Storymania - The Promise Ese by June M Harcourt

The Promise Ese (15)
June M Harcourt

“So far there are two boys, opposites, one fair and one dark, one good and the other bad I suppose…like those two”. A blonde- headed boy had draped his liquorice under his nose like a Fumanchu moustache and was bowing to his curly haired companion.
“Yee.. es,” she said drolly, stifled by the children but what did they care for her bare legs? He dragged her off to the shade of a willow and resumed the story.
‘Well one is in a cave and one outside of it and the one inside is tapping morse-code to the one outside.”
“Is this how you tell it to your son?” she queried with her wet feet itching in the plush grass. She dried them with her summery dress tight over her drawn-up knees.
“No, I try to be more poetic.” So took her hand and held it like a swain passing time with his sweetheart. “Now the dark boy doesn’t know morse-code but he assumes it is a distress message because there is very little air in the cave, its dank and depressing. He doesn’t know that for certain, though. But as it turns out the fair boy is really the dastardly one and is trying to lure the boy down by pretending he wants to come out. ‘I want to share the beauty of this cave with you’. What do you think could happen next? Can he break down the wall of the cave to effect a rescue? Well, he finds a way in, the fair boy grabs him then climbs out and runs away. In the process a rock is nudged aside, divulging a vein of gemstones so the dark one is unexpectedly made rich. The fair one was planning to block the entrance but changed his mind, he’s gone.”
“Faulty story, Hector because you have confused the fair with the dark. The dark should have been in the cave to start off, the fair walking by.”
How could he convince her it was a deliberate reversal?

                                                                               * * *

       On the Sunday GE returned to do some work on his cottage, reshingle a portion of roof to be exact. Hector filled a circular wicker basket with shingles which G.E hauled up onto the roof. This was how they had lifted ice onto the ship to melt for water. Katherine had walked to the village for milk. For pure indulgence she liked milky, liberally sugared tea and rich cocoa. When she was sculpting, however, black strong thin spiced and toxic things kept her going. She had at last finished her-‘unknown soldier’. After a while, Hector ascended the ladder to see the treetops, to view the incline of the roof, to check if Potts might fall – not that the height was life-threatening. Hector was a just a cautious man. He passed wedges and tools to Potts who worked cleanly and efficiently. All his time at the cottage was stolen R.A.F. time but he thought a week of rain was on the cards and he didn’t want his Syrian carpet spoiled. He asked Hector how things were going.
‘Think she misses Hunt, her one and only love. I’m too ordinary. Do you know many arty folk – the Sorley- Sharpes of the world? Katherine seems to know them all. Makes me feel as small as a flea. Oh now I can see her coming back down, the road. Asked her to buy sausages.’
“My neighbour can supply anything. By the way, I shouldn’t worry about being ordinary. Jansens, highly intelligent but not artistic in any way.” He felt like saying ‘served to amuse her’. G.E., however, raised his head to glance at Hector who had his elbows on the spouting, whose eyes deeply in shade under Katherine’s floppy hat could have been staring or not staring. G.E saw he was attending so continued man to man – a position not usual to him, the ‘shy bod’, at all.
“Main thing, don’t put pressure on her to come when you call, or vice-versa. Jansens did. It was right at the time of Hunt’s retreat from the Pole. He called, she went, but never again.” Impishly, G.E was flinging spanners in the works, sparks flying from his ‘man-to-man’ costume.
“What?” Hector thought the slightly flowing air must have wafted falsehoods to his ears.
“They had a time in Germany. I think he was what you might call ‘pushy’.”
“When Hunt was near the Pole – she and Jansens?”
“Apparently. She boasts about him to everyone. Hasn’t she mentioned him to you?
“Yes, but…. Hunt away on his death march? I can’t believe it.”
