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“I expect you're right.” Eve got up, and Jean Mannering followed her lead sharply. “I really should apologize for coming to see you, and for practically accusing you of—something, I'm not sure what.”

“Don't mention it.” She went again to the desk. “Let me give you my personal phone number, in case you want to get in touch again. The one in the book is for the professional me. And thank you: you've given a little bit of spice to an otherwise pretty routine sort of existence.”

Eve wondered how sincere she was.

“I suppose my mother would have found retirement pretty dull.”

“Don't you believe it. She would have gone on committees, organized a Crossley Festival, taken up watercolor painting, stood for the local council if you have one. That was the May that I knew anyway.”

“That was a long time ago. But you're quite right.”

“And what about you?” Jean Mannering's eyes were fixed on Eve shrewdly.

“Me? Well, I am wondering about a change of direction.”

“Excuse my boorishness—I haven't even asked what you do.”

“It's not very interesting. I'm a PR person—
the
PR person for a chain of supermarkets.”

“Ah. Well, I can see that might not be the chosen life's work for a child of May's. How did you come to take it up?”

Eve had often wondered that herself.

“I suppose I fell into it, really. I'm good at my job, but it's not a job I'm proud of being good at.”

“Well, remember: don't give up your present job until you've got a new one, and if possible a better one. I've had countless friends who ignored that simple rule and regretted it.” They were at the flat's door now, and Jean let Eve out down the narrow flight of steps. Jean's voice followed her. “The only thing I remember about your father's leaving you and May was that he was ordered abroad for his health—to somewhere sunny.”

“
Really?
” Eve had swung around. “Thank you for telling me. You don't remember where?”

“I don't. Where would it have been at that time? The Caribbean? Florida? I suppose Spain would be the most likely, wouldn't it? Holidays there were common, though still a bit of an adventure. Worth investigating, though the fact that it was for his health doesn't suggest you're likely to find him alive, does it?”

And she shut the door.

Eve strolled in watery sunshine back to her car. There was something odd about Jean waiting until their parting words to hand her this piece of information. Or misinformation. Did Jean want to direct her attention to her father because she knew it would be a dead end? Or did she realize that she was bound to go in that direction before long, and wanted to send her haring off at a tangent?

Thinking it over sent Eve further into a state of doubt. Was Spain really the most likely place to settle on in a search for sun at that time? It was geographically close, but the period was the early seventies. Wasn't Franco still alive then? And even if he was dead, wasn't democracy pretty fragile there in its early years? Eve had the feeling that the British colonization of unfortunate parts of Spain didn't get under way until later. Her trust in Jean, her inclination to believe what Jean said, which had begun to be established in the first part of the interview, was beginning to crumble. Even the perfectly good advice not to leave her job before she had another to go to began to seem like a shove designed to send her back to the Midlands.

If Jean knew her job was in the Midlands. And that might depend on whether or not she and May had been completely out of touch with each other in the years since Eve's childhood.

That night Eve rang Rani again.

“I've talked to Jean Mannering,” she said.

“And what did she tell you?” When she had finished a rather rushed précis of what had been discussed he said: “And did you believe her?”

“At the time I think I did. Or was beginning to. But
when it came to that last bit, I began to think she had been too clever. Why had she not told me about my father going abroad before? She easily could have done. And was what she told me true, or tru
ish,
or meant to mislead entirely? Even her advice about jobs I began to find suspect.”

“What advice was that? I don't even know what you do.”

“I'm PR to a medium-size supermarket chain. She advised me to get a new job before I packed in my old one.”

“Perfectly good advice. Are you getting a bit
too
suspicious?”

“Probably. I'll try to guard against it. It was just that—oh, never mind. Rani, I've been going through cupboards and drawers and finding all sorts of things, but so far I've found none of the ‘official' things I thought must be somewhere in the house.”

“Birth certificates, passports, that sort of thing?”

“Yes. I thought they'd be sure to be somewhere accessible like a hall cupboard or a desk drawer rather than up in the attic, where I haven't ventured yet.”

“I think you're right. In my experience—in my
job,
I mean—there are cupboard people, and they slip these official papers under something or other in an otherwise disorganized drawer, or somewhere in a pile of games. And then there are the filing cabinet, or just files, people. Is there a filing cabinet in your mother's house, by the way?”

“Yes, a two-drawer job in Mother's study. I looked at it, and it seemed to be mostly about school: photocopies of reports in the local newspapers about special days: mayoral or royal visits, parents' days and so on. Useful if I'd
been writing her biography, but not much to my present purposes.”

“Keep at it. Examine all the files—don't miss one out because it sounds unpromising. There's a real chance you'll find the documents all together somewhere there. There should also be deeds of the house and other things you'll find useful before long. Your mother sounds a methodical person to me. I'd be very surprised if you found documents like that in a black plastic bag in the attic.”

“Right. When I can spare a couple of hours, I'll get down to it. I've started to worry whether my mother and father really were married.”

“At that date, and remembering the sort of woman your mother was, I'd be pretty sure that they were. She was a cut-and-dried person. And the people who appointed her would have made sure that she was . . . Eve, are you thinking of giving up PR work?”

“I've certainly thought of it. Without, unfortunately, coming up with any alternative that appealed to me. I must admit I've got bored with the ‘uniform-shaped apples and pears' and the ‘fatless pork' type of newspaper story that I waste hour after hour on. But that's what you get if you work for a supermarket chain.”

