1993 - The Blue Afternoon

by William Boyd

  “You look different, Kay. So…you know, bigger. I like it. You, ah, you carry it well.”

  “That’s meant to be a compliment?”

  “OK. Try this: can I come home with you tonight?”

  “Won’t Little Miss Peroxide object?”

  “That’s not fair. It’s over, long gone. You know that.”

  “No.”

  “Please—”

  “No, Philip. No.” That particular tone of weariness crept into my voice, memories of ancient arguments, and he knew that he should not ask any more.

  He stood up. “I’ve got to go to the john. I’ll have the same again.”

  I watched him stroll easily through the tables, light-footed. His tall thin body swayed past waitresses and drinkers as he led with his left shoulder and then with his right, as if he were dancing. Like a Scottish dance, figure of eight…Why did I think of a Scottish dance? I smiled, as I recalled Philip’s pale body, almost hairless, and his slim ankles, the Achilles tendon stretched and exposed, like a catwalk model’s. He used to make love to me proficiently but selfishly, his head buried in the angle of my neck and shoulder, never looking up, never seeing my face, never looking me in the eyes, until he was finished. I ordered us both another drink and thought about the man, Salvador Carriscant, who said he was my father.

  When Carriscant had made his bizarre claim I told him at once that my father was dead but it gave him no pause at all, he merely gripped my forearm more fiercely and said, softly, insistently, “Your father is here now, before you, alive and breathing. I know I have done you wrong but now I need your forgiveness. Your forgiveness and your help.”

  I called again for Peter and wrenched my arm free of Carriscant’s grip.

  Peter came quickly up behind him and clutched his elbows, pulling them together. “OK, brother, outside.”

  “Release me,” Carriscant said, his voice suddenly uneven with anger. “Do not lay your hands on me, I warn you.”

  Some rare quality of emphasis in his voice made Peter comply. Carriscant backed away towards the wrought-iron gates of the Escorial’s entrance, still holding me with his persistent, pleading gaze.

  “We just need to talk, Kay,” he said. “Then everything will become clear.” He pronounced the last word ‘cleah’, in the English manner, and for the first time I registered that his voice had an accent: English, in a way, but unlocatably so, with the slightly formal perfection of the complete bilingual. “Please Kay, it’s all I ask.” His jaw muscles clenched and his square face seemed to redden, as if the effort of suppressing what he had to declare to me was bursting within him. Then he turned and left, striding off—surprisingly jauntily for an old man—down the concrete path and across the street.

  Philip and our fresh drinks arrived simultaneously. Philip dipped and slid himself along the banquette until his thigh was brushing mine.

  “I’ve got a lunch party at the beach tomorrow. Lisa van Baker’s house. Want to come with me?”

  “Can’t, I’m afraid.”

  “But there’ll be movie stars,” he said, hands spread, eyebrows raised, mock-horrified at my indifference.

  “I hate movie stars.”

  “OK, what’s the alternative attraction?”

  “Home cooking.”

  FOUR

  I watched my mother slice peeled, cored apples into a tin colander. The sharp worn knifeblade slid easily beneath the pale yellow flesh as she cut slim discs with a sliding, crunching noise, like cautious footsteps on icy snow. She was meticulous in her slicing, each disc a precise thickness, her concentration fixed exactly on her task. She was a small woman, shy and modest. She wore her hair always in the same way, as long as I could remember, combed back from her face and held in a vertical roll from crown to nape. Her features were ordinary and unexceptional: it was only when she put her spectacles on that her face acquired some personality.

  She lived with my stepfather, Rudolf Fischer, in a small house in Long Beach. It was an old fading canary yellow clapboard bungalow with a shingled hip roof, and there was a newer addition of a two-car garage which took up most of what had been a patchy lawn. A cypress hedge separated it from a house of identical design painted flamingo pink. This was where I had grown up but it was not where I was born. My birthplace had been in the former German colony in New Guinea. It always seemed to me one of my life’s crueller oppositions: born in New Guinea, raised in Long Beach. I possessed no memory at all of my real father. Rudolf—Pappi, as we called him, my mother included—had always been there in my life, with his big ruddy face, his fuzzy, balding pate, the curious wen on his face, half an inch below the right side of his mouth, hard and shiny like a sucked boiled sweet stuck there. “Like Oliver Cromwell,” he used to say, “I come wart and all.” He was a big-boned friendly man whose easy geniality hid a weak character. My neat, timid mother was the real centre of force in that household, something that Pappi’s large shambling loud presence seemed to belie. Only the family really knew the truth.

  Pappi was an American, second generation, son of West·phalian immigrants, who, in a conscious act of assimilation, had ceased speaking German as soon as they could string some English sentences together and ensured that their children had grown up monoglottally American. My mother had stopped talking German when she married him, she said, claiming that she even dreamed in English now. But I still heard her singing to herself, favourite songs: ‘An die ferne Geliebte’, and ‘Es war, als hatt’ der Himmel’ when her guard dropped.

  I looked over my shoulder into the parlour. Pappi sat in an easy chair listening to the radio, his mouth open, ready to laugh. My mother carefully spooned the apple discs into a shallow pie base.

