by Robyn Sisman
But now her eye had been caught by a palatial building to her left, where the French flag fluttered from a central turret. On a high pediment decorated with flying nymphs was a clock, with the hands standing at twenty minutes past three. In the Luxembourg Gardens today . . . 3-4 p.m. . . . Important . . . A friend. Molly touched a hand to her face, conscious that she must look blotchy and red-eyed. Did she really want to meet anyone in this state? She peered round the urn to scan the figures seated by the pond, or moving back and forth in front of the palace, but she was too far away to see clearly. There was no one she recognized. Please come. She began to descend the steps.
She was about halfway down when a figure detached itself from the anonymity of the crowd around the pond and made its way urgently toward her. When Molly saw who it was, she felt disappointment, a surge of exasperation. It wasn’t anyone mysterious, only the doctor from the conference hotel, the stranger whose arm she’d grabbed to hide from Malcolm. What on earth did he want? The last time she’d seen him she’d been wearing that ridiculous wig! She already felt foolish enough for one day.
“Molly Clearwater? Is that you?” He peered at her intently. “You look a little different today.”
“Hi.” Molly scuffed a foot. “Look, I’m sorry if this sounds rude, but if it’s about that bloody disk again, I don’t want to know.”
“No, no. All that’s fine, I promise.” He hesitated, looking into her face. Probably he could see that she’d been crying. She glared at the ground.
“I mean, I’ve left Phipps Lauzer Bergman. I couldn’t care less about the conference and—and I’m having a horrible day.”
“Poor you. I’m sorry.” Her eyes flickered to him briefly. He was smiling a little, but not nastily. Actually, he looked quite kind. She remembered that he’d been kind before, at the hotel. But sympathy was the last thing she wanted, or she’d start crying again. She folded her arms.
“So what’s this all about?” she demanded. “All those text messages—what’s the big urgency? Who are you?”
“My name’s Jonathan—Jonathan Griffin.” He put his hands into his pockets, then took them out again. It occurred to her that he was nervous in some way. “Do you mind if we take a little walk?” He gestured at the avenue that led away from the palace.
Molly glowered at him, ready to say no. Then she noticed his strained expression. He seemed to be trying to control some powerful emotion—although what it might be, she couldn’t imagine.
She accepted his suggestion with a nod. Why not? She didn’t have anything else to do.
They walked in silence. Molly wondered what on earth was going on. Perhaps he was a loony or a pervert? Could he possibly fancy her? She hadn’t picked up any such vibe at the hotel, and now he didn’t seem keen to do anything creepy like take her arm. If anything, he was concerned to keep his distance. And he was awfully old: forty, at least. Anyway, nothing much could happen to her among these crowds.
“What a perfect day,” he said, taking an appreciative breath and looking around him.
Oh, right. They were going to discuss the weather. Molly turned her head away and rolled her eyes at one of the white statues of women—queens, to judge from their crowns—lining their route, who stared back from blank sockets.
But the sweetness of the air filled her nostrils. The sun warmed her face, and suffused everything with that golden intensity of light peculiar to autumn. Where it caught the turning leaves, the trees looked as if they’d been dusted with cinnamon. It was impossible not to respond to the vistas so artfully designed to please. The slow, regular pace of their progress side by side was soothing. “Yes, it’s lovely,” she answered.
He began to talk to her about the park: how Simone de Beauvoir had played here as a child, with her hoop, how it contained an old-fashioned puppet theater and a miniature Statue of Liberty. “And beehives!” he added, flashing her a smile. “Shall we go and look?”
They turned off to smaller paths that wound through dappled shade, past statues of lions and stags, poets and mythological figures; past little enclosures of pruned fruit trees, where he pointed out how the individual fruits were wrapped in protective cloth. Here were the bees: “Danger d’abeilles!”—they exchanged a little smile at the sign. As they strolled he asked her gentle, undemanding questions. Had she been to Paris before? What did she think of it? Molly had the odd sense that he was biding his time. But for what?
“Look,” she said finally, stopping at the edge of some kind of railed enclosure, “what’s going on? What are we doing? What do you want?”
