The Promise Ese (23)
''What price are you asking?" Then Murchison came nearer and blurted: "Five thousand". Hector said nothing. His arms were folded high on his chest like a barrier. Murchison growled again: "Five thousand! Didn't you hear me?" Hector, twisting his neck to face Archie alone, asked: "How did you come by this?" Archie thought it measly to have to confess he found it screwed up in a pouch with some second-hand binoculars so decided to try the traditional, "From a reliable source," but then he couldn't add, "whom I have had dealings with on other occasions,� because he had not actually tried to blackmail anyone before. Whereas Murchison had. Murchison said: "Well if you don't want it we will sell it to the newspapers. Might that not interfere with your plans, me old captain?'' Hector wondered if it would. The enormity of Hunts tragedy had hypnotized the public. Public sympathy had deluged the families of the deceased, alternately pumping Hectors own foolhardiness and self-glorification into a frothing unplumbed sewer of bad taste. Could one page of a private letter purify the disgorging mess? Amaranthus? "It might or it might not," Hector said, stiffly." I will need time to think about this. You will hear from me. Archie, its rather a personal piece, you agree?'' Before he could, Murchison sniffed, "Press love that sort of stuff. Don't wait too long, Captain� Murchison was like a stuffed gorilla. 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.
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