"The Blue Afternoon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Boyd William)

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.