Hector clambered down the ladder in a flight of exasperation, incredulity rage and revulsion. Could she have really given herself to another man whilst Hunt was dying a slow and flesh-creeping death, side by side comrades, in excruciating despair? He the last to go, immobile in a threadbare tent beside serene, stiff cadavers? Could she have been so disloyal? Potts had a forthright, hard, iron-jawed face. Hector felt sure of attaching truthtelling to its brickish curves. He believed liars showed weasel in their lineaments. So believe, believe. Unfaithful to her husband? Yes! When he was away serving the Empire, serving her misplaced expectations, discovering new promontories, making history, making McMurdo sound his own, matching the Norskies step for step. Throughout the painful and fitful progress bearing the healthy, homely image of mother and son as his charm. Sustaining Hunt’s dedication to the task in hand. The family urge stung like hunger. Of course all Polar people knew it, all sailors knew it, all explorers anywhere knew it. Katherine would have known it yet she succumbed to lust and flattery. Couldn’t wait a few lousy months for his return? [never to be]. Only then, fair enough, abscond with Jansens, desert the family. But while he was dying? Hector determined to sit on the knowledge. A distorted image of scurvy-eaten skin, blizzard and ruddy angry skins weeping, initially plagued him. The heights of ecstasy to the depths of misery. The frozen and the hot. The honest and the perfidious – the red and the cruel white. – the green tent and the paisley chintz of some stuffy green beer-stinking hotel room.
     Katherine was there – her hair tossed like a mane [hats weren’t healthy, why hide from the sun], a basket loaded with paper parcels beside her, a sweet look on her flushed face and a skein of liquorice dangling from one hand like a snake.
“My muscles are like wires now,” she said proudly, “ I almost jogged up the last hill.’
Hector kept mum, humouring her but inwardly seething. Loyalty, a virtue he valued beyond all others. What was the boy-scout law and how did it run, the loyalty clause? As loyal as a dog to its stick-wielding master, regardless of weals. Regardless of what he put you through.
     When, at nightfall, the fire sputtered in the huge old fireplace, when the candle flames danced in their customized fireproof, pewter sconces set overhead in the dark beams and the kettle lid rattled against the pummelling bubbles, Hector devised his punishment; as they lurked on the sumptuous leather couch, almost scorching themselves. An ex-comrade of his had been deceived and unmanned. Weak, undoubtedly, but deserving of some compensation.
      True was it, Katherine had continued her Spanish lesson immediately after receiving confirmation of Hunts end? She had fled the communications room on board ship, the ship steaming to meet him, tearful but well enough to learn a language with the horrified, sympathetic mugs of other studious passengers looking on! That was how the story went. It disgusted him but she probably classified it as an exhibition of strength. Now with a randy, pulcritudinous Katherine bursting from gin he could instigate the symbolic slap on the wrist. He could arrest her wandering hands. He could meet the fire with the ice. He could administer the retribution, the heavy floundering word, for he never forgave disloyalty. Even in his own marriage – he always loved Emily the most. In the middle of disputes, liaisons, he remained true to the spirit of their union.
      Rabbit saw something was up with him. Potts had ridden off without bidding her goodbye. When twosomes changed to threesomes the backstabbing kicked in, the bitching and the tale-telling. Alice Sorely-Sharpe had warned her that in spite of his reticence Potts could gossip as freely as anyone. So did it spell the end?
     His caressing started. He thought to be intensely gentle to double the impact of the schism when the chance arrived, the break, the carving up of her with the weapon provided by mother-nature to men for utilizing as they may. For love or for hurt. He suddenly yearned for Emmy, a woman who knew what wifeliness was or for Moony, a friend who knew what friendliness was. Why had he entangled himself with the self-indulgent, haughty and drunken chattel of Hunt? Why had Hunt? Did she think she could use them both as a ticket of passage to the South, as a one-way albatross air-line to the crisp white? They prattled in whispers for a while before Hector sought to hear the truth from her own lips. She replied to his question with “its none of your business”, feeling quite put out, heady with the plushness of their nest on the couch, yet displaying a sense of pique that quite satisfied Hector’s prying.
