A Sister’s Gift (26 page)

After a while he follows my lead. I watch him as he takes off his shirt first, his hands fumbling for an age over the buttons. His stomach is washboard flat and I admire it while he unbuttons his trousers and unzips and then he turns away from me to sit on the bed while he pulls off his socks. And then his boxers. At that point I turn away because it doesn’t feel right to watch him doing that; it’s Richard.

And then I feel him sliding in beside me at last. At last.

‘This is a stunning picture of Rochester Bridge, Hollie. I can easily see why it won that competition.’

‘I’m sorry?’ I glance at the clock and it’s half past two already. How long are those two going to be gone? My sister left here at half past ten this morning. Richard phoned to let me know he was on his way up to Bluebell Hill at eleven. So that makes it…over three hours they’ve been there together.

‘I was just commenting on what a good piece this was,’ my mother-in-law says. ‘I’d have it hanging in my hallway any day.’

The bridge picture. Right. I put my hand up to my head to ease the dull, slow throbbing that’s started up over my right eye.

‘It’s a great piece,’ I say dully. We’re sitting at my dining room table which is absolutely stuffed to the gills with ongoing projects this afternoon. Normally I can’t stand this amount of disarray but I hoped having lots of things on the go would help take my mind off what’s happening up at Bluebell Hill today. Only it isn’t working. My eyes graze over the jumbled mess: at one end are all the notes and jottings that Beatrice brought in earlier with her plans for the garden party; at the other, there’s all the brightly-coloured second-hand jumpers Christine wants me to help salvage for their knitting wool. And now my mother-in-law’s also brought her canvas bag out from the car with all her picture frame samples so I can choose the one I’d like to use for the bridge picture.

Oh, God. I don’t want to choose a picture frame today. I don’t want to look at Beatrice’s plans for the garden party, either. I bite my lip. The only thing I want in the world right now is for my husband to come back home.

‘What?’ Christine’s just put aside a thick black corner frame in favour of a thinner, more elegant silver-edged one. ‘You don’t think so? It’s a powerful piece.’

‘It is powerful.’ I make a real effort to concentrate on what she’s saying. ‘This picture just makes me feel uneasy. I don’t know why. It has done from the first time I saw it. I guess…I guess this is just not how I see Rochester Bridge.’

Christine places the silver frame alongside one of the corners of the picture. It matches the grey and black lead pencil drawing beautifully. ‘Ah. This one would do the job to perfection. So.’ She shoots me a sideways glance. ‘How
do
you see it?’

‘Oh, I don’t know…’I shrug. I wish I could just tell her what’s eating at me but I can’t. What would I say? Right now your son is having sex with my sister so he can get her pregnant for me? I feel my stomach churn at the thought. But I don’t want to think about that. Don’t think about it because you’ve got to stay positive; see the good that’s going to come as a result. Think about the outcome.

Christine is still waiting for a reply. ‘I see the bridge as something positive and beautiful,’ I finally get out. ‘I’ve always thought of it as a way for people to reach…things on the other side that would otherwise have been beyond their reach. I see it as something…worthy and noble.’

‘And you don’t feel this picture represents all that?’

Why can’t she just drop it? Usually I’d enjoy this kind of conversation with Christine. I love her to bits and we always talk about all sorts of things but today I just can’t.

‘It does, I suppose,’ I say impatiently. ‘But there’s something in that drawing that seems to imply there’s a danger and an instability about the bridge, too.’

‘Entry number 12.’ Christine peers at the little scrap of paper still attached with a paperclip to the top right-hand corner of the piece.

Turbulent! That’s a good word. That word describes perfectly how I’m feeling at this moment. I’ve had the sense that Christine’s been pretty much on edge too, ever since she arrived from Lincolnshire last night. She can’t
know
, can she? I know Rich and his mum are close, but he wouldn’t have confided a thing like this, surely? I glance at her uneasily.

‘You see what I mean?’ I interrupt her. ‘Even the language the artist is using, it’s…it’s disconcerting. Topsy, get off the table.’ I pull at next door’s huge cat who’s all set to have the time of her life with Christine’s half-unravelled jumpers.

