The Blue Afternoon

  He was impressed and not a little amazed at how coolly he could deliberate about his leaving of Annaliese. He felt no guilt: she was well provided for, she would have a large proportion of his money and property. Their marriage had been a sham for many months and he felt no love for her. Surely it was kinder to leave her with a mystery rather than the knowledge of brutal rejection? Surely—

  He heard the running feet of the messenger cross the courtyard to his office. It was 1.35 in the morning. It had begun.

  He opened the door.

  “A man and a woman, Doctor. Americanos. She’s very sick.”

  Carriscant ran with the messenger to the reception hall.

  He clattered into the hall. Sieverance stood there, half dressed, his shirt open at the neck. In his arms he held Delphine, pale and moaning, bundled up in a blanket.

  “Thank God you’re here, Doctor,” Sieverance said. “A ghastly accident, ghastly.”

  Delphine was laid on a wooden gurney and Carriscant went through the motions of peering into her eyes, feeling her brow, checking her pulse. She was pale and feverish from the cordite he had given her to swallow. In a low, faltering voice Sieverance explained how she had risen from her bed in the night and then, minutes later, he had heard her calling for him from the bathroom, where he found her lying on the floor.

  “In a pool of blood. Blood everywhere. From inside her.”

  “Take her to the theatre,” Carriscant ordered the porters. The trolley was wheeled away and the two men followed behind as she was propelled rapidly down dim corridors towards Carriscant’s operating theatre.

  “She kept saying, Get me to Dr Carriscant. Dr Carriscant,” Sieverance said. “But of course neither of us knew where you lived. So I called in here to get your address. I couldn’t believe it when the nurse said you were working late.”

  “I was just about to leave. Did your wife say anything more?” Carriscant looked grim, as if he suspected the worse. Everything was proceeding very satisfactorily.

  “Terrible pains in her stomach, she said. With the child—”

  “I’m sure that’s—We’ll have to see, Colonel. We’ll do our best.”

  They arrived at the theatre and Delphine, moaning faintly, moving in discomfort, was lifted out on to the operating table. The two porters stepped back waiting for instructions. Carriscant gave Delphine an injection of a weak saline solution. Miraculously, it seemed to ease the pain. He told the porters to wait with her and led Sieverance back to his consulting rooms where he sat the distraught man down and poured him a glass of rum, into which he covertly tipped a few drops of syrup of chloral hydrate. Sieverance gulped it down.

  “I’ll be back as soon as we know what’s wrong,” he said.

  Sieverance looked at him, terrified, trusting. It’s so easy to inspire that trust, Carriscant though. How they want to trust us! And he knew it was because of that trust that he was going to succeed this night. Carriscant handed him the rum bottle and told him to drink his fill.

  Back in the theatre Carriscant dismissed the porters.

  He waited a few seconds after they had gone before talking. He touched her arm and she opened her eyes.

  “Perfect,” he said. “Perfect.”

  Carriscant shook Sieverance awake. His eyes were heavy, his lips were slack. He could barely concentrate from the chloral. Carriscant crouched by his chair, his face set, serious. He was wearing his operating gown.

  “We cannot save the child,” he said. “But we must operate for the sake of the mother.”

  “Oh God…” Sieverance wiped drool from his chin as his dull brain tried to take this in. “I can’t, I can’t…” He shook his head, and tears began to roll from his eyes.

  “Stay here,” Carriscant said. “Sleep. It’s going to be a long night. I’ll call you as soon as we know.”

  He clutched Delphine’s hand in his, squeezing it, looking into her eyes.

  “An hour or two, that’s all.”

  “You will look after me.”

  “When the sun comes up we’ll be putting out to sea.”

  She smiled at him. “Let’s go.”

  Gently, he put the gauze mask over her face and let the chloroform drip from the bottle.

