William Boyd - The Blue Afternoon

'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 doubleedged, 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.'

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 mat 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.