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The Promise E*S*E
by
June Harcourt
Chapter 3
Clara tucked the eiderdown about his shoulders. All men reverted to boys when
dwarfed by the feather billows of a bed and humbled by infection.
"I can read to you from my new part, if you'd like me to. I'm playing a wise
woman from the woods...wise woman from the woods, a tongue-tickler, although I'm
pleased to say the play is not called 'a wise woman of the woods'"
"What’s it called then?"
" 'The Secret Flower'. And only I as the wisest woman for miles around, know of
the flower and of what magic it can perform and how it can bring true lovers
together and protect them from harm” Hector was grinning enormously. "And I know
what you're thinking, my boy, you think it sounds like the plot of a pantomime.
I will have you know, philistine, its basis is a fairy story from Eire collected
by the genius Mr Yeats and set to verse by his collaborator, the Lady Gregory.
And I will be got up like the Countess Cathleen looking very craggy but still
seductive and throaty voiced. And this is my cloak. I've brought it home to set
the mood while I practise my chants. It is the colour of peat, feel it, its
homespun...."
Clara had taken a voluminous earth-brown robe from the chair and spread it
across the bumps in the bed that was Hectors shape.
"Dowdy", he coughed. "Its not your colour, blue is your colour."
"Well it isn't a colour, it’s the ground in which we are all rooted which is too
deep for the light to reach and throw colours on to. I agree. It suits you more
than me. Changes you into a leprechaun." She cowled the hood about his head.
"But I can't kiss you there, pixie, turn your head to one side. I don't want to
catch whatever bug it is."
Clara’s too beautiful to be actress, thought Hector as she fussed around his bed
of pain. Oval-face, golden hair, superb body. She should have stayed a
'professional beauty', and happily slung her hook at the whales of the financial
aristocracy.
"What is it dear?" she said, softly. "You have the pinched look of a sick
person, one which I commend to the dunghill. You can't 'smoke it away' as you
always say. But I think the cough is as a consequence of too often smoking
problems away. Anyway you're not going to die, so why look so glum? True it’s
drizzling outside...but in here it’s sunny." She put one hand to her breast, to
designate the repository of her sun. Maybe an artificial one, the cameras
flash-bulb or the spotlight.
"Ever been in the country,” inquired Hector, " I don't mean a country-house or
an inn, but the remote places, the peaks?"
"We were in the Rocky Mountains, weren't we? Remember all the fish we caught? My
brother is happy there. I can stay with him whenever I want. It snows up at his
farm. The scenery of those mountains can move people. Would you like me to
invite Pat over? He's just lost his mother, poor thing."
Hector covered his face with his hands. Hickox in the 'boudoir', Hector in the
bed?
"Its just a cough. I don't need to lie down. With all this swaddling, it’s
stifling, worse than being stuck in bag while the blizzards rage." Playing
nursemaid he thought an inappropriate role for Clara yet she seemed a little
hurt by his wriggling and complaining. He bunched up the cloak and threw it to
her, said, "Your on. Read me the script."
"Well first you must imagine the scene. I can't do it in shoes, the woman is a
kind of middle-aged nymph, barefoot.... A couple turn up on the shingly beach
after a shipwreck so you must think they were passengers on the ship but they
have a ghostly quality, phantasmagorical, a word the Irish love, you should too,
then I come along, I was collecting seaweed for soup and think I am beholding
two spirits. Now these two must bear a child, it is their destiny, the child
will be monarch of all the land. My secret flower is restorative and hopefully
will reverse the dying process and they can get married, however, all is not
what it seems. By this time they are seated on stools at my hearth, a tremendous
fireplace with a cauldron.... and I say
Press, moan, flow miraculously, the void of wind
This flame, my child, pines for the lick of your breath,
void of wind
Afleet but frail, it staggers and weeps its black tears
and slivers of its dress bamboozle my flowers bending tongue
void of wind be strong, be full, be as the wests moist issue,
be quick, come wind, quake my
child into howls, red and wildly burning.
One key to the story is the flowers invisibility. I have to pretend I'm holding
its stem, like this but then it catches fire and the two ghosts suddenly become
devils and eat the flower which is alight. Then the devils eat me...and then I
am the child. I have sort of...wed the flame which was the flower."
"And do the devils inherit the Earth?"
