For Better for Worse Read online

  In the house, the downstairs rooms were filled with the scent of freshly cut garden roses and the lavender which was drying in bunches in the old-fashioned sunlit porch area at the rear.

  In the kitchen you could still smell the cakes she had baked that morning and in the kitchen garden a long line of immaculate white washing flapped lazily in the soft breeze.

  After supper she would iron it, breathing in its fresh, clean country smell, and then later, when it was on their bed, its scent would cling to Marcus’s skin, mingling with his musky erotic maleness as they made love.

  Reluctantly she opened her eyes, grimacing at the steady downpour soaking everywhere.

  ‘How much further?’ Tom demanded from the back seat.

  ‘We’ll be there soon now,’ Eleanor promised him, her spirits lifting as she saw a signpost for Avondale.

  She had read up on the town and was looking forward to exploring it. Enthusiastically she started to tell Marcus about its history.

  ‘Mmm… Well, I doubt that we’ll be seeing it today,’ Marcus interrupted her. ‘There’s a diversion up ahead.’

  It was just after a quarter past one when they finally turned into the drive of Broughton House.

  The weed-infested gravel, the overgrown rhododendrons which had become too tall and leggy, and the heavy rain which was now falling, did not quite fit in with the picture she had drawn in her imagination, Eleanor admitted, and the house itself, without the sun on it, and perhaps viewed from a slightly different angle than that from which the photograph had been taken, was not quite as she had visualised it either.

  As Marcus stopped the car, Tom stared out of his window and exclaimed in disgust, ‘It’s just a house.’

  Another car was already parked in front of the house and as Eleanor chivvied her sons into their jackets and out of the car she glanced towards Marcus.

  He was frowning slightly as he studied the building in front of him, but when he realised she was watching him he turned towards her, his face relaxing.

  ‘How much land did you say it had?’ he asked her as they got out of the car.

  ‘Around four and a half acres,’ Eleanor told him happily. ‘There’s a walled kitchen garden. We’ll be able to grow our own vegetables; and then there’s the formal gardens, plus a small copse…’

  ‘Mmm… sounds expensive,’ Marcus commented, adding wryly as they walked towards the house, ‘Looks as if the last owner thought so as well, to judge from the way it’s been neglected.’

  ‘Mrs Broughton was very old, and the house has been empty for over six months,’ Eleanor pointed out, adding eagerly, ‘It will all look different in the summer. Gardens never look their best at this time of the year.’

  ‘Hmm. I suspect that this one is going to need rather more than a change of season,’ Marcus pointed out.

  Eleanor frowned. Marcus was sounding rather tense and on edge, a note of terse irritation creeping into his voice, but then the drive down here hadn’t been particularly pleasant, she reminded herself.

  ‘It does all look a bit wild and forlorn,’ she agreed, slipping her arm through his. ‘And this rain doesn’t help. I hope it stops long enough for us to have a good look round the grounds.’

  ‘I doubt there’ll be time for that,’ Marcus told her as the front door of the house opened and the agent came towards them.

  ‘I’m sorry we’re late,’ Eleanor apologised as he introduced himself.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he assured them. ‘My next viewing isn’t until half-past two.’

  ‘Oh, that doesn’t leave us much time to look over the grounds,’ Eleanor protested.

  ‘Well, actually you can get a pretty good view of them from the attic windows,’ he assured her.

  As he held open the front door and stood back to allow them to walk inside, Eleanor caught her breath in pleasure.

  The hall was large and rectangular with a polished wooden floor and a heavy carved wooden staircase with a galleried landing.

  ‘It is magnificent, isn’t it?’ The agent smiled as Eleanor turned to express her admiration.

  Marcus was also examining the staircase, but when he turned back to face her he was frowning rather than smiling.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Eleanor asked him.

  ‘I may be wrong, but I think I can smell damp,’ he told her quietly.

