The Blue Afternoon

ONE

I turned off Sunset Boulevard and drove up Micheltoreno to the site. The day was cloudy and an erratic and nervy wind rattled the leaves of the palmettos that the contractor had planted along the roadside. As I pulled into the kerb at number 2265 I saw the old man. It was the first time I had really noticed him but in doing so now I immediately, for some reason, remembered I had seen him loitering around the site before. When he spotted me staring at him he looked first at his hands and then, most oddly, with some awkwardness, at the soles of his shoes, as if he had stepped in dog dirt or on a ball of chewed gum, and then, finding nothing, he turned and walked briskly away.

I thought little of it, he looked scruffy and unsure of himself, perhaps someone searching for work. Perhaps, also, he didn't realise that I was the architect-it happened all the time. I forgot about it as I slipped off my shoes and pulled on a pair of galoshes. The house was built on an incline and last week's rain had left the exposed earth and clay around the house moist and slidy.

This small almost finished house on its steep plot was my future, and whatever future frustrations it held for me, every time I saw it I still experienced a small frisson of… of what? Of love, I suppose, or something akin to that emotion. I had dreamed that house, had designed it, was overseeing the building of it and, nailed to the fencepost, was the ocular proof of this fact – my shingle. K. L. Fischer, architect. The small blue sign was only slightly marred by the blunt erasure of my ex-partner's name-no more Eric Meyersen-a simple stripe of black paint obscuring his identity. I wished I could obliterate as easily the memories of our association: Meyersen and Fischer, five years of lies and duplicity, of cheating and bad faith. The only consolation was that I knew that one day he would get what he deserved.

I stepped across the threshold into the shadowy hall. From upstairs came the noise of hammering and sawing and the enthusiastic tenor of Larry Rugola, the foreman, singing 'If you was the only Girl in the World'. I walked slowly through the downstairs rooms. The house was small, its size dictated precisely by the shape of the site, and of two storeys: the second floor consisting of two bedrooms, a bathroom and a wide porch – which I rather fancifully called the 'wind landing' – and the first of a large living room with dining room, kitchen and patio garden. The roadside facade presented a series of cream stucco curtain walls, flat rectangles of painted cement arranged to reveal gaps-of glass, of space – or to overlap slightly, giving a sense of the house's volumes receding. The strict geometry of this composition was highlighted, and counterposed, by the two pine trees that I had left growing at the road edge. The juxtaposition of sinuous knotted pine trunk and flat sunwashed cement with clear hard shadows worked exceptionally well. The valley facade was pure International Style: sheer walls of glass with hard horizontals and odd vertical stucco panels. The gap formed by the wind landing looked as if an entire segment of the building had been removed, as if by a giant hand, but the integrity of its space remained, formed by the big oak beams of the trellis.

Inside it was all simplicity. Low ceilings, teak cabinets, closets and panelling, walls either of glass looking out to the view or of smooth buff stucco. The floors were a pale buttery oak and where I thought a softer texture would complement the severe planes I had had laid a rough-weave, taupe carpet. All this took on a life in my mind's eye, of course, as I stood amongst the stacks of lumber and blonde curls of woodshavings and discarded tools, walls unpainted, wiring dangling from would-be sockets. We were still a short way from perfection.

'Ah, Mrs Fischer.' Larry clattered down the stairs, a ballpeen hammer spinning in one hand like a hoodlum's sixgun. 'We never got that panelling. Lumber yard said… ' He grinned at me shyly, knowingly. 'They said, ah, they can't take an order that size, without there being a cash deposit.'

'But we have a credit account there, for God's sake.'

'That's what I said. But the guy says it's Meyersen and Fischer, the account. He don't have no K. L. Fischer.'

I swivelled round and walked to the plate glass of the window wall and looked out at the view. Silver Lake was the fancy name given to the area bordering an artificial reservoir cut between two ranges of hills, north of downtown and east of Hollywood. Narrow metalled roads swerved and looped around the contours through the pepper trees and the oaks. Micheltoreno was one of the longest, starting on Sunset and rising and falling, weaving and winding all the way up to the reservoir. At the top views were to be had both east and west, but here the steep sides furnished a panorama of the sprawling city below which, in certain cases, could stretch all the way to the ocean, its fishscale glitter a lucent line of shimmer on the horizon. I concentrated hard on what I could see, noting the burnished glare off the roofs of the traffic moving up and down Sunset; a small man hanging out a big Mexican blanket on a line; a woman in a cobalt two-piece sunbathing on a tarpaper roof. I rested the palps of my fingertips on the warm glass and felt the tiny sonic vibrations of the city shiver through the transparency. The girl on the tarpaper roof smoothed what looked like Oleo margarine on her midriff. When I was calm again I reassured Larry that I would go down to the lumber yard and sort everything out myself.

'Oh, yeah. That old geezer was here again looking for you. Least I figured it was you.'

'What do you mean? What old geezer?'

'He was just here. He asked if your name was, ah, let me get this right… Carriscant – I think. Yeah. Miss Carriscant.'

'Carriscant?'

'I said he must be mistaken. There was a Mrs Fischer, but no Miss Whatever. Always had been Fischer too. Far as I was – ' He paused and peered at my taut frowning face with, for Larry, some genuine concern.

'I hope I didn't – I mean -'

'No. Strange, I just… No, fine. Absolutely no problem.'

TWO

My name is Kay Fischer. My name is Kay Fischer and at the time of this story I was thirty-two years of age, divorced and by profession an architect. I was five feet six inches tall (I still am) with dull brown hair and bright brown eyes. I had a pretty round face and a keen intellect. And, like most people who know themselves to be cleverer than the vast majority of their fellow human beings they encounter as they go through life, my intelligence inclined me to be a little cruel, sometimes. In those days I smoked too much and I drank and I ate too much as well, because, I suppose, because at the time I was more often sad than happy, and as a result my once neat figure had become plump and haunchy. But I didn't care, really. I didn't care.

I drove back from the lumber yard where, after enjoying years of trouble-free credit facilities, I had to pay 200 dollars down in order to open another account. Clerks who had dealt with me since I began to practise now sorrowfully quoted rules and regulations and referred me to the young manager in his glassed-in office. 'You don't understand,' I said to this blinking, grey person, 'Meyersen is the bankrupt one, or at least he will be when I'm through with him.' Bravado made my voice boom. Rules is rules, the manager said, skilfully avoiding my eye, and in the end I meekly paid.

At my home, a small apartment in a newish apartment court off Laurel Avenue in West Hollywood called, shamelessly, the Escorial Apartments in tribute to its Spanish Colonial roots, I brewed myself a pot of coffee, potent and viscous, and brooded again on betrayal and Eric Meyersen. The Taylor house in Pasadena, the shopping mart in Bur-bank… Three years of work, my work, now belonged to Meyersen and his glossy new firm. In a sudden, squally rage I called my lawyer, George Fugal, but his answering service said he was out of town for the weekend. Still, the coffee tasted just fine, scalding and aromatic, and I smoked three Picayunes one after another just to keep my dander up and paced vengefully about my neat room.

There was not much I had been able to do with the sturdy functionality of the Escorial. I had reduced my furniture needs to a minimum and had had the whorled featured plasterwork of the interior walls smoothed flat and painted white. Two Breuer leather and chrome armchairs faced each other across a glass coffee table which was set upon a blue and yellow Gertrud Arndt rug. The only other furniture in the room was my drawing table. There were no pictures on the walls, either, and I kept my books in my bedroom. The result was as spare and soothing as could be achieved in a Los Angeles bungalow court, I maintained. My watchword had been borrowed from Hannes Meyer: necessities, not luxuries.

The Escorial Apartments were knocked down in 1963 by a realtor and three ugly new houses were built in its place. When I lived there the choicer apartments – mine not included – surrounded a small aquamarine swimming pool. If I leaned out of the corner of my kitchen window (which I did as I rinsed the coffee pot) I could make out a bright triangle of the shallow end. The afternoon sun lit the tiled roofs and the tangerine stucco of the apartment walls and sent jostling rigmaroles of light from the water shuddering along the glass fascias of the balconies. I heard the splash of water and the delighted laugh of a girl – deep in her throat-and I felt a powerful urge to swim, to immerse myself in that over chlorinated blue, and wash Meyersen and the small humiliations of the lumber yard away. In my bedroom I selected a swimsuit and stepped out of my dress, but then caught sight of my thighs and buttocks in the square of mirror on the dressing table and decided instead to do some work. The larger humiliations of disrobing in front of the residents of the Escorial were an unignorable disincentive.

So I sat at my drawing board, adjusted the lamp and unrolled the interior elevations of 2265 Micheltoreno. My credo as an architect was the simplest I could devise: what space did I require, or my client require, and how was it to be confined. The great liberation bestowed by the new materials of the twentieth century had re-emphasised the architect's priorities: the space enclosed became more important than what enclosed the space. Others have put it more eloquently than I but for me stucco sheathing, glass tricks and reinforced concrete, bakelite and chrome, plywood and aluminium were blessings in so far as they served the space they were to contain. My second criterion was simplicity. The task was to design the space and employ the minimum to construct it. The house on Micheltoreno had been conceived, if you like, as an assemblage of blocks of air. Some of these blocks were to be found between stucco walls, some were bounded transparently by sheets of glass, some by beams and wood battens and balcony outriggers and some by the organic shapes of the trees that I had ordered left when the site was first cleared.

My current dilemma was that I needed a closet in the main bedroom but to build one in would mean diminishing the square footage of the bedroom. Not too grievous, in the scale of the world's problems, you might think, but if I did so the bedroom would no longer possess exactly the same square footage as the wide balcony porch on to which it gave – the space I had designed, and the harmony I wanted, would be compromised. I toyed with the dimensions a while and made a few sketches before a solution presented itself. Build in the closet and then echo it on the porch by placing two wooden struts as offcentre 'supports' to the shade trellis. Their function would be notional but the symmetry would be maintained, the wind landing would remain a spatial replica of its neighbouring room. So much, so perfect. Now I began to worry what a bed would do to my empty blocks of air…

The concierge called up from reception.