  Carriscant threw open the lid of the coffer and scooped a long hollow in the ice. He lifted Delphine’s unconscious body off the gurney and laid her down in the shallow depression, then pushed and packed the ice chips back over her body until she was almost covered. He pushed up the sleeve of her nightgown and slipped a thermometer into her armpit. This was one area of the whole operation where he had some real concern: he wanted her numbed with cold, literally chilled back to the bone, but not so cold as it could do damage to her bodily systems. He actually had no idea just how far he could safely let her temperature drop, but when it came to shamming death he knew that a body lacking any vestige of human warmth would do the job far more efficiently than one still flushed with heat. He hoped that his instinct would tell him if matters were becoming critical.

  He sat patiently beside her as she chilled down, from time to time dripping more chloroform on the gauze mask. He took her pulse regularly. She was already pale from the cordite she had eaten, and the penetrating cold began to make her look quite bloodless as all colour drained from her face and her lips. Her hands felt stiff and lifeless, her flesh seemed to take on the consistency of clay. When her temperature had fallen several degrees below normal and the chill and pallor about her were unignorably worrying he lifted her out of her ice bed and wheeled her back through to the theatre. He laid her on the table and placed a cane blanket cradle over her midriff before draping it with one of the operating cloths in such a way that none of the material touched her chest. There was absolutely no visible movement of her shallow breathing. He dosed her once more with chloroform and then scattered blood-soaked swabs on the floor below the operating table and in receptacles on the instrument trays. He set the steam sterilisers going and switched on the arc lights above the table. He smeared blood from a bottle on his gown and dripped a few strategic drops on his hands and forearms. In the blazing lights she lay completely inert, her face blanched almost to blue. He removed the gauze mask and tilted her head so that her mouth was slackly open. He tucked two chips of ice into her cheeks. Then he covered her face with the end of the operating cloth. Glancing round the theatre he saw it bore all the signs of a hasty and emergency operation. Only one further detail was missing. He returned to the morgue and raised the heavy lid on another coffer. Digging into the ice chips he removed the tiny body of the five-month-old foetus and took it through to the theatre. He laid it on a wheeled trolley next to the table and washed it with blood before covering it with a cloth. It was not much bigger than his two cupped hands. Its tiny clenched pug face was frozen in what looked like a rictus of terrible rage. This was his last resort.

  It was clear that Sieverance expected the worst even in his fuddled, drugged state. He saw the blood smears on Carriscant’s gown and the awful severity of his expression. Carriscant could see the man’s gorge rise and how his hand went to his throat as he swallowed desperately.

  “I’m so sorry,” Carriscant said. “There was nothing we could do.”

  Sieverance tried to be brave—he was a soldier after all, Carriscant reasoned, accustomed to sudden death—but his eyes were moist with tears and there was a tremolo in his voice as he asked if he could see her. As they walked through to the theatre he took great shuddering breaths of air, one hand persistently massaging his face.

  Bowed before the shrouded body on the table with its grim detritus—the swabs, the blood, the brilliant knives, the smell—he swayed as if he might fall. Carriscant steadied him and pulled back the corner of the sheet.

  He gave a low moan and stumbled. Carriscant caught him and gripped his arm. She does indeed look dead, he thought, a moment’s worry overtaking him, so white, so still. Sieverance leant over her, muttering her name. He kissed her forehead and recoiled as if he had been burned. His
fingers touched his lips.

  “Jesus God,” he said, shocked. “God help me…” He looked emptily at Carriscant. “She’s so cold…already…” He turned away. “The baby?”

  “A girl.”

  “Is she here?”

  Carriscant showed him the covered foetus in the tray. Sieverance paused before the tiny lump, no bigger than a bread roll beneath a napkin. He lifted the cloth and flinched violently, his whole body bucked. He let the cloth drop and gave a throaty, agonised cry, half moan, half retch. He slowly began to sink to his knees, at which point Carriscant moved forward and caught him by the shoulders, lifting him up, saying, “Here, come now, come away now, don’t torment yourself, come with me.”

