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“But he never did.”

“No. I've found no explanation or letter severing the connection with the
Tribune,
but there was no reason why there should be, since he was not a regular employee. Anyway, I'll leave you to it, but I'm around if you have any questions.”

She went up to her desk by the door, and Eve settled down to her pile of newspapers. She suddenly realized that she did not really know what she was looking for. There was no reason why there should be any news item
about
John McNabb. Cartoonists, with one or two exceptions, remained in the background, and were simply known by their creations: people loved Giles cartoons, but they had no idea what the man himself looked like, or what kind of personality lay behind Grandmother and those fiendish children.

But in default of better material she had to begin with the cartoons. She found that the domestic ones appeared twice a week, usually on Monday and Thursday, but could be shifted if a sensational news item broke on that day. The look of the cartoons was unusual and, Eve thought, attractive: a mixture of sharp lines and wash. The humor was less to her taste, indeed at times it hardly seemed to be humor at all: Andy (the father figure) shouting to Maggie (the mother) in the kitchen, she invisible, he standing over the cat vomiting on the carpet. The balloon read “Maggie, the cat's no so fond of spaghetti Bolognese either.” An early response to Elizabeth David's promotion of Italian cuisine perhaps, but hardly hilarious. Or, one
New Year's Eve, there were the regulation two children (Betsy and Jock) gazing at their father stacking up bottles and asking, “Dad, why do you celebrate Hogmannay when you say every year things get worse?” She thought the problem was the tyro cartoonist with too little experience of life to screw a variety of humor out of it. She jumped forward to 1963 and found the two children, still roughly the same age, standing outside a bedroom door looking at each other with a bubble coming from the inside: “Mummy and Daddy are just playing Profumo and Keeler, darlings.” Not even marginally better.

Looking at more of the later ones, she saw that the traces of Scottish dialect in the early ones had been more or less abandoned for standard southern English as the time went by. Perhaps that was a sign that the cartoons had started to get published in newspapers south of the border as well. Or possibly a sign that John McNabb was only Scottish by name and adoption, and had gradually let his Englishness take over.

He called himself McCrab, both for the pocket cartoons and for the occasional political one-offer. These Eve much preferred. There was one at the time of Harold Macmillan's resignation as prime minister that was typical. The apparently failing statesman is lying in a hospital bed, with R. A. Butler at the bedside. In the next room there is an array of racks, thumbscrews, whips and gibbets, with masked tormentors at the ready and a line of terrified Tory MPs stretching far down the corridor. “I assure you, RAB, I have no intention of influencing the party's choice of my successor” the old fraud is telling the eternal political bridesmaid. Later, when the earl of Home had become
prime minister, the series of McCrab cartoons on the subject showed the newspaper's delight at a Scot succeeding a Scot, along with a distinct implication that the man was by no means so unworldly and untainted by ambition as his reputation at the time suggested. McCrab was showing claws, and Eve liked his work all the better for it.

But there was a limit to what she could learn from forty-year-old cartoons, whether lethal or cozy. Before lunchtime she was up at the reading room's desk talking to Hilda.

“I've reached a bit of an impasse,” she said. “I noticed when we were talking before, you mentioned one of the older employees. I think I might get a better idea of John McNabb if I tried to talk to him.”

“You might well,” agreed Hilda. “He's perfectly compos mentis, and probably willing to have a chin-wag in return for a few drinks or a meal. Pensioners of this company usually are.”

She had turned to her screen and gave a grunt of satisfaction.

“Got something?”

“Yes. His name is Harry Fraser, and his telephone number is 0141 7659 766. When I talked to him yesterday he was in the canteen—they never quite leave us, old journos. We've got quite a bit on him in the records because he was a regular employee. His memory is pretty reliable, though you may have to make some allowance for exaggeration and embroidery—those are in a journalist's bloodstream.”

“I can imagine,” Eve said wholeheartedly. “Did he mention anyone else who knew my father?”

Hilda thought.