'There's a gentleman here to see you, Mrs Fischer.'

I checked my watch: Philip Brockway (my ex-husband) was early. I knew he wanted to borrow money. I had accused him of this when he telephoned and he denied it with such vehemence that I knew I was right. He merely wanted to see me, he said, and added some lame tosh about 'old times'.

All the same, I strolled along the walkway towards reception thinking not too unkindly of Philip-he was so pretty, with his pretty handsome weak face, his small girl's nose and his thick tawny hair. I would play with him a while, make him take me out for a cocktail, before I gave in and paid him to leave me alone once more.

I pushed through the swing doors into the lobby and saw the man from the site, the man who had asked for Miss Carriscant. He was old, grey-haired, but broad-shouldered and stocky, dressed in black as he had been at the house. He clutched his homburg in front of him like a steering wheel and took three paces towards me, staring at me intensely, as if searching for some sign of recognition. His own manifest apprehension put me at some ease.

'What do you want?' I said. 'Why are you-'

'Miss Carriscant?'

'No. No, I am not Miss Carriscant.'

He reached out and touched my bare arm, fleetingly, as if to reassure himself. His fingers felt dry, abrasive, heavily calloused.

'Peter?' I called the concierge. 'This gentleman is leaving.'

'You are Kay Carriscant.'

'I am Kay Fischer. You are making a tiresome and irritating error, Mr -'

'All right, all right. You were once Kay Carriscant. You were born on the ninth of January 1904 in the afternoon. You see, I -'

'Would you please leave me alone, Mr Whoever-you-are? This nonsense is beginning -'

'My name is Carriscant. Salvador Carriscant. Do you know who I am?'

'Of course not.'

The pungent denial in my voice, its plain tetchiness, caused the look in his eye to change. A shadow of sadness crossed his gaze and a deep hurt was revealed there for an instant. For some reason this mellowed me and I felt sorry for him and his hopeless quest for his Miss Carriscant.

'What do you want?' I said, with more kindness in my voice. 'Who are you?'

His face seemed to tighten, drawn down as if there were a pain in his gut. He closed his eyes a second and pursed his lips. He sighed.

'I am your father,' he said.

THREE

Philip accepted the five ten-dollar bills I gave him as casually as if they were cigarettes. Trying not to smile, he folded them into a calfskin wallet.

'Thanks, Kay. I owe you.'

'You surely do. Two hundred and counting.'

'Ho hum. It's only money.'

'Only my money.' I laughed, all the same, Philip was being sweet tonight, as only he knew how, and I was enjoying it. We sat in a piano bar called Mo-Jo's. It was downtown, on Broadway and Third, a joint Philip knew, where his credit was good. It was a curious place, a unique blend of Polynesian idyll and Nantucket fishing village. In the lobby you parted a bead curtain and crossed a log bridge over a moving stream to be confronted by a dark room with a bar decorated with signal flags and cork floats. The barmen wore striped matelot jerseys and red neckerchiefs. Lush groves of potted palms screened intimate booths made from packing cases and driftwood. Carved backlit native gargoyles served as sconces and cast a fuggy crimson-orange light on a bamboo-framed, wall-sized mural of a square-rigged clipper running before an icy, eye-watering wind. It represented the antithesis of everything I believed in, architecturally, and it made me laugh. Philip and I would fantasise about Mo-Jo's brief to his interior designer: 'Sorta Moby Dick meets Paul Gauguin, ya know?', 'Kinda hot and steamy but cool and unpretentious at the same time', 'Nathaniel Hawthorne's wet dream'. On every table was a gilt electric bellpush designed to summon one of the browned-up cocktail waitresses – halterneck tops over grass skirts, flowers behind ear – who sulked in the gloom behind the bar bickering with the matelots. As Philip reached over to press the button he allowed his knuckles to graze my breasts.

'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 lifted 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 awhile 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 muttered, 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.

His skin under the diffused electric light of the street took on marked olive tones, to the extent that he might have passed for a Mexican or Latino, and I thought again of this gift of patrimony he had brought me and how preposterous it was. My own skin was pale and insipid beside his. Shared dark hair and brown eyes made a flimsy case in a paternity suit.

At the door of his lodging house we made an appointment to meet the next day. The little men sat on the steps up to the front door where we had left them an hour since: they stared at me curiously, with no malice or hostility.

'Why are there so many Japanese here?' I asked him quietly.

He turned and spoke to the men on the steps in a language I did not recognise. They all laughed, with genuine hilarity, it seemed.

'Japanese?' he said, reproachfully. 'These men are Filipinos.'

SEVEN

I sat with Salvador Carriscant on the slatted wooden bench of a red car as it rolled and rattled as we crossed over Pico Boulevard at Sawtelle and headed out westward through the beanfields towards Santa Monica. Here and there the boulevard was being widened and long stretches of the small one-storey shops had been flattened to take the new roadway. Soon everyone would be able to drive to the beach. The trolley car stopped at the Ocean Avenue depot and Carriscant and I wandered down to Ocean Park. Once again I noticed that the press of people, the noise and the vivid colours of the sunshades seemed both to attract and disarm him. We stood at the Japanese gambling galleries watching men and women gambling for merchandise rather than money, and strolled past the beach clubs and the many piers, the loop-the-loop and the ride-the-clouds attractions; the air jangling with the shouts of children and the fretful buzz of the speedboats carrying anglers from the shore to the fishing barges-old mastless schooners, and wooden-hulled clippers-anchored a hundred yards or so out in the ocean. Only the Monkey Farm seemed to upset him. The crowd around the cages was six deep and when we managed to push through to see what the lure was I saw the expression on his face change at once from curiosity to disgust when he contemplated the melancholy chimpanzees and the neurotic mangy gibbons in their close-barred pens. He took hold of my elbow and steered me away.

'What's wrong?' I asked.

'Those monkeys in the cages, I don't like it… They remind me of someone.' He changed the subject. 'Let's eat,' he said. 'I want to eat fish.'

We went to one of the new apartment hotels, the Sovereign, which had a public dining room. Carriscant ordered broiled Spanish mackerel which he ate with his usual concentration. 'This is fresh,' he said, grudgingly, 'the best food I've tasted in America.'

The success of the menu dispelled the anger caused by the Monkey Farm and I sensed he was beginning to enjoy himself.

'I could never get enough fish,' he said, 'for all those years, even though we were not far from the coast. We sold all the fish we caught.'

I did not press him, or ask him what 'those years' were he was referring to. There would be time enough later for interrogation, and, besides, I thought he would tell me everything in his own good time, if he felt like it. I realised that this jaunt to the sea was just a means for him and me to become further acquainted – very much the father reestablishing his relationship with his long-lost daughter-and my silence, my reticence, encouraged this mood and that would please him, I knew.

And then I wondered why I should want to please him, why I was encouraging this-what?-this friendship, this evolving relationship. He knew my date of birth, but what did that prove? He knew what time of day I was born but that could have been an inspired guess, a lucky shot… But there was a quality of confidence about his dealings with me that seemed different, indicated a fundamental certainty of purpose that I felt no trickster or flim-flam man could simulate. It was not striven for, did not seek to impress. He appeared relaxed in my company – as if my company were all that he wanted-and that in turn relaxed me.

He looked up, now, from his meal and gave me a quick, strong smile, his broad face creasing momentarily. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps because Rudolf Fischer was so manifestly not my father, and Hugh Paget possessed all the substantiality of myth, I was seizing too firmly on to this new candidate, all attractive flesh and blood, all very much here and now? It was a form of temptation, I knew, a kind of seduction and, I realised as I contemplated this sturdy, handsome old man, it was one I was not as well equipped to resist as I thought.

When I asked him if he wanted a dessert he said he would prefer to eat another fish. He ordered a poached steak of yellowtail tuna which he consumed slowly and with much intense savouring of its flavours as I ate ice-cream and smoked a cigarette. After his second fish he ordered a cognac, the cheapest in the house. He discreetly picked his teeth with a quill tip (he carried a small packet of them with him) and then seemed to rinse his mouth with the brandy. I started to chatter – most uncharacteristically – to cover my mild embarrassment as this dental toilette, this boccal sluicing, went on. He listened politely as I told him about Santa Monica, Venice and the Malibu as I had known them over the years, but all the while I was aware of him sipping brandy and then, more disturbingly, I could hear the foamy susurrus in his mouth as he swilled and flushed the liquid between his teeth.

' – and the Roosevelt Highway didn't exist,' I was saying. 'I mean, now you can take it all the way up the coast to Oxnard, but I remember I came down here with Pappi once-I must have been about twelve – '

'Twelve?'

'Yes, I -'

He frowned. 'That would be about 1916?'

'Thereabouts. Twelve or thirteen, I guess. Pappi had this client – it was J. W. Considine, in fact – who had a house at the Malibu and we had to catch a boat out there from the Santa Monica pier. It was real cut off in those-'

'Kay I stopped talking at once. I realised he had not been listening to me.

'-If I was looking for a man in California,' he said, 'how would I set about finding him?'

'It depends… Do you know his name?'

'He's called Paton Bobby. All I know is he lives in California. He used to, anyway.'

I stubbed out my cigarette. 'Paton Bobby. Have you got any more information?'

'He's a little bit older than me. And I think he was a policeman.'

'That might help. Anything else?'

'That's it.'

I looked at him. I knew that our business, whatever it would turn out to be, was beginning, now, irrevocably.

'May I know why you want to find him?'

He smiled a faint, dreamy smile. His mood had changed ever since I had mentioned my childhood trip to the Malibu, my age and the date. It had sent him back through time, perhaps to that place where he could never get enough fish, and his thoughts had stayed there.

'I'm sorry, my dear, what did you say?'

