The Blue Afternoon

by William Boyd

  “Goat shit,” Pantaleon said. “Centuries old.”

  Udo explained that the crew fed off the livestock as they travelled about the islands and on the longer ocean crossings to Hong Kong and Japan. “You throw all your rubbish in there, the goats eat it, you eat the goats.” He smiled, pausing to light a cigar. “Powerful smell, no? If I was a customs officer I wouldn’t want to linger on this vessel, I tell you.”

  A man descended from the bridge house and advanced along the deck towards them, wiping his hands on a rag. He had a curious sidelong, diffident gait, Carriscant thought, as if some invisible accomplice was pushing him from behind, urging him forward against his will. Udo made the introductions. Nicanor Axel was a small, slight man, with round shoulders, with a dark swarthy skin that sat most oddly with his pale blue eyes and his fair, almost ash-blond hair. On closer inspection Carriscant realised that it was grime that was responsible for the man’s skin colour: oil and dirt, grease and dust seemed to have worked their way through his pores and formed a subcutaneous layer beneath his epidermis, in the way that the ink from a tattooer’s needle seems to shine through the skin rather than rest upon it. No amount of diligent scrubbing would ever return Nicanor Axel’s cheeks to their ruddy Nordic glow—he was steeped and stained with dirt, impregnated with muck.

  He was a taciturn, shifty fellow too, Carriscant thought, with a limp, fleeting handshake. He accepted Pantaleon’s money grudgingly and counted through the notes twice, pedantically, before ordering two deckhands to board the lorcha that was towed behind the steamer, a semi-masted schooner hulk which, while it reduced the General Blanco’s speed through the water, allowed it to double its cargo capacity.

  “I’m most grateful,” Pantaleon said. “There were no problems?”

  “No,” Axel replied. “It was there in Hong Kong waiting.”

  The crewmen came towards them bearing a small wooden chest and set it down on the deck. On the side Carriscant read the stencilled letters: ‘Ets. Flanquin. Paris’. With a chisel, Axel prised off the lid and there, secure in its wooden braces, was a small petrol engine, factory fresh, with a dull sheen of oil.

  Pantaleon knelt before it, lightly resting his fingers on the cylinder casings. “The Flanquin, twelve horsepower,” he said quietly, reverentially, his face entranced and wondering. The dream was one step nearer.

  1903

  Carriscant approached the Sieverance house on the Calle Lagarda in a state of some agitation and trepidation. Delphine Sieverance had returned to her home on 22 December: the new year was now three days old and he had yet to see her. Christmas chez Carriscant had been tense but endurable, largely because he had spent most of his time at the hospital, and Annaliese was preoccupied with her seasonal work with the bishop. Udo had come over for dinner on Christmas Eve, had grown drunk and maudlin as the evening progressed and ended up staying for three days. But at least his limping presence about the house dissipated the coolness that now existed between Carriscant and Annaliese. Nothing had been said openly, there had been no one moment, but somehow over that period a tacit understanding had been arrived at: there would be no more pretence, there was little affection between them any more, and that was that. It was an inescapable fact, Carriscant knew, but its acknowledgement depressed him all the same, and he had deliberately arranged that he saw in the new year by constructing a new rectum for a Jesuit priest, returning home exhausted after a long and arduous operation to a dark and silent house.

  He put on a smile, now, as he climbed the stairs to the living room where Sieverance greeted him warmly, affably. He was out of uniform, wearing a seersucker suit with a thin blue stripe and a loose cerise bow tie which, for some reason, Carriscant found irritating and affected.

  “How is Mrs Sieverance?” he asked, once he had reassured the man about his own well-being.

  “Excellent, improving daily, my dear fellow, thanks to you.” Carriscant accepted more compliments as he was led down the corridor to her bedroom. The American nurse, a plump young woman with a wide gap between her front teeth, opened the door to admit them. She had a busy over-efficient manner that verged on the insolent, Carriscant thought.

  “You know Nurse Aslinger?” Sieverance asked.

  “Indeed. Good morning, Miss Aslinger.”

  “Morning, Doctor, everything is ready for you.”

