The Promise Ese (47) Chapter 1 Hector squirmed implacably on the lumpy chaise-lounge, a fine piece. “Princes have had their chamber maids on this. – slept off their debauches,” Jack confessed with salutary urbanity. “If it disturbs you to know, the floor is like a trampoline. I won’t be offended if you settle for that”. Hector had had it with floors. The puckering joins of Pott’s flagstones had rudely insulted his sense of bodily comfort. Now, condemned to his left side on the hilly chaise-lounge at Jack Carpenter alias Rawlings place, made the memory of floor, almost sweet. Hector bunched up and recalled his previous sleep amidst splinters, acrid creosote and cement powder. He remembered vividly the creaks of ceiling as Katherine, minx with a jinx, moved about overhead playing music on Potts gramophone into the early morning. All sorts, from Mozart arias to Faure chamber-works. And the thumps as if she had stomped the poker into the carpet to maximize the impact of her cacophonous ear-bashers; and his subsequent headache. “Let me show you how it’s done, old boy,” Jack had clipped. “First absent yourself from the rat-race and be a rat on the sidelines. Comment on the affairs of the day, stupidly. Politicians are greasy string-pullers, say explorers are self-aggrandizing poseurs – well, and the King’s an honest blighter in the thrall of career toadies. Give me some time and I could pass you off as a thoroughbred breeder from East Gromwich.” “For two days? How many customers would you have in that time to try on? A handful?” Jack served his brother tea and toast. A woman had finally unstrung him. Captain Hunt’s wife. Hard to take on the chin. When they had last met Jack had noted a paucity of spontaneity in his brother, a kind of calculated emptiness and respectability. Now a trod on egg-shell sat before him, making heavy weather of some cumquat marmalade. “Horse you said – Hunt had married a sturdy, I don’t know, a sturdy dollop of horseflesh. What has age tempered her features?” Jack ribbed him as only a brother can. “No, still a horse, well, a shaggy beast,” Hector said sardonically. “But at the welcome home reception, I recollect them mooching aside, Hunt nearly green. His dream crushed. Well you’d given it a fillip, I suppose, by not actually reaching the pole…She was in charge, wasn’t she, as tall as him, with an impertinent nose and vivid clothes.” “There is more to the girl than the striking physical impression…she has a plucky spirit and a strong will. She’s full of surprises.” “Apparently so. This ‘affair’ was your way of getting one’s own back, one may suppose. By taking his wife and leaving him nothing, not even a rich eternal rest to hang on to…” Hector lay on his back, cursing the antique junk springs, and reflected upon what his brother said. The nut-crackers in Jacks shop were chunks of lead crudely moulded into pairs of bow-legs that squeezed nuts indecently to shell separation. The Toby jugs were grotesque visages. Back-scratchers – hags hands. Everywhere sculpted bits of body presented to him. In the square of Blandford Forum, a Roman Legionary and in Potts domain, child’s fat feet she had crafted. How could he explode the jinx? By naming an inlet Hunt Bay? It would dog him and beat him down, that promise not to land. That very morning he had told Katherine something he had not told anyone at all and that very morning it had seemed a sensible mode of action. His secret inside had run out into the chalky clearing like yoke and with them his pride and self-esteem and pretense and containment. Katherine had sat, hatless, her back against the outer east-facing wall of ‘Potts cott.’ taking in the sun, clutching this time a svelte black teacup and a slice of seedy bread, recouping her strength for another attempted hike to the station. Katherine had sipped and listened to a ghost story. She had squinted at the back of his graying bowed head, his hands like nit-pickers flicking everywhere, his voice solemn as he described ‘the walk’ across New Georgia, the legendary walk, the walk of three disheveled, half-dead men, their tightrope stunt, their walk of miracles. A walk unmapped and new. How when they had paused to heat some food in the snow tempting like a feather-bed –the harangue of a ghostly fourth had roused them to self-preservation, had needled them with a terse command to go and go and go and rest no more, the wispy, wind-whistling voice of the fourth- phantom. Yes he, all three men had written and attested to the prime intervention of this fourth. This fourth had saved them as surely as the weather saved cricket matches. And, without him having made it absolutely clear, readers of his sparse account imagined the fourth as a beautiful angel, a snow-maiden, an imposing Hellenic figure cowled and radiant. Yes, Katherine imagined it thus. Until Hector, the leader of the three asked her to re-imagine and reshape her vision. The mystical fourth presence, indeed, had rippled like tent-cloth, goaded and helped the expedition but not as woman – as man. But not as any man, as Richard Hunt, as Hunt smiling like Billy in that worldly yet spiritual fashion. A face free from blisters or suffering, with a back straight, sturdy…ethereal yes but certain as rock. You see, he had come to atone for his culpable and nonsensical ordering men to march, to die, Five had he killed unwittingly, including himself – now there was three to save. They in turn could save twenty-five more. By their rescue he could redeem himself. It being Hector, guaranteed an anonymity for the Samaritan phantom. For how improbable - Hector attesting to miracles as having sprung from an opposing camp. Credit a ghost? Never publicly. “Yes I’m sure”, he had responded to Katherine’s tender inquiry, “sure as one can be. He