1993 - The Blue Afternoon

by William Boyd

  “Nervous?” Carriscant asked.

  “No…Yes, actually, very.”

  “I’m terrified,” he said with a grin. “Blood turned to ice water.”

  We waited for a good ten minutes before the young man returned. His manner had not altered.

  “My mother will see you,” he said, clearly annoyed at this decision. “But I’d ask you to be staying for a short time. She becomes most tired. Please follow me.”

  “I’ll wait here,” I said to Carriscant.

  He took my hand. “No you don’t,” he said, pulling me to my feet. “You’ve got to be with me.”

  We held hands as we were led down a surprisingly long corridor—the apartment was huge—loose parquet tiles clicking dully under our feet like dice shaken in a leather cup. The stern young man rapped lightly on a door and held it open for us. And now I felt the fear flow through me, a fear for Carriscant rather than myself. Every facet, every aspect of his life had been conditioned for over thirty years by the possibility of this moment one day occurring, and here we now were. The prospect of it somehow disappointing him, of it letting him down—or worse—of it destroying him, was almost insupportable. He squeezed my hand and we stepped into the room together.

  This is what I saw. An old lady sat in an armchair before a tall muslin-draped window that gave on to a distant prospect of the botanic gardens. The screened light that fell on her face was soft and pearly. She was thin and her face had sharpened with age, her skin stretched and seamed, but still strong-looking, the nose prominent, the eyes dark and watchful. Her grey hair was pulled loosely behind her head in a bun. She was still beautiful, I thought, in a severe way, in that semi-hidden manner you encounter with certain old women, that still allows you to see the young woman that once was. She seemed far older than Carriscant. Her hands rested in her lap, or rather, rested in the air above her lap, shaking quite noticeably, unnaturally. The thumb and forefinger of her right hand made continuous small movements, as if rolling a pill between them.

  Carriscant moved forward to her while I stepped to one side.

  “Salvador?” she said, her voice soft, her American accent barely pronounced.

  “Yes, Delphine.”

  “Don’t lurk in the shadows like that. I can’t see you.”

  “Here I am.”

  She looked at him. “You’ve got a belly on you.”

  “Big appetite, you know me.”

  He knelt beside her chair and took her shaking hands in his, their heads moving together. They kissed each other, long and slow, full of a decent and selfless ardour, a real and gentle carnality. I thought of the last kiss they had shared in the darkness of the Calle Francisco, in Intramuros, in Manila, in 1903…A whole generation had intervened, half a lifetime vanished. They broke apart. She touched Carriscant’s face with her trembling fingers. He pressed her palm to his mouth.

  “Mother, please, this is intolerable!” the young man said loudly. I could see the shock on his face, disturbed to see such passion in old people.

  “Oh, shut up, Nando,” she said, her eyes never leaving Carriscant. “Don’t be such a prig.”

  Carriscant touched her jaw with his knuckles, touched her neck. “Beautiful Delphine,” he said, dreamily. “How beautiful you look.”

  “Who’s this?” she said, her gaze turning on me.

  “My daughter, Kay. She helped me find you.”

  I stepped forward to grasp her moving hand—so light—and stared into her face. It was the most curious sensation, encountering someone I felt I knew so intimately for the first time, like meeting a character from a work of fiction, or some long-dead historical figure, in the flesh.

  “You have a look of him, you know,” she said. “Quite distinct.”

  I muttered some words of greeting, how pleased I was to meet her finally…

  Carriscant rose to his feet. “Now I want you to go,” he said. “Delphine and I have much to talk about.”

  “Mother, I don’t think—”

  “Please leave us, Nando,” she said firmly. Which he did at once, with histrionic huffiness.

  Carriscant walked me to the door.

  “You never really believed me,” he whispered, a smile on his face. “Did you?”

  The waiter opened the bottle and poured the wine into two glasses. It was yellow and cold and in the warm sun the glasses frosted at once, beads of condensation forming quickly. We each reached for our glasses and raised them, chiming the edges briefly, and Carriscant said to me, “Here’s to us, Kay. Here’s to us.”

  He and Delphine were alone together for just over an hour while I sat in the green sitting room, waiting. When he eventually rejoined me he was openly thumbing tears from his eyes, but he was smiling too, and as we left the apartment his face was serene and confident.

  “The delightful Nando is not my son,” he said, almost at once, as we descended the stairs to the gloomy foyer. “I’m very happy to tell you.”

