The Blue Afternoon

by William Boyd

  I slipped out of bed but managed still to tug the sheet away from him. He did not move. In the shadowed screened dusk of the room I could clearly see his long thin penis curved over the swell of his thigh and the thin slugtrail gleam of his semen running from its tip on to my clean but crumpled sheets. I covered him and walked through to the bathroom, closing the door behind me before I switched on the light. I was startled, a regular occurrence this, at the pale solid size of the woman reflected in the mirror, the soft wide breasts, the firm belly creased below the navel…My mental image of myself remained trapped in 1926, the year I graduated from MIT, “Master in Architecture”, licensed to sign ‘Architect and Engineer’ after my name, never ageing, slim and enthusiastic with my big-lashed hopeful gaze. The hefty, haunchy reality always caught me unawares at moments like these. I switched the light off again, sat down and did my business in the dark, thinking suddenly, for no particular reason, of lanky, blurry Hugh Paget, my English father, and this dark maddening stranger who so brusquely wanted to frogmarch him out of my life and memories. Dr Salvador Carriscant, small and broad-shouldered, intense and emotional, absurdly quick to tears for an adult male, arrogant and impatient, strident in the pursuit of his own bizarre interests…Annoyingly, frustratingly, I was beginning to feel I had known him for years.

  FOURTEEN

  My mother and I ate lunch at the Spanish Kitchen, the one on Beverly Boulevard. There was nothing out of the ordinary in our meeting like this: we would lunch together every two months or so, often at her prompting. I am sure she was curious about me, about my life, but she was far too polite ever to ask direct questions. But often I sensed her scrutinising me, as if minute changes in my physical appearance—a different shade of lipstick, a new blouse, a wave in my hair—would provide her with clues as to who I was seeing, whether I was content or not, how life in general was going. They were amiable encounters these, as we were fond of each other and, more importantly, we respected each other, and in addition my mother seemed altogether more spirited and self-possessed away from Rudolf’s booming geniality. We passed our two hours together with no sense of strain or forced good manners. She liked spicy peppery food—which Rudolf could not stomach and which she never cooked at home—so we tended to eat in Spanish or Mexican restaurants where she would consume menudo or chiles verdes rellenos with evident pleasure. Not for the first time I wondered where she had acquired this taste—in the East perhaps? Along with me, a legacy of her short marriage to Hugh Paget?

  Towards the end of our meal I asked her casually if she would do me a favour, nothing special, but one that might involve her sitting with me in the car for an hour of two. I was deliberately vague and unspecific.

  “Well, sure,” she said. “Is it something to do with your lawsuit?”

  “Yes and no,” I half lied. I had told her all about Meyersen and his devious ways over lunch, trying not to let too triumphant a note enter my voice. George Fugal had telephoned me at 11.30 that morning to say that the Turner contract had been signed and the sale had gone through. K.L. Fischer Inc. had made an operating profit of $21,058 on its first property deal and deeds were being drawn up for the next development on the new Silver Lake site we had found, a two-acre plot that, at a pinch, could take two houses or a bungalow court. I already felt my animus against Meyersen beginning to subside, diminishing, distancing itself in history.

  We drove back down Beverly towards downtown and the tall white tower of the City Hall. On Olive I parked the car obliquely across the road from Carriscant’s lodging house and my mother and I each smoked a Picayune as we settled down to wait.

  After about thirty-five minutes I saw Carriscant walking down Olive on our side of the road from the direction of the funicular. He was wearing a fawn raincoat I had not seen before and carried a brown paper parcel under his arm. I let him draw nearer and, as he was about to cross the road, I said to my mother in as idle a voice as possible:

  “That man crossing the road…Have you ever seen him before?”

  My eyes never left her face.

  She peered at him.

  Carriscant paused at the lodging house’s front steps, which had its usual complement of lounging Filipinos, and obligingly removed his hat while he chatted to them.

  “No,” she said slowly, “I don’t think so. He looks a bit like that old actor fellow, you know the one.”

