For Better For Worse

What was she so afraid of? Not the ending of their marriage, surely?

What was it, then? Having to confront the fact that all the effort she had put into holding their marriage together over these last two years had just been so much wasted time… Having to admit that she should never have married Nick in the first place… having to face up to the fact that her parents had not been omnipotent; that their way of living their lives was not necessarily right for her. Having to admit that she was married to a man who, despite the fact that he claimed to love and need her, increasingly behaved towards her in a way that suggested his feelings towards her held more contempt than love; that his need was more for a housekeeper than a wife.

Was it the realities of her marriage she was so afraid of confronting, or was it herself?

What was it she really wanted to do? Stay true to the way her parents had believed their daughter’s life should be lived, or be true to herself, accepting herself with all her fallibilities; accepting that staying within her relationship with Nick as it was now was slowly destroying her, killing her self-respect, filling her with loathing for the woman she saw she had become.

‘How long will you be away?’ she asked Nick now before she opened the back door.

‘I don’t know!’ His mouth tightened impatiently. ‘Is my grey suit pressed? I’m taking a client out to lunch.’

‘Venice?’ Fern asked him.

She could see the angry colour seeping up under his skin.

‘Yes, as a matter of fact it is.’

‘You seem to be seeing rather a lot of her lately.’

‘What the hell are you trying to say?’ Nick exploded angrily. ‘She’s a client, that’s all. A very rich client, I might add, and with business the way it is right now…

‘My grey suit, Fern,’ he added impatiently. ‘Is it pressed?’

‘Yes,’ she told him.

They couldn’t go on like this, she told herself as she left the house. They had to sit down and talk honestly with one another.

She smiled grimly to herself. Sit down and talk… The last time they had done that had been two years ago after she had found out about Nick’s affair. She had thought then that he was being honest with her, had allowed him to convince her that their marriage could still work, and for a little while she had actually thought that it might; but then he had started to revert to his earlier behaviour, only this time it had been even worse, because this time, every time he was angry with her, he would taunt her with some viciously cruel remark about Adam.

Oh, afterwards he had always apologised, explained how difficult it was for a man… any man to come to terms with the fact that his wife had been unfaithful to him, told her how generous and heroic he was being in trying to forget what she had done… reminded her of how shocked and distressed her parents would be if they ever discovered the truth… pleaded with her to forgive him, promising that it wouldn’t happen again; and because of the burden of her own guilt she had accepted what he had said, feeling in her heart that she deserved to suffer… to be punished for what she had done.

She was trembling so much she could scarcely see what she was doing, struggling with the latch on the front gate as she opened it.

One brief moment out of time, one careless action, one small error of judgement. Who would have thought that she… that Adam… ?

Fiercely she blocked off the thought, denying it life. She must not think of that now. Not allow herself to remember…

That was, after all, part of her penance, part of the punishment she had inflicted on herself for what she had done.

The morning air was clear and sharp, the wind tempered by the promise of warmth in the spring sunshine.

The wind tugged at her hair, reminding her that she had intended to tie it back. Adam had liked her hair… he had once…

She stopped walking, her body freezing into immobility as she tried to reject her thoughts, pushing them fiercely to the back of her mind, trying not to acknowledge how afraid she was of their power.

It was quite a long walk into town, and she quickened her step a little. She had promised Roberta that she would meet her at the surgery at eleven.

The road where she and Nick lived was on the outskirts of the small market town, a pleasant cul-de-sac of Victorian villas built around the time the railway had first come to the area.

Theirs was one of a pair of good-sized semis which could have been turned into a very attractive and comfortable family home had Nick been willing to spend some money on it. It had the benefit of a large garden and an extra upper storey, and its previous owners had converted the small maze of kitchen, larder and scullery at the back of the property into a large kitchen.

Nick however had pointed out to her shortly after their marriage, when she had tentatively suggested that it might be nice to add a conservatory to the house, that since he was the only one of them working she must realise that he simply could not afford that sort of luxury.

She had done her best to update the décor, and had been quite proud of the dragged and stippled paint effects with which she had transformed the old-fashioned décor of the rooms, and of the curtains and loose covers she had painstakingly made from factory remnants of fabric bought as ‘seconds’, until Nick had commented to her how amateurish her skills were.

