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.