“May I go to Lizzie’s now?” Margaret wheedled.
Her mother ruffled her hair. “Yes, all right. For half an hour. But you must do your piano practice as soon as you come back.”
Margaret nodded eagerly, said a polite goodbye to Jean and scurried out of the room.
What a dear little girl, thought Jean with an uprush of longing. Aloud she said, “You are very fortunate.”
“I know,” said Mrs. Tilbury. “She’s an angel.”
The tea had gone cold now but Jean refused the offer of a fresh pot. Now that Margaret was out of earshot they could talk freely again and there was so much more to be said.
“Did they cure you?”
“Who?”
“St. Cecilia’s. You said you were bedbound for four months.”
“I wouldn’t say it was the doctors who cured me. But toward the end I was certainly much better and although I have had occasional flare-ups since, nothing like I had as a child. Since I had Margaret, in fact, my symptoms seem to have almost disappeared.” She waggled her hands. “If I have been doing a lot of hand-sewing I sometimes feel the old stiffness in my wrists and then I just wear my funny bandages until it goes away again.”
“You’re a dressmaker?”
“Yes—I do alterations and repairs and make clothes to order. Wedding dresses and things like that.”
“Goodness. You must be very accomplished.” Jean’s own needlework skills were rudimentary and confined to essential mending. Falling hems, dangling buttons. Darning was a particular horror, performed so untidily that her mother had been forced to reclaim the task for herself. “I could never make a dress.”
“It’s terribly simple,” said Mrs. Tilbury. “I could teach you.”
“I’m unteachable,” said Jean. “I have the school reports to prove it.”
They smiled at each other.
“Does Margaret know about her . . . origins?” Jean asked, struggling for the appropriate word. “Parentage” seemed to imply skepticism on her part.
“She knows that her birth was special. She calls my husband Daddy, but she knows he’s not her real father. I mean he is her real father, in the important sense, that he has brought her up and loves her as his own.”
“May I ask what it is you are hoping to achieve by pursuing this investigation? You don’t strike me as someone who craves notoriety.”
This was it—the question that had troubled her more than any other. What did Gretchen Tilbury possibly have to gain from exposing her family to public scrutiny? If her case was proven she would become a phenomenon, an object of ravenous and intrusive curiosity to medical science. If she was found to be a fake, her reputation and possibly her marriage would be in shreds.
“I suppose I just read that article in your paper and I thought, Yes! That’s me! And I wanted someone to prove what I had always known.”
“But you must understand that our position—mine, the paper’s, the scientists’， the public’s—will be one of extreme skepticism. It’s not like a court of law—your word will be doubted until it can be proved true. And I won’t leave any stone unturned.”
“I understand that. But I don’t have anything to hide so I have nothing to worry about.”
“What about your husband? Is he in agreement?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And he’s not putting you under any pressure to . . . prove yourself?”
“No, no. He already believes me absolutely.”
“All the same, I think I’d like to speak to him, if that’s all right with you. And even if it isn’t,” Jean added, remembering the stones unturned.
Mrs. Tilbury glanced at her watch. “He doesn’t get home until six-thirty. He has a jeweler’s shop near Covent Garden—Bedford Street. There is a telephone at the shop. We don’t have one here.”
Jean turned her notepad to face her and Mrs. Tilbury wrote down his name and number in her strange continental script; those crossed sevens and the nines like little gs.
“Thank you,” said Jean, though she had no intention of calling him. She planned to turn up at his shop unannounced. She closed her notebook to signal that the interview was over.
“What happens now?” asked Mrs. Tilbury.
“I’m going to contact the geneticist who wrote the original article and ask if there are some tests that can be run on you and Margaret to establish whether or not parthenogenesis took place. You’d need to be able to get up to London. I assume that’s not going to be a problem?”