Levkas Man by Hammond; Innes Read Free Book Online Page A

and two tins of sardines tucked away behind old jam jars and a litter of plastic bags. It wasn’t much of a meal, but it was something, and I poured the remains of the geneva into a tumbler and took it through into the study. I ate at his desk, sitting in his chair and browsing through an English book called Frameworks for Dating Fossil Man . It had a chapter on the changing levels of sea and land, and what had attracted me was a table giving mean height above present sea level at various stages: Sicialian showed ±100 metres, and Calabrian ±200 metres. But the rest of the chapter was beyond me. For example:
    One of the most important events in the history of the Mediterranean shores was the ‘Great Regression’ sometimes known as the Roman or Romanian regression which followed the ‘Milazzian’ (or as some prefer, Sicilian II) and preceded the Tyrrhenian stage of high sea-level. The fact that it coincided with a very striking change in the composition of the marine molluscan fauna is of considerable interest because the Mindel Glaciation, with which this regression probably corresponded, was a time of equally dramatic change in the continental mammalian fauna (Zeuner, 1959a, p. 285).
    That paragraph, and others, reminded me of the way the old man had talked, and I wondered why scientists had to make things so unbelievably abstruse. There can be little doubt that the immediately preceding drop in sea level by nearly 300 feet was eustatic What the hell did eustatic mean?… and that it reflected the withdrawal of water during the Würm Glaciation . Vaguely I remembered that the level of the oceans had varied in geological time according to the amount of water held in suspension in the form of ice.
    I sat there for a time, sipping my drink, thinking of the seas I had sailed and how changed the shore line would have been with the water level lowered by 300 feet. I could not recall what the depths were in the Malta Channel, but all that area of the Mediterranean was shallow. Volcanic, too—those banks that had emerged, been reported, and had then submerged again.
    Thinking about the Mediterranean I suddenly remembered my birth certificate. As proof that I had another name, that I had been born Paul Scott, it might be useful. I reached down and got the old cigar box out of the bottom drawer of the desk. I was just about to fold the papers small enough to fit into my wallet when I saw that the half-sheet of notepaper announcing my birth had something written on the back. I unpinned it and turned it over, laying it flat on the desk and smoothing it out as I read the words my mother had written twenty-eight years ago: My husband will never know, of course, but it was wrong, wrong, wrong—of me, of you. We should never have met again. Now God knows whose child he is . Just those three lines, nothing more, except her name— Ruth . She had signed it. If she hadn’t signed it I could have pretended it was a lie, something added later. But it was in the same hand—the same hand as the love letters in the bureau. Christ Almighty! To discover you were born a bastard and that your mother was sleeping with a man old enough to be her father. Or was he? What age would the old man have been then? I didn’t know. All I knew was that the last childish tie, clung to through all the years of loneliness following the tragedy, was now gone, killed by the lines my mother had added, now lying faded in the pool of light cast by the Anglepoise lamp.
    My first reaction was one of anger. I was filled with a deep, instinctive sense of shame. But then, as I thought about it, my mood changed, for I had no doubt, no doubt at all. Everything suddenly made sense—the long, vividly remembered journey to Europe, his meeting me at Schiphol Airport and the years in this house. No wonder Dr Gilmore had looked at me so strangely when I had insisted that he was only my father by adoption. And now that I knew the