'Why do you need to find this Paton Bobby?'

He sighed, looked down at his empty plate, turned his fork so that its tines pointed downward, and returned his gaze to mine.

'I suppose you could say,' he said, his eyes innocently wide, his expression bland, 'that I'm looking for a killer.'

EIGHT

Philip wrote out the cheque with evident but ridiculously disproportionate pride and handed it over with a courtly flourish.

'Pay to the order of Mrs Kay Fischer, two hundred dollars,' he said, through his grin.

'So you got a job,' I said.

'And a bank account. I've got six weeks' work with MGM. I'm the third writer on Four Guns for Texas.'

'Sounds fulfilling.'

'Sounds like money.'

We were sitting in my office on Hollywood Boulevard. From my office window I could see the top three storeys of the Guaranty Building and the dusty fronds of a palm tree. I rented three rooms above a clothing wholesaler – Tex-Style Imports Co.-who specialised in blue jeans, dungarees and work boots that were sold to the petrochemical industry. The room that faced the boulevard was my office, beyond that was a small corridor that led to a windowless cube which was the drawing room where my solitary assistant, Ivan Feinberg, worked. Off the corridor was the reception area with a view of the parking lot. Mary Duveen, my secretary, had her desk here, squeezed between two banks of filing cabinets. It was all a bit shabby, a little make-do, especially compared to what I had become accustomed to at Meyersen and Fischer, but since the great schism and the lawsuit I had been obliged to economise. I had heard from one of my former colleagues that Meyersen had moved into my old office. Perhaps that was what he had been after all the time?…

I took Philip's cheque and folded it away in my pocket book. He had had his hair cut and was wearing a new sportscoat, cotton, a greenish plaid, and wide mushroom-coloured trousers. His short hair, I thought, made him look even younger, a superannuated college kid, and for a moment I felt a brief squirm of self-pity as I reflected on our short marriage and what I had lost when I kicked him out. I kept the appellation 'Mrs', not because it impressed my clients but because it made them relax, but joined it up with my maiden name. The conjunction seemed to me to reflect ideally my social and personal status. But Philip was offended and hurt: I was having my cake and eating it, he said truculently. But isn't that what life's all about, I replied, the goal we're all chasing? A brief squirm of self-pity, but one that disappeared soon enough.

'Movies,' I said, breezily. 'Going to get your name on this one?'

'There's a chance.'

I laughed. 'And pigs may fly one day, they tell me.' I stood up. 'I'll walk down with you, I've got to get some lunch.'

As we descended the two floors to the street I asked Philip if he knew any way of tracking down a man called Paton Bobby, who was in his sixties and might have been a policeman.

'Tried the phone book? Who's Paton Bobby?'

'A friend of mine needs to find him. I thought you might know how.'

He shrugged. 'You could hire a P. I., I guess… Or maybe I could ask the head of security at the studio – ' He grinned. 'Did you hear that? "At the studio" – I'm a natural, success simply cannot continue to elude me. This guy used to be a cop, he might have some idea.'

We sauntered down the sidewalk towards a street vendor. The sun was hot on the crown of my head and I undid the top button on my blouse. It was a fine day with a baby-blue sky up above and a few perfect dawdling clouds. A fresh breeze moved through the fronds of the new palm trees, still only half the height of the streetlamps. They made a sound of nail scissors snipping or of matches tipped on to a glass table. I put on my sunglasses as the sun bounced off the white walls of the buildings across the street. Too much Streamline Moderne for my taste these days. Curved walls, curved glass, mirrored panels set here and there, stringcourses picked out in red and black to emphasise the horizontals, canopies swooping round corners or ducking into forecourts whenever possible… What was going on here? It was all vitiated anyway by the garish lettering, shouting signs in primary colours hanging off buildings or else set on cantilevered wooden hoardings on the flat roofs, good chow! ham 'n eggs, cameras, gifts, parking. We passed through a tangy waft of fried onion as we walked by harrold's charcoal broiled steaks and made for the street vendor with his refulgent silver chariot. I ordered a super chile dog with mustard and extra onions.

Philip touched my arm. 'Listen, you're not in any kind of trouble, are you, hon?' He was sincere, and it was a kind thought. I realised I was still very fond of him.

'Of course I'm not,' I reassured him. 'It's some old fellow I know, needs to track this party down.'

Philip looked at me shrewdly, not wholly convinced, as I paid for and received my food. I could see him wondering how many 'old fellows' I might know and why I might want to help them locate a missing person.

'Stop looking at me like that. You don't have to do anything if you don't want to.'

'No, no, I'll see what I can do.'

I could wait no longer. I bit avidly into my chile dog, my nostrils suddenly filled with pungent heat. With a finger I helped a stray ribbon of onion into my mouth. I chewed.

Philip looked at me fastidiously. 'I was going to ask you to dinner tonight, but now I've seen your lunch I guess you won't be hungry.'

'Ha-ha. Call me later, you may get lucky.'

When I returned to my office George Fugal was there waiting for me, a wide smile on his narrow face. George was a tall thin forty-year-old with a restless, jumpy demeanour that sat oddly with a professional manner that could only be described as the last word in pedantry. He had thinning brown hair, big watery eyes and a weak chin that always had a bluey, unshaven look to it. If I had not known he was a lawyer I would have placed him as a minor criminal on parole, or a debtor on the run from the IRS. George never stopped looking round whatever room he was in, or over his shoulder; in restaurants he insisted on sitting with his back to the door, the better to squinny round in his seat.

'So what's the good news?' I asked him.

'We got a buyer for the house. I'm sure. A-' He checked his notebook. 'A Mrs Luard Turner. Pleasant lady. I just showed her around.'

'I'm going to finish it first. I hope she realises that,' I said with some ungrateful belligerence. All at once I felt oddly sad. Someone was going to buy my house. Someone else was going to live in my carefully constructed volumes of air.

'She knows that, she knows that. But she loves the place. Classy, she said. Grade-A class, she said. Her very words, Kay, her very words.'

He chattered on, excited and pleased for me, his gaze leaping from me to Mary to the office door to the trash can. We needed the sale to make the profit to permit K. L. Fischer to survive and move on to bigger and greater things. But I was still feeling my loss keenly.

'We've done it, Kay,' George Fugal said. 'You're there.' I smiled at him. Somehow I did not believe it was ever that easy.

NINE

In architecture, as in art, the more you reduce the more exacting your standards must be. The more you strip down and eliminate, the greater the pressure on, the import of, what remains. If a room is only to have one door and one window then those two openings must conform exactly to the volume of space contained between the four walls, the floor and the ceiling. They must be shaped and styled with intense concentration and focus. One inch, half an inch, can make all the difference between something perfect and something botched. Without decoration, without distraction, proportion becomes the essential factor.

My aesthetic mentor, my inspiration, in all this was the German architect Oscar Kranewitter (1891-1929). He was a friend of Gropius and like him was heavily influenced by the austere ideologies of Johannes Itten. Kranewitter was one of the first members of the German Werkbund and taught occasionally at the Bauhaus between 1923 and 1925 (he departed, never to return, after a savage row-it came to blows-with Hannes Meyer). There is no doubt that had it not been for his tragically early death (in an automobile accident) Kranewitter would be regarded as one of the foremost German architects and leaders of the International Style. Because of his demanding temperament and the strictures he imposed on himself and his clients he built very little and his published work is confined to a few articles in obscure reviews such as Metall and Neue Europaische Graphik. And it was in these densely argued pieces that he introduced the concept of Armut into modern architecture -or 'Poverty'. But the sense with which Kranewitter charges and loads this abstract noun is complex: for him the meaning of the word loses any negative or pejorative import and its implication is transformed into something more akin to 'Purity'. The abstruse theorising behind Armut was given a physical dimension in Kranewitter's masterwork, the Lothar House (1924-1929) in Obertraubling near Regensburg. It was here during the painstaking five years of construction that Kranewitter's obsessiveness and fanatical attention to detail took on legendary proportions as his conception of Armut took on plastic form. When the house was all but completed he had the entire ceiling of the dining room torn down and rebuilt four centimetres higher. He designed all the furniture (teak, chrome and leather were the only materials used) and there were no carpets or curtains. The floors were made of a dark polished flint. The colour of the walls was white on the first floor and primrose yellow on the second (yellow is a 'lighter' colour than white, according to Kranewitter, and therefore suitable for rooms above ground level). All the door furniture was forged aluminium and unpainted, as were the massive and specially designed central heating radiators. The rooms were lit with naked light bulbs. It was destroyed by a stray stick of bombs during a raid on Regensburg in the Second World War.

The more I studied Kranewitter the more I came to admire the dedication of the man and the ruthless consistency of his ideas. Rigour, clarity and precision seemed to me attributes that were both admirable and practical. Kranewitter's Armut is not something miserable and deprived: it has a liberating, purgative quality to it. The more the twentieth century advances and the more crassly complicated our lives become and the more the hectoring injunctions of the commercial world intrude – eat! buy! play! spend! enjoy! -and come to dominate our every waking moment, so do the calm and emptiness, the clean, unimpeded, untrammelled nature of the world Kranewitter tried to create grow ever more appealing.

These were ambitions that I tried to realise and incorporate in my own work and they are manifestly embodied in the two completed buildings I designed – the Taylor house in Pasadena, and the Burbank shopping mart. Everything extraneous is stripped away. The interiors are ruthlessly plain, the only lines are vertical or horizontal. Even in such a temple of self-indulgence as a shopping mart -the American antithesis of Armut – Kranewitter's ascetic philosophy is evident. And it works.

