She smiled, mainly from the sense of release from her anxiety at the take-off, but also at the discovery that the man she was seated beside was as generous and open in expression as he was in conversation. In no way was he a predatory male. She warmed to him — his shining blue eyes in a round, tanned face topped with a patch of hair like cropped corn, his small hands holding tight to the armrests, his check Levi shirt bulging over the seat belt he had not troubled to unclasp. ‘You on a vacation too?’ he asked.
She felt able to respond now. ‘Actually I live in England.’
‘You’re English? How about that!’ He made it sound like one of the more momentous discoveries of his life, oblivious that there must have been at least a hundred Britons on the flight. ‘You’ve been on vacation in California, and now you’re travelling home?’
There was a ten-hour flight ahead of them, and Eva’s innately shy personality flinched at the prospect of an extended conversation, but the man’s candour deserved an honest reply. ‘Not exactly a vacation. I work in the electronics industry. My company wants to make a big push in the production of microcomputers. They sent me to see the latest developments in your country.’
‘Around Santa Clara?’
‘That’s right,’ said Eva, surprised that he should know. ‘Are you by any chance in electronics?’
He laughed. ‘No, I’m just one of the locals. The place is known as Silicon Valley, did you know that? I’m in farming, and I take an interest in the way the land is used. Excuse me for saying this: you’re pretty young to be representing your company on a trip like this.’
‘Not so young really. I’m twenty-eight.’ But she understood his reaction. She herself had been amazed when the Director of Research had called her into his office and asked her to make the trip. Some of her colleagues were equally astonished. The most incredulous was her flat-mate, Janet, suave, sophisticated Janet, who was on the editorial side at the Sunday Telegraph, and had been on assignments to Dublin, Paris and Geneva, and was always telling Eva how deadly dull it was to be confined to an electronics lab.
‘Wish I were twenty-eight,’ said her fellow traveller. ‘That was the year I was married. Patty was a wonderful wife to me. We had some great times.’
He paused in a way that begged Eva’s next question. ‘Something went wrong?’
‘She went missing three years back. Just disappeared. No note. Nothing. I came home one night and she was gone.’
‘That’s terrible.’
‘It broke me up. There was no accounting for it. We were very happily married.’
‘Did you tell the police?’
‘Yes, but they have hundreds of missing persons on their files. They got nowhere. I have to presume she is dead. Patty was happy with me. We had a beautiful home and more money than we could spend. I own two vineyards, big ones. We had grapes in California before silicon chips, you know.’
She smiled, and as it seemed that he didn’t want to speak any more about his wife, she said, ‘People try to grow grapes in England, but you wouldn’t think too much of them. When I left London the temperature was in the low fifties, and that’s our so-called summer.’
‘I’m not too interested in the weather. I just want to find the place where all the records of births, marriages and deaths are stored, so I can find if I have any family left.’
Eva understood now. This was not just the trip to England to acquire a few generations of ancestors and a family coat of arms. Here was a desperately lonely man. He had lost his wife and abandoned hope of finding her. But he was still searching for someone he could call his own.
‘Would that be Somerset House?’
His question broke through her thoughts.
‘Yes. That is to say, I think the records are kept now in a building in Kings way, just a few minutes’ walk from there. If you asked at Somerset House, they’d tell you.’
‘And is it easy to look someone up?’
‘It should be, if you have names and dates.’
‘I figured I would start with my grandfather. He was born in a village called Edgecombe in Dorset in 1868, and he had three older brothers. Their names were Matthew, Mark and Luke, and I’m offering no prize for guessing what Grandfather was called. My pa was given the same name and so was I. Each of us was an only child. I’d like to find out if any of Grandfather’s brothers got married and had families. If they did, it’s possible that I have some second cousins alive somewhere. Do you think I could get this information?’
‘Well, it’s all there somewhere,’ said Eva.
‘Does it take long?’
‘That’s up to you. You have to find the names in the index first. That can take some time, depending how common the name is. Unfortunately they’re not computerised. You just have to work through the lists.’
‘You’re serious?’
‘Absolutely. There are hundreds of enormous books full of names.’
For the first time in the flight, his brow creased into a frown.
‘Is something wrong?’ asked Eva.
‘Just that my name happens to be Smith.’
Janet thought it was hilarious when Eva told her. ‘All those Smiths! How long has he got, for God’s sake?’
‘In England? Three weeks, I think.’
‘He could spend the whole time working through the index and still get nowhere. Darling, have you ever been there? The scale of the thing beggars description. I bet he gives up on the first day.’
‘Oh, I don’t think he will. This was very important to him.’
‘Whatever for? Does he hope to get a title out of it? Lord Smith of San Francisco?’
‘I told you. He’s alone in the world. His wife disappeared. And he has a weak heart. He expects to die soon.’
‘Probably when he tries to lift one of those index volumes off the shelf,’ said Janet. ‘He must be out of his mind.’ She could never fathom why other people didn’t conform to her ideas of the way life should be conducted.
‘He’s no fool,’ said Eva. ‘He owns two vineyards, and in California that’s big business.’
‘A rich man?’ There was a note of respect in Janet’s voice.
‘Very.’
‘That begins to make sense. He wants his fortune to stay in the family — if he has one.’
‘He didn’t say that, exactly.’
‘Darling, it’s obvious. He’s over here to find his people and see if he likes them enough to make them his beneficiaries.’ Her lower lip pouted in a way that was meant to be amusing, but might have been involuntary. ‘Two vineyards in California! Someone stands to inherit all that, and doesn’t know a thing about it!’
‘If he finds them,’ said Eva. ‘From what you say, the chance is quite remote.’
‘Just about impossible, the way he’s going about it. You say he’s starting with the grandfather and his three brothers, and hoping to draw up a family tree. It sounds beautiful in theory, but it’s a lost cause. I happen to know a little about this sort of thing. When I was at Oxford I got involved in organising an exhibition to commemorate Thomas Hughes — Tom Brown’s Schooldays, right? I volunteered to try and find his descendants, just to see if they had any unpublished correspondence or photographs in the family. It seemed a marvellous idea at the time, but it was hopeless. I did the General Register Office bit, just like your American, and I discovered you simply cannot trace people that way. You can work backwards if you know the names and ages of the present generation, but it’s practically impossible to do it in reverse. That was with a name like Hughes. Imagine the problems with Smiths.’
Eva could see that Janet was right. She pictured John Smith III at his impossible task, and she was touched with pity. ‘There must be some other way he could do this.’