The Blue Afternoon

by William Boyd

  “Let’s put it back in my library,” she said, diplomatically easing his dilemma. “Have you seen my library, Dr Carriscant? I shall need your help in any case.”

  He refused her offers of lemonade, tea and coffee and followed her into a small study which led off the living room. One entire wall was lined floor to ceiling with bookcases and in front of a window that overlooked the rain-drenched rear garden was a small antique desk with a worn maroon leather top, cluttered with writing materials.

  “I was writing to Jepson,” she said, hastily clearing away pen and many leaves of paper.

  “Long letter,” Carriscant said. For heaven’s sake the man had not been away a week. My God, I’m jealous.

  “Well, actually it’s a play.”

  “A play? You’re a writer? A playwright too.”

  “Not unless the aspiration itself permits the title. I’ve written journalism, some pieces for magazines, Harper’s, The Atlantic. The play, well, it’s a bit of a dream. But now he’s away I’ve got no excuse.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “It’s about a woman—” She paused, and she looked disquieted. “It’s about a woman who is married, but who feels that she’s made a terrible…” She stopped again. “It’s about the terrifying power of social institutions.”

  She seemed suddenly embarrassed by all these revelations and turned back to the view. “Lord, look at that rain! Is this it now?” she asked him. “Le deluge est-il arrive?” Her French accent was fine, he thought, with an odd touch of pride. Intelligent, cultivated woman.

  “I’m afraid so,” Carriscant said, and embarked on a short disquisition about the rainy season in the Philippines, the enervating, moist heat, the typhoons, the constant downpour. “You can go up to the hills of course, where it’s not so humid, but most of us endure it. Look forward to October and the cool nights.”

  She reached for a small tin on her desk, opened it and held it out to him. Crystallised violets, dusted with fine sugar.

  “The ones you gave me,” she said. “I’m running out.”

  He declined her offer. “I’ll get you some more,” he said. “My source is very reliable.” She took one of the violets and popped it in her mouth. He watched her suck on it briefly, her cheeks concave, her jaws moving as she worked to extract its sweetness.

  “Perhaps I will have one, if I may,” he said, his fingers taking a small mauve cluster from the reproffered tin.

  “I have a complete obsession for these sweets,” she said. “I think it’s because I like the idea that I’m eating a flower.”

  Carriscant felt he might pass out at any moment, the room seemed insufferably hot, the musty smell of the leather-bound volumes…He raised her novel in weakening, lethargic fingers.

  “What should I do with this?”

  “If you don’t mind replacing it—Oh yes, what did you think of it? Didn’t I tell you she was a fine writer?”

  “Most enjoyable.” He could not remember a word. He had read the book in a kind of daze, seeing the words, not understanding them.

  “That episode where Esmerelda bests the despicable Captain Farley is quite wonderful. Such fine satire.”

  “I couldn’t agree more. Absolutely.” His enthusiasm, he hoped, he assumed, would conceal his total ignorance.

  “Now that is the type of independent woman I admire,” she said. “Don’t you agree?”

  “Mmm. Now where should I—”

  She pointed at a high shelf, one from the top of the bookcase, at the dark oblong slot of a missing volume.

  “The Woolsons are all up there, I’m afraid,” she said. “You’ll have to use the library steps.”

  She indicated a sturdy-looking oak chair, which seemed unimprovably chair like, until a second glance showed that it possessed rather too many broad redundant struts and a brass captain’s hook hanging uselessly from its side. “It unfolds into steps,” she explained.

  And sure enough it did, most ingeniously, Carriscant thought, as the chair, by a simple act of unfolding, turned itself beneath his hands into a flight of five wooden steps, locked in position by the now apt captain’s hook.

  “It’s my favourite thing,” she said. “I bought it in England on our honeymoon. A little town called Moreton-in-Marsh.”

  “Wondrously simple,” he said. “And strong.”

  He climbed the five steps and slipped the book into its place beside the other Fenimore Woolsons. Everything alphabetical, he noted, dust free. Fine orderly mind, I like that. He remembered his plan, suddenly, and removed another Woolson, at random.