It worked so well it cost me my job. The success of the Burbank mart meant that Meyersen and Fischer were approached by Ohman's Retail Group to design their new store and restaurant complex on Wilshire Boulevard. I did the initial drawings and plans, and had a scale model constructed. Shortly before the final contracts were signed, Eric Meyersen called me into his office and informed me that I was fired. When I asked him why, he said, equably, 'No real reason, honey. I just don't want to see your face around here any more, I guess.' Meyersen had, to put it simply, got what he needed from me – a body of work, a small but growing reputation, a style. Now, with the Ohman deal secure, he figured he could go it alone. Fugal looked at the document of partnership I had signed so avidly five years previously and duly unearthed the subclauses that granted Meyersen this unilateral power. I told him to sue the bastard in any case. Writs were served as the Ohman's Building contract was signed by Eric Meyersen Architects Inc. The Taylor house and the Burbank mart records were similarly altered. My only course of action was to go out on my own and show the world who really was responsible for these buildings.2265 Micheltoreno would be the first nail in Meyersen's coffin.

TEN

Philip was renting a small clapboard cottage in Venice, one street back from the boardwalk and the ocean. I walked up the two steps to its sunblistered porch, tucked the flask under one arm, set down my grocery bag on an old cane rocker and rapped loudly on the frame of the flyscreened door. From inside I heard a couple of plaintive coughs and then Philip appeared in a creased and grubby robe, his hair lank and greasy. He had shaved recently, but it had made little difference, his eyes were dark, his face slumped and pasty-looking.

'Hello, sunshine,' I said. 'Momma's here.'

He had made up his bed – a navaho blanket and three pillows – on a winded davenport in the living room. From next door the sound of his neighbour's radio, playing 'American Dreamer', was thinly audible. By the time I had poured the soup into a bowl and brought it through to him he was back on the couch under the blanket, his knees drawn up, his face set in an expression of stoical suffering.

'Potato soup and pastries, right? I got you pecan pie, lemon cheesecake and four assorted Danish.'

'Bless you.' He took the soup from me and started to slurp it up eagerly, like a starving peasant. 'I haven't eaten for forty-eight hours.'

I had seen the empty quart of bourbon in the kitchenette.

'What's wrong?'

'I got fired. After four fucking days, they fired me.'

'Well, it was a crappy movie-'

' – It was work, Kay. Four hundred dollars a week work.' His voice was sulky and heavy with self-pity. I sat and watched him finish his soup, whereupon he immediately started on the cheesecake. He took too large a mouthful and swallowed painfully. He coughed crumbs on to the davenport.

'Take it easy,' I said. 'No one's going to snatch it away. You want a coffee?'

'I think I got a tumour in my throat. Could you take a look?'

He gaped at me. I held his handsome, damaged face between my palms and tilted it so that the light from the window fell on his gullet. I saw nothing but pink pulsing gorge and a certain amount of lemon cheesecake but I knew Philip in these moods, he needed something to hold on to.

'I don't see much… Maybe it's a little red.'

'Jesus… What about my eyes? Any yellow tinge?'

'Red's your colour today, I'm afraid. Why yellow?'

'I get these pains in my back. I worry my liver is shot – cirrhosis, or something. Maybe a cancer.'

'I'd lay off the bourbon.' I stood up. 'I'll fix you a coffee.'

I walked back through to the kitchenette and put a pan of water on the stove to heat while I looked for some coffee grounds. I heard Philip's doleful footsteps shuffle up behind me and then felt his arms go round my waist. He nuzzled at the back of my neck, little pecking kisses.

'Kay-kay, can I come and stay over a few days? I hate it like this on my own.'

'No, Philip, you know it won't-'

'I just can't cope. I just -'

' – have to stop drinking. So you got fired. It's not the end of the world. This town's full of crappy movies looking for writers. And full of fired writers looking for crappy movies.'

'It was a good job, Kay. The best.' He stepped away from me and thrust his fists deep into his robe pockets. 'Six, eight weeks, I'd have been set up.' He pulled a crumpled slip of paper out of one pocket and looked at it strangely. 'Jeez, I forgot, this is for you.' He handed it over. 'They found your – whatchacallim – Paton Bobby. McGuire at the studio… The fucking studio.'

I smoothed out the sheet of paper and read what was written there: 'Sheriff Paton Bobby, Los Feliz Ranch, White Lakes, Santa Fe '…

' Santa Fe?'

Philip said: 'He wasn't even in California. Just as well you told me he was a cop. We'd never have found him.'

I turned and looked out of the kitchen window. I could see a stunted, abused cypress, its top three feet broken off and hanging there and beyond that a chainlink fence which marked the boundary of a spur track of the Electric Railway. So Paton Bobby was a sheriff in Santa Fe, New Mexico. What could Dr Salvador Carriscant want with him?

'Any chance of that coffee?' Philip said. 'My throat's killing me.'

I met Carriscant at the railroad station in Pasadena early in the morning. He had asked me to come with him to Santa Fe and, for some reason, and much to my astonishment, I agreed at once, without any reflection or any regrets.

He had asked and I had said yes, and it was only later that this had struck me as presumptuous on his part and paradoxical on mine. But he had fired my imagination, had Salvador Carriscant, and his easy assumption about the bond that existed between us was one I was ceasing to be on guard against or question. But I steered my reasoning away from this particular motivation to another that was more acceptable, if quixotic. This was an adventure, I told myself, an intriguing quest, and one that I would regret not seeing through at least a little further along the way. We could make the return journey in two days and my curiosity about Carriscant and Paton Bobby was acute-and besides, I had never been to New Mexico.

The waiting room at Pasadena was clean and redolent of carbolic, the first commuters were arriving and the newsstands were still plump with unsold newspapers and magazines. Carriscant was standing at our prearranged rendezvous at the entrance to the coffee shop looking apprehensive and lost. The smile on his face when he saw me was genuine. He held up two tickets as I approached.

'I bought your ticket,' he said. 'There is no need to reimburse me.'

'Don't worry,' I said. 'I haven't changed my mind.'

'I'm very grateful that you're accompanying me,' he said, as we made our way towards the platform for the Santa Fe express. 'You might find this hard to believe but the last time I took a train was from Glasgow to Liverpool in 1897.'

Paton Bobby's ranch turned out to be south of Santa Fe, a few miles outside White Lakes on a grassy butte with the Sangre de Cristo Mountains dark and solid in the background. We hired a taxi for the day (a modest twenty dollars) and set out from our hotel near the railroad station after breakfast. I asked Carriscant if he had taken the precaution of cabling ahead to warn Bobby of our arrival. He said he had decided against the idea.

'But what if he's not there?' I said, irritated.

'Oh, I made sure he was there. I just didn't want him to know that I was coming.' Carriscant's English accent had the effect of making him at times sound insufferably smug, and this was one of those times.

'Who is Paton Bobby?' I said. 'How do you know him?'

'We met a long time ago. We were quite close friends, for a while.'

I did not press him further, deliberately; I did not want to give him the satisfaction of practising his maddening obliquity on me any more. As far as this quest was concerned Carriscant was very reluctant to tell me anything. Facts about his aims and his past were eked out sparingly, and usually when unsolicited. From time to time a nugget of information would be placed in front of you like an amuse-gueule, the better to whet your appetite, but if you sought for information he withdrew. I was not sure whether he was playing some complex, teasing game with me or whether he was simply guileless – an old man whose memory was occasionally stimulated – or whether he was one of the most sophisticated liars I had ever met. What prompted the reference to the train journey from Glasgow to Liverpool in 1897, for example? Was it just his insecurity, his vulnerability manifesting itself, or was it a piece designed to fit some larger puzzle? I had given up trying to extract information for the time being: I too could play at being indifferent and opaque with the best of them.

We turned off the Albuquerque – Las Vegas road and followed the signs for Clines Cors and Encino. In White Lakes we were directed up a white dirt road running along the edge of a wide sagebrush mesa. We hit a line of splitrail fencing and soon saw the gateway and the sign 'Rancho Los Feliz' burnt deep in the wooden lintel.

'What's that? "Ranch of the Happy Ones"?' Carriscant said. 'Funny how the Spanish saves it from the vulgarity.' The smile on his face died. 'I would never have imagined Paton Bobby in a place like… ' He tailed off. All of a sudden he seemed a worried man.

However vulgar its name, the ranch had a well-run, neat and tidy air to it. Big boulders set at the entrance were freshly whitewashed, the twin rutted track up to the ranchhouse was weedfree, its central stripe of grass clipped short, like the verges. On either side horses grazed in well-irrigated meadows. Prosperity and order seemed to breathe from the alfalfa grass and the manzanita trees.

I looked again at Carriscant. He sat rigid, now, tense, his teeth chewing vaguely on his bottom lip. His eyes seemed lost, distant, barely aware of his surroundings. It was as if he had never decided to come on this trip of his own volition, but was being led here somehow, like a prisoner to a scaffold, or a conscript to a battlefield, passive, powerless to change whatever would ensue. I felt sorry for him, and oddly protective, aware suddenly of his strange helplessness in this big country, and was glad that I had come with him.

Dogs set up a barking as we drew up in front of the ranchhouse, a new building, with stone gables and a long shady porch with bright borders of flowers along its facade. I told a Mexican ranch hand that we were here to see Mr Bobby and we were directed to the front door where a maid duly showed us into a small parlour. Presently, a woman, not much older than me, joined us and introduced herself as Estelle Bobby. I had her placed as the daughter but it soon became apparent she was a new wife. She was shy and pretty with slightly bulging blue eyes and fair hair. If Bobby was in his late sixties he had a thirty-year start on his wife, it was clear.

I introduced myself and Carriscant, who was by now so totally subdued that I felt like his chaperone. When I said his name it seemed to mean nothing to her.

Estelle Bobby directed us to chairs as if she had learned her manners from a correspondence course.

'My husband will be back within the hour,' she said. 'He's out riding. May I pertain what your visit is concerning?'

I turned to Carriscant.

'I, ah, I'm an old friend of your husband,' he muttered, gracelessly. 'I haven't seen him in over thirty years…'

'We were in Santa Fe on business,' I improvised. 'Mr Carriscant thought it would be worth calling in on the off chance.'