  I saw nothing, not a tremor, not a blink, not a tautening anywhere. She turned to meet my gaze.

  “Who is he?” she said.

  “I think he might be a private detective, hired by Meyersen. I wondered if he had come by you, maybe, snooping around, asking questions…”

  “No, definitely not.” She smiled. “Is that it? Can you drop me off at Bullock’s?”

  FIFTEEN

  I stand inside 2265 Micheltoreno. It is built now, done, finished to all intents and purposes. The afternoon sun shines obliquely through the plate glass of the west wall casting a sharply defined shadow on the smooth ochre stucco. I sense the house’s space gather about me, its stacked and assembled volumes of air boxed and confined by their particular materials. The simple trellis on the yard, the planes of the walls of glass and abutting walls of stucco, the roof garden defined by its two oak beams, the way the corridor slides into the courtyard volume that in turn slips down the stairs to the gravel terrace below the western facade. Calmness and order. Absence of clutter, a cool world of clean edges, exact angles, and all designed by me. For a moment as I stand here in the empty room a peace descends on me. I think this is as close to happiness as I can manage these days.

  My mother’s lie was good. In fact its skilfullness was nothing short of brilliant. What tremendous shock she concealed, what massive turbulence of emotion she hid beneath a surface of total calm and placidity. Her only mistake was to forget about natural curiosity. When your daughter informs you that a business rival may have hired a private detective to spy on her you do not immediately ask to be dropped off at a department store. And her unnatural insouciance had the effect of turning what had been instinct and suspicion into conviction and acceptance. Salvador Carriscant’s wild and incredible assertion was now taking on the lineaments of incontrovertible fact. With a strange mixture of reluctance and relief, of puzzlement and pleasure, I had to admit that what I had half suspected all along was now looking like a biographical certainty: Salvador Carriscant was my father.

  SIXTEEN

  Larry Rugola, freshly but crudely shaved, the blood still gleaming on a bad razor nick below his ear, collected me from my apartment at 7 a.m. and we drove up to the new site at Silver Lake. The plot was another steep one (I could not afford flat ground, yet) and had a distant view of the reservoir. A short new concrete spur road had been laid to open up this flank of the hill and at its foot was a chainlink fence with a padlocked gate. There were lurid realtors’ placards tied to the fence advertising the lots for sale, declaiming lake view! in excited letters. It was true: in the clear morning light I could just see a stripe of grey water between the live oaks and the pepper trees,

  Larry unlocked the gate and we paced about the two acres with the plans and a measuring tape. I turned and looked back up at the roadway: you would be able to step right off it on to the roof of any single–storey bungalow, such was the incline.

  I called to Larry who was pacing solemnly about counting his big strides: “We could cantilever out, instead of cutting in.”

  “It don’t come cheap.”

  “Say, what about duplex? Duplex apartments, a row of three, maybe four?”

  Larry wandered towards me, winding in his tape measure. “It’s a thought,” he said, “that way you could go with the gradient.”

  “Living rooms on top, bedrooms below. Step it down and you’ve got a deck on top of the bedroom roof.”

  “With a lake view, even.”

  We set about measuring again with renewed fervour. The plot was an odd fan shape, splaying out at the foot of the hill. We pushed our way through the sage an
d wild laurel bushes to the bottom of the slope to where the ground dropped away into a vegetation-choked arroyo. The plots on either side were still vacant, but through a line of trees on the left came the echoey sound of hammering.

  “You’ll get a lot of extra ground in front,” Larry said.

  “So we landscape it, charge a premium.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  We relocked the gate and drove up the spur to Ivanhoe.

  “Our street got a name yet? How about Lakeview?” Larry said.

  “Lago Vista’s better. The Lago Vista site. I like it.” I tapped Larry’s shoulder. “Turn right here, Larry, let’s go to Micheltoreno, I want to see the old house.”

  We weaved west until we hit Angus and then turned south on Micheltoreno. I felt a pleasant shifting in my gut, an old unfamiliar sensation—happiness, excitement. The naming of the street, saying ‘the old house’: it spoke of progress, the development of a body of work, an avenue of bright tomorrows.

