The Sister Swap Page 16

  He frowned at her inanity. ‘I certainly don’t see anyone else in the room,’ he said in the acid tones for which he was famous.

  She gaped at him. ‘Hunter, what are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m talking about the fact that I believe you have a brilliant career ahead of you if you can only learn to discipline your talent. I’m talking about the people who’ve put their trust in that talent. You owe it to them to finish this. You owe it to me, dammit! I’m not going to be trotted out as another excuse for your procrastination and I certainly don’t want Arnold Markham on my back accusing me of sabotaging one of his cherished protégées…’

  ‘You know Arnold Markham…personally?’ Anne gulped, wiping her sweating palms against her robe, feeling dizzy as she racked her brains as to why on earth Hunter was still going on at her as if she were the Markham prize-winner.

  Hadn’t she taken her courage in her hands and bared her entire soul to him? Hadn’t she just explained all about Kat and her illness and how she had begged Anne to take her place and look after Ivan while she finished the book? Hadn’t he just forgiven her all her sins by making beautiful love to her?

  Or had she simply been too preoccupied with appeasing his rage as quickly as possible to put the facts clearly in a logical progression?

  Anne felt suddenly faint. Just what had she confessed to? In her confused jumble of thoughts she had assumed that somewhere in her stumbling phrases she had dealt with the basic matter of identity. She back-tracked desperately over the stops and starts and twists and turns of their emotional conversation. Had she even mentioned Katlin’s name in her headlong rush to absolve herself? Oh, God, and then, at the end, when he had asked if there were any more skeletons, she had blithely told him no…!

  ‘Arnold’s a very good friend of my mother’s,’ she heard Hunter answer through the roaring in her ears. ‘And he was also my father-in-law.’

  Anne went cold, her whole being going into defensive shutdown against the pain.

  Hunter had an intimate, long-standing connection with Arnold Markham. His reference to him had held friendly affection and deep respect. It was clear in which direction his loyalties would lie if it came to the crunch. Even as his lover, Anne would never have the hold on him that his beloved Deborah had.

  Anne was going to have to make one, final sacrifice for her sister.

  She was going to have to cram that last, leering skeleton back into the closet and firmly shut the door.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘YOU look a little frazzled, Anne; are you OK?’ Rachel Blake asked as she opened the door of her sporty red convertible, parked conveniently close to the university library from which they had both just emerged.

  Anne halted on the footpath, and sighed. ‘Ever hear the phrase living on borrowed time?’

  ‘Want a lift home?’ said Rachel sympathetically.

  ‘What, the whole five hundred metres?’ Anne grinned, looking down the street towards the warehouse façade. She shook her head. ‘Thanks anyway, Rach, but I’m fine—really. I’m just glad we break up for the holidays next week. I’ve got some serious lazing to do!’

  Rachel took the hint cheerfully and Anne waved as the red car took off with its customary throaty roar. She was grateful for her friend’s support but didn’t see the point in another re-hash of the problem that she had blurted out one night after a few too many drinks at a wine bar while celebrating the end of a course assignment. Typically, Rachel, sophisticated to the core, had thought it a terrific lark, and strongly advised Anne to let sleeping dogs lie and make hay while the sun shone, along with numerous other applicable clichés.

  ‘Why borrow trouble?’ she had demanded. ‘For all you know he might already have dumped you by the time he finds out, then you won’t care what he thinks anyway.’

  ‘Gee, thanks, Rachel, that makes me feel a lot better,’ Anne had replied sarcastically. The fact that she and Professor Lewis were a hot item had quickly filtered around the campus in spite of their mutual discretion, but not even to Rachel had Anne admitted that she was in love, not lust.

  ‘Or you might have dumped him,’ Rachel had hastened to add consolingly. ‘It’s much more likely that you’ll get bored with him than vice versa. After all, he’s years older than you and you said he hardly ever takes you anywhere…’

  Only to heaven and back. Who needed to party when they had a free ticket on a nightly ride to paradise?