  “Tell me about Father,” I said.

  “Pappi? Oh, his leg is still sore. I told him—”

  “No. I mean my father.”

  She ran her hands under the faucet, thinking, then glanced at me, one of her keen, sharp looks, watchful. It was at moments like these—when I surprised her—that I saw her toughness and knew where I derived my own.

  “Hugh.” She said his name quietly, like a sigh, as if testing it, a strange fruit, an exotic dessert. “What’s there to say? It’s been so long now.”

  Hugh Paget, my father, an Englishman, a missionary and teacher, who met and married my mother Annaliese Leys, a schoolteacher, in German New Guinea in 1903. In 1904 I was born and two months later Hugh Paget was dead, burned to ashes in a fire. Two years later Mrs Paget and her baby daughter were taken under the capacious wing of Rudolf Fischer, widower, merchant and coir and hemp importer from Los Angeles, USA. Seventeen per cent of the doormats in southern California were made from coir supplied by Fischer Coir, was the company’s proud boast. Rudolf and Annaliese were married in 1907 and settled in Long Beach.

  “What about his parents, relatives?” I said casually, searching in my pockets for my cigarette pack.

  “His folks were dead when I met him. There was a sister, Meredith, in Coventry. Or maybe Ipswich. They moved a lot. We would correspond, but I lost touch.” She smiled. “It’s like that. You work hard at first to keep a memory alive. It’s hard, everybody’s life goes on in different directions. After a while…”

  “Have you still got her letters?”

  “I doubt it. Why all this interest?”

  “I…I just got curious. You know, you get to thinking.”

  “Sure. I think about him too.” She looked sad, bringing to mind this stranger, my father.

  I lit my cigarette. “Can I see the photograph?”

  “Of course. When?”

  “Now.”

  Hugh Paget stood in front of a square corrugated iron building with a palm-thatched roof with wooden cross-shaped finials at either end. He wore a drill-cotton coat and trousers tucked into canvas mosquito boots and at his throat was the white band of his dog-collar. I could see a slim tall man with blurry features that I knew not even a magnifying glass could force into anything resembling an individual face. A breeze had lifte
d a lock of hair off his forehead and the photograph had fixed this one dishevelment in time, for all time. It seemed—specious thoughts, I knew—a clue of sorts, a gesture, a hint as to his nature. Boyishness, enthusiasm, an awkward gaucherie…I tried to paste some sort of personality on to this nugatory image with my usual lack of success.

  Fair hair. Fair hair. Mine was dark.

  “You must have had wedding photos.”

  “I told you, we lost everything in the fire. This was in the chapel, I was lucky.”

  I left it at that, for the time being. I knew she would go on talking quite contentedly but soon she would begin to wonder what prompted all these questions and would start asking some of her own. And then what would I say? In fact I could not really explain my own newfound curiosity about my father. Why was I acting on one strange man’s allegations, and ones so evidently preposterous? Who was Salvador Carriscant and why had he singled me out for this filial identification? Los Angeles was full of crazy people but what unsettled me about Carriscant was that he did not seem particularly unbalanced. And what could he possibly know about Hugh Paget? And why should he appear now, over thirty years after my father’s death, insinuating that the man was an impostor…? The whole idea was ridiculous, I said to myself, and I was about to tell my mother about this odd fellow I had encountered when my stepsister Bruna arrived at the front door with her two children, Amy and Greta, and interrupted me. Pappi’s histrionic cries of love and adoration filled the small house.

  My mother slid the pie into the oven and wiped her hands carefully on her apron.

  “When was I born?” I asked. “I mean, what time of day?”

  “Oh, about 4.30 in the afternoon. Why?”

  “I was just wondering. Just curious.”

  “I like that suit, Kay,” she said, smiling faintly at me. “You look smart. Very efficient.”

  So the matter was closed, anyway. I thanked her, complimented her in return on the brooch she was wearing and we walked through into the living room.

  FIVE

  I saw the corner of the envelope peeking from beneath the front door of my apartment when I inserted the key in the lock. I stooped, slid it out and put it in my pocket. Inside, I placed it on my drawing board and went to pour myself a small Scotch. I knew it was from Carriscant even though it was not addressed.

  I sensed, immediately, that I was at some kind of watershed, now. You know that feeling, when you can almost see the two or several directions your life might take ahead of you, a moment when you know that the next choice you are about to make is going to be crucial and possibly final, that there is no going back, and that nothing will ever be the same again? I could tear the letter up, unopened, ignore the man in future and call the police if he continued to pester me. Or I could open the letter, read what it had to say and thereby allow myself to be drawn in even further to his curious world and his strange obsession about me and our relationship.

  I opened the letter:

  My dear Kay,

  I know you must be wondering if you are dealing with a lunatic. Believe me, you are not. I am as sane as you are. We must talk properly without fear of interruption. I shall not bother you further but will let you know that I am staying at 105 Olive Street for the next ten days only. Please do communicate with me, there is so much to say.

  Dr Salvador Carriscant.

  I had made my choice.