"Decide for yourself," she said, poring over the typescript "An audience needs
to take something with them to argue about while they are getting smashed. What
do you think the meaning of this might be?"
a must , a train of thunder, rain and death, brakes
the ribbolous sea, under waters, flat and cool and
greeny. I your turtle, my body its carapace eons old
worn and travelled, take sup of the sea, cool and flat, I swim, I
scoop
until the tips of winds have joined, the eternal swaying weed.
This is what happens to me at the end, the fire becomes a creature of the seas.
Ruler of both realms, I suppose.... Of, I'm tired of that now." Something had
distracted her. " How can I enlarge my eyes? They sort of shrink in the shade of
the hood. Opening them wider dries them out, gives me that moving picture
quality."
His coughing climaxed in a paroxysm, Clara passed him a glass of water {with
gin} then stroked his brow and he could see the skittishness that had been
palpable only moments ago transmuting into the fixed serious look people get in
their eyes when the situation breeds arousal. Something about his vulnerability,
his panting and closing then unclosing his fists, something so taut as flexed
muscle juxtaposed against the yielding, formless bed linen, a dark mass scarring
the pallor of ivory pillow...
Hector wondered what she was up to. He was sick and had things on his mind, but
Clara was a modern-self-serving creation. She ate life, ardently like a
starveling. Commandingly she hauled the pillow from under his shoulders which
forced his head flat onto the hard, slab of mattress, then leapt up beside him,
so lithe then slid herself on top of him effigy like and her golden hair
pummelled his face until she swept it brusquely aside so she could drill into
his soul with her diamond eyes. Then she said in a low rumbling purr: Don't
cough on me, hon. and began rubbing herself up and down his body as it sweat and
fought the weight of quilt and her weight and the weight of his predicament and
he thought, I won't be able to go through with this and the house-cat demanding
its meal would be left to yowl on the roof-tops. He suddenly stiffened, in not
quite the way she desired, and squeezed her shoulders and lifted her and tried
to blow apart the concealing tresses.
"Clara, he coughed into the hair, I'm not in the mood... and he wondered if this
one denial would blast their relationship to smithereens. It was tenuous. She
was ten years younger. I want you.... but I'm not well enough."
She bolted upright, pinning him down like a recalcitrant steer and thrust her
breasts forward with the brazen indomitability of a figurehead.
"Oh, a moment ago you were pleading to be allowed out of bed. I suspect your
frightened of an oh much to forward woman.. Well I can't wait, that play is a
sexy one, words are sexy."
She bent forward. She was still wearing an elaborate blouse but commenced to
undo the serried flanks of pearly buttons to set her body free. It was partly
true, a little strange to feel the assertive weight of a crusading woman driving
into one. Then suddenly it was off and the straps of her shift were down and she
was hanging over him like a fruiting tree and pleading with ever raised and
quivering pore of her keenly-sculpted figure. Then she kissed, drank every
section of his face bar mouth, ruffled his hair, Hector thinking, I must be mad
and lying still, almost in terror...
Then angrily she jumped off the bed, shrouded herself in the peat-brown cloak
and sat in the chair sighing and screwing up her toes inside her stockings,
every inch of her restless and dissatisfied and aching and steaming. Hectors
eyes followed the shabby gilt cornices from one corner of the ceiling in a
complete circuit as he lay flat on his back avoiding the consequences. He heard
Clara say "I'm going out", her voice monotone, then he heard drawers and her
heels in other rooms and then the staircase and then the front door.
"I craved your love. And what you could, you gave me,
Your body's beauty: yet I sought the soul.
Not loving me, dear child, you could not save me:
Yet all your love could not have made me whole."
Each grinding cough wrung out poetry. What would make any man whole, he mused,
if not the whole woman? So his spittle induced impotence would inevitably send
him home to Emmy. He loathed her sick-bed sympathy because it seemed feigned. At
once the sensual, indelible beauty swelling the attractions of a wanton and
superior, a dominant woman, minutes before and his spurning her offer, made
Hector regret even more the deleterious health effects worked by his erratic,
nearly finished life.
* * *
Mac descried his boss in a desolate condition at the office. He found the
'fallen mighty' downing luke-warm champagne, puffing Havana cigars and coughing
forth intentions:
"I want to do a good deed. I want the letter, for Emily to read, and to spare
the Hunt clan from embarrassment. I want to buy it, but I haven’t all the money,
even if I can knock him down to three. I'll have to speak with Archie, alone.
