The Promise Ese (10) “I take it that, your body is to you as a set of wings, to be used?” Her values looked him in the eye and quivered with a certain force. * * * For Emily, the apogee of the evening had been when the row of orphanned Belgian children delivered their national song to the heart-throbs of a tuned harmonium and when they had given out pralines and curtsied. It seemed appropriate to reward them with books seeing that the meeting had taken place where books abounded. By a quirk of fate, that very Wednesday, the plumbing in their regular hall had caved in. At short notice, the lending library above, boasting superior comforts, was enlisted as an alternative venue, the carpet of which had defrosted the frigid fervour of some of the Missionary societies fustiest members and put the anxious children at their ease. Hector considered them a lot of ‘good sports’, with their hallowed smiles, healthy appetites and sunny outlook. “Although I sympathize with the current crop,” he expanded, undressing, “living up to Livingstone must be frightful ordeal, then there is the African dilemma? How can the Belgians go out there ever again, and I’m sure to the blacks we English look much the same as Belgian murderers. Those little children will be impelled to take up work in the chocolate factories and breweries, sad to think, and balloon like all the ladies of that region. Meanwhile…can the Africans manage themselves?” Emily was watching from the quaint old bed kept for them at her sister, Nancy’s inner London house. One of the only houses unscathed by the Great fire, as Hector always sledged when he put his socks over the gruesomely carved bed knobs and sniffed around the room for functional things like lights and running water. They had given up their own city place. Bournemouth and considerate relatives would do for London sojourns. His pants were loose. Good. Inviting hubris to purchase clothes before an adventure. Suppose one did not return? “Manage to get your walk in today?” asked Emily. “I skiied,” he joked, “besides…I’m thin as thin,” and he pinged his braces as if to reaffirm the fact. “Look at the curtains, instead. I’m sure they are as petrified as this room.” Hector thought she looked blowsy, her primness hoisted for the Missionaries squirreled away again. Her eyes were inquisitors. “Tell me about Lady Hunt,” she oozed finally like a blister. “What does she think of the cloth?” “She thinks it is magnificent of course. She’s a bit down, her great art teacher died but she’s not against us, if that’s what your wondering. I think the animosity went with her husband, her interest in matters Antarctic as well, I suspect. All she does is make statues.” “Do you think she’s beautiful? People used to say that.” “No”, he said, honestly, propping himself up beside her in bed and winding his watch. “Her nose is too sharp…” be more general “…. I suppose she has a certain vivacity. That must be what people mean.” “Eight years since Captain Hunt perished, must have been very difficult. Were you going through maps with her? That’s what was told to me on the telephone, that she wanted to clear out some things she thought useless but what could prove useful to others.” Emily yawned. He yawned. “Mm,” he said, wearily. “Quite an adventure..I was able to advise her. She’s out of touch with most of the RGS mob. Think they blame her for the debacle that was an expedition.” “Yes but she woudn’t have wanted to kill her own husband, would she?” “No, dear,” he sighed. It was nice to feel something flannelly and floppy and warm beside him after months of separate beds. He almost felt bruised after his ‘modelling’ session. “And also I think you must give her that letter.” And his two socks spun in the gloom like two globes on two pillars in the lodge at the knob of the world. * * * “Mac! Carps! Fellas”… Murchison was calling after them. “Bring us back some baccy…” Then the plea and the figure wallowed in drift until the pathetic hut, the provision- cases and even the Stephenson screen were no more. “Cheer up” Carpenter spluttered down-wind or I’ll quote myself (‘it’s the old dogs for the hard roads’). “What do you think, these harpoons make damn fine ski- poles and well I’m not much for skis myself so I’d say these runner-boards make jolly fine skis.” Mac muttered that the thaw had kicked in, the sea-ice was sea-snow, “But where there’s breath there’s life and where there’s life…help!!” His aphorism glugged into history. The ice had silently opened like deathly jaws, slid back like the portal to some unearthly, watery purgatory. Hector had scarcely realized until Macs fingers twanged a string of his banjo, which then Hector instantly spotted floating like a buoy in the prismatic opening of Spring ice. At once he