1993 - The Blue Afternoon (2 page)

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.

P
hilip 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.”

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.

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.