  We came over a rise on Micheltoreno and there was number 2265. A thin crane stood above it and hanging from its arm was a flat section of roof being guided up and away by a gang of men in green overalls. A green bulldozer was backing away from the completely flattened porch area, snorting diesel fumes, and other men were collecting the solid timber spars from what remained of the roof trellis of the sheltered yard. Two dump trucks were parked at the kerb and on their sides was written “John Dexter Demo-Lition”.

  “Holy shit!” Larry Rugola said, stopping the car, his eyes wide and uncomprehending. “Holy fuckin’ shit.”

  We ran towards the house where a man in green overalls tried to stop us approaching as the roof section was swung over our heads towards the truck. From inside the house came the groaning rip of chainsaws and the tearing, nail-popping sound of jemmies being enthusiastically employed. Two men emerged from the opening where the front door had been carrying the bath and behind them followed three men in business suits and aluminium hardhats, handkerchiefs held to their noses against the dust. One man removed his helmet and a hank of thin blond hair was caught by a breeze.

  “Ah, Mrs Fischer,” Eric Meyersen said. “Always premature. I wanted you to see the vacant lot. I was going to call. I hope you took a photographic record.”

  The crane swung round to collect another roof panel.

  “Where’s Mrs Luard Turner?” I said, staring at him, trying not to look around me.

  “I think she’s up for a part at Metro,” Meyersen said. “Talented lady. Charges a modest fee.”

  Then I stepped forward to take a swing at him, claw the pale eyes out of that smiling face, but Larry Rugola caught me by the elbow.

  “Come on, Mrs Fischer. Leave the bastard.”

  We walked quickly towards the car.

  “Don’t worry,” Meyersen shouted after me. “We’re going to build another house here. Very similar design, in fact. Different architect, that’s all.”

  We drove away down Micheltoreno. Larry was laboriously and vehemently calling Meyersen every obscenity he could summon to mind. His dogged cursing was obscured by a muted roaring in my ears, my boiling blood I supposed, a foaming red surf, heating my arteries, scalding my internal organs with its furious rage. The noise dimmed eventually, or was drowned by the traffic, as we turned west on Sunset and headed thoughtlessly on out, aiming somewhere for the distant sunlit ocean.

  SEVENTEEN

  Carriscant turned away from the window. Through its oval I could see the studded silver wing and the engine nacelle and half the blurred disc of the propeller hauling us through this thin high air. We were flying Transcontinental and Western’s Sky Chief service to New York. Somewhere below us was Montana. We had eighteen hours to go.

  “It’s quite extraordinary,” Carriscant said, palms patting the armrests of his seat, then gesturing up the aisle at the other passengers and the neat stewardess pouring out cups of coffee. “Here we are sitting in an armchair being served a beverage…To think we can do all this, in such a short time, up in the air like this. Unbelievable. I feel I’ve been given a mighty dunt on the head and woken up in a different world. Rip van Winkle isn’t in it.”

  “Dunt? What’s a dunt?”

  He chuckled. He was in a fine mood, clearly. “It’s a Scottish word. Means a blow, a hit. My father used it.”

  I sensed one of my rare opportunities approaching: he seemed as if he might be receptive to a few questions.

  “Your father was Scottish?”

  “Yes. From a place called Dundee. His name was Archibald Carriscant.”

  “Is Carriscant a Scottish name, then?”

  “It’s the name of a small village in Angus. There’s a River Carriscant too, tributary of the Tweed.”

  “So you’re Scottish by origin,” I said, slowly, taking all this in. Angus. Tweed.

  He looked at me carefully, not fooled by my ingenuousness, stroking the cleft in his chin with his middle finger, pondering whether to answer me. I wondered for my part whether he might be thinking up some intriguing falsehood, to lead me on a little further.

  “I’m half Scottish, actually,” he said. “And a quarter Spanish and a quarter Filipino.”

  I hid my intense surprise at this news. “Ah. Hence the Salvador.”