'Certainly, of course, you're more than welcome,' Mrs Bobby said and went off to fetch us some coffee while we waited.

Two cups later, with Mrs Bobby busying herself elsewhere in the house, we heard the sound of a horse's hooves and saw a neat buggy with a high-stepping bay between the shafts enter the yard and move out of sight behind the back of the house. I glimpsed a large stout man at the reins, quite bald and with a big wide moustache. We heard a rear door open and the sound of voices conversing. I turned to Carriscant. He was pale, his mouth slack.

'I feel sick, Kay,' he said, hoarsely. 'I think I'm going to vomit.'

He extended his hand shakily and, without thinking, I took hold of it and squeezed.

'Come on, drink some coffee, you'll be fine.'- 'I think we should leave. Now.' Panic lit his eyes.

'Don't be ridiculous. We've come all this way. What's he done to you, this man?'

Carriscant shook his head wordlessly. To give him some time I rose to my feet and went through to the hall, closing the parlour door behind me. Paton Bobby was emerging from the kitchen. Under his perfectly smooth, shiny pate he had a square seamed face, with kind eyes, and a wide neatly trimmed grey moustache that effectively bisected his face from ear to ear. He was broad-shouldered and carried his big belly easily, almost proudly. Some men seem to suit being fat and Paton Bobby was one of them, comfortable, attractive even, in his solid obesity.

He shook my hand and I introduced myself and apologised for arriving unannounced.

He looked at me shrewdly. 'My wife says this gentleman is an old friend of mine. I have no old friends called Tarrant.' He had a slow easy voice, with a harder rumble somewhere at the back of his throat. I saw a leather cigar-holder, like a Pan's pipe, jutting from the breast pocket of his jacket.

'No,' I said carefully, flashing a smile at Mrs Bobby. 'Not Tarrant. Carriscant. Dr Salvador Carriscant.'

The genial curiosity on Paton Bobby's face vanished instantly, transformed completely into an expression of astonishment that would have done justice to a cartoon character. His brows arched, his eyes wide, his open mouth forming a soundless 'What?' He began to blink rapidly.

'Salvador Carriscant?' he repeated. 'Are you out of your mind?'

'No, Paton, she's not.'

We turned to see Carriscant, framed square in the parlour doorway, composed, clear-eyed. Paton Bobby took half a step back, as if to focus better, still frowning, staring.

'My God Jesus Christ,' he said softly, almost fearfully, his voice ragged with emotion. ' Salvador.'

And at just that moment I felt a flush of anger rinse through me. I was so ignorant, had been so wilfully kept in that state that to witness now the profound shock of this reunion, to see plainly its melodramatic impact, made me feel used and exploited. Carriscant vigorously, two-fistedly shaking Bobby's hand, the two of them manfully loud in their mutual exclamations of astonishment… This was the craven fellow who moments ago was threatening to vomit, who needed his hand reassuringly squeezed. I stood there watching them and resented, with special force, the way this man had insinuated himself so deeply into my life already. And with such ease… What did I owe him? What hold had he over me? What responsibilities were due? None, was the quick and simple answer and I resolved to have nothing further to do with him and his bizarre private schemes.

'What's going on?' I said, a little too abruptly. 'What is there between you two?'

Bobby turned, surprised. 'Didn't he tell you? My God, Salvador was-'

'-Later, Kay, please,' Carriscant interrupted, courteously. 'If you don't mind. I have to talk to Paton first.'

'Fine. I'll be in the car. Let me know when you're ready to leave.'

I sat in the car for ten minutes, maddened and cross at myself, until the stickiness of the hot leather under my thighs drove me outside again. I paced around smoking a cigarette watched with only the mildest curiosity by the taxi driver, an old taciturn hacker called Arthur Clough, who had large uneven yellow teeth and a persistent sniff. From where I was standing I could see the top of Paton Bobby's head, which seemed to do nothing but nod all the time. I asked Arthur if he knew of Bobby.

'Sure,' he said. 'I, think he used to be sheriff of Los Alamos – and didn't he run for mayor of Santa Fe once? After he came out of the army or something. I seen his face in the paper a while back.'

He accepted one of my cigarettes and smoked it fastidiously, like a Victorian dandy, held palm upward between thumb and forefinger.

Carriscant and Paton Bobby came to the front door about an hour later. From my position, although I could not swear to it, it seemed as if Bobby had been weeping, but the idea seemed so incongruous as to be almost incredible. But his posture was stooped, that canted-back, spread-legged confidence seemed absent, now, and I distinctly heard him say as they made their farewells: ' – I hope you can forgive me, Salvador.'

'Of course,' Carriscant said, with what sounded like genuine feeling. 'I never blamed you, Paton. Never. You were doing your job, and,' he paused, 'and it was a difficult time.'

Carriscant climbed into the car beside me, stiff-faced, upset. He sat back in his seat and closed his eyes.

'Poor Paton,' he said.

'What's happening?' I said, full of angry curiosity. 'You can't keep this from me any more.'

'Oh, Kay, Kay, give me a moment.'

The car pulled away from the house. Paton Bobby had not lingered on the porch. Carriscant looked at me and managed a smile of sorts.

'I'm sorry, Kay… It's not fair, Kay, I know, but this was crucial, essential for me, my dear Kay, if you could only -'

'Stop saying my goddamn name!'

My vehemence seemed to shake him out of his patronising complacency, his sense of triumph. For some sort of victory had ensued in that house, long overdue, I suspected, and he was savouring it. In the event, he stopped talking and reached inside his coat and drew out a small leather wallet, which he opened. Inside it was the folded page of an illustrated magazine. I glimpsed an advertisement for a beer I did not recognise and some phrases in Spanish, or so I thought. Without further explanation Carriscant handed me the sheet and I spread it open on my knees. On the page there were six photographs with captions beneath them. The language was Portuguese, I now saw, and the pictures appeared to be of routine society occasions or news events. My eye caught a wedding, an arm-waving top-hatted politician making a speech, an elaborate villa damaged by fire. Carriscant's finger indicated the bottom righthand photograph. A man in tennis whites was being presented with an enormous silver trophy by a flamboyant young woman in a cloche hat and many strings of pearls. I noticed the date at the bottom of the page: 25 May 1927. I glanced at the caption trying to translate it. A charity tennis match… Jean-Claude Riverain the winner -I remembered the famous tennis player, and looked curiously at him now in his loose dusty flannels, a damp comma of hair pasted to his high tanned forehead – and Miss Carmencita Barrera, the celebrated motion picture actress, all winking sequins and lace, her face as white as pipeclay…

'The actress?' I said.

'No, the woman two along from her.'

I peered closer. An elegant woman, in her fifties perhaps, still attractive, applauding, a faint ambiguous smile on her face. The focus was sharp, I could make out the paisley motif on her dress but I could not judge whether her smile was one of polite boredom or polite enthusiasm. Between her and the actress was an elderly man with white hair in a dark suit; on her other side a naval officer of some exalted rank; the other figures were blurred. No-one else apart from the actress and the tennis star was identified.

Carriscant took the page away from me and folded it carefully, slipping it back into its wallet.

'That is her,' he said simply and with curious authority. 'I was never sure, never really sure, that's why I needed to find Paton. He was the only one who could confirm it.'

'Confirm what?'

'That she was – that she is – who I thought she was.'

'And he did?'

'Without hesitation. Without a moment's hesitation.' He let a slow shuddering breath pass from him. 'And now I know. You can't imagine what it's like, after thirty-three years.'

'Dr Carriscant, you have to tell me what you're talking about. There's no point if I don't-'

He held up a hand to stop me and then breathed in and out, a dozen deep breaths as if to invigorate himself, as if he had been asleep for a long time. It was most irritating.

'All this time,' he began, 'I thought she might be dead, you see. Thought I'd never know what happened. But then I found this picture, by some… some miraculous, some devious twist of fate. And now I know she's alive.'

'But the picture's almost ten years old.'

'But she's alive. She looks – ' Tears bulged at his lids, his voice thickened. 'I know she is waiting for me.' He said this with adamantine confidence, and then turned to me.

'We'll go and find her.'

'We? What're you talking about?

'You and me, Kay – dear Kay. We will go to Lisbon and find her.'

ELEVEN

It is hard to find a small cemetery in Los Angeles. And I was set on my son being buried somewhere small and private, a place where there would be few passers-by, where there would be fewer incurious glances than in some multi-acre necropolis or the vast landscaped death park that is the norm.

I found an old, partially rebuilt mission at the north end of the San Fernando Valley where, by dint of a hefty donation to the restoration fund, I was provided with a plot in one corner, shaded by a grove of eucalyptus trees. I go there from time to time, about once a month, trying not to make a ritual out of my visits, in good moods and bad, but inevitably the place has forged its associations (I have no real memory of him, after all) and now it is the rattle of dry leaves, the tomcat smell of eucalyptus, even the filigreed shadow of sun through branches, that conspire to remind me of my dead son.

I spent some time on the headstone also: what does one inscribe when a life has only spanned sixteen days? 'Those whom the Gods love… '? 'Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity'? In the end I chose white marble, very simple, and had the name and the date inlaid in bronze. COLMAN BROCKWAY, 10 April 1930-26 April 1930. Over the years since his death the verdigris on the bronze lettering has run and stained the marble beneath, like green tears. Green tears for my blue baby. Coleman Brockway came into the world with a stacked deck against him from day one – he had a hole in his heart.

Mrs Luard Turner wore a white fox wrap with her aquamarine suit even though the day was hot and the sky above was a changeless blue. She was heavily made up too, like an actress, I thought, with a thick base of panstick and powder over skin that was beginning to show signs of slippage and slackening. I closed the door of the big closet in the bedroom.

'You'll notice the house has many closets,' I said, 'and that many of them are twice as large as is normal.'

'What? Why, yes, I did think -'

'The idea, you see, is that there should be no clutter. Everything can be stowed away.' I smiled at her, I was starting to hector, I knew, a habit I fall into when I suspect someone is not really paying attention. 'I can't stop people owning possessions, but I can encourage them to keep them out of sight.'

