Deceptions (53 page)

Everything else dropped away; the past week receded, and all she saw was the letter and what it could do to Garth. Energy surged through her, buoying her up from the despair that had (fragged at her since Stephanie's death. Someone was trying to ruin Garth, viciously, anonymously ... and whoever it was would succeed; he could be irreparably damaged if they didn't fight. They had to find out who—

Wait, wait, she thought. What about leaving? I've told Garth I'm leaving.

She brushed it aside. Yes, of course, of course I have to leave. Nothing has changed that. But I can't right now, not this minute, because there's something I have to do first. I owe it to Stephanie; I owe it to Garth, because I deceived him. Nothing has changed; I'll still leave - I'm just putting it off for a little while until this is cleared up. Because it's obvious that—

*I told Dolores you'd call tomorrow,' said Garth, coming in. 'I'm Sony I was so long; I feel as if I'd been in combat with a tornado. You haven't poured the coffee.' He sat down and filled their mugs. 'Now maybe we can - my God, Stephanie, what is it?*

Wordlessly, she handed him the letter. He scanned it, the lines in his face hardening as he read it a second time. 'I didn't know they'd drag me into it.' A thought struck him. 'Unless... you've gotten one of these damned things before, haven't you? This is what you were talking about when we quarreled just before you went to China. Why didn't you show it to me? All that anguish, when I didn't know what the hell you meant—'

*I don't want to talk about the past,' Sabrina broke in impatiently. 'We have to think about what we're going to do now to stop it before it goes any further.' She was thinking quickly. 'If copies were sent to the trustees or officers of the university, and they believe it, or even if they don't but they're afraid of a scandal, you could be hurt; couldn't it

even affect your appointment as director of the Genetics Institute?'

'Yes. But wait a minute.' Events were whipping past Garth, and he tried to slow them down. A few minutes ago, answering the doorbell, he left behind a drooping, anxious figure determined to run away. He came back to a vividly alive woman sitting on the edge of her chair, a warrior charging to his defense, recognizing with perfect insight what damage the letter could do. Six months ago, concerned with herself and less interested in the politics of the university, she would not have been so quick. He was stirred by the bright anger in her eyes, the taut line of her slender neck as she held her head high, ready for battle. For him. 'You don't believe the letter,' he said.

'Believe it? Garth, you can't be serious. No one who knows you would believe this trash. Someone wants to destroy you; we have to find out who it is.'

He looked at her thoughtfully. She had believed it in September. Now she didn't. 'I'm a little slow today,' he ventured. '1 thought I heard you say you were leaving, going back to London.'

'You're not slow and you know it; don't play games with me.'

'And if I ask the same of you?'

'I'm not playing games! What is the matter with you? Can't you see how things have changed? If other people get this letter and I'm not here, they'll assume I've left you because what it says is true. No one will believe I left for other reasons; if I leave now, you would be condemned no matter what you said.'

So she had seen that, too, Garth thought. She had seen it all. He went to her and took her face between his hands. 'I thought of that when I saw the letter. Thank you.'

'You didn't say anything.'

'Such as?'

'Asking me to stay because of the harm that would be done iflleft.'

'If you left. My dear love, if you left, the wreckage would extend far beyond a campus scandal. It would destroy this house, this family, three hearts and minds and spirits—'

'Don't, please don't—'

He kissed the tears from her eyes. But her body was tense, as if she was clamping down the possibility of desire, and he moved away. They had time now. As long as she was staying, they had time. Her grief and despair in London had been so terrible, and her loneliness for her sister so much more than he could imagine, that he felt demands on her would be intrusions in a healing process he could support but not direct.

But now he asked for one more assurance. He took her hands in his. 'You are staying? Whatever your reasons were for wanting to leave, I don't have to wonder each morning if I'll find you here at the end of the day?'

'I'll help you get through this,' she promised.

That isn't what I asked.'

*Garth, can't we take one step at a time? So much has happened in such a little while ... I'm trying to do what is right for everyone.'

'You can't make that decision alone. It involves all of us.'