  “May I borrow this? I’ve become a real admirer.”

  “Of course, with pleasure. We shall form an appreciation society, here in Manila. A club of two.”

  Is she flirting with me? he thought, at once uneasy on his high steps. A club of two, that speaks to my mind of a certain…chaleur. He backed nervously down the five steps and, as he did so, the brass captain’s hook, only partially fitted into its eye, slipped the fraction of an inch necessary to make it tightly latched and secure. That tiny adjustment (they later analysed)—just a nudge, a giving—was sufficient marginally to unbalance him in cautious backward descent. He swayed right and in compensation brought his right foot hard down on the final step. The crunch of its tenon joint breaking was like the snapping of a dry biscuit. He went over and back, arms grabbing at emptiness and crashed to the floor with surprising noise, over which, however, he could hear her shriek of alarm. The breath was blasted from his body and his vision dimmed to a hazy tangerine-grey. His head began to toll with pain, audibly, he thought, from where it had bounced off the wooden floor. All he could think was: I have broken her most precious possession.

  He opened his eyes to see her pale face hovering above his, her fingers scrabbling at his necktie loosening it. He realised he must have passed out for a second or two and was overwhelmed at her solicitude. But the doctor in him was shocked to find her kneeling on the ground in her present condition.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, all anxiety. “My God, what a fall it was. Spectacular!”

  “Mrs Sieverance, please.” He struggled to sit upright, sucking in great mouthfuls of air. “Kneeling. You mustn’t…I’m fine. Fine.”

  He felt woolly, stupid, his head both thick and light at the same moment. “I’m so sorry,” he managed to go on. “Your library steps.”

  She was leaning forward now, taking her weight on her arms. He tried not to notice the way her breasts were forced to fall forward and push against her bodice as she turned on all fours to examine the library steps. He pushed himself over; he did not feel capable of standing just yet. Her fingers sifted crumbs of wood.

  “Ant borings. It would have happened to the next person to stand on it.” She smiled at him. “It might even have been me. You’ve saved me again, Doctor.”

  That tone again. “You must let me repair it,” he said quickly. “Dr Quiroga knows the best carpenters.”

  “Oh, it’s not important.”

  “But you said—”

  “It’s only a thing, after all. Someone owned it before me, someone will own it after. I’m only borrowing it really. We all are. We all get too attached to possessions, to things. They cannot be possessed, utterly, like food or wine. They are only on loan to us, these things we so cherish.”

  This little heartfelt speech silenced him.

  “That’s very true,” he said, dully. “But I’m still very sorry.”

  “Perhaps you could help me up.”

  Carriscant stood, slowly, and offered his hands. She took them. She took them…

  “I think you’ll have to come behind me,” she said. “The muscles in my stomach—”

  “Perhaps we should call the maid?”

  “Dr Carriscant, please.”

  He stepped round behind her as she raised her arms to accommodate his hands, which he fitted into the warm hollow of her armpits. He felt the big muscle, pectoralis major, clench on his forefingers as he lifted h
er up, taking her full weight (no slip of a girl this, he realised), and raised her from the floor. She stood and he quickly fetched her sticks.

  “There,” she said, a curious smile on her face. “What drama! The returning of a book, who would have thought it would lead to all this?”

  He wanted then to declare his love, to seize her hand and tell her she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, that every gesture, every animated facet of her being irradiated him with longing. He wanted to press his lips to hers and taste the violets on her tongue.

  His face was immobile. He blinked. A headache was starting. A shoulder muscle was in spasm.

  “I’m so sorry about the steps,” he repeated. “I insist on sending for them. Quiroga will know the right man.”

  “You’ve got dust on your coat,” she said and reached forward to slap his thigh with her fingers, lightly cuffing the dust away.

  He felt indescribably puny, wholly unmanned. He had to leave.

