The Promise Ese (7) The weather turned out simply unbearable. Katherine had arrived courtesy of the Sorley-Sharpes own swish conveyance but despite the hasty employment of an umbrella had had her intriguing raiment spattered by wet gravel, raindrops then dog fur and bumped herself in the warren of deplorably arranged passages - a very problematical house design. One could instantly surmise a shying away from the Palladian or Moorish, and a trending towards quaint on the home-grown blueprint of the Sharpe�s provincial little Victorian dolls house of a residence. A less romantic vision splendid, soggy in the rain, she could scarcely conceive of. And her thoughts at once fled to the Mediterranean Eden where many rosewatered weeks of her life had been whiled in the delicious grasses and sands and netted divans of Spartan hideaways quiescent amongst the olive plantations. Then what would it be for lunch? Stodge, stodge, stodge. However, the interesting and mysteriously attractive Potts had been flagged as an eating companion, a man not always easy to arrange appointments with. The man, Katherine believed, possessed of the finest feet of her experience. Strong, dependable feet. Discreetly powerful as a leopards. But it was not he alone who rose to greet her in the working-class type reception room, close beneath the suffocating downpour roar. Handel, the war poet, Sharpes sister Beatrice Wendell, Amberly the ageing composer all squashed in like rabbit babies with Potts and wonder of wonders her least favourite explorer, the arrogant and infuriating Sir Hec! She couldn�t possibly continue snubbing him forever and couldn�t possible restrain the smirk prompted by a memory of that sweet little signal she�d offloaded at the �Collisseum� like the sigh of someone content to die, at peace. She appreciated his dismay upon seeing her, if arm- locking can be notated as a language. His dudgeon screamed at her, but no one else. Pink coyly peeped out from under his tumbling sandy hair, in an as beguiling way as the gaunt, nigger-tanned celluloid snapshots of himself framed by the flowing, luminous robes of an Arabian prince, arrested audiences besotted with more traditional ideas of battle than the filthy trench ones. Here was the embodiment of Arthur. Magnificent on camel as crusaders on jangling steed. He had been, and now the world knew. Ah, the power of the cinema! Sherry �flips� before lunch. Even Fabians had to grease their tongues. �What?� they all shouted above the rain. Sharpe, full of a new satire, read aloud some parts hoping to make them guess the model for each buffoon. The mouth-pieces wore steelier disguises; mostly he modelled them himself, but dug up one obscure ethicist from an obscure encyclopaedia to spruke an anglicised Schopenhaurian willlessness. Yes this would be his anti-german effort, better late than never. Alice mocked the work with a wife�s impunity; others wondered what it would amount to on stage. Where was the drama? Amberly might compose some incidental music like his �Manfred at the Precipice� if he would wake. Oldness and Wiseness. Pink and Carpenter, whilst acknowledging the combination, admitted its absence from their own shakily handwritten scenarios. Snoring was not a thing to die of. Who�d ever heard of the �snore of the brave�? Katherine marvelled how seamlessly the heroes present could don and shake off their parts when required to amuse a preening host and hostess. Hunt hadn�t grasped the knack. He would have worn it like a shroud, he wouldn�t have fit it or would have fidgeted so much, it have fallen off! She didn�t believe in life after death so she knew he couldn�t hear her thoughts, but then he may have agreed. How he loved to hear himself run down�poor old Leo, her Richard, her lionheart. In her honour the Sharpes unveiled a bulbous bottle of Chianti to chase down the stodge. What an incongruous thumbing-ones nose at the pitiful monotonous, deluging grey. Nearly everyone supposed her life a similarly monotonous pine for the lost husband. She had been pampered by the entire nation ever since that day of the telegram until a populous telegram parade accelerated apace with the machine guns �rapid rattle� and legions of widows began to march with her. Their losses had freed her from black. Loosed her thoughts from white and bent her back to the clay. To Pink�s feet. Competing with the Chianti for the award of most astounding were the gruesome scratches on behalf of Hector�s cheek, an ancient vegetable sprung up wild in the Wendell pottager and Handel�s chance meeting with the translator of