Moss offered. Finn took down a canister from the mismatched assortment lined up beside the clock, then nodded towards the teapot with its colourful knitted cosy. Moss was puzzled. Puzzled and hurt—he wasn’t making any effort to speak to her, and she began to feel like the intruder she undoubtedly was. The kettle boiled, and soon two steaming mugs of tea joined the wedges of toast which Finn had liberally coated with Vegemite.
‘You found the towel, then?’ Finn, unused to visitors, had been inordinately proud that he’d thought of the towel. ‘It just came to me,’ he said. ‘The idea of the towel.’ He looked at her hopefully.
‘Just the thing,’ Moss said. ‘Thank you.’ She couldn’t work him out. Was he a bit—well, simple? Hadn’t he been a mathematician? A brilliant one, from what she’d learnt. Perhaps he was just absentminded. Genius tended to be that way— at least in popular folklore. She bit thoughtfully on her toast and suppressed a grimace. For some reason Finn thought she liked Vegemite. Still, she ate her toast without complaint: she needed time and didn’t want to offend him.
The salty taste of the Vegemite was sharp on her tongue, and as she and Finn carefully chewed their toast, the sound of crunching mingled with the ticking of the clock. Neither of them spoke until Moss poured them both a second mug of tea. She could wait no longer. Her plan had been to let Finn broach the subject, but his silence was resolute.
‘You do know who I am, don’t you?’
‘What year were you born?’
‘Nineteen eighty-three.’
‘Your mother was Amy Sinclair? Partner of Linsey Brookes?’
Moss felt a sudden wave of nausea. Dear God, don’t let me vomit. Not now. She forced herself to breathe slowly, deeply, before replying. ‘Yes. Amy and Linsey—my mothers.’
‘Then you must be my daughter.’
And he just sat there, sipping his tea.
Moss had pictured this moment quite differently. This was when her father was supposed to open his arms wide and hold her for the first time. She had even imagined the roughness of his whiskers against her cheek. They would both cry a little and then laugh, and he would look at her with wonder and regret. Instead, he went on relentlessly sipping his tea. She tried to read his face but it was blank. Even the kindness she had recognised last night had been erased. Say something, she begged silently. Please.
But Finn was struggling. He had lived alone for so long that he found even small talk a challenge. Last night, before sleep claimed him, he had tried to cobble together some thoughts, some words that might at least be adequate. I’m so happy to meet you at last. That was patently untrue and Finn was a bad liar. I’ve often thought about you. Also untrue. And dangerous. It might make her think she was welcome. The last thing he wanted was another person in his life. Why was she here, anyway? Keep the conversation as neutral as possible, he advised himself.
‘How did you find me?’ he asked.
Moss swallowed her disappointment. ‘Maths,’ she said. ‘I followed the maths trail.’
A few months ago, while looking through some of Amy’s sheet music, she’d come upon the contract that had brought her into being. It was typical of Amy to be careless with such an important document. Her mother snatched it away, but not before Moss had seen the name: Michael Finbar Clancy. So, as she explained to Finn, at that point she had both his name and his profession. Fortunately, Michael was a prolific writer in his years as an academic, and had been making quite a name for himself in probability theory. Her search was temporarily frustrated when, after a few years of regular publication, his name suddenly disappeared from the learned journals. It seemed he had vanished without a trace, but by then Moss’s initial curiosity had hardened into resolve. She saw that he’d written quite a few of the articles with a Philip Cousins who was now Associate Professor of Mathematics at Monash University. It was Phil who told her where to find Michael Clancy.
‘He’s changed a lot,’ he warned her.
‘I never knew him, so it won’t matter to me,’ she replied with a shrug. ‘As I said, I’m only looking him up because my family used to know his family, and Granny would like to get in touch.’ She was surprised at her own glibness.
Finn was appalled to learn how easy it was to find him and angry