  We found a taxi on the Rua do Pedro V, and Carriscant told the driver to “take us to a café with a view of the river”. We were driven up into Biarro Alto and were dropped at a nondescript place called the Cafe Pacifico but which turned out to have a pretty terrace with a fine view of the wide estuary and the hills beyond Almada. We sat down and ordered our bottle of wine—“the most expensive and the coldest”—and while we waited for it, munched at a plate of small green olives which had been brought to our table as we sat down.

  “She sent you the photograph from the magazine, didn’t she?” I asked, my voice kind, but serious. Certain matters had to be cleared up, now.

  “Of course.” He looked at me, almost disappointed it had taken so long to figure out. “She sent it to the San Jeronimo. My one remaining ally on the hospital board made sure it reached me, eventually. It took about three months.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Well…” He gave me an apologetic smile. “I thought it seemed more dramatic, more of a challenge the way I told it. Would enthuse you more.” He shrugged. “Maybe I should have told you.”

  “It was obviously some sort of cryptic cry for help.”

  “Yes. Or a test. Wanting to make sure. Just to see if I was still there, if I remembered.” His face saddened. “I’m sure it was the onset of her illness that provoked it. Time running out and all that.”

  “Or guilt?”

  “No, Kay. No.”

  “So you dropped everything…”

  “More or less.” He paused. “I’ll never forget that day. My youngest son came running in waving this envelope saying could he have the pretty stamp. I couldn’t believe my—”

  “A son?”

  That shrewd look again. How he eked out his revelations! “I have two,” he said. “And a young daughter. I’ve been married for fourteen years. My wife—Mayang—is looking after the restaurant.”

  I felt a baffled amused anger rise in me like a bubble. It burst, harmlessly. “And you’ll be going back to them?”

  “Naturally,” he said, almost offended. “I hope you’ll come and visit us, soon.”

  I said I would. Why not? Anything seemed possible now. Carriscant would have me peeling vegetables in his kitchen, more than likely.

  “She waited for me in Singapore, for six weeks,” Carriscant said, his eyes focused on something in the distance. “Then she heard of the trial and knew I wasn’t coming. She miscarried the child there too. A boy.”

  “A boy?”

  “Yes. And Axel came with her to Europe, all the way, saw her safely there, she said.” Carriscant smiled. “He was probably in love with her, poor grimy Nicanor…” He sipped some wine. “She went to Vienna as I knew she would, we had planned that, and she lived there for some years. She married an Austrian I didn’t ask his name—but he was killed in the war. She met Lopes do Livio in Spain in 1920, in Santander. He was a widower, the boy, Fernando, was his. Do Livio died six years ago. Nando has cared for her ever since: they are very close, she says, he’s devoted to her
. She’s lived in Lisbon since 1923. She has Austrian citizenship. No-one knows her background, not even her husbands did, neither of them.”

  We drank some more wine, it was tangy and sharp and Carriscant topped up the glasses. Inland, continents of dark plum-grey clouds were building, threatening the rain that Joao had promised, while out west, over the Atlantic, the afternoon sun shone with that silvery flinty brilliance you find over big oceans, light reflecting back from the huge expanse of shifting waters. We sat in silence for a while and watched the track of a small white steamer trail its saltspill across the flat windless stretch of the Mar de Palha, the Sea of Straw, as it headed lethargically for the docks at Alfama.

  I felt full of sadness for Salvador Carriscant. He was in the rare and terrible position of having experienced for an hour or so glimpses of the life he might have led. He had contemplated a parallel existence for himself and had had to face full square the what-might-have-been. This is something we can all do, in moments of idle despair; these possibilities exist for us, but only as reveries or as wistful hindsight. For Carriscant, however, the notional had been made flesh, embodied in the frail shaking old lady he had talked with that afternoon. If only, if only, if only…

  “She killed Sieverance,” he said. “She told me. After she left me she went back to their house for her play, she said, for her play…” He shook his head incredulously. “It was an accident. She was creeping out when he surprised her. He had his gun drawn, thinking she was an intruder. She tried to run out, there was a struggle as he tried to prevent her, the gun went off.”

  I thought about this: you hear a noise in your house in the small hours of the morning, you arm yourself with a revolver, but the burglar turns out to be your dead wife, whom you saw lying cold and pale beside the body of your stillborn child hours previously…You don’t struggle with her, it seemed to me. You might scream, you might collapse in shock. But would you fight?

