That paragraph, and others, reminded me of the way the
old man had talked, and I wondered why scientists had to make things so unbelievably abstruse. There can he little doubt that the immediately preceding drop in sea level by nearly ^00 feet was eustatic What the hell did eustatic mean?. . and that it reflected the withdraiual of water during the WiXrm Glaciation. Vaguely I remembered that the level of the oceans had varied in geological time according to the amount of water held in suspension in the form of ice.
I sat there for a time, sipping my drink, thinking of the seas I had sailed and how changed the shoreline would have been with the water level lowered by 300 feet. I could not recall what the depths were in the Malta Channel, but all that area of the Mediterranean was shallow. Volcanic, too-those banks that had emerged, been reported, and had then submerged again.
Thinking about the Mediterranean I suddenly remembered my birth certificate. As proof that I had another name, that I had been born Paul Scott, it might be useful. I reached down and got the old cigar box out of the bottom drawer of the desk. I was just about to fold the papers small enough to fit into my wallet when I saw that the half-sheet of notepaper announcing my birth had something written on the back. I unpinned it and turned it over, laying it flat on the desk and smoothing it out as I read the words my mother had written twenty-eight years ago: My husband will never know, of course, but it was wrong, wrong, ivrong-of me, of you. We should never have met again. Now God knows whose child he is. Just those three lines, nothing more, except her name- Ruth. She had signed it. If she hadn't signed it I could have pretended it was a lie, something added later. But it was in the same hand-the same hand as the love letters in the bureau. Christ Almighty! To discover you were born a bastard and that your mother was sleeping with a man old enough to be her father. Or was he? What age would the old man have been then? I didn't know. All I knew was that the last childish tie, clung to through all the years of loneliness following the tragedy, was now gone, killed by the lines my mother had added, now lying faded in the pool of light cast by the Angle-poise lamp.
My first reaction was one of anger. I was filled with a deep, instinctive sense of shame. But then, as I thought about it, my mood changed, for I had no doubt, no doubt at all. Everything suddenly made sense-the long, vividly remembered journey to Europe, his meeting me at Schipol Airport and the years in this house. No wonder Dr. Gilmore had looked at me so strangely when I had insisted that he was only my father by adoption. And now that I knew the truth, the whole relationship took on a deeper significance. I understood at last the emotions of love and hate that had always existed between us.
I pinned the sheets of paper together again-my mother's note, my birth certificate and the adoption papers. It was all there, the whole story. Why hadn't I realized it before? I should have known the truth without my mother's frantic confession of guilt. And he had never told me. In all those years he had never even implied that I owed him a deeper allegiance than that of an adopted son. Why? Was it just the code of an earlier generation, their greater chivalry towards women, or had it been the fear that I might not understand a love that must have been compelling and uncontrollable?
I sat there for a long time, the papers in my hand. The conviction that he was my natural father-a certainty that was instinctive rather than logical-affected me profoundly as I went over in my mind all that Dr. Gilmore had said. It gave me a sense of pride I had never had before, pride in him and in that part of me that I now recognized as belonging to him. We were so entirely different on the surface-but underneath … I was smiling to myself, remembering the latent hostility, my struggle to survive against the strength of his personality, when my thoughts were interrupted by the knocker banging at the front door. I slipped the papers into my wallet and went down to find a man of about forty-five standing there.
"You're Dr. Van der Voort's son, are you?" He spoke English with a North Country accent and my body suddenly froze. But then he said, "I'm Professor Holroyd of London University. Gilmore told me I'd find you here."
I was too relieved to say anything. I just stood there, staring at him. He had a pipe in his mouth and his face was round and smooth, his manner brisk. "I'd like a word with you."
I took him up to the study and he went straight over to the swivel chair and sat himself down. "I haven't much time," he said. "I'm attending a conference at The Hague and I'm due shortly at the Rijksmuseum." His overcoat was unbuttoned and his dark suit hung on him so loosely it might have been made for somebody else. "I'm not a man who believes in beating about the bush. I've done some checking up on your father. I'll tell you why later."
Though he was speaking with his pipe clamped between his teeth, he still managed to arrange his mouth in a smile. The smile, and the twinkle that went with it, were both produced to order. He thrust his head forward in a way that I was sure he had found effective. "He was a Communist. You know that, I imagine."
"What do you want?" I asked.
"Your co-operation. That's all." He took his pipe out of his mouth and began to fill it. "You're not a Communist yourself, are you?"
"No."
"You reacted against your father's ideological principles, eh?"
"How do you mean?"
"Well, I presume you are aware of his political activities."
"He was helped by the Russians-I know that. But only from Dr. Gilmore."
"I see." He lit his pipe, puffing at it quickly and watching me over the flame, his eyes narrowed. "I'd better fill in the picture for you then. Pieter Van der Voort joined the Communist Party as a student in nineteen twenty-eight. He resigned in nineteen forty following the Russian invasion of Finland. I have no information as to whether he renewed his membership following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in nineteen forty-one. Probably not, since he would have been suspect as a revisionist. We can, however, regard him as a fellow-traveller. Certainly he was in Russia in nine-
teen forty-six and was mixing freely with their most prominent academics in the years immediately after the war. Later he returned to Amsterdam, and from nineteen fifty onwards he was kept supplied with substantial funds. This enabled him to embark on a whole series of costly expeditions, the results of which were published in Russian scientific journals. Later, they were incorporated into books produced by the Russian State Publishing House with eulogistic forewords by Ivan Szorkowski, a very mediocre, but politically powerful, professor of Moscow University."
"Are you suggesting the work he did during this period was purely political?"
"No, no. The articles he wrote for the scientific journals, which concerned only the results of his expeditions, were of universal interest. They established him as one of the most outstanding men in his field."
"Then why are you telling me this?"
He held up his hands. "Let me finish. Then I think you'll see. The books were undoubtedly political. They drew certain quite unwarranted conclusions. And since these were favourable to the Russian image, they were widely reviewed and acclaimed throughout the Communist world. The second of them was published in nineteen fifty-six, the year Russia crushed the Hungarian uprising. He was, therefore, very much in the limelight at the precise moment when he was again faced with the sort of personal political dilemma that had caused him to resign his Party membership in nineteen forty."