  Damp! Eleanor stared at him, and the agent, who had obviously overheard him, stepped in quickly, saying lightly, ‘Old houses often smell slightly of damp, especially when they have been empty for a while as this one has, but structurally the building is extremely sound. The Georgians knew how to build. There might be the odd patch of damp, but it’s nothing serious.’

  ‘Serious enough to cause the skirting to rot,’ Marcus commented mildly, but he smiled at Eleanor when she looked across at him, and agreed with her when the agent opened the door into the sitting-room and she enthused on the amount of daylight that large windows to the front and side of the room allowed in.

  ‘Oh, look, Marcus, it’s still got all the original plasterwork on the ceiling, and the picture rails, and look how heavy these doors are. It will all need decorating, of course.’

  In her mind’s eye she could see it already. Excitedly she turned back to Marcus. ‘It’s perfect, isn’t it?’ she whispered to him.

  ‘Mmm… We’ve only seen one room so far. How many bedrooms did you say it had?’

  When Eleanor told him, he raised his eyebrows slightly.

  ‘It’s a very large house,’ he pointed out to her.

  ‘Yes, it’s ideal, isn’t it?’ Eleanor enthused. She turned towards him, her face alight with excitement. ‘It’s just perfect for us, Marcus. Of course I know it will need a lot of work doing on it,’ she added as they followed the agent into the large drawing-room, and from there into the dining-room, and then a further small sitting-room, which he told them had been Mrs Broughton’s favourite room, because it overlooked the long borders which had been designed and planted by Gertrude Jekyll. ‘But now that I’m not committed to going into the office every day, I’ll have enough free time on my hands to cope with that.’ She paused as she saw that Marcus was frowning again.

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

  ‘I was just wondering if it was going to be as easy as you imagine to oversee the kind of work that this place needs. You saw for yourself how long it took us to drive down here today. If you were having to make that kind of round trip several days a week… You said yourself that one of the benefits of working from home would be that you would have more time to spend with the boys, but with them at school…’

  ‘Hopefully we could time things so that most of the work can be done during the school holidays,’ Eleanor told him cheerfully. ‘That way they’ll be able to come with me.’

  ‘Go where with you?’ Gavin asked her.

  ‘Come here,’ Eleanor told him with a smile, touching the top of his head with gentle fingers, mentally imagining the pleasure and the fun they would have living somewhere like this… and not just them but Vanessa as well.

  ‘The kitchens, I’m afraid, are rather archaic,’ the agent announced as he led the way to the back of the house.

  As he opened a door and they followed him inside, Eleanor realised that her dream of a large family-sized kitchen had been exactly that.

  The reality was a collection of small dark rooms obviously designed in the days when only the servants inhabited such quarters.

  ‘Potentially this area could be converted into an excellent kitchen-cum-living area,’ the agent told them.

  ‘Potentially,’ Marcus agreed, wandering over to one of the windows and peering out.

  ‘Is that the kitchen garden?’ he asked.

  Eleanor joined him at the window, staring excitedly through it to the walled area beyond.

  Vegetables gone wildly to seed showed here and there among the weeds, and on the walls the once neatly espaliered fruit trees were beginning to burst into new leaf.
/>   ‘Until the last few months of her life, Mrs Broughton employed a full-time gardener. He died six months before she did.’

  As Eleanor strained eagerly to study the garden, she tried to imagine how it must once have looked with rows of neatly cultivated vegetables, all healthily free of chemicals, all deliciously organic and wholesomely grown. She remembered her grandmother’s store cupboard with its rows of fruit-packed Kilner jars, the home-made soup she made in the winter.

  Upstairs the bedrooms were well proportioned, although the bathrooms were in need of refitting, and the attics, although dusty and dirty, did give the promised view of the grounds.

  It was a pity they were shrouded in rain and looked so dismal that even the boys seemed less than enthusiastic at the prospect of exploring them, and since they still had the garage block to look over, a tour of the whole grounds would probably have to wait for another day, Eleanor acknowledged reluctantly as they all trooped back downstairs.