'Oh, sure,' she smiled back, uncertainly. 'I, ah, like to be tidy too.'

'Everything in this house has been thought through, Mrs Turner. Every proportion is precise. Wherever possible I have built the furniture in – like the kitchen, like that unit of drawers and shelves in the living room-because you simply cannot, in a house of this style, of this, if I may say so, ethos, make a – '

'I'm sorry? Eeth what?'

'- you can't just put in ordinary furniture, your average sofa, armchairs, etcetera.'

'I can't?'

'Where you need new furniture I would ask you – actually, I would beg you-to go to specialist furniture makers. Order items that will suit the house, you'll never regret it. I can give you half a dozen names of-'

'Mrs Fischer is very proud of her house,' George Fugal interrupted with a nervous laugh.

'Oh, sure,' Mrs Turner said, looking around. 'Ah, is the bathroom functioning?'

I showed her where it was.

'It's a done deal,' George said. 'She's crazy about the place.'

'Could have fooled me. Is she all right? She seems sort of distant, not in touch. Is there -'

'Kay, I have ten per cent in escrow. She's not fooling around.' He looked nervously over his shoulder and lowered his voice. 'Will I be able to hear the noise of the flush? I mean here, in this room?'

'Probably. Why?'

'Could we go downstairs? It makes me uncomfortable, you know, when she comes out – I hate that moment.'

George and I descended the stairs noisily, our feet clattering on the bare boards, so Mrs Turner could flush the toilet without fear of embarrassment.

'I think you could have made these stairs wider.'

'George, I don't advise you on points of law.'

Mrs Luard Turner duly appeared and was duly satisfied. She forgot to ask but I still gave her a list of names of cabinet makers who could provide her with dining room tables and easy chairs that would not destroy the clean lines of my perfect rooms. It was agreed that the contracts would be signed in Fugal's offices the next day at 10 a.m.

I drove west on Sunset and turned up Normandie on to Hollywood. Carriscant was pacing up and down outside the front door of my building. It was five days now since our trip to Santa Fe and I had not seen him in the meantime, all my efforts having been concentrated on ensuring the house was ready for sale. The by now increasingly familiar aggregate of emotions coagulated inside me as I pulled up at the kerb and I saw him hurry over – a tacky mass of surprise, curiosity, fractiousness and fatigue. The trip to Santa Fe had proved too sustained and rich a diet of Salvador Carriscant. For the moment smaller doses were what was required.

Carriscant followed me into my office, close on my heels, as if he was expecting me to make a run for it; I could sense his impatience and his excitement brewing in the air around us but I refused to be cajoled or hurried, taking my time checking my messages with Mary and spending five minutes with Ivan looking over the preliminary drawings that he had made on a new site we had found in Silver Lake, a few streets north of Micheltoreno.

Eventually I allowed Carriscant to take a seat in my office while I made a call to Fugal to confirm that all was proceeding normally with the Luard Turner deal – everything was in order. I recradled the phone.

'Look, you can't stay long,' I said, 'these are my office hours. If you knew how busy -'

'Kay, I understand. No-one understands better than me. I simply thought you would like to be the first to know.'

'What?'

'What I've found out about the photograph.' He removed the soft wallet from his coat pocket. 'It's amazing what information you can mine from a well-equipped public library.'

'Fire away.'

Carriscant told me he had discovered more about the tennis match that the photograph featured. It had been part of a series of charity events taking place over three days -bicycle races, boxing bouts, a raffle with cash prizes-co-sponsored by the US legation, the Portuguese Red Cross and an Anglo-Portuguese charity welfare group called the Knights of 1147, commemorating the year, Carriscant informed me with an annoying pedagogical air, when English crusaders helped capture Lisbon from the Moors. The festival had occurred between 20 and 23 May to celebrate the Knights' golden jubilee and the visit of the US Navy's light cruiser Olympia and a British destroyer flotilla to Lisbon. The tennis match had been the highlight of the three days' entertainments, an exhibition game between Riverain and Carlos Pelicet. 'Riverain won 6-2, 6-4,' Carriscant informed me. 'Apparently it was a closer match than the score suggests.' What was interesting, he went on, was that the cup had been named after the wife of the US envoy – the Lillian Aishlie cup.

'And what was even more interesting,' Carriscant said, leaning forward, placing both hands on my desk, 'is that the envoy's wife did not present the trophy.'

I assumed Carriscant would inform me why this was 'even more interesting' in his own good time.

'I know,' I said dutifully, 'that actress – what's her name – did.'

'Exactly. Q. E. D.'

'I don't follow.'

'The envoy's wife couldn't have been there.'

'Possibly. So what?'

'So that means the other people on the dais were more than likely US legation staff.'

Finally I began to see the meandering line his reasoning was taking. 'So,' I said, slowly, 'no ambassador's wife for the presentation of her own trophy – '

'Call in a cinema actress. But someone has to be there from the legation.'

'Why not the Red Cross or the Knights of diddly-squat?'

'Because this was the USA 's event.' He removed his precious photograph from its wallet and spread it out on my blotter. The actress, the white-haired man in the dark suit, Carriscant's lady with her enigmatic smile, the naval officer.

'The guest of honour,' Carriscant said, his forefinger on Carmencita Barrera (the nail was rimmed with dirt, I noticed), it jumped the next two faces down the line, 'the naval officer,' back for the white-haired man, 'the envoy and,' he paused, 'the envoy's guest, or the naval officer's wife.'

I could see that this last appellation affected him. 'It sounds plausible,' I said, 'but you can't know for sure.' I turned the magazine page round to face him. 'All these people are on the gorgeous Carmencita's left. The really important people could be on the right.'

'No, absolutely not. Press photographers always make sure the dignitaries are in the shot.'

I could see he was in no mood to quibble. He was convinced with all the unreasoning certainty of a zealot, and he was not going to be shifted.

'So, you're saying – ' I began.

'I'm saying that this woman… ' there was now a distinct tremble in his voice, an emotional vibrato. 'This woman was the friend or wife of a US embassy official in Lisbon in 1927.' He reclined in his chair, his face set in the curious clenched half-grimace of someone fighting to hold tears back. He folded his arms tightly across his chest, embracing himself.

'This is where the trail starts,' he, said, his voice husky with triumph. 'This is where it must begin.'

'Well, good luck to you.'

He looked at me blankly, emptily for an instant, as if I had suddenly spoken in a foreign language.

'No, Kay, we begin. Us, you and me. I can't go without you.'

'I told you the last time, I'm not going anywhere. I have a house to design. I have a life to live here, for God's sake.'

'It would only be for six weeks, two months.'

I laughed: more a gasp of incredulity than a laugh, actually.

'Dr Carriscant, this is your… your obsession, not mine. I barely know you. I can't simply -'

'I can't afford to go to Lisbon,' he said petulantly, accusingly, as if it were my fault. 'I have no money.'

'Neither of us has money.'

'You've just sold your house.'

'Yes, my house. To build another one. We work on a shoestring here, look around you.'

He lowered his head to stare at his hands which were held in his lap, loose fists. His shoulders hunched and subsided a few times, as if he were relieving an ache, and when he looked up at me again shameless tears were flowing from his eyes.

'Kay, I'm asking you as my daughter -'

'Stop that, right now -'

'- as your father. Come with me, help me.'

'You are not my father,' I shouted at him. 'Hugh Paget was my father. How dare you -'

'No, I am, I am, Kay!' he shouted back. 'I am!'

The fervent confidence with which he made this claim silenced and unsettled me. I realised that in my association with Salvador Carriscant, the hours I had spent in his company, our two-day trip to Santa Fe, I had tacitly set aside my doubts and had complacently – perhaps voluntarily-allowed the assumption he had made to lie there between us, like a gift proffered, but not yet accepted. Nor yet rejected. Now was the time for that act to occur.

'If you are my father,' I sad reasonably, under control, 'then who is my mother?'

'Why, your mother, of course. Annaliese.'

'She is alive and well and living in Long Beach, California, if you want to go visit.'

He looked sad and shook his head, wordlessly, then sniffed and wiped the drying tears from his cheeks. Not for the first time I asked myself if he was an innocent fool or simply a very bad actor.

'She would never see me,' he said. 'She would never acknowledge me.'

'Why not?'

'Because of what I did to her.'

'How long were you married?'

'Five years.'

I stopped myself from asking any more questions even though dozens of fresh ones were lining up clamouring in my head. What was the date of the marriage? How old was I when it ended?… The problem was that all my questions presupposed the veracity of his version of events – and I saw that this was how Salvador Carriscant drew you in, enmeshed and enmired you. I was not going to play his dangerous games any longer.

'I'm sorry, Dr Carriscant,' I said abruptly. 'I can't help you on this, no.'

He stared at me balefully, sullenly, his eyes full of a new dislike and resentment. And then, all at once, the mood passed and his face brightened. He exhaled and let his shoulders slump and smiled weakly.

'Oh, well,' he said almost light-heartedly, 'what can I do? I hope you won't object if I try to change your mind – from time to time.'

'You can try,' I said, 'but it won't work.'

THIRTEEN

Philip's thigh was still warm against mine. Too warm. I moved further away from him, very slowly, shifting myself along the mattress until I felt the moistness on my flank begin to cool. No portion of my body touched his, none of the calorific glow emanating from him warmed me: if it had not been for the surprisingly loud sound of his breathing I might have been alone in my bed. I spread my fingers and the tips touched a damp patch on the mattress-his semen, I supposed, and immediately my mind turned to the banal routines of housekeeping, of needing now to change my sheets even though they had been on the bed barely a day…

It had been a mistake to invite him to stay a night with me. We had made love, which of course was what I had wanted, a sudden and simple need for effective sex of some prolonged duration – so I could experience its visceral uncomplicated joys with none of its complicated personal preambles and aftermath. Philip was the only person who could furnish me with that, and he had, with, for him, an extra dimension of delight (it had been over a year since the last time), but he had fallen asleep, literally a minute after it was over, it seemed, his head heavy in the hollow between my shoulder and my breast, his legs against mine, a palm flat on my thigh. It had taken me ten minutes of small patient manoeuvrings to free myself from the various contacts with his body and I lay now, still and untouched in my small area of coolness, wishing he was home and trying not to feel cross with myself.

