The Promise Ese (24) "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."
Go to part: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51
Copyright © 2002 June M Harcourt |