The Murchison creature only wants to throttle negotiations, at worst me. Off his
head, maw-crammed with simmering violence...What are the assets, Mac? What can I
off-load? The pills, worthless...the Burmese dam, never get built. I should have
gone sclusively for Peruvian oil."
"I still have the petroleum shares you gave me". Mac's joints twinged. He could
sense the onset of a monologue.
"And you have a wife in Surbiton. My brother-in-law looks after you, I hope. I'd
best have a word with him. We must leave Lady Carpenter in the dark. I can say
it was discovered in the bottom of a suitcase...hmm... at the old hut, buried
under twenty-feet of snow, in a sardine-tin. I'll have to dig into the American
money, then another thousand...ship capital. Liquid assets, that’s what we need.
Hunt’s father owned a brewery, believe it or not. The frogs are millionaires by
default. Lucky with the land. I could try for vineyards in Australia. Wilson is
a geologist he can sniff out the best grounds around Adelaide. Its very dry
there, ideal. What do you think Mac? I don't want to involve the in-laws or my
brethren. I don't want the dear ones of this world feeling sorry for me and I
don't want you to tell anyone, particularly the crew. This is the genuine
gold...”
He nodded at a framed photograph of a jolly ship beside a wharf thick with
people waving their hats. Pennants flapped from the rigging like welcome
garlands and tiny bandsman hugged tight their brass instruments amidst the
crush.
"Public adulation is the utmost society can grant the seeker. You know it and so
do the rest of the black dots on that deck. But what does it mean, Mac and how
long will it enthrall? Life’s prize...a handsome death. Now look at me laid low
with disease."
His coughing sent a tremor through the room. He was propped against some
panelling in a very casual manner as though it was a tree-trunk, his knee drawn
up and the cigar hand dangling over.
"Off to the club, I suppose. Hope I'm well enough for the show tomorrow"
It was the final of his film and slide presentation. It was the cut off. The
maiming of his last adventure. There was but the next to consider. Mac helped
him to his feet. It was a rare sight indeed, his chief, a-staggering and bent.
Like a recurrence of sciatica.
"What if I fetch a doctor? Mac volunteered, gingerly, foreseeing protest. "Jim
will come, I'm sure. It may be his lunch-break."
Hector grimaced. "You would have him condemn me to those most inhumane
treatments of bed-rest and abstinence?" His protest was a mild one.
Mac shepherded him towards the antechamber which housed the camp-bed, saying
persuasively;
" Then don't you feel it would be wiser to rest here, until the coughing clears.
They might not let you in to the club." Then again, a course of hand-shakes and
backslaps could revitalize.
"What", he exclaimed, jovial. "You should see the state of the clientele. Dosed
to their eyeballs in claret and liqueurs, rough night for the ol tub. Waves this
big and they shoot over the side like mutton." He staggered in the teeth of
horrendous, killing seas. "And that,” he cough-laughed, " is merely from the
aperitif"
The befuddled silliness might be genuine gold or it might be play-acting.
Mac scrutinized Hectors eyes. Clear. His eyes never altered. They were either
tinkling with excitement or suffused with impending tears of proof emotion.
"I suggest you sleep," said Mac. But Hectors attention meandered.
"Where’s Robbie {Browning} as distinct from Rabbie Burns?" Mac helped him search
for the mandatory 'collected works', splayed somewhere beneath an army blanket.
"My last ride."
His poem of the moment was called "The last ride."
He declaimed from acute memory the twelve stanzas more or less seamlessly, the
jig of the meter propelling, waltzing, wheeling him into a sobriety of tears. It
was about..."all that my life means".
"The missus has forbidden my recitations. She rails I never learn anything
modern... But Mac, I can tell one of my old chums, white-hot, grandiloquent
verse made up the charm that won her to me, hand-kissing and, rose-petal,
breast-heaving sentimentality, the classics and the morbid Tennysonian. If only
I had such talent myself...strictly cheat's stuff, this bleeding dry other men’s
work."