  She followed him to the top of the stairs as he made his farewells. Her smile was still ambiguous, a sense of power seemed to be emanating from her, he thought, of someone now perfectly in control. But how? Why? What had happened to bring this about? His clumsiness? His stunned, faltering behaviour? He walked out into the rain, enjoying the drenching he was receiving, his hair soon slick, drops of water running down his hot face, not looking back. As he walked along the road to Quapo, to the bodegon where Constancio was waiting with his carriage, the questions nagged at him again. As far as he could tell he had behaved, before and after the fall, with absolute propriety, had been the very model of polite discretion. So why did she act as if she knew something he did not? The balance of this relationship had altered markedly, he thought, with a small thrill of foreboding: the weight had swung to favour her.

  SCALPEL

  The woman’s body lay face down in a small vigorous torrent, swollen by the rains that ran into the Tatuban estero. The stream was some way to the north of the city, between the Dagupan railroad and the Santa Cruz racecourse. Carriscant looked around him: they were barely a mile from Intramuros and yet all around them was bushy scrub and marshy fields under low pewtery clouds. It was a depressing scene, drear. Drear was the perfect word, he thought. Or drookit, a good Scottish word, except that had connotations of cold and here it was warm and steamy. The rain pattered steadily against his hat and yellow slicker. Bobby, beside him, held an umbrella above his head and not far off half a dozen native constables stood by stoically, soaked through.

  “This track here leads to Tondo,” Bobby said, pointing, then swivelled round. “Go the other way and you get to the Chinese hospital.”

  “Is she Chinese?”

  “Mestiza, I think. We can’t identify her. Chances are she’s from Tondo.”

  The woman was unshod and her clothes were mean and worn. Carriscant shrugged. “Tondo. It could take you months to find out who she was, if at all.”

  “We got to try,” Bobby said tersely.

  Carriscant frowned: Bobby was not in a good mood—understandable, perhaps, but he could not see why he had been summoned. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

  Bobby signalled to the constables to move the body from the streambed and turned away and offered Carriscant a cigar which, for once, he accepted. They dithered and fussed over the lighting process, Carriscant taking three damp matches and Bobby two. Carriscant exhaled smoke, looking out over the drab scene. The cigar was cheap, tasted dry, of straw, hot on the back of his throat, an odd contrast as everything he saw spelled ‘cool’: grey skies, muddy greens, rain, waterlogged ground. He felt he was breathing in tepid consomme. Under his shiny raincoat he felt completely damp, hot and damp.

  Bobby blew on the end of his cigar and said, “I think it’s the same fellow.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Same person killed her as killed Ward and Braun.”

  Bobby led him over to the four-wheeled wagon where the woman was now laid out. She was young, not much more than twenty-five, Carriscant guessed, her face covered in smallpox scars. She looked thin and malnourished and the right side of her muslin blouse was torn. As Bobby lifted her arm Carriscant saw, through the rip, the rough puckered slit of a knife wound between her fourth and fifth ribs.

  “Stabbed in the heart,” Bobby said. “And like the others found in or near water at the site of Filipino or American lines as they were on 4 February 1899.”

  “Who was up here?” Carriscant said, surprised.

  “First Montana.” Carriscant was sceptical. “If she’d been a dead American soldier, I’d grant you your supposition. But she’s a peasant, a sick peasant too, I’d wager, from a Tondo slum. And there’s no L-shaped wound.”

  Bobby’s hand went into his pocket and drew something out. He showed it to Carriscant: it was a scalpel. Carriscant took it.

  “We found it by the body, just on the bank there,” Bobby said.

  It was a Merck and Frankl scalpel, heavy duty, with a strong two-inch-long bevelled blade, Carriscant saw.

  “It’s what we call a straight, sharp-pointed bistoury. Not for precision work. It’s a common make,” Carriscant said, returning it.

  “We figure the murderer was surprised. Otherwise I’m sure we’d have an L-shaped wound and a missing heart.”

  “But why a woman? Why a slum dweller?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We…” Carriscant paused, not knowing quite how to express this. “We have these scalpels in the San Jeronimo.”

