The Blue Afternoon

by William Boyd

  “I’ll build my own,” Pantaleon said fervently, holding his arms out straight in front of him, pointing back at the barn. “A base of crushed stones, bamboo poles set a metre apart, wooden planks nailed to the top of them.”

  “Panta, that’s almost a hundred yards. Think of the cost, man!”

  “No, no. It’s an excellent idea. Thank you, Salvador.” He gripped his hand and shook it excitedly. “Thank you, bless you.”

  “My pleasure.”

  They squelched back towards the barn.

  “Have you reconsidered, Salvador? You know how important it is to me.”

  “I told you, I can’t possibly. I’d be terrified, I’m not like you. I’d be useless. Train some youngster. I’m too heavy, anyway.”

  “No, no, we can take the weight. It has to be you. I’ve calculated everything based on your weight.”

  “No, Panta, really—”

  “Don’t say no. Don’t. Just think about it some more.” The rain let up momentarily as Carriscant was driving back to Intramuros. The wind was coming from the east and he could see huge cloud continents building over the foothills of the Benguet mountains. Only a temporary respite, he thought, taking off his hat and mopping his face with a handkerchief, we’ll really catch it this evening.

  At the hospital, in his consulting rooms, he saw the inventory he had asked his senior theatre nurse to prepare. Numerous items were missing from the stores including one Merck and Frankl straight, sharp–pointed bistoury, as he had surmised. Who could say when it had gone, however? It could have been lost, it could have been stolen months ago, it could have been thrown out accidentally in a bundle of soiled swabs…So why did he suspect the hand of Drs Cruz and Wieland? He started, as methodically as he could, to explore the ramifications of this supposition but stopped after two minutes, exhausted by its crowding implausibilities and inferences. In this kind of mood, he realised, anyone was capable of being turned into an enemy—Cruz, Wieland, even Bobby. Perhaps Bobby had planted the scalpel there, to unsettle him, to test him out in some way…But why? What did that imply? This way lay madness, he knew, and put the whole matter out of his mind. There was a long queue of patients outside his consulting room door.

  Later, his work over for the day, he stood at the rear window of his office looking out at a corner of the hospital’s garden. The air was loud with the mumblings of distant thunder and tall plum-coloured clouds were building high over the city. Yet to the west, over Manila Bay, the sky was clear and the sinking sun was shining brightly, filling the garden with a heavy creamy light, making the ancient tiled roofs of Intramuros glow, their vibrant terracotta temporarily renewed, set starkly against the boiling bruised mass of the thunderclouds. The first drops began to fall, silver like coins, through the garden’s radiant light and, as the clouds hunched over the city as if to smother this audacious sun, a brief blending of mauve thundercloud and late afternoon luminescence turned the air blue, it seemed to him, almost changing its nature from something invisible to something there, tangible, as if the blue light that filled the garden was a fine mist of droplets suspended in the atmosphere. Enchanted, rapt, not really thinking, Carriscant opened his window and stretched his hand out like a child trying to catch, trying to touch, this beautiful phenomenon. His fingers closed on nothing. He saw instead the hundreds of shades of green in the leaves and bushes and grass; he smelt the ferrous, musty reek of the impending downpour; big gobbets of rain thwacked his outstretched palm and he heard the thunderclap break over San Juan del Morte as the afternoon turned blue before his spellbound eyes.

  His reverie was interrupted by a small commotion of protesting voices in his anteroom. Señora Diaz’s polite protests presaged her rap on the door, around which her plump, apologetic face appeared.

  “There is a patient, Doctor, I’m so sorry. I said it was too late but it’s an emergency, I think.”

  “Show him in, Señora Diaz. And you may go. I’ll be here ‘til late.”

  He sat down behind his desk and, with his fingernail, idly drew joins between the ink blots on his blotter. The rain began to fall now in earnest, beating down, filling the gutters to overflowing, the sound of water plashing everywhere. That effect of the light in the garden, he thought, extraordinary. The atmosphere so charged with moisture, the white glare of the sun and the bluey greyness of the clouds seeming to fuse in the microscopic drops. Some sort of one-tone prism effect, he supposed, if that made sense, quite magical. Felt he could touch the air, scoop blue handfuls almost.