looked young and drawn but was Hunt, had Hunt’s teeth, Bill’s smile. I could have been hallucinating, I suppose but my also comrades witnessed the Presence – an angel in a hood. They have made statements independently. I believe a persons religious views to be between himself and his maker, therefore whether you believe in a kind of divine intervention, or in my lunacy as result of mental strain, I cannot know nor wish to…yet before we terminate our relationship I thought it might soothe you to know, that is if you ever doubted your husbands…goodness.” It hurt him to cough up that word but he couldn’t think of another plainer. The entire subject broached the airy realms of incomprehension, almost theosophy. And Madame Blavatsky wasn’t thick in the cottage. He had stumbled about the clearing feeding Katherine words in the strong shadows cast by a robust morning sun, all the while in fear of Lady Hunt’s nominal power. She could out of spite sabotage his expedition with but one simple peevish statement to the press regurgitating the old feud, the waste of money. “My late husband did all that can be done in the region – why risk more lives etc.” Katherine had swished her tea dregs into a heap of stones and spread her crusts to where birds came. She had then said: “Thankyou for telling me.” her voice seeping, and went clumping up the box-like stairs. No more would she trust in his veracity. He had humiliated her, grossly confronted her with a woman’s undisputed vulnerability. It snagged in the teeth of a masculine gale. He had tried to wring out her ridiculous sense of sexual equality. One couldn’t be queen and one of the boys at the same time. Yet had his ravishment chastened her monumental self-respect? Not at all. No man had been tough with her like that before. It hardened her. Was he pulling her leg with his revelation of the Fourth’s persona? Making it up, stretching things too far by personifying a nebulous Providence? His memory had flexed the Fourth into a dependable young fellow with Hunts open face. It had muscled aside the Her, the She, the ice-maiden with a limitless howling voice who dogged their fantasies. She had shrunk into a light breeze. It couldn’t be helped. He had said what he had to. Soon Katherine had cascaded down the stairs, ready to leave. Hector, hand on chin, had mumbled stoically “Let me carry your bags.” She had declined the offer saying: “At least you have one-upped on Richard. He thought it unseemly to be seen hauling luggage in public, as if it might offend all the thousands of porters in the world. The first time we met, I carried my own bags all through the streets. He thought he would ‘stand out’. But by trying not to he drew attention to himself.” Then with mute skittishness, she had tripped forwards and kissed his dry, cold lips passionately until they quivered then said brightening: “I like you, just for upsetting me. Who else would have bothered? I deserve it. Condemn me. Others have either been too polite or too scared or not interested enough to bare home-truths, like unpeeling the flayed skin of my soul. Oh and it smarts. Surely his mother must blame me for suggesting he go there a second time…blame me for spearing the Pole down his throat.” Hector had not counted on contrition. Reviving the disloyalty to Hunt had prompted within her a surge of loyalty towards Hector, like the dog to stick-wielding master, the dog licking its weals then coming for more. Maybe she was unpunishable. “You’re going to be married,” he had mentioned as a final blow from the stick. “Give him your love and loyalty and be the dancing bird with the wild ostrich plumes, for him.” ‘Oh I will plead with God to let me stay! Stay till the Night is gone, till spring is nigh, Till sunshine comes…be brave…I’m tired…good-bye…’ She had gone then, leaving Hector to neaten up the sleeping room and replace the key and trundle back into his regular life. Why had he come to Jack? Where scandal stuck and clutter messed the clean family closet. Why? Close by, that was it. Emmy would sense reason behind his agitation. She would root out the fuel behind the chimney-smoking with her hound snout. She would catch the trickling motion of new ice as it set thinly and threatened to lock in his life once again. Katherine’s lead, her gap of blessed water freezing over. Had it been leading anywhere further than the wonder of a few months? If he could escape the maze he should be able to skirt around the edges of the pack. He no longer dreamt of pressure ridges squeezing his innards out. This new ice stretched like an endless unrolling bolt of Willesden duck, a surface ideal for sledging. He wanted to talk to another man about her. The bony mounds of body oozing through her diaphanous slip, her shoulder blades, his slamming her wrists to the floor, blotches of river-spray darkening her cream and green dress, the furrows as she applied herself to her art, as she hunched by the stove as willing as any man to work then rest in the shade of her efforts. Oh yes, he would have loved having a woman like that to share the slog at winter quarters. She could have typeset their pretty record of the expedition, ridden bareback on the ponies with her sweeping hair, floored him in their singing contest, sewn ration bags, repaired worn socks. No, no chores. She need but have loafed outside the hut door with arms out-stretched, enthralled by the erratic, hypnotic curtains of aurora, jobless but busy with her artists eye. Then, after cocoa, scraped under his blankets like a hot-water bottle and tittered about Hunts tepid love-making whilst Hector nuzzled behind her ears. Moony was a pawn of men, Emily a great mother and Rabbit had been King Hector’s temporary consort. “A woman like that comes as an asset to an