“I really don’t know,” Maggie said coldly. Maggie felt angry, resentful. Who was he—this man, this stranger—to suddenly appear in her life?
“I know I have no right to ask … no right to know.…”
“No, you don’t,” she said. “You—you took the easy way out. Even when you got better, you still took the easy way.”
“Yes, you’re right,” he said. “It was wrong. And I’m sorry. I’m going to try to make it up to you if it takes the rest of my life.”
The conversation was awkward, painful, but Maggie was filled with a sudden need to talk. “I’m going to need you to talk about … my mother.”
“Clara?” Edmund said with great effort. “Maggie, those were—dark days. Best forgotten.”
“No,” she said forcefully, causing a nearby couple to stare. “I need to know. I need you to tell me.” Then, quietly but still intently, “Don’t you think you ought to talk about it? Get it out? Isn’t that what Freud would say?”
“Freud …” Edmund said. “Freud was not British.”
Maggie was silent.
“But yes, yes, you’re right. You deserve to know. And I need to tell you.”
There was another silence but less tense this time.
Edmund cleared his throat. “I do … I do want you to know how proud I am of you. And I know I’ve given up all rights to be your father. But perhaps we can be friends?”
“ ‘Friends’?”
Suddenly, Edmund’s self-control broke and he smothered a racking sob. “Friends. Anything. I’ll take anything. Oh, Maggie, I just want to be part of your life, while we still have this chance. While there’s still time. I know I was wrong. And I want, more than anything, to make things up to you. As best I can.”
In a desperate voice he added, “My dear girl, can you ever forgive me?”
“Maybe not tonight,” she said finally, blinking back her own hot tears. “But someday. Maybe someday.”
“I’ll take that,” Edmund responded. “Thank you.”
David and Chuck were dancing, Chuck a full head taller and David with his head on her impressive bosom. Together they turned to watch John thread his way through the couples on the dance floor. “May I cut in?” John asked.
Maggie looked up at him and nodded.
“Of course,” Edmund said, relinquishing his place and returning to the banquette.
John took Maggie’s hand and drew her toward him. As the blond singer, her peachy flesh spilling out of a tight red-satin dress, segued into a slow rendition of “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” he drew her into him, and they began to dance.
“This is all very strange,” Maggie said, leaning her head against his chest, smelling his bay rum cologne.
“Which part?”
Maggie considered. So much was strange these days.
“What are your parents like?” she asked instead.
“My parents?” John laughed. “My father, Archibald Sterling, flew Sopwith Camels and Bristol F-Two-Bs in the Great War. Now he lives in Derbyshire and is a crotchety old M.P. in the House of Commons. And my mother, Jane Sterling, writes children’s stories. Naughty puppies, bluebirds who talk, fluffy chicks who lose their way—that sort of thing.”
Maggie gave a wistful smile. “So they didn’t fake their own deaths?”
John twirled Maggie around and then drew her in again. “Listen, Maggie. You know, parents—all parents—have secret lives. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be parents after all.”
“So you think I should forgive him?”
“I think—I think you should give it some time.”
The song came to an end, but John didn’t release her. As the blond chanteuse relinquished the microphone, the orchestra began to play “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” the lush melody carried by a golden trumpet.
Maggie looked up at John, her arms still tight around his neck. “Do you like your father?”
“I suppose. I don’t really know my father. He was always in the office or away in London when I was growing up.” Then, “But, nonetheless, I’d have to say that I do love him.”
“Well,” Maggie said. “I don’t know if I love my father.”
“That’s understandable.”
“He left me. He lied to me.” Maggie stopped dancing in the middle of the floor. “My father’s a liar.”
John stopped as well. Together, they stood in the middle of the floor as the other dancers slowly spun around them.
“It’s hard to trust someone who’s abandoned you.”