The Promise Ese (18)
He couldn't see Clara because she was away on tour for three months. And he couldn't see Emmy because she saw into him and her sympathetic, searching gaze seemed to burn. And he couldn’t even see Browning because the words were very tiny and the hotel bulbs were timid. So he could only smoke away this absurd and undeserved agony of brain. In the past he would have thrashed it to pieces with a flail of new plans. He would have rushed to fruition before the smaller men could catch his tail. God, this was a death he didn't wish to meet. * * * ‘My darling little Gwen (the only girl living who grows an extra inch taller each time she sneezes), What do you think your old Dad has been dreaming about? If you can guess, ask Mama to buy you a special prize. I can already hear your brains churning and grinding towards an answer which if creaky will assuredly be correct. We really thought our little ship let out groans the day she settled down on her ice pillows to sleep forever. And when the wind howls it reminds me of our ships sighs. Would you believe that a senseless product of mans toil could experience such severe distress at the moment of its end, that it should cry out...' * * * Soon he was down at Bournemouth, not tired or achy but crackling with a future. Only at nights did he fear the penetrating eyes of his wife. "Emmy, I need a ship,” declared Hector, with a fervour that threatened to swamp her resurgent wifeliness. He loomed avast on the hall mat. Emily's wary look measured a suffering so extensive it reached to the silvering roots of her hair. "Where would you head - Alaska?" she said, forcing interest, then, mechanically: "The North Pole has been claimed, there is nothing new to discover South, and I don’t believe you could find a Government in Europe willing to back proposals smacking, to any extent, of risk. Every country's budget's been stretched to its limit by the demands of war. What few resources there are get funnelled into rebuilding." And reparations. Versailles had become again a venue for frivolous parties of ghosts and gawkers. Dealing over. Unless he proposed to colonize the ice-sheets? But land-grabbing had died with the wild-west. Emily drew breath. She had ticked off salient negatives. Over the hallway floorboards their shoes heels mimicked the rhythm of this regular, eyes-downcast deflation of his intent. Then the warmth of the drawing-room fire seemed to stall it. He shunted Emily to a sofa powdered by muslin light, where he dusted a few toys to the floor indifferently, until she bent to clear them. "Do our children still play with blocks?" he asked, reclining. "No, they have advanced beyond the block stage. This is a 'brain-teaser'," she said, presenting her husband an hexagonal segment. He examined it with an exaggerated interest then several more shapes as his wife arranged them in a tray. "You've solved this before?" "Why do you think that?" "Because every piece fits where you place it," he observed. "Not much of a mental struggle, apparently." "Oh I've not tried it before," said Emily, smugly shuffling triangles into formation. "But I can see," she added, "this one is for you. It's a humdinger." Carpenter eyed his wife, amused. He hunched forward, legs together, board on knees. She held out the central starry polygon for him to fit then winced with glee at each wrong twist. Its many little sharp points fought off other nestled shapes flecked with drifting cigarette ash. Even as Carpenter coolly determined its angle of fit, the prickly star wouldn't click. No matter his accuracy of calculation, it stuck and stuck. His effervescence began welling into annoyance when Emily, at last, slipped the board from sight before it could be thrown. "I'm not interested in tricks." He thought: She will dance on my grave. Her faint gleeful stutters had scratched at their festering disaffections. "It's a child’s game," she affirmed. "Emily, which is the game? This or this?" His arms shaved a wide arc in the air. In years past she would briskly have said "Don't be silly....", squeezed his over- animated hand, rung for coffee, rattled on about the children or praised his pals until he grew bored and hastened away to something important which she understood wasn't very, but lives had changed so she decided to stare him down - administer that guiding slap she fancied to lay on the peach-hewn cheek of his mistress if ever it showed. But a spiritual hurt, visible in his eyes even at life’s peaks, stopped her, saddened her, made her yearn for a younger love within those deep, deep eyes. He let the wordless attempt at self-assertion wilt but felt no complacence. She had sailed