For Better For Worse

‘The way you dreamed. I would never have let myself imagine…’ He broke off, shaking his head. ‘I still can’t believe it’s all actually happening. This chance means so much to me, Zoe.’ He stopped walking and looked at her. ‘I don’t think you realise…’

‘Yes, I do,’ she interrupted him softly. ‘I know just what it means to you to have your own place, Ben. I know how important it is to you.’

‘Providing nothing goes wrong…’

‘Nothing will go wrong. What could go wrong? The contracts are signed, and we’re on our way. Stop worrying… Nothing will go wrong—I promise you.’

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_c7d0b5d2-d50c-597d-ac4d-eff5608cfb85)

ELEANOR suppressed a small exclamation of impatience, glancing at her watch as the traffic came to another halt. London was impossible at this time in the morning. Especially when the streets were still grey and wet, the sky sullenly threatening and what blossom there was beginning to show on the trees battered by the sharp east wind.

The traffic moved—inches rather than yards, and she counted slowly to ten, trying to relax her tense muscles. She was going to be late arriving at her office, and she had an appointment at nine-thirty. A potential new client. She gnawed anxiously at her bottom lip, recalling the interview she had had recently with her accountant.

They were still making a profit, he had told her, but their costs were rising; the rent on their offices had doubled in the last eighteen months and was set to rise again. All over the city, peripheral businesses such as theirs were beginning to suffer from the cutbacks made by the conglomerates and multinationals which used them.

The tidal flood of extra and extremely profitable business she and Louise had seen in the last years of the Eighties was now ebbing away very fast and the anticipated upsurge in business they had expected from the new ties with Europe had been a trickle rather than a flood.

The office, which had been so convenient when she still lived in the flat, before she and Marcus had married and she and the boys had moved into his elegant Chelsea house, was now an increasingly tension-inducing drive across London.

Why was it that wet weather always made the traffic slower? she wondered irritably, frowning. She had intended to make an early start this morning, but then Tom had overslept and come down late to breakfast and Gavin had ‘lost’ his football kit, so that by the time she had actually managed to chivvy them plus their belongings into the car she had already been running behind schedule.

Marcus had already had his breakfast and started work in his study. He had frowned up at her as she opened the door, putting down the brief he had been working on. Even now, after three years of being together plus almost a year of marriage, her heart still turned over when she saw him. A ridiculous reaction in a woman of thirty-eight going on thirty-nine, surely? And to think that until she had met him she had been a woman who prided herself on her common-sense approach to life, on her awareness of the errors of judgements and the misplaced romantic ideals which had led to the break-up of her first marriage.

Until she had seen the brief in Marcus’s hand, she had almost been tempted to ask him if he could run the boys to school; the school was closer to his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn than it was to her office. But, despite the intensity of their love, a part of her remained brittly conscious that Tom and Gavin were her responsibility, just as Vanessa was his.

Vanessa… She could feel her stomach muscles tensing as she thought about Marcus’s daughter.

It troubled her that she was finding it so difficult to establish a good relationship with her. She was after all Marcus’s child… his daughter. Vanessa’s parents had been divorced for several years before she, Eleanor, had become involved in Marcus’s life. But whenever Vanessa came to stay with them Eleanor felt uncomfortable and on edge. She had even begun to feel ill-at-ease when she and Marcus made love when Vanessa was there.

Part of the trouble was that the Chelsea house had never been designed for two adults and three children. Marcus had bought it after his first marriage broke down; for a single or even a married couple without children it was the ideal London home, small but elegant with its downstairs kitchen-cum-living-room and Marcus’s study plus the dining-room, its first-floor drawing-room, which was spacious enough for the kind of parties a highly successful barrister might need to give. There was nothing wrong either with the two good-sized bedrooms, each with its own private bathroom, unless of course you happened to have three children to squash into that one spare double bedroom.

The bedroom which, Vanessa had told Eleanor coolly but very challengingly, had always been hers when she visited her father.

Which meant that her sons had to share the double room next to theirs and then be squashed up together in the small stuffy attic bedroom, which had never ever been intended to be anything other than a temporary emergency bedroom, whenever Vanessa came to stay.

She loved Marcus so much and she knew he loved her, but he had lived on his own for almost seven years before they met; he had been used to a quiet, well-ordered way of life, without the kind of tensions which now seemed to be disrupting their lives.

The obvious answer was to move, to find a larger house which would accommodate them all comfortably, give them all room to breathe… give all three children their all-important personal space.

The trouble was that, in London, the size of house they needed would be so exorbitantly expensive that it was pointless even thinking about moving.