  He looked up and saw her. She had come into his room so quietly that for a crazy moment he thought she was a vision too, another sublime trick of the light. He gave a small cry of astonishment which he managed to turn into a cough and rose abruptly to his feet.

  “Mrs Sieverance…”

  She wore a straw boater, a navy-blue cotton jacket over a pale grey ankle-length skirt. Her thick hair was gathered at her nape with a maroon velvet ribbon.

  “I’m so sorry to be so late, Doctor. I wasn’t feeling well.”

  Carriscant came round from behind his desk and pulled out a chair for her to sit on. He noticed she was not using walking sticks any longer. He had not seen her for some days, but that still indicated rapid progress. She looked pale, her brow moist, and her breathing was swift and shallow.

  “No sticks? You’re overdoing it, I suspect.”

  “I feel so much stronger. Felt, I mean. But this afternoon, I was writing and I began to feel faint, most odd.”

  “Nurse Aslinger, didn’t she—”

  “I gave her the day off, I felt so fine, you see.”

  He took her pulse. The way the electric sconce on the wall cast its light meant that, looking obliquely at her, he could see the fine down on her top lip. The finest peach bloom. Her fleece, her pelt. The tip of her tongue appeared to moisten her lower lip. An arc of light caught the lash-screened jelly of her eyeball. Some black stuff on her eyelashes. Facepowder dust in the whispy blonde hair in front of her ears.

  “It is a bit fast, the pulse.”

  “I thought so. And my breathing. I can’t seem to slow it. As if there’s this tightness across my lungs.”

  “The wound? Any pain?”

  “It’s strange. A kind of tingling. A sort of…effervescence in that area, to the side.”

  “If you’d be so good as to get on the couch, I won’t be a moment.” He smiled at her and moved to the door. “Where are you going?”

  “To call for a nurse.”

  She laughed and shook her head, in amazement, he thought.

  “Dr Carriscant, really, you have cut me open and removed part of my body. I appreciate your sense of decorum, but it’s not necessary.” She removed her hat, set it down on the chair and went behind the screen to the examination couch.

  “Could you help me? I don’t like to swing my legs up.”

  He crouched quickly in front of her, dry-throated, his fingers on her ankles. Small black kid boots with low heels, a crisscross of laces wound through brass button-hooks. He swung her legs up on to the couch. A faint creak of leather as she turned with him and then lay back.

  “I’m very grateful, Doctor.”

  “No, no. You were right to come.”

  Her fingers unbuttoned the side of her skirt. Buttons on both sides. Gleam of buckles too.

  “There are these small belt things.”

  “I have them.” He unbuckled them at each side and folded down what was now the front flap of her skirt top. She undid the bottom of her jacket and pulled it wide. There was a cotton shift below, with a thin yellow chalkstripe. He could see beneath its hem a strip of her belly above the navel and the puckered top of her drawers, held tight by a cloth drawstring bow. She tugged the ends free and widened the waist to its full extent.

  He was not thinking. His head was empty of everything but the rushing, finger-drumming noise of the rain. Scent of rosewater from her, dusty, sweet. His eyes flicked to the window: the garden was darker, overshadowed, the light
s in the room glowed brightly in the premature dusk.

  “I just—” he began, his fingers on the loose waist of her drawers. He pulled down carefully, exposing first her navel and the pale plump swell of her belly, then the gentle jut of her pelvis. No further.

  “If you could just lift—”

  “I’m worried it’ll hurt, my muscles there are weak.”

  “Here.” He slid his hand beneath her, palm uppermost, into the small of her back. He took her weight and she arched carefully, her hands busy beneath her buttocks, freeing the rear flap of her skirt, pushing it down over the bulge of her haunches. His hand was hot on her spine.

  Fingers on her drawer waist again as he pulled it lower to reveal the scar. It was looser than he had anticipated and his tug revealed a full inch of her pubis, the wiry golden hair grown back, almost.

  He stiffened with shock at the sight, his chest suddenly full of air, his groin alive with stirrings, slackenings, as his penis thickened, pushing against his trousers. He pulled up the waistband a little, to cover it—so—tugging down the right side to reveal the scar. He kept his head bowed: he could not meet her eyes, in case she had seen that he had seen.

