by Susan Napier
Duncan was already out of the car and halfway across the footpath. ‘Your parents are into alternative lifestyles?’ He leaned up to the window, peering intently into the chaotic interior, his breath misting the glass. ‘Groovy!’
Wild horses wouldn’t have stopped him venturing inside to explore the cluttered shelves and stampeding elephants wouldn’t have chased him out when Kalera’s parents swarmed out from the back room uttering cries of surprised welcome, her mother tall and tanned, her long hair bouncing down her back in a single fat braid and her father stocky and thickly bearded, with a grey-streaked ponytail almost as long as his wife’s.
‘Sunny! I should have known you’d turn up today—my stars predicted that someone closely related to me would make a special journey on my behalf!’ Silver crowed, her long crinkle-cotton dress fluttering as she flung her thin arms out to greet her daughter with a breath-shattering squeeze, her rows of jangling bangles snagging on the silky knit of Kalera’s top.
‘I only live a couple of kilometres away—I’d hardly classify it as a journey,’ she said drily, when her mother allowed her to surface for air. ‘Hello, Kris.’ She submitted to her father’s hairy hug, trying to avoid the sight of Duncan’s knowing grin as her bluff was exposed.
‘Oh, phooey! You’re always so literal…astrology is about the bigger picture! Tell her what I said, Kris, when I read it last night—I said, I wonder if that means Sunny might turn up tomorrow?’
‘That’s what she said,’ Kris Donovan agreed amiably. Kalera felt her stomach tighten at the slightly unfocussed look in his eyes. Her parents’ attitude to soft drugs was another reason that she had separated her life from theirs and created her own set of guiding principles. She loved them but didn’t like some of the choices they had made in life. She hoped Kris hadn’t left a joint smoking out in the back room. The way her luck was running lately they would be raided and she and Duncan would end up under arrest!
‘Sonny?’ said Duncan out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Do they think their daughter is a son?’
Her mother overheard and laughed. ‘That’s her name—Sunshine Kalera Donovan…because she was born outside on the grass, a real natural childbirth—at the commune we were living in at the time…’ She chattered on with her usual lack of circumspection about Kalera’s marvellous sunlit childhood, unfettered by the rules of society or the tyranny of government, or the brainwashing of state education. ‘It was only when she decided she had to go to high school that she refused to answer to Sunny and made everyone call her by the middle name that Kris’s mother insisted she have. It’s a pity, isn’t it, because I think Sunshine suits her—don’t you?’
They both looked at Kalera, whose mouth was drawn into a little prune of annoyance, and Duncan’s voice was silky with amusement as he said, ‘Actually, I think moonlight suits her even better…’
Silver laughed again, her blue eyes flirting in approval at his wit. ‘You’re Duncan, the computer man, aren’t you? Kris and I spoke to you at Harry’s funeral. Did you come with Sunny, or are you interested in crystal healing?’
‘I did come with Kalera,’ he said, so gravely that only she was aware of the wicked double entendre indicated by the tell-tale flick of muscle at the corner of his mouth. ‘But I wouldn’t mind finding out a bit about the way your crystals are supposed to work.’
‘You mean how they do work,’ scolded Silver, but Duncan couldn’t have said anything better calculated to open the floodgates and soon he and the two Donovans were deep in a discussion of belief versus science, leaving a disgruntled Kalera to serve the customers. All too soon the conversation strayed from psychic healing, astral projection and aura cleansing to more personal matters and she heard Kris being shamelessly pumped for more reminiscences of commune life involving Kalera.
‘We get the odd hankering to go back to the old life, don’t we, love?’ she heard her father say. ‘This is the longest time we’ve stayed in one place since Sun—I mean Kalera—was born. But we’re only on a short lease with the shop so we can just pick up and go pretty well whenever we want—maybe load all this stuff into a gypsy caravan and travel the fairs for a few years…’
‘What a great idea!’