with him before on few previous schemes, on voyages soulwise or seawards. Still he thought it better not to stint with the ballast. "Some have made money", he said with confidence. "The arms merchants. Government coffers may echo stonily whilst bald men soak in tubs of gold." Emily blanched. That wealth was tainted and it would taint him. "Why not organize another speaking-tour abroad? I'm sure the continental public is not quite sick of the Pole. They love to skate. We both know it is any easy way to earn some money." "Easy for who? I have to rant and rave about this hellish thing that happened to us and feed the publics vicarious appetite for disasters. I'm positive they're sick of me. It’s a frisson, a seasonable thing. I'm a falling apple." He stared reflectively into the afternoon room haze of languid smoke and weak sun. He started to kick one foot, wondering at the certainty of Emmy's opposition to his schemes. Her solemn yearning for a happy home which was beyond his ability to provide all but quenched his spark. "Well then", he said. "Try looking at it from a different angle. I could clean their muddied money for them and make it pay back a thousandfold the nations from which it was wrenched - in blood," he added, to sound biblical. Emmy leaned a bit that way Hector had learned this from his friend Mackintosh the last time the two conferred. Mackintosh acted as carrier pigeon between an oft-times estranged husband and wife. Then, characteristically, Hector clapped her fist between his fine hands, adapted his gaze to her as if she was a blank cheque and sonorously intoned, "I've always wished for nothing else but to benefit humanity through an addition to Knowledge". She knew he wanted this to be true. Sincerity even flashed over his face, briefly, but an unfocussed enthusiasm pervaded as always, along with disappointment, doubt, fumbling at their grips. She nodded, a nod he divined as approval. "Well,” he said, smiling, " it's not necessary to confabulate together over details. I have several plans for the money-side. I just thought you'd like to know that there's a voyage in the offing. North maybe.... I.." It would never be north. North was the cradle of havoc. It belied his candid self to stop short from explosive disclosure yet the sentence tailed. He stood up, paced about, mentioned their dining together, unless... He had also heard she was seeing an old flame some nights. "I have a meeting. Percy wakes soon. Would you like to take him for a walk?" she said, suddenly charming. Hector said he hoped the older children might be home as well. He needed reminding about their respective ages, schools and holidays. He wanted especially to see their daughter, Gwen. "Gwennie, said Emily, "greatly enjoys those letters you've been sending. Is that what you wished to ask her about?" He rarely visited for other than purposes of divulgence or discernment. "Did you bring gifts? They expect it. If you really want to do good by the children, send funds as well as fatherly advice. Their school fees are ballooning. I've read those letters and they remind me of Polonious who, remember, falls to the blade and is really a butt of jokes." "I mean my letters to entertain that’s all," he said defensively. "I don't think I will stay. The car can take me to the station or all the way. The children won't mind. I can think of lots more exciting, enticing, joyous jumbles for their occupation. See to it they have enough tantalizing books." "They prefer to play at the seaside, although the weather has been less than kind to us." "Beaches can be windswept places". After a discussion of practical household and financial arrangements, which Carpenter dubbed 'ephemera', he motored away, extracting from the gloom a somewhat distasteful glimpse of a loose-ish, he supposed discontented, woman framed by porch columns, waving vaguely like a penny-model Venus. * * * By the time Sir Hector Aeneas Carpenter arrived in London it had darkened considerably, street lamps worked magic, pulsing mists hung about. 'Tomorrow,' he had decided on the car journey, 'telephone Emmy, implore her to come back and steady my city life.' He urgently needed a round of respectability to re-assure potential backers and cosy down the rumours; re-create that easy-chair, fireside domesticity that his people deserved. With destiny rising in the east he could readily endure occasional probing glances. Married people barely monitored their others physiognomy, anyway. They just floated past and flagged signals. He and Emmy that afternoon had not soul-peered. Lost the need. Her eyes glittered in that doorway like a glass shard in the sun. 