       Katherine decided to ignore her suspicions and give herself over to passion. The heat melded her into a succulent ball of flesh, needing to be re-formed and returned to human. Hector responded. Her tongue was not a tongue, it was a lash. Her fingers were as tools. “Rabbit’ he trundled her to the floor, feeling the delight of the overture to the act – they were growing into each other, but then he whispered something and rolled her over to her belly and suddenly pinioned her limbs. She could barely breath. He went in to her ramming from behind – her protestations muted by lack of air, by pain in her chest by pain in her rear-end, by the ignominy of the used, by the shock, by his insensible wild and vindictive, words.
“Faithless whore! Grovel before the animalistic while your husband is dying!”
  Stop, let go but he wouldn’t.
“Stop, not like that,” she wailed.
  He just plunged uncomfortably into her and barked spiteful, hurtful things until she understood. The dusty floor pricked her nostrils. The grief. She felt abject like an old nag being harassed and mutilated or a lioness or a cow, any old beast. Her body hurt. Mounted, mated. Like dogs in the street.
“So midear, Antarctica is out of the question for you. Take one woman, and I’d have to allow wives and girls for all the crew. You should have bludgeoned Hunt into taking you, or the ‘ blue-gum’, anyone but the bringer of untold pleasures and thousandfold pain.” His voice cracked the thick air. She wondered if his face had suddenly sickened like Dorian Gray, shrivelled up. Way over the top. He ordered her to be sorry.
“How can you blame me for Jansens,” she squeaked. And then the bringer of pleasure peaked and fell on her so her breasts were bruised by the floors iron-like wood. And he breathed crushingly but mercifully spent, tiredly into her ear his last word on the matter.
“This is between you and your husband. At this moment I am the husband you should have had – the great hero.”
“You men, you always stick up for one another.”
He stood up awkwardly and strolled mysteriously to the corner of the room where a peculiarly large gramophone horn dominated. Patterned by the harsh imprint of woven carpet on one cheek, Katherine rose to her knees and clam-like bent at the waist dropped her head down and smoothed her sore face with her hands. Then she tidied her garments and sat on the couch, frightened of the fire. It mirrored the immeasurable burning round about her thighs and buttocks. She said quietly: “Men and huts. See what it does to you? Loyalty, huh. I know you all hated each other in those huts. How could it be otherwise? A microcosm of society – all the various ranks represented but admirably modified into a kind of puritanical community – clean up your own muck, lick your own plates, aid ones fellow men if he falls sick. Its time for the world to be told the truth about ‘men and huts’. How it changes them monstrously. Oh Hector, “ she moaned, humiliated, gin-soaked, in shock, hugging her knees. “Why did you for now I must stumble outdoors into the cold, into the ebony night…”
Hector had anticipated rage. Yet Katherine seemed all squeezed out, resigned, fulfilled, in so much as her mind-print of Hector’s character head been proven right. Once a cad…
She sighed over and over as she stuffed little articles into her haversack then without once turning her eyes towards him almost fell down the stairs out into never-never land, the outdoors ponderous under unbroken night cloud – the railway station a mile away. She could bunk down there on a waiting-room seat. He followed a little way until she threatened to scream, preferring to walk alone, feeling safer without him. Typical, she thought, not a single word of apology from him, not a gulp of emotion. The act, justified by the bond between men. Was it stronger than all other, stronger than their unorthodox love?
     Finally Hector, who still followed, lunged, grabbing at her. He begged her not to shriek on account of the neighbours becoming alarmed.
“I will not allow you to disappear into the dark”, he commanded, “come back to the cottage.”
“No, no au contraire I will beseech the neighbours to take me in. Tell them a tremendous rat frightened me, a fire-breathing rat with yellow fangs.” They scuffled on the chalky track for a moment. “Kiss me…what!” she panted, suppressing squeals. “You must be joking…”
   ‘ Gaily she mocked the menace of the skies,
     Turned to our cheery cabin once again…’
“Listen”. Hector held one of her hands firmly, buffing her knuckles in a regular motion like rocking an infant. “Listen,” he said again, embodying composure. “I’ll sleep down below, then tomorrow we’ll see.”
“Well I know what I'll never see – Carps in heaven…brute! Anyway I’ve suffered my punishment, haven’t I, like a good girl.” She felt somewhat woozy but trudged obediently back to the cottage – “might burn down. We’ve left the fire unattended.”