She saw his face fall, and felt a pang of regret at the sharpness of her tone. He was obviously a nice man. “It’s just—I’m not in a very sociable mood and . . .” Damn! She was going to cry again. She took a few steps away from him and gripped the railings. She was aware of children’s shrieks, the bright colors of climbing frames and swings, and realized that she was looking into a playground.
He came up beside her. “I’m sorry. Of course, this must all seem very odd. The thing is . . .” He paused for so long that she turned to look at him. He seemed agitated, struggling to find the words. “I don’t mean to add to your worries,” he said. “It’s just that I’ve been wanting to meet you for a very long time.”
“How could you? We only met yesterday. How do you even know my name? How did you get my mobile number?”
“Ah, that was Malcolm Figg.”
Malcolm! She knew it. The vague friendliness she’d begun to feel for this man drained away. “I’ve had enough of this,” she snapped. “I don’t work for Phipps Lauzer Bergman any more. As my boss so kindly pointed out to me last Friday, I was only a ‘stupid secretary’ anyway.”
“Molly!” he protested. “You’ve got the wrong end of the stick. I’m not interested in anything to do with Phipps Lauzer Bergman, or that godawful boring conference. I’m interested in you.”
Molly’s head whirled. “Me? Huh—what’s interesting about me?”
“Everything, as far as I’m concerned.”
She shook her head. “You’ve got me confused with someone else. I’m just an ordinary English girl over in Paris for the weekend. A silly girl who’s made a mess of everything.” Again the tears rose, and she hid her face in her hand. She thought that she would hit him if he dared to put his arm round her now.
“I’m sure it’s not that bad.”
“What do you know? What do you care? You know nothing about me.” Molly rounded on him, moist eyes blazing. She knew that she was being unfair, that he was only trying to be kind, but she was so unhappy that she lashed out anyway.
He looked back at her with an expression of obvious distress. “Well, in a way that’s true. But in another way I know quite a lot about you. I know your birthday, for example: the twenty-fourth of May. I know where you were born. I know that your middle name is Catherine.”
“God, who are you? A detective or something?”
He shook his head and smiled.
“Well, how do you know my birthday, then? Are you some kind of creep who’s found me on the Internet, maybe intercepted my e-mails?”
“Do you really think that?” He looked her calmly in the eye.
“All right, no. But how do you know so much about me—and why should you be interested in me?”
“Can’t you guess?”
Molly shook her head. But an idea was stirring in her mind. A ridiculous idea. Impossible. She looked out across the playground and wrapped her arms round her waist.
He was silent for a moment. “Let me try to explain this another way.” He took a deep breath. “Will you let me tell you a story?”
She nodded slowly, staring at the distant trees.
“Once upon a time, a long time ago, a very pretty girl and a rather thoughtless young man met and fell in love. They had a fantastic summer together. He thought she was great. But when the summer came to an end they went their separate ways. He had to go abroad, to work. And although he really, really liked the girl, he
didn’t think about her as much as he probably should have. And what he didn’t know, because she didn’t tell him, was that she was pregnant, and that eight months after he left she gave birth to a daughter. He didn’t find that out until the child was nearly three years old, and by that time the mother had no use for him.”
“What about the little girl?” Molly gripped the railings tight. “Didn’t she have a use for him?”
“I don’t know about that. You see, this man wasn’t allowed to meet her. He didn’t know where she lived.”
“He could have found out . . .”
“You know what I’m telling you, don’t you?”
“No! Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Molly. Look at me. Please. I’ve waited so long for this moment. I’ve thought about it, dreamed about it, feared it might never happen.”
Molly resisted his plea, staring fiercely down at the ground, no longer seeing anything as her eyes misted over. Her heart thudded. A wild hope was growing in her mind. She felt dizzy, as if she could stand only by clutching these railings. “That young man. Was it . . . ? Is it . . . ?” Finally she raised her head. “You?”
He nodded. She saw that his eyes were shiny with tears, but they looked at her steadily. “And that little girl,” he said, “was you. Molly, I’m your father.”
