The Promise Ese (32)
“Don’t,” he said, pausing mid-stair, “no more fussing with my clothes. That’s how it always starts – clothes then manners then friends.” But she was so infatuated; her submissive burble- of- simmering- chocolate smile melted his indignation. Incredible. Age and youth are twins. So he kissed her on the stair, lover-like, until her milky deliciousness boiled over. Oh, how she loved him. She wished he wouldn’t leave them for the sea. * * * “It’s New Year,” he said to Mac, “Year dot, eight months to go!” The office was neat, the furniture polished, some bills paid, a second man sat at a second table counting circulars. Hector felt so busy he’d decided to concoct a general newsletter to be copied and distributed amongst everyone, once a month, to keep them up to date with expedition happenings. ‘The Clause’, he dubbed it, this little foray into amateur publishing. Mac flicked him a postcard. A corny cow labouring under an ensemble of corny cowbells embarrassed the picture side, while the message side read: ‘My Dear Hector, Happy New Year! I can ski like Bergstrom. I am red and fat like a piggie, forsooth, and the Austrians call me ‘Lady Hickox’ which just goes to show where there’s no smoke-signals there aint no fire. Love to the missus and bairns [A tad for you}, Lady Clara Hickox De Lune’ “Happier or sadder?” he begged of Mac, say happier? “Happy,” Mac obliged, catching Hector’s eyes like the wiggle of a skirt in the street, then dropping them. Out of a perverse longing, Hector plonked the card on a shelf, drew the attention of their new man to it, then drolly said: “What do you think Morris, sick-looking beast, eh?” * * * Katherine Hunt spread out some newspaper over one half of her glass-sheet worktable, to muffle the clunk of her tools. A snippet of bold type caught her eye. ‘Famous Explorer Makes public for first Time Details of his Forthcoming expedition to Queen Astrid Land….The Irish Polar Explorer Sir Hector Carpenter says ‘I have a ship, by far the most suitable ever constructed for polar work.yet to be named….there is to be a competition…prize…’ Katherine shook her head, said to herself: ‘I can’t believe it…an overnight stay on a sub-antarctic island! With him? What a view to climb for, what a peak of Darien! * * * “Why shouldn’t Charles come?” “Look Hector,” she said, defiantly, “if our boy wants to distinguish himself in some other field, in medicine, is that so blameworthy? Your father raised ten children, he was moderately well-off…” oops. Their Bournemouth domicile rocked in the parachuting winds like a skiff. The parlour fire flared every so often, like a gas-jet in need of a gimlet. Emily anticipated a dressing-down but he merely garaged his hands in pockets, requested she continue, encouraging with an irresistible series of winks the flighty sometimes facile speech she employed since regaining love. “Its up to him what he wants to do with his life.” “Too true. But months are months and years make a lifetime.” “He fails to see the point…” Well, Hector thought, our son’s an oaf. Hector’s reformed self burst a rivet under the pressure of such thought. His old, ordinary, ornery self reiterated ‘oaf, oaf, oaf’. The only doctors he knew fond of their trade had been scotched from the expedition files. The grandeur of the ice-walls drove them batty. While others who ridiculed their practice, chore and bore, could practically trim a square-rigger blindfolded. “He’d be company for the Scouts. They could have fun – we are not trying to break records this time on my ‘ship of fools’, my dear. Anyhow, its such a clunker – might turn him off the sea-faring life.” Emily looked hard at him. “He will not go with you, Hector, under any circumstances. This much he has told me, in confidence. You know he and Richard Hunt’s son are both going to Harrow, and they have made a sort of anti-explorers pact. It’s very amusing. Yet I would have liked him to autograph my cloth.” Her cloth stretched over a chair. A going-away memento for all aboard to marvel over, a linen table-cloth embroidered with maritime symbols, pictures and with various signatures of members of the “polar family.’ She had been saving it from finger-marks, little boy’s finger-marks. Percy traipsed in from the rear garden, his hands gritty and numb, marched over to Hector and stammered; “Long or short?” “What have you been doing outside?” His father was unctuous and easy. “It’s far too cold, see the snow? It’s in love with the land but they can’t quite unite.” A saucy few renegade sleet- flakes tricked the panes into feeling a storm. Percy wiped his hands and hid them behind his back. He knew muck from snow. “Long or short,” he insisted, baked-on to his father. “Goodness,” said Emily, impatiently. “Won’t you do the game? You initiated it with all these ‘either ors’. He’s impressionable, think what you say…” She hovered over the cloth as if it was a decorated cake. Hector squatted so he would be better able to chafe warmth into his child’s bluish skin, traumatized by winter. Ruddy, nimble, Hector portrayed none of that cowardly stiffness, that he and everyone had found so depressing, demoralizing. His ligaments had been tenderised by a resurgent regimen of exercise