William Boyd - The Blue Afternoon

'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.