  The garages had originally been stables, and comprised a long run of buildings, with an upper storey with steeply sloping eaves and small dormer windows.

  ‘These would make offices for us,’ Eleanor enthused as she watched Marcus having to bend to avoid bumping his head on one of the low door lintels.

  ‘For us?’

  ‘Mmm… You know, I’ve been thinking, Marcus… You know how you already do some work at home; well, if we bought this place, you could work from home two or three days a week. That would cut down the amount of time you would need to spend commuting; and you would have more time to spend at home with us.’ She turned towards him, taking advantage of their privacy—the agent and the boys had gone back downstairs.

  ‘Last night and this morning…’ She leaned closer to him, resting her head briefly on his shoulder. ‘I was thinking on the way here this morning… it’s been so long since we had time to… to be together like this… to be able to concentrate exclusively on one another. Living here… I want us to be a real family, Marcus, close and supportive of one another. All of us,’ she emphasised.

  ‘And it isn’t just the time, it’s the privacy as well,’ she added. ‘There’ll be enough space here for all of us. The children will get on so much better if they have their own rooms… their own space, I’m sure of it. I know how much Vanessa resents the fact that Tom and Gavin use her room, and it is very disruptive having to move them out every time she comes to stay. I thought we’d let Vanessa choose her own room. She’s at that difficult, sensitive stage and…’

  ‘Don’t hope for too much where Vanessa’s concerned,’ Marcus warned her. ‘You can’t bribe her, Nell.’

  ‘Bribe her?’ Eleanor moved slightly away from him, looking indignantly at him, her face flushing slightly. ‘Is that what you think I’m trying to do… bribe her? I just want to make her feel that she has a real place here with us. I know from my own experience how difficult things can be for a girl of that age. I know how unhappy and miserable it made me when I was growing up, not having a stable home, somewhere that was really mine. Every time I left school to join my parents, they were living somewhere else. I loathed it.’

  ‘Vanessa isn’t you, Nell,’ Marcus told her. ‘I know how disruptive she can be… but she is only a child, and sometimes I think that you—’

  He broke off while Eleanor continued to frown at him.

  ‘That I what? You can’t stop there, Marcus,’ she told him quietly, her euphoria suddenly vanishing, leaving in its place a sharp, chilly feeling.

  She knew how much Marcus hated arguments and scenes, how much he disliked the quarrels and tension which seemed to erupt whenever all three of their children were together. He never interfered, nor favoured his own child above hers, but she was well aware that he was not the kind of man who enjoyed that kind of domestic disturbance.

  That Vanessa knew it too and sometimes deliberately provoked her own sons into arguments and quarrels was a suspicion that Eleanor kept to herself.

  She was not, she had already decided, going to be the kind of stepmother and second wife who was constantly finding fault with her stepdaughter and constantly demanding the support of the girl’s father against her.

  Not that it was always easy; there were times, like last year in Greece, when Vanessa’s attitude towards her had brought her perilously close to the edge of her self-control.

  Who would have thought that a teenage girl had the power to make a grown woman feel so vulnerable about herself that she could actually bring her almost to the verge of tears? And yet last year that was exactly what Vanessa had done.

  Before Eleanor could take the subject any further Gavin and Tom came rushing up the stairs, bursting into the room, Tom demanding excitedly, ‘If we come to live here, can we have a puppy?’

  She was so relieved to see their enthusiasm that Eleanor responded immediately without thinking, ‘Yes, of course you can.’

  As she turned around, she saw that Marcus was shaking his head.

  ‘Vanessa is allergic to dogs,’ he reminded her tersely.

  Immediately Eleanor felt guilty. Of course she was. Why on earth hadn’t she remembered that?

  Quickly she corrected herself, explaining to Tom that it would be impossible for them to have a dog inside the house because it would make Vanessa sick, but to her dismay, instead of accepting her explanation, Tom kicked moodily at the floor and demanded accusingly, ‘Why is it that she can always have what she wants and we never can? She always gets what she wants,’ he added sullenly. ‘It’s not fair.’

