The Sister Swap. Susan Napier

Brownie points for delivering it a day early although his expression wasn’t encouraging.

      She gave him a coolly restrained smile that she hoped was unthreatening and lifted the covered plastic con- tainer in one hand, offering his tie with the other. She had no intention of telling him that she had carefully washed and pressed it herself in clear defiance of its bossy care-tag. At the moment a dry-cleaning bill was effectively as far beyond her budget as a new silk tie would have been, so she’d figured she had nothing to lose.

      He reached for the tie but made no attempt to accept the pasta sauce, and she took advantage of his sudden need to anchor his slipping towel and ducked under his arm to saunter into his flat.

      ‘Come in, why don’t you?’ he murmured ironically, turning to follow her.

      ‘Thanks, I will…just for a moment,’ she said cheerfully, as if he had uttered a gushing welcome and she was merely being polite.

      The physical layout of his loft, she discovered to her intense interest, was virtually a mirror-image of her own, but there any resemblance ended. Here lived sinful luxury instead of artful practicality.

      There was oatmeal carpet underfoot, so thick and soft that her sandalled feet sank down into it, and the walls were colour-washed a pale terracotta, dappled with either sponge or brush to produce a stippled effect that provided an interesting background for the gilt-framed paintings which lined the walls. Floor-to-ceiling wooden bookcases surrounded the familiar high, arched windows at one end and at the other was a huge, ornately goldframed mirror that took up almost the whole of the wall that backed on to her flat, effectively doubling the apparent length of the room, the reflection of the sky making it seem lighter and airier even now, with rain pouring down outside and dusk approaching. The dancer in Anne coveted that mirror immediately, while the lazy hedonist in her lusted after the butter-soft apricot leather of the squatly over-sized couch and chairs.

      His kitchen was larger than hers, cleverly designed to encompass the leading edge of culinary technology, and as she put the plastic tub down on the marble bench Anne had the uneasy feeling that her economical but tasty recipe for pasta sauce might be somewhat out of its element. Rather as she was in her swirling home-made skirt and loose peasant blouse. Then her glance fell on the reason for her generosity and damped down her qualms.

      ‘All you have to do is heat this for…’ As she turned back from her spying mission she discovered that her instructions were being delivered to empty air. Hunter Lewis had disappeared with the same uncanny quietness with which he was prone to appear. She looked at the telephone on the kitchen wall and wondered if she dared take advantage of his absence, but decided that it would be unwise to antagonise him further than she already had. It was a major achievement just to have got inside his flat.

      She moved to take a closer look at some of his paintings. Originals, of course—prints were probably beneath his dignity, she thought wryly—but his selection was an eclectic mix which suggested that they were chosen with the heart and eye rather than the dictates of an investment portfolio.

      ‘Don’t you like it?’

      She jumped as Hunter materialised in the doorway beside the painting which she was studying with a frown. His bedroom, she surmised, and realised with a small hitch of her breathing that his cotton crew-necked shirt and unbleached linen trousers didn’t quite blot out the mental image of him in a towel.

      She looked at the painting again. ‘No,’ she said bluntly, before she remembered that she was supposed to be buttering him up and began hurriedly back-tracking. ‘Th-that is, I don’t really know much about art so I really can’t—’

      ‘I didn’t ask for artistic criticism. I asked whether you liked it.’

      ‘Does it matter?’ she hedged, wondering belatedly whether he might have painted it himself. She tried to squint at the signature without being too obvious.

      ‘No, it isn’t mine. I have no skill with a paintbrush whatsoever. So you’re not going to be insulting my talent by telling me you don’t like my taste in art…nor, I hope, my intelligence with polite lies,’ he added silkily as she nibbled at her lower lip.

      ‘All right, I loathe it,’ she was neatly trapped into admitting sullenly. ‘I can’t make head or tail of it and I don’t like the colours. Satisfied?’ Her eyebrows almost flew off her face as she regarded him haughtily.

      ‘Completely. Actually, it was painted by my mother.’

      Anne closed her eyes. When she opened them again gold flecks were smouldering in the blue irises at the discovery that he was laughing at her. ‘My commiserations to your father,’ she said insultingly.

      ‘My parents were divorced when I was still at primary school. My father’s dead now, but he shared your dislike of my mother’s art.’

      Anne gave up and allowed the vivid blush of remorse that had been lurking under her temper to swallow her up.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled. Why did her good intentions towards this man always go up in smoke? ‘I’m sure your mother is a very good artist—’

      ‘The international art world seems to think so,’ Hunter interrupted blandly. ‘She’s very well-known. In fact, I had to pay several thousand dollars for that painting that you find so unlikeable.’

      Anne was instantly outraged on his behalf. ‘She made you pay for one of her paintings? Her own son?’

      ‘Only indirectly. I bought it retail from a gallery. My mother often gives me a painting for my birthday or for Christmas. But when I asked for this particular one she refused—sold it outright to the gallery instead…’

      ‘Why?’

      Anne knew all about artistic temperament. It was prone to flights of illogic that could verge on the ridiculous —which she and Ivan could thank for their current sojourn in the city. In Katlin’s view the artistic ends justified the means. It was left to Anne to endure the pangs of conscience suffered by less talented mortals.

      She had smothered her deepest doubts about what they were doing by insisting on an absolute minimum of outright lying, enrolling at the university under her own name and simply saying, ‘Call me Anne,’ whenever someone addressed her as Katlin. It usually worked—they accepted the correction politely, without question… except for this man, of course.

      But it was tough. Not least because she still worried about whether she was doing the right thing for Katlin and Ivan in the long term.

      Anne herself could never envisage a situation where she would put her career ahead of the needs of her own baby, but neither could she condemn Katlin for being different. Her pregnancy had been a very difficult one and mother and child had almost died during Ivan’s premature birth.

      Afterwards, when Katlin had taken the baby back to the tiny, isolated cabin on the coast that she called home, she had found to her horror that the words that had once flowed so easily from her pen had completely dried up. With another’s needs taking precedence over her own she could no longer achieve the necessary physical and mental peace that she required for her writing. She had stubbornly resisted Anne’s pleas to contact the baby’s father.

      Anne, who had stayed with her sister to help her through the first month of solo parenthood, had been alarmed on later visits by her sister’s deepening list-lessness. She had been thrilled when the recipient of this year’s Markham Grant had been finally announced, thinking that it might be just what Katlin needed to bounce her out of her slough of despond.

      It had, but not in the way that Anne had fondly en-visaged. She had been a great deal less thrilled with her sister’s brilliant solution to the problem of her ongoing writer’s block but, after discreetly consulting Katlin’s doctor about his concerns for his patient’s mental and physical health, she had reluctantly allowed herself to be persuaded.

      Hunter was regarding her morose expression thoughtfully. ‘My mother doesn’t like this painting either. She regards it as a depressing aberration in her abstract style.’

      Anne