The Promise Ese (9) “What now? You think it’s alright to pull someone along then let them go, do you – to woo the strays?” Specifically me, out of spite? I don’t care if you barely know each other even if you revile me. Shut your eyes, pretend I’m someone else, that I’m a plaster mannequin.” He couldn’t imagine why someone who surrounded herself with cues wasn’t a nudist but bashfully she sloughed her dross one garment at a time, wondering if he could turn rough. Their wispy conversation had stalled. Smell predominated. All of a sudden she stood up, nervous, boldly nude, and whispered something, then came down to her knees, her faults bathed seamless in the greylight, her dark hair to her waist like a horse tail. The conservatory glass was foggy. No one could see. “I know what you are,” was all she whispered. He was a man – available. He was excited. No fear of rejection. There followed a semblance of love-play on the floor. . …at least…. deconstructionism. She worked him all over hungrily, they swapped body-parts and as the day grew darker the plaster effigies increased their iridescence and made the two living replicas conscious of their incapacities as works of art. And the heat smudged their memories. ‘Help me..’ tap, tap, tap. * * * * The Dream. “Cripes, if I have to eat any more of that blubber I’ll be sick. Wish we could have sardines.” Fanshawe stooped beneath a crossbeam, wringing his mittened hands then sat on a packing case, thanking the messman for his sweet tea before hoeing in to the fair bread. “Not bad, not as tough as the last lot.” Jones, the paragon of Science stepped out from behind a crude partition and swizzled a testube for all to see. Gravely, he reported: “There’s a bacteria rampant in this oil. The seal is bad. The meat must first be sterilized in a high-powered oven…. otherwise”, he grinned, fanatically, “dysentery.” “I’m not having any of that kind of talk in this house, thankyou very much. You’ll be upsetting our patient. I won’t have it. Without him, we are done for.” Lady Moncrieff, the imperious speaking trumpet for these troubled times, the conscience of neo-Georgia. Her loftiness left Hector shaking with suspense. Her tread shook the very tongues in their grooves. She closed in. He trembled as the curtains parted. “Boss,” she whispered at the shaven-headed figure overflowing a packing-case bunk, shielding his fear with the blanket border. “Boss, we have a problem.” Once she had adjudged him awake, her loudness seized the hut again. “The seal-meat is off.” “Oh. How long have I been unconscious?” “Far too long,” she bellowed. “Must say you look like last nights penguin-foot hoosh. Now up out of bed, work to be done. Time is of the absolute essence. Mackintosh, here will help you dress.” “Mac,” he murmured with relief, ‘what’s amiss?” “Antarctic fever, taken quite a few of them off. I’ve been doing a bit extra to make up for their loss. As you can see, though, boss, the icicles are taking over” Hector noticed spicules of rime adorning the packing-case shelves like fluffy moulds and hoar on his own beard. Mac was in fact decked in bulky furs. “What, isn’t the stove functioning.” “Run out of coal. And”, he lowered his voice, “the Llanlubbers just cultured the botulinus microbe from seal liver in our larder. Yes, it finished Franklin, so…its curtains for us.” He whipped his finger across his throat, “you know, the chopper. Sorry Boss.” But Mac still had his banjo so there was a cause for optimism. “Put this fur on,’ he said, helpful, “ and I’ll play number six in my repertoire of – six. Moncrieffs got loads of these esqimaux suits. She buys them wholesale from the nearest esquimaux and doles them out to those she feels deserves them.” The fur felt rigid and uncomfortable over his lightweight underwear. “I can’t bend my arms”. Hector complained whilst clomping an inelegant bear-shuffle. “Whose this?” “Have you forgotten our queen?” Mac squinted at him queerly. “Look, the queen, he leaned across the bunk and tapped his finger on a curling rectangle of processed negative tacked to a flattened packing-case stood vertical. “What about this one?” Hector nodded at a grimy face in the third level of a brickwork pattern of mugshots. A very plain woman. “Your wife, of course, and your daughter and here is your favourite pony. I’m afraid we ate Shifty yesterday, right tasty too. And here’s your brother, he’s ‘gone over’ to the other side, since your collapse. Shaved off his moustache, looks a different chap.” Hector stared blankly. “Strange that you can’t remember, boss…” Fanshawe was arguing with Moncrieff: “Won’t catch me in any of that Russkie kit. I’d rather freeze…’ Hectors authority and normalcy suddenly cracked his torpor. He stuck his head around the curtain and counted then growled: “Lost ten men- that’s ten too many” His combustible glare burned at the fractious Fanshawe. “I’m wearing it, you wear it.” “Have something to gnaw upon, Boss. You’ve lost weight.’ Murchison held out a tin plate with some bread. “The last of our farinaceous food. We’ve been experimenting with blubber dripping. Horrendous smell but if you hold your nose like this – slips down with the greatest of ease.” “Hmph. You cook for the week? “At your service Boss.” Hector, unable to sit in his furs before they had loosened up, stood at the stove like an insulated pipe. He probably could have stood on it without catching fire. Iced tea? “First things first,” he laid down the law. “We must save ourselves from starvation and hypothermia. We must find food and heat. Jones can you declare with all certainty our seal stock is inedible? Isn’t there a miracle solution we can inject into it to kill the parasites or whatever’s the source of rot?” “I’ve dug down deep, Boss. Even the pups from last season have putrefied. Its mush out there in the grotto. I think we should even dismantle the hut and rebuild it elsewhere. I can’t trust the ground. It’s been in contact with the affected seals for too long.” “Three cheers for the Llanlubber.” “Enough sarcasm from you, Fanshawe. Its smart-arses like you that break the spirit and corrupt the soul of man.” And you look like a galumphing big baby in that fluffy baby suit, Fanshawe thought cussedly to himself. Moncrieff slapped Hector spiffingly on the back as if to say Buck up, keep your pecker up, that’s the spirit, wipe the floor with em. He turned to her, asked softly: “Phyllis, where by the way are the woman? Has the fever taken them off?” She shook her head sagely. “No, she said,” but they have gone to god, in a manner of speaking. Your brother persuaded them…” She shouldered him towards the Northern window. “The God of the tundra…Captain Hunt. They have thrown themselves at his mercy, a week ago today, at the height of your own fever.” “That’s right,” added Mackintosh. “There’s mountains of food at his place, all sorts of indulgences. I can be a minstrel and sing for our supper. There’s one problem, but….” “The ice is beginning to thaw between our hut and his hut.” “Hut? He lives in a palace!” Murchison thumped the packing-case table, testily. “This bread? They bake loaves with mare’s milk. Unless you can fix things, me ol Captain, I’ll be off as well, dodgy ice or not, I mean Boss.” “Does this mean we can stop taking meteorological readings?’ They began talking over one another. Hector prioritised as the decibels skyrocketed. Despite the encroachment of ice his hut appeared almost brand new. Were there any dogs, sledges, paraffin for the Primus? Ah, the printing-press. Leaflets. Passing aeroplane might intercept a balloon towing an s.o.s tag but no it was 1907 again – stranded. He asked for opinions but it seemed the brightest of his meteoric expeditioners had succumbed or risked his wrath by defecting. Jones thought they could shut down their vital systems like rotifers and wait a few million years for the Antarctic to recede. “He’s been at the methylated spirits, Boss,” brayed Fanshawe. “And so has our scout-mistress there. Behold her nose.” “Its frostbite, you imbecile. I think his brain is softening. I request our leader write a certificate declaring this ‘bugger’ insane and henceforth and unwilling member of the shore party. Do it at once, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” Fanshawe mounted a box marked ‘luncheon tongue’ and flailed like a Cyclops. “What did you call me, you old battle-axe? You all heard her, I hope. Throttle her for me, Murch–ado-about-nuffin. Suffocate the old crow in her own blubber and pickle her in fur.” Hector tweaked the multi-layered arm of his dyed-in-the wool chum, Mackintosh. “What do you think, can I trust any of them?” he whispered confidentially. Mac smiled: “ Speaking for myself, I’d say ‘not on your life.’ Speaking for the fate of the whole expedition, I’d say ‘you’d best choose one.’” Hector, in the loudest voice he could muster after his stint in bed, demanded immediate quiet, then decreed: “Phyllis Moncrieff will assume the role of honorary leader while Mackintosh and myself are away seeking rescue. This will be made official with my signature, and in lieu of a seal, for any that cannot read, my thumb-print. Leader Moncrieff is hereby given permission to punish any who offend against the law of this hut.by whatever method she deems appropriate. For food, you must experiment with whatever is available, the same goes for heating. Joint with our mission of obtaining sustenance goes the bid to free our monarch…our much revered and beloved Queen?” “Queen Amaranthus.” “Who…” * * * Orchids flourished in the turquoise penumbra parasoling the leaden lamp-base, the Morris chair upholstered in ‘Pomegranate’ and its drowsy flushed-with- turquoise occupant. Lady Hunt inspected his eyelids – pouches full of adolescent marsupials, she thought, raking over metaphors. Restive eyes outgrown of sleep. She reoccupied her own chair, flipped her Turkish slipper and watched its amber, beaded flanges vibrate, kaleidoscope. Perhaps he would awaken as an idiot, a stutterer, a dribbler. She picked up the fire-tongs and gnashed them. She clapped, clapped her book. She sang. She played her tulippy glass with flimsy gold-rim reading spectacles. Then the precocious marsupials released themselves. Kicked up their kangaroo heels. What could she say but; “Had a good sleep?” Hectors concentration was still drying from dream, nevertheless he recognized her, even strangely lit by lamps, cadaverous. But he wasn’t sure of the location. “With reason, you have never been in this room – only my greenhouse.’ She’d spread a quilted comforter over his lap. He was made to feel a dopey invalid. The perception bit at his manhood. She told him it was five o’clock. “I have to be home before seven.’ “I already know, you told me earlier, so I rang your wife to reassure her. She asked me about the table-cloth, wouldn’t you like to tell me about it?” What had occurred? He saw the indecent sculptures, her, the fogged windows, the silk green Chinese rug pinching them with its little dry clay chips. He saw all in his head. What grew visible to him now was an artistic, nose-thumbing ambience of black pottery and the complete and eerie silence of snow on roofs and a crackling fire. “You must have come a-knocking for a reason. What about this cloth. You never got round to showing me. I know it’s been a not-very-nice day for me, my teacher Meurat…. I distracted you from your mission, Hermes. Where’s the letter, Hermes? Would you like me to relieve you of it? I can. Leo said to me, not often, but once that I can remember. ‘There are none that would stoop so low, or something as common. He hated you so much. I’m sure, if he hadn’t been an animal lover, would have kicked a cur and called it ‘Carpenter’, the sneak. Where will you fit in the life-story? One of these days, when I’m settled in the country avec mon mari, I will start writing and then we shall see.” She tittered and skulled what turned out to be absinthe. He marvelled. “I have a throat of cast-iron,” she bragged. “Left over from the fin-di-siecle but I prefer its antiseptic taste to the ghastly medicinal wines that our countrymen dedicate their bridge-parties to. It’s clean. It kills fleas and worms. This batch had been watered down. Now what about this sumptuous tapestry your wonderful and caring wife is sewing. Why don’t you show me?” Yes. Hector had promised Emmy. Where was it? A shallow cardboard carton from his ghost-owned packaging company. Like a casket of myrrh. He could understand why Em had taken up the needle. He was trying so hard to be a model husband so she was trying to be an enthusiastic and diligent wife and fit the broadsheet image of the goodly Lady. He would gladly concede her marks for effort. What about that afternoon? The bosom of their extended family and he the bosom of a…compelling but non-practising Lady. Curdling his life again after the interim of two docile months. But as Emmy had stressed, loyalty to the damned. I am going to die. I will die. We each one of us will die but I am overdue. No, then I will not see my children develop into…dun, pin-stuck dollies of their parents. God Forbid! Fight inertia all the time. Punching and punching safety. Sink into life and eliminate the need of a Weddell seal blowhole for stumbling into, before the gurgle…the death-gurgle coming arm-in-arm with old age, anyways. “She hopes your son might kindly add his name like these others, some crews of the past - then the autographs are traced with threads of pie “ He showed-off his shroud, his valediction with a proud, poetical luminous voice. “The missionary people assist. All brilliant needle-workers. Emily has a sense of humour. This is the ‘Stalwart’, poor old girl…see how it sags.” He had caparisoned an armchair with the shining white linen square. Katherine examined closely the shamble of masts that represented his sickly familiar consecrated-to the-ice ship. His earlier ship, the ‘Parhelia’, was a lambent relief of tapestry skeins, under-sail, plying the billowing fabric of sea. Bergstroms pied, modest signature. It was so soppily sentimental it almost moved her absinthe-drenched susceptibility. As she was close, her lines of age, her sun-streaks became valleys in the lamplight. Hector put his hand in her hair but she said ’excuse me’, very coldly. The frostiness hurt. Katherine felt he was going to ask about the afternoon, therefore said, rushing; ‘Before, in my studio, when you were about to unroll the piece, Mrs Jobs, thankgoodness for her strength and trustworthiness, noticed a haze come across your eyes then you fell down. We think it was the heat. You see, I am used to it. I enjoy solid heat, not the centrally-heated stuffiness, you understand, but the closeness of red-hot embers or Cyprus branches. My mix of tea overpowers some. I was awake in the night, I’m tired myself, maybe…” “I must have blacked-out.” He cycled his ‘ruminant plod’ around the cherry-red walls, the gypsy gee-gaws, shawls, fans and lopsided vases with authentic finger- pressed lumps; then stopped to huddle beside her under the exquisite