Her serviceable shoes marred the creaking stairs with a fresh chalk outline as each foot heaved its weight to oblivion. Exhaustion. Her mind churned. Hector refused to elaborate on the incident. Was he ashamed? He merely advised her to act responsibly when alone, hauled his sleeping-bag downstairs into the storeroom without further utterance and crammed it against some timber off cuts then coughed – the dirt in the room as thick as tilth. Once she was safe alone at the scene, Katherine immediately flicked through her notebook to Potts poem:
‘The little things creep out to patch themselves hovels in the marred shadow of your gift,’
and waited for the mouse to come and take its share and grow fat. It was free to eat every morsel.

East
Chapter 1
     Hector squirmed implacably on the lumpy chaise-lounge, a fine piece.
“Princes have had their chamber maids on this. – slept off their debauches,” Jack confessed with salutary urbanity. “If it disturbs you to know, the floor is like a trampoline. I won’t be offended if you settle for that”.
Hector had had it with floors. The puckering joins of Pott’s flagstones had rudely insulted his sense of bodily comfort. Now, condemned to his left side on the hilly chaise-lounge at Jack Carpenter alias Rawlings place, made the memory of floor, almost sweet. Hector bunched up and recalled his previous sleep amidst splinters, acrid creosote and cement powder. He remembered vividly the creaks of ceiling as Katherine, minx with a jinx, moved about overhead playing music on Potts gramophone into the early morning. All sorts, from Mozart arias to Faure chamber-works. And the thumps as if she had stomped the poker into the carpet to maximize the impact of her cacophonous ear-bashers; and his subsequent headache.
“Let me show you how it’s done, old boy,” Jack had clipped. “First absent yourself from the rat-race and be a rat on the sidelines. Comment on the affairs of the day, stupidly. Politicians are greasy string-pullers, say explorers are self-aggrandizing poseurs – well, and the King’s an honest blighter in the thrall of career toadies. Give me some time and I could pass you off as a thoroughbred breeder from East Gromwich.”
“For two days? How many customers would you have in that time to try on? A handful?”
Jack served his brother tea and toast. A woman had finally unstrung him. Captain Hunt’s wife. Hard to take on the chin. When they had last met Jack had noted a paucity of spontaneity in his brother, a kind of calculated emptiness and respectability. Now a trod on egg-shell sat before him, making heavy weather of some cumquat marmalade.
“Horse you said – Hunt had married a sturdy, I don’t know, a sturdy dollop of horseflesh. What has age tempered her features?” Jack ribbed him as only a brother can.
“No, still a horse, well, a shaggy beast,” Hector said sardonically.
“But at the welcome home reception, I recollect them mooching aside, Hunt nearly green. His dream crushed. Well you’d given it a fillip, I suppose, by not actually reaching the pole…She was in charge, wasn’t she, as tall as him, with an impertinent nose and vivid clothes.”
“There is more to the girl than the striking physical impression…she has a plucky spirit and a strong will. She’s full of surprises.”
“Apparently so. This ‘affair’ was your way of getting one’s own back, one may suppose. By taking his wife and leaving him nothing, not even a rich eternal rest to hang on to…”
     Hector lay on his back, cursing the antique junk springs, and reflected upon what his brother said. The nut-crackers in Jacks shop were chunks of lead crudely moulded into pairs of bow-legs that squeezed nuts indecently to shell separation. The Toby jugs were grotesque visages. Back-scratchers – hags hands. Everywhere sculpted bits of body presented to him. In the square of Blandford Forum, a Roman Legionary and in Potts domain, child’s fat feet she had crafted. How could he explode the jinx? By naming an inlet Hunt Bay? It would dog him and beat him down, that promise not to land.
     That very morning he had told Katherine something he had not told anyone at all and that very morning it had seemed a sensible mode of action. His secret inside had run out into the chalky clearing like yoke and with them his pride and self-esteem and pretense and containment. Katherine had sat, hatless, her back against the outer east-facing wall of ‘Potts cott.’ taking in the sun, clutching this time a svelte black teacup and a slice of seedy bread, recouping her strength for another attempted hike to the station. Katherine had sipped and listened to a ghost story.