His reconstituting a prepared hash seemed at variance with the Hunt method of
shaping recipes from the basic, uncontaminated elements embedded in one human
heart. But then how grossly Hunt over-cooked the Amaranthus letter then sloppily
doled it out, to some woman who throve upon rhapsody and thus revealed, had to
be his wife. Never sufficient sugar for the wives. "Flings' shy away from a too
overt sprinkling. Hunt had always come across as such an earnest fellow,
betrothed to his majesties fleet. A dose of spousely billing and cooing, a
whimsical peck on the cheek of his wife then a grand smacker for the navy's bum.
And never a fling.
Mac saw there was little chance of desk-work although a sheaf of charts had
arrived in the mail and their new ink smelt like the elixir of life. If Sir
Hector would just vacate the premises. But he was leaning on the table- top
staring wetly into a third- dimension of profoundly livid emptiness, coughing
into a terrible handkerchief.
"Before the last ride wouldn't it be sweet to behold a pair of up'turned eyes
and feel the sobs upon ones breast and hear her pleading?"
* * *
Lady Moncrieff realigned a rebellious pince-nez before continuing with her
abridged reading aloud of 'Swaziland, children find a home.' Her teenage
daughter surreptitiously glanced at personal objects scattered throughout the
room, trivial souvenirs stamped with the insignia of foreign countries, South
American textiles, a scrimshaw and a pair of yellowing gloves that had shaken
the hand of the tsarina. A board game called ‘Dash to the Pole’ with a likeness
of Carpenter on its carton, and candlesticks and a globe upended on it axis to
display the two poles swarming with their appropriate fauna, almost to scale,
like fly dirt. It was, thought Evelyn Moncrieff, as if the other lands of the
world had slipped off and been scrunched up and tossed into the bonfire by the
hand of God. The school-mistressly readings of her mothers made the other lands
seem so impossibly disenchanting that Evelyn thought it, indeed, a wise
selection he had made. Because still the British Isles were there, stuck as if
by some divine glue. She squinted across to where the globe balanced on a
cabinet. Maybe Africa had escaped the bonfire too. Maybe the artist had coloured
it like dry grass, the same tint as the globe itself. Maybe God had camouflaged
Africa.
Discreetly absorbing the hefty import of an African mission, its pitfalls, its
raptures, Lady Carpenter sat, at peace, fondling her 'Aurora' brooch with its
gem shower of stars. As well as feeling that the Missionary Society’s practices
benefited her directly, she faintly hoped that by funding the next voyage of
discovery undertaken by her husband et al, they might also provide the added
relief of ridding him from her. Reluctantly, she banished the likelihood of his
ever getting suitable employment. He tired of routines so quickly and most work
required them. Too old for the merchant service and too blabber-mouthed for
diplomacy. A pity the war had ended. Lady Moncrieff ended and passed to Emily
the text of her tract.
"Besides Swaziland, she said, the society is considering re-opening their
mission on certain islands of the Fijian archipelago. Now that the shipping
lanes are safe again, the impediments are few."
"I’m sure my husband will have a view on this. Perhaps he could come and address
the regional body. Does it meet often?
"The South Sea Islanders, we call them," she giggled heartily, "meet.... meet
once a fortnight at headquarters" Evelyn lifted her eyes to the udder-like jowls
of her mother whose chittering laughter had been known to soothe squalling
African orphans. Her ordinary face was like a wooden mask but the laugh recast
it in chocolate. "Oh my dear but none of us is brown like the genuine
Polynesians." Milk-white chocolate.
At least there is plenty to read, thought Evelyn, bored by the conversation.
After Hectors 'newsprint' decree Emily and a maid had scratched every surface
searching for papers and journals and leaflets and programmes and magazines to
strew about for him to flick through. Many out of date by miles. But it didn't
bother him. Amazingly, Evelyn had levered free ‘a view book' from the '1911
Festival of Empire.' Nine years ago!
"A very great occasion," nodded lady Moncrieff, as Evelyn opened out the
panoramas and plastered them before both ladies’ eyes. Gwennie would do just as
much, but at age twenty? By then she would be much more sophisticated. Suddenly,
Emily could make out his tread in the hall. She shot from her chair to the
double doors and marginally opened one to peep out. A racked Hector discoursing
with Nanny beneath the fanlight.
"Now, now, Sir," Nanny was saying gently, Mind you don't cough upon young
Percy". The boy was dabbing at something swinging from daddy’s forefinger. A
penguin’s foot on a chain.
