Missing From Home by Mary Burchell Page A

any importance in it, I assure you.”
    “Except some vulgar gossip about me, I gather.” Greg had recovered from a good deal of momentary embarrassment, Clare saw, and was now looking as grim as she had ever seen him.
    “Not at all. Don’t make such heavy weather of it, Dad!” Clare almost envied her child for her casual way of handling Greg. “As a matter of fact, Pat rather admired your evasive actions. With such attractive parents, she and I have grown used to watching people make passes at you both. We’re intrigued by the fact that you’re hardly ever taken in.”
    “Har—?” began her father. Then he said stiffly, “What an extraordinary way of regarding your parents, surely?”
    “Oh, not really,” Marilyn assured him. “ Modern daughters see a lot more than parents realise.”
    “Well, if you’ve seen anyone making passes at me, you’ve certainly seen more than I have,” Clare remarked, and she laughed for the first time since Greg had come into the flat. “You’re an absurd child!”
    “But you love me just the same, Mum, don’t you ? ” Marilyn hugged her suddenly.
    “Very much indeed.” As Clare returned the hug she looked past Marilyn’s dark head and saw, with some astonishment, that this time it was Greg who felt shut out. And, because she was essentially generous, she added immediately, “And so does your father.”
    “Yes, of course.” Marilyn flashed him an affectionate glance. “That’s what is meant by family solidarity.”
    It was not, of course, and the moment or two of silence which followed this remark testified to the sad lack of solidarity now existing in this particular family. Then Greg cleared his throat and said, with an air of returning to essentials,
    “So there was nothing—in this letter or anything else—to suggest any side of Pat’s life which you didn’t know about ? ”
    “Nothing at all.” Marilyn shook her head. “But my guess still is that there’ll be a letter in the morning.”
    “Why in the morning?” her mother asked with a sigh. “Why not a phone call tonight, or a message of some sort at any other time? You keep on speaking of hearing in the morning, as though — almost as though you had some reason for thinking it.”
    “Oh, Mother !” Marilyn sounded reproachful. “It’s just that tomorrow is the first moment you could hear by letter, isn’t it? I mean, even if she wrote last night as soon as she reached—wherever she was going, you wouldn’t have got the letter today. Tomorrow is the first moment news could reach you by post.”
    “I suppose you’re right.”
    “You seem to have worked it out in quite exact detail.” Her father looked hard at her, but Marilyn withstood his glance admirably.
    “I just use my intelligence,” she explained. “That’s why I think it would be a mistake to do anything like going to the police until after the post comes tomorrow.—I’ll wash up, shall I? and you two can have a talk.”
    And on this she went out into the kitchen, leaving a pregnant silence behind her. Then finally, Clare said, “You don’t think she knows something she doesn’t want to tell us, do you ? ”
    “No. No, of course not. You mustn’t be so suspicious, Clare. You’re always inclined to be.”
    “I wasn’t suspicious about Mrs. Curtiss,” retorted Clare, and suddenly she smiled mischievously in a way that gave her a fleeting likeness to her younger daughter.
    He looked startled for a moment. Then he laughed too.
    “And I wasn’t suspicious about those men she says make passes at you,” he returned almost gaily.
    “It’s the most ridiculous thing! I don’t know what she was talking about,” Clare declared.
    “Kid’s do get funny ideas,” he agreed tolerantly. And suddenly she realised that at last they were talking like people with intimate ties, and not like strangers.
    Perhaps he felt it too, for after a moment he said, with a reflective smile,
    “ I didn’t know they rated us as attractive,