William Boyd - The Blue Afternoon

'Miss Caspar, excuse me, I wanted to see you. I waited -'

'Who are you? I'm afraid I don't… ' Her fingers brushed her forehead above her right eye as she focused on him. Her frown tightened.

'Good Lord, it's you. You're the mad fellow who rushed screaming out of-'

'Miss Caspar, I came to apologise. I wanted personally to-'

'Stop. Please. The matter is closed. No need.'

There was a token smile and she began to turn away. On the periphery of his vision he was aware of her two men friends returning with their sweetmeats.

His voice became urgent: 'Miss Caspar -'

'Listen if you call me that once more, I'll -'

'- Rudolfa, then,' he said, bravely. 'If I may, Rudolfa, I would like to explain -'

'What? What are you talking about? Rudolfa?' She stepped back abruptly. 'Would you kindly leave me alone or I'll call the police.'

One of the men appeared suddenly at her elbow. He could sense all was not well and said to Carriscant, aggressively: 'What do you want?' He turned back to the woman. 'Is everything all right, Delphine?'

Delphine…

'Excuse me,' Carriscant said, somehow managing a small bow. 'Forgive me, a case of mistaken identity.'

He strode off up the esplanade, bumping into people as he went, heedless, face set in a haughty seigneurial grimace to mask his coruscating embarrassment, thinking only: You damn fool, Paton Bobby, you damn stupid big American fool.

Carriscant watched his mother shuffle on to the azotea, her arm held by a young girl, and then settle herself with some difficulty in her favourite chair. The cane blind on the east side was raised to allow the weak morning sunshine to warm her briefly. The house at San Teodoro (about a sixty-mile journey from Manila) was large and simple, two storeys high and made up of big square rooms with highly polished wood floors. It had belonged to his mother's family for generations and his father had always seemed a little out of sorts in it, a little lost, dwarfed by its massive generosity – what did one want with four public rooms on the ground floor?-and he never appeared truly comfortable within its walls. It was as if, as a foreign interloper, he were being haunted by the shades of the swaggering, complacent mestizo landowners who had run their fiefdom of San Teodoro for a hundred years, secure and unreflecting, until the Americanos came. Who is this pale, sandy-haired engineer, these ancestral voices seemed to echo, what has this meek fellow from his distant rain-lashed country to do with this family, its heritage and its responsibilities?

And his father had felt it, Carriscant recognised now, as he supervised the laying out of the tea things, he was happier riding up and down his railway or in the syndicate offices in Manila. Whenever they came to stay at San Teodoro something in him seemed to shrivel and cower, until their carriage bore them away again, through the avenue of nassa trees that lined the driveway, and his father's spine seemed to straighten and his shoulders flex, and he was Archibald Carriscant, Dundonian, engineer, once again.

He poured out some corn coffee from the English teapot as his mother stared silently out at the clump of madre de cacao trees in the garden, just coming into bloom. He was used to his mother's silences, in fact he enjoyed the freedom of not having to make conversation, so he sat back in his chair and sipped the sour brew. Since his father died she had become increasingly eccentric, not taciturn or withdrawn exactly, but moody, in the sense that she allowed whatever mood she was in absolute sway over her demeanour. If she was merry then she was delightful company; if she was depressed then she was melancholia personified. She made no apologies for these swings, in fact she regarded her refusal to pretend as a positive virtue. Carriscant glanced at her: today was a little hard to evaluate. 'Preoccupied' perhaps, or 'thoughtful'-nothing too grim anyway. Along with this new honesty she seemed to have cast off some of the pretensions of her mestiza sophistication, and as she had aged she appeared to have darkened too, as if her india blood were seeping to the surface of her skin, an old pigmentation reestablishing itself. She had rejected her Spanish and European wardrobe for more traditional clothes. Today she wore a simple broad-sleeved abaca blouse over a black velvet skirt and around her shoulders lay a panuelo fringed with lace and heavily worked with delicate embroidery. A small ebony fan hung from her wrist and every minute or two she would snap it open and fan her face vigorously as a matter of reflex rather than need. Her face was sunken and seamed with wrinkles like a peach stone but her brown moist eyes were alert and suspicious. She still ran the household at San Teodoro and had regular meetings with her farm managers. Once a quarter the tenant farmers would travel down from the estates in the north and present her with copies of the monthly accounts.

Carriscant sipped at his coffee and set it down: the stuff was vile, he thought, he only sipped at it to please her. No doubt her newfound taste for it was another move back to her forebears.

'You haven't asked me how I'm feeling,' she said. 'What's the point of having a doctor for a son if he has no curiosity about your state of health?'

'Because I can see you're fine. You look wonderful.'

'I'm not fine. I've felt terrible since Flaviano was killed. Nothing's been the same.'

Flaviano had been her major-domo, he had been killed in the war.

'Well, we've got peace now,' he said. 'Life will return to normal.' How easy it was to express the sentiment: he almost believed it himself.

'We're all Americans now,' she said. 'That will be interesting. Not that I shall live to see it.'

'Better this than what we were,' he said halfheartedly.

She looked at him full of scorn. 'There were other options, you know,' she said. 'It wasn't a simple case of either or.'

'Realistically 'Do you know any of them? Americanos?'

'Plenty. Very friendly people.'

'Don't forget I've seen how friendly they can be,' she said darkly, turning away to look out at the garden. She did not need reminding – and neither did he – of the day a company of the 3rd Wyoming Volunteers had visited San Teodoro.

'Look, I've got no quarrel with the Americans,' he said. 'From my point of view – with a few exceptions – they've done nothing but good. At least they're trying. We were rotting out here before. Backward, neglected. We were like some eighteenth-century province of Spain, all friars and hidalgos. This is the twentieth century, Mother – ' He stopped when he saw her face and changed the subject. 'How's your hip?'

'Terrible. This last rainy season it was agony. Awful. I remember your father suffered from arthritis, I used to think he was making a ridiculous fuss. Now I know.'

Carriscant thought about his father, how little he had known him. A fair decent man, kind, not very demonstrative… All of a sudden he wished his father were alive, wished he were here so he could ask his advice. He was surprised at the strength of this emotion. He missed him, and he felt the ache in his chest. And then he tried to dismiss the idea as absurd. Oh, Father, I've fallen out of love with my wife and am obsessed with an unknown American woman, what should I do?

'When you married Father,' he asked his mother abruptly, 'was your family opposed? Did they mind?'

'Why should they mind? We'd already intermarried. Anyway, my father knew I wanted to, and he wouldn't have stopped me.'

'An enlightened man.'

'An intelligent man.' She wagged her fan at him. 'Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.' She looked sharply at him. 'Who said that?'

'Ah… Voltaire?'

'Pascal, foolish boy. The great Pascal. When you're in that position there's nothing you can do. You might as well follow your heart. At least that way you might find some happiness.' She looked at him shrewdly. 'For a while, anyway.'