  But Rachel’s flawed philosophy had held out an alluring appeal to someone whose conscience was already compromised, and as the weeks had slid by Anne had discovered the truth of Francis Bacon’s axiom that it was impossible to love and be wise. She’d temporarily given up her idea of a part-time job and had cut down on her massages, purely on the off-chance of spending a few more precious hours a week with Hunter, and in consequence was dipping even more deeply into her precious savings.

  It had certainly not been wisdom that had prompted her to phone her sister—not for news of Ivan, who had just cut his eighth tooth, or to find out that Dmitri, now somewhere on the high seas between Fiji and Hawaii, had been told that his residency application was being fast-tracked through the normally prolonged consider- ation process—but to beg for permission to draw Hunter into their confidence.

  When she had confessed the reason, Katlin had been so depressingly brave that Anne had known as soon as she had hung up the phone that she couldn’t do it.

  ‘I guess you have to tell him, then, if it really means that much to you,’ Katlin’s voice had run hollowly down the line. ‘I’ll have to forfeit the publishing deal but, as long as they don’t blacklist me, maybe I can hawk the book around to another editor…And maybe Dmitri’ll be able to lend me some money to refund the grant if they threaten to sue…if he decides to stay, of course,’ she’d added cautiously. ‘I don’t want him to feel obligated or anything. But—hey, maybe you’re wrong and it won’t come to that!’ Katlin pretending to be an op- timist had not been very inspiring. ‘Maybe you’ll end up finding out that Hunter’s so much in love with you that he’s willing to be your accessory after the fact to anything short of murder! Maybe if he thought he could keep you by keeping his mouth shut…’

  There were a few too many ‘maybe’s for Anne. The only thing worse than Hunter not being in love with her was the thought that his loving her would cause him pain. How could she ask him to surrender his honour for her sake? What had she done to earn such a sacrifice? It would be a betrayal of her own love even to ask. Love wasn’t supposed to be a test. You didn’t pass or fail. Love was all about giving, not taking…

  If giving was a measure of love then perhaps Hunter wasn’t as immune as he pretended to be, thought Anne later as she let herself into his flat with the ingredients for him to make another of his mouth-watering Italian dishes, and found a huge wrapped package waiting for her on the marble bench. Hunter was addicted to giftgiving, which was a strange quirk in a man who had insisted that she should not expect anything of him.

  As well as the slim leather satchel that had replaced her scruffy varsity book-bag, Hunter had surprised her with clothes…pretty, extravagant things that she couldn’t possibly have afforded herself—the vibrant red dress she was wearing now, a hot pink padded jacket that made her easy to spot in a crowd, a Chinese robe that he had acquired on his travels abroad, and which he liked her to wear around the flat knowing she was naked underneath, some cobwebby underwear—and numerous frivolous trinkets including a not so frivolous Walkman radio so that her love of loud rock music didn’t clash with his equal reverence for jazz and silence.

  In turn she had given him the only thing of real value that she had to give—the secret gift of her love. If, as she suspected, Hunter was afraid to love again then she would be fearless. So she made herself vulnerable to him in a hundred small ways, respecting his periods of physical and mental withdrawal but making it quietly clear that she wasn’t about to curb her natural warm exuberance in order to conform to his rigid concepts of mutual
independence. She laughed at the shadow of rejection, challenged his cynicism with her enchantingly fresh view of the world, made him chuckle with her wit and impressed him with her fierce enthusiasm for the languages that she was learning by leaps and bounds, and her intense curiosity about the cultures they represented. She danced for him and taught him to appreciate the finer points of rap music, allowed him to inform her about art and politics and the subtleties of accepting defeat on the chessboard…

  They now spent more evenings together than apart although they rarely slept together, separate beds seeming to be, to Hunter’s incomprehensible way of thinking, an important factor in maintaining the necessary degree of emotional separation between lovers. Whenever he casually invited her to stay the entire night, Anne made herself accept just as casually, careful not to let him see her inward elation at the widening chink in his armour of assumed indifference.