fell on his stomach and reached out an arm for Mac, whose freezing fingers left the banjo for a second before trying to latch onto the less freezing grip of his imploring comrade but alas, just as the two hands met, a black and sinister shape forced its ugly, brutish head up through the ice-hole and broke the bond, then with a pounding splash, retreated back to seek out its new, human prey. A killer whale! Hector gasped. Mac’s ice-block of hand had come away in his own like a snag of putrefaction, the curled fingers like a buzzards talons. He blenched and threw it away. His makeshift skis carried him away from this jerking scene of horror to fresh ice but it was all thin and all deadly and the walls of a cell from which there could be no escape. Then to his joy, the wind-muzzled voice of his friend Mackintosh resurfaced, a scrap in the teeth of the turbulent breeze, and said ‘All is well, all is well.’ It rang like a church-bell and gave Carpenter pause and cause to thank providence. Mac then reappeared, wringing-wet, almost stiff, waving not an instrument but a soggy green seaweed. “I found this while I was down there,” he ruminated like Jones the science-wonder. “It is a rare species, one of the Spitzbergen kind. Put it in your mitt for safe-keeping.” Hector took off all his own dry furs and padded them around Mac. “I don’t think you will dry but at least the air cannot penetrate,’ he crooned like a father and mother in one, shivering himself but invincible. Suddenly the ice started to crack severely but amazingly their skis held them like pontoons and they found that poling was as good as paddling for propelling them across the advancing tide. Hector was wondering how long he could last without adequate clothing. Mac confessed feyly, out of the blue: “The past week I’ve been reading up, some of the treatises Moncrieff brought with her. Some are like handbooks, some are like dictionaries, some are like Berlitz language and custom manuals for all parts of the world. There is one…well its about animals and I feel pretty sure that I have taught myself…. penguin so when you spot a penguin Boss, give us a shout.” The boss did at once. A six-foot tall emperor was cantering by, obviously on his way somewhere, checking the time as…. of what nature was the hurrying creature in that book? “There Mac, stop it, I’m too damn cold,” Hec chattered, grievously. “Aak, aak, eek, owee, uk, uk, ecc-a-ee, aw mee ga.” The penguin skidded to a halt. “Gwak,” it answered, then turned and drew Macs hand out from under its stub of wing… Hector’s eyes snapped open. Cold sweat. Em awoke, her nightdress clammy. Hector was awash, straight on his back, as rigid as death. Perhaps his heart had finally beat its last. She prodded him. ‘What is it dear. Are you dead?” Which was a foolish question. “Don’t be ridiculous. Nightmare.” He stared for a while into the dark. He stared at the hallucinatory pallid hand bobbing about in his minds eye. What was making him dream of the Cape and the Sound and the Ross Sea? He rolled over and pushed Em onto her side and squeezed her. She was immersed in his sweat, his fear. “Tell me in the morning, it must be awful.” Episodic. “Ek am awsk”, Mac thanked the penguin and dismissed it from further duty. It slid off on its barrel-shaped belly, speedily to avoid the hungry pairs of eyes it presumed to be watching from any one of the huts four misty windows. “That saved us time, eh Boss?” The emperor had towed them through the turgid sea like a trained dolphin. Hector could not speak. Frozen breath had sealed his lips. They had reached Hunt’s headquarters. Not a soul had emerged from the grand hut to greet them. “Pound on the door, that’s the best.” They nodded at each other. Hector, unfurred, looked like an abominable snow giant. “ Bang, Bang” Noises. “Who is it?” “Tell them it’s the Salvation Army.” “The Salvation Army. We’ve some pease porridge to distribute. Any down and outs at home?” An escalation of noise within. The squat stall-like door opened with a whoosh exposing Lady Emily who, blinking out into the white wonderland, whitened herself, in recognition of her Lord. “Good gracious. I would have thought you part of the landscape by now.” They bundled Lord Carpenter inside, dragged him in like supplies through a bunghole, all the time his eyes were rolling at the immensity of Tundra-dom – the chandeliers and walking-sticks and up-to date issues of the Times. What was the food? Bacon and Devonshire cream and asparagus. Emily had on a chic fur of Siberian-fox with matching slippers. “Gave up his own clobber for me, he did,” said Mackintosh humbly and now, “I don’t know we’ll have to rub some feeling back into him.” Luckily, the hut was hot as an oven. Then, responding to the needs of her