An Unsuitable Wife

by Lindsay Armstrong

  ‘Who is it? I don’t think I recognise her; it doesn’t look like Karen, does it?’

  Mike said nothing for more than a minute during which he also turned around and examined what he could see of the sky behind Bustard Head and all around; and he had never looked more Red Indian and totally, impassively withdrawn as he did it, Sidonie thought and caught her breath. Then he said, ‘It’s his sister.’

  Sidonie gasped then followed the track his gaze had taken around the sky. ‘Mike,’ she said involuntarily, ‘we can’t go out in this. It’s coming really fast——’

  ‘Of course we can’t; I wasn’t going to suggest it,’ he said drily.

  But you thought it for a moment, Sidonie said to herself. Will it be that painful to see Tim Molloy’s sister again? she also wondered with a strange, sick feeling. ‘He might not want to have anything to do with you…with us,’ she said, pressing her palms together urgently.

  ‘Is that why he’s waving at us like a threshing machine?’ Mike suggested with irony.

  ‘But this could be very awkward,’ she said slowly. Tim was indeed waving enthusiastically although the girl behind him had so far not made any gesture.

  ‘No, it won’t,’ Mike said, bringing the throttle back to neutral as he positioned Morning Mist behind Moonshine, and pressing a button so that the anchor fell into the water with a splash and the chain rattled out after it. ‘Merely inescapable if I know my friend Tim. He’s quite unsquashable. Anyway, Sid,’ he said, turning to look directly into her eyes, ‘it was all over years ago whatever Tim may have intimated to you to the contrary. Helen is married now and I’m not manfully concealing a broken heart so don’t you start getting yourself into a tangle …’

  But Helen Cook née Molloy was no longer married, except technically, as it turned out, and she was one of the most seriously beautiful women Sidonie had ever seen.

  Tall and lithe, she had a graceful figure, glorious long hair the colour Titian would have sold his soul for, beautiful hazel eyes beneath strongly marked brows, a wide, lovely but hauntingly sad mouth and quietly diffident air that made you want to make her smile …

  It was also obvious after only a few minutes in her company that she couldn’t have been less like Karen if she tried. Why? Sidonie found herself wondering throughout that confused evening. She’s not only lovely but so nice, why didn’t they make it, her and Mike? She would be perfect for him …

  But before she got to that stage she had to contend with Tim, who had his dinghy in the water almost as soon as they’d anchored and came zooming over.

  ‘Great to see you folks!’ he called as he heaved his teddy-bear bulk up the back ladder. ‘Wondered if we might catch up with you somewhere!’

  Sidonie thought Mike sighed before he said gently, ‘Good to see you too, mate. I take it you bear me no hard feelings?’

  ‘Well, the less said about that the better, but she was a right bitch so, although it’s hard to concede you actually did me a good turn…’ he smiled ruefully ‘…in point of fact you did. And how’s my little friend Sid?’ he added playfully and chucked her under the chin.

  ‘Fine, Tim!’

  ‘You look it too. Guess what?’ He turned to Mike ingenuously. ‘I’ve got Helen with me. Flew her up to Hamilton after I had to fly Karen almost forcibly the other way; she didn’t seem to see why we shouldn’t go on as before, would you believe? But enough of her—Helen,’ he lowered his voice dramatically, ‘has separated from Brian so I thought she could do with a little break.’

  ‘Has she, now?’ Mike said slowly. ‘Tim——’

  ‘Naturally she’d like to say hello—why don’t you two come over for dinner?’

  ‘I’ve got a better idea; why don’t you and Helen join us?’

  ‘Mike,’ Sidonie said nervously some time after Tim had left, promising to be back within the hour, ‘I don’t think this is a very good idea.’ It had been in her mind to say it as soon as Tim had left but she’d found herself curiously tongue-tied.

  ‘Neither do I.’ He was watching her batter some fish as he’d taught her. They’d both showered and changed and in clean shorts and a fresh white T-shirt moulded to the muscles of his broad shoulders and with his hair tidy and damp he took her breath away for a moment as she lifted her head to look at him anxiously. ‘However,’ he went on, ‘we might as well get it over and done with. Tim won’t leave us in peace until we do and, as you may have noticed, Pancake Creek is a hard place to dodge your friends. I also feel——’ he moved his shoulders irritably ‘—as if I owe him one.’