Kalera imagined Stephen’s reaction to seeing his in-laws drive up to his front door for a visit in a rattletrap gypsy caravan, and shuddered. He had been polite but cool to her parents on the few occasions they had met, and she knew that he was relieved that her relationship with them wasn’t closer. Duncan, on the other hand, was proving a kindred spirit…so much so that she was aghast to hear Silver proposing to shut up shop so that they could all go to the vegetarian restaurant next door for lunch.
An hour later she sat toying with her sprout salad, listening to her mother tell her what a wonderfully open-minded man she worked for—the man in question wolfing down his aubergine casserole and trying his best not to look smug.
And failing.
‘He’s so receptive to new ideas, I can see that working for him must be intensely stimulating to the creative imagination,’ Silver expounded over her plate of stir-fried tofu. ‘It’s such a pity that you’re not going to stay on there, Sunny…’ She heaved a disappointed sigh, and Kalera stopped picking at her salad to regard her in disbelief.
‘When I first started there you told me working at Labyrinth would stifle my “small inner voice” and the radiation from all those computers would stunt my aura!’ she reminded her bluntly.
Silver was unembarrassable. ‘Yes, well, that was before I got to know Duncan better.’ She patted his arm fondly with her heavily be-ringed fingers.
‘You only met him an hour ago,’ Kalera pointed out, nettled at the ease with which he had insinuated himself.
‘Yes, but I could see right away that he had a very healthy aura,’ said Silver blithely. ‘He’s definitely good karma, Sunny…and so very broad-minded about things.’ Her crowning compliment! ‘Much better for you than that stuffy Stephen. I remember when you brought him here you were brittle as a stick the whole time in case he took offence at something we said, but look at you now—happy to kick back and just go with the flow…’
That was because she knew the flow was actually an unstoppable torrent, thought Kalera, although it was true she didn’t have to worry about Duncan taking offence at her parents’ outlandish eccentricities—he was in his perfect element!
She noticed that he had stopped eating, his ears pricking up at the sound of Stephen’s name, and a little ‘alert’ sign switched on in her brain.
‘Silver…’ she warned.
‘Oh, I know, you don’t want us to hassle you about it.’ Silver flapped her hands. ‘It’s your life, you live it—but really I can’t help thinking that the man is impossibly dull. At least Harry, for all he was a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, had a sense of humour and was good for a few laughs. I can’t see you having much fun with Stephen—you’re both so tiresomely serious. I suppose he is sexy in a chilly kind of way, but I can’t imagine I’d find him very thrilling in bed—he’s far too uptight. Or is great sex the big attraction?’
Kalera flushed, clinging to her temper. ‘Silver, I’m going to marry him—’
‘You ought to move in with him for a while first…see if you still want to stay when the sex stops being such a kick—’
‘Stephen can’t do that; he has Michael to consider.’
‘That’s why you should move in. At least then you might get a chance to meet the kid! And anyway, what’s wrong with him knowing that you’re having sex with his father? Kids accept sex as an intrinsic part of life if you treat it as natural and normal and not some dirty secret that should be hidden. You saw Kris and I with lots of different sex partners when you were young and it never bothered you!’
With an effort Kalera managed not to flinch. Her mother really had no idea of just how severely bothered her daughter had been by that casual exhibitionism, or how pressured she had felt to conform when approached for casual sex by other commune members, even when
she was still below the age of legal consent.
‘You’re engaged to Stephen and he still hasn’t introduced you to Michael?’ Duncan interjected. ‘What’s he planning to do—wait until you’re married and spring you on the boy as his stepmother?’
‘No, of course not,’ snapped Kalera, who wasn’t so certain any more that Stephen didn’t intend to do exactly that. But that didn’t make him as insensitive as Duncan was implying. ‘Terri’s making things difficult right now by refusing to allow unaccompanied visits, and Stephen doesn’t want to upset Michael by turning him into a tug-of-love child—’
‘Terri’s making it difficult?’
His emphasis stung and her eyes warred with his. Of course, he would take his lover’s side, she thought nastily.