husband with the automatic intensity of a female for infant, Emily threw off her gaudy attire, pat it over him, knelt down and delivered a plangent kiss on the scaly, frost-bitten mouth and kept her mouth there pumping in life until this freakish, heaven of an outbuilding revealed its deal and cork armature to his eyes wandering through recuperation and remembering and regeneration and…. she had never kissed him that way before. Sir Swithem snaked out from Hunts own little private corner and said: “Ah, that must be the other boy. We knew he didn’t have the stamina.” Emily upreared and faced him like a termagant. “That’s none of your business. I predicted it of you people up here- drowning in luxury without a splinter of human kindness or compassion. Serves Him right if He never returns, the manner in which He treats his comrades.” Sir Swithem wiggled his nose piquedly. Haggish, dirty thing, he thought. What would she do, man every expedition with Girl-Guides of sturdy calf? Then Morris sauntered over. “Play it careful with the ladies,” he mumbled, “especially the married kind. As tautly strung as the wires on this here Bosendorfer.” “Huff. I shall go away and polish some naval technology then. Did you know it is us you must thank for the concealed weathercock? Operates upon the re-distribution of noxious gases principle. The carbon-monoxide from the flue is siphoned into the roof then through an intricate web of welding drawn up into the trivet of the cock, thus percolating the foul through the virginal zephyrs of Aeolus.” “Bollocks!’ said the Boss, hoarsely but could anyone hear? “What’s he done with Captain Hunt, up the flue? Where’s my brother?” Emily swooped down. He was still flat on his back like a carcase. “He had to go”, she whispered, “on a rescue mission. Gwennie and the Queen.Ooh I wish I hadn’t deserted Neo-Georgia, my bumble-footed Hector, but it seemed as if all was up and there were the children to think of…little possum Perky he’s in a packing-case, even now- when the Vikings came I felt sure he would be butchered, what being so plump and only a few years out of the sac, I mean womb. I nailed him in. Oh but Gwennie, our plumsie, even that great piano could not hold her and now who knows what has become of her. But Captain Hunt he was convinced of the wherefore and rushed, oh well he tried to rush but some little matters required sorting out, anyway he has gone, just half an hour since towards Poleheim to bring the Vikings to order and to restore our loved ones to us.” “How come they got away with it? What about the others. What about weapons? Didn’t anyone offer resistance.”? “Captain Hunt had commandeered practically everyone for his small geological trip, so that’s where he was. Jack tried to bribe them with a pearl necklace. The old admiral has as much pluck as a pheasant stew.and Morris, he just got in the way trying to snip bits off the Vikings beards off, you know, to compare it with the hair of modern races. I suppose I should have set myself on fire or something as a signal. Oh I am a failure…” She sobbed, but Hector rejoiced. This indissoluble conundrum fired his heart more than any old scrounging trip. It was a fight. The Tundra King had robbed him of men, of the means of survival. He had over-turned loyalties and be sure of it, he would lose lives. He would dishonour the nation! Hector romped into action. “Mac, stay behind and look after things. I’ll take Morris” Guard well the troublemaker. His motto. * * * Katherine Hunt lay in bed from which she rasped the precise words “Uh, I remember you without clothes”. This immediately divulged her state of seedy abandon. She splayed out on her stomach with her throat constricted and it was from one eye she beheld his solid respectable gentleman’s “holding off” in the doorway. “Come over and roll me up like a rug”, ensued, as she whipped up her knees and went from crucified to foetal, never taking her red, lank eyes from him. Hector then detected the limpness of the bed-coverings, their pasting to her form, the calling–card of fevers, if not dipsomania, that land of plenty trouble. So he tucked her in a little and reversed the damp pillows. She squeaked, pathetic, for a person who could speak lush. He felt sorry she was sick and told her he felt sorry. “Might be tonsillitis, I can’t swallow…agonizing but the worst is this cold, shivery and roasting both at once.” She was curling up more and more, moaning. “Please put something else on me.” He attempted to oblige but could only find Emmy’s cloth in its delivery box. The bedroom was a riot with stacks of documents, catalogues at the foot of the window seat, postcards of art wedged and pinned over every vertical, hairbrushes, withering fruit, a trail of underclothes leading