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

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.