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sounded like bad news to George. Was Sheila happy, living like this? Was it a Sapphic arrangement? He assumed so.
    That he had fathered Sheila at all was a profoundly unsettling fact. It was like finding that one was the heir to someone whom one knew only from items of gossip in newspapers, and it raised a similar cloud of guilty whys and wherefores.
    It was a thousand years since he had felt himself to be her father, her his child. It had been like that once. He remembered holding a torch to the print of a book in a darkened room. Sheila was ill with measles. He was reading her to sleep. The book was
The Wind in the Willows
. To Sheila in Aden, the Thames Valley of Ratty, Mole and Mr Toad was as delightfully unreal as Samarkand. George made it up for her: the leaves of the green trees feathering the water like long fingers; the freshly rinsed colours of England after a summer shower; the tumbledown brick cottages under their bonnets of thatch; men and girls in punts; lock keepers’ gardens; mysterious weirpools where big pike swirled.
    “Do Mr Toad again, Daddy—”
    George, perched on the edge of the Indian Ocean, went toot-tooting his way through Wallingford and Goring as Sheila fell to sleep, a drowsy giggle the last sound from under her thin blue Navy blanket.
    A year after the divorce, George came back to London in December. Busy with visits to shipping agents, he’d asked the girl at the hotel desk to buy him two tickets for a matinée of “Puss in Boots” and had gone to Liverpool Street to meet his daughter from the train.
    She was a foundling. Sternly buckled into her schoolgirl gaberdine, she stepped from a trailing cloud of thick steam from the engine. Her hair was pulled back from her skull in plaits. She wore spectacles with round gunmetal frames which magnified her puritan, Tribulation Wholesome eyes. When Sheila’s eyes came to rest on George, he felt arraigned in them.
    God knew what Angela had told the child; God knew what Sheila herself, this vessel of probity, thought she knew. Whatever it was, she clearly wasn’t telling George. She walked by his side like a wimpled nun. It must have pained her, George felt, to be seen in the company of a man of such desperate reputation. Even before they left the station, he wanted to explain to strangers that his intentions were innocent, this girl really was his daughter.
    By the time they were rounding St Paul’s in the taxi, he knewthat the tickets to the pantomime in his pocket were an offence. He’d meant them to be a surprise. A stupid idea. He should have known.
A panto?
How could he have dared to inflict anything so frivolous on this severe stranger?
    All through lunch he felt punished. Sheila drank water, and stared at him each time he gulped at his wine, then set him questions about his health. She dismissed the ice cream when it came and said it was bad for her teeth. He asked her, thinking sadly of the panto tickets, if she was at all interested in the theatre.
    “We never go in Norwich,” Sheila said. “In any case, Mummy finds it jolly hard to make ends meet.”
    So they went instead to a news cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue and saw the huge bald baby face of Eisenhower, triumphant in his re-election. George sneaked sideways glances at his daughter in the stalls: her eyes were fixed on the screen, her hands folded in the lap of her mackintosh. She seemed utterly indifferent to the presence of her father.
If only
…
if only
… George thought of “Puss in Boots” just a few doors up the street. They would be into the second act by now. George imagined another father, another daughter, leaning together over a shared box of chocolates in the dark; the Dame shouting “Oh, yes, it is!”, and the auditorium of children roaring back “Oh, no, it isn’t!” Not his child. She was gazing at a sequence of cold black and white pictures of Anthony Eden opening a new civic housing project in Birmingham.
    When they left the cinema, Sheila consented to