lamp-bowl. “I may trust my senses,” he muttered, referring to her smell. Patchouli arose as if the painted orchids on the lampshade allured with puffs of heady turquoise. “Winter is odourless,” she said. “I am the breath of June.” Her absinthe breath sighed into his detective’s nostrils. He enclosed her waist. ‘Why can’t I have you for real?” Swiftly she extricated herself and pretended not to hear. “Are you a drunk?” “You are in my house. Call me a drunk…I will…” “And you will what? I have not lived a single peaceful moment for the last six-months. Everywhere is mischief.” The kerosene-blue halo earmarked filaments of carpet hair marring his coat breast. He remembered her wearing an unpretentious, hempen smock and went on one knee to examine the stretch of tailored gaberdine which, in his estimation, would have avoided its protective covering. The bottom few inches of her dress was crumpled and ruggy looking. Hmm, he grappled with the situation. Hmm, amnesia. “Yes a bird trimming implement cut you, didn’t it?” she swerved, playfully or artfully twisting her jewellery. “ Why is there nothing in the middle of this?’ Her peroration lit upon the brandished napery demanding attention as the only stop-gap in a livid miasma of room. “Is this space for a caricature of the owner?” She thought the central panel of the cloth an ideal page for his grandiose opinion of himself. “So you have no idea what it represents?’ She saw the bulb was beginning to melt him like Icarus. “It is the white South, of course. There is nothing to draw. There is nothing. The continent is empty at its heart.” His complex voice dipped, toneless, vanished, barren. He brushed a rug hair from her. Her unbroken pluck of the filly soothed to malleability. “I lack first-hand knowledge,” she nickered. If he had offered his hand she may well have nuzzled. “he would have scraped up all the poetry in his soul to describe it for me.” Then she shifted again. “But no, how can I realize the emptiness? As a woman I feel comfortable folded up in things, you know, practical, not in the abstract, dallying with the emotional side, designing my appearance. What do you feel about the female? Are you the same block of dense material when it comes to women? He was pretty conventional. Huh, his mother…. worshipper of the Father, notice I discount the term ‘man’. Men are Fathers as women are mumsies. Now the presence of a woman out there would interfere with the serious business…the building of a lodge at the base of the world for men to flock to and cohabit like well-meaning and jolly brothers. I think about these things. But still I can think about love, as women do. How delightful to be loved like a brother is loved and not because of what one can do for a man, not solely for the invisibility of ones darning.” “He loved you for your darning?” He had sat down in the Morris contraption nee easy-chair. She sank to her haunches, next to him, supporting herself on the arm and stared into a nervy reflection of furniture in the fender brass. “Well, I couldn’t even by the most subversive imaginations, be confused with his mother. It was his bid for freedom. He fixed on someone so different, in fact I am a little like one of his sisters, Edie who took to the pen. Surging inside of him was a rebellious, romantic, unconventional and carefree little sprite that I could see and that my sprite…felt for. But now, in hindsight…sprites cannot resist the cold. One wants an ice-imp, a Nordic troll-like spirit to carry one there, some thing from the source. I shouldn’t have pushed him but the prevarication, the questioning…went on and on over and over. So my sprite dug its spurs in. Freed of mumsie and of everything.” Her hands were bare and brown with abraded, short nails. He pat one in a meaningless reflexive way. She observed their two hands together. His was sleek, most definitely not a club, nor a shackle, nor a roast joint, nor a fathers or rambunctious uncles hand with boils. Jaundiced by nicotine at the tapering finger-tips. It fit over hers without swamping it. “Now Sir Hector,” she began, standing, chasing away the pins and needles, arcing, jingling with silver and a lozenge of jade amulet glassy from the patchouli oil on her fingers which rubbed it, “let me broaden the subject. Amberly’s impromptu vignette on the piano before Christmas. Before that came Madeline Jaspers, ‘warbling’ as you so rudely said. I may have hinted as to my musical appreciation compared with your want of it. I’ll mention another occasion.” She took down an inkily glazed cast from the mantlepiece and passed it to him. “This is the hand of a young pianist, a kind of aberrant, strikingly handsome quisling of the rich, dismissive of the patronage system yet beholden to it for his livelihood. Meurat, when he was in London, took a liking to his style…this is the result, or rather one of them.” Hector imposed an opinion: “I find something macabre in this obsessive hoarding of dismembered…people fragments. I imagine this Meurat to have