     She had squinted at the back of his graying bowed head, his hands like nit-pickers flicking everywhere, his voice solemn as he described ‘the walk’ across New Georgia, the legendary walk, the walk of three disheveled, half-dead men, their tightrope stunt, their walk of miracles. A walk unmapped and new. How when they had paused to heat some food in the snow tempting like a feather-bed –the harangue of a ghostly fourth had roused them to self-preservation, had needled them with a terse command to go and go and go and rest no more, the wispy, wind-whistling voice of the fourth- phantom. Yes he, all three men had written and attested to the prime intervention of this fourth. This fourth had saved them as surely as the weather saved cricket matches. And, without him having made it absolutely clear, readers of his sparse account imagined the fourth as a beautiful angel, a snow-maiden, an imposing Hellenic figure cowled and radiant. Yes, Katherine imagined it thus. Until Hector, the leader of the three asked her to re-imagine and reshape her vision. The mystical fourth presence, indeed, had rippled like tent-cloth, goaded and helped the expedition but not as woman – as man. But not as any man, as Richard Hunt, as Hunt smiling like Billy in that worldly yet spiritual fashion. A face free from blisters or suffering, with a back straight, sturdy…ethereal yes but certain as rock. You see, he had come to atone for his culpable and nonsensical ordering men to march, to die, Five had he killed unwittingly, including himself – now there was three to save. They in turn could save twenty-five more. By their rescue he could redeem himself. It being Hector, guaranteed an anonymity for the Samaritan phantom. For how improbable - Hector attesting to miracles as having sprung from an opposing camp. Credit a ghost? Never publicly.
     “Yes I’m sure”, he had responded to Katherine’s tender inquiry, “sure as one can be. He looked young and drawn but was Hunt, had Hunt’s teeth, Bill’s smile. I could have been hallucinating, I suppose but my also comrades witnessed the Presence – an angel in a hood. They have made statements independently. I believe a persons religious views to be between himself and his maker, therefore whether you believe in a kind of divine intervention, or in my lunacy as result of mental strain, I cannot know nor wish to…yet before we terminate our relationship I thought it might soothe you to know, that is if you ever doubted your husbands…goodness.”
      It hurt him to cough up that word but he couldn’t think of another plainer. The entire subject broached the airy realms of incomprehension, almost theosophy. And Madame Blavatsky wasn’t thick in the cottage. He had stumbled about the clearing feeding Katherine words in the strong shadows cast by a robust morning sun, all the while in fear of Lady Hunt’s nominal power. She could out of spite sabotage his expedition with but one simple peevish statement to the press regurgitating the old feud, the waste of money. “My late husband did all that can be done in the region – why risk more lives etc.”
     Katherine had swished her tea dregs into a heap of stones and spread her crusts to where birds came. She had then said: “Thankyou for telling me.” her voice seeping, and went clumping up the box-like stairs. No more would she trust in his veracity. He had humiliated her, grossly confronted her with a woman’s undisputed vulnerability. It snagged in the teeth of a masculine gale. He had tried to wring out her ridiculous sense of sexual equality. One couldn’t be queen and one of the boys at the same time. Yet had his ravishment chastened her monumental self-respect? Not at all. No man had been tough with her like that before. It hardened her.
     Was he pulling her leg with his revelation of the Fourth’s persona? Making it up, stretching things too far by personifying a nebulous Providence? His memory had flexed the Fourth into a dependable young fellow with Hunts open face. It had muscled aside the Her, the She, the ice-maiden with a limitless howling voice who dogged their fantasies. She had shrunk into a light breeze. It couldn’t be helped. He had said what he had to.
