The Promise Ese (11) Wrestle with the standing enemy Until, obedient he lies beneath me. Only then may laze to slumber turn, And the patient arms of God relax, Only then the child champing to be born Might mask its birth, claiming attack. He did have another verse scrambled away, but the above served him well enough for girl’s keepsake annuals. “Now you can see why I’m not a poet,” he fizzled far off…sssss like a firework into her low, abating consciousness. “And why I have let you.” Because she was asleep. Her whimpers of misery had ceased, like the sparklets of a Katherine wheel. ‘Chicken! Chicken.’ In the fireplace wind skirmished but it was belligerent rather than verbose. She opened her eyes, listened. The whatnot at the vistas-end of her preliminary glance displayed mute carnival glass. ‘Chicken!’ Aslant, her gaze zoomed back to the hand on her arm, dipped. Then she startled and turned but lion-heart, he couldn’t be there. What was his voice exactly? She grazed her left hand all over the sheet where Hector’s solicitous body had nursed her. Flat. Cold. Sad. In her right hand – a tickle of paper. She zipped under again like an incorrigible jack-in-the-box. The letter! She had unfolded a quarter; enough. ‘Leo,’ she called back to him. ‘Chicken,’ he replied as nebulous memories do. On her breast she put the fledgling letter to stop its heart failing through heat loss. ‘Come in my little dugout with me,’ she whispered to the paper. I’m sick but does anyone care. He was most kind. You said he was a cur.’ Katherine’s fever was running a crèche for ousted memories, a joining of hands in the spirit of reconciliation under the sweating bed-clothes tree. ‘Deary me, the promise, the promise, the promise. Won’t you venture down here with me – ham in the sandwich of thighs…’? She fanned some fresh air. Leo had been her first man. ‘For years I saved myself up for someone such as you, healthy and virtuous and strong… and with a straight back and then what a time squandered.’ How many of those willing boys she could have taken. ‘Now make up for the lost time, petty pois.’ Queer how she could remember Richard’s (Leo’s )‘bit’, but fought to reconstruct the notes of his voice. ‘Well-disciplined bit’, she snickered. ‘Wiggle it for me – wiggle bit! At Once, Sar – do it for the Royal Navy – you would, wouldn’t you, blushing. Show-off. What about Jansens? Never made enough headway with him to elucidate. My Eagle, Jansens.’ She sighed. ‘No not a wiggler. A bergschrund. A peak! Snatch a peek? Thankyou Dr. Jansens, might take you up on that. So old now, missed out, missed Meurat. Hectorrr, let me tell you about your colonial enfant tres beau, closer than a eucalypt to heaven. The heroic great sentinel gum.’ Katherine heaved her breaths harder and harder as the oxygen diminished then broke out and gulped like a fish. Then she thought of the beautiful young men on Hunt’s ship when she toured it the final time – the horsy one with the look of death. And Billy’s wife savaging her in the lobby at cocoa-time. Why? Didn’t she long to consume her husband on that last night? Richard and I – we are orgiastic. Mm pray together, you two highest church. My God Priapus. Katherine light-headedly tumbled from her bed to the bales of documents, journals and correspondence, eventually fishing out a blue leaf of writing paper before crawling back into her salubrious hollow, where the two writing papers could be married. She laid them margin to margin and propped herself on one elbow. Buff meet blue. She read Hectors typing thoroughly then read leonine Richard’s lovely curlicues. Oh, they went their separate ways at one point. Hector had expunged any reference to his health when issuing his blue copy. Now he seemed not to care. But still she had conjectured about Hector’s dicey heart if that’s really what his condition amounted too. Richard and Billy had made the ad-hoc diagnosis, arrogantly and delighted in letting the penny drop at the feet of various influential people. The rumours origin, she thought. Then she traced some fading words with a sucked finger – Am-ar-Amaranthus…heartsease. Tosh, she thought, which Hector had seen fit to include. On the blue was a scratchy star in lieu of signature, like a paw-print. Some either kind of secret dig, she supposed, his crooked sixpence star yet it added whimsy to what was pride. Why untrustworthy, Richard? she asked. She rummaged around for page one of the Promise letter. That too was eventually found and after some years of apartness, reunited with its second. Nothing further, merely family references and complaints about auxiliary power and the loader. That’s right; lumber your wife with bellyaching, pour out your troubles… Katherine groaned out of bed, put on the dressing gown then screwed up the incipient Amaranthus portion and poked it in between the bars of the grate where it burned slowly as tight balls of paper burn. Next she took Hectors copy and kissed it to page one – married, folded the pair in half, called to Jobs Mrs for tea and to find out what had happened to the noble Carpenter… feel woozy. * * * Everyone had made their suggestions. Hundreds of letters had been flooding the newspaper office. Now here was hers – ‘Christen Ship Promise.’ A telegram. Hector imagined the revelation to have swept upon her after she had opened her hand. Swept over her like the flushes. So the housekeeper had not got to it beforehand, nor the fantasies, nor a draught. ‘Get Well Soon’ he cabled back, concerned. Mac and the boys at the office had advised him against the park, since the sky looked stormy. However he needed somewhere to rest. He wanted to create distance. Captain Hunt, through his statue, as usual, lived as far away from mankind as anyone ever could, in legend and in the stellar mists. A mite of a bird must have decided his statue presented refuge. In command of thyself, indeed! It buzzed and bothered the impassive countenance. Stoical it remained. It pushed into Time. The teardrop- bodied bird pecked at the concrete Burberry coif, it pecked at the eye. The memorial showed Hunt in full polar regalia, impregnable, planting a pole, questioning the Yonder, aping the slim, strong, blonde disdain of the Norse Jansens who set the fashion for all Seigfrieds in the future to follow. One had to exude modesty and reclusiveness. One had to embody geographic and scientific piety. But one also had to growl and be master. Hunts chiselled-out pupils brought to mind the browny areolas of Katherines nipples, held in suspension, distended by bath water. Look in your notebook and study accounts, implored the more dutiful Hector, think of the “Promise’, already named the ship in truth, have you, in your mind? I can think of what I like. The supine promise of the treasures at hand in the bath-tub. What if she wasn’t his ‘type’! She was game. Obviously he was game. Every adventurer was game to the very core. “Most definitely, but Loyalty, where does that come in? Now really, Carps there’s a safer bet. She’s frilly, I fancy, and young. Couldn’t find one more nubile or more tight….’ A bright, young shop-girl marched by squeezed almost to death by a scarf and knitted cloche-type hat. She didn’t look twice at the miserable chunk of Hector on the bench but she smiled…she smiled momentarily. The vulgar comment had frozen him to the slats. Its tone dumped on him like a tsunami. The content undermined the tone. The teller….racier than his own conscience. “Yes, I admit, a bit too bar-room for the Navvy.’’ And he said Navvy! It was Captain Hunt! Ogling the fair sex? Hector had his doubts. He had been holding his talisman shard of star-glass which he kept in his silver cigarette case. His grip tightened upon it. He wanted to peer through it to see if the apparition dissolved in the process. “Not on your life”, said the apparition, “and incidentally I know what you did to my wife with that glass implement. She sick and all, shame on you. Nothings changed, has it Carps. Once a cad, always a cad.” Captain Hunt seemed apparelled for his own funeral in a well-cut black frock-coat, white silk stock, but hatless. With his old pipe. His legs-crossed, one arm along the top of the bench, untouched by the militant winter air, a sort of balding dandy. He purred and puffed. “She’s a very handy woman,” he smiled, off-centre, suddenly arose like an enormous phantom jackdaw, and tapped his pipe at the statue’s winning physiognomy. “As you have discovered, a percentage of you has discovered. Take the lead, dear boy. Take the lead. Give her a shock. Lead her by the nose. For too long she has had it over men with her free and easy ways. Inconsistently persistent like this Southern Corngrinder. Birds!” Finally the birds buzzing had riled him, he, the statue…interchangeable. In Hector’s view, this was the worst Hunt, that fortunately he had had very little truck with whilst the best Hunt had lit the sky albeit briefly on the very first expedition, the seminal ‘Deliverer’. The two young Turks had been able to speak to each other, then, with single entendres and fulsome respect, both endeavouring to advance the Antarctic map and oceanography and British interests and their own incompatible ambitions. The apparition