Emily excused herself from her guests, then prodded Nanny towards the swiftly
vacated room entrusting her with the job of introducing Perks to the company and
of generally entertaining them.
"Are you hungry?" she asked Hector, somewhat officiously.
He shrugged
"Wait on...” Emmy wished he'd hang there as she went half-way down the kitchen
stairs to resonate instructions to a below-stairs ‘staff’ of one. For the sake
of stringent economy, Cook settled below like dregs with a maid of all work
floating free, and Nanny. Lean times. What of the lady’s maid and a chauffeur
and a butler? Hector had once promised Emmy a bevy of liveried doers.
But Hector grumbled "God, woman...."and flounced off into the drawing-room after
nanny, half expecting to find the prime-minister enthroned in a cosy chair.
"Good afternoon, ladies", he smarmed, cleansing his throat abruptly, cruising
towards the startled snippets of femine vagary with an outstretched, sinuous
hand and an all too courtly demeanour. Percy trotted forward and received a
right royal pat upon his little head of blue-black curls. Hector, at first, eyed
the younger Moncrieff, a fright in wheaty, worn-out woollens, but took her
sticky hand with its bitten nails and kissed it ever so lightly,
"Miss...?" Evelyn flashed beseechingly at her mother.
"I am Phyllis Moncrieff, this is Evelyn, my daughter, and I take it you are the
man of the house."
Ah, thought Hector impressed, she seems like a good sort.
"I am one of them. One is at school and the other, you can see before you,
reeking havoc,” he said and gestured towards the girlishly clad boy.
Evelyn and Nanny were both trying to wrench the 'View Book' from Percy’s clawing
grip without detonating his infantile frustrations."Please, little pet...”
Evelyn was insisting. "I like to look at it. You would enjoy the pictures too.
I'll sit over here and show them to you." Percy held out his arms compliantly
for the young miss who, with a delighted whimper, hoisted him beside her onto a
couch and began by pointing out the queen, photographed during a descent of the
Crystal Palace stair way, she slender, and the steps exuding grandeur.
"What is that?" Hector asked. Emily had returned with a tea-tray and the maid.
"Its a souvenir from the very great Pageant of London, 19ll," obliged Lady
Moncrieff, bustling over to assist her hostess.
"I'm awfully sorry, Phyllis," she was saying whilst dealing the crockery.
"Not at all. During the war we shut off half of our country place because all
the girls were off doing ambulance work and such-like. Even Arthur learned to
boil potatoes. I can see a time in the near future when service will be a thing
of the past. The girls are leaving school, well-educated, with minds of their
own and who would have sanely predicted this shortage of manpower across all our
industries. No I'm afraid people like us will just have to start getting our
hands dirty like every other civilized human-being. Of course when one is away
on a station in Africa or the pacific, its general mucking in, washing in the
streams and cleaning the babies' sores, pounding the bananas for their porridge.
Its no burden at all."
Laughter accompanied the lubricious strains of tea pouring into bone china.
Percy had mistaken the stiff circles on the heads of match-size men, in one of
the photographic vistas, for sucking peppermints. Evelyn was contentedly
cuddling him on her knee.
"Hats,' she corrected, "boaters".
"Boats, that’s right, and this is a train Perky my boy. See that, it says
'red-route'." Hector had brought across a squat footstool to sit upon. Percy was
three and had rarely seen his father up so close before. He stared at him,
wanted to touch him, shyly. A while since they had all been together but then
Miss Moncrieff made a dowdy substitute for Gwennie, beautiful and budding.
Hector sauntered to the table for his tea.
"Em, do you recall the red-route train from 1911?'
"I'm afraid not, " she replied, then, "Oh yes, the diamond-mine train and the
vineyard, Australia and the dried cod, Newfoundland." All of a sudden her
memories dazzled.
"Always difficult to remember that far back, " was Alice's bold contribution.
"I'm a forward-looking person myself."
"So is Hector," Emily smiled as if surrendering to some intangible. She was on
tenterhooks, awaiting his coughs, yet somehow they had been swallowed with the
cakes and tea.
"Of course the war blots out most prior things” Oh of course, of course.
