"The police made me check but I couldn't be sure. The basement is full of old luggage he could have taken a couple of suitcases and I wouldn't know. I'm not really sure what clothes he owns."
"Does he drive a car?"
She nodded. "He doesn't use it much anymore, but it was in the garage the police said it probably hadn't been driven for weeks." She closed her eyes for a second. "I've been all through this, Robert. It's useless. There've been no strange withdrawals from his bank, American Express say he hasn't used his card? There's just no sign of him at all."
I leaned back, then pushed my chair away from the table; I suppose, knowing she wasn't going to like what I had to say next, I wanted to put a little distance between us. Then I went on, "All right, I accept that he's missing. At the very least, he's been damned inconsiderate? but then old men sometimes are, you know. What I don't see is suicide. He was wealthy. His health it was still good?"
"Yes."
"No one's found his body?"
"That doesn't mean anything."
"There's been no note?"
"But that doesn't mean anything either."
"Not definitely, I suppose? but it's hard to disprove a negative. Until he comes back, you have to say that suicide is a possibility, but it doesn't seem very likely."
She hesitated, glancing down, then looked up again. "I told you I had a reason."
"Yes. Something to do with your being adopted."
She began to speak but then stopped herself and reached out for her cigarettes. As she lit one, I watched her face. It was broad, girlishly freckled, with a slightly snub nose. In a way, she did look her age, but something was missing she was like a young girl who'd suddenly woken up to find she was forty; it was hard to account for the intervening years? or was that simply because I hadn't been part of them? Maybe; but then I thought it went further than that, for as she brought the cigarette up to her lips, I noticed that her hands displayed a similar sort of displacement. The wrists were thin, delicate, very long, like the wrists of some wistful Pre-Raphaelite maiden. But the fingers themselves belonged to a real country girl; they were practical and strong, bony, the nails now bitten down to the quick. Bloomsbury girl? hippie lady? princess? peasant? she was a little of each.
Now, guardedly, she said, "You knew I was adopted?"
"Yes."
"All right. I was adopted as an infant, in 1940. I was just a few months old. I only remember Harry? my father. I don't even remember his wife my legal mother because they separated just a year or so later. I stayed with him. He's the only family I've ever had. Or wanted." She looked up at me. "I didn't even know I was adopted till I was fourteen."
Harry Brightman. I remembered now that's what she always called him. Harry or Father. I looked at her. "Wasn't fourteen a little late to tell you?"
"It hadn't made any difference before. It didn't then. It didn't later? I think he might never have told me at all, but I asked him if I could meet my mother and he had to explain. We were in France for a holiday. I remember we were in Cannes, sitting in a cafe. You could see the ocean. I said that when we got home I'd like to meet my mother. I'd never asked before, and I suppose I only asked then because of my age, but that's when he told me. He said that he didn't even know where my mother was and that she wasn't my real mother anyway?I was adopted."
"And what did you feel?"
"I was dizzy for a second. That's all. Then everything settled back down. Nothing had changed. And once I knew my mother wasn't my mother, I had no desire to meet her." She hesitated, then continued. "But I don't want you to miss the point in all this. It didn't make any difference. It never has. On that day in Cannes, he told me everything I know about my adoption I was a baby, it happened in 1940, it took place in Halifax. But that's it. The subject had never been raised before, and hasn't been since? That is, until a few weeks ago."
"Then what happened?"
"Nothing really. But he started to talk about it. At first he was vague. Hints. Then he began asking if I didn't want to know where I came from?"
"And what did you say?"
"That I didn't. I'm not a child anymore it doesn't mean anything to me. Then he started to press didn't I want to know who my real father was??"
"And?"
"He's my real father. I don't want another one." She looked up at me. "But you see what I'm saying? Something about the whole subject was bothering him."
"Is that surprising, though? He's an elderly man. He probably won't live much longer. Perhaps he only wanted to give you one final chance?"
"It was more than that."
"All right. But why does any of this make you think he's killed himself?"
She flinched at the words, but held steady. "I'm not sure. But it could, couldn't it? What if my biological parents came back? Or?"
"Or what? What difference would it make? If you were a child if you'd just been adopted? yes, I could see it. But now? You'd all go out to lunch, shake hands, and that would be the end of it."
"Not necessarily. Say there'd been something wrong about the adoption, something illegal."
"Do you think there was?"
"No. But? people buy babies. Maybe?"
I waited, but she didn't say anything more. I thought over what she'd said. It sounded farfetched; but even if Harry had bought her, I didn't see who would care, forty years after the fact. I said, "Did you tell the police all this?"
She nodded. "They didn't think it was important. They're sure he wasn't being blackmailed, because of his bank records. They told me they'd look into it but I don't think they have."
"And you want me to?"
She looked me square in the eye. "Yes."
"So far as you know, this was the only strange element in your father's recent behavior."
"Yes. It's the only thing I can think of."
"All right, then, I'll do it. I don't promise much even if I do find out something, it probably won't be connected to your father's disappearance. But I'll try."
She smiled. "Bless you, Robert. I knew you would."
I squeezed her hand. "Remember: no promises."
She smiled and nodded. And then, after the strain of all this, I sensed a certain embarrassment come over her, so I said, "I just thought of something. I left my bag on your front porch."
She laughed. "Don't worry, the neighbors are honest. Go and get it, then I'll show you your room."
She led me up to a bedroom on the second floor, and after taking a shower, I stretched out on the bed and began to think? though more about May than her father. So far as he was concerned, I had few worries: Harry Brightman, I was willing to bet, was pursuing an old man's folly, chasing a woman whose existence he'd been too embarrassed to admit, especially to his daughter. May's adoption, the possibility of suicide, buying babies all that had nothing to do with it. The police, I suspected, had also reached this conclusion, and in fact I could see only one point contradicting it May's fear itself. She was genuinely upset, there was no doubt about that. And she wasn't the sort to cry wolf. On the contrary, self-sufficiency had always been one of her hallmarks, so that her call for help now was ample testimony to the devotion she felt toward her father. Should I be surprised at such feelings? Did I have a right to be? Hardly. If May was dominated by her father, in life, I had lived far more completely under the influence of my own father's death.
I lay still, listening. Beyond the window, the day was already darkening and sounds from the street were hushed and remote. The house was silent. I listened to it: like all silence, it had its own timbre, and this was gray, cold strained in some fashion?and as I tried to define what this quality was, my mind slipped back to the afternoon and the rose garden, all enclosed, with May's kneeling figure trapped in that high, wan halo of light. The silence of a nunnery? that's what now came into my mind, and I wondered whether that might be true, that some devotion I'd never known about had locked her away from me, that she'd used me to try to break its grip and failed, making her the victim in a tragedy that dwarfed my own. Or, on the other hand my mind now began racing maybe such thoughts were just pure projection; God knows I've been called a monk often enough, and more than one woman has complained that she felt, with me, that she was competing against some ghostly presence, all the more powerful for being invisible. Perhaps that was the answer, for now a memory came back. It was a memory of our last night, the last time we'd made love: May had returned from seeing her father but she still hadn't told me that she'd changed her mind. Her passion had been fierce that night, almost desperate. Later, I'd assumed that she was trying to console me, offering one final gift. Now I wondered. Might she not have been giving me a last chance to woo her away? Perhaps I'd been struggling that night with an invisible protagonist of my own May's father, and her love for him and when I'd lost, I'd lost for both of us?