The Sister Swap Read online

  Her new friend’s use of the phrase ‘country girl’ sent a small frisson up her spine. In the past two weeks she had seen very little of her surly neighbour, mainly be- cause she had adopted a policy of active avoidance. Apart from the occasional thunderous knocking on the wall whenever she forgot herself and played her tapes a little too loud, or to cover one of Ivan’s rare bouts of crying, he was just as scrupulous at avoiding contact.

  Whatever it was that Hunter Lewis did for a living, his hours seemed to be erratic, so that it was no easy task to work out a schedule by which she could be sure of missing him whenever she ventured out. However, an ear to her bedroom wall was usually enough to ascertain if he was at home and therefore unlikely to be encoun- tered on the stairs. Coming back in she just had to keep a sharp look-out and take her chances. Every time she went up or down the stairs it was an adventure, and her heart pounded in her throat with nervous apprehension.

  ‘So…how’s the rest of your lecture schedule shaping up? I can’t believe you’re taking Japanese and Russian. One language at a time is enough for most of us!’

  Anne shrugged. ‘I’ve already done basic correspondence courses in them so it won’t be too much of a shock. I used to love making up and solving codes and cryptograms when I was a kid. I even used to invent languages with proper alphabets and rules of grammar…put the whole works down in little notebooks. It’s just something that I’m good at.’

  ‘Inventing grammar’? Now I know you’re weird.’ Rachel rolled her eyes. ‘Most of us spend our childhood trying to avoid having to write any grammar! Your teachers must have loved you. So…what do you think of your lecturers so far?’

  ‘They seem OK.’ It was an understatement. Just to be at university was wonderful and Anne knew she was seeing everything through rose-coloured spectacles.

  ‘Lucky you. I’ve got some killers from last year. Him for example.’ She screwed up her face and inclined her head at one of the figures crossing the quad. ‘Gorgeous bod, personality of Dracula. You know, there are poor souls who actually take political studies because they think it’s going to be an easy option. Big mistake. The drop-out rate in his class is fierce. He has a fiendish temper and he just piles on the assignments!’

  ‘So how come you’re still taking it, then? Can’t resist the gorgeous bod?’ teased Anne with a smile as she casually scanned the quad.

  ‘I discovered I’m actually quite good at it,’ admitted Rachel sheepishly, making Anne laugh. ‘I know, I know…it shocked me even more than it did Professor Lewis. He thought I was just another blonde bimbo looking to plug a hole in my schedule—practically shredded me to pieces that first semester. The Pit Bull, I call him…let him scent a weakness and those big jaws just go chomp!’

  Anne wasn’t listening. She had spotted him at the exact moment that Rachel had mentioned his name. He was walking towards them at an oblique angle but there was no mistaking that tight, impatient stride or the saturnine expression. He was wearing a sports jacket over dark trousers and pale shirt and tie, and was carrying a bulging leather briefcase.

  ‘Professor Lewis? Professor Hunter Lewis?’ she said hollowly, hoping against hope that it was merely a ghastly coincidence.

  ‘Yeah. You know him?’

  ‘He’s a lecturer here?’

  ‘I told you, political studies.’ To her horror Rachel lifted her hand and waved to the man as he approached to pass their seated figures. ‘Hi, Hunter.’

  She received a grunt in reply and a brief glance that didn’t even break his stride. Anne was relaxing again when the big head suddenly snapped back around and he came to a halt. Before he could beat her to it Anne scowled at him. As if it weren’t enough that she had to avoid him around the flat, now she was going to have to worry about running into him on campus as well.

  To her dismay he backed up, ignoring his student, and stared at Anne. ‘What are you doing here?’ he snapped.

  As if it had anything to do with him!

  ‘Following you, of course,’ she snapped back, flicking her long plait back between her defiantly stiff shoulder- blades.

  His face darkened. ‘What in the hell for?’

  He believed her! The incredible egotism of the man. ‘I’m a masochist. I’m hoping if I throw myself in your path often enough you’ll fall in love with me and invite me to live miserably with you ever after.’

