The Blue Afternoon

by William Boyd

  She smiled and hunched into his arms, her hand on his ribs, her shoulder fitting snug in his armpit. He moved his leg and felt his foot go over the edge of the examination couch. His elation faded instantly as the brute facts of their circumstances forced themselves in on him once more—the facts of where they were and how short a time they would be together. She seemed to sense his mood change, and touched his face, stretching her neck to kiss his chin.

  “What are we going to do?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He managed a wry smile. “If we were in Paris or London it would be no problem. But in Manila…” He raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Why didn’t we meet in Europe?”

  “Vienna,” she said, wistfully. “That would be wonderful. Have you been to Vienna?”

  “No,” he said, saddened. Vienna with this woman: an ache of unlived lives settled itself in his gut. Platoons of alternative existences lined up to mock him.

  “I was there in the spring of ‘ninety-seven. On the seventh of March I went to a concert and Brahms was there. He was very sick. Almost brown. A thin brown sick old man. But I saw him. They played his fourth symphony. Do you know it?”

  “No,” he said. “No, I’m afraid not.” He felt a bitterness in him. “Brahms,” he repeated softly, as if the word were a talisman. “Brahms. To be in Vienna with you, To go to a Brahms concert…” He thought of a cold European city. A fire in a comfortable room. Maybe snow falling outside. A big white soft bed with Delphine waiting, naked, for him. He groaned. This was agony, it was intolerable, an appalling torture. This was what it did to you, he supposed, this level of infatuation: sublime delights and fiendish torments. He thought of the Brahms concert again: before he died he would hear the fourth symphony. He would pay one of the second-rate touring orchestras that came to Manila to perform it for him, however ineptly. Some other less pleasant visions came to him.

  “Was he with you?” If Sieverance had been there he could never possibly hear—

  “No. I didn’t really know him at that time. We were engaged the following year.”

  He wanted to ask how someone like her could have married someone so…so insipid, so nothing, so unworthy of her. To find out how people became trapped in unions that were so manifestly wrong. Jepson Sieverance with his ephemeral personality, his feeble boy’s moustache. His indecisiveness. Pleasant enough manners, he supposed, but where was the man, the true character that had won this fabulous treasure, this goddess? He stopped himself, this was madness. He thought sourly of his own marriage, its tired disharmony. As well put the questions to yourself, fool. It happened all too easily.

  “He’s changed, you know. Jepson.”

  “Yes?”

  “This war did it. He’s not the same man. Something’s gone from him. A confidence, a generosity. He was never a true soldier, you see. It was like a family trade he had to go into. But now he seems more dedicated to it…Soldiery, I mean. He thinks he has a talent for it, he told me. He said he thought his father would be proud of him.” She gave a small snort, half disgust, half amusement. “Why is that so important to men? That their father should be proud of them? Why don’t they go their own way, be themselves?”

  He left the question unanswered for a while: he was not content to be talking about Sieverance. “I never think about my father,” he said, honestly, bringing that mild placid stranger to mind for the first time in ages.

  “Good,” she said, but he could see she was still thinking about her husband.

  “I don’t hate him,” she said, with quiet vehemence. “It’s more a kind of apathy…an apathy of feeling. I feel nothing for him. I don’t quite despise him, if you know what I mean. Almost-contempt. I can’t summon up the energy to hate him.”

  She paused, her head slightly cocked, as if this were the first time she had articulated such feelings and she was surprised to hear the words spoken out loud. Carriscant remained silent.

  She went on: “But…what fills me with anger is that I didn’t see this lying ahead of me. That I made myself blind. Anger at myself, I mean. And then despair.”

  “Despair?”

  She looked at him, her eyes clear with a pure hard conviction. “I can’t spend the rest of my life with him. With a man like that. I can’t just waste it away.”

  He touched her face again, pushed a lock of hair off her forehead.

  “Why did you come to me that day?” he asked.

  “Because I knew you wanted me to, with all that book nonsense. I knew you wanted me to.”

  “But did you want to?”