slithered towards Hector, “Anything to say for yourself, hmm? I believe you have ‘known’ God, ha,” he laughed vaporously, “in not the way you have known Ama, but tell me, it’s the pay-off for the Second Degree, may I be corrected if I’m wrong?” “Third degree.” “Of course, the gaining of this knowledge foredooms the recipient to an eternal and compulsive lust for more. The eternal lust.” ”The infernal lust”. Hector lashed at the pipe and crumbled it to dust then as he moved to strangle with the cravat, Hunt stayed his arms. “Isn’t there something you would care to have resolved?” He seemed to be growing larger again. “Yes, was it scurvy that killed you?” he asked the funereal splodge. Now that one Hector could auction off to the newspapers yet he surmised a wicked silence from the ghost story of his own weaving. Captain Hunt bowed his head of thinning hair, grew smaller and winced; “I wanted to leave my son a father of substance and leave my wife her hero. There was no other option. “There are always other options.” “Billy said so. You see that is where we differed.” Hector refused to strangle a man when he was down. Mercifully, the apparition walked back into the statue, wearing his hangdog depressed face that the ashlar absorbed, using a transfiguring beauty-gel of Clara’s, because Katherine had grafted a hero from the relics of an ordinary and worried man. Hector crowed to himself then he berated himself for neglecting to confront the ghoul about the letter. Take the Pole and be damned. What can anyone do with a plot full of Pole? Lunacy. He took a substantial gulletfull of wintry air and watched the people whisking through the park in their disguises. * * * “The little bird is the herald of death. Why I thought you would have known it.” Emily. D. Carpenter. * * * “Morris, I can readily take along someone such as yourself. He would never waste the penal code on someone so…common, common garden civilian.” Hector had dined on five-star hoosh for five days before departure and felt his knuckles itching for retribution. Captain Hunt and his confounded rocks. “Rocks in the head. One question in the examination, I recall, “If one man had one sledge and there was two tons of rocks to carry but only one day of rations plus a blizzard, how many hours would he spend packing the food and how many calibrating the rocks?” “Huh.” Walt’s broomhead moustache had crusted in particle snow “and did anyone know the answer?” “One did, the Tundra King but when asked the next day he had simply forgotten what it was.” Hector saw it wasn’t to be a convivial, chatty slapdash after the Captain. He had chosen to plod unassisted by beast with neither tent nor provisions, just a tailored polar bear pelt and pockets stuffed with Belgian marzipan. Lord knows what the tracks were that he and Morris were hot on. Like a treble width ski with dinner forks at intervals. Soundless and sightless until the dark mast of a tent drew nigh. “Steady yourself, old man, you never know what we may find inside.” “Only Greaves, is that you Boss, so glad..” The lad fell a–blubbering, sprawling on the inadequate floorcloth. One of his feet was big. “Dunno, can you have the fever partway up your body. My foot, Boss, think it has a separate heart, cause the rest of me’s fine except – I don’t like that Tundra Hunt, Boss, I should never have deserted you, we thought you was for it, but…. he is a bad man.” The poor chap fainted in the arms of his beloved leader who cursed softly. “Well, well, well heres a sick ‘un. What shall we do Walt. What would they do up in the Yukon?” “Shoot him dead.” Hunt had not left even one ski, a stove, or a wafer or more pertinently, a sledge. “So we carry him with us, and ‘the lone trail lures us on’”. Then suddenly a steady grumbling blew their direction, the grumbling of a thousand glaciers discharging at once, hurricane grumble, grumble of dyspeptic earth farting quakes. A tractor tilling a field on a still summer afternoon. On they plodded, feeling a tractor in the poppy-field summer would be gladdening to their snow-sore eyes, when out of a cloud what should appear but a tractor on packing case and dinner-fork ski! A-ha, the troops! Oh they thought they were the pharaohs of the frozen south in their super chariot but even two men with a limp body over their shoulders hiked faster. The gawping tractor crew were strangers to Hector, but they recognized Morris the Alaskan anthropologist. “Boss Carpenter,” he said laconically to the crew. “He will save women.” “Exactly so I am leaving Greaves in the tractor with you hoods. Take care of him.” Carpenter’s beetling