“Now you remind me, he did mention someone called Jamie. What was it he said about him? That's right: he said Jamie and he were John McNabb's best friends, one inside the
Tribune
offices, the other in the big world outside. I didn't follow it up because I was getting all the information I thought you would need from Harry. I don't imagine there would be anything about Jamie in our indexes, but you could ask Harry about him. Do you need to use the phone here?”

“No—I need a bite to eat and time to think. I'll ring him from my hotel later.”

Eve calculated that lunchtime would probably be a couple-of-pints time for a retired journalist and that Harry might be too old for mobile phones, so she had a bar snack in her hotel and then went up to her room to make the call. The voice that answered sounded well oiled.

“Harry Fraser here.”

“Oh, Mr. Fraser, you don't know me, but my name is Eve McNabb.”

There was a brief silence.

“Now, you wouldna be John's daughter, would you?”

“I would, yes.”

“His name came up yesterday, otherwise I'd no have thought of it. He's a long time gone, your da'.”

“All my lifetime, almost,” said Eve. “I have no memories of him. Would you be willing to come out with me tonight for a meal and a pint or two, so that you could share your memories of him with me? He left a great hole in my life that I wasn't aware of until recently.”

“Aye, your mother died, I heard recently. I never saw the wee lady after she moved south, but everyone said, and I wasna surprised, that she turned out to be a cracker—just the best teacher you could ever imagine.”

“She was, Harry, she was. A cracker. But it's my father I want to get some idea of. Did he have any other friends in Glasgow who might come along for a bite with us, and share their recollections?”

Perhaps Eve imagined it, but the silence this time seemed loaded.

“It's that Hilda, isn't it? She's been yapping. Yes, there is Jamie Jewell. He's still in the land o' the livin'. But I've no got his address, and—”

“You sound reluctant. Why the doubts?”

She could imagine Harry Fraser pursing his lips.

“We-e-ell, the truth is, he's no verra reliable. Takes a drop too much, and then another. Just talks awa' for the sake of talkin'.”

“Do you know where to get hold of him?”

“Oh aye. Early evenin' he'll be sittin' in his usual place in the Highlander, swappin' tips for tomorrow's racin'. If I can lay hold o' him, I suppose I could get him along to you, supposin' he's not already on to his third pint and on the road to bein' totally useless. If I do, you should be a bit sparin' of whatever he asks of you—and ask he will, that's as sure as death and taxes.”

“Where would you recommend we went?”

“We could try the Spotted Hound. Food's their specialty, and they've a lot o' rooms—wee ones and mediumsize ones, on three floors, so we could be pretty private, supposin' that's what you wanted.”

“I don't know about that. You're the best judge. Is there likely to be anything come up that calls for privacy?”

“Naw, naw, nothin' in the world. Nothin' that I know of, anyway. But your da' left your mother and disappeared to Australia—you never heard from him again to this day, so Hilda in the library told me—”

“Australia!” Eve took a deep breath as she absorbed this new bit of information. “
I've
never heard from him. And my mother believed him to be dead, or told me so all that time I was a child, and after.”

“Aye. So mebbe you wouldn't want all this to be talked about wi' too many prying ears in the vicinity.”

“I suppose not. Look, I'll be in the Spotted Hound at half-past six, and we'll have a meal, and you'll try to bring Jamie along. Oh, and I'll get a table with a bit of privacy if I can.”

She didn't, as she said it, think that privacy was a high priority, but when she thought about it she began to change her mind. Harry Fraser had had a slight reserve about him as soon as the topic of Jamie came up, and the drunkenness and loose tongue of the man seemed an inadequate motivation for it. In any case she was not inclined to think a loose tongue was a drawback in her present situation. Did he imagine Jamie knew something he, Harry, didn't, and that it was discreditable? Already Harry had told her something new, no doubt under the impression that she knew it already.

Her father had gone, apparently, to Australia—the hot, dry climate the doctor had suggested.