Fortunately, her father was already meandering off on another conversational track which diverted the brewing conflict, but Kalera was still brooding over Duncan’s sneering remark when they left a short time later. She had tried to object when he had chided that she needn’t bother her parents for a lift home, but after insisting on paying for their meal—an offer Silver and Kris had accepted with embarrassing alacrity—Duncan was in a position of unassailable strength.
‘We mightn’t have been able to get you all the way home, anyway,’ laughed Kris, putting the seal on his daughter’s fate. ‘The VW’s been conking out on us quite a bit, lately.’
‘Interesting people,’ said Duncan as they left the reopened shop.
‘So…you were brought up outside the mainstream of society by a couple of radical free-thinkers,’ he mused when she didn’t respond.
‘What’s wrong with that?’ she snapped, having vowed that she wasn’t going to say another word to him. She might find her background embarrassing, but she wasn’t ashamed of it.
‘Nothing; it just explains some things,’ he said, unlocking her door and handing her into the car before swinging in behind the wheel. ‘Do you like them—as people, I mean?’
At the last moment Kalera couldn’t resist being honest. ‘Most of the time, yes. But their love was so freely shared around that I never felt special, or intimately connected with them, and they took so little responsibility for me that I doubt they knew I was around a lot of the time. I cope best if I try to think of them just as a screwball couple I know.’
‘Difficult?’
‘Impossible,’ she sighed. ‘But, listening to Kris, I don’t think they’ll be here much longer. As usual they’ll get bored with what they’re doing and take off to find some new fad or vessel of enlightenment, and I won’t hear from them for months—or years.’
‘Well, I liked your screwball friends,’ Duncan teased, pulling up at a red light. ‘And they seemed to like me too. I think we’re working on a majority opinion, here: your parents like me, the people who work for me like me—you like me! Stephen seems to be the only dissenter…’
Her head jerked around. ‘I wonder if your affair with his wife has anything to do with that?’ she pondered sarcastically.
The harsh sunlight streamed in through the windscreen, causing his eyes to narrow as he stared straight ahead. ‘He doesn’t hate my guts because I had an affair with his wife. He hates my guts because he thinks I did.’
It took a moment for her to realise what the quiet words implied. Cars roared across the intersection in front of them, adding to the thunder in her head.
‘Are you saying you never had an affair with Terri?’ she demanded hoarsely, willing him to look at her and yet afraid of what she would see when he did.
His fingers flexed and curled back around the compact steering wheel, his profile taking on a hawkish intensity.
‘Oh, yes, we had an affair,’ he admitted with a deep-throated passion that was like a sharp punch over the heart. ‘When we were both young, single and free we were crazy about each other for a short while. But that was over before she got engaged to Stephen. I never touched her after that. She was in love with Stephen and as far as I was concerned she was my friend’s wife. My relationship with Terri was just that—pure friendship—and I felt very sorry for her when the marriage started to turn sour because of Stephen’s suffocating jealousies…’
But sympathy could sometimes easily be mistaken for something else, Kalera thought, not only by Stephen, but Terri, too—if not before, then perhaps in the vulnerable aftermath of the break-up of the marriage…
‘But surely he must have had some reason to feel jealous in the first place…’
Duncan’s head turned at last, his expression a volatile mixture of bitterness, anger, resignation and contempt. ‘Yes, he had a reason—his own obsession! He always did have a controlling personality but it pushed him to want absolute control in his marriage. He was always demanding to know where Terri had been, expecting her to account for every moment of time she spent away from him, objecting to anything that took her attention away from him—job, friends—both male and female—shopping, family, hobbies…’
Kalera swallowed. This was all beginning to sound creepily familiar!
Duncan’s eyes went back to the road.
‘And when he couldn’t verify any of his ridiculous suspicions and Terri turned to me for advice and help he latched onto me as the most enviable and convenient target for his mistrust. That way he didn’t have to admit he was in the wrong,’ he said grimly, sliding the car into gear and accelerating away the instant the light went green, driving them both back into their seats. He drove with a controlled aggression the rest of the way through the suburbs, painting a vivid word-picture of a man caught up in a spiral of self-deceit.