  ‘Well, I can understand that,’ she said with a faintly tart edge that caused him to suppress a slight smile, ‘but, apart from anything else, he doesn’t know.’

  ‘Know what?’ he queried and removed a smudge of flour from the tip of her nose with his finger.

  ‘About us,’ she said hollowly.

  ‘Then he soon will.’

  Sidonie placed the last battered fillet of fish on the plate and turned away to rinse her hands. ‘I don’t think I want him to, though, Mike,’ she said carefully. ‘Which is why it might have been easier to go to their boat.’

  He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face him so that he could look narrowly into her eyes. ‘Why don’t you want him to know?’

  She couldn’t help the tinge of pink that came to her cheeks or the tremor that ran through her body but she tried to marshal her thoughts against that narrowed, rather rapier-like blue gaze of his. ‘For two reasons,’ she said quietly at last. ‘I’d rather what’s between you and me stayed that way. It is something that’s just between us, isn’t it?’ She swallowed.

  He said after a long pause, ‘Yes, put like that but——’

  ‘No, Mike, listen to me,’ she pleaded although a certain stubborn light had entered her grey eyes. ‘That’s the way I want it to stay. I don’t want anyone else to—’ her throat worked as she tried to express herself honestly yet in a way that staked no claims ‘—to trample through it even kind-heartedly as Tim might, although then again he might not. And that’s my second reason—it could complicate things…’ She broke off and looked up at him helplessly.

  ‘As a matter of fact, Sidonie,’ he said sombrely and moved his hands on her shoulders, ‘it could uncomplicate things, if Tim still has hopes regarding Helen.’

  ‘And if Helen still has hopes?’ she whispered, her gaze steady but shadowed. ‘No, Mike—’ she shook her head and closed her eyes briefly ‘—don’t use me to do that. Because that would flaw what has been something nearly perfect for me.’

  His hands suddenly tightened on her until she winced and he said roughly, ‘Sid, what do you think I am? I—’

  But a dinghy bumped against the stern and Tim called, ‘Ahoy there!’ boisterously, as well as knocking ringingly against the planking of the hull. ‘Anybody home?’

  ‘Mike?’ Sidonie said desperately. ‘Please.’

  ‘What about the evidence of it?’ he said tersely and gestured towards the aft cabin. ‘She’s going to want to look around.’

  ‘I’ve hidden it all.’

  He stared down at her, his mouth set in a suddenly hard line, then he shrugged.

  * * *

  ‘It’s lovely, Mike,’ Helen said softly. She ran her fingers over the dining-table. ‘Although I still have a soft spot for your first boat even though we had to rough it compared to this.’

  And Sidonie knew suddenly, with a further sick feeling, that Helen had done this trip with Mike once. But that was the only reference the other girl made to things that had once been; otherwise she was the perfect guest, quietly intelligent, helpful and happy to let her brother do a lot of the talking. Yet, once you knew these two had loved each other, Sidonie thought with despair, you couldn’t imagine it being any other way.

  Not that Mike showed anything other than that Helen was a friend he appreciated. There was no stiffness in his manner, although she did see his eyes linger once on the faint pale band of skin where Helen’s w
edding-ring had obviously recently reposed. But for both of them, from what they said and the way they acted, it might simply have been a case of two friends meeting each other again after some time—might have been unless you knew. And of course Tim knew; it wasn’t hard to see the way he watched them despite his antics-his antics which Sidonie found herself drawn into so as not to appear as what she was—a live-in lover aboard Morning Mist—with disastrous consequences.

  ‘Now little Sid here,’ Tim said, putting his arm about her shoulders after they’d finished the fish, ‘is the kind of crewperson most men dream about. She can strip a diesel motor, Mike tells me, pop up a sail, read a GPS and radar as good as any man, besides being a very straight kind of girl—Karen shocked her to the core.’

  Sidonie blushed and squirmed inwardly. Which caused Tim to laugh and say, ‘Don’t look like that; you showed more judgement than the rest of us. Wouldn’t you say, Mike?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mike agreed, but drily.

  ‘But tell me more,’ Helen said with genuine interest. ‘Where did you learn about diesels?’

