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Chapter Ten. The days that followed passed in a blur for Annabel






The days that followed passed in a blur for Annabel. She spent many hours poring over her aunt’s diaries, trying to piece together the complex picture of her life. At times it was all she could do to concentrate. She found her thoughts straying constantly to Cody, wondering what she was doing, when she would come by.

They saw one another every day, ate dinner together, walked along Passion Bay in the moonlight, occasionally brushed fingertips or thighs, but were not lovers.

Last night, on one of their strolls, Cody had slipped an arm around Annabel’s waist and asked, “How did Passion Bay get its name? ”

“I don’t know, ” Annabel replied. “I guess my aunt must have named it. She lived here for the past thirty years and this was her favorite beach. The Bay does have a certain reputation among the Islanders though.”

“Oh, yes? ” Cody prompted. “What’s that? ”

Annabel smiled. “Well, there’s a legend. According to Mrs. Marsters, hundreds of years ago the Islanders believed that the waters of Passion Bay held the secret of fertility, so any woman who could not have a child would come here to bathe. A famous chief whose wife was barren—her fault, naturally—brought her to the island and left her here for three full cycles of the moon.”

“Great way for her to get pregnant, ” Cody murmured.

“Indeed. Anyway, the story goes that he returned to pick her up and she had conceived. In due course she gave birth to a daughter.”

“So she was already pregnant when he left her here, ” Cody remarked. “I guess they didn’t have test kits back then.”

Annabel administered a playful prod. “No, she wasn’t. And this is where we get to the interesting bit. Evidently this woman was quite certain she actually conceived on the island. She claimed she was visited on a number of occasions by the goddess of the island, who lay with her and made her the gift of a child—the only one she ever had, as it turns out.”

Cody’s eyes widened. “Presumably this was after the local missionary told all the heathen about the virgin birth? ”

“Cynic! ” Annabel sighed. “No, it was way before the missionaries sank their talons into the Cook Islands. And even more interesting is that no one lived on Moon Island at the time except for a small group of priestesses—the Island was sacred to women and men were forbidden. But the women who did live here had children, all girls.”

“Very weird, ” Cody said. “So what do you make of it all? ”

“Well there’s really only one possible explanation.”

“That the ‘goddess’ was a man in disguise? ”

Annabel laughed. “Of course not! It was parthenogenesis, the splitting of an egg without a sperm.”

Cody looked dubious. “I thought scientists couldn’t be sure about that.”

“Do you really think they’d tell us if they could? Imagine that—men not required for procreation.”

Cody stopped in her tracks and grinned widely. “Women’s eggs carry only an X chromosome...”

“Now you’re getting the picture. If parthenogenesis really can happen, it would result only in girls, and given that the female is the species type, that’s hardly surprising.”

“Oh, dear, ” Cody commented. “The male-as-mutant argument. You’re not a man-hating lesbian ball-breaker by any chance, are you? ”

Annabel glanced at her sideways, sparkling. “Will I score any points if I say yes to that? ”

“If you want to score points I have some more creative suggestions.”

Annabel turned to face her, slid her arms behind Cody’s neck. “Nothing that could result in parthenogenesis, I hope.”

She trailed slow sensual kisses down Cody’s throat and onto her bare shoulders and they sank down onto the warm sands of Passion Bay. Reading in Cody’s eyes an echo of her own desire, she cupped her face and claimed her mouth in a kiss fraught with pent-up need. She felt Cody’s hands tangle in her hair, the exquisite pressure of their bodies aligned hard against one another. But as she moved to unfasten the knot holding Cody’s sarong, the younger woman tensed, her retreat unmistakable.

Shaking, her body hungry for release, Annabel eased her embrace. This was not rejection, she realized. Cody needed time to build trust with her. Tenderly she cradled her, and they lay together listening to the sounds of the night.

Annabel knew with fatalistic certainty that they would become lovers. The thought filled her with restless anticipation. At the same time she was aware of mixed emotions. The more she came to know Cody, the more conscious she was that for her, the attraction was not purely physical. She was drawn to Cody on another level.

Somehow the New Zealander had slipped beneath her guard, engaging a tender part of her self Annabel seldom connected with any more. It made her feel oddly vulnerable. Wary of exposing herself, she decided to play a waiting game. It was obvious Cody was attracted to her, but she also sensed the younger woman’s confusion. It was hardly surprising. Cody had just been left by a long-term lover for a man. That would be enough to dent anyone’s confidence.