‘Actually I’d say that what the artist has just described is precisely
why
this picture works so well. Because it shows both sides of the equation. Because it’s real. Maybe…’ Christine angles her head a bit to get a better look at the piece ‘…maybe reaching “things on the other side,” as you just put it, can be a hazardous occupation as well as a rewarding one, wouldn’t you agree? This picture shows that admirably. Perhaps that’s what impressed the judges.’

‘Both sides of the equation?’ We both stand and look at it quietly for a while but I can barely take it in. I’m thinking how there might also be another side to what those two are doing up on Bluebell Hill right now. I mean, they’re both young, attractive people, aren’t they? What if they’re taking so long because they’re actually – God forbid! – enjoying it?

Shit!

I’ve got to stop thinking like this or I’ll go mad. She’s such a flirt, my sister, that’s the trouble. What man could resist the little coquette when she gets going? I never really dwelled on it before, but all that instinctive batting of eyelashes she does and that throaty laugh of hers…We’re so used to it here, but it might turn a man on, if that were her intention.

And Richard…I can hardly bear to think his name, to imagine him with her – if I ask him later, will he swear that she was rubbish in bed, that it was a torture to lie with her and that he thought only of me; that he closed his eyes and filled his head with images of me as he caressed her, kissed her – oh, God, is he kissing her now?

I feel a shot of pain at the thought. There is no need for kissing. Nor…tenderness, nor love. But they are both tender, loving people. I know this. All the things that I dread most, the things that I have not let myself even know that I feared – it is only what would come most naturally to them both, for they are neither of them robots.

Dear God, what have I asked them both to do? I feel a horrible pain in my chest as I realise that there are so many things I have not allowed myself to dwell on. So many things I have cast into the waves of chance, and trusted in without consideration, and any moment now they’re all going to come back in on the tide.

Could I possibly make some excuse and get in the car and go up to them now? If it’s not too late, can I still call it all off? It’s so awkward that Chrissie’s here. I’d have to make some excuse
to go out and she’s so damn perceptive she’d know something was up…

‘Darling, everything
is
all right, isn’t it?’ Chrissie shocks me now by holding my gaze for that little bit longer than usual. I nod wordlessly but she continues slowly. ‘Hollie, it isn’t, is it?’ Oh, my lord, she knows, she must know…her voice is so dull, so guilty now. Have we both been skirting around each other avoiding saying the one thing that’s been on both our minds all day? ‘You look so unhappy. I wasn’t going to say anything but…’ She leans forward and touches me on the shoulder lightly. ‘Richard
told
me, darling.’

I catch my breath as she turns those sympathetic eyes on me now. ‘He did?’

‘I asked, forgive me. He’s been so miserable recently and you know he and I have always been close. It’s never been my intention to interfere in what goes on between you two, you know that.’

I watch her in silence as she struggles to get her reservations out. His mum knows! Oh, my word. What must she be thinking, what must she be feeling? I sense the colour creeping into my face, I feel so ashamed…

‘I wasn’t supposed to say anything. But how am I supposed to stand by and watch two of the people I love most in the world making themselves so unhappy?’

How long has she known? How
much
does she know, exactly? Does she know where they are, what they’re doing right now? Does she wonder, like me, why it’s taking so long?

I sit down at the table, feeling suddenly weak at the knees. If she knows, in one way it will be such a relief to share it with someone. Even if she doesn’t approve, even if she thinks we’ve made a terrible mistake.

I stare at her wordlessly as she scoops up a pile of jumpers and sweeps them into her knitting bag, unable to maintain eye contact with me any longer and for the first time I catch a glimpse of
something else; of how this must look to someone seeing it from the outside, of how obsessed I must seem to anyone looking in, to be prepared to go to such lengths.
Am
I obsessed? Anyone who ever achieves anything against all odds has to be, surely? Who dares wins and all that. But I know it isn’t quite as simple as all that.

