“I don't know about that, but last I heard, she lived in Paris. She was actually his half-sister, that's what he told me, a lot younger than him. Didn't look a bit like him, and Daddy kind of flirted with her, which was a bit strange. Still, she was nice enough to me, sent me pretty things to wear. When Mummy didn't catch them and take them from me,” she said, and yawned. She added, “Although she must be some kind of old maid, to be so devoted to her half-brother. Hung on his every word.”

The “sister” sounded less and less like a blood relation, but I suppose it hardly mattered. “Do you have a photograph of either of them?”

“Sure, why? Mary, what is going on?”

I thought that I preferred her stupefied by sleep.

“I think your father may have been involved in something criminal.”

“Oh, bunk! Have you been talking with Mummy? She's got crime on the brain when it comes to Daddy.”

“No, I haven't spoken to your mother. May I see the pictures?”

I thought that the only hope was if I did not pause for explanations, but simply overwhelmed her with peremptory demands. It worked, in that it got her out of bed to pad in her pyjamas over to her childhood book-shelves and draw out a picture album.

She'd hidden the photos of her father behind harmless snapshots of friends and holiday scenery. One of him, young and handsome, with hair as light as my father's (blond hair on a guest-room pillow, the machinery in the back of my mind noted: blond enough that his face would not show much of a stubble some days after it had been burnt) holding a black-haired baby girl in his arms: Flo had her mother's hair. The second photograph showed Robert Greenfield some years later, turning his scarred face slightly away from the camera as he lay on a deck-chair with some stretch of the Mediterranean behind him; a third showed him later yet, his body beginning to thicken and his hairline receding, standing beside a handsome, somewhat taller woman dressed in pre-war fashion—but when I took my eyes from their figures to study the background, my knees gave way and I had to fumble for a chair.

The photograph had been taken at the Lodge.

“Who's she?” I asked Flo, although I thought I knew already.

Flo squinted at the photo. “That's Aunt Rosa. Daddy's half-sister. She came to California a couple of times. Look at that hat—this must've been taken before the earthquake.”

“When was her other visit?”

“Hell, I don't know. I was maybe eight or nine. Yes, that was when Daddy went away.”

(“Looked familiar,” Mr Gordimer had told me—he had in fact seen her before, nearly twenty years earlier.)