been deficient in his relations with whole people. I mean How do you do. Woops.” He shook the artificial hand and then dropped it as if it had sadly departed from an arm. “Did he fail in medical school before attempting art school?” She frowned. “Complete people are the sum of their parts. That’s the dictum. Why must you try and pass for asinine? Sailors are stupid. Let me finish the story.” He went up and replaced the beseeching sculpture beside a crystal garden in a clear glass cube, then smiled unfussily and told her he would be going shortly when the story finished. She nipped at his eyes with the speed of a nerve then looked away again. “At this particular party, while everyone watched enthralled his transcendental rendering of Debussy preludes you looked cross and folded your arms. Now that was an impression I carried away – Carpenter the musical philistine. But what was interesting about Cyril Graeme was his mumsie problem. He modelled for a friend of mine – there was a romance of sorts, unsuccessful because of the hectic hiding and tricking mumsie and sneaking off beacause she disapproved of his ever having girlfriends or as she thought, rivals for his affections. This affects his work – every piece of music composed by him is a snippet of under ten minutes, he will arrange traditional tunes, folk dances…but he cannot write a symphony, he cannot sustain… because, unexpectedly, there intervenes the watchful and resentful eye of his mother. My friend gave up but first took her revenge. She made a delicate nude statue of Cyril and gave it to his mother as a present and you know, she didn’t recognize her own son? Thought it was just an Apollo of the genre…I wonder what befell him after he ran away to America. I’m sure Mumsie must have stowed away in a locker.” “There are all sorts or reasons for running.” He started refolding the cloth like vestments “ and of course why should a mother be able to distinguish one unclad human torso from another.” “So you don’t consider anything odd at all about his mother choosing his girls?” He laughed; “A matter very close to your own heart apparently.” “Leave that,” she said, tapping his back as he wrangled with the indefinite creases. “Come back for it next week. I’ll let you know when its ready. Paul is always away with his bicycle.” She tipped her absinthe to the dregs but held out the tulippy glass to him. She wanted him to taste it. She began searching for the bottle but he declined. “You really ought to mind the turps. You may lose control. Have something to eat after I’ve gone.” Queen Catherine looked unhappy. “I’m a biscuitarian.” She said, scrabbling at the sides of her unhappiness. Then she went up and held on to him, pinioned him, her head on his left shoulder. She was lost. He was solid. After the absinthe he wondered if her taste would be of catmint and port-wine trifle since that’s how her resting skin smelled - tropical perfume and fuel, and the specks of dry-clay in her hair! He bowed to more evidence. Ah, the tea, now sampling at three! He couldn’t have slept at all, three to five? Drifted asleep in a bath of tea? No, tasted. Would she still taste of him or had the absinthe served to gargle her mouth clean. “And I’ll be feasting with missionaries. Must always eat as much as you can.” She pulled back and he ran his finger down her impertinent nose, wishing she would look at him. No, so he curved his hands around her eyes like blinkers. “Don’t stay unhappy.” “You must see the studio at night,” she deflected. There was a smoky lamp in the hall which her bangle clinked against as it was lifted, then again while it led them through a morning-room, past a door with a yellow strip of light at its edge where the Jobses were ‘at home’, to the pair of opaque narrow doors where the Meurats congregated. She opened one door and set the lamp down carefully. He peered in at the conservatory, redolent, lit by snow through the window walls, magical, mysterious and as shin-shattering as a cemetery in starry darkness. He heard dripping and felt a chill of graves. “The workshop of the monumental mason,” she whispered. “See why I go for the natural plaster, how the white lights itself. Each winter I promise to uproot my studio but the glass, it thrills me.” She existed like a primitive Spanish idol jostled by candle flames at the altar of forbidden worship. She was black and wooden. One of the sculptures shadows. ‘Ha”, she laughed softly, in reply to a querulous inquiry, “the afternoon? How charming of you to fall asleep, the soldier couchant upon the rump of his dead charger. Charming indeed, but…’ She was a pendant voice. “Really, sometimes I like to soar on air currents for the fun of it, you know those birds that never seem to be flying in one direction, and I’m pleased if another bird joins me. Today, an odd bird ruffled in. If I could fly, I’m sure I would constantly, because it was possible, and for no other reason - and that it made me happy.”
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