She bent her head. Garth began to say something, then stopped. In the silence, she felt him turn over the hand he was holding. Her left hand. 'You aren't wearing your ring.'

A chill touched her. 'No.'

'Where is it?'

She hesitated, swinging between lies and the truth. 'In London.'

'Damn it, who are you to take all these steps on your own? You decide you won't have a family anymore, so you take off your ring and that makes it official. Then all you have to do is say a quick goodbye?'

She felt relief and guilt. One lie or another, she thought, but better this than the truth; that she'd returned the ring to Stephanie. 'I thought it would be—'

'A symbol,' he said. 'And it is. But I happen to believe in symbols. Where is it now?'

'I suppose ... in the house on Cadogan Square.'

'Then Mrs Thirkell can send it back.'

'If she can find it.'

'Write to her.'

* All right.'

*And if she can't find it, we'll buy another.'

/ won't be here long enough.

'And I'm asking you, Stephanie - are you listening to me?' She nodded. 'I'm asking you to let me help you at the same time you're helping me. Damn it, we're part of each other and we'll help each other. Agreed?'

'Agreed,' she said, wishing he could, knowing he could not. She picked up the letter. 'What does this mean- "those stories about students—"?'

'I'll show you.' He left the room and brought back the university newspaper. 'Last Wednesday's Standard. Our joumahsm students outdid themselves.'

Sabrina read the banner headline, 'Sex for Grades', and beneath it, 'Or Vice Versa.'

'The Standard doesn't know who makes the first offer,' she read. 'But three professors and a passel of fair female students have been summoned to VP Lloyd Strauss's office for an airing of charges that they've bieen trading favors, with payment in grades - the only thing more valuable than money hereabouts. It may have been going on since last spring quarter; a nasty tale that could affect class standing and even graduation in some cases. Not to mention the academic future of the professors.'

'Written like a gossip column,* Garth muttered. 'Somebody ought to teach those kids that journalism is serious business. They're dealing with people's lives.'

'Which people?* Sabrina asked.

'Melvin Blake, someone named Millburn and Marty Talvia—'

'Not Marty. You mean those rumors were—? I don't believe it. Oh, poor Linda.'

'—and now, it seems. Garth Andersen,'

'But it's all absurd. You and Marty wouldn't—'

'And Blake and Millburn?'

'I don't know them. I suppose if any of the rumors are true—'

'The problem is, my love, that if you admit the possibility of one, you admit the possibility of all.'

•But Garth, I know you wouldn't, and Marty ... wouW Marty?'

'I think he and Linda had a bad time a few months ago. He didn't confide in me; I think he tried to once or twice and then backed off.'

'When you were in California I asked you once on the telephone—'

'He's had other women. He talks about them, long after the fact, ashamed of himself for behaving like a kid who sneaks candies even when he's not hungry. But I would have thought he'd keep away from students.'

'What did he tell Lloyd Strauss?'

'All of them denied it.'

'And then?'

'That's as much as I know. 1 assume Lloyd is doing some checking; I haven't talked to him lately. I will now. Would you like more coffee?'

'No, I ought to be thinking about dinner.' How naturally she said it; how natural it was to slip back. Sabrina looked at Garth, close to her in the warm room. How natural it was to love him.

He met her look. 'And I love you,' he said. 'As for dinner, we'll go out. The larder is bare. We didn't want to function too successfully without you. But there is wine.'

Sabrina watched him open a bottle and fill two glasses. 'I think we should make some waves on the social scene,' she mused. 'I think we should be highly visible. Garth and ... Stephanie Andersen, in the open, with nothing to hide.'

He handed her a glass. 'Who is it you're trying to convince?'

'Whoever wonders about our marriage and what you do with your free time.'

He laughed. 'If you think it will help. I'd rather find the letter-writer.'

'Oh, yes,' she said calmly. 'We'll do that, too. We should make a list of students you've failed in the past year. Or any who got a lower grade than expected. Or anyone you yelled at. Why are you laughing?'

'The list is getting very long.'

'How long? You think of names and I'll start writing.'