After the missionaries had gone he took off his shoes, collapsed on a
chaise-lounge, read about Swaziland. He hated sherry, it was all that was about.
"Oh do sit up, won't you," chid Emily, straightening up the room. Percy had been
taken for a pram-ride by Nanny in order to cool off following his hectic gambol
with a quite boisterous Evelyn Moncrieff, once she had thawed a bit.
'Why", he said coldly, "I'm not an item of furniture you can re-arrange."
Obviously there was some issue pendant in the atmosphere needing to be snatched
and opened and tussled with. "Do you wish me to launch a spasm of coughs? I can,
if it will make you feel victorious otherwise the Baxter Company can employ me
to promote their magic cough medicine. One swig and he just went right on with
the commentary."
He drummed the few words in tacky Yankee fashion like a travelling medicine-man.
"And," he went on, ceaselessly, "yes the darned witch of the east-coast, she
with the flaxen tresses and devils lashes pinned me to the deck forced open my
mouth and dripped in the sweet as honey remedy and behold, the magic worked for
me and my splutter was cured as surely as the ocean is a dreadful place. You
hear?"
"You're lucky to be alive Hector. Can't you simply bless every day that God has
allowed you to be so?" Emily hovered above him in the power position, hands on
hips, up to his challenge. Something had twanged. Their respectful charade, the
saying and the never said, the riddles and poetry and correct, mannered tableaux
of a simmering marriage, the frozen resentments splashed into the hoosh pot and
seethed... the dollops of pure fat caught. Hector sat forward.
"And that’s what you do, is it, my dearest chuck, thank the holy Trinity for the
wreck of a husband manacled to your side in the heat of summer, in the shadow of
his returned and glorious ship, bang in the teeth of a rejected lover who walked
weeping away? I know you thank me for our little boy, everyday you thank me for
coming back from the dead and falling into your arms and defying the odds".
Forty-four years old, past the age of child-bearing, they automatically assumed.
Like Christ he had risen from the ice and she had wanted to be Mary. She had
wanted to slake his lust. Everyone knows about Mrs Darwin, the forty-eight year
old breeder. Emily flinched at the recollection of the night and searched for
bombs. She threw up his penchant for the high-life, for bungling business then:
"What about your actress? She's even less to be grateful for. Were you her
second or third choice?" What better than to next hit out at his bit of fluff,
she thought? "Mac pointed her out to me on the pavement outside our grocers. She
even came up and cooed at Percy, startled him. I didn't let on that I knew. I
warrant your not much use to her in your present state, a woman like that, an
extremely younger woman."
"There’s no virtue in celibacy. What ever happened to Raymond that beau ideal of
yours? Is he a monk?"
Emily was not normally one to dwell on the lascivious but naturally, the
impinging sensate closeness, outside the grocers, of her replacement, the blush
of her complexion, so peachy, so brazen had projected certain undesirable but
insistent images into her daily ruminations. A picture of her and him, him and
her, the legs, the arms, the embraces. Their private language. What did they
say? The shame of her prurient thoughts. Until now they had mostly skirted the
impact of his love-affairs, like skirting tramps asleep in the street. The
impetus of organization and the thrall of new schemes had usually slapped him
into consciousness. Lately he had become an indolent sea-bather idly scudding in
the tepid shallows. Emilys purple thoughts chastened her accusations. Instead
she said:
"Where have you been? People call for you and I have to fabricate excuses?”
Hector was still sitting on his hands, breathing heavily, gazing at Emily’s
hemline. His deep brown, even hair was mussed from the hip of the chaise-lounge,
awoken. He said:
"Leave me." Two words, two fangs.
"No, although,” she slowed, slowed, as if approaching a steep gradient, "maybe
I’m tired of resourcing you. My allowance was always going to be an adjunct to
your earnings from books or whatever. But its all there has ever been. I'm
forced to be breadwinner, the woman in the family! Neither of us would like this
to be generally known.... would we.”?
His couch was tree-stump height, his sphere of interest her ankle, his fingers
operating pincers. His huddle that of an artisan intently at work, his breath a
tap of the hammer. She was the venomous spectre of failure standing over.
"Your brother shows the same tendency, the habit of living off females, preying
on them. The result of an over developed number of sisters. I can imagine the
two of you lording it over your numerous, devoted sisters."
Very well, row then, woman, he thought, and probed her booted ankle with his
nervous fingers.
