'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.'
Carriscant thought about this and gazed out over the garden. Some doves were wooing beneath the madre de cacao trees, pacing to and fro, wobbling featherballs of lust.
He stood up. 'I should be going,' he said, suddenly decided.
'Go on, go on. You've been here long enough. Go back to your darling Americanos.'
Smiling, he bent and kissed her cheek. He rested his hands on her shoulders and felt the thin bones through the material. She held his face between her skewed and knuckly hands and kissed him on the brow.
'Goodbye, Mother. And thank you.'
The thought came to him as it always did on parting that he was the product of the strangest union – the meeting of a timid Scottish engineer from Dundee and a combative provincial mestiza heiress from southern Luzon. No wonder he could not fathom his own personality, sometimes.
'What do you mean 'thank you'? Are you all right?' she asked. 'There's nothing wrong, is there?'
'No, of course not.'
'You're not going away again, are you? It was so long the last time. I'll be dead soon, you can go away anywhere then.'
'No, no, I'm not going away. I'll be here.'
'Well be careful. And you can bring that wife of yours the next time, if you want. I won't be rude to her.'
'I will, she'd like that.'
He kissed her again and left her on the azotea. He waved back at the small figure as the carriage pulled out of the house's forecourt and bore him down the driveway towards San Teodoro, flashing in and out of the shade cast by the avenue of nassa trees. He felt his spine stiffen and his shoulders broaden as he contemplated what lay ahead, Archibald Carriscant's son, truly. There was a smell of molasses carried to him on the breeze.
DAWN ON THE PASIG
Frail coils and eddies of mist rose up from the turbid green-grey waters of the Pasig as the small flat- bottomed ferry nosed up to the jetty on the northern bank. Dr Salvador Carriscant, wearing a frayed and worn dustcoat and a small peaked cap, was the only passenger at this hour. He stepped off the prow on to the wooden decking and pulled his collar up. He was dressed this way in an attempt to allay suspicion and to draw the minimum of attention to himself. It was still cool and fresh and the almost-risen sun gave the air and dew- drenched landscape a pewtery, matt finish. He hurried past the curious glances of the few indio peasants, waiting with their sacks of vegetables, and disappeared down the path that led through a fringe of riverine trees towards the distant white walls of the Malacanan Palace.
This was his third crepuscular visit to the archery field, driven there by a vague and desperate plan of first seeing the American woman again and then perhaps following her back to her home or place of work. But it was the need to take action itself, primarily, actually to have something to do, that prompted these early rises. He felt that he could not make any more enquiries without drawing attention to himself, and he certainly could not, should he ever encounter her again in public, approach her and try to explain who he was and why he was there. He had to see her on his own, he realised, only then could he resolve the misunderstanding.
And he deliberately did not think beyond that moment, if it could be engineered, and what would happen subsequently; all his efforts would be directed simply to bringing it about, after that chance, destiny, fate would have to determine what happened next. He felt both foolish and exhilarated by these dawn excursions: he knew, from the vantage point of disinterested rationality, that all this creeping about in the bushes was preposterous and demeaning, and yet there was no denying that the sense of adventure, of what might be, was exciting and fulfilling in its own right. In the past few days he had lived more intensely, his waking hours had been more charged with anticipation, than he could remember in years. Perhaps this was a definition of an obsession? The ability both to see the manifest error in a course of action and yet pursue it fiercely just the same… Whatever it was it fulfilled him; it allowed him to go about his business in the hospital, to lead a normal family life with some measure of control and equanimity, for he knew that in a day or so he would be sitting damply once again in the acacia wood near the Palace, the sun warming the treetops, waiting for Delphine to appear.
Delphine.
He muttered the name to himself, tasting its two syllables, as the path entered the woods. Delphine. At least that ghastly encounter on the Luneta had procured her Christian name. The other day he had been on the point of asking Bobby if he knew an American woman called Delphine but at the last moment an onset of caution had made him hold back. That question could only prompt others in return; better to keep his own counsel for the moment.
He left the path and made his way through the wood towards the screen of cogal bushes that marked the perimeter of the archery butts. He had found a position that gave him a good view of the field and of the track that led from the Palace and San Miguel, up which carriages had come. He settled himself down in his hiding place, his back against the seamed trunk of an acacia tree, and prepared to wait.
The grass field was fully sunlit and the first flies were beginning to buzz around his head when he heard the clopping of horses' hooves and the crunch of carriage wheels from the lane. Three carriages pulled up and about ten or a dozen ladies noisily descended, fussing around, fitting wrist guards, stringing bows and selecting arrows for their quivers. He saw almost at once that she was not there and the frustration that this covert scrutiny had held at bay for the last forty-eight hours washed over him with full depressing force. He sat back wearily against the tree, rebuking himself all over again, the cries and laughter of these young American women at their sport carrying to him across the grass, and the soft padded thuds as the first loosed arrows struck home against the straw targets.
He called to mind her face, that first day he saw her; called to mind the way the quiver strap had defined her breasts – quite full and large, he thought now, larger and rounder than Annaliese's. And he found himself remembering too the way she had swung her hips to the music that evening on the Luneta… She was a tall woman, there was nothing gamine or petite about her, nothing girlish. And her skin was so strange, white as a milkfish… Her buttocks would be milk-pale too, he thought, and her thighs… He tried to imagine her naked, shutting his eyes against the dappled canopy above him, altering his position to allow his swelling erection a