  Anne heard Rachel’s soft gasp, but ignored it in favour of maintaining her defiant front. He wasn’t her professor. To her he was just an obnoxious stranger.

  ‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’

  ‘Not to someone who doesn’t have a sense of humour.’

  He didn’t dispute the point, instead abruptly switching tactics. ‘Are you taking an extension course here at the university?’ he asked more politely.

  Ah, it was finally beginning to sink in that her life might not revolve entirely around him. She widened her eyes innocently. ‘Actually I’m thinking of enrolling in political studies.’

  A brief spark of emotion glowed in the hooded gaze and then Anne was subjected to a long, silent look that would have made her blush if she hadn’t been so annoyed. ‘Sorry, my class already has a waiting-list,’ he said with silky insincerity.

  ‘Oh, dear, and I’m sure there won’t be any vacancies opening up when the term is under way and your students realise what a sweet-tempered and tolerant being you really are behind that gruff exterior.’

  This time Rachel gave her a sharp nudge of her elbow in the kidneys and Anne felt guilty for allowing her temper to get the better of her discretion.

  The dark gaze switched from Anne to Rachel’s flushed and curious face. ‘Been telling tales out of school, Rachel?’

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it, Professor,’ said Rachel with glib mock-deference.

  ‘Oh, be my guest,’ he responded mildly. ‘I’d much rather have the wheat sorted from the chaff before the first lecture.’

  ‘The chaff being those who don’t treat every utterance of yours as a pearl of indisputable wisdom, I suppose,’ Anne murmured.

  ‘I’m surprised at a country girl mixing up her barnyard analogies. Perhaps you don’t know as much as you think you do, Miss Tremaine. It’s swine and pearls.’

  She knew his condescension was deliberate but she couldn’t help responding to the provocation. ‘We didn’t keep pigs. I had to come to Auckland to encounter the behaviour of common swine.’

  ‘Er…hadn’t we better be going now, Anne?’ Rachel said hastily, picking up her leather satchel and getting to her feet, tugging her friend up with her.

  ‘Anne?’ The black eyebrows flattened. ‘I thought your name was Katlin.’

  It had had to happen and Anne was proud of the way she handled it, letting none of her trepidation show.

  ‘My family calls me Anne,’ she said with perfect truth. ‘With an “e”,’ she added helpfully.

  ‘Why?’

  He wasn’t asking about the ‘e’.

  ‘Because it’s one of my names,’ she said evasively. ‘A lot of people don’t like their middle names,’ she said, choosing her random comments carefully to avoid an outright lie. ‘I happen to like Anne. It’s a good, plain, uncomplicated name.’

  Now that was a lie. She had always wanted to be called something more dramatic. Alexandra or Laurel…or even Elizabeth would have done. A name you could do some- thing with…

  His eyebrows rose again and she knew that he was thinking exactly what she was—that a plain, uncomplicated name suited her looks. Though her eyes were large and thickly lashed they were an indeterminate colour-sometimes hazel, sometimes muddy blue, more often hovering disappointingly somewhere in between. She might have just scraped by as pretty with her winged brows balanced by a nicely shaped mouth, except that in between was the noble Tremaine nose which threw her small face all out of kilter. Her brothers used to tease her that it was lucky she had also inherited the impressive Tremaine chest when she went through puberty, otherwise her centre of gravity wouldn’t
have shifted south of her chin!

  Another impressive attribute, one that her brothers never teased her about because it had proved so vital to the family’s well-being, was her unshakeable, unbreakable loyalty towards those she loved.

  The car accident that had severely injured her mother’s back when Anne was fifteen had been the start of the long process that had shaped her adult personality into that of a deeply compassionate woman, always willing to help those less fortunate than herself. Katlin had always been hopeless on the domestic front and at the time of the accident had already embarked on her ob- session with writing, so it had naturally fallen to Anne to put aside her quiet dreams of university study and travel and buckle down to the task of being ‘little mother’ to the rest of the family. She had done it as she did most things, with a good-natured enthusiasm that had served to reassure her father and brothers, and especially her bed-ridden mother, that it was no great self-sacrifice for her to leave school without even minimum qualifications. In between the cooking and cleaning and caring for her mother Anne had plugged away at correspondence courses, which had gone some way to appeasing her hunger for knowledge and intellectual stimulation, and if occasionally she felt sorry for herself she never let it show.

