Phantom Lover

Her head snapped up. A yawning figure appeared in the doorway, her delicate, willowy figure clothed in the merest excuse for a nightgown, her long blonde hair spilling in disarray across her slender shoulders.

Honor’s heart sank into her practical shoes at the sight of her guest. She could hear fate laughing like a drain in her ear.

‘You’re up early, Helen. It’s only eleven o’clock.’

Her sarcasm went completely over her beautiful sister’s head. ‘Is it? I’d better get a move on, then. My flight leaves at three and Trina is taking me to lunch at the Regent before she zips me out to the airport.’

Her sister got lunches with her New Zealand agent at the best hotel in town and a lift to the airport in a limo, Honor ate cheese sandwiches in her kitchen and drove an ageing Volkswagen. And God forbid that she offer to farewell her sister at the airport. Helen hated to feel ‘emotionally pressured’, dismissing Honor’s ready sensitivity as ‘mawkishness’. That about summed up the differences in their lifestyles—and their personalities, Honor thought ruefully.

Honor had spent her teenage years watching with a mixture of awe and pity as her older sister clawed her way up through the fiercely competitive ranks of struggling models to achieve world-class status. She sincerely admired Helen for enduring the stresses and brutal rigours of maintaining herself at a constant peak of physical perfection from the age of sixteen, when she had won her first beauty competition, to her current graceful approach to thirty. But envy had no part in that admiration. Having seen the knife-edge of uncertainty on which Helen’s ego was constantly balanced, Honor had pitied her with the complacency of someone who knew how much of an illusion effortless beauty was, how false the glamour of her world really was.

She looked down at the letter clenched in her hand. No, she hadn’t envied her sister at all.

Until now.

‘Helen...’ Her voice trailed off. Did she really want to know? She gritted her teeth. She had no choice. He was talking about meeting her, for goodness’ sake!

‘What?’ Helen yawned again, stretching the tall, lithe body, sculpted taut by diligent daily aerobics and rigid dieting. Helen might eat at the best hotels, but she only ever tasted their salads!

‘Remember last time you stayed with me—you know when we had the Valentine’s Day Ball?’ Honor had been so busy helping to organise what was touted as being the rural social event of the year that she had forgotten to arrange a partner for herself and by then all her male ‘mates’ were spoken for. When Helen had arrived for an unexpected few days’ visit it had seemed a great idea for her sister to use the extra ticket. Who better to help create the necessary glitter for the event than a top international model?

‘Mmm.’ Helen sounded faintly wary, probably worried that Honor was going to request another charity appearance.

‘Do you remember meeting anyone called Adam?’ Honor held her breath, although she knew it was a forlorn hope. As soon as she had seen that wretched ‘Helen’ she had known...

‘Adam?’ Her sister’s vivid green eyes narrowed in thought, accentuating their perfect almond shape.

‘Adam Blake.’

‘Adam...Adam. No, I don’t think so.’ Helen shrugged cheerfully. ‘You know what I’m like with names, darling.’

Honor did know. Unless people had the potential to be useful to her career Helen tended to operate on the principle out of sight, out of mind.

‘Are you sure? Do moonlight and roses and ladies in distress ring any bells?’ she persisted doggedly.

To her shock her sophisticated sister pinkened. Honor had never seen her blush before and now she knew why. That creamy pale, unmade-up skin flushed unevenly, in blotchy patches.

‘Helen?’ Her voice was sharper than she had intended. ‘You do know who I’m talking about, don’t you?’

‘Not really. God, I’m dying for a coffee.’

‘What does “not really” mean?’ Honor scrambled up to follow her sister out into the tiny kitchen, watching with a jaundiced eye as Helen began puttering about on the bench-top. The only time her sister came even close to looking ungraceful was when she pretended to be domestic.

‘It means that maybe I do and maybe I don’t. I never asked who he was, although come to think of it he might have said that his name was Adam...’

‘Who said?’

‘Just someone who helped me out that night. I got into an awkward situation and he happened along at the right time, that’s all.’

That’s all? Honor wasn’t fooled by her sister’s casualness.

It took another half-hour and two cups of bitter black coffee to extract the story from her sister, and it was every bit as painful as Honor had known it would be.

Some time just after midnight, Helen had got into an undignified tussle with an overheated and over-inebriated admirer whom her customary haughtiness had failed to freeze off. When she had ducked out of the hall to escape his attentions he had followed, leaping amorously upon her in the rose-garden, tearing the bodice of her dress just in time for some amateur celebrity-hunter with a camera to get a couple of supremely compromising shots.

Helen’s unnamed gallant had not only appeared out of the darkness to haul the man off and send him smartly on his drunken way, but had driven her back to the cottage in her ruined dress and left her with the promise that he would make sure the photographs never saw the public light of day.

‘I never said anything because I just wanted to forget the whole embarrassing incident,’ said Helen sharply, forestalling Honor’s obvious question. ‘My dress was an Ungaro, you know. The shoulder-strap was practically torn away and though I got a dressmaker to repair it it was never quite the same. I was nearly in tears, I was so furious. I hardly spoke to your Adam, if that’s who it was, except to give him directions to this place. I only went to that damned ball because of you, you know, and what did you do but go off and leave me to the mercy of some drunken moron!’