"Oh," she squeaked, disgusted, " keep away from me with your insidious little
niggles."
"Ah, Emmy you are so biting." He smothered his face with her petticoat. "You
miss the shouting me?"
"I don't want to see you grovelling there, for pity sake, get up and control
yourself." Emmy stepped back, hesitated, deciding whether to physically assist
him to his feet. He wasn't such a large man; it was his manner that triggered
the illusion. His chest was large yet his limbs were like twigs in comparison.
His sore voice vaporous.
"If only you weren't such a seriously moral, small-seeing woman. Makes me scared
to shit."
"Gracious!" she exclaimed, appalled.
"I wonder if you at all appreciate the state of things. When I go away, you will
never see me again. All the glamour stuff and the world-tours and the hobnobbing
with eminent folks gone for good. But you have your own life to cherish, those
charities, the girl-guides. Being patroness suits you and our children can
aspire and grow up and do good and remember their father as one who perished and
in time my memory will blur with Captain Hunts and they will find it difficult
to fathom who perished at the Pole and who just perished of drink or scuttled
his head on the yard arm, But until these happenings do transpire why can't we
not be friends? You need not be anxious for your friend or want to boss him and
make him pick up his shoes and books and matches and frown at the people he can
never bring home. Living two lives has worked me over, I'm afraid. When one has
seen all things clearly, the not being able to behold them that way forever, is
intolerable."
So it’s devolved to messianic gibbering, as she termed his pathos.
Then he stood up of his own accord, desisted from the intricate hand movements
and looked her in the eyes, not with the'mother me' plead but with reclaimed
intelligence. He coughed and said:
"Now we have had it out there is something you must know."
There existed in the neglected library of their house, a carbon-copy of the
Hunt-Carpenter agreement, meticulously typed by the Carpenter himself, champion
of type-writing machines and telephones and acetate recordings. Whilst he was
rifling through years of documents, Emily noticed a playbill from the 'Collisseum'
{London playhouse owned by Albert Colliss}, a promotion of the new Irish
verse-play "The Secret Flower".
Emily asked Hector if it was worth going to see.
" If Brieux appeals to you, so it may." His irony was lost upon her, however.
One of Brieux-s dramas revolved around the cancerous effects venereal disease
reeks upon the innocents in a profligate society. She scanned the cast of
characters and was about too...scream... when he lay out the wrinkled, faintly
legible screed with the two prominent signatures and a counter sign and a
pencilled addendum in a top corner; 'the promise that Providence compelled me to
compromise'.
He shut the door which divided the library from the dining room, shut out that
rooms heat from the inhospitable, unlived in library cum storage area, or as far
away from Ethel {the maid) that one could flee to. He could tell Emily was
restive, eager to belt on her chatelaine’s keys and rush off to primp the
cushions. What relevance could his' promise' exercise over a today dammed by
fifteen years of effluvial yesterdays?
He could put it plainly. He could say that he had lobbed upon some evidence in
support of the 'Hunt was a sore loser' hypotheses, envious and suspicious and
vacillating and weak , that in Carpenter he recognized a stronger man, a
challenger, a free spirit who needed to be brought to his knees before a
legislative council of Polar luminaries. At the time most people had thought
Hunt’s gripe legitimate. He had staked out a claim to certain ice-fields
therefore earnt the right to work them. Carpenter had just been the third
officer on the 'Deliverer', third in line and whatsmore, debilitated...
"But it so happens, Emmy my darling, this indignation and crying foul was merely
a pretext to trap me and squash me down well and truly into the amateur class.
You remember the wording., ‘ if at all possible.' Well the erudite and learned
Royal Geographical Society and their vassal knew it would bloody well be
impossible.... and I would end up a supreme cad and any discoveries made written
off as lies."
Emmy bided patiently, not discerning the point. She almost would have been
happier arguing a little more about infidelities. She wondered how the 'De Lune'
witch would appear at the Collisseum, how she would make up for the ‘Secret
Flower.’ Cold, bleak room. Hector left it, reappearing shortly afterwards
lugging a gramophone and two records. To connect audience to performer one had
to inject commonality, tune the two wavelengths to identical pitch.