  That bright shiny pink mark he had made on her. No inflammation. He ran his fingertips along the weal, the dots of the stitches faded to nothingness, practically. His hands on her again. He closed his eyes.

  She said softly, “There is no-one called Esmerelda.”

  “What?”

  “In that novel, East Angels. No-one called Esmerelda, no Captain Farley, no besting of anyone in particular.” She was looking at him with intolerable directness. He took his hands away from her belly.

  “I don’t understand,” he said, realising now what he had revealed of himself and his motives that day at her house.

  “You never read that book. You lied about it to me, and yet you wanted to borrow another. Why?”

  She propped herself on her elbows. Her voice was lazily quizzical as she stared at him. She was asking questions to which she already knew the answers.

  “Because…” His voice was low, confidential, almost a whisper. “Because I wanted to see you.”

  He leaned forward at her and as his lips touched hers he felt her arms go around his neck drawing him down.

  The door locked, the lights off, they made love with great and tender solicitude and the absolute minimum of movement for fear of tearing or damaging her healing wound. He slid off her skirt and drawers and then, with his help, she turned and knelt above his supine body on all fours as he prepared himself, unbuckling his belt and tearing open his fly, and she, inch by inch, with great care lowered herself on to him, easily. Her hair hung down, the ribbon loosened somehow, brushing his face, and once he slipped his hands up beneath the cotton shift to hold her hanging breasts in his palms. “It’s not sore,” she whispered, as she worked herself slightly to and fro.

  He lay back, not moving, his hands on her thighs now as she gently moved up and down, tiny undulations.

  He could not hold back for long and when the moment came the almost absolute stillness of their posture, the lack of bodily contact, of any heaving or straining, made it seem dreamlike, otherworldly, as if this extraordinary experience were happening while he lay buoyant in some tepid stream or was held in the windshifted topmost branches of some mighty tree.

  Then she eased herself down and lay on him and only then did they kiss and touch, nuzzle and caress. He could think of nothing to say. Nothing. And so they lay still on his examination couch, behind the screen in the unlit room, as the rain poured down and it grew dark outside.

  THE GIRLS ON THE PONY

  After she left he sat there in the gloom, numb with a helpless sense of joy, exhausted and stupidly happy. He closed his eyes and tried to bring to mind her smells and textures, the words they had said to each other, certain moments that he could hardly believe had happened. He found his memory maddeningly elusive. For a brief second he could re-experience the full softness of her breasts in his hands and then an image of the consulting room ceiling, its heavy lamp fixture, the sepia foxing of some damp stains, would push that aside, to be elbowed away in turn by the whisper of her voice in his ear—“I know, I know”—or the tickle of her thick hair on his face, the sight of her upper body twisting round rebuttoning her skirt, or her pale lovely face looming for a last kiss. What had their final words been? He could not recall. How had they arranged to meet again? Surely—surely—they had organised something? He was seized suddenly with an awful fear that this would be the first and last time they could come together in this way and, with a rush of bile, he cursed his marriage, and hers. He suddenly detested Manila with its provinciality, its small-mindedness, the impossibility of privacy amongst its resentful expatriates with their prurient curiosity, the ubiquity of servants, prying, whispering, the impossibility of ever being anonymous or alone.

  In such a mood of frustration he left the hospital and walked out through the blue dusk, down Calle Palacio and Fundacion to the Real gate. He crossed the stagnant moat and headed for the Luneta, which he could see ahead of him, its ring of electric lights burning brightly in the encroaching night. Across the bay the Sierra de Marivelles hills were opaque and dark, a final stripe of citrus-orange picking out their silhouette. Music carried to him from the bandstand as he approached the crowds and the dozens of carriages moving slowly round and round the grassy plots in the centre of the oval.