‘I didn’t abandon you—it was more like the other way around. I couldn’t get close with all your admirers clustering around,’ said Honor, stung by the unfairness of the accusation. ‘Besides, you told me to keep my distance from you, remember, because I wasn’t feeling very well and you had that Australian swimsuit shoot in a few days and didn’t want to get my germs. In fact my infectiousness was the supposed reason for your suddenly rushing off to Sydney the next morning.’

‘Yes, well, I wasn’t going to hang around and wait for some sleazy tabloid to pick up on the story and ring me for a comment. Can you imagine the headline—TOP MODEL IN TOPLESS ROMP?’ She shuddered. ‘My publicist would have fits. Not to mention Mother.’ Honor was unsurprised to note that her concern for their ambitious mother, who had been the driving force behind Helen’s career and was still her manager, took second place to her fear of adverse publicity. Helen was always acutely conscious of her image, to the point of paranoia.

‘He got a shot of you topless?’ Her throaty voice squeaked with horror. She knew that her sister always turned down nude work—‘preserving her mystique’, she called it. Even swimsuit offers were accepted only when their prestige was exceptional.

‘Well, it wasn’t quite that bad,’ Helen conceded grudgingly. ‘But I was being considered for that new aerobics clothing line at the time and they wanted someone with a squeaky-clean image. I couldn’t afford to risk even a mild scandal. Why all the interest now? Don’t tell me this Adam is looking for me after all this time?’

No, but only because he already thought he had found her!

And because Honor always tried to live up to her name she had shown Helen her precious letters...all except the last few passionate epistles which she couldn’t quite bring herself to share. It would be too much like a betrayal.

Her sister’s reaction was quite predictable. She had given one or two a cursory read-through and collapsed in hilarity.

‘He thinks you’re me? What a hoot! He’s in for a shock, isn’t he?’ she giggled with an adolescent glee that Honor darkly thought ill befitted a woman who was almost thirty. ‘Especially since his last sight of you was when you were snoring like a jet-engine!’

‘Snoring?’ Honor’s puzzlement was shadowed by the gloomy presentiment of further humiliation.

‘Drooling, too, as I recall,’ Helen added with sisterly cruelty. ‘I couldn’t go back into the hall with my dress practically in shreds so we cut through the gardens to get to his car and there were you, parked on a bench like a homeless tramp. Since you’d said you were going to stay until the last gasp no matter how rotten you were feeling, I told what’s-his-name to carry you to your car so that you wouldn’t get double pneumonia or something if you didn’t wake up for a while. I thought if I told him you were my sister he’d make a fuss and insist on you coming with me so I did us both a favour and told him you were a distant relative with an extremely jealous husband. I even left you the stolen roses that drunk tried to foist on me in order to keep my hands busy while he tried to have his sweaty way...’

‘Thanks a million,’ grumbled Honor, cringing at the unflattering picture she must have presented. She should never have taken those pain-killers on top of several glasses of champagne.

‘What—what was he like? What did he say?’

In her mind she had pictured the man who wrote to her as being quiet and reassuringly ordinary-looking, with kind eyes and a ready smile. Socially unsophisticated. The kind of man who would be more interested in a woman’s mind than her appearance. The kind who preferred warmth and humour to the cold perfection of glamour.

Helen was maddeningly vague. ‘I can’t remember. He was thin and dark...I think. He made the usual protective male noises but I didn’t really listen. He must have been pretty strong, the way he carried you, but he drove some awful station wagon or something. Not my type at all!’ It was typical of Helen to judge the man by his car. At Honor’s sound of annoyance she said impatiently, ‘Well, what do you expect me to say? He wasn’t Superman. There was nothing memorable about him—not that I wanted to remember anything about the whole wretched business anyway. I’m swamped in gorgeous men every day of my working life, darling, why should I remember some unimportant stranger I met ages ago?’

Honor looked at the valentine—slightly dog-eared from months of affectionate handling—that had started it all, and sternly made herself face facts.

‘He couldn’t possibly have meant to write to me—not after having met you,’ she sighed, far too aware of her sister’s devastating tunnel-vision effect on men to have any illusions about how she rated in comparison.

‘What does it matter who he meant to write to? It was you he ended up corresponding with,’ Helen pointed out kindly, spoiling it by adding, ‘If you ask me, he’s got to be pretty arrogant in the first place if he thinks a woman like me would be interested in some country hick...’

‘He doesn’t live in the country, he lives in Auckland,’ Honor automatically defended.

‘Small-town hick, then,’ said Helen, ignoring the fact that Auckland was New Zealand’s largest city. She was very proud of the fact that she had outgrown her home country, whereas Honor had very proudly grown back into it after several years’ enforced stay in the canyons of New York city.

‘Anyway, it was a gross piece of assumption on his part that I’d be interested. I don’t know what you’re worrying about. If he dumps you what have you lost? Only another penfriend, for goodness’ sake. You used to have stacks of them when you were twelve—I should have thought you’d have grown out of that sort of teenage stuff by now. Doesn’t say much for your social life, does it? I told you burying yourself in this place would stunt your growth. I suppose, as usual, you let your imagination run away with you and built it into some grand romance in your mind.’