I met Philip in 1928 on the campus at UCLA where I was taking evening extension classes in German. Philip was studying German too, with a vaguely conceived view of going to work in Germany, in the film business there. I was keen to better understand and translate some of Kranewitter's Metall articles whereas Philip only sought a basic conversational fluency. It had been one of his many passing fads; it lasted three weeks in this case but the enthusiasm survived long enough for us to note each other, find each other attractive and contrive oh so casually to meet.

We dined, we dated. I was much slimmer in those days and, I'm sure, much jollier company. Without much ado we began an affair. Some weeks later when Philip was between apartments he came to sleep over at my little house in Westwood village and discreetly stayed on. We married soon after that in the spring of 1929. Coleman was born a year later-blue and damned-and when he died all happiness left us. We divorced in Mexico that summer and it took us an awkward year to become friends again. I knew that Philip was still attracted to me but I had changed and could now see the conspicuous weaknesses in him, however much he amused me. It was a long time before I relented and we slept together. Tonight had been the fourth time. These occasions were becoming progressively less enjoyable.

I slipped out of bed but managed still to tug the sheet away from him. He did not move. In the shadowed screened dusk of the room I could clearly see his long thin penis curved over the swell of his thigh and the thin slugtrail gleam of his semen running from its tip on to my clean but crumpled sheets. I covered him and walked through to the bathroom, closing the door behind me before I switched on the light. I was startled, a regular occurrence this, at the pale solid size of the woman reflected in the mirror, the soft wide breasts, the firm belly creased below the navel… My mental image of myself remained trapped in 1926, the year I graduated from MIT, 'Master in Architecture', licensed to sign 'Architect and Engineer' after my name, never ageing, slim and enthusiastic with my big-lashed hopeful gaze. The hefty, haunchy reality always caught me unawares at moments like these. I switched the light off again, sat down and did my business in the dark, thinking suddenly, for no particular reason, of lanky, blurry Hugh Paget, my English father, and this dark maddening stranger who so brusquely wanted to frogmarch him out of my life and memories. Dr Salvador Carriscant, small and broad-shouldered, intense and emotional, absurdly quick to tears for an adult male, arrogant and impatient, strident in the pursuit of his own bizarre interests… Annoyingly, frustratingly, I was beginning to feel I had known him for years.

FOURTEEN

My mother and I ate lunch at the Spanish Kitchen, the one on Beverly Boulevard. There was nothing out of the ordinary in our meeting like this: we would lunch together every two months or so, often at her prompting. I am sure she was curious about me, about my life, but she was far too polite ever to ask direct questions. But often I sensed her scrutinising me, as if minute changes in my physical appearance – a different shade of lipstick, a new blouse, a wave in my hair – would provide her with clues as to who I was seeing, whether I was content or not, how life in general was going. They were amiable encounters these, as we were fond of each other and, more importantly, we respected each other, and in addition my mother seemed altogether more spirited and self-possessed away from Rudolf's booming geniality. We passed our two hours together with no sense of strain or forced good manners. She liked spicy peppery food – which Rudolf could not stomach and which she never cooked at home – so we tended to eat in Spanish or Mexican restaurants where she would consume menudo or chiles verdes rellenos with evident pleasure. Not for the first time I wondered where she had acquired this taste-in the East perhaps? Along with me, a legacy of her short marriage to Hugh Paget?

Towards the end of our meal I asked her casually if she would do me a favour, nothing special, but one that might involve her sitting with me in the car for an hour of two. I was deliberately vague and unspecific.

'Well, sure,' she said. 'Is it something to do with your lawsuit?'

'Yes and no,' I half lied. I had told her all about Meyersen and his devious ways over lunch, trying not to let too triumphant a note enter my voice. George Fugal had telephoned me at 11.30 that morning to say that the Turner contract had been signed and the sale had gone through. K. L. Fischer Inc. had made an operating profit of $21,058 on its first property deal and deeds were being drawn up for the next development on the new Silver Lake site we had found, a two-acre plot that, at a pinch, could take two houses or a bungalow court. I already felt my animus against Meyersen beginning to subside, diminishing, distancing itself in history.

We drove back down Beverly towards downtown and the tall white tower of the City Hall. On Olive I parked the car obliquely across the road from Carriscant's lodging house and my mother and I each smoked a Picayune as we settled down to wait.

After about thirty-five minutes I saw Carriscant walking down Olive on our side of the road from the direction of the funicular. He was wearing a fawn raincoat I had not seen before and carried a brown paper parcel under his arm. I let him draw nearer and, as he was about to cross the road, I said to my mother in as idle a voice as possible: 'That man crossing the road… Have you ever seen him before?'

My eyes never left her face.

She peered at him.

Carriscant paused at the lodging house's front steps, which had its usual complement of lounging Filipinos, and obligingly removed his hat while he chatted to them.

'No,' she said slowly, 'I don't think so. He looks a bit like that old actor fellow, you know the one.'

I saw nothing, not a tremor, not a blink, not a tautening anywhere. She turned to meet my gaze.

'Who is he?' she said.

'I think he might be a private detective, hired by Meyersen. I wondered if he had come by you, maybe, snooping around, asking questions…'

'No, definitely not.' She smiled. 'Is that it? Can you drop me off at Bullock's?'

I stand inside 2265 Micheltoreno. It is built now, done, finished to all intents and purposes. The afternoon sun shines obliquely through the plate glass of the west wall casting a sharply defined shadow on the smooth ochre stucco. I sense the house's space gather about me, its stacked and assembled volumes of air boxed and confined by their particular materials. The simple trellis on the yard, the planes of the walls of glass and abutting walls of stucco, the roof garden defined by its two oak beams, the way the corridor slides into the courtyard volume that in turn slips down the stairs to the gravel terrace below the western facade. Calmness and order. Absence of clutter, a cool world of clean edges, exact angles, and all designed by me. For a moment as I stand here in the empty room a peace descends on me. I think this is as close to happiness as I can manage these days.

My mother's lie was good. In fact its skilfullness was nothing short of brilliant. What tremendous shock she concealed, what massive turbulence of emotion she hid beneath a surface of total calm and placidity. Her only mistake was to forget about natural curiosity. When your daughter informs you that a business rival may have hired a private detective to spy on her you do not immediately ask to be dropped off at a department store. And her unnatural insouciance had the effect of turning what had been instinct and suspicion into conviction and acceptance. Salvador Carriscant's wild and incredible assertion was now taking on the lineaments of incontrovertible fact. With a strange mixture of reluctance and relief, of puzzlement and pleasure, I had to admit that what I had half suspected all along was now looking like a biographical certainty: Salvador Carriscant was my father.

SIXTEEN

Larry Rugola, freshly but crudely shaved, the blood still gleaming on a bad razor nick below his ear, collected me from my apartment at 7 a.m. and we drove up to the new site at Silver Lake. The plot was another steep one (I could not afford flat ground, yet) and had a distant view of the reservoir. A short new concrete spur road had been laid to open up this flank of the hill and at its foot was a chainlink fence with a padlocked gate. There were lurid realtors' placards tied to the fence advertising the lots for sale, declaiming 'lake view!' in excited letters. It was true: in the clear morning light I could just see a stripe of grey water between the live oaks and the pepper trees, Larry unlocked the gate and we paced about the two acres with the plans and a measuring tape. I turned and looked back up at the roadway: you would be able to step right off it on to the roof of any single-storey bungalow, such was the incline.

I called to Larry who was pacing solemnly about counting his big strides: 'We could cantilever out, instead of cutting in.'

'It don't come cheap.'

'Say, what about duplex? Duplex apartments, a row of three, maybe four?'

Larry wandered towards me, winding in his tape measure 'It's a thought,' he said, 'that way you could go with the gradient.'

'Living rooms on top, bedrooms below. Step it down and you've got a deck on top of the bedroom roof.'

'With a lake view, even.'

We set about measuring again with renewed fervour The plot was an odd fan shape, splaying out at the foot of the hill. We pushed our way through the sage and wild laurel bushes to the bottom of the slope to where the ground dropped away into a vegetation-choked arroyo. The plots on either side were still vacant, but through a line of trees on the left came the echoey sound of hammering.

'You'll get a lot of extra ground in front,' Larry said.

'So we landscape it, charge a premium.'

'Sounds good to me.'

We relocked the gate and drove up the spur to Ivanhoe.

'Our street got a name yet? How about Lakeview?' Larry said.

'Lago Vista's better. The "Lago Vista site". I like it.' I tapped Larry's shoulder. 'Turn right here, Larry, let's go to Micheltoreno, I want to see the old house.'

We weaved west until we hit Angus and then turned south on Micheltoreno. I felt a pleasant shifting in my gut, an old unfamiliar sensation-happiness, excitement. The naming of the street, saying 'the old house': it spoke of progress, the development of a body of work, an avenue of bright tomorrows.

We came over a rise on Micheltoreno and there was number 2265. A thin crane stood above it and hanging from its arm was a flat section of roof being guided up and away by a gang of men in green overalls. A green bulldozer was backing away from the completely flattened porch area, snorting diesel fumes, and other men were collecting the solid timber spars from what remained of the roof trellis of the sheltered yard. Two dump trucks were parked at the kerb and on their sides was written 'John Dexter Demo-Lition'.

'Holy shit!' Larry Rugola said, stopping the car, his eyes wide and uncomprehending. 'Holy fuckin' shit.'