brows pummelled opposition, but a little man like a parrot threw Hunts usual argument at him – the sick man is a drain on resources and hampers the fitter. “Buffoon,” the boss’s fury answered with an attempted swipe but his fur-cast arm was stiff. “Who would think…” muttered the swayings of loyalty among the brethren. In unison their heads turned to South, their tractor column continuing at strolling pace. Even above the engine a furore became audible. “Blast, blast, damn and blast, I love doggies you know. I thought I had it cinched – two ponies fore, doggies aft and the all-terrain tub floating between. And now, well the doggies are just too tired and the horses have begun to nibble each other – so I’ve left them to forage out there, see, let them off their wires for a while. Its purely a question of morale with the ponies.” Captain Hunt lifted his green-tinted goggles for a moment to wipe away the condensation. “What! Oh no…” He shaded his hand across his eyes to pan the vicinity – not a pony in sight. “Can you believe it?” he said, “They’ve absconded, the ungrateful good-for –nothings. The finest vitamin enriched fodder, felt-lined stalls and raised pony bunks to keep their hooves from the icy ground. How dare they do this to me! What do…Oh its you, is it really the commanding bumpkin from neo-Georgia?” He snapped to attention. “Muscling in on my territory again. This is a RN, RGS, RS, RA sponsored and funded rescue bid and I am its leader.” All the self-pity, disbelief and grizzle ticked off into the rosary-pouch of the Crusader; Hunt of handsome fetlock, regular teeth and stern, haughty visage, uprose. “Apparently,” remarked Hector dryly, “ but its curtains without transport.’ “What do you mean – here comes my tractor.” As he spoke, its engine died. “Well what rhymes with Hunt, C - - -? How could you have been so brainless as to have let the Vikings pillage your hut? As it stated in all the briefs – be on the aware for Bergstrom and co, located North east of the pole and still searching for it.’ “He didn’t read the briefs,” a traitorous voice blared from the tractor. “He was too busy filing his finger-nails.” Everyone laughed, especially the sick man. Morris slapped his thighs – and all his teeth were gold. Hunt retreated to his improvised canvas-tub sledge and sat down. “I must think about this,” he said in a pother. “What have you got in that thing?” asked Hector. Hunt raised a corner of sacking. “It’s my golden rock and you can’t have it. It’s to pay the ransom – I mean there may be a ransom demand, on the cards would you say?” Hector stared at the considerable nugget. “Give in, would you?” he questioned contemptuous, then called, “Right lads, once more unto the breech,” and many men dived like rodents from the tractor into the sea of snow and banded together behind their new leader. Greave’s foot had miraculously resurrected its blackened tissue. The mood was upbeat. “Very well,” Hunt burbled to himself, “you go ahead and I’ll follow. What a pair of mitts you’d make,” he said, half-heartedly to his favourite dog, White-Cloud. * * * After the applause had died down, Hector prepared to speechify. He put his thumbs in his waistcoat and surveyed the tracts of geriatrics and Sunday-school graduates. Emmy was next to him on the stage, as grande- damerie as her humility allowed. The completed cloth made a gracious altar-cloth on the trestle table and the slides were set. Hector had donated a cache of lantern slides to the missionary Society and upon this occasion talked his Skipper into providing the commentary, Skipper a charming and confident snuggle of grins and light-blue eyes and mawkish, humorous elocution. “Ladies and gentleman, honoured guests etcetera,” Hector commenced. “Many times have I been asked why and many times have I answered, the choice is not my own and the task of exploration seems not a sane one to those that have not experienced the calling but it is what I know and remains the truest and most stringent test of Faith that one could hope for. So far we have weathered the storms and god willing may we beat back the stings of all storms that threaten to overturn our diligent seeking. It has been said that the icy wastes reaffirm mans insignificance on this vast earth, that he is diminished but I prefer to think the opposite to be true. The scope of the empty plain magnifies man into a great and significant event, it makes the small man, large by virtue of his humanity unique in a wilderness where other life is almost non-existent. Such a life entails responsibility. He must not smear the unsullied reaches nor attempt