25
Molly gave a wrenching cry and spun away from him. She couldn’t see, she couldn’t think. Her legs staggered. She put out a hand to steady herself, and felt the scaly bark of a tree under her fingers.
“I’m sorry. I know it’s a shock.” His voice was at her shoulder. Out of the corner of her eye she could see his hands hovering in mid-air.
“I’m fine.” But she wasn’t fine. She leaned against the tree, panting for breath.
“Come and sit down.” His hand clasped her elbow, and she allowed herself to be led to a vacant bench under the trees. She rested her forearms on her knees and bent her head to the dusty ground, gulping in air.
“Are you all right?” He sat down beside her, not too close. She stared dumbly at his black leather lace-ups. She was aware that he had turned to face her, one knee riding up on the bench. Perhaps she choked, because she heard him say, “Let me get you some water. Don’t move.”
She heard the crunch of his shoes on the gravel. A moment later she raised her head and saw him loping toward a wooden building, the flaps of his jacket flying. At the entrance he looked back and raised a hand, perhaps to reassure her—or to reassure himself that she was still there—then disappeared inside. It seemed to be some kind of café or restaurant, housed in a quaint structure whose shingle roof and deep eaves reminded Molly of a woodcutter’s cottage in a fairy tale. The people who sat at the windows, sipping from cups and raising genteel forkfuls of cake to their mouths, looked equally unreal.
In a minute he was out again, carrying a tumbler of water, trying to hurry, careful not to spill. Molly watched him approach—this stranger—her father. Could it be true? Out of all the men in the world, out of all the fathers she had fantasized into life, the choices had suddenly narrowed down to one middle-aged man in a tan jacket and blue shirt walking toward her.
“Here. Take your time.” He bent to give her the water, then sat down beside her again, watching her face as she drank. She held the glass to her lips with both hands and took slow sips, trying to calm her spinning thoughts. At length she summoned enough control to lower the glass and turn to him. “Is it true?”
“Yes, it’s true.” His eyes were tender and anxious: blue eyes, she noticed, like hers. But that meant nothing.
“What makes you so sure I’m your . . .” She hesitated. It seemed too intimate to say the word aloud.
“My daughter? My daughter Molly?” Far from hesitating, his voice brimmed with joyous conviction. He laughed and pushed a hand roughly over his hair. Then he swivelled sideways on the bench to stare directly into her eyes. “Isn’t it obvious?”
Molly looked away. This sudden intimacy with a stranger was too much for her. To cover her confusion, she fired more questions at him. “Why are you telling me now? Why here, in Paris? Why didn’t you look for me earlier?” She wanted to say: Where have you been all my life?
“Because I didn’t know how to find you. And for another reason I’ll explain in a minute. You see, I’m here only because I happened to see your name on the conference bumf. Phipps Lauzer Bergman invited me months ago. I never intended to come. But I’m not very organized and I didn’t get round to replying, so a few weeks ago they wrote again, asking me whether I was attending and including a list of everyone coming to the conference. I glanced through it, just to have a chuckle at the careerists and free-loaders among my colleagues, and was about to bin the lot when a name leaped out at me: Molly Clearwater. I couldn’t believe it!”
“So you knew my name? You knew I existed?”
“I’ve known of your existence for nineteen years. But I didn’t know where you lived, not even whether you were in England. Suddenly here was my chance to see you, to get to know you—if, of course, it was you. But Clearwater’s an unusual name. I didn’t really have any doubts. And now that I’ve met you I don’t have any doubts at all.”
Molly felt her own doubts melting in the sunshine of his confidence. An absurd hope was rising in her. She stared at him speechlessly, barely able to take in what he was saying.
“I could have simply phoned you up at work, or waylaid you outside your office,” he continued, “but this is such a tremendous thing for me, meeting you at last. I was terrified of blundering in on your life in a way that might frighten you, and make you reject me. I thought that if we met in normal circumstances, on neutral territory, as it were, we’d have the chance to get to know each other a little before—well, before I sprang this surprise on you. I wanted to find out what sort of a person you were first, maybe even get a hint of your feelings about your unknown father.”