  He went quietly, without a backward glance. As they slowly crossed the courtyard towards the entrance gate Carriscant—his arm around his shoulders—asked him if there was anyone at his house.

  “The servants are there,” he said. “The place is all packed up, but they’re still there.”

  “Will you be all right?”

  “I…Yes, I think so.”

  “Try and sleep,” Carriscant said. “I’ll make sure everything is sorted out here.”

  “Thank you, Doctor, thank you…I don’t think I’ll be capable of anything.”

  “Leave it to me.”

  “Will you be here in the morning?”

  “Yes,” Carriscant lied. “I’ll send for you.” He helped Sieverance into his victoria. Sieverance sat back shaking his head with some vigour, whether from the effects of the chloral or the shock he was under, Carriscant could not be sure. He was not in the least surprised at the complete success of his subterfuge. It was all a matter of suggestion. Here was a hospital at night, a woman covered in blood, a grave medical crisis. All possible prognoses would be going through Sieverance’s mind, especially the worst. Many women die of complications in pregnancy: Carriscant’s efforts had merely reproduced the man’s darkest fears. If you half expect an event to occur, you rarely question it when it does. And even more, Sieverance trusted him, as a man and as a doctor. He had placed his trust in me absolutely, Carriscant thought, in his hour of need. The fact that his most terrifying fears were realised does not reflect on me at all. With trust all duplicity becomes simple. He looked at Sieverance now and, for a moment, seeing the man in this state, he felt an icy squirm of guilt wriggle through him. There was a price to pay for this elaborate subterfuge and it was Sieverance’s awful pain and misery. He watched the man sit there struggling to come to terms with this brutal reckoning life had served him. Carriscant turned away, telling himself to be strong and not think about it: there was no other way and, he reminded himself without much conviction, time was a great healer.

  Sieverance’s carriage pulled off and Carriscant walked as fast as he dared back to the theatre. Delphine was still unconscious and some warmth was beginning to seep back into her limbs. He lowered the big arc light so the heat of its glare would penetrate better and piled some blankets on top of her. He rubbed her hands and wrapped her feet in hot towels. As he saw her temperature steadily rise he began to clear away the evidence of the operation.

  He rang for a porter and told him to bring a coffin from the hospital store. The man showed no curiosity at the news that a patient had died. But then why should he? Carriscant said to himself. Fetching a coffin or wheeling a cadaver into the morgue was doubtless a task he performed unreflectingly many times a day, especially working from Cruz’s wards. So desperate was he to create an illusion of death, he was forgetting just how commonplace and unremarkable it was in a place like this.

  The coffin arrived, wheeled on a trolley by two porters. As he opened the door of the theatre he allowed them a glimpse of Delphine on the table before dismissing them. Some work had to be done on the body before it went into the coffin, he said. He would call them when everything was ready. Alone again, he locked all doors that communicated with the rest of the hospital and pushed the coffin into his temporary morgue. He lifted the body of the murdered Filipino woman out of its ice-chest and laid it in the coffin. He fetched the foetus and placed it alongside its mother. Then he nailed the coffin shut and tied the necessary label and the envelope containing a copy of the death certificate to the top handle.

  The coffin was waiting in the corridor outside the theatre when the porters returned to collect it. Carriscant told them to take it to the hospital morgue whence it would be taken for burial the next day.

  As the coffin was duly wheeled away the thought came to Carriscant that Sieverance might not be satisfied with one of the simple, crude coffins that the hospital provided. Indeed, he might not want his wife buried in the Philippines at all and would want to ship her home, in which case the body would have to be embalmed…He suddenly felt his heart jolt with alarm. Surely, even if that was what he wanted to do, they would have a day or two’s grace? Sieverance was in no state to set about ordering new coffins and searching for a responsible undertaker the next day. The death certificate was signed, the hospital administration would routinely inform the necessary authorities. It would take a man of unusual morbidity—having already been profoundly shocked by the sight of his dead wife and dead child—to order the coffin reopened so he might see them again.

