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“Or even to have paid him,” she said. “That isn’t outside the range of possibility either.”
Kent said, “Why would he do that?”
“He wouldn’t be the first doctor to do something like that. Maybe he needed the money to keep a clinic going for poor people, how do we know? Maybe he just wanted it for himself. Doctors aren’t saints.”
“No,” said Kent. “I meant Cottar. Why would Cottar do it? And did he have any money?”
“No. He didn’t have any himself but-I don’t know. It’s only one hypothesis anyway. The money. And I was here, you know. I was here to take care of his mother. He really cared about his mother. He knew I’d never desert her. So that was all right.
“It really was all right,” she said. “I was very fond of Delia. I didn’t find it a burden. I might really have been better suited to taking care of her than to being married to Cottar. And you know, something strange. Delia thought the same as I did. About Cottar. She had the same suspicions. And she never mentioned them to me. I never mentioned mine to her. Each of us thought it would break the other’s heart. Then one evening not that long before she -had to go, I was reading her a mystery story that was set in Hong Kong, and she said, ‘Maybe that’s where Cottar is. Hong Kong.’
“She said she hoped she hadn’t upset me. Then I told her what I’d been thinking and she laughed. We both laughed. You would expect an old mother would be grief-stricken talking about how her only child had run off and left her, but no. Maybe old people aren’t like that. Really old people. They don’t get grief-stricken anymore. They must figure it’s not worth it.
“He knew I’d take care of her, though he probably didn’t know how long that would last,” she said. “I wish I could show you the doctor’s letter, but I threw it out. That was very stupid, but I was distraught at the time. I didn’t see how I was going to get through the rest of my life. I didn’t think how I should follow up and find out what his credentials were or ask about a death certificate or anything. I thought of all that later and by then I didn’t have an address. I couldn’t write to the American embassy because they were the last people Cottar would have had anything to do with. And he wasn’t a Canadian citizen. Maybe he even had another name. False identity he could slip into. False papers. He used to hint about things like that. That was part of the glamour about him, for me.”
“Some of that could have been along the lines of self-dramatizing,” Kent said. “Don’t you think?”
Sonje said, “Of course I think.”
“There wasn’t any insurance?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“If there’d been insurance, they’d have found out the truth.” “Yes but there wasn’t,” Sonje said. “So. That’s what I intend to do.”
She said that this was one thing she had never mentioned to her mother-in-law. That after she was on her own, she was going to go looking. She was going to find Cottar, or find the truth.
“I suppose you think that’s some wild kind of fantasy?” she said.
Off her rocker, thought Kent with an unpleasant jolt. With every visit he had made on this trip, there had come a moment of severe disappointment. The moment when he realized that the person he was talking to, the person he had made a point of seeking out, was not going to give him whatever it was he had come for. The old friend he had visited in Arizona was obsessed with the dangers of life, in spite of his expensive residence in a protected community. His old friend’s wife, who was over seventy, wanted to show him pictures of herself and some other old woman dressed up as Klondike dance-hall girls, for a musical show they had put on. And his grown-up children were caught up in their own lives. That was only natural and not a surprise to him. The surprise was that these lives, the lives his sons and daughter were living, seemed closed in now, somewhat predictable. Even the changes in them that he could foresee or was told were coming-Noelle was on the verge of leaving her second husband-were not very interesting. He had not made any admission of this to Deborah-hardly even to himself-but it was so. And now Sonje. Sonje whom he hadn’t particularly liked, whom he’d been wary of in some way, but whom he’d respected, as a bit of a mystery-Sonje had turned into a talkative old woman with a secret screw loose.
And he’d had a reason for coming to see her that they were not getting any closer to, with this rant about Cottar.
“Well to be frank,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like such a sensible thing to do, to be frank about it.”
“A wild-goose chase,” said Sonje cheerfully.
“There’s a probability he might be dead now anyway.”
“True.”
“And he could have gone anywhere and lived anywhere. That is if your theory is correct.”
“True.”
“So the only hope is if he really died then and your theory isn’t correct, then you might find out about it and you wouldn’t be any further ahead than you are now anyway.”
“Oh, I think I would.”
“You could do just as well then to stay here and write some letters.”
Sonje said she disagreed. She said you couldn’t go through official cha
“You have to make yourself known in the streets.”
In the streets of Jakarta-that was where she meant to start. In places like Jakarta people don’t shut themselves up. People live in the streets and things are known about them. Shopkeepers know, there’s always somebody who knows somebody else and so forth. She would ask questions and word would get around that she was there. A man like Cottar could not have just slipped by. Even after all this time there’d be some memory. Information of one sort or another. Some of it expensive, not all of it truthful. Nevertheless.
Kent thought of asking her what she pla
Even so, she could fling it all away in a couple of months. Word would get around that she was there, all right.
“Those cities have changed a lot” was all he said.
“Not that I’d neglect the usual cha
“For instance I expect there’ll be devastating heat. It doesn’t sound as if it has a good location at all-Jakarta. There are swamps and lowlands all around. I’m not stupid. I’ll get my shots and take all the precautions. I’ll take my vitamins, and Jakarta being started by the Dutch there shouldn’t be any shortage of gin. The Dutch East Indies. It’s not a very old city, you know. It was built I think sometime in the 1600s. Just a minute. I have all sorts of-I’ll show you-I have-”
She set down her glass which had been empty for some time, got up quickly, and after a couple of steps caught her foot in the torn sisal and lurched forward, but steadied herself by holding on to the door frame and didn’t fall. “Got to get rid of this old matting,” she said, and hurried into the house.
He heard a struggle with stiff drawers, then a sound as of a pile of papers falling, and all through this she kept talking to him, in that half-frantic reassuring way of people desperate not to lose your attention. He could not make out what she was saying, or didn’t try to. He was taking the opportunity to swallow a pill- something he’d been thinking about doing for the last half hour. It was a small pill that didn’t require him to take a drink-his glass was empty too-and he could probably have got it to his mouth without Sonje’s noticing what he was doing. But something like shyness or superstition prevented him from trying. He did not mind Deborah’s constant awareness of his condition, and his children of course had to know, but there seemed to be some sort of ban against revealing it to his contemporaries.