  “I know,” Bobby said. “And in the San Lazaro and the First Reserve hospital.” He carefully put the scalpel back in his pocket. “Could you tell if one of these was missing?”

  “Possibly.”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  Carriscant looked back at the corpse. The soaked clothes were plastered to the small thin body. He could see that the belly was markedly distended. The mouth was slightly open showing stained front teeth. His brain was working quickly, troubled and agitated.

  “I think you’ll find,” he said to Bobby, “that this woman is pregnant. Four or five months.” He pointed to the swell of her belly.

  “Really? God…” The information seemed to have disturbed Bobby unduly. “That’s awful.”

  “I’ll confirm it at the hospital,” Carriscant said. He made his farewells.

  On the ride back to Manila he found his mind returning again and again to the same troubling conclusion. The scalpel found by the woman’s body, he was sure, would be traced back to his operating theatre at the San Jeronimo. He could not explain where this conviction came from. But it came to him with the numinous clarity of a revelation. Someone had stolen it and that someone, or some people, had placed it by the body for the sole purpose of implicating him in the murders.

  THE BLUE AFTERNOON

  We’ve had terrible problems,” Pantaleon said. His face looked drawn and his chin was dirty with stubble. “But I think we’ve solved them.”

  They were in the doorway of the nipa barn looking out at the rain falling steadily on the meadow. Behind them in the musty gloom stood the Aero-mobile, almost complete, lacking only one propeller.

  “Problems of torque,” Pantaleon went on. “The propellers make the plane want to pull to the right and I’ve had to counterbalance one propeller with the other. Very complicated.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “And weight. I need extra fuel. It’s put me back by several weeks, but we’re almost there.”

  “Don’t exhaust yourself, Panta,” Carriscant said, laying a gentle palm on his friend’s shoulder. “You can’t hurry these things. One day, I’m sure, you’ll take to the air.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” Pantaleon said excitedly. “I’m not alone. There are others.”

  “Other what?” Carriscant was beginning to grow concerned about him now; the mood was too sustainedly febrile and neurotic.

  “Other flyers. You’ve got Santos-Dumont in France, Bosendorf in Germany, that fellow in America wh
at’s his name?—with his manned gliders.”

  “But you’re practically there,” he turned and gestured at the machine. “Look at it. Amazing achievement.”

  “Chanute, that’s him. But it’s Santos-Dumont I’m most worried about. He’s extremely rich. Money no object, you know.”

  “Panta—”

  “And this!” He actually shook his fist at the rain. “It’s not due to start for at least another two months. What’s going on? Look at that field. It’s a quagmire, practically underwater. That’s why I bought this place. The ground is meant to be drained naturally. The farmer swore on his children’s heads that would happen.”

  Carriscant peered up at the sky as Pantaleon ranted on about the farmer’s duplicity. It was noon and the clouds seemed to be thinning. He could not be sure but he thought he could make out a bluey haze beyond the pale grey blanket.

  “You need a road,” he said, without really thinking. “A metalled road, like the ones the Americans are building in Intramuros. Take any amount of rain—and smooth—then you could—” He stopped. Pantaleon was staring at him, his thumb and forefinger pinching his bottom lip. “What is it?”

  “A road…Of course.”

  “Something firm, anyway. A beaten track, a—”

  Pantaleon strode out into the downpour, heedless of the wet, measuring out the ground with his big strides. Carriscant sighed, erected his umbrella and followed him out into the field, tugging his collar away from his neck, the dampness making it chafe. He had actually found mould on a shirt in a closet that morning. A perfectly good white shirt with blue mould growing on it, mildewed like a cheese.

  He caught up with Pantaleon at the end of the meadow. Through a fringe of guava trees was a paddy field and beyond that the swollen brown mass of the estero, dotted with more than its usual cargo of water cabbages, like vivid green footballs, no doubt. The Pasig had been full of them this morning, he had noticed, as he crossed the Colgante bridge.