The Promise Ese (30)
Indubitably, the seraphs puffing out their wind-gush like a floss of baby’s hair, exhilarated, delighted any who saw. Rotund balls of cheek, fluffy hair and fluffy wind, bodiless heads fluffing the skies like roseate clouds, yet: “Can you see the maleficent glint in this ones eyes. Yes it’s a wind-boy, brewing a storm but in the way of the chubby-faced idiot who innocently strangles the one he most wants to be loved by.” “Oh, I rather think he quite intends to swamp every galleon on the seven oceans. He’s out there now, he’s spitting rain at us, oh.it’s flooding out of his rosebud mouth,” said Sorely-sharpe, in response to Katherines broodings. He had laid out the wind-map over the detritus of his desk. Not very large but precise. They ranged over it with a magnifying-lens, minute degrees and velocity estimates and directions. Then in affirmation, the wind-boy over their heads increased his spit, it threshed against the panes and seeped in at the gaps. Sorely-Sharpe began removing knick-knacks from the sill and packed some scrap papers in to soak up the rainwater. Hector, who had seen every variety of map in various studies, institutions, boardrooms, had to admit that the maker of this one had invested every swirl with personality. The sun puckered lopsidedly with its nine, thick wavy rays and the world itself lay like two halves of an orange with poles at either end like pith. The lone sea serpent flopped against mariners, horror-struck and goony. He thought it deserved a nobler fate than to be scrunched in between books on the shelves of dubious literature that boxed them in. Much were remainders of Sharpe’s own work. “Do you notice these specks here,’ he said pointing, “well they no longer exist. Some so-called islands simply disappear, but then new ones are always being discovered.” “Could they be icebergs”? “Not these particular ones. Too far north.” He ran his finger gingerly along some coast-line as the rampaging rain muted further talk. Virtually alone in the room with him, almost bumping heads over the map, Katherine studied the practice of coincidence. A strange typescript of half a letter had come to her anonymously in the post; a few weeks before, Carpenter had returned eye contact at a theatre, and now a social obligation. What month was it, what year, what would her horoscope reveal?” “Has Colonel Pink been in to view the map?” Sorely-Sharpe smiled. “You’re the only ones who haven’t… now if you will excuse me, I have a book in my bedroom about this cartographer…I will bring it down. He had a hearty private life… full of peccadilloes.” William had almost given up. He couldn’t get them to even look through each other. It was as though the cramped conditions blasted them apart instead of driving them into pleasantries. She’d never give him any money without the expeditions having been summarised and promoted and Sir Hector naturally bloomed in such tasks. But he continually put his hand over his left cheek and seemed constrained, when as William slipped out, a screeching blend of gramophone and showers struck at the little study door and forced them in behind it. A mutual disdain for the tortured female larynx as demonstrated by Amberley’s mawkish war elegy squealed onto disc by the celebrated soprano, ‘Dame Cuckoo’. Katherine scoffed at Hectors disingenuous nicknaming. She reproved: “An ignorance of all things musical. Never flaunt it, Sir Hector, least in this house. He is a God, the greatest living composer…” “What, you don’t believe me when I say that any Cuckoo couldn’t sing half as bad. Even a cuckoo with mange.” “Birds don’t get mange, they have lice.” “Apologies, my Lady.” He straightened up as she had, noticed their heights being equal aligned their sight to the one plane. “Might do a spot or reading, now what do we have…mm” he reached in and extracted a rotten tooth from the shelf, “the Voyage of the Deliverer’, not a favourite of mine.” This was his pay back for her frivolous insult in the half-light. Hunts book, his masterpiece. “So you remain as much as a child as ever.” “Yes, but it seems I have met my match, as the saying goes.” The cacophony had descended into a morbid march penned for the funeral of their late King. Cruickshank, the dachshund, nosed his way around the doorpost, between Katherine’s ankles and curled up on a rumpled, moulting hearth-rug. “Smells” they commented in unison. “What don’t you like dogs?” “You may call this a dog, I call it a vole.” “I shan’t disagree,” she said. Hector subsided into a chapped leather desk-chair with the book and opened it sideways to view a photograph. “Aren’t you going to succumb to the little mut’s charms like the rest of the household? Why, I even noticed Colonel Pink twiddling with its ears. He’s not the marrying kind, is he?” Katherine clamped her arms behind her back and swayed towards him. “Isn’t this digression a little too informal under the circumstances? We are strangers to one another, except through heresay, and I don’t like you.” “That makes it all the more easy to be frank. Loathing grants us an exemption from normal social obligations. I’m not likely to risk losing the respect of someone unless it’s someone who has never afforded me any. But then again, whose tongue?” “Well I’ll admit your eyesight is good.” “Only as good as your own,” he said, foisting Hunts tome upon her attention then slamming it shut like a lid on their pasts. She’d implicitly been aware of the photograph he’d chosen to inspect. Had to be the symbolic sledging shot, a sledge graced by three apprehensive over-wrapped young men, their passion for the Pole igniting; a sledge adorned with cute pennants, a sledge - the overloaded scourge of their dog-team. The one exemplifying article of ice-obsession. And a specious photograph. Hunt glowed out of it. “Do you recall what you were thinking on that occasion?” Katherine asked, unambiguously. Hector glowered out of it. He could have answered facetiously about ‘feeling bloody freezing’ yet decided to return in kind. “I was wondering what we would look like after two months on the Barrier – would there be a similar photograph…would there be three men, or two or an empty plain. You mustn’t blame me for being alive, Lady Hunt.” He inwardly cursed himself for exposing a vulnerability usually snaffled by bravado. Neither Murchison nor Morris spoke such daggers with their eyes. Hers were undiluted, dilated