The Promise Ese (12) “Yes?” Great fun these old boys. “I presume Livingstone took flour with him?” “No he consumed the local fare. You must have read his works? Africa and Arctic, they both begin with the letter ‘A’.” “But which comes first in the encyclopaedia?” Some good-natured ragging drew a few smiles and laughs. “Hector?” The call came. It was only a matter of when. Emmy was an inevitable. ‘What a charming chaperone you make, m’dear. The room is full of wolves.” “Don’t be silly. Lady Hunt has a request to make of you.” Hector, in accommodating mood, inclined towards her scent. What a wild violet she seemed on the wagon-train of puritanical dreariness. My Mexican wench. He felt possessive, but on what basis? She soared freely, that’s why. He would he could borrow that freedom, forever. “I would like to employ you as a model for my Tasmanian commission. There is a town there, Ross, I’m making them an ‘unknown soldier’ for the square, for the wreaths to lean on. Your wife has granted her consent.” She said, slipping in a measured giggle for the man hoping to borrow some free spirit. “I do hope you can spare me some time. I’ve fallen behind with my timetable, I’ve been unwell.” A spontaneous, delicate cough into her gloved, lily-languid hand. “Oh, said Emily, bemused by the sudden languor, “but he can’t sit still for very long.” “Everyone always says that but you would be surprised.” Katherine settled herself, reservedly, aware of the sidelong glances and whispers and hero-worship, playing for sympathy. Her husband whipped the Pole. Her hand went to the jade. She wore a plush black fur-coat. She looked down onto Emily as they spoke about sittings. Several dowdy ladies gravitated towards them, bringing cups plates and enquiring minds. Katherine’s nerves screwed. Women’s groups were her acknowledged loathing whether relations, schoolgirls, peeresses. As a white woman in a black village of sunburnt Christian evangelicals she stuck out. One must put on the seemliest airs if one chose to come out and be among one’s fellows. She was soon surrounded. Hector hung about off- camera. Her hand in the glove resembled Meurats hand of the pianist. Skipper Wilkes fell in beside him. “She needs rescuing, “ he observed, cannily, then slipped a cigar into Hector’s pocket. “Congratulations for conning the missionaries.’ He grinned. “They’re alright.” Hector returned the grin. “Emily has been cultivating their charity…it means publicity for their cause. A missionary sponsored hydrographic expedition.” Wilkes, a wayfarer. Yet here he was, close to the bosom of Hector’s private affairs. As though his life was being sewn in a bag, the strands pulling together, the insignificant immensifying. Yes it was the lens effect. What was the lens? Was she it? “Go on, rescue the lady,” egged Winkun Wilkes who took it all on face value. Katherines face had been straining in their direction. So Hector broached the cordon of cloaks and cups and with Katherine on one arm, Emily the other escorted them into the hall again to view the ‘magnum-opus’, the cloth. Many had already gone home. “Now you see,’ he begun, magnanimous, waving his arms low across it, “this is the South pole in the centre here, then we have these perilous names lurking about the edges, look some ships have already hit the rocks and lost their cargoes – that is a sledge just floating about and there goes a dog doing dog-paddle and these are the flags of various nations.” “What’s that one?” someone asked. “That’s Norway and here are Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and the blessed Union jack, a little raggle-taggle? Maybe the name of our new ship could go right there, on the invisible pole. You see, Lady Carpenter understands me. Explorers can only see the next ridge ahead, they never know what is at the very heart, that is why this has been left vacant. We maybe able to use this as a surrender flag, or if the worst comes to the worst, a rescue flag. This is my favourite part, this Nunatak or is it Mt Katherine or Mt Alexandra. According to this map, it is the loneliest mountain in Antarctica…” Katherine asked Emily where the dribs of people heading upstairs were going. To the lavatories, it appeared. Some were also leaving through the side doors. Katherine attempted to excuse herself elegantly, determined to sit up there till he bloody well came. No on second thoughts: “Can I borrow your husband for a minute, Lady Carpenter? A library upstairs you say, not open of course…could he hail me a cab?” “Charles can do that.” “Oh well, Katherine said to herself, visibly huffy, “I may as well go then…bumpy journey home.” She plodded up the creaking stairs, feeling incredibly anxious. A little after Hector took his cigar and made up the stairs as if intending to smoke it. I am as I am, he thought, flawed to the marrow and cannot disguise the fact. Katherine, slumped on a padded bench-seat behind a pot-plant chewing on her glove, sat up immediately like a criminal in the dock. “You know why I came here tonight”, she said, “ask Emily. To give them some money, provided they pigeonhole it for exploration purposes – I fear the evangelicals. So that means it is for you and your men. Would you have accepted money from me otherwise, as a personal gift?’ She raced out the words defensively. “I don’t know.” “May as well smoke,” she said, glimpsing the cigar. “Break the fast, hmm?” She surveyed him, obliquely and asked him to have lunch with her sometime…. of course, the statue, it’s urgent. Come tomorrow? Living at Bournemouth…. makes it hard. Can it be arranged? Svengali, I’ve never felt so well since my last bath, except for my neck. Where on earth could this scratch have come from?” She steadied. “Look at my neck, now what blood-sucking eel-fish did that?” ‘On the ice it pays to leave little flags along the trail. In fact, it’s vital. Food or death.” He looked rather at sea. His hands were stretching themselves in their usual energetic routine, poised, whiling away the patience necessary to survive until the next moment. “If you are wondering about my tonsillitis, it wasn’t. Bronchial… Yes and what of ‘Promise’ for a name? I couldn’t imagine anything better, if we two were ever to strike another bargain similarly…sensitive. You look at me as if I was an ice-pack. You look incredulous. Carps!” she twitched, bedevilling… He said: “Check the ‘ladies’. See if they’ve all gone. You know privacy is a rare commodity. Its ‘privates on parade’, eternally, the glare of the sun.’ Once closeted inside the ladies lav she merely said: “Kiss me.” He flicked a little crumb from her lips and then with sparkling eyes did just that, feeding his hands under the heavy black fur around to her buttocks until he felt like Adam encountering woman for the first time. If he could drive her buttocks together he could seal, he could seam, he could jam the fragments of life into a cushion of completeness so that nothing could leak in or out, the earth couldn’t swallow him, his resolve would stay inviolate, his body, mind never fail him, the winds not touch him, the ice have something in it more than colourless, tasteless crystals…and the rift, brook it. “And now its time for this. Its time to leave.” He ran the cigar under her nose with a quizzical, lewd look. His whole mouth was shining wet and soft, his voice, often lilting, a grind of engines at idling speed. He bunched the fur up to her rather pointed face, opened the door and scanned the landing. “Feel me again, won’t you…” she begged. “Can’t.” he said. “No time.” Chapter 2 Potts made-up into a bamboo stripling Bergstrom. The northerners ate more and clambered about the birch forests and their nurses bound ski on their cradles, some grew tall, muscular, confident and not frightened of their own company and embracing whaling as a glorious profession, whilst the Brits flinched at a clubbing and powdery tea-cake bread ensured as runts they lived, but did not thrive. Yet what they lacked in punch they made up for in spirit. Diminutive Colonel Pink had freed a brown people from tyranny. Social freedoms, moral victories were won by English parliaments of reformist zealots and the high thinking throughout the past squalid century of European revolutions and factory children. Bergstrom hit the belly-button of the south, Jansens perfected sledging travel. Yes they truly made a difference to the world! Pink-Potts had such a wonderful face. It smiled intellectually and his compelling sky eyes, deep-set to the point of no return, and his lofty brow, would do for scuffles in the quad. Though Katherine doubted it would convince as the farming-boy turned Somme warrior mourning his pounds of shrapnel-pitted horse-flesh. Even if Hector had rusted with age and the impact of atrocious ordeals, he retained what she thought would suit. Her increasing fondness for him reinforced this view. She was acquiring a liking for little pieces of him. His round ears and eyelashes. But she thought it would be propitious to change the environment, to lay him out on a terrace in Mykonos where bodies baked. It was so grey, yet clearing in Kensington. It was with all this in mind that she jingled smartly through the frosted-glass doors in response to the door-bell, leaving Potts to carry on ‘installing’ her new gramophone. But he left it to look over her drawings of Carpenter, heavily washed and shaded and almost cherubic. He wasn’t so sure that the welding of artist and model improved the art, that her sudden fetish for Captain Hunt’s bete-noir would inspire the strumming fingers of her daemon. And would it soothe her restiveness? An imbroglio. Too many married men. They veered her away from Pinks direction, at least. Maybe her teasing had amused him, however, maybe. He certainly admired the headless great soldier, though. It was a St George falling on the dragon. The shoulder-blades of Pinks own brother, wrists of iron, tender