“It's just that the Leeds headquarters of the West Yorkshire Police has got its civilian PR office in chaos at the moment. Rumor has it that the man they appointed to head the unit two or three months ago is turning out to be a blabbermouth who will talk to the press about any and everything in the most unbuttoned fashion, with disastrous consequences. Now, nobody is going to listen seriously
to a detective constable from one of the minorities, but would it be all right if I floated your name?”

“Well, the work would certainly be more interesting than what I'm dealing with at the supermarkets. At least I wouldn't mind going to talk to someone about it . . . On the other hand, would it be wise? When I'm poking about,
investigating,
on my own account at the moment?”

“Wise?
Wise?
I'm fed up with always being wise. Where has wise got me? Into a marriage which is no marriage . . .” There was a pause while he tried to calm down. “Though of course I would not want to harm innocent people, or distress anyone. And I would absolutely not want to harm you, Eve.”

“I'm the last person you need consider, Rani.” They were silent for a moment while they both reflected on what he had just said. Rani's frequent, obsessed mentions of his family caught Eve on a raw nerve. “Drop my name into the conversation at headquarters. But I may be away for a day or two, searching for any traces my father may have left of himself in Glasgow. You can leave a message on my answer machine.”

“I will. Don't get your hopes too high. And good luck in Glasgow.”

“Good-bye, Rani. Thanks for the good advice.”

But what she really felt thankful for was that her feelings, and Rani's feelings, had taken a step forward, perhaps two or three steps forward, toward the light of day. And she was willing to risk the possibility that she would turn out to be his bit on the side, his bit on the rebound. She did not think Rani was that sort, a superficial and changeable character, but she was willing to risk anything
if, just for a time, he would be hers and she would be his. But there still forced itself into her mind, often, the image of a little girl, and one of a bewildered, unhappy woman who was as much a victim of clashing cultures as Rani.

It was two days later that Eve set out for Glasgow. She drove over to Keighley and caught the train to Carlisle that had begun in Leeds. She had done the journey once, many years ago, with her mother. She had been told it was “one of the great train journeys in the world” and she had dimly appreciated it then, and had not found any that toppled its supremacy since. She settled down to enjoy something she might not be able to experience much longer, if the mass sellout to air and global pollution continued.

The train was full of walkers, who seemed to Eve to be a race of men and women apart. They talked about their favorite pubs, ramblers' rights, points of special difficulty in the walks ahead and bed-and-breakfast places with notably unwelcoming habits. Eve could see that to find notes pinned around the bedroom with such messages as
GUESTS WHO WASH THEIR SMALLS IN THE WASHBASIN WILL NEVER BE WELCOME IN THIS HOUSE AGAIN
was to feel unwanted, but the discussion of such horrors
meant the walkers never once felt the need to look out the window at the majestic scenery through which the train was traveling. Perhaps they somehow did not count landscapes viewed from a train. Or perhaps scenery was not the point of their activity.

In Eve's luggage was her mother's birth certificate and the marriage certificate of May and John McNabb. They had been found in a file marked
PARENTS' EVENINGS
, which she had ignored when she first went through the filing cabinet, and with them were the deeds of the house, which her mother and father had acquired in the autumn of 1971. She herself had been born the year before, eleven years after her parents' marriage, which had been solemnized at the Durham Registry Office on the eighth of March 1959. Eve wondered what the connection was between either of them and Durham. Presumably it was John's childhood home, or that of his parents, because May had been Glasgow both by birth and upbringing before her father and mother had moved to Melrose.

The train reached North Lancashire, with ramblers getting off being replaced by others getting on, all full of stories, and all with emotions ranging from rhapsody to outrage. At Carlisle, Eve changed trains, and by teatime she was settling into her Glasgow hotel and looking for a place where she could eat alone without being chatted up. She was well acquainted with the city from childhood visits with her mother—shopping and art gallery visits after trips to Melrose to see her grandparents. She chose a restaurant, not too wisely, because she still got alcoholic approaches. Glasgow had changed in the intervening years, but in that respect it was unchanged.

She had contacted Hilda Wantage, the archivist of the
Glasgow Tribune,
before setting out, and they had discussed what she wanted. Eve had simply said she hoped to understand as much as possible about her father, whom she'd never known. They had agreed she could leaf through a few years' copies of the paper to get to know his pocket cartoon about the McTavish family, and also his presumably more ambitious political and one-off cartoons. Then she had asked for anything in the way of information that the archivist could find in company records.

Hilda was a comfortable, motherly figure in her early thirties. She gave the impression she would have preferred to be home washing her son's football gear or her daughter's ballet skirts. On the other hand she seemed excellent at her job, and had a selection of old issues for Eve to browse in, and assured her she had only to ask for anything else.

“Are they divorced then, your parents?” she asked.

“My mother has just died. Cancer.” There was the automatic sympathetic shake of the head. “She told me when I was a child that my father was dead, and I've no reason to disbelieve her.”

But you do, Eve saw that Hilda was saying to herself.

“Well, I've found nothing in the records, one way or the other,” she said. “He was employed on a contract basis, and he ended that in June 1973 ‘for medical reasons'—unspecified, but I've talked to one of the older employees and he said your father had had a series of chest complaints and was recommended to try a warmer and drier climate, at least for a time. He said the cartoons were popular,
struck a cozy note that was appropriate for that time, and it was generally hoped that he could return.”