Thirteen years on, the fuselage shuddered as the pilot made his final descent, and the smog looked worse than it had on that earlier visit - thicker, more toxic. But then, of course, so did I. My cab driver took La Cienega instead of the freeway, and when he pulled up at some lights in the flats, the peculiar smell of Los Angeles came in through the open window, an aroma of jasmine-scented garbage. Having forgotten to bring my sunglasses, I squinted to make out the street signs - Horner, Alcott, Pico - and to re-read my grandfather's letter. 'I know how busy you must be,' he'd written in his elegant hand, 'but I'm horribly behind with my memoirs and could really use your help editing them. Is there any chance you could come out here for a few weeks? The book's so overdue that my publishers would be happy to pay you for your trouble.' This was the first solid offer I'd had in months, and knee-deep in debt following the bankruptcy of the experimental theatre group in which I'd worked since leaving university, I'd jumped at it.

Reaching Beverly Hills, I asked to be dropped on the horseshoe-shaped driveway of my grandfather's house on North Canon Drive. Dwarfed by the soaring palms that lined the road, a man in a baseball cap was watering some oleander by the archway that led through to the inner courtyard. Thinking him to be Pedro, the pool man, I called to him, but he turned to me with the soft, frightened face of a stranger. A small sign staked into the lawn between us bore the words 'Edison Security. Armed response', the very blades of grass making death threats, so I told him my business before dragging my suitcase on its squeaking wheels to the front door, sensing his eyes on my back.

Handmade out of hardwood and plugged with wrought-iron studs, the Spanish colonial-style door weighed a ton but still looked fake, as if you could push it open with your little finger. A smiling sylph in a halter-top and cut-offs answered the bell and introduced herself as Julie, the new housekeeper.

'Hi, Ralph. How you doing? It's really great to meet you,' she said. 'I've heard so much about you.'

My grandfather had mentioned Julie in his letter, but from his description of her as 'a wonderful cook from Iowa who runs the house to perfection', I'd imagined a spinster in her fifties, buttoned to the neck. With long brown legs and long brown hair that she wore in squaw-like plaits which fell down her chest, Julie wasn't yet thirty.

The dark, cool hall was bigger than the entire basement flat I'd been renting for the past six months in east London, and my eyes strained to adjust from the glare of the day as I followed Julie through a series of arches that led into the library. I felt dry and empty. Opening the shutters, she said that she was going upstairs to fetch my grandfather.

'Look,' I said. 'If he's resting -'

'Oh, no,' she said, cocking her head to one side. 'He asked me to tell him the moment you got here. Really.'

Watching her run up the curved staircase, I was apprehensive. Over the eight years since I'd last visited my grandfather, we'd exchanged the odd letter and spoken on the telephone regularly but never for very long, and I'd found it all too easy to paint an upbeat but untruthful picture of my work as a writer and a director with the Direct Debit Theatre Company. Grandpa had little idea of the difficulties we'd faced in recent years, let alone that the company had finally gone bankrupt, and he continued to imagine that his grandson was enjoying a creditable career in the London theatre. Having grown up in Britain himself, Grandpa retained an enduring if misty-eyed affection for its institutions, and had referred to me as 'the white sheep of the family' while I was at Oxford University. It was a joke my father had suffered with a tight smile at the time, but now, consigned by events to the role of spear carrier in the tired repertory production of my own life, the joke looked to be on me. A year after Direct Debit's disbandment, I was still trapped beneath my own little rain-cloud of failure and worthlessness.

Suddenly, the ground began to rumble, leading me to fear an earth tremor until I recalled the elevator that I'd been forbidden to play in as a child. When the grinding noise stopped, the concertina door rattled open.