  “Exactly. Do you think you could ask the young lady if I could have some coffee?”

  From one point of view it had been amongst the easiest decisions of my life—he was my father and he had asked me—from another the most unconsidered and spontaneous. But Eric Meyersen and his wanton, brutal destruction of my house had been a powerful propellant. When George Fugal told me I could do nothing, that Meyersen was completely within his legal rights, I knew that I had to leave the city for a while, escape the shame, leave behind the focus of my anger and bitterness. I needed time, above all.

  So, when Salvador Carriscant came calling again with his now alluring proposition of a trip to Europe he found me teary and weak and easily persuaded. He put his arms around me, patted me on the back and muttered consoling words in my ear. There, there, Kay…Don’t worry, all this will pass. I held him close and blurted out my woes, told him about Meyersen’s betrayal and my impotence. Come with me, Kay, he said. Just the two of us, you and me, get away from all this. Take some time off, think things through, then come back and put the world to rights again. For once this was what I wanted to hear and for once I wanted someone else to steer the course of my life for a while. I was tired, weary of standing up for myself…You must know that feeling, how vulnerable you are, when you long for someone else to take responsibility. So my father did just that and asked me to come away with him. And I was glad to go. What else could I have done?

  I put all plans for the Lago Vista apartments to one side, told Larry Rugola I was taking a vacation—he understood—and spent some of the profits from the sale of 2265 to embark on this ‘quest’. We were sailing from New York to Lisbon two days hence on the SS Herzog, of the Hamburg-American line, courtesy of Eric Meyersen.

  I tried to draw some satisfaction from this but failed. In the days since the house had been destroyed my spirits had never been lower. Carriscant, contrarily, was positively rejuvenated by the news of our journey, almost intolerably jaunty and good-humoured. I had made one sole and unmovable proviso: he had to tell me everything, what all this was about, who this diplomat’s wife was and what mystery was about to be unveiled in Lisbon, should we find her there. I reminded him now of his obligation.

  “Oh, I’ll tell you,” he said breezily. “It’s quite a story. By the time we reach Lisbon you’ll know everything I do.”

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s start with the family tree.”

  This is what he told me. Archibald Carriscant was an engineer, one of that worldwide diaspora of Scots professionals and in his early forties when he first arrived in the Philippines—then a colony of Spain—in 1863, sent by his Hong Kong firm of Melhuish & Cobb to supervise the rebuilding of the southern breakwater that formed the entrance to
Manila’s docks on the Pasig river. When that task was over he was transferred to the construction of the narrow-gauge steam railway that linked the quaysides with the warehouses and storage sheds behind the customhouse. Melhuish & Cobb won the contract for the construction of the Manila–Dagupan Railway from the English syndicate that was financing it and the rest of Archibald Carriscant’s working life was spent travelling up and down the hundred miles of country that lay between Manila Bay and the Gulf of Lingayen, planning culverts and embankments, cuttings and bridges. A tall, pale, shy man, bald since his early twenties, Archibald Carriscant had resigned himself, with few regrets, to a life of permanent bachelorhood. But during a time when he was positioning the goods sidings at Tarlac he was befriended by a local mestizo landowner, Don Carlos Ocampo. In the month he stayed at Don Carlos’s summer estates near Tarlac he was most surprised to discover that his timid, almost imperceptible wooing of Don Carlos’s eldest daughter, Juliana, proved successful. A year later they married and moved into a large house Don Carlos provided for them in Intramuros, the old walled city in the heart of urban Manila. In 1870 Archibald Carriscant was appointed area manager for Melhuish & Cobb’s operations in Luzon and a son, Salvador, was born to Juliana. Salvador, an only child, intelligent and lively, was educated at the Municipal School for Boys and went on to study medicine at the College of San Tomas. In 1893, at his ailing father’s bequest, he left for Europe to complete his medical studies and take a degree in surgery at the medical school of Glasgow University. Archibald Carriscant died while his son was away in Scotland. Salvador Carriscant returned to set up practice in Manila in 1897.