“What about the hospital?” he said.

“I telephoned. She sent in a note, to say she wouldn’t be in.”

“Until when?”

“What?” She gazed at him, baffled for a moment.

“How long did she say she’d be out?”

“Oh. I didn’t ask.”

“Did she give a reason not to turn up?” She shook her head; she did not know. She bit her lower lip until it turned white. “Maybe she has the flu,” he said. “Maybe she decided to go off on a holiday- they make those juinior doctors work like blacks, you know.”

“She would have told me,” she muttered. Saying this, with that stubborn set to her mouth, she was again for a second the child that he remembered.

“I’ll phone the people there,” he said, “in her department. I’ll find out what’s going on. Don’t worry.”

She smiled, but so tentatively, with such effort, still biting her lip, that he saw clearly how distressed she was. What was he to do, what was he to say to her?

He walked with her down to the front gate. The brief day was drawing in and the gloom of twilight was drifting into the fog and thickening it, like soot. He had no overcoat and he was cold, but he insisted on going all the way to the gate. Their partings were always awkward; she had kissed him, just once, years before, when she did not know he was her father, and at such moments as this the memory of that kiss still flashed out between them with a magnesium glare. He touched her elbow lightly with a fingertip and stepped back. “Don’t worry,” he said again, and again she smiled, and nodded, and turned away. He watched her go through the gate, that absurd scarlet feather on her hat dipping and swaying, then he called out to her, “I forgot to say- I’m going to buy a car.”