  She smiled at him, teasingly. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Lots of men would want you, you must know that.”

  “I was…I was intrigued by you. Even that day at the archery, and then on the Luneta. So angry. So cross with me.” She grinned, showing her teeth. “And then you saved me. I was lost. Simple as that. Head over heels.”

  Was she mocking him? This was what thrilled him too, this provocativeness. So new, so American. So different from the European women he knew. A kind of audacity in her, a huge self-confidence. So why had she married that lap dog?

  “Why did you marry him?” he asked suddenly. “I’m sorry, it’s none of my—”

  “No,” she said, smiling ruefully. “Good question. I don’t know. At the time, he seemed…well, not the best, but everything someone in my position could reasonably hope for. When he asked me to marry him I couldn’t think of any really convincing reasons for saying no.” She hunched into him. “It’s been a terrible…It was a big mistake.”

  “At least he brought us together.”

  She stretched her neck and kissed him. “I’ve had this dream,” she said. “A story I heard about an Englishwoman, a true story, who was travelling out to India to rejoin her husband. She went ashore at the Suez Canal, at Port Said, with a party of friends and they went to the souk. While she was there she became separated from her group and when they went to look for her they couldn’t find her. She had gone, vanished. Never to be seen again.”

  “So what’s your dream about?”

  “I have this theory that it was all a plan, and she made her escape. That she’s alive and well and living the life she always wanted. Somewhere else. All her friends and family think she’s been killed or abducted, but I have this notion of her, living under a false name, in Australia, or Brazil, or Turkey, or Moscow.”

  “You could escape like that,” he said. “Just disappear…And then I could come and join you. We could go and live in—”

  “Don’t say that sort of thing, Salvador. It’s not fair. Please.”

  “No, you could. Then I could—”

  She put her finger on his lips to silence him. “Ssssh,” she said.

  He stayed quiet.

  “Did I really nearly hit you with that arrow?” she said.

  He held up his hand, forefinger and thumb two inches apart, and she laughed, deep in her throat, causing her breasts to shiver beneath her chemise. He pressed himself against her thigh, very aroused.

  “Delphine, we have time, we—”

  “No. I must go.” She reached down and her fingers trickled across his hardness. “I’m sorry. We have to be careful.”

  “You’re right, you’re right.” He sat up, all his anger returning. “We have to find some way. We have to.”

  “Let’s go to Paris,” she said mock-gaily.

  “Vienna.”

  “Salzburg.”

  “Samarkand.”

  “Timbuctu.”

  “Anywhere but here,” he said, vehemently.

  That silenced them and they dressed quickly, a little morose. Such fantasising was dangerously double–edged, he realised: it elated and depressed in equal measure.

  At the door of the consulting room they kissed.

  “I can smell you on me,” he said. “It’ll drive me mad. What shall we do? When shall I see you?”

  “I’ll contact you, somehow,” she said, suddenly troubled. “Perhaps at
the house again…I’ll see.”

  “I love you, Delphine. I love you.”

  “Don’t say it, please. It upsets me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…Because it makes me think.” She took his face between her hands and stared at him. “It makes me think too much and that’s bad.”

  They held each other. Then Carriscant gently broke their grip apart. He unlocked the door and opened it.

  Pantaleon stood there, his knuckles raised to knock.

  Guilt blazed from them, Carriscant knew, like a fireball. Guilt and shock. Etched on their features like a crude caricature.

  That second over, everything resumed a semblance of order. Introductions were needlessly made. Pantaleon enquired in broken English after Mrs Sieverance’s health. Carriscant prattled idiotically, inventing some nonsense about twinges of pain provoking a spontaneous visit, trying to pretend to himself that there was no blush on her cheeks and forehead. Delphine’s composure returned enough for her to make an orthodox farewell.

  “Take the stairs very slowly, Mrs Sieverance,” Carriscant called heartily after her. “Don’t try to run before you can walk.” He managed a laugh and turned back into his office where Pantaleon now stood, his back to him, seemingly obsessed with something he could see in the dusk-filled garden.