     Soon Katherine had cascaded down the stairs, ready to leave. Hector, hand on chin, had mumbled stoically
“Let me carry your bags.” She had declined the offer saying:
“At least you have one-upped on Richard. He thought it unseemly to be seen hauling luggage in public, as if it might offend all the thousands of porters in the world. The first time we met, I carried my own bags all through the streets. He thought he would ‘stand out’. But by trying not to he drew attention to himself.” Then with mute skittishness, she had tripped forwards and kissed his dry, cold lips passionately until they quivered then said brightening: “I like you, just for upsetting me. Who else would have bothered? I deserve it. Condemn me. Others have either been too polite or too scared or not interested enough to bare home-truths, like unpeeling the flayed skin of my soul. Oh and it smarts. Surely his mother must blame me for suggesting he go there a second time…blame me for spearing the Pole down his throat.”
Hector had not counted on contrition. Reviving the disloyalty to Hunt had prompted within her a surge of loyalty towards Hector, like the dog to stick-wielding master, the dog licking its weals then coming for more. Maybe she was unpunishable.
“You’re going to be married,” he had mentioned as a final blow from the stick. “Give him your love and loyalty and be the dancing bird with the wild ostrich plumes, for him.”
     ‘Oh I will plead with God to let me stay!
     Stay till the Night is gone, till spring is nigh,
     Till sunshine comes…be brave…I’m tired…good-bye…’
     She had gone then, leaving Hector to neaten up the sleeping room and replace the key and trundle back into his regular life.
      Why had he come to Jack? Where scandal stuck and clutter messed the clean family closet. Why? Close by, that was it. Emmy would sense reason behind his agitation. She would root out the fuel behind the chimney-smoking with her hound snout. She would catch the trickling motion of new ice as it set thinly and threatened to lock in his life once again. Katherine’s lead, her gap of blessed water freezing over. Had it been leading anywhere further than the wonder of a few months? If he could escape the maze he should be able to skirt around the edges of the pack. He no longer dreamt of pressure ridges squeezing his innards out. This new ice stretched like an endless unrolling bolt of Willesden duck, a surface ideal for sledging.
     He wanted to talk to another man about her. The bony mounds of body oozing through her diaphanous slip, her shoulder blades, his slamming her wrists to the floor, blotches of river-spray darkening her cream and green dress, the furrows as she applied herself to her art, as she hunched by the stove as willing as any man to work then rest in the shade of her efforts. Oh yes, he would have loved having a woman like that to share the slog at winter quarters. She could have typeset their pretty record of the expedition, ridden bareback on the ponies with her sweeping hair, floored him in their singing contest, sewn ration bags, repaired worn socks. No, no chores. She need but have loafed outside the hut door with arms out-stretched, enthralled by the erratic, hypnotic curtains of aurora, jobless but busy with her artists eye. Then, after cocoa, scraped under his blankets like a hot-water bottle and tittered about Hunts tepid love-making whilst Hector nuzzled behind her ears. Moony was a pawn of men, Emily a great mother and Rabbit had been King Hector’s temporary consort.
“A woman like that comes as an asset to an expedition. She would make herself useful and seldom complain – oh about her comrades yes, but not the situation. She asks that strength and resilience shine out from others as they, and many other sterling qualities shine from her,” Hector had barraged Jack eloquently.
“Strong words, Hec…”
“Well you should have seen her last night shining, another star, blazed up when we broke up, if that’s what we did.”
“She bleeds poetry from you, so it cannot be love. More like a dangerous obsession.”
“How dangerous?”
“Dangerous enough to upset the new expedition.”
“The next ‘voyage’,” corrected Hector. “ After the ‘Stalwart’ disaster I daren’t risk over-stating. She’ll be married and gone by then. ‘Destiny sails on – she tolls the bell.”
Hector had fallen silent, remembering his poem. He then had asked Jack whether he thought forced isolation, whether so-called Pole fever, permanently affected people. Jack thought it opened them up to emotional exploitation. They groped around for lives to cling to because they understood life in its essence to be the main attraction in the dead reaches. And the clinging on to it after it was dead. That’s because the wash-up from expeditions went on for years and years, what with lectures and publications and bickering. Cobwebs of one lagging the new build. Life and work knotted up.
“I’m philosophical now,” Jack had declared. “The old stuff has made me that way and the country folk. Drawing rooms are not the be-all and end- all. You and me are at one on that now.”

Go to part: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51