‘He destroyed a friendship and a marriage for the sake of a delusion. Towards the end Terri even caught him reading her diary and opening her letters, following her in his car, and coming home at odd times of the day to try and catch us out.
‘She left him because she couldn’t cope, and he blamed me for that, too. Anyone but himself and his own self-destructive urges. Terri told him that she still loved him but she wouldn’t go back to him until he agreed to get professional help. Instead he chose to spite them both by getting a divorce, but he still can’t let her go—even now, with you in his life…He won’t admit either his own culpability, or the fact that he still loves her…’
He had stopped the car and in a blur of humiliation Kalera managed to comprehend that she was home. Soon she would be safe from this relentless emotional onslaught. She fumbled her seat belt undone, scrabbling for the door handle with a trembling hand, and Duncan’s arm shot across to detain her, trapping her against the seat-back.
‘Open your eyes, Kalera,’ he urged fiercely. ‘He’s sick—and instead of getting treatment for his illness he’s trying to substitute one obsession for another. It’s started already—he’s training you to accept his intrusion into every facet of your life—’
His arm was like an iron band across her breasts, the small cockpit of the car chokingly oppressive as Kalera struggled to gather her shattered thoughts. ‘He has a right to intrude; he’s going to be my husband.’
Duncan made a rough sound in his throat. ‘That’s the way he wants you to think. I know you need security and that’s probably why you’re marrying him, but what he’s got in mind is a maximum security prison. And with Steve there’s no parole for good behaviour!’
‘So this is just a friendly warning, right?’ Kalera cried, desperate to escape and lick her wounds in private. ‘You have no axe to grind, no desire to get revenge for him publicly branding you an adulterer when you’re actually as innocent as a newborn babe?’
In her anxiety to get away she knew she had made it sound as if she didn’t believe him. But she did—at least she thought the core of what he said might be true but that, as usual, he was wildly exaggerating the details to give them the most emotional impact. Stephen was an extremely intelligent man and ran a complex and highly successful business. He might have some emotional problems, but Duncan was making him sound psychotic.
Duncan cursed with vicious fluency
. ‘I’m breaking a promise to tell you this—I’m trying to stop you making a fool of yourself.’
He must mean a promise to Terri, thought Kalera with a searing bolt of jealousy that gave her an inkling of what Stephen might have felt.
‘Thanks, but I prefer to make my judgments based on first-hand information rather than second-hand opinion,’ she said, finally succeeding in releasing the door-catch and kicking open the door with a fine disregard for several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of high-performance vehicle. She tugged at his arm and after a moment of resistance he let her go, leaning across the seat as she scrambled out to deliver his parting shot.
‘In that case why don’t you ask him first-hand the real reason he doesn’t want you to meet Michael? It’s not because Terri won’t let him, but because his twisted mind has persuaded him that Michael isn’t his son, but mine. And unless somebody makes him believe otherwise he’s going to end up freezing that little boy right out of his life!’
CHAPTER NINE
KALERA’S hand smoothed nervously down over the stiff folds of her red silk taffeta dress, her eyes skimming over the glittering throng who had responded to Stephen’s gilt-edged invitations, most of whom she’d never seen before and doubted she’d recognise again. They crammed the marble-pillared ballroom and milled around on the dance-floor to the live orchestra, spilling out of the open doors onto the wide terraces where flaming torches lit the sumptuous buffet.
Kalera thought she had been prepared for the strain of this formal engagement party but experience was proving her wrong, not least because of the insidious doubts that had crept into her mind to divide and multiply over the past week, filling her with jittery uncertainty about the future.
But she was proud of the fact that despite Duncan’s continuing best efforts to panic her into urgency she had not rushed into making any rash decisions. After last Saturday’s confrontation she had not flown straight to Stephen with a string of angry and unsubstantiated accusations, which was obviously what Duncan had hoped she would do. She had not dramatically called off the engagement a mere week before the lavish party that Stephen had devoted so much time and energy to organising. Whatever Stephen had done in the past, Kalera did not believe he deserved to be treated so shabbily.