  “I thought,” I said gently, “that Sieverance was found shot in his bed.”

  Carriscant looked at me shrewdly. “Then she must have dragged him back.”

  “Does she know what happened to you?”

  “She knew about the trial. That was when she decided to leave Singapore. She just assumed…” he trailed off.

  “She knew we would never be together then.”

  The clouds build to the east, a great purple range, a massive presence in the panorama, while we sit on, warm in the sun shining on us from over the ocean.

  I thought carefully before I spoke. “I don’t believe her, Salvador,” I said, in a measured quiet voice. “I just don’t. She went back to kill Sieverance. To make absolutely sure. It was the most appalling risk. I understand why she wanted to do it, but if she hadn’t, if she had gone straight to the docks, straight to Axel…Don’t you see? Then everything would have gone according to plan. That’s the only explanation that makes—”

  “Oh no, no, no. It was a mistake, a terrible accident.” He said this with simple conviction, looking hard at me. “I believe her.”

  “I don’t.”

  “What do you believe then?” There was a silence before I decided to speak. “That you killed Sieverance. To set her free. To make sure.”

  He laughed. “Kay, Kay,” he said fondly. “I love you for that, it makes me sound so very noble.” He reached out and patted my hand. “She just confessed to me. She told me everything. Let’s go back there and ask her, if you want.”

  He knew I wouldn’t, it was not a convincing gesture and I remained unconvinced. I let it go. What good would my deductions do, my reasoned detections? What do we know of other people, anyway, of the human heart’s imaginings? Carriscant’s faith was sure and constant. His belief in Delphine Sieverance and what she had done that night was no more absurd than any of the other notions we use to prop up our shaky lives. And he was happy too, that was important. He had achieved what he had set out to—no mean accomplishment—and he had seen the woman he had loved for all these years once more.

  “Will you see her again?” I asked.

  “No. She asked me not to and I agreed. Besides, I don’t want to, don’t need to.” He exhaled, and I felt the sadness skewer through him. “She’s going to die soon,” he said, leadenly. “She has shaking palsy, paralysis agitans, she can hardly walk. She’s looking forward to it, can’t wait to die, she said. But she’s glad she saw me, glad we were together again. I think it helped her enormously.”

  His eyes filled with tears, I saw them shimmer and bulge at the eyelid as he thought about her and her approaching extinction. And that provoked my tears too, and I felt the salt sting.

  I was full of doubts, full of conflicting versions and explanations of this strange and complex story I had been told. But at least I knew now there had been a man called Salvador Carriscant and he had been in love with a woman named Delphine Sieverance. That much at least I could confirm, having witnessed it with my own eyes, and perhaps that was what was most significant. As for the rest, I had my theories, my dark thoughts, my suspicions, my version of events as they had unfolded all those years ago in Manila. But what did it matter? I sat here on this sunny terrace looking out at the Sea of Straw, at the steamer’s track, the glass of yellow wine in my hand and I found that I envied Salvador Carriscant, my father. Carriscant’s luck. He has loved. That fact was implicated in everything he had done since he had met her and since she had left him. It was a real presence in his messy, crazy life, there but invisible, hidden below the surface, like softly stirring green fields of kelp under a stormy thrashing sea. And I was also witness to the fact that he still loved that old lady with her dark eyes and her shaking hands. And his life was therefore good. And therefore I envy him. I loved too, once: my blue baby, Coleman. But Coleman died. And Delphine is going to die. Aren’t we all.

  “Look at this,” Carriscant said, gesturing at the scene before us. “It’s very rare, this trick of the light. Quite wonderful.”

  The purple livid mass of the thunderclouds seemed to dominate the overarching sky, but still the sun shone on our faces as the charged light thickened and changed colour around us. My finger traced a track through the cold beaded moisture on the sweating bottle; the little steamer had almost reached the quay at Alfama; the sound of traffic and voices rose faintly from the busy streets below us, and I smelt the musky bouquet of the wine as I brought the glass to my lips and drank deep.

  So what makes the difference—here and now—on this terrace on this eloquent blue afternoon, as we sit caught between perpetuities of sun and rain, held in this particular moment? I look over at Salvador Carriscant, who is smiling at me, his old broad face radiant with his tremendous good fortune, and I know the answer.

  THE END