For Better For Worse

Was he deliberately trying to goad her into a response, Eleanor wondered, or did he simply not realise how rude he was being? She had met other men like him, men who were plainly uncomfortable with and antagonistic towards women in business, and she had developed her own method of dealing with them.

Once, in the aftermath of a long, lazy afternoon of lovemaking, Marcus had told her with sleepy pleasure as he ran his hand lingeringly over her warm, relaxed flesh, pausing to cup her breast and slowly caress the still erect peak of her nipple, ‘I love this peace you always carry with you, Nell. It’s such a pleasure to be with a woman who is so calm and secure. It makes it so easy to love you.’

It had been shortly after that that he had proposed to her.

‘No, we don’t seem to have developed the skill of making really good coffee, do we?’ she agreed with a smile. Another woman might have balked at using such placatory tactics, Eleanor admitted, but for her they were almost a way of life… peace and calm, good relationships, concord and harmony were important to her. Too important?

‘Your coffee, like your bread, is uniquely irreplaceable,’ she added, ‘although I understand that Marks and Spencer are doing their best. Apparently they are actually importing the flour now from France for their croissants and French bread.’

‘They are among your clients?’ Pierre Colbert asked her with shrewd interest, dropping his earlier aggression.

Eleanor allowed herself a small surge of relief.

‘Some of their suppliers are,’ she told him, opening the file she had brought in with her. ‘I see from your own client list that you have dealings with design houses in several major European cities, and that they in turn deal with manufacturers in the Far East. The clothes from the design houses you represent will sell best in our small exclusive country-town boutiques.’

‘You have done your research well.’

Was that a hint of respect she could see overtaking his earlier churlishness? She hoped so!

Eleanor smiled gently at him, too wise in the ways of business to show her relief.

‘I understand that at the moment you use translators domiciled in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. We, of course, could supply all your translation needs here under one roof.’

‘As can the other companies I deal with,’ he pointed out, watching her.

‘True,’ Eleanor agreed with another smile. It was going to be hard work persuading him to give them his business, she recognised as she quietly and calmly started to point out to him the advantages of using them.

‘Additionally Louise, my partner, specialises in Middle Eastern languages. And Russian.’

‘Ah, but remember,’ he told her quickly, ‘with the break-up of the Soviet Union into various independent states, each will want to revert to its own language.’

‘A fact that we have taken into consideration,’ Eleanor assured him.

It was true. She and Louise were actively recruiting on to their freelance books experienced translators who were able to work in these newly re-emerging languages.

Quite how she was going to continue to fit this additional commitment to interview and test their freelancers into her existing busy life, Eleanor wasn’t sure, but somehow she would have to find a way.

She had tried to make a start on all the application forms this weekend, but it hadn’t been easy. For one thing, the only place she had to work was the bedroom she shared with Marcus, and with Vanessa next door, her radio playing at full volume, it had been impossible for her to summon the necessary concentration, even knowing that it was vitally important to the continued success of the business that she and Louise secure an all-important head-start on their rivals in what promised to be the only genuinely expanding field open to them.

They needed that business if they were to continue to generate good profits, and yet with the ever-increasing demands on her time that marriage to Marcus had brought, never mind her own desire to have more time to spend personally with him, the actual hours she had left for expanding the company were alarmingly small.

She had already given up her two evening gym sessions and the once-a-month, long, leisurely Sunday lunch she used to share with her oldest woman friend, Jade Fensham; that had had to go because it conflicted with the weekend when Marcus had access to his daughter.

His daughter. She could understand why it was difficult for Vanessa to accept her, but surely it should not be so hard for her to accept Vanessa; she was after all a part of Marcus, and she loved him.

Jade told her she was too idealistic, and she had countered by telling Jade that she was too cynical.

Jade had shrugged those elegant shoulders and narrowed her long green cat’s eyes.

‘After two marriages and two divorces what do you expect? Take my advice: never, ever expect anything but trouble from a man’s children, especially if they’re teenage girls.’