  But in any event, Carriscant thought, as he hurried back to proceed with the reviving of Delphine, even if he had foreseen that eventuality it would have been one beyond his powers to prevent or forestall. Whatever happened, whatever alarm was raised, he and Delphine would be far out at sea, a day or more’s sailing from Manila. The trail vanished, or at any rate stone cold.

  However—as he watched the colour slowly return to Delphine’s cheeks, and felt the warmth of her hands spread to her fingertips—the bowel-loosening sense of excited relief he was now beginning to feel was qualified by this small persistent undertone of worry. There was an irredeemable vanity about Sieverance, his every utterance and mannerism testified to it, and it would be very typical of the man to want to order his wife the most splendid casket in Manila, and to organise a funeral of ostentatious grief and circumstance. He was not the sort of man to nurse his sorrow silently or with solitary dignity.

  “How do you feel?” he said to Delphine, cupping her sweet face with his hands. “Any better?”

  “Very strange…” she said. “Sort of distant…and groggy.”

  She sat in a chair in the operating theatre dressed in the clothes she had given him days earlier—a simple dark blue dress with high collar. She had a bonnet on her lap with a deep low brim that would shadow her face.

  “Can you manage?”

  “Yes.” She had not asked him one question about Sieverance and how he had taken the news of her death. “I think so.”

  She looked up at him, still a little vague. “How was it, I mean…Did Jepson—”

  “It went perfectly. Not a moment’s doubt.”

  “Good,” she said, in a small neutral voice. She might have been responding to some news about the weather holding fair for the next twenty-four hours. “Good.”

  He looked at his watch: it was nearly 4. He helped Delphine to her feet and led her down a passage to a rear door that gave on to the hospital garden. There was a moon, enough to provide a faint grey-washed light. The air was warm and moist and the sound of the crickets in the bushes was shrill. They hurried along a path, through the dark shadow-thronged garden, to a back gate that opened on to the Calle Francisco.

  Carriscant took the key from his pocket, unlocked the gate—the hinges were stiff and they groaned as the door swung open—and peered out. The carriage he had ordered was waiting by the church fifty yards away. They slipped out of the door and walked quickly and silently down the street towards it. The horse snickered and the sleepy driver looked round as they approached. He would have no idea they had come from the hospital, Carriscant was glad to observe. He gave the address of the destination to him.

  “Axel will be waiting for you,” he said to her in a whisper. “He’ll take you to the boat
. I’ll be there shortly after six.”

  She gripped his hands. “I can’t believe this has actually happened,” she said. “He really believes, I mean he has no doubt I’m—”

  “Completely. I saw him, comforted him. He saw you dead with his own eyes.”

  “So we’re free—really, truly?”

  “Yes, my darling.”

  He could not hold back, he drew her slightly behind the coach and slipped his arms around her. He kissed her lips and pressed himself against her. Then his lips were on her neck and her hands were on his back, and he smelt her smell. Rosewater. She must have put on some scent. Carried some scent with her. He felt the warmth of her strong firm body down the length of his. Suddenly, strangely, he wished he were a bigger, taller man, as if a greater physical presence were a better guarantee of the protection he could give her, of the care he could afford. He had an image of her turning to this more imposing, bulkier Salvador Carriscant, snuggling into him, sheltering in the lee of his big frame. He was suddenly light-headed with fatigue and accumulated tension. His longing for her ached like a tumour behind his breastbone, a small hot coin of pain. The thought of their life together beckoned him on like a vision, a white arm of road through a verdant and sunlit country.

  He helped her into the carriage. She blew him a kiss and did not take her eyes from his until the carriage turned the corner on to Calle Palacio. He stood there alone for some moments listening to the sound of the horses’ hooves die away as they travelled through the dark narrow streets of Intramuros towards the San Domingo gate and the north quays of the Pasig, where Axel was waiting and where their new life would truly begin.