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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…’
