The Collector's Daughter by Gill Paul

Author:Gill Paul [Gill Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Published: 2021-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Nine

London, February 1973

Eve couldn’t help worrying about Ana Mansour. There had been no reply to her letter so she decided to try telephoning to ask how she was. Brograve wouldn’t approve but she could call when he went out for his walk after luncheon. That was the time when she usually rang her friends, sitting at the telephone table in the hall with a cup of tea to have a good old natter.

The phone in the hotel rang out for a long time and Eve was about to give up when a man with a foreign accent answered. He knew who Ana Mansour was and Eve heard the creaking of stairs, then a knock on the door. There was a pause followed by the sound of feet hurrying down and the receiver being lifted.

“Lady Beauchamp?” Ana said, with hope in her voice.

“Please, at this point you should call me Eve,” she replied. “I wanted to telephone to say I’m worried about you stuck here without your children, and to say please don’t stay in London on my account. I will try to find some information for you but there are lots of gaps in my memory and I’m not sure if I will be able to help.”

Ana didn’t speak for a moment and when she did, she sounded deflated. It occurred to Eve that by telephoning she had raised her hopes, then torn them down again.

“I need to finish my research before I return to Egypt,” Ana said, “but thank you for your thoughtfulness. I do sympathize with your memory loss. It must be hard.”

Eve tried to shrug it off. “Most of the time it doesn’t affect me. Life goes on, you know. But your questions made me stumble up against some of the blank spots, and I wanted to apologize if I seemed vague.”

She heard the flare of a match as Ana lit a cigarette, then inhaled. Eve got a fleeting sense that she could smell the tobacco smoke wafting down the line.

“After my father’s stroke, he found that writing down his memories helped. The more he wrote, the more he remembered little details that had escaped him. You might try that.” Ana inhaled again.

“Yes, I suppose I could, but I don’t seem to have the concentration for writing anymore. Besides, the difficulty lies in pinpointing exactly what I can’t remember.” She laughed, but it made her anxious. It was one thing knowing what she didn’t remember; what about all the things she didn’t know she wasn’t remembering? There might be some important ones. “How is your father now?” she asked.

“He died over ten years ago,” Ana said, “but I spent a lot of time with him after the stroke. Like you, he had gaps in his memory, and I came to the conclusion that his brain protected him from distressing memories, like his experiences in the war. It made me wonder if . . . Please stop me if you find this upsetting, but I wondered if

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