by Penny Jordan
Tiredly Eleanor thanked him and walked with him to his car. Her dreams of buying the house and living within its walls, her dreams of what family life and togetherness should really be, were becoming so tarnished and bruised that she couldn’t even close her eyes any more and visualise the transformations she had originally been so happily confident could be made.
As she walked back to the house and locked it with the set of keys the agent had lent her, she glanced at her watch and frowned.
Where were the girls? She had warned them not to be gone more than half an hour.
She turned round, scanning what she could see of the grounds.
They couldn’t have gone very far, surely? Like her, neither of them were dressed for wandering through the garden’s wildly overgrown undergrowth.
She called their names, her frown deepening when there was no response. In view of the contempt both of them had expressed for the countryside she was surprised that they were so keen to explore it rather than look round the house.
She had brought Vanessa with her in the hope that once she saw the house she would become more proprietorial about it, feel more involved in their plans.
She had envisaged discussing with her which room she would like, what kind of bathroom, what kind of décor and colour schemes, hoping by discussing these aspects of the move with her to win her interest and enthusiasm, but she had quickly recognised that as long as Sasha was with her this was impossible.
She called their names again and when there was no response she sighed under her breath. Where on earth were they?
Grimly she set off down the path which led to the boundary wall of the property and circled round inside it, linking the small iris-filled dell and the pool with small copses of trees and cleverly planned vistas.
Eleanor had explored this path on a previous visit, marvelling at the patience and care which had gone into its planning; even now, when so much was overgrown and out of control, it was still possible to see how it must have once been; flowers carpeting the ground beneath the trees, carefully planned seats and even a small, almost secret arbour all designed to encourage the walker to pause to admire the way the garden had been planned to almost reluctantly and shyly reveal its pleasures and secrets. But on that occasion she had been dressed for that kind of exploration.
Today she wasn’t. Today, because she had had to spend so much time chivvying the girls to get ready, she hadn’t even remembered to put a pair of low-heeled shoes in the boot of the car. Instead she was having to negotiate the path wearing an almost brand new pair of matt black Charles Jourdan court shoes with thin, delicate heels. Her equally fragile and expensive tights didn’t last beyond the first few yards of the overgrown path; the bramble which ripped them lacerated her leg as well, leaving a long, ugly scratch from which blood was already starting to ooze.
As she stood up from stooping to check and examine it, a whippy branch of elder stung against her cheek and left a dark mark on the sleeve of her cream silk shirt. It was a new one, a Donna Karan Jade had persuaded her to buy in Harvey Nichols’ sale.
She had worn it this morning on impulse, because Marcus had liked the way the soft fabric hung, telling her that it was not just the silk itself that was so subtly provocative, but that the way it outlined her breasts had an immediate eye and touch appeal that he found difficult to resist.
And so this morning, when her fingers had brushed against it in the wardrobe, her eyes had softened with the memories it evoked and she had impulsively put it on.
To give her confidence… to remind her of Marcus’s desire for her?
She tensed briefly. Why should she need to do either? To impress Vanessa and her friend, then? Her mouth curled ruefully into the smile that Marcus had first fallen in love with, the smile that said she was a woman who was tender with other people’s vanities and vulnerabilities and aware of her own.
This resurgence of her sense of humour, though, was only brief—all it took to banish it once again was the sound of the girls’ voices, and not just theirs, but male voices as well.
She saw them before they saw her, and it only added to her anger that it was the pretty dell which had so appealed to her that they had chosen for their rendezvous; and an arranged rendezvous it must have been, because there was no way these leather-clad youths with their pallid skin and loose-muscled bodies could ever have simply happened to be walking past.
As they turned to watch her, Vanessa’s expression hostile and aggressive, Sasha’s openly contemptuous and amused, the boys’ wary, uncertain, the silence seemed to press down on her.
She could feel her heart beating and her body tensing, her clothes clinging stickily to her body. She felt slightly sick, anger and relief warring inside her.
Vanessa was Marcus’s daughter, but her responsibility, and as she looked into her stepdaughter’s hostile, tense face she could feel the bitter taste of failure and guilt rising up in her throat.
‘Vanessa…’ She could hear the harshness in her voice, feel it tearing at her throat. ‘Didn’t you hear me calling you? What’s going on?’
She could see Sasha smirking at her and cursed herself for the banality, the predictability of her reactions, but how could she explain to Vanessa how afraid she was, how shocked not just by her behaviour but by her own inability to predict it, to protect her from the consequences of it? What if she had not found them… what if those boys…?
She shuddered, visualising herself going back to tell Marcus that Vanessa had disappeared…
Out of the corner of her eye she saw the smoke curling up from the cigarette Vanessa was still holding awkwardly in her hand as though unfamiliar with the act of smoking it, unlike Sasha, who took a deliberate lungful of smoke and exhaled it with casual expertise, challenging her… daring her to say or do anything.