  He turned to the bed. She sat there patiently, smiling at him, a smile of such pleasure and such genuine warmth, he thought, that it made him want to weep.

  “Ah, my favourite medical man. Dr Carriscant, a happy new year to you.”

  He took her proffered hand and shook it briefly. “And to you, Mrs Sieverance. A happy and healthy one.”

  “Not forgetting prosperous,” Sieverance added with a silly laugh.

  “Health and happiness will do fine for oh-three,” Delphine said, and then continued, “I’m feeling very well, Doctor. I walk a little further in the garden every day. I’ve even taken a short carriage ride.”

  “You’ll be on the Luneta next,” he said, “listening to the band. The police band is playing all next week.” He approached the bed, avoiding her eye.

  “Talking of the Luneta, you haven’t seen anything of Miss Caspar recently, have you?” she asked. Her face was all smooth innocence.

  He could not believe the temerity, the arrant mischief. “What? Ah, no I don’t think—”

  “Who’s that, my dear?” Sieverance asked.

  “Miss Rudolfa Caspar,” she said, her face deadpan, her eyes never leaving Carriscant. “A mutual acquaintance. She’s an old friend of Dr Carriscant, isn’t that so, Doctor? A special friend.”

  “I think I should be—” Carriscant gestured vaguely towards the bed.

  “Excuse me, I’ll make myself scarce.” Sieverance left.

  Nurse Aslinger drew back the sheet over Delphine’s lap. Carriscant saw that, although her nightgown had been folded up to her waist, towels had been laid across her thighs and belly so that only the area of the dressing was exposed. Nurse Aslinger stood close by his elbow as he gently removed it. The six-inch scar was pink and vivid but it had knitted well. His mouth drying rapidly, he could just make out, beneath the towel’s hem, the shadowed new growth of her pubic hair. Gently, with his fingertips, he touched the wound: a shininess, a hard smoothness, but no puckering or ridging.

  “Beautiful scar,” he said automatically, without thinking.

  “Not the word I would choose,” she said.

  “It’ll fade with time. In a year or two you’ll hardly notice it.”

  Nurse Aslinger replaced the dressing while he routinely prohibited over-exertion, sudden movements, horseback riding.

  “Oh, I have something for you,” she said and reached into the drawer of the bedside table and held out a book for him. He took it: East Angels by Constance Fenimore Woolson. He opened the cover and saw her name written boldly in violet ink on the flyleaf: ‘For Delphine Blythe with affection, Fenimore’. Another hand had added ‘Sieverance’ after ‘Blythe’.

  “Delphine Blythe Sieverance,” he said. “That has a fine ring to it. Thank you.”

  “You must tell me what you think.”

  There was a knock on the door and Sieverance re-entered, his face alight, unusually full of invigoration.

  “Mrs Sieverance is making excellent progress,” Carriscant said, with jovial formality like a doctor in a bad play, slipping the book into his coat pocket. “We are very pleased with her.”

  “Then this is the perfect occasion to express our gratitude.”

  “Really, there’s no further need—” Carriscant began but then stopped when he saw that Sieverance had closed his eyes and had raised his beaming face heavenwards. He took his wife’s hand and then, to Carriscant’s profound alarm, his.

  “Please join hands before the Lord,” he said to Carriscant and Nurse Aslinger, who promptly slipped her hand into Carriscant’s. “And please kneel with me.”

  Carriscant found himself being drawn down into a kneelin
g position at the foot of Delphine’s bed. Sieverance’s face was frowningly beatific, at once stern and devout, while Nurse Aslinger’s head was piously bowed, revealing a nasty heat rash on her nape.

  “O Lord above,” Sieverance intoned in a low, intense voice, “grant us this day thy blessing and receive our thanks for thy blessed powers of healing visited upon our beloved Delphine.”