  The only real no-go area that Anne was solely responsible for, purely as a matter of self-defence, was her writing. If Hunter tried to discuss the book she bluntly changed the subject and, under his own rules, he was powerless to insist. Of course, not talking or thinking about it didn’t make the constant dread of discovery go away and sometimes she caught him looking at her with a brooding speculation that made her heart shudder with apprehension.

  The new gift was a silk floor-cushion in jewel-bright patchwork fabric—Hunter was well-acquainted with her preference for doing everything on the floor—and Anne immediately cast it on the carpet beside his favourite leather chair and looked for something to do on it while she waited for him to arrive home from his lecture. First, though, she had a shower and put on the peacock-blue Chinese robe, brushing her hair and leaving it rippling down her back, idly noticing the battered suitcase standing in the corner of his bedroom and wondering wistfully whether he might be emptying some space in his wardrobe for her. Carefully removing the long hairs from his brush, she put it back on the top of his chest of drawers and went out to raid his crammed bookcase, skipping her finger along the rows, stiffening as she suddenly came across a familiar name on a slender spine.

  Deborah Markham Lewis.

  She withdrew the slim volume and discovered that it was a book of poetry. She backed away, turning it over in her hands, slowly, as if it were primed to explode in her face. On the back cover was a large, full-length black and white photograph and underneath a few brief, biographical details.

  ‘Poet…author…married to fellow author…published posthumously…’

  Anne subsided on the cushion, staring at the photograph.

  She had been right. Hunter’s wife was beautiful, in the most classical sense of the word.

  It was a fragile, ethereal, ultra-feminine beauty…the perfect, pale oval face, the floating Pre-Raphaelite hair, the cool intellect revealed by the light eyes, the delicate limbs under the flowing white dress…no wonder she haunted Hunter. She must have been his ideal intellectual as well as feminine mate!

  She frowned as she turned the stiff pages, struggling with the incorporation of typographical elements into the unrhymed metre and the esoteric subject matter. Anne was no literary judge of poetry but she knew what she liked and Deborah Markham Lewis left her cold.

  ‘What are you reading?’

  She hadn’t even heard him come in.

  Hunter discarded his briefcase and came towards her, loosening his tie, his dark eyes smiling at the sight of her curled on the cushion, the Chinese silk cascading like a thin veil of water across her body. ‘I see you like my present…it’s called a harem pillow. As soon as I saw it in the shop window I imagined you waiting for me just as you are…’

  She knew the exact moment when he recognised the book in her hand. His face seemed to draw in on itself, his lids half drawing down over shuttered eyes.

  ‘I didn’t know your wife was a poet,’ said Anne, striving to act naturally. If he’d left the book on the shelf he must have expected her to notice it eventually. She tried to think of a diplomatic comment. ‘They’re very…profound. She must have been a very interesting woman.’

  He gave her his thoughtful, heavy-lidded look and then shocked her by smiling faintly.

  ‘That was ultra-polite of you, Anne, and most noncommittal for a woman who holds definite opinions about almost everything. You don’t like Deborah’s poetry, do you?’

  Caught out, Anne blushed and he shocked her afresh by adding kindly, ‘Don’t worry, I never liked her later stuff much either.’

  ‘I—I’m sure she was very good…’ she stammered faintly, her romantic illusions about his perfect marriage beginning to crumble around her startled ears.

  ‘Oh, she was. Once. She had an enormous early promise that was never fulfilled…sound familiar?’

  She ignored the wry tag, turning over the book and looking at the photograph with new eyes. ‘She was very beautiful.’

  ‘That was part of the problem,’ he murmured cryptically, sliding his hand under her hair to stroke the sensitive nape of her neck.

  Anne shivered, leaning her head back against his forearm so that she had an upside-down image of his face. ‘What problem?’ she asked, not expecting him to answer.

  His hand stilled, then resumed its caress. ‘She was used to being admired and flattered. She was an only child, an exquisitely elfin baby who grew into a stunning girl genius who grew into a beautiful, frightened woman. She had an image of perfection for herself that had to be maintained at all costs…’

  A light went on inside Anne’s head at the thought of that fey, wraith-like figure. She ducked her head and squirmed around to face him. ‘Did Deborah have anorexia?’