some Chinese poet he treasured. Katherine could think of nothing to add unless she confessed of her impending marriage to an MP, abroad in the spring. She listened to Hector describe the dog that mauled him. All looked sceptical. No, really a feather-splitter, met one in a murky curiosity shop, swinging from the ceiling, for sprucing up the plumage of hawks. Now Handel who happened to be a hunting man, had not ever heard of such a device. So? Hector would buy it and let it speak in its antique dialect of the doubletted and the bewigged. Really. Potts sweeping appearance �made� the film that outclassed any documentary footage she had seen, Katherine informed them all. The Arabs charging, standards a flutter, dust flying, made a change from the monotonous �it�. Three lots of penguins in ten years! She tipped her glass at Hector as she gibed at the Antarctic and he couldn�t have enjoyed it more. Some people chose to lampoon the whole business yet inevitably overrode their tomfoolery with a tut tut, shh, its just silly twaddle, we don�t really mean�Hunts wife meant it. He�d been smiling all afternoon, genial and sure. Smiling at her and everybody. He wondered about Potts and she, Potts the reluctant matinee-idol and she the sculptress, the seductress. As he had once wondered about Hunt and she, Hunt the man he was sure none but a mama could love. Temptress. Destructess, empress�. snake-goddess. Such a wordy house! Of Course Alice asked about the expedition funding. I have half-found a university where the talk snowballs, in fact with as much velocity as Sharpes Herr Professor, and with about as much depth as his flurry, Hector feared. But he would keep up the plod. He doesn�t come across as mope-prone, like the last Sunday, thought Alice, or saddened by the scratches, or sickly but quite positive and Katherine buoyed by the Italian wine and disporting some jade extravagantly set, miffed by the rain, yet otherwise pleasant�time to do business. Since the garden was so absurdly out of bounds Alice foresaw problems with her division of the company. Eight people meant four couples and one in private meant three spaces and a very pointed arrangement style. Men at table was ordinary, Handel and he the smokers would expect to linger, ladies withdrawing was the thing of the swank, he and her closeted in Will�s study, well had to be a purpose. Will could stay in and then apologetically go out but wouldn�t they follow? She cursed the friend who had let her in on the mutual antipathy betwixt Katherine and Hector Carpenter. Common knowledge. Time healed rifts. Let the healing begin today. They hadn�t actually spoken to each other, this she had observed whilst Pink had hardly opened his mouth for anyone else but the remarkable Mrs Hunt. And Hector had been particularly attentive to everyone in turn, indiscriminate except with her, and their waffly little pet Dachshund. So a ruse would be required, a lure � that map! Of course. The gorgeous pageant of sea-monsters and whirlpools and Portuguese cartography which William had recently grabbed at an auction for inspirational purposes. A prop for the prime candidate in his dreamt of comedy about the sea, the signature card of his retired and fusty admiral who builds a house like a ship and bombards people with wit from its embrasures. Now any sailor worth his salt must long for the whiff of charts, Katherine doted upon art, so�But then Sharpe would surely jump up and bluntly say it; Come to some arrangement, my lady, you have told us you have some money and can�t for the life of you decide how to spend it. 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?� Her �Ha� sprayed up from the water-logged sward as, explosively, she merged into a lunatic, eurhythmic dance, a jiggle and bend, loop, bobbing erratically, scattering a tangible challenge to the chug-chug of a choking Dodge engine, to the motorcyclist. Performing an escape from uniformity to chaff them. She became the centre of the young night. Hector breathed expressively but stood passive, thinking of�what? She flung out further investigation: �Where did it come from? I did find the first page of that actual letter but�was it copied from the original? I�ve lost many�over the years�� One of his blue typescript copies of �the promise� missive had indeed crawled under her door. Eventually, leaves vocal in their shedding of rain, the cars cough and her circular motion flicked some words askew from his comprehension. Thus annoyed, Hector sloshed up to her, broke the dance and said: �You see it was an antipathy on behalf of your husband. He knew he really had no rights over the naked, unclaimed ice. He wanted to scare anyone with a similar desire then barge in when he felt like it and make history. Who�s dishonourable?