"Nimrod,” he said holding up a record. "The music for the film, as you know,
weathered many transformations and we tried it without music. At which time I
had to use my voice as a type of musical essence. Then we tried an opera singer,
mournful and dirgelike. But Nimrod proved the most successful ship theme,
ploughing through the waves, erect on the ice like a monument to human endeavour.
Ah, such waste."
"I am not a stranger peering up at you from a draughty auditorium," she abjured,
" what do I need convincing of, why do you want to enthral me? That Captain Hunt
business. It was not important. I never considered your behaviour to be the
least dishonourable. It was a stupid ploy and he's paid for it now, so leave it
alone. Anyway where is this letter? Whom was it addressed to?"
The threat of Nimrod seemed to have mobilized her attention. Hector snared her
gaze and uttered slowly;
"Many have reviled me, they have withheld their support. If it can be
demonstrated that my actions developed as a consequence of deliberate
provocations and machinations, and as hinted in the letter, ill-will harboured
against me, personally by Hunt, the many might look for ways to assuage their
consciences and repair relations with me. Do you realize how it spoilt
friendships, divided loyalties? - ' Ah ha so now we see, he's not prepared to
play the game according to the rules, he is a cheat and certainly no gentleman.'
"
"You've said you don't care about others opinions."
"Only if they’re bad ones handicap my prospects of...” Escape? Enrichment? "Of
living a contented life."
* * *
He promised Emmy that they could breakfast together next morning. Three days had
passed with not a sign of him. Yet like a stray he had came back when hungry.
But he wasn't to sleep in her room, even as a way to economize with the coal,
rather their eldest sons room, as snug as the broom cupboard. Ethel could
massage some feeling into its comatose habiliments. Hector could lie there and
dream of wangling investment capital from the island woman, Phyllis Moncrieff.
Bloodthirsty lot, the esquimaux. The missionary society and Hector would set up
a trading co-operative. Reindeer furs and seal skins to be replaced by stalwart
English Burberry and Jaeger fabric. Hunts letter would rinse the slur from his
name then abetted by the missionaries and their dollars he could survey all the
arctic islands and live in an igloo. What was Emmy doing in her room while he
lay stony cold on the almost nuns pallet? Was she thinking about her husband,
wishing him dead? Or was she crooning to Percy unable to sleep from the
excitement of seeing his ol man? Or maybe she answered letters at the ormolu
escretoire that a Bavarian prince had thrust upon them. Or maybe she was yawning
and curling up in bed trying to warm her feet.
‘ Dear little Gwen,
You will be pleased to hear that Dads film and his little talks to very vast
assemblages, have come to an end. He is free to plan his next adventure. One
day, I’m sure, girls will be able to sail ships all the way around cape horn...
but then it may be the aeroplane they wish to fly all the way across the great
continents...’
Hector had done away with smoking for a few days which left him jittery.
‘To celebrate the finale of our film extravaganza, an enormous and starchy
banquet was held in honour of the man who made the film and very many of the
brave souls who featured in it and me of course but because I was feeling a
trifle nervous and tired something happened that must amuse anyone who is told
of it. For some reason the top of a bottle exploded, flew to the high ceiling
and came down directly into a glass which only needed to be moved an inch. As
this occurred so rapidly, my hand just couldn't steady itself, the glass pitched
on to someone, a lady who in turn fell off her rickety chair and short-circuited
a lamp which happens when water comes into contact with electricity, because she
was drinking at the time. Now do you for a minute think the lamp which was tall
and fancy, a statue of a lady holding aloft a torch, then itself fell over? It
did. It tipped over backwards and smashed a frosted window to pieces, one of
which glass splinters landed near me. Embossed on this tiny bit of glass was a
star so you can believe I take this as a good omen. In olden times, sailors used
stars to set their courses and the constellations each have meanings...’
Oh, well, it was likely he wouldn't remember this blotchy mental cablegram in
the morning. For a homily, to caption his description of the event - "be
Prepared for any mishap, because one can never be certain that the berg whirling
into view is not the berg carved with your epitaph.'
Hector looked at the night sky through his dormer window and perceived some
stars. If he connected his fingers in geometric patterns before his eyes he
could stitch them into rudimentary designs. Then squinting between thumb and
forefinger, the stars could be plucked and held like chance diamonds in a young
Brazilian stream. The biggest blinding star preserved itself for twilights.
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