‘I wish, Chrissie, that there had been some easier way around it.’ I bury my head deep in my hands and my voice comes out muffled and squashed. I wish I could have felt satisfied – my thoughts are ringing in my ears so loud she must surely hear them – I wish I’d been satisfied, happy even, to try for an adoption. It would have been better. It would have helped some other little human being. It would have given me the chance I so long for, to
mother
, but it wouldn’t have given me…It wouldn’t have given me the child of my own blood that I long for. Oh, I don’t know what the difference is, in truth, or why I feel it so keenly. All I know is that I never felt that bond of kin with Flo, who was so good to me, who did everything a mother could and should have done for me. I never felt for her what I felt for my own, itinerant and unavailable mother; that unseen bond that connects two people joined by blood. I never wanted to become another Auntie Flo. I wanted to become the person my own mother should have been to me. I’ve wanted to fill that void with the goodness of all the things Auntie Flo taught me, but for a child who would be with its
own
parent, not like I was. Oh, does it sound too crazy for anyone else to understand who hasn’t been through it?

‘Over the last couple of weeks I’ve felt so conflicted about it all, not sure if this was the right action to take or not,’ I get out at last, my eyes locked on Chrissie’s. ‘I’m so frightened that this thing is going to come between Richard and me,’ I add, my voice breaking. ‘And I love him so very much. That would be the last thing in the word that I want. Do you think,’ I watch the little tired lines around her eyes that are etched that much deeper than usual, ‘we’re doing the right thing?’

‘I think so.’

‘You do?’ I breathe out in an agony of relief that is mixed with regret, because now that this huge tangled web is done, created and irreversible, I am having serious doubts about it myself.

‘Oh, yes, I do. In fact, Hollie, I encouraged him,’ she says softly.

‘I am so sorry, Scarlett.’

He lies there naked alongside me, propped up on his elbows at first, his breath coming hard and short. Rich looks so remorseful that for one horrible moment I think he’s about to say he can’t go through with it. Poor, poor Richard. He’s riddled with guilt and also at this moment – I know because I saw him before he got in beside me – inflamed with desire.

‘Don’t be sorry.’ When I lean in to kiss him softly on the shoulder I can feel him ever so slightly pull back, so I stop. I’m going to have to let him take the lead in this. I lay my head down on the pillow beside him instead and just look at him.

God, he is beautiful. And I have wanted him so much for so long that it hurts to even be here in this position, unable to express my true feelings, having to pretend that it’s all an altruistic act on my part when I know full well it is not. I know that by letting him take me now, I betray not only my sister’s trust – and that is bad enough – but I betray his trust too. A sob catches in my throat at that thought. I do not want to betray him. I see his eyes widen in compassion at my distress, his tender and protective instincts drawing him to me and I know that he mistakes my tears for a sign of reluctance. He thinks I’m crying because of the sacrifice I’m about to make. He doesn’t know it’s because of the frustration I feel, because I cannot be honest with him.

‘Oh, Rich.’ I put up my hand to wipe away my tears and I can feel all his tension and his hesitation melt away in an instant.

‘I’m the one who should be apologising.’ If only you knew, I think. I haven’t been completely honest with you. It’s on the tip of my tongue to say it.
I can’t sleep with you because I’m in love with you. And I don’t need to sleep with you to get pregnant because I’m already expecting your baby
.

‘There’s something I need to say to you. I just don’t know…how to say it.’ Without making you hate me forever, that is. ‘I don’t want you to hate me,’ I whisper.

‘Lettie, that’s…’ He moves in a little closer to me, his face tender, compassionate. ‘Don’t you know that’s impossible? Don’t you know that will never happen, no matter what?’

‘Richard, the thing is…’I sniff, but he stops me.

‘I already know what you’re going to say.’

I catch my breath. ‘You do?’

‘It’s pretty obvious and I don’t blame you.’

‘Really?’

‘You’re about to say that you feel…strange and unnatural doing this. That you’re only doing it for Hollie and I know that. I respect that.’