  Over the years she had maintained an attitude of obstinate optimism towards her mother’s condition while everyone around her was losing hope. It had been a long, slow haul, but after numerous operations and continuing physical therapy Peg Tremaine’s condition had gradually improved to the point where, although she still wasn’t pain-free, she could move about and perform most household tasks without help. At last Anne had felt free to reclaim some of her childhood dreams, to fly the family nest and seek her own destiny.

  But that destiny had immediately become inextricably bound up with Katlin’s. Typically, Anne had found the bonds of love were too strong for her selfishly to ignore her sister’s cry for help. So here she was, plain Anne masquerading as complex Katlin and shamefully beginning to enjoy it.

  She frowned, daring him to take advantage of the opportunity for a fresh insult. It struck her that she had never frowned so much as she did in Hunter Lewis’s company. It must be infectious.

  ‘Anne was my grandmother’s name,’ Hunter Lewis said unexpectedly, a taunting amusement lightening his expression as he watched Rachel try a second time to edge her fierce little friend away.

  ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me she was tough as old boots and as mad as a snake,’ said Anne darkly, shrugging off the tug at her elbow.

  ‘Actually she was a darling, a sweet little lady with a heart as soft as butter.’

  Anne waited warily for the punch line but it didn’t come.

  ‘Yes, well, I’m sure any grandmother of yours wouldn’t dare be anything else,’ she told him stubbornly. The expression in his eyes was masked as he glanced down at his watch and she added sarcastically, ‘Oh, please, don’t let us keep you. I’m sure there must be other people who actually have appointments to be intimidated by you.’

  She was faintly appalled at the way she was carrying on but he merely gave her a sardonic smile. ‘Are you saying I intimidate you, Anne?’

  She had to tip her head back a long way to look him boldly in the eye. ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t think so,’ he said drily. ‘Then you won’t be upset if I tell you that next time you leave anything behind in the washing machine I’m going to put it through the office shredder. Thanks to your carelessness I now have three pink shirts.’

  Her red T-shirt! Anne put a hand over her mouth to stem a sudden giggle. She had wondered where it had gone after the last wash. Because it was a cheap one the unreliable dye meant it had to be separately washed in cold water and she had thrown it into the machine after having done Ivan’s nappies on a hot cycle and scurried back to her loft to hang the nappies on a makeshift drying frame she had rigged up in front of her window. They took longer to dry than they would have flapping on the clothes-line outside the rooftop laundry-room but Anne couldn’t risk using that any more than she dared leave them in the glass-fronted dryer.

  ‘Perhaps you can use them to soften your image,’ she said in a stifled voice.

  ‘And perhaps I can just bill you for three new shirts.’

  ‘And pigs might fly,’ scoffed Anne with the insouciance of one who knew there was no blood in a stone.

  ‘You were right.’ He paused for Anne’s puzzlement to register before he added smoothly, ‘Your ignorance of porcine behaviour is evidently woefully complete.’

  ‘Porcine behaviour?’ Anne began to giggle again. ‘Your pomposity is showing, Professor. You seem to have quite an interest in piggy—sorry, porcine activities. Is it a particular hobby of yours? What is it exactly that you’re professor of anyway? Oh, that’s right—piglitical studies…’

  She went off into gales of irresistible laughter and Rachel began to laugh too, after first making sure that the volatile Professor Lewis wasn’t going to explode on the spot. Instead he chose to leave, with a succinct comment about the declining standards of undergraduate humour.

  ‘God, I thought you were begging him to blow his top, but you do know each other from somewhere, don’t you?’ giggled Rachel. ‘You’re not…? Well, he made it sort of sound as if you were…well…’

  ‘Living together? We are—sort of.’ Anne gave a heavily edited version of her rent-free accommodation arrange- ments, only vaguely referring to a grant. Then she hastened to impress on her friend the need for discretion.