about the torrid coastal paths, moorlands, side-roads. In the most pitiless of weathers. He felt like a bobbing bouncy ball of downy-hearted pig-iron, physically de-compressed. Teetotalling. The opposite of what had passed before. A crumbling, groaning mess. Emmy adored the new man. “I say short.” Hectors response to the quiz. The child refuted the choice cagily by presenting a zipped-up clownish smile and by shaking his head. “Must be long?” Percy swished his head again and this time brought out a snail-shell from under his woollen vest. “It’s not any,” he said. “It’s round.” Hector glanced over to Emily, “That’s a fact.” Whilst Percy giggled to hear the snail sizzling in the grate where he had just smashed it. Hector then looked less pleased. “Mustn’t be cruel to animals, my boy,” he reproved, with both palms cradling the gleaming-orange face so that it hooked to his own faintly stern one. Percy tore free. “Ah, not the cloth…” squealed Emily, darting to safety her sample of domestic, womanly ingenuity and safe creativity. Hector promised to retrieve the prodigal Hunt signature for her. ‘One day the fairer of the two boys happened to be passing by the airless den of his opposite number, when a tap, tap, tapping sound met his ears. It wasn’t like the tapping of a beetle or the crack of a woodpecker’s beak or even the tap of a stone against the crust of a shellfish flat upon an otter’s belly. No it was a finger-nail juddering, impatiently as finger-nails do upon things – out of boredom, the tap, tap, tap of a cryptogram.’ * * * It proved a trial for Katherine to be manhandling the raw materials of her art on the day she learned her teacher, Meurat, had died. The news of his death had left her feeling deflated, bobbing between inspiration and devastation, merely fumbling with the clay chilled and resistant – like punching brick butter. She wondered what Meurat would have done – sat on it? Would he have slapped his gauntlet at the elements or simpered in the face of the muse? Mmm, he may have heated some dampened rags by the stove and poulticed them on the clay to render it supple. A chequerboard of mullioned panes walling the conservatory-studio in which she strove to create had accumulated a kind of indoor fog so that trees, lifeless as limbs of bent wire hung-over, rasped a noise of no origin like a dryad trying to spook her, with only the hiss of the belching stove, odd clank of cartwheel or passing motor, shattering Winter’s concentration. She always suffered like a fast mouse with its high energy requirements when the sun switched off for the season. Greek relatives and empathetic friends were calling for her to come over to them, to the sun, but she had a commission so they excused her. Another ‘Unknown Soldier’. Visitors had been put off, pleasures had been postponed as she peeled the layers of life away to the onion and that became her core. The agreed obligation to produce a ‘great work’ then became her flavour. Potts readily proffered his extremities and even arranged for his brother to display his torso to her. For what she wanted was an assemblage of varied human pieces to symbolize the legions quarried from the girth and pith of empire like a Roman affair, garnered and then squandered, all ground up like mincemeat to be squeezed into the sausage skin of her monument. Meurat would have wagged his grizzled jaw and approved and slipped open his commodious drawers of modelled protuberant fingers and toes and thumbs and elbows like the skeletal beseeching mob of a catacomb clawing at passing sandals through the grill. And served her the hand of one and the foot of another, male and feminine, child and crone, monster and innocent chuck. A criminal’s head for St John. And for the soldier perhaps a fisherman. Having given up for the moment, she snugly primed her tools, called hands, around a cup of witches brew blended from some hedgerow weeds, herbs, tea-leaf – toxic and empowering. It smelt of cassia bark. Visions of Pinks magnificent feet, forearms preoccupied her.. Certainly looked a squiff in a bear-suit when he came in his new uniform. She suspected his preference for eastern garb over western drab disguised his less than classically creditable proportions. Aint’ alf so foppy as her first husband prancing around with his neater, thicker proportions, stamping out the wrinkles and enhancing whatever he wore and gracing all with ‘good teeth’. And wanting her to feel his proportions….one husband. Was there to be another? She didn’t ask them to earn the privilege anymore. What was there to withhold? Matronly age? Win me…proud of my aloneness. She drank all her tea, before idly kneading her clay again. Never an optimal temperature. If London was Capri she could slab all the pots on a roof for the sun to temper. Suddenly her housekeeper, Mrs Jobs popped through the frosted conservatory door to announce a visitor, even though Katherine had sent out warnings of tantrums if disturbed. She supposed it didn’t really matter. Apart from the droll ‘unknown’ her head was full of Meurat, memorial services, lacklustre skies and the upcoming husband, Mr M.P, he of the shooting lodge and grouse meadows.
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