—why?’

  ‘Vanessa is your child,’ Eleanor pressed on fiercely, ‘Not mine. I can’t…’

  ‘My child, my creation, my blame, is that what you’re trying to say?’ he asked her quietly. ‘Vanessa, like every child ever created, is an individual, Nell. Yes, in some part her personality, her faults if you like, are genetic, inherited… a gift or a curse depending upon how you look at it. But she is a human being… not a piece of machinery I can programme and control. I don’t like what’s happening any more than you do but we can’t force her compliance. The best we can hope for is that tolerance and awareness will develop with maturity. In the meantime… In the meantime,’ he sighed wearily, ‘it might help if she were offered a little less provocation. Couldn’t you have seen to it that Tom’s posters were removed before she arrived?’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps I could,’ Eleanor agreed irritably, swamped by her own anger and sense of ill-usage. ‘If you had stuck to our original arrangement and picked Vanessa up, then I might have had time to get the bedrooms properly organised. I might have had time to spend with the agent as well… and time to finish the translation I’ve been working on all week…’

  The dark mobile eyebrows lifted slightly, the cool grey eyes suddenly cold and hard. ‘All that in less than an hour. What a marvel you are, Nell. You must teach me how you do it.’

  * * *

  They made it up later, of course… on the surface at least; but underneath… Eleanor sighed under her breath. What was the matter with her? She was behaving almost as much like a teenager at times as Vanessa.

  Tonight when Marcus came home she would talk to him, try to explain. Perhaps if she could persuade the boys to have supper early and watch television in their own room she and Marcus could eat alone… She could make his favourite pasta dish, open a bottle of wine… wash her hair and put on something special… that red jersey dress he had bought her from Jean Muir, the one he had once whispered that he preferred her to wear without undies.

  Suddenly feeling a lot more cheerful, she started humming. If she was going to cook she’d better check the fridge… a little bribery for the boys might not be a bad idea either. After all, burgers once in a while weren’t going to mean the end of the world.

  ‘What’s that?’ Tom demanded suspiciously, pulling a face over the sauce on the hob.

  ‘It’s not for you,’ Eleanor assured him. ‘By the way,’ she added, ‘Nanna rang this morning. She and Grandad are going to come and pick you up on Saturday morning for half-term, so anything you want to take with you… It will just be the two of you, by the way. Daddy will probably call round to see you, but Karen and the baby…’

  She broke off as she saw the look they were exchanging, her heart sinking a little.

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ she asked them.

  ‘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.