� Who indeed? Katherine smiled a smile of largesse, towards all on the front steps who had been watching and clapping her aborted fairy dance, then steamed lowly to him: �Read the expert opinion on it, there�s masses and, please will you cut out of the melodramatics? I don�t want to receive anymore anonymous, nasty harangues from you through the post. Say, say what you feel�you must feel like the victor, life is victorious. Even a slug has triumphed over dust.� She pressed his gruff intent as sinuous as the night. �Oh, I feel vital now after the fresh air. Goodbye, safe journey.� But wouldn�t shake his hand. Then whilst the backlit semi-human statues, cheery under the lintel, were loudly waving him away through colossal gates she ran over to Pink and said hurriedly: �Please G.E, I�m serious, can�t you take me away from here? I feel I cannot endure the babble anymore. You know Alice, surely her incessant, her incisive nosiness bores even you at the end of the day� �Where did you have in mind? I was going to stay the night at Winchester.� �Fine, do you think I could hang on all that way without falling off? �Its very chilly.� �I�ll borrow some wet-weather gear. I have my fur-coat. Please�� She firmly squeezed his forearm. This time he didn�t flinch. It was growing cold. �Very well, but I leave you to explain. I know a way to sweeten things, just tell them Carpenter has all the money he needs for his next venture, that he and you have reached an entente.� �I have no idea what you mean but I�ll say whatever you like� * * * Hector whisked down the blind having caught his own reflection in the train window and been thwacked by it. He had restaged, rewritten, re-enacted the scene tens of times in his head, each one a macabre impersonation of Truth. Morris shoots him. Morris shoots her. She immolates herself. He strangles Morris. Hickox raises the marble mantle-clock with both hands and � lights his pipe. Where the quicksilvery gift of gab? Grinding in his mind. Moony? �Let the blind up, honey-pie�� Face the unavoidable. He let it go, braced himself in the crotch of the seat, closed his eyes� try to relive the previous night. Vicious rain splashed the moving glass. His rudimentary features super-imposed against the thick window streaked with rain, each pore jolting runnels as if a toy maker had him by the shoulders and was cruelly trying the cord in his neck, flopping the head about, crashing his brains like conkers. What if they could be in the compartment together, if his Plymouth train could become the boat-train? They had kissed, voracious, and his face had bled and she had swilled his blood, fluttered her tongue along each ragged line. Now he let this pungent instance out to skip and dance at last in the dribbles of rain. The last, the best, Moony, his lantern somewhere in the dead of an ice-night, blipping across his physical memory her thousands of volts. Volts. Live. He had to be daring the gulf of oblivion for systems to be electrified. Leering at extinction, ribs cordoned by� harness, by wire, belt. She led him. Clara, the handler of his body, the purger of feelings controlled. She had unclipped his survivor�s instinct. Dumped inconsequentials- like table-frippery, like compass, like milk in tea, like decorum. With the sunrise her ice-fingers began crackling loose of him. And the last guy-rope loosed from him. Moony was extinguished. One super-nova, one night to forever after refuel heaven. He smoothed his hand across the glass as if fine human tissue lacquered his first-class carriage window. One last fantasy, the cream between her legs. At lunch each mouthful had been her. If Sorely-Sharpes dingy cortege could have moled a way into his skull and read his recollections� Perhaps it might have excited their atomic particles! Oh but the Potts and Handels, the queers, would�ve gagged. Female bodies made them wretch, the Ruskins of the world. They had lain on their backs talking to the dark. Last night at the ol� �boudoir�. Hickox had grudgingly consented. Hector thought to break it all down before he went away. �What do you mean, the �whipping-boy�?