soles, folds of a uniform pock-marked by her thumbs and a horse half inchoate, primordial rock, half smooth. Pink wiped the plaster shoulder then nodded at Jobs Mr, trimming trees outside the conservatory, his ginger hair the only daub of colour in the ashen kiln of garden. His horseshoe shaped saw cut lazily. Intentionally as it so happened. He found the goings-on in the Madams workroom a tonic and a stimulant to guts jaded by a diet of steak-and-kidney. Most bewildering of all – she had never censured him for malingering. When she was alone she liked to lie on the floor. G.E Potts tightened the connection on the gramophones party-hat horn and picked out their voices in the morning-room beyond the french-doors, then two ectoplasmic figures, hazily swaying to and fro. Her chirpy voice died as they lashed heads together. He could see them as one, one pane of the dimpled glass and he imagined her to be smiling – kissing and smiling? Was it possible? He edged a little closer to the doors, gaping like passions vent. Carpenter was stroking her cheek, shut-eyes. After what seemed an interminable time the chatter recommenced. Potts nipped away, unsleeved a brittle record, Beethoven, something traditional, and set the adagio movement from the seventh into slow, crackling motion. “As you can see,” She enticed him through the doors, courting, chirping “we have decided to extend your musical appreciation from palm-court to classical then to symphony concerts. Do you agree?” Uhh, the dull German march to the gallows, as dull as a stretch of lampwick. Nimrod – four minutes in its entirety! As British as mustard! Hector bid good-day to Colonel Pink then went to the monument. All her other statues had been pushed aside to accommodate the W.P. (work in progress). Tin wash tubs and sacks of plaster, and files and pliers to mangle the armature and snapshots of a horse-arse from every perspective clipped on to an easel. Hector noted the fellow sawing limbs. “Are you growing tired of trees’ he asked, sarcastically, “and changing down to shrubs?” “Why?’ She put her fist underneath her chin to consider then said: “Yes, I think Art’s going overboard with the pruning.” “Art?” “His name is Arthur Jobs.” G.E. volunteered to arrest him then went out through a potting porch into the garden. Soon the two men could be seen passing the time of day. Potts had trained himself to endure the low-life, to slum it in the airforce, but sometimes sneaked away from the barracks to nourish his friendships of an equal par. “Now m’dear, how d’ye plan to adhere my head to this splendiferous trunk,” tipped Hector, small and as live as a wriggling fish against a masonry, incumbent Neptune. “Poor coot, obviously fell to the saw, live by the saw die by one.” He wrapped his fingers as far around the headless neck as they could reach. She could see he was hovering in the Kiplingesque, ‘what larks’ type mood that had originally, years ago, weaned her from his causes, his hijinks, his gall. And confirmed her as a Hunt supporter. “What’s up with you?” she demanded. He said he had come for his sitting, neither funfair nor concert else. Strangle Beethoven, thanks. Katherine sighed resignedly and showed him where to pose. She also showed him the position she had decided upon after coughing up a ream of lightening-fast sketches. The ‘Adoration’ plinth, overflowing cushions and bolsters provided the stage for his prostrate soldier act. Then when he had cuddled down, pretending the tassels were horse-hair, she produced the callipers. “I have to measure your skull.” She extended the callipers like a pair of compasses preparing to plot the landmarks on his face. He fancied being chased around the glasshouse with those callipers and landing on the rug like they had before, yet the stove chugged on ordinary and the sky outside was bright and nosey, and there was not a tea-mug to be seen. “Then I mix up the plaster, slap it on thick, mould it then when its dry, rasp it and burnish it.” She transferred his measurements when she had made them onto a diagram like a phrenological illustration. Her smock of the day was sleeveless tunic, something a butcher might wear. When she came again to finetune his pose, he knelt straight, captured her right-hand and tucked it in on his shirt. ‘Feel that?” He raised his eyebrows, as he should for the memorial, questioning God, but for real. His heartbeat felt irregular. She looked seriously into his face, so suddenly sad and wondered if they all looked like that, sitting shivering in the snow waiting to die. This is dreadful, she thought, what if he goes before the work is done? He presumed that would be her prime concern, her damned art. “You know, she said, sweetly, we should go for a holiday after this. GE’s just bought a place on the heath, a romantic secluded place, a little ramshackle…but quiet and private, you know, straight from a Hardy novel.” “What inducement is that? His books document