We ran towards the house where a man in green overalls tried to stop us approaching as the roof section was swung over our heads towards the truck. From inside the house came the groaning rip of chainsaws and the tearing, nail-popping sound of jemmies being enthusiastically employed. Two men emerged from the opening where the front door had been carrying the bath and behind them followed three men in business suits and aluminium hardhats, handkerchiefs held to their noses against the dust. One man removed his helmet and a hank of thin blond hair was caught by a breeze.

'Ah, Mrs Fischer,' Eric Meyersen said. 'Always premature. I wanted you to see the vacant lot. I was going to call. I hope you took a photographic record.'

The crane swung round to collect another roof panel.

'Where's Mrs Luard Turner?' I said, staring at him, trying not to look around me.

'I think she's up for a part at Metro,' Meyersen said. 'Talented lady. Charges a modest fee.'

Then I stepped forward to take a swing at him, claw the pale eyes out of that smiling face, but Larry Rugola caught me by the elbow.

'Come on, Mrs Fischer. Leave the bastard.'

We walked quickly towards the car.

'Don't worry,' Meyersen shouted after me. 'We're going to build another house here. Very similar design, in fact. Different architect, that's all.'

We drove away down Micheltoreno. Larry was laboriously and vehemently calling Meyersen every obscenity he could summon to mind. His dogged cursing was obscured by a muted roaring in my ears, my boiling blood I supposed, a foaming red surf, heating my arteries, scalding my internal organs with its furious rage. The noise dimmed eventually, or was drowned by the traffic, as we turned west on Sunset and headed thoughtlessly on out, aiming somewhere for the distant sunlit ocean.

SEVENTEEN

Carriscant turned away from the window. Through its oval I could see the studded silver wing and the engine nacelle and half the blurred disc of the propeller hauling us through this thin high air. We were flying Transcontinental and Western's 'Sky Chief service to New York. Somewhere below us was Montana. We had eighteen hours to go.

'It's quite extraordinary,' Carriscant said, palms patting the armrests of his seat, then gesturing up the aisle at the other passengers and the neat stewardess pouring out cups of coffee. 'Here we are sitting in an armchair being served a beverage… To think we can do all this, in such a short time, up in the air like this. Unbelievable. I feel I've been given a mighty dunt on the head and woken up in a different world. Rip van Winkle isn't in it.'

'Dunt? What's a dunt?'

He chuckled. He was in a fine mood, clearly. 'It's a Scottish word. Means a "blow", a "hit". My father used it.'

I sensed one of my rare opportunities approaching: he seemed as if he might be receptive to a few questions.

'Your father was Scottish?'

'Yes. From a place called Dundee. His name was Archibald Carriscant.'

'Is Carriscant a Scottish name, then?'

'It's the name of a small village in Angus. There's a River Carriscant too, tributary of the Tweed.'

'So you're Scottish by origin,' I said, slowly, taking all this in. Angus. Tweed.

He looked at me carefully, not fooled by my ingenuousness, stroking the cleft in his chin with his middle finger, pondering whether to answer me. I wondered for my part whether he might be thinking up some intriguing falsehood, to lead me on a little further.

'I'm half Scottish, actually,' he said. 'And a quarter Spanish and a quarter Filipino.'

I hid my intense surprise at this news. 'Ah. Hence the Salvador.'

'Exactly. Do you think you could ask the young lady if I could have some coffee?'

From one point of view it had been amongst the easiest decisions of my life – he was my father and he had asked me – from another the most unconsidered and spontaneous. But Eric Meyersen and his wanton, brutal destruction of my house had been a powerful propellant. When George Fugal told me I could do nothing, that Meyersen was completely within his legal rights, I knew that I had to leave the city for a while, escape the shame, leave behind the focus of my anger and bitterness. I needed time, above all.

So, when Salvador Carriscant came calling again with his now alluring proposition of a trip to Europe he found me teary and weak and easily persuaded. He put his arms around me, patted me on the back and muttered consoling words in my ear. There, there, Kay… Don't worry, all this will pass. I held him close and blurted out my woes, told him about Meyersen's betrayal and my impotence. Come with me, Kay, he said. Just the two of us, you and me, get away from all this. Take some time off, think things through, then come back and put the world to rights again. For once this was what I wanted to hear and for once I wanted someone else to steer the course of my life for a while. I was tired, weary of standing up for myself… You must know that feeling, how vulnerable you are, when you long for someone else to take responsibility. So my father did just that and asked me to come away with him. And I was glad to go. What else could I have done?

I put all plans for the Lago Vista apartments to one side, told Larry Rugola I was taking a vacation-he understood – and spent some of the profits from the sale of 2265 to embark on this 'quest'. We were sailing from New York to Lisbon two days hence on the SS Herzog, of the Hamburg-American line, courtesy of Eric Meyersen.

I tried to draw some satisfaction from this but failed. In the days since the house had been destroyed my spirits had never been lower. Carriscant, contrarily, was positively rejuvenated by the news of our journey, almost intolerably jaunty and good-humoured. I had made one sole and unmovable proviso: he had to tell me everything, what all this was about, who this diplomat's wife was and what mystery was about to be unveiled in Lisbon, should we find her there. I reminded him now of his obligation.

'Oh, I'll tell you,' he said breezily. 'It's quite a story. By the time we reach Lisbon you'll know everything I do.'

'Right,' I said. 'Let's start with the family tree.'

This is what he told me. Archibald Carriscant was an engineer, one of that worldwide diaspora of Scots professionals and in his early forties when he first arrived in the Philippines – then a colony of Spain – in 1863, sent by his Hong Kong firm of Melhuish amp; Cobb to supervise the rebuilding of the southern breakwater that formed the entrance to Manila 's docks on the Pasig river. When that task was over he was transferred to the construction of the narrow-gauge steam railway that linked the quaysides with the warehouses and storage sheds behind the customhouse. Melhuish amp; Cobb won the contract for the construction of the Manila -Dagupan Railway from the English syndicate that was financing it and the rest of Archibald Carriscant's working life was spent travelling up and down the hundred miles of country that lay between Manila Bay and the Gulf of Lingayen, planning culverts and embankments, cuttings and bridges. A tall, pale, shy man, bald since his early twenties, Archibald Carriscant had resigned himself, with few regrets, to a life of permanent bachelorhood. But during a time when he was positioning the goods sidings at Tarlac he was befriended by a local mestizo landowner, Don Carlos Ocampo. In the month he stayed at Don Carlos's summer estates near Tarlac he was most surprised to discover that his timid, almost imperceptible wooing of Don Carlos's eldest daughter, Juliana, proved successful. A year later they married and moved into a large house Don Carlos provided for them in Intramuros, the old walled city in the heart of urban Manila. In 1870 Archibald Carriscant was appointed area manager for Melhuish amp; Cobb's operations in Luzon and a son, Salvador, was born to Juliana. Salvador, an only child, intelligent and lively, was educated at the Municipal School for Boys and went on to study medicine at the College of San Tomas. In 1893, at his ailing father's bequest, he left for Europe to complete his medical studies and take a degree in surgery at the medical school of Glasgow University. Archibald Carriscant died while his son was away in Scotland. Salvador Carriscant returned to set up practice in Manila in 1897.

'And, shortly after, I met your mother,' Carriscant said.

'In Manila?' All these revelations were confusing me.

'Of course. Where did you think?'

'It doesn't matter.' We were strolling back to our hotel from a chop house on Forty-first Street.

'And then the war started,' Carriscant said with a shrug.

'What war?'

'The war between the USA and the Philippines.'

I decided that was enough questions for this evening.

In the morning, after I had visited the Portuguese consulate to have a visa stamped in my passport (Carriscant, being British, did not require one), I visited a bookshop to try to discover more about this American-Filipino conflict but could find nothing. However, in a small volume entitled A Pocket History of the United States of America 1492-1930 I came across the following paragraph and copied it down.

One consequence of the Spanish-American War was that the Philippine Islands were liberated from the yoke of imperial power when Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on I May 1898. Filipino rebels, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, who had been in revolt against their Hispanic masters for several years, saw the Spanish-American War as an opportunity to declare their independence and form a Philippine republic. When they discovered that the United States proposed merely to substitute its rule for Spain 's the insurrectos, as they were known, promptly attacked their former liberators on 4 February 1899 and laid siege to Manila. The subsequent war lasted three years and was only concluded after the capture of the rebel leader, Aguinaldo, in 1901. This war, one of the most prolonged and deadly in the annals of empire, exerted a high toll. Some 230,000 men, women and children perished, of which 4,234 were brave American soldiers, and the cost to the nation's exchequer was an enormous 600 million dollars.

Archibald and Juliana Carriscant and their son Salvador… Commodore George Dewey and the battle of Manila Bay… The capture of Emilio Aguinaldo… Six hundred million dollars of American taxpayers' money spent on a forgotten and bloody colonial adventure half a world away… What did all this have to do with me? I wondered how it could possibly explain my journey to Lisbon with a man who claimed to be my father in search of a woman whose face I knew from a torn-out page in a 1927 pictorial magazine.

We had a rare and gratifyingly tranquil voyage on the SS Herzog. The Atlantic swell remained glassy and docile as we cruised eastwards through mild hazy sunshine, the fraying rope of smoke from our two tall stacks trailing persistently behind us as if reluctant to be dispersed on the gentle oceanic breezes.

During our ten-day journey Carriscant was as good as his word – he told me everything, and answered every interrogation I put to him without demur however embarrassing my enquiry or however damaging it might prove to the portrayal of his character and motives. As you will see, his candour was impressive. I kept copious notes of everything he told me and wherever possible attempted to catch him out or corroborate details. In the relaying of his story I have allowed myself some of the licence of a writer of fiction, have embellished it with information I obtained later and with facts gleaned from my own researches. But in the end this is Salvador Carriscant's story and I have had to trust the teller, as we all must in these circumstances, but what follows is, I believe, as close to the truth as anyone could come.