The boys, less aggressive and dangerous than she had first feared, were already melting away. As she saw the vulnerable, almost panicky look Vanessa gave their disappearing backs, Eleanor felt her own heart soften in quick sympathy, but when Vanessa turned back to look at her the resentment and loathing in her eyes quickly reminded Eleanor of reality.
‘Vanessa—’ she repeated quietly, but she wasn’t allowed to continue.
‘You can’t tell me what to do,’ Vanessa interrupted her hotly. ‘I wasn’t doing anything wrong, anyway.’
Nothing wrong. Eleanor looked pointedly at the cigarette Vanessa was still holding.
‘I don’t think your father would agree with that defence, do you, Vanessa?’
‘Oh, trust you to bring Dad into it. I’ll bet you just can’t wait to tell him, can you? I hate you and I wish he’d never married you, but you can’t stop me doing what I want. Tell Dad if you like, I don’t care. It was you who made us come here. Boring, dull place.’
Her face was flushed with anger and defiance now, the hot colour overlying the greenish hue it had had earlier.
How long had she been smoking? Only recently, Eleanor suspected. Surely she knew the dangers of what she was doing? She couldn’t not, she was an intelligent girl—and as for the other danger…
Eleanor looked round the small, enclosed place trying not to ignore the images her imagination was creating. Two girls on their own, vulnerable and provocative… those boys… her skin felt clammy and cold.
‘Have you any idea of what could have happened?’ she demanded, unable to hold back her feelings any longer. ‘Those boys…’
‘We were talking, that’s all,’ Vanessa told her.
‘You had no right to arrange to meet them without asking me,’ Eleanor countered. ‘I may not be your mother,’ she added, anticipating Vanessa’s familiar protest, ‘but while you’re with me you are my responsibility. Have you any idea how I would feel if I had to go back and tell your father…?’
‘Oh, yes… that’s all you care about, isn’t it? What Dad thinks. You don’t care about me at all, really. Go on, admit it—secretly you’d love it if I just disappeared… if someone did murder me.
Well…’
‘Vanessa, that’s not true!’
‘Liar,’ Vanessa taunted her softly, throwing down her cigarette and adding angrily, ‘Well, go ahead. Tell Dad what you like… I don’t care.’
Eleanor closed her eyes, warning herself that there was no point in provoking Vanessa into a full-scale row, especially not in front of Sasha.
Was it that, she asked herself tiredly, or was it more that she simply felt too overwhelmed to tackle all the issues Vanessa’s behaviour had raised…?
What would she have done, said had Vanessa been her own daughter? Or did she secretly believe that her own child would never have behaved in such a way?
As she turned back down the path, shepherding them in front of her, Eleanor wondered what was worse: their deliberate deceit or the fact that, despite her intelligence, Vanessa was apparently either unaware or uncaring of the damage smoking would do to her health? And added to that was the spine-chilling cold shock of very real fear Eleanor had experienced when she had first seen them.
No doubt the boys were harmless enough, for all their unappealing physical appearance. They had certainly, unlike Sasha, showed no inclination to force any kind of confrontation when they saw her; but what if things had been different… what if they had been more worldly… more aggressive? Was she being hyper-cynical in feeling that it hadn’t just been for a cigarette and a chat that they had followed up on the invitation which either Sasha or Vanessa or both had issued to them?
She did not for a moment believe that Vanessa had had anything sexual in mind, but that was the whole point. From the look on her face after she had thrown her cigarette away, the greenish pallor of her skin, Eleanor suspected that the smoking had been more out of bravado and peer pressure than anything else.
Just supposing another kind of peer pressure had been put on her—or, even worse, actual physical force?
Her stomach churning with anxiety and with guilt as well, Eleanor didn’t notice the tangle of roots until she tripped over them.
As she put out her hand to steady herself she saw Sasha and Vanessa turn round to watch her, and heard Sasha sniggering at her as a rough tear was added to the existing damage to her clothes.
The drive back to London was completed in a silence that was only broken when Vanessa demanded challengingly, ‘I suppose you’re going to go running to Dad now. Well, we weren’t doing anything wrong. Just talking… It must be true that middle-aged women get all hysterical about things,’ she added insultingly.
‘Look, Vanessa,’ Eleanor began impatiently, and then stopped. On another occasion she might have just laughed; as it was she felt too drained, too shaken by her own fears about what might have happened, her own guilt for not being more aware, for being so gullible and foolish, to do anything other than to remain silent.
She would have to tell Marcus, of course. Not to punish Vanessa but for her own protection. There was obviously no point in her trying to explain to the girl the very real danger she could have been inviting, never mind discuss with her how she really felt about the deceit involved in setting up the meeting in the first place.
Teenage girls liked and even needed secrets they could share with one another, giggles, whispered conversations, long, deep talks about boys and ‘things’. Letting them have secrets, respecting their privacy and acknowledging their transition from the protected dependency of childhood to the independence of adulthood were one thing; tolerating and accepting outright deceit, coupled with the teenagers’ awareness that they were being deceitful and why, was another.
