"Not if Dad keeps on stealing the best pictures—"
"True." Becky smiled. "But if he goes on the way he is now, our private collection will be worth more than the business—as selling my van Gogh back to the Lefevre Gallery proved only too cruelly. He has the best amateur's eye I've ever come across—but don't ever tell him I said so."
Becky began to concentrate on the signs directing her to the docks and finally brought the car to a halt alongside the liner, but not quite so close as Daphne had once managed, if she remembered correctly.
Daniel sailed out of Southampton on the Queen Mary that evening, with his mother waving from the dockside.
While on board the great liner he wrote a long letter to his parents, which he posted five days later from Fifth Avenue. He then purchased a ticket on the Twentieth Century Limited for a Pullman to Chicago. The train pulled out of Penn Station at eight the same night, Daniel having spent a total of six hours in Manhattan, where his only other purchase was a guidebook of America.
Once they had reached Chicago, the Pullman carriage was attached to the Super Chief which took him all the way to San Francisco.
During the four-day journey across America he began to regret he was going to Australia at all. As he passed through Kansas City, Newton City, La Junta, Albuquerque and Barstow, each city appeared more interesting than the last. Whenever the train pulled into a new station Daniel would leap off, buy a colorful postcard that indicated exactly where he was, fill in the white space with yet more information gained from the guidebook before the train reached the next station. He would then post the filled-in card at the following stop and repeat the process. By the time the express had arrived at Oakland Station, San Francisco, he had posted twenty-seven different cards back to his parents in the Little Boltons.
Once the bus had dropped him off in St. Francis Square, Daniel booked himself into a small hotel near the harbor after checking the tariff was well within his budget. As he still had a thirty-six-hour wait before the SS Aorangi was due to depart, he traveled out to Berkeley and spent the whole of the second day with Professor Stinstead. Daniel became so engrossed with Stinstead's research on tertiary calculus that he began to regret once again that he would not be staying longer, as he suspected he might learn far more by remaining at Berkeley than he would ever discover in Australia.
On the evening before he was due to sail, Daniel bought twenty more postcards and sat up until one in the morning filling them in. By the twentieth his imagination had been stretched to its limit. The following morning, after he had settled his bill, he asked the head porter to mail one of the postcards every three days until he returned. He handed over ten dollars and promised the porter that there would be a further ten when he came back to San Francisco, but only if the correct number of cards remained, as precisely when he would be back remained uncertain.
The senior porter was puzzled but pocketed the ten dollars, commenting in an aside to his young colleague on the desk that he had been asked to do far stranger things in the past, for far less.
By the time Daniel boarded the SS Aorangi his beard was no longer a rough stubble and his plan was as well prepared as it could be, given that his information had been gathered from the wrong side of the globe. During the voyage Daniel found himself seated at a large circular table with an Australian family who were on their way home from a holiday in the States. Over the next three weeks they added greatly to his store of knowledge, unaware that he was listening to every word they had to say with uncommon interest.
Daniel sailed into Sydney on the first Monday of August 1947. He stood out on the deck and watched the sun set behind Sydney Harbour Bridge as a pilot boat guided the liner slowly into the harbor. He suddenly felt very homesick and, not for the first time, wished he had never embarked on the trip. An hour later he had left the ship and booked himself into a guest house which had been recommended to him by his traveling companions.
The owner of the guest house, who introduced herself as Mrs. Snell, turned out to be a big woman, with a big smile and a big laugh, who installed him into what she described as her deluxe room. Daniel was somewhat relieved that he hadn't ended up in one of her ordinary rooms, because when he lay down the double bed sagged in the center, and when he turned over the springs followed him, dinging to the small of his back. Both taps in the washbasin produced cold water in different shades of brown, and the one naked light that hung from the middle of the room was impossible to read by, unless he stood on a chair directly beneath it. Mrs. Snell hadn't supplied a chair.
When Daniel was asked the next morning, after a breakfast of eggs, bacon, potatoes and fried bread, whether he would be eating in or out, he said firmly, "Out," to the landlady's evident disappointment.
The first and critical call was to be made at the Immigration Office. If they had no information to assist him, he knew he might as well climb back on board the SS Aorangi that same evening. Daniel was beginning to feel that if that happened he wouldn't be too disappointed.
The massive brown building on Market Street, which housed the official records of every person who had arrived in the colony since 1823, opened at ten o'clock. Although he arrived half an hour early Daniel still had to join one of the eight queues of people attempting to establish some fact about registered immigrants, which ensured that he didn't reach the counter for a further forty minutes.
When he eventually did get to the front of the queue he found himself looking at a ruddy-faced man in an open-necked blue shirt who was slumped behind the counter.
"I'm trying to trace an Englishman who came to Australia at some time between 1922 and 1925."
"Can't we do better than that, mate?"
"I fear not," said Daniel.
"You fear not, do you?" said the assistant. "Got a name, have you?"
"Oh, yes," said Daniel. "Guy Trentham."
"Trentham. How do you spell that?"
Daniel spelled the name out slowly for him.
"Right, mate. That'll be two pounds." Daniel extracted his wallet from inside his sports jacket and handed over the cash. "Sign here," the assistant said, swiveling a form round and placing his forefinger on the bottom line. "And come back Thursday."
"Thursday? But that's not for another three days."
"Glad they still teach you to count in England," said the assistant. "Next."
Daniel left the building with no information, merely a receipt for his two pounds. Once back out on the pavement, he picked up a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald and began to look for a cafe near the harbor at which to have lunch. He selected a small restaurant that was packed with young people. A waiter led him across a noisy, crowded room and seated him at a little table in the corner. He had nearly finished reading the paper by the time a waitress arrived with the salad he had ordered. He pushed the paper on one side, surprised that there hadn't been one piece of news about what was taking place back in England.
As he munched away at a lettuce leaf and wondered how he could best use the unscheduled hold-up constructively, a girl at the next table leaned across and asked if she could borrow the sugar.
"Of course, allow me," said Daniel, handing over the shaker. He wouldn't have given the girl a second glance had he not noticed that she was reading Principia Mathematica, by A. N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell.
"Are you a mathematics student, by any chance?" he asked once he had passed the sugar across.