  “Amen,” said Nurse Aslinger. “And we thank thee, O Lord of hosts most high, for the dedication and skill thou hast bestowed on thy servant Salvador Carriscant. We thank thee, O Lord our God, for leading us into this man’s care—”

  Carriscant’s ears closed as more gratitude was delivered up to the Almighty. He felt his cheeks and ears glow with a form of pure embarrassment he had not endured since he was a child. Nurse Aslinger’s hand was hot and moist, Sieverance’s was bony, its grip unnecessarily firm. He gazed at the needlepoint rug (puce roses on an oatmeal background) on which he knelt and concentrated on the dull ache that was beginning to spread through his left knee joint. But something made him slowly raise his eyes: Delphine was looking directly at him and her lips moved as she mouthed one word at him—’Sorry’. They were conspirators again, anew, and he felt himself begin the sudden headlong slide once more.

  The prayer of thanks lasted almost five minutes and after it was over Sieverance’s exhilaration was almost insupportable. Carriscant made a brief farewell to Delphine and went through with Sieverance to the sitting room where his host insisted he stay and have a glass of lemonade.

  Carriscant took small rapid sips, keeping the glass to his mouth.

  “As a military man, you know,” Sieverance said, dabbing at his poor fair moustache with a knuckle, “we don’t often give much thought to divine providence.”

  “I suppose not,” Carriscant said, aimlessly, not understanding where the conversation was headed. Not caring. This lemonade is really not too bad.

  “It takes an occasion like this to make one realise just how fortunate one has been.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I mean what if, what if Delphine had fallen ill next week instead of before Christmas? Lord knows what would have happened.” He shuddered, upset by this vision of a hypothetical future. “It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

  “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “Ah, no.”

  “My regiment is being posted to Mindanao. Off to fight the wretched Moros. We leave next week.”

  TWO PROPELLERS PUSHING

  Pantaleon Quiroga cranked the handle on the front of the Flanquin and the engine fired into life. The Aero-mobile shuddered and quivered, as if suddenly animate. The chain drives to the propeller mountings hummed and clattered on their sprocketed wheels. Carriscant and Pantaleon stepped back and looked on in a moment of amazement before Pantaleon beckoned Carriscant round the thrumming machine to where the spinning bosses of the pushing propellers (yet to be mounted) were fixed. Carriscant rested his hand gently on a panel of stretched and doped silk and felt the powerful vibrations travel up his arm. For the first time he sensed that Pantaleon’s dream was not a deluded fantasy after all, the fellow might actually be on to something.

  “Two propellers pushing,” Pantaleon shouted, twirling his fingers in illustration. “But I’m a little concerned about the allowances I made for the fuel tank and the radiator. They were heavier than I thought.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “We’re getting close to the maximum weight if my calculations are right. Very close.”

  Pantaleon walked forward and slung a long leg over the forward of the two bicycle saddles mounted above the four-wheeled carriage the machine rested on. He reached over and adjusted the throttle control on the engine and the noise slackened as the motor idled. He listened to it for a moment, his head cocked, and then switched it off.

  Carriscant peered over his shoulder at the two wooden levers that were mounted in front of him and the pedal controls that were operated by his feet. Above his shoulders were two other levers sticking forward, like handles on a wheelbarrow, from the leading edge of the upper wing.

  Pantaleon saw him looking and explained. “The whole front edge is hinged,” he said, gripping the handles and demonstrating. True enough, he could move a front flap of wing up and down through an angle of forty-five degrees. “On leaving the ground it is pushed up to the full extent to provide maximum lift. Once we are in the air I can pull it down to reduce resistance, or up if we need to be more…” he searched for a word, “…buoyant.” Carriscant had a sudden perception of a vocabulary adapting itself, creating itself. Like medicine and surgery, new discoveries enriched the language—germ, appendix, bacillus, phagocyte, micro-organism…

  “I call it the air-catcher,” he said. “I’ve applied for a patent. If it works, who knows? I might—”

  “If it works? My dear Panta, you can’t possibly take such a risk.”

  “On the gliding models it seems fine. But once we’re up with a machine of this weight…” He turned and pointed to the second bicycle saddle behind him, with its own set of levers. “That’s why I’ve reproduced the tail-warping mechanism here.”

  “You don’t mean to tell me you’re going to move seats in mid—” he was about to say ‘journey’ but it seemed wrong, “—while the machine is in the air? In its aerial trip?”

  “No, no. My fellow-flyer—my co-flyer, indeed—will be controlling the warping while I deal with the elevators,” he pointed to his foot controls, “and the air-catcher.”

