For Better For Worse

‘And boys,’ Zoe pointed out huskily to him without looking at him. ‘It does take two, you know.’

He gave her a thin, bitter smile. ‘She was supposed to be on the Pill, remember…’ He got up abruptly, turning his back on her. ‘I’m tired. I’m going to bed.’

As he walked into the bathroom, Zoe realised that she hadn’t shown him the letter. She picked it up and stared at it and then slowly put it down again.

Perhaps tomorrow, when he felt a bit better. Tomorrow, when she had had time to forget how suddenly and frighteningly he had become a stranger to her, a stranger who it seemed almost hated and despised her.

But Ben didn’t hate her and he didn’t despise her. He loved her. She knew that.

Right now he was upset and shocked. She looked at the letter again and sighed quietly, blinking back the tears threatening to fill her eyes.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_3a8a150b-52d8-556c-a667-fbef45dd720b)

ELEANOR frowned as she thought she heard a sound coming from the boys’ room. She put down the text she had been studying and got out of bed, reaching for her robe. The Vivaldi tape she had been playing in the background as she worked was not on loud enough to have disturbed her sons, and, still concerned about Tom’s bout of sickness, she hurried into their room.

Both of them were fast asleep and when she leaned over to place the back of her hand against Tom’s forehead it felt reassuringly cool.

Straightening up, she watched them both for several seconds.

Both of them had been much wanted and dearly loved, by her at least. Allan, her first husband, had not really snared her joy in their conception, and had certainly never wanted her to have a second child. He had deeply resented their claims on her time and attention, half wanting to be mothered himself.

Things were very different now, and he was a far more responsible and participating father to his daughter with his second wife than he had ever been with his sons. But then, when they had married, he had been very young, and very ambitious, and with hindsight, and the calm detachment that came from recognising that both of them in their separate ways had been victims of their totally different perceptions of what marriage should be, she acknowledged that he had perhaps been justified in claiming that she had put the children before him, had loved them more intensely and more exclusively than she had him.

He still kept in touch with them, and she had been scrupulous about ensuring that they saw as much of him as was feasible. His new wife, Karen, was a maternal woman who made it clear she had enough love for everyone, and she and Eleanor got on very well, surprisingly. In fact, it had been Karen’s idea that Tom and Gavin come to them during the day in the school holidays now that she was at home with her young baby, instead of rather impersonal childcare arrangements. Eleanor had even begun to pride herself a little on the way things had worked out, on the way both her sons had adapted so easily and contentedly to her marriage to Marcus.

But today, with his one brief sentence of accusation and unhappiness, Tom had totally destroyed that complacency.

‘You don’t want to be with us any more,’ he had told her. ‘You just want to be with him.’

And even allowing for a certain amount of childish exaggeration; even allowing for the fact that he had been feeling extremely sorry for himself, and possibly subconsciously trying to offload his own share of responsibility for his sickness, there had still been enough real despair and fear in his voice to unleash the spectres of guilt and anxiety which were tormenting her now.

Marcus had been less than pleased when she had announced that she could not go to the Lassiters’ with him, but he had accepted her decision without trying to pressure her into changing her mind.

That was one of the things about him which had first broken down her reserve, her doubts about the wisdom of embarking on a second attempt at marriage.

Allan had been inclined to behave petulantly and manipulatively when he couldn’t get his own way, forcing her to make choices between him and their children, putting such an unbearable burden of pressure on her that in the end his announcement that there was someone else and that he wanted a divorce had come almost as a welcome relief.

Marcus wasn’t like that, though. He respected her rights as an individual, even while he cherished her as a woman. In contrast to most other men, he seemed to know instinctively when she needed the reassurance of a certain amount of male possessiveness, a certain degree of proprietorial but wholly adult determination to have her undivided attention focused on their own very personal relationship, and when their relationship had to take a back seat to her maternal and professional duties.

Tonight, though, she had been aware that, beneath his outwardly relaxed calm acceptance of her decision to stay at home with Tom, inwardly he was irritated and annoyed.

‘There is nothing really wrong with Tom,’ he had pointed out coolly to her, and that, in giving in to his demands that she remain at home, she was potentially making a rod for her own back.

Logically he was quite right, Eleanor had admitted, but a small maggoty worm of resentment at his lack of understanding had made her wonder if he would have been quite so logical had it been his own child. Now, having satisfied herself that Tom was comfortably and healthily asleep, she acknowledged that at least part of her resentment had also been caused by her own totally illogical feelings of hurt because he had not recognised that it was more than Tom’s sickness which had made her feel she must stay with her son.

Men were not like women, she reminded herself as she went back to their own bedroom and got back into bed. They did not possess a woman’s understanding and intuition of emotions and needs that were not directly voiced.

Marcus was a pragmatist and it was surely unfair of her to expect him to read her mind, to know what she was thinking and feeling. After all, she had not known what was on Tom’s mind, had she?

She frowned, pausing in the act of returning to her abandoned work. She found it easier to read like this, cocooned in the warm comfort of their bed.

Just as she liked feeling that she was cocooned in Marcus’s love? But surely that kind of need belonged to someone lacking in maturity; someone who could not accept a genuinely equal partnership… someone who expected her partner to meet all her emotional needs?