  ‘It was Sid’s greatest ambition to work with motor-bikes once,’ Mike said with a faint smile. ‘She’s an unusual girl.’

  ‘I’m a bit of a freak actually,’ Sidonie heard herself confiding. ‘There are some things I’m terribly bad at——’

  ‘She means she can’t swim and she can’t cook, otherwise she’s quite normal,’ Mike put in.

  ‘But I’m learning, aren’t I?’ Sidonie replied with a touch of genuine reproach.

  ‘Indeed you are,’ he said gravely.

  ‘And Mike actually found her on the dock at Airlie Beach!’ Tim said jovially in what Sidonie realised was a clumsy attempt to establish her correct status on Morning Mist.

  ‘Just like a waif and a stray,’ she said brightly herself and immediately flinched inwardly but it was as if she were on a rollercoaster she couldn’t get off.

  ‘Here today, gone tomorrow, although it wasn’t actually the dock, it was the main street. Mike, would you like me to clear the table and get the dessert?’

  His eyes lingered on her enigmatically. ‘No, you stay put, I’ll do it,’ he murmured. -

  ‘You don’t look like a waif or a stray,’ Helen said slowly, her beautiful hazel eyes showing concern, and she grimaced immediately. ‘Forgive me, that sounds awful but——’

  ‘I’m not really,’ Sidonie said.

  And Mike said over his shoulder at the same time, ‘She isn’t. She’s also a Bachelor of Science and Arts and has been a wildly successful teacher—depending on whose point of view you take.’

  ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ Helen said with just a hint of that heartbreakingly lovely smile. ‘I’d love to hear more, Sid.’

  Sidonie took a deep breath. ‘Well, I went up to Airlie Beach to take up a teaching post as it happens, but in fact it didn’t happen, to cut a long story short, and when…Mike was looking for crew I thought that instead of going straight back to Melbourne this would be like a holiday. That’s all there really is to tell. I——,

  But Tim leapt into the breach. ‘And she’s been like a favourite kid sister to us ever since! Here, let me top up the wine.’

  Oh, Tim, Sidonie couldn’t help herself thinking with a shaft of pain, have you forgotten that I traded confidences with you one night? I suppose it seemed so out of the question…And irrelevant, anyway, if these two are made for each other.

  She struggled through another hour before the Molloys took their leave and was simply standing in the middle of the cabin when Mike came back from seeing them off.

  ‘Sid?’

  She lifted her shadowed, weary face to him. ‘Yes, Mike?’

  ‘Don’t you honestly think that was all a little pointless?’ He made no attempt to touch her.

  She lifted her shoulders anguishedly. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell you,’ he said deliberately. ‘There’s no chance of Helen and me getting together again, because you can’t change the basic things about yourself—’

  ‘You don’t know that, Mike,’ she broke in huskily. ‘She may have changed and come to understand…better. She doesn’t look or sound like a…I don’t know, the kind of person who couldn’t understand you. If you must know,’ she said barely audibly, ‘you and she look as if you might have been made for each other.’

  ‘Then looks can be deceiving,’ he said harshly. ‘Nor are you in any position to be an expert on the subject, so would you do me a favour and stop theorising as well as tormenting yourself unnecessarily? There’s no need.’

  ‘Unnecessarily?’ she whispered, and found that her throat hurt with the effort to speak and her head hurt with the effort to think; but she knew she must, because the metaphorical train seemed to be gathering speed within her and rushing her to either of two unacceptable destinations: one where she would break her promise and break down and tell him that without him she would be tormented for the rest of her life; or the other—and her vague fears suddenly crystalised in her mind—where she would hear him suggest some compromise for them, some arrangement, although she couldn’t think what, but mainly because he couldn’t bring himself to abandon her like some stray…Why, oh, why did I use those stupid words‘? It’s what’s been worrying me since Rosslyn Bay

  ‘All right,’ she said suddenly and tried to smile.

  ‘No more—nonsense. Could we go to bed, please? Unless—you’d rather not.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She bit her lip. ‘I meant-rather not go to bed with me—oh, hell,’ she said hopelessly, and added with bleak honesty, ‘If you must know it’s a little difficult to imagine you wanting to sleep with me—after her. She was so…elegant as well as everything else, someone who could grace the pages of Vogue, I’m sure,’ she added with a prickle of sudden defiance.