At half-past six she was installed in a snug little niche in the Spotted Hound, at a table with two empty chairs
around it and in front of her a glass of Perrier water that could pass as a gin and tonic if the two old men were wary of speaking to a totally clearheaded person. She spotted them the moment their heads appeared toward the top of the stairs leading from the second to the third floor. One was clearly cajoling the other forward. When they appeared at full height, she thought at first they were both small men, but realized when they approached her that the one she identified as Harry Fisher was of medium height, but emaciated and bent. Jamie Jewell was five feet nothing-very-much, with a face suggesting a chirpy personality that was currently overlaid with reluctance. Eve conjectured that this reluctance was fighting against a partiality for free drink and food, in that order. They came toward her, looking like nothing so much as a comedy duo about to get into another fine mess.

“There's no so many lasses on their own here, so you stood out,” explained Harry, shaking hands. “This is Jamie, and he was one of your da's best friends here in Glasgow, an' I doubt he had a better down there in the Auld Enemy.”

“I'm very grateful to you both for coming,” said Eve, standing up. “Now, what will you have to drink? Do you want to see the menu?”

It turned out they were both partial to the pub's steak-and-kidney pie, and each had a favorite dark beer. Eve insisted on their telling her their choice of sweets and went off to give the order at the bar, bringing the two glasses back herself. That was surely a couple of hours mapped out, she thought, with a refill of bitter if absolutely
necessary. As she put the glasses down on the table, Jamie put his hand on hers.

“Takes me back, this does. I used to come here with John and May. Not often, but now and then. It warms my heart that you want to hear about your dad. Let me tell you this—he was a fine man, and don't let anyone say any different. I knew him for years and years. We met at college, in Manchester.”

Eve had noticed his north of England accent. She had also noticed that his enthusiasm for talking about her father contrasted with his apparent reluctance to come and do just that.

“In Manchester?” she said. “I've wondered whether my dad wasn't maybe English rather than Scottish in upbringing.”

“Scottish? Not at all, or hardly. He never did more than the odd visit to relatives before he came up here to live. Durham he went to school in. His mother was Scottish, so he could do captions in the lingo, and bubbles and that, but he was County Durham by birth and upbringing.”

“But how did you both land up in Glasgow?”

Jamie Jewell frowned.

“How John did I don't really know. I expect I did know, but I've forgotten, just as all of us old codgers forget all sorts of really important things. John always did love doing cartoons and caricature portraits at college—did pocket cartoons for the college magazine, for example, and caricatures of all his mates as they sat around in a pub. If he wanted to carry on with that sort of thing, a
provincial newspaper was the obvious place, with hopes of a London posting to follow.”

“We're no provincial in Glasgow,” said Harry genially. “Here's the center of the universe.”

“Aye, well, it doesn't always feel like that. Anyway, he knew I wanted a teaching job in a good school, and he sent me any odds and ends he saw in the Glasgow and Edinburgh newspapers. I didn't fancy going to the sticks and being the only one around who spoke proper English, but when there was an opening for a good school in Glasgow I applied and got it. I've been here ever since.”

“That was very nice of my father.”

“I tell you, we were best mates. And he was like that. He was the kind who would do anything for you.”

“Were he and my mother going together then?”

Again Jewell frowned. He was not joking about the memory of the old.

“I wouldn't be sure. A newspaperman's working day and a teacher's are quite different, so we didn't meet all that often. But I'd say I met them together pretty early on.”

“And that would be—when?”

“Oh, darlin', I'm not that good on dates. The era of Supermac anyway. The prime minister who spoke to interviewers of his Scottishness though he was no more Scottish than I am or your father was, and never sat for a Scottish constituency.”

“Did you like my mother?”

He smiled broadly.

“Loved her. A girl in a thousand. And so enthusiastic. You could see the children would just blossom, being taught by her. They'd learn twice as much as if they
were taught by your average Scottish dominie, of whom I had more than enough experience in my own school.”