in the leaves and bushes and grass; he smelt the ferrous, musty reek of the impending downpour; big gobbets of rain thwacked his outstretched palm and he heard the thunderclap break over San Juan del Morte as the afternoon turned blue before his spellbound eyes.
His reverie was interrupted by a small commotion of protesting voices in his anteroom. Senora Diaz's polite protests presaged her rap on the door, around which her plump, apologetic face appeared.
'There is a patient, Doctor, I'm so sorry. I said it was too late but it's an emergency, I think.'
'Show him in, Senora Diaz. And you may go. I'll be here 'til late.'
He sat down behind his desk and, with his fingernail, idly drew joins between the ink blots on his blotter. The rain began to fall now in earnest, beating down, filling the gutters to overflowing, the sound of water plashing everywhere. That effect of the light in the garden, he thought, extraordinary. The atmosphere so charged with moisture, the white glare of the sun and the bluey greyness of the clouds seeming to fuse in the microscopic drops. Some sort of one-tone prism effect, he supposed, if that made sense, quite magical. Felt he could touch the air, scoop blue handfuls almost.
He looked up and saw her. She had come into his room so quietly that for a crazy moment he thought she was a vision too, another sublime trick of the light. He gave a small cry of astonishment which he managed to turn into a cough and rose abruptly to his feet.
'Mrs Sieverance…'
She wore a straw boater, a navy-blue cotton jacket over a pale grey ankle-length skirt. Her thick hair was gathered at her nape with a maroon velvet ribbon.
'I'm so sorry to be so late, Doctor. I wasn't feeling well.'
Carriscant came round from behind his desk and pulled out a chair for her to sit on. He noticed she was not using walking sticks any longer. He had not seen her for some days, but that still indicated rapid progress. She looked pale, her brow moist, and her breathing was swift and shallow.
'No sticks? You're overdoing it, I suspect.'
'I feel so much stronger. Felt, I mean. But this afternoon, I was writing and I began to feel faint, most odd.'
'Nurse Aslinger, didn't she -'
'I gave her the day off, I felt so fine, you see.'
He took her pulse. The way the electric sconce on the wall cast its light meant that, looking obliquely at her, he could see the fine down on her top lip. The finest peach bloom. Her fleece, her pelt. The tip of her tongue appeared to moisten her lower lip. An arc of light caught the lash-screened jelly of her eyeball. Some black stuff on her eyelashes. Facepowder dust in the whispy blonde hair in front of her ears.
'It is a bit fast, the pulse.'
'I thought so. And my breathing. I can't seem to slow it. As if there's this tightness across my lungs.'
'The wound? Any pain?'
'It's strange. A kind of tingling. A sort of… effervescence in that area, to the side.'
'If you'd be so good as to get on the couch, I won't be a moment.' He smiled at her and moved to the door.
'Where are you going?'
'To call for a nurse.'
She laughed and shook her head, in amazement, he thought.
'Dr Carriscant, really, you have cut me open and removed part of my body. I appreciate your sense of decorum, but it's not necessary.' She removed her hat, set it down on the chair and went behind the screen to the examination couch.
'Could you help me? I don't like to swing my legs up.'
He crouched quickly in front of her, dry-throated, his fingers on her ankles. Small black kid boots with low heels, a crisscross of laces wound through brass button-hooks. He swung her legs up on to the couch. A faint creak of leather as she turned with him and then lay back.
'I'm very grateful, Doctor.'
'No, no. You were right to come.'
Her fingers unbuttoned the side of her skirt. Buttons on both sides. Gleam of buckles too.
'There are these small belt things.'
'I have them.' He unbuckled them at each side and folded down what was now the front flap of her skirt top. She undid the bottom of her jacket and pulled it wide. There was a cotton shift below, with a thin yellow chalkstripe. He could see beneath its hem a strip of her belly above the navel and the puckered top of her drawers, held tight by a cloth drawstring bow. She tugged the ends free and widened the waist to its full extent.
He was not thinking. His head was empty of everything but the rushing, finger-drumming noise of the rain. Scent of rosewater from her, dusty, sweet. His eyes flicked to the window: the garden was darker, overshadowed, the lights in the room glowed brightly in the premature dusk.
'I just – ' he began, his fingers on the loose waist of her drawers. He pulled down carefully, exposing first her navel and the pale plump swell of her belly, then the gentle jut of her pelvis. No further.
'If you could just lift -'
'I'm worried it'll hurt, my muscles there are weak.'
'Here.'
He slid his hand beneath her, palm uppermost, into the small of her back. He took her weight and she arched carefully, her hands busy beneath her buttocks, freeing the rear flap of her skirt, pushing it down over the bulge of her haunches. His hand was hot on her spine.
Fingers on her drawer waist again as he pulled it lower to reveal the scar. It was looser than he had anticipated and his tug revealed a full inch of her pubis, the wiry golden hair grown back, almost.
He stiffened with shock at the sight, his chest suddenly full of air, his groin alive with stirrings, slackenings, as his penis thickened, pushing against his trousers. He pulled up the waistband a little, to cover it – so – tugging down the right side to reveal the scar. He kept his head bowed: he could not meet her eyes, in case she had seen that he had seen.
That bright shiny pink mark he had made on her. No inflammation. He ran his fingertips along the weal, the dots of the stitches faded to nothingness, practically. His hands on her again. He closed his eyes.
She said softly, 'There is no-one called Esmerelda.'
'What?'
'In that novel, East Angels. No-one called Esmerelda, no Captain Farley, no 'besting' of anyone in particular.' She was looking at him with intolerable directness. He took his hands away from her belly.
'I don't understand,' he said, realising now what he had revealed of himself and his motives that day at her house.
'You never read that book. You lied about it to me, and yet you wanted to borrow another. Why?'
She propped herself on her elbows. Her voice was lazily quizzical as she stared at him. She was asking questions to which she already knew the answers.
'Because…' His voice was low, confidential, almost a whisper. 'Because I wanted to see you.'
He leaned forward at her and as his lips touched hers he felt her arms go around his neck drawing him down.
The door locked, the lights off, they made love with great and tender solicitude and the absolute minimum of movement for fear of tearing or damaging her healing wound. He slid off her skirt and drawers and then, with his help, she turned and knelt above his supine body on all fours as he prepared himself, unbuckling his belt and tearing open his fly, and she, inch by inch, with great care lowered herself on to him, easily. Her hair hung down, the ribbon loosened somehow, brushing his face, and once he slipped his hands up beneath the cotton shift to hold her hanging breasts in his palms.
'It's not sore,' she whispered, as she worked herself slightly to and fro.
He lay back, not moving, his hands on her thighs now as she gently moved up and down, tiny undulations.
He could not hold back for long and when the moment came the almost absolute stillness of their posture, the lack of bodily contact, of any heaving or straining, made it seem dreamlike, otherworldly, as if this extraordinary experience were happening while he lay buoyant in some tepid stream or was held in the windshifted topmost