  He studied her in silence for a long moment. Then he picked up her hand and kissed her knuckles. ‘Let me show you, then,’ he murmured.

  But he didn’t make love to her; he held her instead and soothed her to sleep, stroking her hair as he often did. And even if she was glad, because nothing else would have seemed right to her overburdened spirit, she was also hauntingly sad.

  She woke with her head on his shoulder, could hear the gentle slap of water against the hull and curled in even closer to him before she remembered and attempted to sit up abruptly.

  ‘Don’t.’ He pulled her back.

  ‘Mike—’

  ‘Don’t start, Sid,’ he warned softly. ‘Let’s give ourselves a break.’

  For once, she remained uncharacteristically silent. Until he said wryly, his hands roaming her warm, soft body gently, ‘What are you thinking, sweet Sid?’

  She grimaced, for in truth she had a jumble of thoughts going through her mind—that men really were incredible sometimes being one. That despite this she wasn’t going to be able to resist him, that somehow or other she had to get her act together…

  She said, ‘Sometimes when you call me that you make me feel like sweet pea.’

  He laughed quietly and pushed his hair out of his eyes then rubbed the blue shadows on his jaw. ‘You remind me of a flower. I used to think it was a wild rose, thorny but worth the prickles. I can translate to a sweet pea easily, though. Fragrant—’ he sniffed the silken hollows of her throat and lower ‘—delicate, a lovely blossom on a slender stem—yes, not hard at all.’

  ‘I…really?’ She couldn’t help herself.

  ‘Really and truly,’ he vowed and moved aside the covers.

  ‘Mike—’

  ‘No, let me look at you, Sid.’ And he drew his hand down her body. ‘I sometimes think of that outfit you wore when we first met,’ he went on, ‘and what unimagined delights it concealed. But then again I’m glad. It’s been like a voyage of discovery.’

  ‘Mike,’ her voice shook, ‘you say the nicest things sometimes.’

  For a moment, though, as he stared down at her, she thought she saw something in his eye
s that could have been pain. But he said, ‘It’s true.’ And he started to make love to her.

  Dear diary, we left Pancake Creek that morning. The wind had settled overnight to a steady ten knots so we put up the sails, said goodbye to Helen and Tim and got under way. I don’t know why but my memories of Pancake Creek will always be of a wise, ancient, timeless, serene sort of place—and that’s really odd when you think of the turmoil I alone went through there. I’ll also never forget Helen and Tim standing on the back of Moonshine, Tim with his arm round her shoulders as they waved us goodbye. And Mike…never looking back once. I believe there’s a cemetery near the lighthouse on Bustard Head with some very old graves; perhaps Pancake Creek has seen its fair share of suffering too…Perhaps I too will be wise and serene because of it all one day, but to say that at the time I didn’t know what to do would be to put it mildly, diary, only there wasn’t a lot I could do then. That opportunity didn’t come until a few days later.

  They had a pleasant trip to Burnett Heads and then a rough trip across Hervey Bay.

  ‘Which is a pity,’ Mike said, putting his arm around her; ‘I was hoping to show you some whales. I suppose you know all about the humpback whales and how they migrate annually from Antarctic waters up here to breed and have their young?’

  ‘Tell me all the same,’ Sidonie said. ‘Have you seen any?’

  ‘Last year I saw a mother and her calf not far from Rooney Point.’ He pointed. ‘That’s the northern part of Fraser Island, the eastern arm of Hervey Bay. They played for nearly an hour. It was quite a sight. But you need patience and better conditions to find them. And time.’

  Time, she thought, which is running out. Tin Can Bay, at the southern end of the Great Sandy Straits that divided the mainland from Fraser Island, was only a day away and she couldn’t help herself from shivering suddenly.

  Mike looked down at her. ‘Cold?’

  ‘A bit. Where will we anchor for the night?’

  ‘I was thinking of North White Cliffs, in the straits. It’ll give us a bit of protection from this southerly. We could even have a meal ashore; there’s a new resort there, Kingfisher Bay. I don’t think it’s quite finished but I believe they’re taking guests. How would that suit you, Miss Hill?’