* * *
Eleanor tensed as she picked up the post which had been delivered while they were out. Almost immediately on their return to the house the two girls had gone upstairs to Vanessa’s room and the loudness of the music now coming from it was beginning to make Eleanor’s teeth ache as well as her head.
As she looked through the mail she wondered how long it would be before the neighbours started to complain about the noise.
Perhaps that was something she ought to have pointed out to Vanessa, she decided ruefully—the advantages of living in isolation with no one to complain about any noisy teenage predilection for over-loud music!
She frowned, pausing to study a typed envelope addressed to her in French bearing a French stamp.
Assuming it was from Louise and would contain the signed papers she needed to complete the final winding up of the partnership, Eleanor put the rest of the post down and opened it.
It wasn’t from Louise. Much to her astonishment it was from Pierre Colbert, a totally unexpected follow-up to their meeting, explaining that since he had been unable to get a response from her partner to his request for her private fax or telephone number he was having to write to her.
What he wanted to know was whether she would still be interested in taking on some of his translation work. He had contacted her partner—who had written to him informing him of the dissolution of their partnership in the first instance—hoping to discover whether he could get in touch with Eleanor, since he had been unable to get any reply from her office telephone. Eleanor’s frown intensified as she read this, since one of the few duties Louise had taken on after they had agreed to end the partnership had been that she would make arrangements for their telephone and fax calls to be diverted to Eleanor’s home number. Now it seemed that, instead, not just her own calls but Eleanor’s as well were being diverted, but to Louise’s number.
Now, though, there was some urgency in the matter, as he was due to begin a business trip to the Far East at the end of the month and had really wished to have a meeting with her before this in order that they could talk. If Eleanor was interested in his translation work, he went on to say, he had hoped that she would be able to travel to Provence where he had his headquarters, at his expense of course, so that they could discuss everything. If she was interested and felt able to take the work on he asked that she telephone him, adding that, unfortunately, the only time he would be able to see her now would be during the following ten days.
Shakily Eleanor put down the letter. She had had to accept the rift which had developed between herself and Louise and the loss of someone whom she hadn’t seen just as a business partner but as a friend as well, but this new evidence of Louise’s underhandedness still had the power to hurt her.
Louise was not proficient in modern European languages and could surely never have hoped to get Pierre Colbert to give her the contract, which meant that her only purpose in neglecting to organise the passing on of her own telephone number to him had been mean-spiritedness and nastiness. She had obviously felt obliged to give him her home address, but Louise must have hoped the news of the work would come too late—if at all.
What hurt even more was that Louise knew how concerned she had been about losing work through the break-up of their partnership; she had even admitted then that she was especially anxious to do as much as she could to maintain the level of her income because of the expense of moving house.
Yes, Louise knew how much this contract would have meant to her, and if she had been able to be in contact with Pierre Colbert in time she could perhaps have arranged to see him earlier. As it was… She sighed as she studied the date of the letter. As it was, there was no way she could go to France while she had Vanessa and Sasha here, and since Pierre Colbert specified that he wanted to have something sorted out before he left for the Far East that must surely mean that he already had someone else in mind should she not be able to take on the contract.
Later in the evening, when she was discussing the letter with Marcus, she told him tiredly, ‘It’s impossible for me to go, of course. I shall have to ring Monsieur Colbert and tell him.’
Marcus frowned as he listened to her. What had happened to the Eleanor he had fallen in love with and married; the Eleanor who had charmed and delighted him with her laughter and her happy, confident, positive attitude towards life? That Eleanor had always had time to listen to his problems, to be interested and involved in h
is life. That Eleanor had made him feel that he featured prominently in her life. This Eleanor seemed to be more interested in a house than she was in him. A house and their children. Even when they were in bed together at night she talked about it, about them, worried about it.
What was wrong with him? he asked himself irritably. He was a man, not a boy, who ought to know himself well enough to understand that the irritation, the resentment, the jealousy almost he was feeling now came not from Eleanor’s preoccupation with Broughton House, but with the spill-over from his own childhood feeling that his mother did not love him; that the mere fact that he belonged to the same sex as his poor despised father made it impossible for her to love him.
His grandmother’s attitude towards him had reinforced this feeling, and so had his first marriage to Julia.
It had taken him a long time to accept that a part of him must have deliberately chosen as his first wife a woman who he should have known instinctively would cause him to repeat within his relationship with her the same needy rejected role he had experienced with his mother and grandmother.
With Eleanor it had been different; right from the start he had not merely been attracted to her physically, but had also been aware of how very different she was from the other women who had taken prominent roles in his life. Eleanor had a vulnerability, a gentleness, a warmth and genuine compassion for others that he now recognised they had lacked.
In the initial stages of their relationship, her sexual hesitancy and insecurity had helped to bond them together, his awareness of her insecurity making it easier for him to acknowledge, even if it was only privately to himself, his own emotional need. Her relationship with her sons, her love and care of them had never made him feel threatened or jealous. Her agreement that their relationship, their love for one another was strong enough not to need any additional cementing with the conception of a child of their own had strengthened not just his love for her, but his feeling of security as well.