  His smile twisted as he crouched down beside her and took the book out of her hands, tossing it on to his chair. ‘Clever Anne. Bulimia nervosa. But she was far too intelligent to let it control her. She apparently had it from her mid-teens but she hid it so well that I didn’t know anything about it until it became useful to her to let me know.’

  ‘Useful, how?’

  He sat on the carpet, shrugging out of his jacket, the object of her rapt attention as he continued his casual revelations. She hardly dared breathe in case he suddenly realised whom he was talking to and clammed up again.

  ‘To make me feel guilty, to stop me from pressuring her, I suppose.’ He removed his cuff-links and rolled them absently around in his palm. ‘Although at the time I thought I was just helping her. We had each had one book published when we met—I was lecturing at Victoria University in Wellington—and it was a case of instant mutual fascination. But when we got married Deborah found that domesticity was vastly different from what she had imagined it should be for a “literary couple”. She had a few short stories and a book of poems published in the first couple of years but she gradually started discarding most of what she wrote, endlessly rewriting the same piece only to decide it wasn’t good enough.

  ‘So she started to lie about how much work she was doing, first to other people, then to me and finally to herself, because failure didn’t fit in with her image. Her output dropped pretty well in inverse proportion to mine, and inevitably she resented the fact that I was being published and she wasn’t—quite rightly so, since she was the greater talent, according to the literary critics. Of course, she was a “serious” writer and I was an unashamed populist so there wasn’t really any comparison, but she claimed my ego was afraid of the competition. Perhaps she was right and there was a subconscious rivalry I was never aware of. She said I was stifling her with my attention, that my criticism destroyed her self-confidence, that I frightened her with my temper and my sexual appetites.’

  Anne was dazed. ‘She said all that?’ About Hunter? Her Hunter?

  Hunter let the cuff-links roll to the floor and fingered the wide sash of her robe. ‘Oh, much more than that; I’m just hitting the highlights,’ he said drolly. ‘But not all at once…it came out in dribs and drabs over the years as the bitterness built up. It got so that she couldn’t bear to live with me, but she didn’t d
are live without me either, because I was her best excuse for failure. Her dreams had all gone sour and she had nothing to replace them with…only that incredible beauty. But she knew that was transient too…’

  His face was remote but Anne knew him well enough by now to recognise that his rigid composure was indicative of internal turmoil. ‘Was that when her bulimia got out of hand?’

  ‘No.’ Her question shook him out of his state of suspended animation, throwing a mental switch, and he suddenly tugged at the sash he was holding and Anne gasped, catching at the knot at her waist as she felt it begin to give.

  ‘Shall we try the cushion out for size?’ he said with soft lechery, as if they hadn’t just been talking about a cataclysmic event in his life.

  ‘I thought you were going to make dinner?’ she murmured, to give herself time to think. Surely he couldn’t expect her simply to ignore his intimate revelations? He must have told her for a purpose. But what was it?

  ‘We can send out for pizza later.’ He gave a sharper tug so that she almost slithered into his lap. ‘You might show a little more enthusiasm. Or should I say a lot more…? That cushion was extremely expensive…’

  That caught her on the raw, acutely conscious as she was of their financial disparity. Was he implying that her love was for sale? Did he know what an insult that was? ‘I didn’t realise you looked on it as an investment rather than a gift.’ She lifted her chin and flashed her eyes at him warningly. ‘Maybe if you show me the receipt I can work out how many kisses it’s worth!’

  ‘If you’re talking fair exchange you might consider offering me that painting of mine that my mother gave you by mistake.’ It had become a joke between them, his trying to bargain it away from her just as his mother had predicted, but this time Anne didn’t respond and he shrugged.

  ‘Well, it’s definitely more than a few measly kisses,’ he said smoothly. ‘I’d say you owe me an orgasm at least…’ His hand slipped inside the wrapped edge of the robe, and insolently between her legs.