brown cannonballs prone in the dense atmosphere of ink- light and loud rain. “You have kept your men alive, I concede,” she said. “Time might even thank you for it.” She then faced a shelf as if examining spines, her voice strained to compete with the rain, her hair as impenetrable a mass as her withdrawn eyes. Hector put the book against his face. It was cool. ‘Nimrod’ gradually emerged, swelling from the din on the rich notes of the drawing-room piano. A sign for Cruickshank to shake himself and scamper back to the dog-lovers. “It’s the composer performing his own piece, a rare privilege. We had best go and prostrate ourselves.” Her proudness had liquefied like the weather, fleetingly, but now solidified again. Her obdurate balls of eyes turned on him, drilling his awful wound, as he followed she followed a wiggling canine backside into the passage-way and to the door of music, where the two paused, like newlyweds on a parapet, to listen and observe the tweed-suited rapture of a vision realized. Uncannily, his music’s might soothed the rain. They all congratulated Amberly who next wanted to play something more recent, something embryonic. However the teapot took priority and Pink was taken aside by Hunts wife for a tete-e- tete at which she resumed the process of enticement, slithering her teacup around its saucer, pursing her lips, baling him up. They talked of the R. A. F. huts. They talked of leadership, of printing presses, of Thomas Hardy. She animated the window sconce whilst Sorely-Sharpe, a bundle of high-pitched verbal slap-stick doubled them up around the fire. Hector was saying: “I know of one flower, the Amaranthus, striking in its blood-red hue and extraordinary height with tips like feather-dusters or fire-brands. Bunch them against old bricks with marigolds…and nasturtiums.” He racked his brain for flower-names. Mrs Wendell owned some knowledge of the cut-flower trade and to her he was stressing the windfalls to be bagged from an inventive pairing of the home-decorating trend towards browns and golds, with the style of flower produced. “Dried-flowers, I may suggest, displayed with leaves and berries and all sorts or russet vegetation to match the wall papers. Have that effect of herbs strung from old beams that the arts-and-crafty identify with in their house design. I suppose you prefer ‘Omega’ workshop?” “What was that flower you just mentioned a moment ago, Sir Hector?” called Katherine, deliberately expanding her radius of influence and muzzling the chit-chat. “The Amaranthus.” He rolled the word-orb towards her, having made footballs gilt by his Irish inflection. ‘Mmm, I don’t know it. Are their many hybrid forms?’ “ There is but one that has ever captured my notice, the giant Amaranth, the red stem, red leaves, cat-kin type heads that tease the quavering clumps of cottage flowers as the lion’s mane plushly shames a young-mans wisp of beard. They grow them…in New Zealand, a native plant. The Maori adorn themselves with the plumes just as the natives of New Guinea crown their headdresses with Bird-of paradise feathers. So you see, as a cut flower, they would last and last.” “How tall did you say”? Katherine put her nose to her tea to hide a smile. His answer would seal it for her. “About this tall”, he said as his hand rose higher and higher to the top of his own head. Sorely-Sharpe said: “well if the thing can grow to that height what say we change “Kew Gardens’ to the “Forest of Kew”. Mirth and night-coming and the Plymouth train. It was crisp in the hovering dusk as their feet slurped across gravel. Hector had intended to hustle a refreshing walk to the station, convinced that clouds would part for him but time had ticked away and in the end the Sorley-Sharpes had offered him the service of their ‘man and motor’. Beforehand, Potts showed off his glistening machine nestled in a thatched out-building. It whinnied when he stroked its pod-shaped tank or so Katherine dreamed, her head still aching with the stuffiness and dander of the house. After having to spend that night sneezing in the guest bedroom she might very well fear for her wits. Towering trees rustled all around them as furred creatures, intoxicated by the perfume of washed earth and foliage, sprung out of hollows to parry with drips. Several breeds of owl haunted the stately garden. Red squirrels dwelt there. Katherine was what carpet-bound types called ‘outdoorsy’ and after a day of inane confinement she felt like dancing. She was also regrettably consistent for doing whatever she felt like doing. “Is it set out for passengers, Colonel Pink? I really should fancy a spin in the moonlight, in the rain, maybe even snow?” Pink had dreaded the suggestion. Whenever they met, she tossed it up and he brushed it off. Now it winked like a staple joke between them. He grinned at her directly, he could in the blue-light, their faces flatly shadowed, ironed out the awkwardness in their relationship. These older women that fell for him either as ‘boy’ or desert icon or intelligent friend spiced up his life as well as making him nervous and uncertain of his own responses. Lady Hunt, an accomplished artist, treated him neither as one nor the other but almost simply as a man with a will. She reminded him of one of those fearless women travellers he’d encountered on the caravan routes, a guide in tow, a curiosity, a suntan and a joy. “The road surfaces are very irregular and the potholes, by now I should think are soup-pots. Our hosts would never forgive me if you broke any bones.” His tone, as flat and starched as his crepuscule face, disappointed. She accepted the implication and rankled. Fragile bones! No she could be any age in the twilight. G.E. wandered over to crank the car and left Hector and she deep-breathing the aromatic vegetation at one corner of the lawn. The soaking foliage was singing like crickets. Their breath steamed. Katherine shuffled jumpily. “Its as if the drips high-dive, they spring from one leaf to the next and that puddle there, is their performance ring,” she mooned. “You can perform, can’t you?” Hector delved, empathically, “Like the Russians?” “Not at all,” she laughed, noticing him suddenly, “if you mean Ballet. Haven’t you ever been? By the way, that letter, it came from you, that I now am sure of – a gesture characteristic, I thought, of…” “Peter pan?”
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