Half an hour later, when Penny and Cliff came in, they found their parents still at the breakfast room table, talking. Dad was relaxed in his chair, legs stretched out before him, a quiet smile on his face. Mom sat straight, writing, her eyes bright. Penny sighed and touched Cliffs arm. 'Right,' he said, and they both knew what he meant; their home was back together again.

When Sabrina unpacked that night, she discovered Mrs Thirkell had filled the suitcase with Lady Longworth's clothes. Her closet in Evanston was now a mixture of Stephanie and Sabrina - like our lives, she thought. I wonder how much longer I'll be able to tell them apart. Putting everything away, she slid into the familiar four-poster bed, feeling the weariness of a day that had gone through a dozen transformations since she left Washington in the morning.

She saw Garth's silhouette in the doorway before he disappeared into the bathroom. There was something special about that; she tried to think what it was. And in a moment she had it; this was their first night together in a routine of family life since the night in New York when she had acknowledged her love for him. Since then they had been separated, first by her grief and then by the ocean. Now, she had agreed to stay. As his wife. And she could not pretend that night in New York had never happened.

She lay still, waiting for him, remembering the hours of longing that had filled her nights in London. And then he was beside her, silently gathering her to him.

'My sweet love,' he murmured. 'This bed grew emptier and wider each night you were not in it.'

She laughed, a low, contented laugh, moving her lips against his. 'So did mine. If we had waited long enough, they might have met in the middle of the Atlantic'

'No. We waited long enough. Too long.'

His hands moved over her slender form, and hers answered along the harder lines of his body. Their lips spoke against each other, murmuring, laughing, making small wordless sounds, while their eyes met. When they came together, it was with the incandescence they remembered: joy and delight, the intensity of pleasure given and received, a sense

of belonging, of coming home. They were strong in what they could give each other; they were both vulnerable, without shame, in what they needed from each other.

Wonderingly, Garth gazed at her beauty, at the brightness it cast. 'You fill the room with light,' he said.

'And life and love,' Sabrina said softly. She traced the lines of his face with tender fingers. 'I remember a poem: "Love makes one little room an everywhere." That's what I've found with you.' 'What we have found,' he said. They lay still in the lamplight, holding hands. Garth's arm cradling her, Sabrina's head on his shoulder as she drifted in the pleasure of the last hour and the comfort of his flesh, so much a part of hers there seemed no division between them.

She gazed at the reflection of the moon in the mirror, a clear white crescent caught in the black branches of an oak tree. As I am caught, she thought drowsily, in my love for this man, and his for me. She remembered with a smile one of Antonio's Indian tales. It was not important, he had said, if she did not love him before she married him. 'The Guarani gods say love is the last thing, not the first. It grows slowly through sharing and creating. When you live together and build a family, love will come.'

'Do you know,' Garth said ruefully, 'reluctant as I am to admit it—'

'—^You're hungry,' Sabrina finished, laughing. 'Well, come on. Let's see what we can find in the bare larder. It won't be the first time you and I have made something from nothing.'

Garth handed Lloyd Strauss the letter, in its envelope. 'Add it to my official biography for university press releases: BA, MA, PhD, director of the Genetics Institute and lecher.'

Strauss took a similar envelope from his desk drawer and held it out to Garth. 'Came yesterday.'

Garth felt a stab of helplessness: an invisible presence, vindictive and persevering, on a campus of thirty thousand students - assuming it was a student who was behind it. He pulled out the letter, identical to his. 'Are there others?'

'Not that I know of. The president didn't get one.'

'How come you got the honor?'

Strauss shrugged. *The stoiy in the Standards My strong arm summoning Talvia and Blake? Somebody wants you summoned. And lo and behold, here you are.*

'Not through a summons.'

'You beat me to it.'

'Lloyd, you're not taking this seriously.'

'I take all accusations seriously.'

Garth gave him a long look. 'Something else is new, I gather.'

'Talvia and Blake resigned from the faculty today.'

Garth swore softly and began to pace the office. 'Forced out? To make it look as if the university was cleaning house?'