to disgrace the virtues of his simple humanity, because nowhere else on our Earth, does God see clearer, than on the snow plains where there is nowhere to hide. And er, this magnificent tablecloth, for the fledgling explorers on our new ship, as it looks as white as snow, can only serve to remind them of the responsibility that so many have been willing to bear before them, in the name of Progress, scientific endeavour and the witnessed Truth.” Emily thought he was truly great for once, if a trifle convoluted. Then the Skipper Stanley Spencer Wilkes assuming front and centre at the prompting of Lady Phyl Moncrieff, a somewhat gargantuan, over fed MC, commenced with a jest along the lines of “the tablecloth failing to remain as pristine as it is tonight after a few weeks on the mess-table, under the mess-table, etc with the men…” Jests relating to drunkeness sunk in the creaking, white-washed, tin-ceilinged hall like lead balloons except when they spouted from Wilkes – a waverer, but a navigator of undisputed genius. Hector never tired of letting people know. “Before the slide presentation,” gobbled Moncrieff like a friendly turkey, I’m hoping that Captain Wilkes will undertake in layman’s terms to outline the nature and the purpose of the proposed new voyage – where exactly are you going?” He said, the rascal, they were planning to explore some uncharted islands down south then go treasure- hunting. “Allow me to qualify what the Skipper has said,” Hector interjected, judiciously. “Missionary expeditions of the past two-hundred years throughout the south pacific have reported upon the existence of an island, an island of mystery and rare plants, 250miles south-west of Rarotonga. They tentatively called it Terrascotia, in honour of a Glaswegian cleric, Father McGuffie, but have since met with difficulties trying to relocate its precise position. There may be Kanaka type peoples living there. By intensive study of some old maps and charts we hope to be the first to grab hold of the palm trees and nail them to within a few degrees of dead cert. Latitude and longitude.” Conspicuous in the audience a wily reporter beknownst to Sir Hector grinned at the strange announcement then nudged the fellow next to him who in turn nudged a lady in front until eventually the series of discreet nudges reached the podium and Lady Moncrieff. She nodded her head vigorously then whispered to Wilkes who whispered to Hector “ I’m not sure. Do we have a name for the ship?” He shook his head and smiled then declared, smugly to the audience: “No we do not have a name for the ship, well we may, but until the official announcement, arranged to coincide with the er…enshrining of our rowing-boat the J.C on the roof-top of a city store on the tenth of March, our little craft shall remain the ‘ship’.” Gazump the unveiling, never! There was a hint of a murmur but most everyone had come to see the slides and to hear Wilkes yarn in his youthful, nonchalant way and the finished table-cloth, Hector, missionary business, even the sandwiches and cakes melded into a shadow of the Stalwart’s flaming progress. Hector sat back and watched the tapestry ships flounder through the dangerous shoals of signatures and maritime symbolism. He imagined his coffin filling it out like a strong sou’westerly and all the people dabbing their eyes and doodling on his eulogy leaflet and not singing. He thought of the open-hearted crowds welcoming them from New Georgia Island, the rivers of people, the river of love, the love of the public which lay upon one like clover. Then personal, private one-upon-one love, the love with a dirk up its sleeve and poisoned lace handkerchiefs. The more threatening love. His children were sitting in the front row with the Moncrieff girl and her Father, bearded, patriarchal. Charles, a sullen studious youth, head cocked like a ruminative medical-man already and Gwennie, motion-picture sensation if she could pull off the Clara bow. Hector subsided on the banks of his own wit. The gas was being lowered and the slides were slotting in and out. Winkun Wilkes could nose um into the teeth of a gale and keep a steady course. There, a splendid panorama of the Island. Hector peeked. The audience seemed entranced by the sheer razors of ridges and the glissading glacier ice. How beautiful it looked! How he longed to picnic there on a snow-ramp over looking the wineglass bay with… “That’s Lady Hunt isn’t it.”