from onset to prostration, and a cream, mushroom blown-glass lamp streaked with pink veins of dye. A sketchblock had been tossed on the floor. ‘The Adoration’ squiggled in it. There it was on the window seat, the stark original. It had been transplanted. It looked like an igneous rock someone had thrown through the window. Hector unfurled the mythical sheet of cure and laid it over the shuddering woman. There in chalk, was Paul Hunt’s autograph completing the ring, in fealty to the empty heart, the fraternal ring - coronet and neck-brace and noose. “There ye are m’dear. Dressed for the ball.” He suddenly pressed his hand into the nub of the world, a handprint in the metaphorical plaster… “in the plaster of eternity” but his hand left no trace on the linen hinterland nor could it even feel her bottom sheathed by something spongy. “Ooh that’s useless,” she swallowed excruciatingly, distorting her features, then kicked like a colt in juicy grass. Beneath was a hefty dressing gown underneath which he supposed her fervid, goose-pimply agony only. “It’s my brother’s,” she slowly referred to the dressing-gown.”It’s not ‘his’ or my fiancé’s. I wouldn’t choose it for myself. Big-boots and men’s ties have run their course with the suffragette marches of the old days.” He was gazing down with hands in pockets at the rack and ruin, smiling not for that but for the naturalness and candour of everything surrounding him. “Its ship-board chaos in here, m’dear.” Tears were welling in her eyes, “Please, I can barely, speak…help me in the bath? I feel I can rely on you. I want somebody to look after me, a bit…please. I need to get warm.” It was a husky shrill cry for help, “ stop smiling!” She tried to shout. “Real pain!” “Are you sure you haven’t a touch of a malady more serious?” “No, I would like to wait before calling the doctor.” She rose stiffly and laboriously, clutching her wrap then linked her arm in his and started to winch him towards the door shuffling her little bare feet Chinesely. How the mighty had collapsed! It dawned on him that her art-queen poo-poohing of the mundane and even her petulance with everybody in the years past might have been public policy – a slapping on of clay over vulnerabilities too angular to pass inspection. “This way,” he indicated, then with one great sigh of emboldened strength lifted her like a baby cuddled in a big rug into his arms. He winked roguishly but her disoriented skull with sopping hair merely lolled on him, her eyes rolled on him. Then she pointed like a lookout man to the corridor, cold and dispiriting, and breathed fast. Once in the bathroom she moaned louder. The heater had been lit earlier, the water had heated. The choking, glugging boiling water twanged against the hollow unplumbed tub and the brass bungle of piping smeared and juddered. She crouched on his lap on a spindly chair. He whistled a shanty into the matted hair at her neck, massaged her thighs through the gown. “Ca suffit’, she croaked. “What would you like in your bath, M’dear…we have lilac crystals and eau-de-cologne. Here is a jar of pearls.” He dropped a pearl in the water to see what happened, it fizzed as he swirled in some cold water. As inviting a puddle as one begrimed could hope for. “I want it hot.” She sounded as deadpan as a dead pan. He’d rolled up his sleeves workmanlike, assured her it was as hot as Hell. When she was in the blotchiness of her sweltering skin suffused into hot-dog parity. Sickness had destroyed the bashfulness, if it had ever existed. She said distantly: “Scoop it over me…no no…. I will sleep in the bath…the ghastliest offshoot of fevers, you know, is the tension of mind, the ghosts and ghouls of thought…I must drown them.” She seemed to be addressing his knee. Her olivey complexion had turned meat-red. What about her hair? It would dry in bed under the blankets, she said. Hector was instructed to anchor her arms as she slid under the water and to keep her steadied while the complete skin suffocated in water. He brought over the chair to save his back. Then as an elbow, she unflexed, unbent, unfolded and sank to the bottom leaving a little island of knees and a snorkel of nose, shut-eyes, weedy rafts of floating hair. Well, she trusted him not to drown her. She was fiercely gripping his forearms, squelching her mermaid’s body a little askew, to do so properly. Of course he had the chance to observe, to contemplate. “Lower me, like Ophelia, if you would be so kind,” gasping, she requested, thinking of the Millais painting as well as of her own refined imaginings of the placid, desirous scene. He stood, then they latched finger-tips and she submerged her head, bubbling, open-eyed, her practice from the pellucid Aegean, her much-admired feat. Hector shooed