misery.” Nonetheless, he smiled at her sweetness. “I didn’t think you would be able to go abroad and I have a wedding to prepare for. We are honeymooning in Tasmania to co-incide with the monuments unveiling.” He wanted to kiss her but they were watching through the windows of wall, like undertakers. So she kissed him, covered his face with her hands like cloths soaked in plaster, left the eyes free and stared into them, wholly. He wanted so badly to be loved. Em fled from passion, Clara loved being in love, his comrades feared and admired and obeyed him, the ponies had loved him because he fed them maize, perhaps Billy had loved him as a brother for a while, his sisters loved him as a rover and various elderly benefactresses loved his eternal youth, but who loved him for being a nincompoop, and a charlatan and a promise-breaker and a drinker and rotten father and worse poet and gambler with lives, and loser of the Pole and bankrupt and a wet-eyes and a jester? He said: “I’ve been thinking of you, lately. You are part of the deal. I model, you pay with yourself.” “Strange, she said, I’ve also been considering you in….in a separate context, as the single person whose example drove my husband to his end.’ Hector felt savage. “He deserved it m’dear after deliberately cutting me out of the glory. Furthest point south in 1902 – Billie and he, Carpenter back at the tent minding the un-cooperative ‘curs’. He had no right to deny me that. I had kept up with the best of them, matched their pace, done my share of the relays and dog-whipping and dog slaughter, but when the hey-day arrived – someone, says Hunt, has to mind the animals. Dogs could have hightailed it into the mountains for all anyone cared. They were sick and wormy. One of the worst days of my life. And he expected me to thank him! ‘The hand that rocked the cradle’, rather the hand….” He curtailed the indictment. “The glass here is like a shop-window at Christmas …a smooch in the W.C, precious kafuffle on the rug…. what, you would deny me as well, carry on his dishonourable deeds? Don’t you like me a bit?” “I thought you would pose gratis.” “Doing is owing.” Oh he did resemble a ticked-off snitch. She took her hands right away and put them on her knees and sized up his hurt. Mild. “What do you mean,” she almost whispered, inoffensive, patient, cheerful, “you want to plant your pole, is that it? Messy and I’m still young enough to bear children…forty-two. I may be bohemian but I’m not brainless.” He blushed. “Well we can do something about that can’t we?” “Goodness Carps,” she said spryly, “just have a regenerative rest on the cushions here, there’s a dear. You healed me the other week, with your breath, and your heat. Told you I never felt more blooming” “Please don’t call me that – it brings back repulsive memories.” “As bad as all that, eh?” Rest your heart, my love, she thought, and lovely eyelashes, as she squashed him into position. He fixed his eyes onto the plaster rifle-barrel, innocuous against the horse-belly but grabbed her apron before she could bolt. “Let me call you something,” he said, still tremulously heart-sick. “Let me call you rabbit – as a boy I used to watch the neighbours rabbit over the fence and wish it was mine. It was white with black patches, called ‘Fortnum’. I wish you were mine.’’ His voice had wound down to sentimental. She was touched; more than she cared to admit for no one had spoken so plainly and sincerely to her before. Boys had threatened to shoot themselves for her and Hunt had played the roué, Jansens had compared her to a neve – here a sentimental Irishman with fluid tendencies lyricized with five short words - must be the language of love. Katherine the washer-woman bustled about her tubs and buckets until the porridgey plaster saturated her wads of cloth like a bread and butter pudding. When he had made his confession she had snuffled her nose, rabbitlike and poked out her tongue very engagingly. Art, artfully assisted, bending the constructive fencing wire into a chassis for the soldiers ruffled head of hair and sweat and unquiet bamboozlement. His redness and muscularity set the scene from ‘L’assomoir’, the steamy sniffs of people at work in haste to get the task off their shoulders. Hector talked non-stop, feeling bouncy again, happy to be preserved young and strong for all time even his frame said old and weakening. He dashed of an autograph for the artless Art unnerved by the presence of seasoned greatness and told him his wife jobs mrs baked delightfully and kept the house spic and apart from the scuffled, webby conservatory, span to the point of monumentality – you know a monument like this here man’o’war to the virtues of domestic decency. Leastways, he was polite, Art thought compared to the other japing scions of art-school who mussed the floors and smelled of wax crayons and left aside Mrs Jobs teas, too full of lard for their lah-dy-dahing waistlines. Now Captain Hunt, he had