Annabel could remember all too clearly those feelings of helpless rage, of self-blame and introspection when she broke up with Clare. For months afterward she had stared at herself in mirrors, wondering if there was something wrong with her, some defect only others could see. Even though the breakup was more or less mutually agreed, she had still felt somehow at fault. If only she were more political, Clare might have stayed, if only she looked more butch, if only she enjoyed demos as much as theater, if only she didn’t sound like old money. There was a list as long as her arm.

She had been so vulnerable then and so lonely. It was one of those times when she had most felt her isolation as a lesbian. How different it was from her breakup with Toby. After only six months of marriage, she had been inundated with support—phone calls from her mother, cuddles from friends, and kindness from people at work. And she was the one who had left!

With Clare, she had been forced to pretend that everything was just fine and rosy in her world, that her housemate had got a new job in San Francisco, and wasn’t that great? Of course her lesbian friends understood and comforted her. But for the first time in her life, Annabel had experienced deeply the distress of her invisibility. She had felt like two people, one the hard-working, successful banker, the other a secretive, distressed misfit.

Her parents were pleased, of course. Not because they wanted to see her hurt, but because they had always believed her sexuality could only lead to unhappiness. They saw her breakup with Clare as a sign of their daughter coming to her senses. Her mother even referred to the possibility of another marriage now that she’d “got all that out of her system.” Annabel didn’t bother to argue. What was the point?

Since that time she had barely mentioned the subject of her relationships to her parents, and they never raised it. They knew she was still a lesbian, but it was not discussed. Silences were nothing new in Annabel’s family. For as long as she could remember, she had sensed the unspoken; the underground messages, her parents exchanging subtle glances, anger simmering beneath the quiet earth like a volcano. As a child, she had sometimes felt so nervous she had been unable to keep hold of her cutlery. And she never understood why.

Dusting off another diary, Annabel shook her head. The old trepidation was still there, that strange waiting feeling. Waiting for what? With curious unease she opened the book and read.

Rebecca has been wonderful. She won’t let me feel ashamed for a moment. She’s even bought me an island of all things, the goose. Mad isn’t it? I have no idea how we are ever to get there but Rebecca says her family isn’t in the shipping business for nothing and we leave as soon as the baby is born. I want to go now but Rebecca insists we should stay just in case anything goes wrong. As always she is the sensible one.

A baby? Whose baby? Her mother’s perhaps. There was nothing about Laura’s pregnancy in the diaries, yet the timing seemed right. Heart thumping wildly, Annabel skimmed back through the pages in case she had missed something. She could find no other reference to a baby. The diary was full of Rebecca—her cigar smoking and how Annie worried it would ruin her lungs, her passion for art and the poverty stricken painters who turned up for dinner every odd day, her conservative family and the politicians her father had in his pocket.

Page after page was dedicated to their love for one another and their lovemaking. Annabel skipped by those, unwilling to intrude on her aunt’s most intimate revelations. She would have to make sure her mother never saw any of this, she thought with faint humor. Not that there was any danger of Laura Adams flying halfway across the world to read her sister’s letters and diaries. She had never visited the island, in fact, had never spoken of it other than in the vaguest terms.

Until her friendship with her aunt had begun to flourish, Annabel had no idea Annie’s overseas home was in the Cook Islands. It was another subject no one ever mentioned. Even Annie had seemed strangely reluctant to talk about her life on Moon Island.

Cursing, Annabel glanced at her watch. It was Mercy Mission time, and Bevan Mitchell didn’t appreciate his passengers not turning up. With a sigh of impatience, she closed the diary and climbed down the attic steps into the hallway. A baby?

She gathered up her gear, donned her riding hat and stalked out, churning her discovery over in her mind.

Someone her aunt knew, some close friend perhaps, had been having a baby. Or was it Rebecca? Aunt Annie was childless. Annabel knew that much. Again she felt that uneasy curling in the pit of her stomach and a nebulous image floated across her mind—herself as a tiny child, on a woman’s knee, handling a large golden object and biting it. The woman’s face was out of focus, but her hair was pale. Mother, Annabel thought. Yet she felt oddly disturbed.

 






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