away the whizzing notion of dropping in on top of her and them drowning together, unless the bathroom flooded first and crashed ceiling, tiles and the lot of them into the basement. But she seemed an insular water-dweller, prune-wrinkling and black-haired in places and middle-aged, bony. It was inconceivable, the idea of anyone else he had ever been on terms with, lying there so completely at his command, so distinctly, threatened, vulnerable, oblivious, unselfconscious, naked, blithe, exposed, testing, asking – an exclamation or a question mark? So she was unique in her level of – faith placing. She was unique in her manner of action, although… He thought of Clara. She twisted the scripts once or twice. Yet Clara was dumpling enough for a fur-trimmed Christmas-card figure skater. Katherine hauled herself up and re-bent, then enclosed her hands around her cataleptic head pain. “Help me, I’m getting out.” She reached out. He braced her; She stepped over the steep enamel walls into the niche of his arms and many grating towels with hideous black and green borders. Immediately she shivered although Hector could only compare her temperature to that of a broiling mutton bone ladled from an active stockpot. “I’ve got to get back to bed” yet he tried at least to milk the bath-water from her lengthy, tepid, tresses. Then, regardless of protest, he carried her again, on the look out for Jobs Mrs, who it seems had snuck in to her lady’s bedchamber and made the bed whilst all was quiet. God knows how the servants interpreted this behaviour. May sick people be excused. The sheets, hospital tight, she fought asunder. Desperately she needed to retain the heat. Desperately she crawled into a tinier ball and zealously stropped one foot upon the other. Desperately she beseeched Hector to aid her. Desperately she suggested the infiltration of his own body-heat. “You owe me one. Paul, by the way wishes you well on the new voyage, tell your wife that. I can imagine she…repines about the either or. the either Hunts man or Carpenters man…thing. But I don’t believe in the ‘sins of the fathers’…do you?” Katherine was mumbling moistly into her hand cradling her chin with that particular recumbent abandonment of the dead-to-the-world infant. Clearly she was unwell. He had seen grubby, cantankerous men reduced to pitiableness by slighter but nevertheless relentless syndromes, the same shovelled out eye-sockets. He thanked her magisterially for contributing her time to the tablecloth and generously kissed her on the ear which provoked a sort of bull-frog titter of: “Get in, I’m for the pyre.” So Hector, being ever attentive to the poorly, scuffed off his shoes and bowled in beside her fully clothed. As if lightening had struck, she felt, with articles in his pockets and buttons, small change etc jabbing into her, the nonsensical aura attached to her request: yet concurrently the sudden surge of heat and comfort stifled her laughter with its wonder. She luxuriated. He curved one big shoulder over her upper-arm to her hand and clamped it; his legs paralleled hers, his upper-body, prominent chest provided the divinest insulation. Two in a tomb. “Head hurt?” he asked with a voice like melted cheese. She nodded so he began stroking the shiny trails of hair across her brow. She could smell the fizzing pearl on his hand. He told her, graphically, about the unmatchable iniquity of high-altitude headaches, to make her feel less special. Not for an instant did a piercing awareness of her shivery hot body leave him. He felt like her overcoat. Is that how an overcoat must feel? How frustrating for the overcoat. Katherine burned with all his weight against her. Undoubtedly a ‘gentleman’ held her. That’s all he did, despite…she felt the vestigial animal in the gentleman wanting more. The small of her back felt him. Then as the euphoria, that sense of blankness bearing the buds of another’s ambience, permeated, the trickles of delirium began. Her voice wobbled like a little girls and sprinkled his hand because she found it so parching to swallow. “What are you like…? I can tell you what I’m like. I’m like all the rubbish in this room. No you, man of action, man of business, man of the moment, what?’ “Man of the imagination.” “So you can build castles in the air.” “I can imagine ways out of them.” A huge hanging photograph of a fading- into- black Captain Hunt as bare as the babe in his arms, above the bedstead, gave symmetry to the scene below except that one wasn’t bare and one wasn’t her father but she was the babe and he could rock her to sleep with Browning’s ‘Youth and Art’…Still there? Try one of my own – I want to feel the arms of God about me, Bathe in the stream of Lethe,
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