  “I see. I suppose it makes sense.” Carriscant frowned: he had grown used to the Aero-mobile by now, with its fragile, translucent ugliness, but these controls seemed unnecessarily complex. Surely there must be a simpler way? All these moving surfaces—warping, elevating, catching—all these levers, struts and wires. When you saw a bird fly it seemed…He stopped. Pantaleon was looking fixedly at him, his eyes wide, strange.

  “What is it?” Carriscant said.

  “I was wondering, Salvador, if you’d do me the honour.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of joining me on this historic flight.”

  RAIN

  The first rains arrived early that year but Dr Salvador Carriscant, ever prudent, had been carrying his umbrella with him since the end of January and, as the first fat drops hit his head, he congratulated himself on his foresight. He folded away his small easel and sketch pad and closed his box of water–colours before retreating to the shelter of a nearby bamboo grove, where he was still afforded a clear view of the Calle Lagarda and of the entrance to the Sieverance home. The bamboo grove was on the other side of a small overgrown creek—the estero San Miguel—from the Calle Lagarda and its spacious villas. Conscious of the risks he had run on the last occasion he had indulged in espionage, he had gone to some lengths to make his presence here plausible should he be discovered. In his sketch book were several indifferent and half completed views of this undistinguished portion of Manila’s suburbs. An expanse of marshland, some rice fields, a few palm trees and in the distance the neat dome and campanile of the San Sebastian church and convent. He had always vaguely planned to take up water–colouring as a hobby and respite from the relentless demands of the operating theatre and had seized on this pastime as the perfect way both to satisfy this urge and ‘innocently’ observe the Sieverance home. He had to admit, however, it was the proximity of the house and its occupant that distracted him and dominated his mind and not the soothing effect of his daubings.

  Colonel Jepson Sieverance and his new regiment, the 1st Nebraska Volunteers, had embarked for Mindanao five days previously on the steamer Brewster, according to the gazette in the Manila Times, a fact that Paton Bobby had confirmed too. With the husband gone, Carriscant knew he had to see Delphine once more, but without the presence of Nurse Aslinger as chaperone. The nurse, he reasoned, must quit the house occasionally, but three days of patient water-colouring—two hours the first, four and a half the second—
had seen no-one but servants enter or leave the compound. He checked his pocket watch: he had been out for almost three hours again today, and now the rain had started he wondered if it were worth lingering further. He looked up at the turbulent, livid sky. Rain in the Philippines is a full–blooded, uncompromising, natural phenomenon. The big drops noisily battered the material of his umbrella and he could feel the ground beneath his feet beginning to soften and deliquesce. Above his head the fine spiky fronds of the bamboo stands were thrashed and flung this way and that by a robust breeze. Some beetle droned by searching for shelter, an angry noise in a black dot…

  A faint clatter of hooves made him look sharply across the estero as, to his surprise, he saw the gate to the Sieverance compound open and a small carromato emerge containing, indubitably, the mackintoshed and ample figure of Nurse Aslinger. It trotted down the Calle Lagarda towards the Malacanan Palace and as it did so, Carriscant, bent beneath his umbrella, hurried upstream to the Marquez bridge and splashed his way down the dirt track that led back into San Miguel. He was at her front door in five minutes. Two minutes later he was pacing damply about her living room waiting for the maid to inform Mrs Sieverance that Dr Carriscant was here to visit her. In his hand he held her copy of East Angels by Constance Fenimore Woolson. As a dutiful and responsible borrower, he told himself, he was returning the book promptly to its owner.

  She came slowly into the room, walking with two sticks to help carry some of her weight. She was wearing an apple-green dress and her hair was up. Her wide smile of welcome was pronounced and irrefutable. His nervousness returned with perplexing force.

  “Dr Carriscant, what a surprise.” She frowned, suddenly. “I haven’t forgotten, have I? We hadn’t planned—”

  “No, no. Ah…I was visiting my colleague, Dr Quiroga. I took the opportunity of returning your book.” He thrust it forward as if he had just learnt the meaning of the phrase, realised it was going to be awkward for her to take it, what with her two sticks, and looked around foolishly for a table on which to set it down.