  “Very pleasant woman,” Carriscant said. His voice sounded insufferably pompous, he thought, ridiculously formal.

  “I’m so sorry, Salvador,” Pantaleon said, low-toned, solemn.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought you were gone, then I heard voices. You must believe me, I would never pry, never—” He stopped. “Forgive me.”

  Carriscant sat down slowly behind his desk, picked up a bevelled glass paperweight and turned it in his fingers. Pantaleon was right, of course. It would have been impossible for them to have maintained a pretence of not knowing. He pressed the cool heavy glass to his hot cheek.

  “It’s useless, Panta,” he said, his voice suddenly ripe with the relief of being able to confess. “I’m desperately in love with her. Desperate.”

  IN THE NIPA BARN

  Carriscant knew the routine well by now. He sat in the nipa barn and imagined the various stages of her journey to him. Delphine arrives at her front door with her young maid Domenica, carrying her easel, her roll of paper and her box of water-colours. She says goodbye to Nurse Aslinger, reassuring her that her health has never been better. The victoria then takes them down the road to Uli-Uli where they cross the bridge and wheel left along the Calle de Santa Mesa and proceed along this for half a mile before turning up a narrow vegetation-choked lane called, rather grandly, the Calle Lepanto. They stop at its end: over to the left they can see the squat grey walls of Bilibid prison, ahead lies open country and small isolated villages. Delphine and Domenica, each carrying their respective bundles, set off along the footpath towards Sulican. After five minutes they pause. Delphine sets up her easel (the water-colour pretext had been Carriscant’s idea) while the maid spreads a grass that in the shade of a buri palm and sets out a light picnic lunch. Delphine paints for an hour or so, weather permitting, and breaks for lunch. That completed, she picks up her sketch book and announces she is going to wander around looking for inspiration, reassuring Domenica that she will be back before 3.30. She sets off across the nearby fields, pausing while in eyeshot to sketch a carabao team in a rice paddy, or a clump of bamboo overhanging a meander of an estero, before picking up a cart track that leads her over a small wooden bridge to a plumbago hedge. Pushing her way through she comes upon a wide level meadow, at the far end of which is a recently constructed nipa barn.

  Carriscant was waiting for her. He swung the barn door closed behind her and padlocked it. They embraced and then hurried down to the far end, past the Aero-mobile to Pantaleon’s makeshift living quarters. Carriscant had brought a quilt and some sheets in an attempt to make the bed a little more comfortable. They undressed quickly and with due care settled themselves in the camp bed (surprisingly comfortable and quite sturdy) and then they made love.

  It was after he had confessed to Pantaleon that Carriscant had thought about using the nipa barn for their assignations. Pantaleon had given him the key ungrudgingly, saying only that he wanted to know nothing more about the affair and adding pointedly that he never worked on the Aero-mobile in the afternoons. Carriscant began to thank him profusely but he was silenced. “You’re my friend,” Pantaleon had said, “but that doesn’t mean I approve.” Carriscant had left it at that: the matter was never mentioned again. As far as Delphine was concerned Pantaleon knew nothing about the arrangement. Carriscant said merely that he had been given a spare key and that he knew Pantaleon was safely at the hospital on the afternoons they met.

  This was the fifth time that he and Delphine had been together in the barn and already little routines and customs had established themselves. He always brought a present—something negligible, something silly—and Delphine would have something left over from her picnic—an apple, a pomegranate, a chicken leg. They made love rapidly and without much ado within the first five minutes of arriving and usually did so again, at a more leisurely pace, towards the end of their allotted time. In between they lay together on the camp bed and talked.