“So you were, um, interested in me, sort of?”
“Of course I was interested! I nearly went mad waiting for this conference, and wondering what you would think of me. I had my hair cut specially. I bought this jacket. I know,” he added quickly, brushing at the creases on his sleeve, “it doesn’t look new. Something happens to clothes when I put them on. And I’m a lousy packer. But I can assure you that this is the first time I’ve ever worn it, in your honor.”
There was such warmth in his eyes that Molly couldn’t help responding with a faint smile. But she wasn’t interested in his jacket. “Go on,” she said.
“The minute I arrived at the hotel, I asked the front desk if you’d checked in. Not yet, they said. I asked again when I came down for dinner, and learned that your booking had been canceled, and you weren’t coming at all. God, that was a low point. I nearly got on a plane and went home. Little did I guess that fate was going to lead you to me anyway, mysteriously disguised as a raven-haired Australian spouting French nursery rhymes!”
Molly put a hand to her hair, blushing as she remembered. That awful wig! In the many and various fantasies in which she’d staged a meeting with her father, the one constant had been her own poised and impressive appearance. “I must have looked ridiculous.”
“You were fantastic! Resourceful, brave, delightful. You cheered me up when I was feeling depressed about coming to the conference for nothing. Of course I didn’t know then who you were. But I worried that you were in trouble. As soon as I met the absurd Figg, I understood perfectly your desire to avoid him at all costs. By the way, his story is that he fired you.”
“I resigned!” Molly said indignantly.
“Of course you did. Any intelligent person would. Though I shall always be grateful to him, since he was the one who inadvertently revealed that you were the girl I’d been looking for all along. And, thanks to him, I managed to get your number. My messages didn’t frighten you, did they?”
“Not exactly. They were just, you know, weird. No one uses proper punctuation or spelling like that.” She suppressed a
smile, not sure yet if she could tease him.
“Don’t they?” He seemed shocked. Then his face cleared. “Anyway, you came. That’s the main thing.”
“I nearly didn’t.”
They exchanged a look. The tension in his mouth and the softness in his eyes told her as clearly as words how much he had feared that she wouldn’t come, and how overwhelmed he was that she had. There was no doubting that he cared.
But not that much, she thought bitterly, or he wouldn’t have waited all this time to tell her so. Probably, in a little while, having satisfied his curiosity, he would remember that he had an appointment to keep, or a plane to catch. It had been so interesting to meet her. They must keep in touch. How dare he invade her life now, when it was too late? Molly looked away. She felt suddenly claustrophobic in the shade of these somber trees, whose perfectly spaced trunks hemmed her in like prison bars. The jingle-jangle of a carousel had started up nearby. In a patch of sunlight she could see prancing horses with scarlet nostrils and seafoam manes, swooping up and down. Small children clung to the gilt barley-sugar rods, and beamed seed-pearl smiles at their hovering parents. She stood up. “I’d better take this glass back,” she said.
“No, no, let me.” He jumped to his feet, and practically wrenched it from her hands. He looked at her worriedly, sensing her change of mood.
She could read in his eyes the fear that she might leave now, and felt an impulse to hurt him. “Did you say Griffith or Griffin? I can’t quite remember.”
“Griffin. Jonathan Peter.” Though his voice and gaze were steady, she could tell she had upset him. He twisted the glass nervously. “Molly, I—I don’t know what you’ve been told about me. I appreciate that you may not be interested in me. The last thing I want is to disrupt your life. If—if you don’t want anything to do with me, I’ll try to understand. But your existence has been very important to me for nearly twenty years, and now that we’ve met, you are very important to me.” He broke off, frowning with the intensity of his thoughts. Emotions scudded across his face like shadows of clouds on a bright field, and she knew that he was choosing, discarding, editing his words, anxious not to get it wrong. He turned back to her. “You’re grown-up now. I’ve missed your childhood. That’s the brutal fact we both have to face. But I would like to explain why. I would like to tell you the story from my side—if you’re willing to hear it.”
