1993 - The Blue Afternoon (22 page)

“I call it the
air-catcher
,” he said. “I’ve applied for a patent. If it works, who knows? I might—”

“If it works? My dear Panta, you can’t possibly take such a risk.”

“On the gliding models it seems fine. But once we’re up with a machine of this weight…” He turned and pointed to the second bicycle saddle behind him, with its own set of levers. “That’s why I’ve reproduced the tail-warping mechanism here.”

“You don’t mean to tell me you’re going to move seats in mid—” he was about to say ‘journey’ but it seemed wrong, “—while the machine is in the air? In its aerial trip?”

“No, no. My fellow-flyer—my co-flyer, indeed—will be controlling the warping while I deal with the elevators,” he pointed to his foot controls, “and the air-catcher.”

“I see. I suppose it makes sense.” Carriscant frowned: he had grown used to the Aero-mobile by now, with its fragile, translucent ugliness, but these controls seemed unnecessarily complex. Surely there must be a simpler way? All these moving surfaces—warping, elevating, catching—all these levers, struts and wires. When you saw a bird fly it seemed…He stopped. Pantaleon was looking fixedly at him, his eyes wide, strange.

“What is it?” Carriscant said.

“I was wondering, Salvador, if you’d do me the honour.”

“Of what?”

“Of joining me on this historic flight.”

T
he first rains arrived early that year but Dr Salvador Carriscant, ever prudent, had been carrying his umbrella with him since the end of January and, as the first fat drops hit his head, he congratulated himself on his foresight. He folded away his small easel and sketch pad and closed his box of water–colours before retreating to the shelter of a nearby bamboo grove, where he was still afforded a clear view of the Calle Lagarda and of the entrance to the Sieverance home. The bamboo grove was on the other side of a small overgrown creek—the estero San Miguel—from the Calle Lagarda and its spacious villas. Conscious of the risks he had run on the last occasion he had indulged in espionage, he had gone to some lengths to make his presence here plausible should he be discovered. In his sketch book were several indifferent and half completed views of this undistinguished portion of Manila’s suburbs. An expanse of marshland, some rice fields, a few palm trees and in the distance the neat dome and campanile of the San Sebastian church and convent. He had always vaguely planned to take up water–colouring as a hobby and respite from the relentless demands of the operating theatre and had seized on this pastime as the perfect way both to satisfy this urge and ‘innocently’ observe the Sieverance home. He had to admit, however, it was the proximity of the house and its occupant that distracted him and dominated his mind and not the soothing effect of his daubings.

Colonel Jepson Sieverance and his new regiment, the 1
st
Nebraska Volunteers, had embarked for Mindanao five days previously on the steamer Brewster, according to the gazette in the Manila Times, a fact that Paton Bobby had confirmed too. With the husband gone, Carriscant knew he had to see Delphine once more, but without the presence of Nurse Aslinger as chaperone. The nurse, he reasoned, must quit the house occasionally, but three days of patient water-colouring—two hours the first, four and a half the second—had seen no-one but servants enter or leave the compound. He checked his pocket watch: he had been out for almost three hours again today, and now the rain had started he wondered if it were worth lingering further. He looked up at the turbulent, livid sky. Rain in the Philippines is a full–blooded, uncompromising, natural phenomenon. The big drops noisily battered the material of his umbrella and he could feel the ground beneath his feet beginning to soften and deliquesce. Above his head the fine spiky fronds of the bamboo stands were thrashed and flung this way and that by a robust breeze. Some beetle droned by searching for shelter, an angry noise in a black dot…

A faint clatter of hooves made him look sharply across the estero as, to his surprise, he saw the gate to the Sieverance compound open and a small carromato emerge containing, indubitably, the mackintoshed and ample figure of Nurse Aslinger. It trotted down the Calle Lagarda towards the Malacanan Palace and as it did so, Carriscant, bent beneath his umbrella, hurried upstream to the Marquez bridge and splashed his way down the dirt track that led back into San Miguel. He was at her front door in five minutes. Two minutes later he was pacing damply about her living room waiting for the maid to inform Mrs Sieverance that Dr Carriscant was here to visit her. In his hand he held her copy of East Angels by Constance Fenimore Woolson. As a dutiful and responsible borrower, he told himself, he was returning the book promptly to its owner.

She came slowly into the room, walking with two sticks to help carry some of her weight. She was wearing an apple-green dress and her hair was up. Her wide smile of welcome was pronounced and irrefutable. His nervousness returned with perplexing force.

“Dr Carriscant, what a surprise.” She frowned, suddenly. “I haven’t forgotten, have I? We hadn’t planned—”

“No, no. Ah…I was visiting my colleague, Dr Quiroga. I took the opportunity of returning your book.” He thrust it forward as if he had just learnt the meaning of the phrase, realised it was going to be awkward for her to take it, what with her two sticks, and looked around foolishly for a table on which to set it down.

“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 her 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.