That she was lucky, Polly already knew. How could she not? She had been told over and over throughout her childhood. Her school friends had been emphatic on the matter. They all admired Nora, wishing their own mothers could be just like her. She was the only one who would host actual high tea parties in the dining rooms of expensive hotels, or with Mrs. Robinson in a maid’s uniform at Darling House. Girls clamored for invitations, despite having no time for Polly when she was on her own at school.
Polly knew that she was not as charming or as fun or as good at friend-making as her mother; now she noticed all of the other ways in which they were different. Nora was a confident person who relished attention, and Polly was not. Nora’s complexion was pale with a tendency to freckle, whereas Polly’s was light olive. Nora was unmoved by music, where certain songs made Polly weep. Polly started to keep a list of their differences in a notebook, wondering whether they were traits she held in common with her father, and under this consideration the negative space began to grow and take on a shape.
Eventually, Polly worked up the courage to ask her mother directly about Mr. Bridges.
“Who told you about him?” Nora demanded, and then, “Never mind. He’s nothing.”
“He’s my father,” Polly dared to venture.
“He’s not your father! He could never have fathered a wonderful child like you.”
But Polly didn’t believe her. She had been lied to for too long. Besides, there was no other explanation. She continued to raise the subject. Every birthday she wondered whether she was finally old enough for her mother to trust her with the truth. Her proximity to answers made the lack of knowledge agonizing. She would walk into a room where her mother was entertaining friends and a hush would fall over the group, followed by a greeting, artificial in its cheerfulness, and she would torture herself with the possibility that they all knew. She began to feel less of a full person, as if she were see-through. She became withdrawn and silent; she felt herself disappearing.
And then, one day, when she was eighteen and pregnant with Jess, she found him. She had learned by then how to use the library resources, and she tracked him down. On a breezy afternoon in May, she waited for him outside his office at Crows Nest, and when he emerged, briefcase in hand, she approached from the other side of the street.
He smiled cheerfully when he saw her—courtesy, no more—and, for want of a better introduction, she blurted out, “I think you’re my father.”
A moment’s hesitation and then, “Polly?”
Her legs felt as if they might collapse. She nodded.
Richard Bridges walked closer, his gaze taking in the features of her face as hers did the same to his. At length, he smiled again, more warmly this time. Polly realized that his eyes had glazed. “I wondered if I’d ever see you,” he said. “Would you like to have a coffee?”
Polly didn’t drink coffee—didn’t drink much of anything during that stage of her pregnancy—but of course she agreed.
“She told me you weren’t mine,” he explained, as they sat on opposite sides of a table at a nearby cafe. “She was very firm about it. She had a solicitor write to me, telling me not to contact you.”
“Well, I’m an adult now, and I’m the one contacting you.”
They talked pleasantly, but politely, about their lives, and about Nora and the past—a strange social experience. She told him a little bit about her school years, and he told her that he’d married again and had a son and two daughters. Polly’s heart clenched at the prospect of half-siblings. For a moment she’d glimpsed what it might feel like not to be so alone.
When it was time to go, Richard Bridges said, “I suppose we should have one of those tests, shouldn’t we?”
He meant a DNA test. It made sense, Polly considered, given what Nora had told them both, and he offered to pay, so they did.
The test came back negative. So, whatever else could be said against Nora, she had been telling the truth when she said that her daughter had been conceived with someone else.
Polly was bereft. But as the truth of the result sank in, she realized that she wasn’t completely surprised. If she were honest, no matter how deeply she had wanted to belong somewhere and to someone, she had felt no sense of recognition when she met Richard Bridges. Nothing in his face, or in his gestures, genial as they were, had reached out and connected with her, given her a sense of kinship, of coming home.
Richard Bridges was as flummoxed as Polly. “She said you weren’t mine, but I never truly believed it. I couldn’t work it out at the time and I’m afraid I still can’t. How could you be anyone else’s?”
The answer seemed self-evident, and Polly felt a wave of embarrassment for him, followed quickly by sympathy. He was trying to save face; he was humiliated by the proof that his wife had once upona time been unfaithful to him. Polly didn’t know what to say and settled on “I’m sorry.”
He appeared not to have heard; he was deep in his own thoughts and memories. “She was desperate to conceive,” he continued with a frown. “We’d lost a few pregnancies already. It happens, I’m told. I was never sure exactly what the problem was. We had all the tests; she made sure of that.
“But there was no one else but me. I suppose that sounds terribly self-confident, but that’s not how I mean it. At the risk of being indelicate, she had seen a doctor, the most recent in a long string, who gave her a window of days and said she needed to make sure she gave herself every chance.
“She didn’t leave the house that week and she didn’t let me leave, either. She saw no one except the housekeeper, Jane Robinson, and Dr. Bruce, who made house calls. Afterward, she stayed in bed for a fortnight because she said it gave the baby a better chance of ‘sticking.’ And, say what you will, it worked, she was pregnant. But I was there that month—it couldn’t have been anyone else.”
It was an awkward farewell, and Polly had the sense, as she turned to watch him walk away, of sliding doors. There went the man who might have been her father, with whom she had shared the rather intimate experience of having their DNA compared, reduced now to the status of a stranger, someone she would probably never see or speak to again.
The flight attendant was still demonstrating the life vest and whistle, and Polly tried to pay attention. She had seen it all before, of course, more than once, but watching the woman’s presentation seemed to be the least one could do. She couldn’t help her mind wandering, though.
Polly hadn’t told Nora about her meeting with Richard Bridges, the test they’d done. What would have been the point? But he hadleft her with a problem to puzzle over. In the evenings, when she sat on the garden seat overlooking the harbor, she would recollect their conversations; in particular, she remembered Richard Bridges’s insistence that Nora couldn’t possibly have betrayed him.
His argument had been one of reason rather than emotion. Nora hadn’t left the house, he’d said; as far as he was aware, the only people she’d seen during the month that Polly was conceived were him, her doctor, and Mrs. Robinson. But where Mr. Bridges drew one conclusion from that set of facts, Polly came to another.
Nora had laughed uproariously when Polly asked whether Dr. Bruce was her father and told her not to be so ridiculous. “Honestly, Polly, I don’t know where you get these ideas. Dr. Bruce is a very handsome man, and you could certainly do worse, but he is not your father.” She’d sobered before continuing: “Darling, it really isn’t wise to make wild accusations like that.”