Her frown deepened. She had been increasingly aware lately of a growing imbalance in the way she believed she ought to feel and react and the way she actually was doing. This unexpected chasm of self-doubt and insecurity which seemed to have opened up within her worried and confused her.

Of course there had been other times in her life when she had suffered from insecurity and lack of self-worth, but those times were behind her now. So why had Tom’s unexpected accusation overset her so much? Why had it filled her with such panic and tension? Why, whenever she was confronted by Marcus’s daughter’s obvious aversion to her, did she feel she had to somehow conceal both the girl’s behaviour and her own reaction to it from Marcus himself?

The Vivaldi tape had come to an end. She was not, she recognised, going to get any more work done now. She had too many other things on her mind.

After Marcus had gone out she tried to talk to Tom, to reassure him that he was wrong to believe that Marcus was any kind of threat to his relationship with her, but when she had gently tried to draw him out, to question him about why he should believe that she no longer loved him, he had clammed up on her, refusing to discuss the subject.

The antique grandfather clock in the hallway chimed midnight. Marcus should not be much longer, she comforted herself.

The clock reminded her of the one her grandparents had owned. They had lived in the country and every summer she had spent two weeks of her holidays with them, before flying out to join her parents in whichever part of the world her father happened to be stationed. As a career diplomat, he had been constantly on the move, and as their only child Eleanor had never felt particularly close to her parents. Her father’s career had necessitated her spending most of her childhood at boarding-school, and, while she loved her parents and knew they loved her, they had never had the closeness she had promised herself she would share with her own children… a closeness she had genuinely believed they did have. Until this evening… How could they be close when she had not even known what Tom thought… when it had been Marcus who had correctly diagnosed the cause of his sickness and not her?

As a child she had looked forward all year to those holidays with her grandparents, to the unchanging security of their pretty house in its sleepy country setting.

Perhaps because of those childhood memories, she had been determined to maintain her own children’s contact with Allan’s parents. After all, they were their only set of grandparents; her own parents had died in an air crash before she and Allan married. But the last time they had visited, Tom had complained that things weren’t the same.

She frowned now, remembering how upset he had been to discover that the room at his grandparents’ which he had always thought of as his own was also the one Allan’s new baby from his second marriage slept in when they were there.

At the time she had dismissed his complaint as mere childish possessiveness and jealousy, but now, aware of how disruptive she herself was finding it every time Marcus’s daughter visited and she had to move her own sons out of their room, it suddenly struck her ominously that something more than mere childish resentment might have underlain Tom’s complaint.

Children needed security… needed to feel that they had their own special and protected place in adults’ lives, especially those children who had gone through the trauma of seeing their parents split up.

Now, when she thought seriously about it, she recognised that Tom had been increasingly truculent and withdrawn recently, especially when Vanessa visited, and it was unfair to expect him to give up his room to Vanessa… Just as it was unfair to expect Vanessa to be happy with the discovery that the room she had always thought of as her own was now someone else’s.

The answer was of course to buy a larger house, but she and Marcus had already discussed this and agreed that it was financially impossible.

She glanced at her watch. Marcus should be home soon. Their large bed seemed empty without him. She smiled wryly to herself, acknowledging the direction her thoughts were taking.

When she and Allan had married she had been sexually naïve, and they had never really been sexually compatible. This had been another source of friction between them. Secretly she had always blamed herself for her inability to respond as fully and passionately to his lovemaking as Allan had wanted her to, and then, after the birth of the boys, he had become less and less interested in making love to her.

After their divorce she had been cautious about allowing herself to get involved with other men. Sex had been something she had pushed to the back of her mind and out of her life. She had the boys, and the excitement of a burgeoning career to keep her fulfilled and busy.

And then she had met Marcus. He had patiently encouraged her to put aside her wariness and caution and to learn to celebrate and enjoy her sexuality. He was a very sensual lover. And a very experienced one?

She frowned as she felt the tiny tremor of anxiety touch her spine. What was she worrying about now? Marcus had always been open and honest with her, making no secret of the fact that there had been other women in his life before they had met. He was not a promiscuous man but it would have been naïve of her to believe that he had lived a celibate life in the years between the break-up of his first marriage and their first meeting.

Her frown deepened as she remembered how, the last time she had visited them, Vanessa had asked her if she ever got jealous or worried that Marcus might leave her for someone younger.

‘Most men Dad’s age marry someone a lot younger,’ Vanessa had commented. ‘Women aren’t attractive to men once they’re middle-aged.’

‘That’s not true, Vanessa,’ she had countered as firmly as she could, trying to dismiss her own personal feelings and to concentrate instead on her concern that already, while still only in her teens, Vanessa was being dragged into the female trap of perceiving her own sex as only being able to have a valid sense of self-worth when rated by their desirability to men; but Vanessa had shrugged her shoulders and walked away from her, telling her unkindly over her shoulder, ‘You’re only saying that because you’re old.’

Old… at thirty-eight?

Marcus arrived home just after one. She had been asleep but she woke up when he walked into the bedroom, smiling sleepily at him as she asked, ‘Did you have a good time?’