  As always the crowd was predominantly dressed in white and at this hour—or was it something to do with his eyes, he wondered?—the linen suits and muslin camisas seemed to glow in a stark, unearthly fashion in the gathering darkness. The music changed from a jaunty rendition of ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ to a lilting waltz and again it seemed to him that the pace of the circling people and of the ponies drawing the carriages slowed to accommodate the new rhythms of the music. Men and women he knew greeted him as he moved aimlessly through the crowd and he raised a hand in brisk acknowledgement, keeping a vapid smile on his face and turning this way and that, changing course at each encounter to avoid having to speak further to them.

  His mind was filled with wonderment still, reflecting on what had just occurred, thinking of Delphine and their delicate tender lovemaking. He felt at once blessed and humble, grateful and unbearably moved by her generosity. Suddenly alone for a moment, his meandering dance having taken him to the edge of the glow cast by the bright bunched globes of the electric light, he turned back and looked again at the slowly revolving throng, round and round, going nowhere, accompanied by the beautiful music, the chatter of a thousand conversations, the occasional snicker of laughter.

  Moving in and out of the crowd, crossing the grassy plots, crossing the roadway, moving heedlessly, were two little American girls seated astride a bare backed pony, with their blonde hair floating loose behind and tied with a big loose bow of ribbon on one side in the American fashion, their thin bare legs in their velvet slippers dangling side by side on each flank of the pony. The girl in front holding the reins looked happy and exhilarated, her smile wide, her eyes constantly on the move, full of curiosity. But the little girl behind, clutching her sister’s dress, looked solemn and fearful, holding tight, her eyes fixed resolutely on the ground. They circled the Luneta twice and then he lost sight of them behind the grouped carriages on the far side. They did not reappear and he felt an overwhelming sense of loss invade his being, a terrible sense of life’s impermanency and transience, a sudden understanding of the meaning that this vision held. He crossed the road to the sea wall and sat down on it, his legs dangling over the narrow beach, looking out over its wheeled bathing huts and the dark waters of the bay to the last thin slashes of lilac on the horizon. Unobserved, alone, he put his head in his hands and wept.

  HIPPOTHEETICAL

  The Merck and Frankl bistoury lay in the middle of Paton Bobby’s desk in his office in the Ayuntamiento, its blade end pointing towards Salvador Carriscant.

  “So you say there is
one missing,” Bobby repeated. Needlessly, Carriscant thought.

  “According to my inventory.”

  Bobby frowned and drew his hands from below the level of the desk top and placed his fingertips carefully together, his thumbs resting under his chin. Carriscant noticed that the middle and ring fingers of his right hand were bandaged.

  “What happened to your fingers?” he asked.

  Bobby looked rueful. “You remember that day when we found the woman’s body? And we found the knife? I put it back in my pocket and forgot it was there. Ten minutes later I went for my matches and ouch.”

  “It happens. If you carry a scalpel you need a case, or a little leather scabbard. Like this.” Carriscant showed him his own.

  “Yeah, well I don’t plan on carrying one around full time.”

  “Well, we certainly have one missing, if that’s any use.”

  “It might have been. Except the San Lazaro can’t account for three and we got a whole box gone from the First Reserve.”

  “That’s hospitals for you.”

  Bobby stood up and paced up and down, evidently perplexed. He turned and seemed about to speak and then thought better of it. And then he changed his mind again. Carriscant thought he had rarely seen a man’s mental intentions so clearly written on his face—not the best of assets for a policeman, he reckoned. He waited patiently for Bobby to confide in him.

  “If that scalpel was from the San Jeronimo,” he began, giving a fair impersonation of a man thinking on his feet, “then conceivably—conceivably—it could have been taken by Dr Quiroga. Yes?”

  “Look, Bobby, I’ve already told you—”

  “Merely a supposition. Hypothetical.”

  He pronounced the word ‘hippotheetical’ and Carriscant had to force himself not to smile.

  “The supposition is completely absurd,” Carriscant said. “You’re implying that Dr Quiroga has something to do with these murders? Preposterous.”

  “It’s a lead, you’ve got to admit that. First the General Elpidio connection and now this scalpel. And the surgical precision of the mutilations. Competently done, those were your words, not mine.” Bobby paused, pointing an unbandaged finger at Carriscant. “Dr Quiroga’s family come from Batangas in southern Luzon. It was one of the fiercest areas of rebellion. He made three trips there to my knowledge in the last year of the war.”