  ‘If he asks you anything about me, don’t tell him. Especially don’t mention Ivan.’

  ‘He doesn’t know you have a baby next door?’ Rachel was astonished. ‘Does it negate the terms of your grant or something? I know I made Hunter sound a bit like Attila the Hun but he’s not actually on permanent staff here, just holding a visiting lectureship, so it’s not as if he was part of the stuffy university hierarchy or anything…’

  ‘I’m not really sure,’ said Anne, uncertainly answering all questions simultaneously. She hadn’t read the fine print of the grant but presumed it was probably legal and binding. All she really had to go on was what Katlin had told her and Katlin wasn’t exactly noted for her strict attention to detail.

  ‘Just…be careful what you say, that’s all. Not that I expect he’ll be interested enough to ask,’ she added hurriedly, seeing the speculation twinkling in Rachel’s laughing eyes.

  Later that afternoon, struggling up the stairs with Ivan in his push-chair, she rather regretted the pride that had made her refuse Rachel’s standing offer of a lift to the nearest supermarket. She had caught the bus and on the way back it had rained, and although she had a plastic rain-shield on Ivan’s push-chair she had had no cover for herself or the paper shopping bags on the uphill walk from the bus station.

  She used her back to open the self-closing door beside the parking bay that led to the stairs, struggling to hook the laden push-chair up the concrete step after her. Inside the tiny bottom landing she paused to check the letterbox and stuff a letter into her damp pocket before unloading the two soggy shopping bags from the wire tray on top of the push-chair and placing them at the bottom of the stairs. After a quick check up the stairwell she picked up the push-chair containing Ivan and began to hurry up the stairs. She had found it easier to carry them both together than to take Ivan out and fold up the push-chair and then juggle them both, the folded push-chair being an unwieldy length for one of her height, invariably banging painfully against her ankles or trying to trip her up.

  ‘Lucky for you, my fine fat friend, that I spent all that time sheep-chasing otherwise I wouldn’t be able to manage this,’ she panted at the second landing.

  Ivan’s dark eyes almost disappeared into his chubby cheeks as he favoured her with his peculiar, slit-eyed grin and sucked mightily at his fingers.

  ‘Oh, yes, I know you’re hungry. Aren’t you always? Well, you’ll just have to wait until I can go back down and get the food. I only have one pair of hands, you
know. A pity we can’t ask the bad-tempered professor to help, isn’t it? I saw him today, and do you know what he had the gall to say…?’

  She told him all about it as she unlocked the loft and carried him in, colouring the encounter by describing how she had felt and what she had wanted to do rather than what she actually had done. Ivan was a dream listener. He never interrupted her or tried to contradict her. His innocent baby ears were her diary into which she described her days. It eased her occasional attacks of loneliness and homesickness to have someone to chatter to. She just hoped babies didn’t have total recall. She wouldn’t like to think that in twenty years’ time Ivan would throw it all back at her.

  She took him out of the push-chair and strapped him into his slanting baby-bouncer to keep him safe while she raced down to get the supermarket bags.

  She was trying to cut down her shopping trips as much as possible but she was limited by the amount that she could carry at any one time.

  Hugging a limp paper sack under each arm, she slogged back up the stairs, going ever faster as she felt the paper fibres beginning to collapse.

  When she reached the last landing she stopped to readjust her cargo and suddenly became aware of a swift, almost noiseless step behind her. She whirled around, just in time for the man hurrying up the stairs behind her to cannon straight into her burdened arms.

  Anne let out a soft shriek as she felt one of the soggy sacks split completely and watched in horror as a cascade of groceries poured down Hunter Lewis’s chest. Fortunately they were all packaged goods and none broke open on impact, but Anne heard him swear under his breath as several cans bounced off his shoes.

  There was a small silence punctuated by a staccato series of fading thumps as a can of baked beans rolled away down the stairs. Then Anne felt the bottom of the other bag begin to give and automatically clutched it tighter, one hand cupping the disintegrating packages at the same moment that Hunter reached forward with an impatient growl.

  ‘Allow me—’