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But what was she angry about? The fact that her parents were quarrelling… the fact that Ben had gone rushing off to Manchester to be with his mother and sister, when she needed him here with her?
But he did not know she needed him, did he? And why did she need him? It wasn’t as though she was facing anything particularly traumatic, after all. All she was doing was simply correcting a mistake; putting right something which should not have gone wrong in the first place. It wasn’t as though the pregnancy had any real significance for her…
And yet here she was…
&nbs
p; Here she was what? Full of anger and self-pity because no one but she would ever know of the sacrifice she was making… The life she was destroying… For Ben’s sake… for the sake of their plans…
She was making? No, she wasn’t the one making that sacrifice. It was her child who…
No… As she thumped the side of the steering-wheel with her hand she didn’t even feel the pain of the impact, only the shock caused by the direction of her thoughts.
This was stupid. More than stupid, it was dangerous and self-destructive.
What was the matter with her, anyway?
Nothing. There was nothing at all wrong with her. Tomorrow she would ring the clinic, make the necessary appointment and with luck by the time Ben returned it would all be over and everything would be back to normal. The whole thing over and done with and safely out of the way, so that she could concentrate on their new venture, their new life.
It would be up to her to provide the optimism and the strength to support Ben through his doubts and pessimism, she had always known that—had in a way almost been pleased by his dependence on her. She could not give Ben and the business the time and attention they needed and have a child as well.
It was all so unfair—she did not want the complications this pregnancy were causing her, she told herself angrily later as she let herself into the flat.
Why was life doing this to her… testing her like this? Why her?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘I’M OFF now, Nell…’
Eleanor paused on the stairs, tensing as she watched Marcus disappearing through the front door. Couldn’t he have waited until she got downstairs and said goodbye properly to her?
Angrily she walked into the kitchen and started clearing up the breakfast things. There had been tension between them ever since the traumatic events of the previous weekend. The reverberations from the scene Marcus had walked into still echoed uncomfortably in her head.
‘Of course you want to move,’ Vanessa had accused her bitterly. ‘This isn’t your home. It never has been…’
It wasn’t true, of course. Or was it? Had a part of her always perhaps secretly felt insecure of her tenure here somehow—her right to Marcus’s love?
She frowned, disliking the thought and the doubts, the emotions they aroused.
Why was it that Vanessa possessed this skilful ability to enmesh her in the trap of her own insecurities and fears… insecurities and fears she did not always even know she possessed until Vanessa underlined them for her?
Sometimes it seemed as though Vanessa was actually trying to undermine her relationship with Marcus… their marriage. And yet why should she? Her parents’ marriage had been over and their divorce complete long before Eleanor had ever met Marcus, and initially Vanessa had seemed to accept her readily enough.
Vanessa was a teenager, she reminded herself, and, like all teenagers, she was subject to unpredictable moods and emotions.
And besides, it was not her relationship with Vanessa she ought to be focusing on but her relationship with Marcus.
This week they had been treating one another with the kind of careful, almost hostile neutrality which would have seemed laughable at one time.
Was it really only a month or so ago that she had been congratulating herself on the success of their marriage, fully believing that there was nothing, no one that could come between them? Laughing about the doubts which had initially held her back from committing herself to Marcus.
It was not the quarrel between their children that was the cause of the resentment she could sense between them now. Not on her part, anyway. What she resented was not Marcus’s irritability with their inability to get on with one another, but the fact that he seemed to assume that she was somehow, if not directly to blame for this state of affairs, then at least remiss in not somehow being able to remedy it. Why, after all, should she be the one to take on the responsibility for solving the problem? Couldn’t he see that his very attitude towards it, towards her was making the whole situation worse? And it wasn’t even as though she was not trying to do something. It was not her fault that Vanessa had taken such a violent dislike to the idea of their moving to Broughton House—a dislike which Eleanor suspected sprang partly from the fact that Tom had announced the news to her so unexpectedly, and partly because she herself had been the one to propose it.
‘I did warn you,’ Marcus had told her almost curtly when she had complained to him that Vanessa seemed to be deliberately trying to poison Tom and Gavin’s minds against the move.
‘But they’re the ones we’re doing this for,’ Eleanor had protested. ‘It’s for their benefit as well as ours. Vanessa complains violently about the boys having to use her room. At Broughton House she’ll be able to have her own privacy—’
‘I can’t make her like the idea, any more than you can,’ Marcus had interrupted her flatly, his voice impatient and irritated.