  SIX

  I emerged from the Third Street Tunnel and drove down Hill Street, swinging back up Fifth and up on to Olive Street high on Bunker Hill. From up here I could see the tower of the new City Hall, tall and white, shining in the crossbeams of its searchlights. Between the ancient houses and over vacant lots I caught glimpses of the glowing electric arrow of Wilshire Boulevard thrusting west its sixteen miles towards the ocean and the last cinnamon stripes of the setting sun.

  105 Olive was an old Queen Anne mansion, probably built in the 1880s. It was nicely asymmetrical and not as over-decorated as some I had seen. It had a roof of fish scaled shingle and a big domed turret with a bent lightning conductor. Its verandah circled three-quarters of the house and its elaborate carved porch frieze was badly broken, looking like the tattered edge of a paper doily. A dusty pepper tree with a tyre swing stood in the patch of beaten earth that had once been a lawn. The old mansion was now doing humble duty as a boarding house for transient workers. A handwritten cardboard sign in the window said ‘rooms $1’. A few men sat and smoked on its front steps, small brown men in cheap but clean clothes. I assumed they were Japanese.

  I pulled over to the kerb and settled down to wait—for what? I wasn’t exactly sure, but I felt that I needed to turn the tables momentarily, to observe Carriscant himself, covertly, as he had observed me, before we embarked on this momentous and earnestly entreated communication.

  Carriscant appeared at the front door about forty minutes later. He was wearing a tight blue overjacket, with a naval cut, and had his homburg on. I left the car and followed him to the funicular railway that led down from the heights of Bunker Hill to Hill Street below. I felt relatively inconspicuous, almost masculine, in fact: I wore slacks and a trenchcoat and had a beret pulled down low on my brow.

  Carriscant entered the little cream-coloured cable car and moved up to the front where he took his seat. I waited until it was about to depart and slipped in at the last moment and stood at the door. There was a small jolt and the car began to move down the gradient towards the busy streets below. It was a clear night, so clear I could see the lights of Huntington Park and Montebello and, over to the south, the glow of big orange flares burning at the Dominguez oilfields at Compton.

  I followed Carriscant as he crossed Hill and walked over to Main Street. The sidewalks here were busy: on either side of the street were movie theatres, burlesque joints and dime museums, penny arcades and shooting galleries. There were many Mexicans among the passers-by and groups of sailors up from the naval yards at San Pedro. Carriscant paused at a second-hand bookseller and browsed a while through the boxes set out in front of the store. I turned to face the window of a steakhouse and concentrated my attention on a display of plank-steaks, unnaturally red against the bed of crushed ice upon which they were fanned out, like fat rubber playing cards. Eventually, Carriscant moved on and turned into an all–night lunch room, blazingly lit, and sat himself down at a rear table. I strolled to and fro past the window a couple of times and watched him place his order. I noticed he did not remove his hat from his head and as I turned to begin my third discreet trajectory I decided at once that any further delay would be foolish. I pushed open the glass door and went in to join him.

  He did not seem at all surprised to see me, which made me irritated for a moment and made me regret my impulsiveness. He rose halfway from his seat and tipped his hat in a formulaic gesture of politeness. The act seemed to remind him he had the thing on his head and he removed it carefully, setting it down on the empty seat beside him, then he brushed his hair flat with the palms of his hands in two slow stroking movements. He looked fatigued, much older suddenly, and the bright lights of the lunch room cast sharp shadows across his face making the prominent lines deep, like gashes. I took the seat opposite him.

  “I would offer you some food—” he began.

  “No, no. I came to see you. Your letter…You said you needed help.”

  “I do, indeed I do.” He smiled at me. “Did you follow me here?”

  “Yes.”

  He chuckled. “Dear Kay.”

  I ignored this. “Are you in trouble?”

  “Trouble?” He appeared to think about the word, as if pondering its semantics. “Not exactly, but I do need help. I am a total stranger, you see. Total.”

  A waiter brought him his food, a large plate of dark pasty stew with mashed potatoes and what looked like squash. He ostentatiously searched for the meat and then cut the few cartilaginous strips deliberately into small cubes before beginning to eat.

  “More meat on a wren’s shin,” he mutt
ered, angrily. “This is disgraceful food,” he said. “There’s no excuse, in this country of all places. I would have cooked myself but there are no facilities at the lodging house.”

  “Do you like to cook?” I knew I was making conversation, gauche conversation, and disliked myself for it, but I felt strangely awkward with him, as if in responding to his invitation I had somehow lost the advantage of our encounters. He, by contrast, appeared very relaxed and smiled patiently at me.

  “I am a cook. I love cooking.”

  “What do you mean? It’s your job?”

  “Yes. At least it has been for the last fifteen years.”

  “On your letter you signed yourself Doctor.”

  “I was a doctor first, then a cook.”

  He ate his meal with surprising speed, as if someone was likely to snatch his plate away, with a concentration and energy that were almost alarming. After he had finished he said he was tired and did not wish to talk further. We walked back towards the funicular—the ‘Angel flight’—that would take us back up to Bunker Hill. He was silent but I noticed he was looking about him at the city almost fearfully, awestruck by its scale and business, its din and brightness.