William Boyd - The Blue Afternoon

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.

'Come on,' he said, and they walked back to the camp bed. He watched her take her little sponge on its string and soak it again in its bottle of clear fluid before, turning away from him and squatting down, she inserted it. He inched over to allow her space as she climbed in beside him.

'I love you,' he said. This was another of their new habits.

'Maybe we will fly away,' she said softly, as he softly kissed her throat. 'One day.'

With a collective groan of effort the four constables tipped up the big coffer and a small avalanche of ice granules spilled on to the ground. There was a soft thud and a bundle rolled free, wrapped in oilcloth. Bobby pushed it to one side with his boot while the others made sure there was nothing else in the coffer but ice.

'What is it?' Bobby asked.

Carriscant crouched down and unfolded the material. 'It's a liver,' he said. 'Human, I think.'

'Jesus Christ! Is it Ward's?'

'He sent Ward's liver back. Must be someone else's.'