He had done it quite kindly and gently, but she could still remember how humiliated she had felt when, flushed with success and proud of what she had done, she had suggested they give a small dinner party to show off their home.

‘Darling, it’s impossible,’ Nick had told her. ‘Don’t you see… anyone we invite could be a potential client? One look at what you’ve done to this place and they’re going to wonder if my professional skills are as amateurish as your homemaking ones.’

His criticism, although perhaps justified, had taken from her all the pleasure and sense of achievement she had felt in what she had done, and when three weeks later Nick had suddenly announced that he had booked a firm of decorators to come and repaint the whole house she had quietly kept to herself her disappointment over the effect of the no doubt practical but very plain woodchip paper with which every internal wall had been covered.

It was obviously Nick’s choice and no doubt he was right when he explained that it looked far better than what she had done.

After that it had never seemed to Fern that the house was really her home; only the kitchen was her domain, and she had tried to make it as cheerful and warm as she could, even though she could tell from Nick’s face that he did not approve of the bowls of spring bulbs; the flowers from the garden, the soft yellow paint and the pretty curtains and chair covers she had made for the room.

From the outside the house looked neat and well cared for, just like all the others in the cul-de-sac, but inside it was empty and desolate of all that made a house a proper home, Fern reflected sadly as she turned into the road into town, her footsteps automatically slowing down slightly as she studied the view in front of her.

It didn’t matter how many times she walked down here, or how familiar the view before her was; she always felt a fresh surge of pleasure at what she saw.

The town had originally been an important stopping-off point for stage-coaches and other carriage traffic, a vital link with the main arterial routes of the day, and although now modern roads and motorways had turned the town into a quiet backwater, bypassing it, the signs of its thriving, bustling past were clearly visible in its architecture.

One side of the town square was still dominated by the coaching inn which was said to date back to the fifteenth century, although its present exterior was that of a late Tudor building, herringbone-patterned brick insets between the beams replacing the original wattle and daub. Adjacent to it ran a line of similar buildings, once private homes, now mainly shops and offices. Next to them was the church crafted in local stone, its spire reaching up dizzyingly towards the sky.

There was a local legend that the original bells had been melted down at the time of the Civil War to make weapons and armour, but as far as Fern knew this had never actually been substantiated.

Like looking at the rings of a tree to discover its age, the various stages of the town’s growth could be seen in the different styles of its architecture.

The third side of the square was lined with handsome Georgian town houses, originally the property of the wealthy tradesmen who had made their homes in the town, drawn there by the business generated from the coaching traffic.

Adam’s office was in one of those buildings, beautifully renovated and lovingly restored to all its original elegance.

When it came to his work, no detail was too small to escape Adam’s careful attention. Even the paint for the walls had had to be specially mixed to an old-fashioned recipe.

It had been Lord Stanton who had unearthed in his library an estimate and recipe for paint originally supplied for the new wing of the hall which had been built at the same time as the houses and by the same builder who had been responsible for the pretty Nash-type terrace of houses in Avondale.

As she crossed the square, heading for the church, and the surgery, Fern deliberately took the longer way round so that she wouldn’t have to walk past Adam’s office. The sun glinted on the leaded windows of the coaching inn, highlighting the uneven thickness of the old-fashioned glass, and picking out the detail on the pargeting decorating the upper storey of the building next to it.

In the centre of the square stood an open-arched two-storey stone building, a relic of the days when the town had marked one of the stopping-off places for drovers taking their flocks from one part of the country to another.

On a clear day from the top of the church tower it was possible to see out over the Bristol Channel to the west and to the spire of Salisbury cathedral to the southeast.

It had been Adam’s gentle coercion of the local authorities, supported by Lord Stanton, that had been responsible for the removal of the square’s tarmac road surface and the uncovering and restoration of the original cobbles which lay beneath it.

Adam’s family had lived in the town since the late sixteenth century. Wheelwrights originally, they had prospered during the days of coach travel.

Fern had never met either Nick’s mother or Adam’s father, both of whom had been killed in a road accident a couple of years prior to her knowing the stepbrothers. However, while Adam had always spoken warmly of both Nick’s mother as well as his own parents, Nick rarely mentioned his family at all.

Fern knew that Nick’s father had deserted his wife and small son when Nick was barely three years old—Adam had told her that—but when she had once gently tried to sympathise with Nick over his father’s defection he had rounded angrily on her.