The weekend before last, white-faced with a tension-induced migraine, she had asked herself what it was she was doing wrong and why it was that Vanessa was so antagonistic towards her. After all, it wasn’t as though she was responsible for the break-up of her parents’ marriage.

Perhaps Marcus was right. Perhaps she ought to try to arrange things so that Tom and Gavin stayed with their father when Vanessa came to stay. At least it would stop the interminable quarrels that seemed to break out when they were all together. Was she being unfair in suspecting that it was Vanessa who deliberately provoked them? It was true that Tom, over-sensitive and too vulnerable, tended to over-react—a legacy of her divorce from his father? But Gavin had a far calmer temperament; phlegmatic and easygoing, he had been a placid baby and was now a placid, sturdily resilient child.

Yes, it would make life easier if they kept them apart, but it wasn’t what she had hoped for, what she had planned when she and Marcus had married. She had never assumed that merging their two families would be easy, but neither had she anticipated that her relationship with Vanessa would become so destructive. Her relationship? What relationship?

The last thing that Vanessa wanted was any kind of relationship with either Eleanor or her sons, but most especially with Eleanor. Sometimes she felt as though she and Vanessa were two rivals locked in a silent and deadly battle for Marcus. And yet the last thing she wanted was for Vanessa to feel that her marriage to Marcus in any way threatened his daughter’s position in his life.

In fact she had been the one who had suggested to Marcus that he see more of his daughter. It had disturbed her a little, when she and Marcus had first become lovers, to discover how little he saw of his child.

‘She’s happy with her mother,’ Marcus had told her.

‘But she needs you in her life as well,’ Eleanor had insisted gently.

‘You have a husband and children,’ she suddenly came out of her brief reverie to hear Pierre Colbert saying to her. ‘Does this not affect your work?’

Eleanor refused to react, to allow him to provoke her into becoming defensive.

‘I’m a woman, monsieur,’ she told him quietly. ‘And as such I am well used to balancing many demands upon my time.’

She saw from his expression that she had both surprised and amused him, and mentally congratulated herself for not falling into the trap of complaining that he would not have asked her such a question had she been a man. He was a Frenchman, undeniably chauvinistic and no doubt unashamedly proud to be. She would succeed far better with him by emphasising the virtues of her sex rather than by challenging him to accept her as the equal of any man.

She watched him thoughtfully as he smiled at her, and then said shrewdly, ‘My partner and I like to think that we offer a very skilled and competitive service, and I believe that you must think so too, monsieur, otherwise you would not be here. You are not, I think, a man who needlessly wastes his time.’

She watched the respect dawn in the clever brown eyes before he looked away from her.

‘You are one of several agencies recommended to me,’ he told her dismissively. ‘It is always wise to consider several options, even though some of them must always be more favourable than others.’

He was standing up, terminating the meeting. Eleanor rose too, still outwardly calm and relaxed, although inwardly she was wryly aware that he would probably prefer not to give them the business. Had she been a man… or French…

As she escorted him to the door, she tried not to dwell on how much they needed the extra income his work would have given them. She had known when he first contacted them that it was extremely unlikely they would get the business. It made her feel a little bit better knowing that she had subtly challenged his initial attitude towards her, drawing respect from him in place of his original hostility.

After she had seen him off the premises, she went back to her office and picked up his file. She needed to put Louise in the picture vis-à-vis her meeting with him.

She got up and walked into the foyer. ‘Is Louise in her office?’ she asked Claire.

‘Yes, she’s just come in,’ the receptionist told her.

Smiling her thanks at her, Eleanor walked across to her partner’s office.

Claire watched her enviously. Eleanor was everything she herself longed to be. Attractive, successful, married to a man who exuded an almost magical charisma of sex and power; a man who, although he might be well into his forties, still had such an aura of compelling masculinity about him that he made her go weak at the knees. Not that he ever gave her so much as a second look. And even if he had…

Eleanor was so… so nice that she couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt her.

Yes, they were an ideal couple, with an ideal relationship; an ideal lifestyle.

Marriage, career, motherhood—Eleanor had them all.