� Whip me, whip me� He had said it was part of a time-honoured strategy for quelling mutinies. �Isolate the discontent, drive it towards a single object � me, in this case. I�m reviled as the common enemy, almost a wife-beater, most definitely scoundrel but you, my darlingest Darling�you are safe. I have saved your splendid hide from THE scandal which would have scuttled any hope of success in the future. Imagine the scandal-mongers and their awful hyena�s cackle disgracing the lawn of the �Collisseum�. But now you must soldier on until, �Vanity Fair� ordains Claire De Lune the greatest actress of the century. Morris is a zero. Can�t you feel yourself a leading light, the brightest in the firmament, already?� �With Sir Hector Carpenter still the greatest and bravest explorer, and smartest. But we should have talked about it. It was very shocking, that sort of thing demands a run through.� �I wasn�t entirely sure that you hadn�t gone mad with the red- indian stuff.� Clara had giggled and pinched a little piece of him under the covers. �It�s true�I was trying�probably wouldn�t have been good to fight. I so longed to see him laid out. Thinks he�s an anthropologist, ever since we honeymooned in the mock-up reservation and � howed� around the great campfire and smoked whatever root gets jammed into the peace-pipe and, I don�t know, borrowed wives and braves. Imagine if the tourist department created a cartoony village where the stone-age peoples of Briton could feed up the customers with millet husks or whatever meal they ate, dress them up in skins, transport them into a prior, hazy time of innocent marauding� What do you think it would do for the consciousness of your empire? African natives would no longer frighten the masses the same as Martians do. Brotherhood. I suppose you and your wife sometimes play pet games. What�s your little married �thing�?� He had emphasized for her, ticklishly, the English predilection for chivalrous tales of esprit-du-corps, quests, the lady of the lake, husbands away on crusades, love-potions and grails and of course Guinevere and Lancelot, and Arthur, the quintessential cuckold. �Every major poet has taken up the thread and woven it into various concoctions. So I was just another traditional Knight riding away to retrieve an honourable�reputation, or treasure to spread at her feet.� But snow was snow. Snow was a screen for the moon to project light on. �She�s a wonderful woman. We must have something in common if you like us both.� Then they had made love in earnest, the last, the best, the best, the worst�blinding. And Hector had given back his key and wished her happiness and promised he had a scheme for fixing Morris if he started swinging again the big �D� for divorce. And he had said Hickox was a straight, reliable man who loved her and could provide riches and�.only then had Moony begun to snivel. Snivels breed snivels. Then it was though she was the South pulling away from the relief ship, glaring white, growing distant and all his tears were freezing his lashes and the ship was clearing the pack until the South was bittersweet horizon. He shut the blind. He was crying and Teignmouth was nearing, where he had to get out and meet people, benefactors. �I had to find out if she was hiding you away� Quiet. He rubbed his itching eyes and again he could feel her consoling caresses, �sacrifice, for me�?� Oh, I can trust you can I, but �I had to find out if she was hiding you in the attic. I was worried, it wasn�t an act..� And all the garbage swashed into his house �contaminate your children, me? Oh Hec..� Don�t cry Moony�He loved her, it was true. She had slipped and they had both looked silly and he had loved her more because. the ship had shivered way, way down on the sea-bed, his arm had wormed up with the letter � she had re-assumed her professional, unflappable, sophisticated, fashionable demeanour then cut him and cut him��Oh what has that unmentionable wanton street-thing done to you?� In the cupboard with you Em. I can kill myself anyhow, wouldn�t that surprise you? Emily�s voice was the Harpy rain that changed rivers to torrents�death-traps. He tidied and took up his book and his hat and his umbrella and his coat, flicked up the blind and suddenly there was no one there, just an illuminated station. At the same moment, G.E turned his bike off the road so Katherine could re-arrange herself. She wanted to stop at Stone-Henge. Clouds were moving overhead. Then, strangely a vision of Sir Hector, crooked like an Easter Island rock, scud before her eyes, blaring that scowl of his from the old photograph, his cheek tattooed as she had witnessed, with injury. Like a bat, like a shudder. �Well, I can honestly say this is the coldest I have ever been� His face passed like a cloud across the moon. Her teeth chattered.
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