  She told him about herself. She had been born in Waterloo, New York, the only child of Dalson and Emma Blythe. They had both died of typhus in the 1879 epidemic and she had been adopted by an uncle and aunt, Wallace and Matilda Blythe, he a mathematician and school principal in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She had been well educated and for a while there were older cousins who provided a family life of sorts until they left home. Then her life became increasingly solitary through her teens as she lived on alone with her ageing guardians. It had been a school friend and her aunt, an emancipated, intelligent woman, who had sprung her from this mouldering domesticity and taken her to Europe on a series of summer trips in the 1890s where, she said, she discovered she had opinions and a personality of her own and at the same time saw how confined and hopeless her life in New Brunswick had been. Her aunt died, her uncle became increasingly infirm. Then one evening at a dinner party in Manhattan she met a young officer called Jepson Sieverance…

  Carriscant remembered the present he had for her.

  On this occasion he had brought a box of Turkish cigarettes, oval shaped with twin bands of gold at one end, and Delphine agreed to try one. Carriscant slipped out of the camp bed, naked, and fetched the matches from his jacket pocket. He crouched down in front of her to light her cigarette and then lit one for himself. He stood up, enjoying being naked in the warm dusty atmosphere of the hut. Thin planks of sunlight squeezed in through gaps in the bamboo walls and illuminated the interior with a soft murky light. He felt the cool packed earth beneath his feet and wandered over to the Aero-mobile, which was showing distinct signs of being worked upon. The engine had been removed from its mountings and was resting on blocks on the floor, and the chain drives to the propellers were disconnected. He moved round to the front of the machine and climbed into the forward saddle, feeling the leather warm against his buttocks. He turned his head to look back at Delphine, who was sitting upright in the camp bed, as she inspected the end of her Turkish cigarette with some disapproval.

  “Rather strong for me,” she said. He watched her put the cigarette in her mouth, inhale carefully and then blow a plume of bluey smoke up towards the rafters, her throat stretched and pale.

  She stubbed the cigarette out on the floor. “What’re you doing up there?”

  “Panta’s having trouble with his machine. He’s decided to set the engine sideways, I mean on its side, to minimise the vibrations. He thinks the lateral vibrations—of the pistons, you know—will be better than vertical.”

  “Makes no sense to me. It’ll never work.” She threw off the quilt and left the camp bed, sauntering over to him. Her ripe body was ghostly pale in the gloom; he saw the sickle shadows of the underhang of her breasts, the dense golden triangle
of her bush dark against her creamy thighs. He felt his desire for her thicken like a clot in his throat.

  “It’s a mad dream,” she said leaning against his leg, looking up and down the Aero-mobile, tapping the side with her finger. He saw the tiny dapple of freckles on her bare shoulders. “This thing’ll never fly.”

  “If only we could fly away on it,” he said, his voice ragged with feeling.

  She leaned forward and kissed his shoulder. “Amen to that,” she said. The soft weight of her breast flattened against his arm. He climbed down from the saddle and pulled her to him.

  “Maybe we could fly away,” he said again, carefully.

  “Open the doors,” she said with a laugh. “Start the engine—lateral or vertical—we’ll go as we are!”

  He kissed her, laughing too. They made many wistful jokes about this now, more and more often. It was a way of talking about the subject without facing it four square. The jocularities, however, were gaining a poignant weight, a tacit import, that was growing hard to ignore, harder to bear.

  “Maybe he’ll have an accident in Mindanao,” he said audaciously. “Maybe some insurrecto will take a pot shot at him, solve all our problems.”

  “Don’t say that, Salvador. I don’t hate him like that. I don’t want him dead. I don’t want you to think like that.”

  “It would make things simpler.”

  “But I can’t even fantasise about that. I can’t be a party to thoughts like that.”

  “But what if you were dead?” he said quickly. “What if everyone thought you were dead, like that Englishwoman in Port Said?”

  “Don’t.”

  “No, I mean it. We wouldn’t be harming anyone. What if people thought you’d…I don’t know—drowned? In a boating accident, or something, but in fact you’d swum ashore. Then he would think you were dead. And you would be free.”

  “Dreams, Salvador, dreams.”

  They began, almost as a joke, as a kind of exercise, to speculate. A fire. An overturned boat. A trip to the mountains from which one person never returned. She went along with it for a while but then he saw it was beginning to trouble her with its plausibility, its practical possibilities. But the idea had taken firm root in his mind.