'Why am I not flooded with telegrams from the team. I call but the war has quelled their roving spirits'. He had been trying to round up the old hands from previous journeys South, hoping their tonic company might reinvigorate his spluttering engine of achievement. A vision of writhing arms buoying him up, the arms of all the devoted pillars of his past intensified a desire for succour from what remained of the night. He asked the driver to set him down in a street halfway between his own house and Clara's flat, to keep the fellow guessing. He snuck furtively along close to spear-point ironwork and cavernous porticoes. Not a twinge of headache. She had given him her key before leaving. The other piece of her divided affections, Hickox, had yet to win that privilege. He clothed her but didn't own her. Hector had quarried a little promontory of her heart. When the front door shut behind him, he felt hot from walking. He hungered but went directly to her bedroom - she called it her 'boudoir', where, thoughtfully, an assortment of biscuit tins, his stash, filled one compartment of her dressing-table. Everyone presumed the mind-blinding obsession with food nursed by all starving, marching Antarctic explorers continued forever after rescue. Compensation paid in the form of rather unusual and extravagant delicacies, as if fattening up the wretches served as well as medals and buckets of glory. All his comrades had reported this phenomenon and by now were heartily primed for future bouts of under-nourishment. Food companies lurked with cameras hoping to snap away at them munching a wrappered morsel. It was all tending towards the commercial side, nowadays. After a fire had been ushered into life, Clara’s room felt happier so Hector lowered the light to an after-glow. He crouched before the fire, reddening, dreamily visualizing her firm figure pounding the stage with anguished hands wringing. Clara called herself 'Claire De Lune', but with Lady Macbeth entering the repertoire the stage-name would have to raise a tone. What about 'madame something-or -other'- for an actress 'mrs' sounded solid - she could invent a husband. He wondered if Clara had packed her blue satin dress - no it still clung to the wardrobe hook, like ice, glacial blue. He ran his fingertips down the rippling smoothness that glinted violet in the flame tinted light before, withdrawing, laying the gown over the white bed-cover - the plateau and the river of ice. He had told her the dress imitated nature, stole nature's jewels, the piercing blue blink of an ice-cave, the turgid hummocks of glacier, the blinding, swiping sharp-soft canyon of blue, the crevasse. I've fallen into you, Moony, he said, and you are closing, crushing, swallowing me, shielding me from the blizzard, squeezing and sliding me towards the fathomless black who-knows-where and who-knows-how many have plunged to its core. The crisp satin thawed beneath his breath. Wherever he ran his finger, the dimple filled with liquid shadows, ice-coloured, cleaving. He lay his cheek upon the sweet-scented flank, the eternal stream and this time, as a bubble in the grate popped he could feel it in his chest, the harness knifing his ribs, formless snow billowing over in wave-clouds and the wind strangling voices and the void and then her......... the shapeless one beside him, the single multifarious substance, the water turned woman, the atmosphere coalescing and puffing lung bursts into one ear, into his nose, all the hollows of his body expanding with wind rush, lifting him as a gust towards base rock. Carpenter jerked into consciousness. Tufts of grey morning sprouted from about the curtains edge. Morning. So much living took place in his restless slumbers, lately. His scarred hands were buried in the blueness somewhere. It was running over the carpet now, metamorphosed, from old ice to spring thaw. The heat from his face and chest, his moist breath had played the gown to dishevelment. Hector's neck and knees were stiff. He had rolled to the floor unwittingly. Dust from under the bed teased his throat. Hungover yet he seldom drank rashly. A nightmare - yet it was not bad tasting like the storm ones. Instead it was delicious, this residue in his memory, a feminine flavour. Of course it had been all right, that incident, that pain transformed to gold, because he had survived. So why could he think it with horror yet dream it with delight? The ruched sleeve was a guiding hand, the flimsy satin truly flesh. Still it could accommodate her figure. I must be off my rocker, he thought, crouching on a chair, feeling for cigarettes, massaging a leg, at a loss.
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