Her business made a reasonable profit, and as a leading litigation barrister, a Q.C., Marcus earned good fees, but living in London was expensive. Her ex-husband had remarried almost immediately after their divorce and had a second young family, and was simply not in a position to continue to contribute to Gavin and Tom’s education—at eleven and thirteen respectively both of them still had several years of education ahead of them, especially if, as she hoped, they both went on to university.

Her tension eased as the traffic suddenly started to move.

It was just the miserable weather that was making her feel so on edge, she reassured herself. At this time of the year, everyone had had enough of cold and damp and was looking forward to some sun.

She and Marcus had hoped to spend a week with friends in Italy in May, but one of Marcus’s court cases had been brought forward and now it looked as though their week in Tuscany would have to be cancelled.

As she turned into the underground car park beneath the block that housed her office, the sleet started.

It was just gone half-past nine, she noted as she locked the car and headed quickly for the lift.

The office block was a modern one, centrally situated in the heart of the city and a good catchment area for their business. Eleanor and Louise had agonised for weeks on whether or not to take the lease. It had been expensive even then, and in those days neither of them had been sure of what volume of work they could expect.

That they had met at all had been pure chance. They had literally bumped into each other when Eleanor had been delivering some translations she had just completed for a large firm of importers.

Louise had been there on a similar errand and, once they had discovered that their language skills complemented rather than competed with one another, it hadn’t taken long for them to decide to pool those skills and set up business as a formal partnership.

It had been a decision which had paid off well; their reputation had spread by word of mouth and within four years of becoming partners they were successful and well known enough to feature in a rash of magazine and newspaper articles about the emergence of the successful businesswoman of the Eighties.

In those days both of them had been single, Eleanor with a bad marriage and an even worse divorce behind her and only too thankful to fling herself head-first into the demands of establishing a new career, not just because she needed the money, but because it also offered her a much needed solace for her wounded pride and battered self-esteem; and Louise, eight years her junior, just emerging from the trauma of ending an intense and destructive relationship with a married man.

Physically so very opposite—she tall and fair, quiet and restrained in both her thoughts and her actions, Louise small, brunette and impulsively vivacious—they had shared a common need to heal the wounds life had inflicted on them, which had bonded them together in their determination to make their partnership work.

And it had worked… Had worked? Eleanor frowned as the lift reached her floor, and then shrugged as the doors opened. Had worked and was still working, she assured herself firmly.

The office block had originally appealed to both of them because of the brightness of its new design. Built around an atrium, it had a spacious, open feel to it which was emphasised by the atrium itself.

Today, though, the marble and chrome seemed to give off a chilly air that made Eleanor shiver slightly.

They had probably turned down the heating again, she reflected as she headed for her office. All the tenants had been complaining about the rapid escalation not just in their rent but in their overheads as well. As she glanced down into the atrium itself she noticed that some of the plants looked over-green and slightly shiny, more as though they were artificial than real, she reflected with distaste, her attention caught by the sterile perfection of a white lily.

Such plants did not belong under London’s sleet-laden grey skies, or imprisoned here, forced into life beneath their covering of glass and heat.

Claire, their receptionist, looked up with a relieved smile as Eleanor walked into the foyer.

She and Louise had chosen the décor for their offices with great care, calling on an interior designer friend of Eleanor’s for confirmation of their choice, but what had seemed energetic and appropriate in the Eighties now looked brash and slightly harsh, as inappropriate for the grey skies of recession as the plants in the atrium were for the grey skies of London perhaps.

‘Monsieur Colbert has arrived,’ Claire told her. ‘I offered him coffee but he refused.’

Thanking her, Eleanor went through into her own office, removing her coat and checking her appearance quickly before hurrying through into the room she and Louise used for negotiating with clients.

Pierre Colbert was French, with business connections which brought him regularly to London and which took him just as regularly to all the other major European cities. He acted as an agent for several large clothing designers and wholesalers, the type who were two steps down from the ‘named’ designers and two up from the general run of high street suppliers.

His business, if they could secure it, would prove an extremely valuable addition to their portfolio. Eleanor had heard via another client that he was unhappy with his existing translators, and she had made a tentative approach to him suggesting that it might be worthwhile their getting together.

She had been warned that as well as liking to get his pound of flesh he was also rather difficult to deal with, and, as she walked into the office and saw the impatience with which he was regarding her, her heart sank a little.

She didn’t show her feelings, though, giving him a calm smile and extending her hand.

‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she apologised. ‘The traffic…’

‘The English do not know how to drive,’ he interrupted her brusquely. ‘In Paris we have traffic; here in London you have chaos…’

‘Perhaps you would like a cup of coffee,’ Eleanor offered, side-stepping his aggression.

‘Coffee?’ He smiled sourly. ‘I think not.’