Even going back further, he frequently called on my services. He manufactured and sold furs, but he also imported and exported them. Ocelots come from Argentina, jaguars from Brazil, there are problems selling mink in America? he was always having difficulties with permits and regulations of one sort or another. You understand?"
"Go on."
"All right. On the last occasion I saw him, our regular lunch, I sensed that something was different. I mean, I had the feeling that something was troubling him, something that lay beyond the normal bounds of our relationship. He mentioned a woman. It was clear that he meant a liaison, an infatuation in his past? but it was all very fleeting. It wasn't the sort of thing he'd normally have spoken about and you realize that it's not the sort of thing I'd normally speak of to you."
I nodded. Indeed, the difficulty he'd had in speaking at all made me sense that his feeling for Brightman was more "personal" than he'd let on. "I understand, sir. Did he mention a name?"
"Anna. He said, 'When I look back, Anna is my deepest regret.' We'd been talking about the past, the war. He'd had something to drink, perhaps more than he'd usually take. He spoke as if I knew what he was talking about."
"But you didn't?"
"No."
"And you didn't like to ask who this woman was?"
"It would have embarrassed us both."
"I see? But there are no Annas involved in any of this. The baby was called Elizabeth Ann?"
He lifted his hand from his desk in a dismissive gesture. "Does that make any difference? A nickname, a pet name?"
And now, at last, I had it. I could hear May's voice in my ear: He said he wanted to tell me who my real father was. But surely the usual focus of interest was the mother's identity? All of which must have shown on my face, for now Cadogan said, "I take it you've drawn the obvious conclusion, Mr. Thorne?"
"Yes, sir."
I had. May Brightman was Harry Brightman's natural child. In adopting her, he'd merely been adopting his own illegitimate daughter. I said, "Did you just reach this conclusion then, during that conversation?"
"No, it was a suspicion I'd held for a good many years."
"Had you ever tried to confirm it?"
"No. It was none of my business. Conceivably, I realized, it might have had some effect on his will, but I drafted it to take that into account." He hesitated a moment. "In that conversation, you see, I thought he was depressed, not quite himself, but there was nothing dramatic about it. I have no reason to suppose that it had anything to do with his going away. If he hadn't, I doubt that it would have stuck in my mind."
I nodded. The old man leaned back in his chair. Then, rather deliberately, he looked at his watch. "If you don't mind? I think I've told you all that I know."
"Yes, sir. And I thank you for doing so."
I rose. Cadogan didn't hold out his hand. I considered, then decided not to offer him mine. But as I turned to leave, he stopped me.
"Mr. Thorne? Earlier, I asked if you knew the meaning of trust. I hope you now understand why."
Would I tell her? That's what he was asking; but, right then, I couldn't have answered, so I merely nodded, turned, and went out the door. Outside, the porter was waiting and I followed him down the stairs and through the big oak doors to the street. The sidewalk was dark and deserted; a drizzle was falling. Standing there, I let it prickle, cold and sharp, on my face. I took a deep breath. Would I tell her? I really had no idea what to do. And all at once it must have been the rain?I was back in that graveyard where my father was buried and an uncanny sensation passed through me: an obscure, distressing feeling that I was not here by accident, that somehow Brightman's fate was intimately connected to my own. In a strange way, the story of May's origins was becoming my secret, and so, by a natural progression, was becoming allied to that other secret I held the truth about my father's suicide. No wonder I found it disturbing. But there was an assumption in this that I'd definitely keep back what I'd discovered. Should I? May's instructions had been clear enough: she didn't want to know unless it became absolutely necessary. Perhaps, given that, I had no right to tell her, for there was still no certainty that the adoption and Brightman's disappearance were connected. Why, given the facts, should he have fled? No doubt they would have upset May to some extent, but hardly as much as his abrupt departure had done; in the end, after all, the truth could only have served to draw them closer together.
What should I do?
As I walked along, a soft voice began whispering the answer: Let it alone, let it alone. But I suppose, even then, I knew that I wouldn't. Whether I liked it or not, this was my secret now?I'd found out something that no one had ever been intended to know, and there had to be more.
What was it?
As I reached the car, I remembered what the King of Hearts had told Alice: "Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
For May Brightman, and perhaps for her father, the beginning lay in Halifax, Nova Scotia, during the blitzkrieg spring of 1940.
5
When I was living in Moscow, the first "ordinary" Russian friend that I had was a man named Nikolai Morozov. He was an engineer who'd become a bureaucrat, but like many scientifically trained Russians, he fancied himself as a frustrated literary man. He loved poetry; above all, he loved Kipling. I'm not sure why. Kipling is frowned on in the Soviet Union ("an imperialist reactionary," etc., etc.), so perhaps he thought he was being daring. Or possibly — though Nikolai spoke English well — he found Kipling's straightforward rhythms and rhymes easy to enjoy. In any event, I once drove with him to Leningrad. We arrived early in the morning of a cool March day and a terrible fog had come up from the Neva, the Gulf of Finland, and the various other swamps and lagoons around which the city is built. Immediately, Nikolai began to declaim:
"Kipling," I mumbled, a little sleepless myself. "His famous poem about Petersburg."
"It is Kipling, yes, and it should have been his poem about Petersburg. But in truth it is about a place in Canada called Halifax, Nova Scotia."
This, until I arrived that morning at the end of October, was the sum total of my knowledge about Canada's famous eastern port, and though I wouldn't have sworn to the town's virginity, Kipling was dead right about the fog. Blindly, we descended through it, flaps down, wheels down, the whole plane feeling tentatively ahead for the first touch of the ground beneath the thick, ashen coils that swirled under us. Then, frighteningly close, it was there… and we glided onto a rain-slick runway with the gentleness that only cockpit computers and fervent prayer can bring.
I took a cab into the city. It was a small, Victorian garrison town mellowed by time and now softened by the fog and the rain: gray, narrow streets; weather-beaten clapboard houses; and that odor of salt, fish, and diesel oil that is common to ports the world over. My hotel, the Nova Scotian, was right downtown, and my room overlooked the harbor. Eating breakfast, I peered out the window while the persistent, mournful note of a foghorn shivered the glass. Though the fog was bad, it wasn't bad enough to close the port down. An Esso oil tender puttered back and forth several times, then a grain carrier, flying the Hammer and Sickle, inched its way up the channel, and finally, as I sipped my coffee, a warship nosed into view, gray as the fog, sullen and menacing as a shark. I guessed it was a destroyer, and the sight of it brought my mind back to business. May Brightman had been adopted in June 1940, the same month that France had fallen. The United States was still eighteen months away from war, but down in this harbor the first of the Atlantic convoys had been preparing to run the U-boats' gauntlet — as Edward R. Murrow would have put it.