? Emmy smashed his visions with a whisper. He jumped. Her lantern-lit fleck of face had come along side, craning from its chair next to his. He said nothing. “There,” she continued quietly, “at the rear of the hall. Just came in this minute.” “Its dark. Could be anyone.” “But you said she was tall” Emily was persistent. “Do look would you”. Hector frowned a snorting frown and trained his eyes into the Hades of ambiguous figures. Three along the back partition. My god, her hair was knotted in a kind of burnoose. She stood out, one candle in a branching candelabra. Her face was immobile. All faces were turned into the wind of the screen and the jaunty narration and asides and the lantern glow danced spears of golden light over the special wefts of chameleon silks. Hector satisfied his wife with a positive identification. Then the Skipper uttered some trenchant simile, or just slowed his voice, enough to make the hair stand up on peoples necks at the tragedy of the maiden ‘Stalwart’ succumbing to a cold molestation by a cruel-hearted ice-king with her masts; once again tearing at the sky their message of help, the ant in the palm of a giant, black on white. Hector always thought he was over it. The silence in the hall was a mid-winter silence. Wilkes, the wizard, making him cry, making the entirety cry, making the ‘Stalwart’ cry out her suffering. Katherine had not moved. Would she cry for a ship? Would she cry for the annihilation of his ambitions? Because that is what the ships loss meant to him now. The rest was addenda. Through his mizzly eyes he saw her handkerchief. The ensign of emotion. Thank God she had a heart. He couldn’t love anyone who hadn’t. Emily, impermeable, said: “I should invite her down to Bournemouth since our sons are friends. What about the Sorley-Sharpes? What about a picnic when spring comes, before she is married?” “We don’t know them well enough,” he said firmly. Emily had become so familiar lately, her casual, gossipy, far- from-the-bone, grabs at his ear all because he had turned abstemious. Then the frothing and mooning about, all because she had reintroduced the ‘physical’ into their relationship – her idea of it, that is – a pet and a poke. He almost preferred the brooding scrutineer Emily with her drilling eyes and devious ways. The settled in her wifeliness Emmy dragged like a sea-anchor. He could fight her off again if the worst turned to the worst – the wurst to the best, Clara had written on a further card from Munich – schnapps kingdom. “Pat will buy me anything, my own the-ater, hmm.” Jolly good. “Well,” kept on Emily, “what about dinner in London.” “Dear woman, he said without averting his dilatory stare from the auditorium, “are you that curious? I’m surprised you’ve not served on some committee with her by now – reformed polar explorers or widows of lost seaman. Telephone, have a talk by all means but exclude me from arrangements. She is the foe, after all.” He paused. “Why not approach her when the show is over…. may be hungry.” “Yes she is painfully thin.” said Emmy with a purpose in mind. Hector’s doughy, syrupy, sugary, cream-puffy, fruity, raspberry-jammy painting of supper co-erced Wilkes to the missionarie’s hall. Hector had appointed pockets of men all over the land to promote this voyage, because if it didn’t ‘make’ them all for life- rich and famous, happy, nothing could. So carte blanche to the youngsters. Hector felt he was too tired. Misty-eyes and the audience concentration had amazed the Skipper. “You would have thought the war exhausted all feeling.” The big-wigs from the South-Sea branch accumulated in the men’s corner of the supper room, to pore over Wilkes’s maps. “It’s a boy’s tale for sure,” Lord Moncrieff said, “Now what about this treasure?” “Captain Kidd’s”, the skipper laughed fitfully. “Five-million pounds there for the taking – and the giving, of course, Cocos Island. If Britain was to lay claim…” Reverberant and crammed about the supper trestles. Dunking, spilling, half-bitten scones. Gwennie and Evelyn attending like slaves to the ranks of the thirsty. In swanned Katherine, her light gait distinctive, particularly in comparison to the closed walk of Emily who accompanied her, her new toy. Charles slunk behind, probably counting footsteps or the feet, or watching for elephantiasis in the ankles. Hector presented him as a future president of the Royal College of Surgeons, yet the young man said his interest ran with psychological disorders, his primary aim was a science degree, a solid grounding in all the sciences. “And then Dr Livingstone. Would you not want to follow in his footsteps, my lad?” Suffused with waggery, Hector elbowed Wilkes; “Say Stan, I warned you, as a Stanley…” “I presume…”
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