o’erweened with his civility to the staff to the point where they preferred skulking by him to evade the pats on the back and the pay-rises and the patronizing waffle about teamwork and stiff uppers. And he also shied from the lardy dumplings. H.A. Carpenter was not the man to disparage cooking; one could tell by the way he ate up the mistress of the house. Guzzle too much more of her, and there won’t be any left for afters, quipped Jobs startlingly to himself. “Now we wait for it to dry a little. Thankyou Art…” She sort of taunted his loyalty by tossing her steamed together fringe of reddy-brown hair and hipping her ruddy hands like the laundry maid and winking for the teapot instead of bidding. Hector imagined he spotted a frisson of a little something between the man with the saw and the pliers and the ginger moustache and good-for-nuthin lounginess. And the lady alone who played in her room without blinds. Eventually the day pipped by and the tides of elation at a moderately well-executed lump of forehead washed into relaxation. Potts had long gone to primp his fifty lines of self-revelatory text. She chiselled at the fin of her soldiers tunic as Hector almost trotted from one statue to the next, the statues randomly disposed of like jumble-sale bric-a-brac. “Emily has gone away for the fortnight to Limerick with some girl-guides, the good-girl-scouts, to roam about the upland and refine their complexions, he laughed. “Is she vying for a berth on your ship then?” He said he had nowhere particular to stay the night and was wondering… “I don’t know, she said, inattentively, squatting beside the great white beast of caked powder. “I don’t even let Gerald sleep over. You were lucky to see my bedroom.” “A dump. M’dear, I shouldn’t wonder you keep the civilized masses from its shores.” He waved his tired cigarette at her like a wagging finger then pinched her bottom. “When I am working the scent of a challenge elates me, disembodies me…. you have been extremely cute to me today, cousin, but my wings are tied. I must get this finished. I work by candles and all the defective elements brilliantly reveal themselves, then I must smash them into willlessness.” “I made up a poem at the slideshow the other evening and now it invades my memory. Do you wish to hear It.”? He was looking into the yard at a pair of fanning doves jousting upon the neat stack of lopped tree-flesh. “Yes she said, indeed. She swabbed her hands on a wet towel, examined the thread-like trails of plaster that skeletonised the creases of her palm then sat with her back against the old blocked fountain for a breather, laying her head on one of the Moorish cushions. And over the billowing furlongs The ships come more and more Clippers and cutters and barquentines Life-boats and sloops by the score Their engines a’grumble, their rudders befouled And all a’churning the sea Until one ship rises above them all The marvellous ship that is me! And Kate she stands near the back-door All hatted and coated and wan Her face is a mask, her gloved knuckles ask For the folly to be quickly done. For then they must shudder, then they must mould Her hands steer the ship on its way To the reaches of Hell, the buoy with its bell Tolls the ship of her Will out the bay. She had several drawings of Hector fanned in her hands like playing cards. She said, disgruntled: ‘You have a prodigious memory rabbit-tamer but I must say – the head won’t do. You have such a severely anguished look in your eyes….yes they laugh and plead but they are lonely and testament to suffering. Look, whatever it was. Now when I first met you the eyes were ravenous, eager, fighting things, now they have come through but not unscathed, come through battles…. I need a soldier who is ready and willing to fight until death for his country and honour. So I’m afraid the head needs be pulverized when the plasters dry. Fortunately it was only preliminary moulding. Meurat, you know used to smash his pieces with a mallet and then rejoin them differently to be the fragments of lives. But I think the sketches are worthy, in fact, here you are, penurious soul, give them away as mementoes, they may be valuable one day.” “Perhaps then you could adhere my head to the equine rear-end.” She fluttered six leaves of grey drawing paper into the dusty air and watched six fragments of Hector land in the dust – a sleepy, puzzled, putting-it-on, vanquished Hector. He was surprised and suggested she ask Potts to try and resuscitate his face from it superior attitude and assume the Jobs vernacular. The man of the people. Katherine sighed, her teeth a little rabbity, and said she felt hungry. “Why don’t you take me out Sir to alleviate this famishment?” She sat up waiting like meerkat for the danger to impinge itself –plucky but fatigued by holding the erect, wary shaft of spine. “Thought you be cross, wasted a day. I’d prefer to do the asking.”
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