  ‘Tom, that isn’t true,’ Eleanor protested.

  ‘Yes, it is. Otherwise we wouldn’t have to move out of our bedroom every time she comes to stay.’

  ‘Tom, you know that that room was Vanessa’s and you know why you have to sleep in the attic when she comes to stay. But it won’t be for much longer. When we move here, you’ll be able to have your own room.’

  ‘I don’t want my own room. I want a puppy.’

  ‘Time we left, I think,’ Eleanor said wryly to Marcus, but instead of returning her slight smile he had turned his head away and was looking through the window.

  As he followed her towards the stairs, he stopped and Eleanor turned back to look enquiringly at him as the boys went back downstairs.

  ‘Do you think it’s a good idea to tell them we’re moving here at this stage?’ he asked her. ‘I know how much you like the house, Nell, but don’t you feel that we could be taking on too much? You’ve seen for yourself how much work needs doing, and personally I—’

  ‘No… don’t you see, that could be a plus point,’ Eleanor interrupted him eagerly. ‘We’ll be able to have the conversions designed specifically to meet our own needs. It’s offers by sealed bid, Marcus,’ she added anxiously. ‘I’d like to get ours in just as soon as we can. I suppose we ought to consult a valuer first.’

  Marcus was frowning.

  ‘We’ve only just seen the place, Nell. Surely you can see for yourself that it will need a thorough structural survey, never mind a valuation. I really think we should—’

  ‘Marcus, it’s wonderful, isn’t it? I feel as though it’s just been sitting here waiting for us. I feel as though a huge weight’s been lifted off my shoulders. It’s the answer to all our problems. You’re very quiet…’ She smiled up at him. ‘It’s all the driving, I suppose, in the rain.’ She made a face. ‘It’s a pity we didn’t get a better day to view it…’

  * * *

  Half an hour later, on the way home, his three passengers all asleep, Marcus glanced into Eleanor’s face and frowned to himself.

  He had never seen her so excited about anything before—not even him? It was so out of character for her; she was normally so calm and controlled. He could still remember the glow which had come to her eyes when they had come across the pond in the ten minutes he had allowed her to walk him round the grounds in the steady rain. This fantasy she had about them all living in rural bliss, one big happy family—couldn’t she see how improbable it was… how i
mpractical?

  He knew she’d been under a lot of stress recently—hadn’t they both? But this need she seemed to have developed to become some kind of earth mother, presiding over an impossibly perfect family… Did she really believe that moving out to the country could actually achieve what anyone in their senses could see was a totally unrealistic harmony?

  He had thought that, like him, she enjoyed their London life; and it disturbed him to discover that he knew her less well than he had thought. What else was there about her that he did not know?

  He could understand her concern for her sons. She was a good mother, wise and fair as well as loving, and worked very hard to provide them with a sense of security and the knowledge that they were loved.

  Unlike Julia, who had always alternated wildly between ignoring Vanessa almost totally when she had more important things to occupy her time and attention, or spoiling her outrageously, showering her with a, to him, nauseating false maternal affection, which was of course why Vanessa…

  He sighed under his breath. He loved his daughter, and was increasingly aware that her upbringing was having a detrimental effect on her personality. He acknowledged that it wasn’t easy for Eleanor having to deal with her, but why couldn’t Eleanor see that there was nothing she could do to alter Vanessa’s attitude? Too old to have discipline imposed on her and too young as yet to understand the merits of self-discipline, Vanessa revelled in the power she had to hurt others, too immature to be able either to temper or balance her own feelings and needs against those of others.

  How much of that was his fault? He had left his marriage to Julia, driven away from her by the constant seesawing of her moods, the debilitating arguments and theatrical and equally exhausting fits of remorse; the pressure of living life at such a constant high pitch of emotional intensity turned him off rather than on, his need to escape from his increasing loathing of Julia’s moods and demands for attention overwhelming everything else.