expedition. She would make herself useful and seldom complain – oh about her comrades yes, but not the situation. She asks that strength and resilience shine out from others as they, and many other sterling qualities shine from her,” Hector had barraged Jack eloquently. “Strong words, Hec…” “Well you should have seen her last night shining, another star, blazed up when we broke up, if that’s what we did.” “She bleeds poetry from you, so it cannot be love. More like a dangerous obsession.” “How dangerous?” “Dangerous enough to upset the new expedition.” “The next ‘voyage’,” corrected Hector. “ After the ‘Stalwart’ disaster I daren’t risk over-stating. She’ll be married and gone by then. ‘Destiny sails on – she tolls the bell.” Hector had fallen silent, remembering his poem. He then had asked Jack whether he thought forced isolation, whether so-called Pole fever, permanently affected people. Jack thought it opened them up to emotional exploitation. They groped around for lives to cling to because they understood life in its essence to be the main attraction in the dead reaches. And the clinging on to it after it was dead. That’s because the wash-up from expeditions went on for years and years, what with lectures and publications and bickering. Cobwebs of one lagging the new build. Life and work knotted up. “I’m philosophical now,” Jack had declared. “The old stuff has made me that way and the country folk. Drawing rooms are not the be-all and end- all. You and me are at one on that now.” * * * Emily scrubbed at a corner of glass with her handkerchief to eradicate a gummy fingerprint. Percy had had his cake and then smeared it. Each corner of the cloth featured caricatures of vessels – now they were as ships under glass. It did look glorious framed. - the work being tea-cloth size, it wobbled but held the frame together, held Hector together it could be said, since he was feeling near the ‘ebb’ of his days and to have his life enclosed, splattered on a glass-slide as a specimen to be researched rendered death the easier to conquer. Here - ship one, the ‘Deliverer’; ship two, “Parhelia’ [mock-sun]; ship three, the ‘Stalwart’, and then rum old ‘Destiny’ the poor relation, the sealer that leaked and lurched. Then the names – Hunt, Bergstrom and the minor players and his staunchest allies – Wilkes, Mackintosh, then swirling around, wildlife. It had been for the name of Sir Hector Carpenter to encapsulate the lot by outliving and budging his nose through the boredom and monotony of ‘off to the South’ again. Those ‘little voices’ were calling to him. The years failed to mute them. Every iceberg seemed to mouth the simmering ‘come, come’ and each tinkling crystal-point laugh the word ‘dare’. “I am glad we opted for the darker timber,” said Emily, arms folded, staring at the frame. “It almost looks a paper document, some kind of charter, don’t you think?” He did. It resembled a precocious schoolboys project on exploration with its compass, ships and sails like swans wings. “When will the men be able to see it? I fear it might get damaged at the office now its full of boxes.” The time of his departure was fast approaching. Valuable equipment they stowed in the office to minimize warehousing costs. Some nights he ‘camped’ there, worried by dreams of theft. He envisioned Murchison furclad humping up and down the stairs, repossessing thermometers. Nervous dreams as stage-frightened first-nighters must have of turning up on stage naked. His entire self was not in it. Certain emotional attachments were tearing shreds off him leaving nothing but raw bone for the sea. “Its too good for the ship.” Too, too true. This ship was by far the ramshacklest. “You might be able to bolt it soundly to the wardroom partition. I am going to miss you. I would feel I was with you through its being there.” When every accoutrement on the “Stalwart’ buckled beneath ice its significant pictures, the portraits of their majesties, lasted in tact, so Emily’s belief in him. Emily had not expressed such stereotypical sentimentality for years. Since their engagement, when his departure had left her truly despondent and hankering for the company of a genuine child. He had until then been her irrepressible and beloved ‘boy’. He returned a leader. “What – the ball of this sun would be your eye fixed on us whilst we sup, that right m’dear?” “They don’t call me one-eyed for nothing,” she laughed. “All the while sewing this thing I was squinting one-eyed.” She smirked at him. Awkward because tucked away his indigestible secret about Katherine made smirking into an imposition. He patted her hand. He said gently: “It will never be as before with us, will it Em, I mean last year was a dreadful one for us. Perc’s growing older and you have found a purpose with caring for little orphans and suchlike. Do you truly want me to sail away for good? I felt it was coming to that. I felt you pushing me out on a raft instead of guiding me in on the tow. I need you as twenty years before. I need you to be waiting.” “Yes Dear, I’ll be waiting. How will I recognize you?” He took out his star-glass and held it to one eye. “Its me monocle.” Emily’s sister’s house sat quiet, Percy put to bed, Emily’s sister and her family out, leaving time to be cherished, a comfy private drawing-room, an evening alone together by the fire yakking about sundry little nothings and reading aloud as many other people did before the invention of radio. Contentedly, they watched as the now framed and glazed ‘cloth of dreams’ poised obliquely on a sideboard grappled with firelight and gasflare for its decorations’ sanity. Reflections made mad the embroidered reliefs, made them behave as toys of the solar –wind instead of silk strands.
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