PENNY JORDAN - For Better For Worse

Her mother picked her up from the station. At forty-six she still showed traces of the pretty girl she had been, the prettiness now softened and transmuted into a polished elegance.

As she kissed her affectionately, Zoe said, ‘You look good! I like the new hairstyle, it suits you.’

Heather Clinton smiled. ‘I wore it like this in the Sixties, straight and bobbed.’

‘Only then it was the same colour as mine,’ Zoe teased. ‘Not blonde.’

And then she had gone braless, and worn skimpy little shift dresses that showed more of her body than they concealed, and in those days her body had been worth showing, her skin glowing with health and youth, honey-tanned, sleek and firm.

Now, despite her aerobics classes, despite the expensive body preparation she used, she was beginning to be aware of the first beginnings of an unflattering loss of tone, an awareness that, no matter how hard she tried, it was impossible for her to recapture that golden, silky-skinned glow which David had loved so much.

Had he noticed its loss too? Did he, as she did herself, compare her to younger, fresher-skinned women and find her wanting?

She glanced at her daughter, half anxiously, half enviously. Zoe was all the things she had once been; so like her and yet so very different from her.

‘Daddy’s had to fly to Jersey,’ she told Zoe. ‘So I’m afraid it will just be the two of us.’

‘Never mind,’ Zoe told her. ‘We’ll be able to have a good gossip. How about having lunch somewhere together? That Italian place… I’m starving.’

She grinned to herself as she saw the uncertain sideways look her mother was giving her clothes: black leggings, black lace-up boots, a silk turtleneck sweater which she had swooped on with glee in a second-hand shop and, over the top of it, a thick bulky cotton-knit sweater which was really Ben’s.

In contrast her mother was wearing a casual but very obviously expensive cream linen skirt and jacket, teamed with the plainest of plain ivory silk shirts, her nails elegantly buffed and free of polish, just as her hair was free of lacquer and her face of heavy clogging make-up. Her only jewellery was her wedding and engagement rings, and the pretty trio of gold Cartier bracelets Zoe’s father had bought her for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

Over lunch it was Zoe who skilfully controlled the conversation and who then, as a penance for not confiding in her mother about her own and Ben’s hopes for the new restaurant-cum-hotel, allowed Heather to take her into her favourite dress shop and buy her a new outfit.

Her mother had pulled a slight face over her choice of brilliantly patterned Lycra cycling shorts and a top which she claimed clashed appallingly with it, but Zoe had smiled indulgently, refraining from pointing out that her generation had its own fashions and its own tastes and kissing her mother affectionately as they waited for her purchases to be wrapped up.

When her mother announced uncertainly that it was her evening for her bridge lesson, Zoe heroically concealed her amusement and gravely assured her that no, she did not mind at all.

‘Ben will probably be home by the time I get back,’ she assured her mother, hugging her warmly.

Only when she got back, Ben had not returned, and after the warmth of her parents’ home, with its unpretentious and unfussy but oh, so discreetly expensive décor, the flat seemed even more unwelcoming than ever.

Here on the tatty basic furniture there were no carefully treasured silver-framed photographs, no pretty pieces of Chelseaware… no cleverly chosen objets d’art … no paintings. No, there were none of those things, but there was love, Zoe reminded herself, and then she stood still, frowning, the forefinger halting that she had been dragging lazily through the permanent film of dust on the black ash table which Ben had assembled and which had joints which were nothing like true.

There was love in her parents’ home as well, wasn’t there? Of course there was, she reassured herself. All through her childhood and then her teenage years she had been aware of that love, and had taken it for granted. Too much for granted? After all, among their generation her parents were unusual in remaining together.

On her way up the stairs she had collected the post. Two bills, a bank statement and a thick white typed envelope which she was dying to open.

It was addressed to both of them, and she was nearly sure it was something from their backer. What did it contain? News about the property he intended to purchase? She could feel the excitement starting to uncoil and fizz up inside her.

Hurry up, Ben, she pleaded silently. Hurry up. She could have opened the letter, of course, it was after all addressed to both of them, but like a little girl she wanted to share the surprise with him… to share the pleasure… or the disappointment.

It wasn’t going to be a disappointment, she assured herself firmly. Ben was the one who was the pessimist, not she…

It was almost midnight before he came back, and she knew immediately when she saw his face that whatever his mother had wanted to tell him could not have been good news.

‘Ben!’ she cried out in sympathetic alarm. ‘What’s wrong? Is someone ill? Is…?’

There were dark shadows under his eyes, and his skin looked drained and sallow, his blue eyes which could glow warmly with love and tenderness bleak and empty.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked him gently.

He sat down heavily on the old sofa they had inherited with the flat. Zoe’s mother had wanted to have it re-covered for them, grimacing at the unknown identity of its many stains, but Zoe had firmly refused, flinging over it instead a richly patterned rug she had picked up from one of the street markets.

Now she sat down next to him, not touching him… waiting…

‘It’s Sharon,’ he told her emptily. ‘She’s pregnant.’ He turned his head and looked at her, but he wasn’t seeing her, Zoe recognised, not really; his expression was too controlled, too hard and full of starkly bitter bleak despair.

Uncertainly Zoe waited, instinct telling her not to speak… not to touch… not to do anything; and then abruptly he seemed to focus properly on her, the blood surging into his face, burning it with a heat that left stains like bruises against his cheekbones.

‘She’s sixteen years old, for God’s sake, and she’s pregnant.

‘Mum thought she was on the Pill, but apparently she forgot to take it and Sharon, of course, like the little fool that she is, didn’t say a word to Mum about anything until she was just about bursting out of her school uniform.

‘My God… hasn’t she learned anything? Hasn’t she seen from Mum? Doesn’t she realise?’

Zoe swallowed painfully, knowing that his anguish was something private, something beyond the bonds that the two of them shared, caused by his knowledge and experience of a way of life that was totally alien to her.

Even so, she tried to reach out to him, asking hesitantly, ‘And the father… the boy?’

‘The boy …’ The face he turned towards her was white now… not with exhaustion but with a bitter savage fury, the expression in his eyes one that made her shiver; one which she thought would always haunt her.

‘The boys, not the boy,’ he corrected her thickly. ‘Sharon told me that she isn’t sure just who is the father. And of course the stupid bitch has left it far, far too late to have an abortion. Mum can look after it, she told me. Either that or the council can rehouse her.’

Not knowing what to say, Zoe reached out and touched his arm gently.

‘It might all work out for the best,’ she began unsteadily, only to recoil in shock as Ben threw her hand off his arm so violently that she fell back against the settee. His eyes blazed fury and, even worse, contempt.