The Promise Ese (22) "Especially since her husband lost his life at the Pole", Pink added sombrely. * * * 'My dear Papa, My school friends were extremely envious of my London tour last week. They have never been to a museum before where some exhibits were given to the museum by their own Father. Also have found some curious rocks on a footpath behind my school which I hope to show you when next we meet. They have crystals in them. Please could you come to Bournemouth next summer so we can have picnics. Mama says she hopes you are not going to leave us again because the South Pole has been discovered and there is not a need for anyone to go there again. The slippers that you bought me suit very well but I have to hide them from my friends who only have woollen ones. Yours very Affectionately, Gwennie. Hector wistfully pocketed the letter. And how very graciously, Clara in muffs and scent, had sidled near to them in the bird room like a predatory species herself, perhaps wanting to shred his tentative father-daughter relationship or perhaps reverse the role of cuckoo by foisting out the natural mother. And Gwennie had shyly whispered to him about the fancy lady following them. Could he associate in any sensible form this bizarre inclination of his amore with Smith's appearances? All his life he had by good fortune and fair weather managed to elude the civil suit. Smith and Hickox might be inseparable halves of the one ill-omen. They might be the invisible figure hovering over his shoulder wielding a sword. The twin-bodied doppelganger. Hector's concentration was impaired. He'd begun to mumble his talks. Well, he didn't feel for a minute these provincial audiences would pick out an inaccurate estimation of distance, misquotation of heroic stanza, mangling of genera, sub-species and vernacular. Anyway the hues of his audiences had so begun to weaken in contrast and richness, that not only to Hectors eyes was his own life chemically fading like an old negative, but the world he viewed merged like a flock of grey doves smoking their way into an overcast heaven. For a change he could worry about Gwennies schoolgirl passion for geology. Not seemly for a young girl. She should be kneading her imagination into a dough of seduction, aim for the wealthiest laird of the land.... keep her mother company... loll at her aged Papa's feet and beg for more stories. Millais's picture ‘the North-west passage’ represented one of the finales scripted for aged mariners, the pathetic yet commanding grey-beard regaling his grand-progeny with thrilling whale tails. Melville was typical. Then there had been Swithem, the one crushed by a precarious bookcase. A wizened but brisk old man who would swig the breath of the flowering sons of England as though it were the finest madeira before driving them into the medusa arms of fortune to serve his perverse ambitions. * * * Finally he was to uncover the truth about Smith. Puppet-like silhouettes swayed behind a screen of filmy curtaining as Hector approached the address. Rubbish had collected in the corners of the miniature front garden apparently kept as ash-pit. Normally without much agonizing one can trace the hand of woman in the lineaments of a homes' street frontage, through the presence or absence of frills and potted plants. So with the address in Leathwaite Road - a male establishment if ever there was one. Crates of bottles at the side, mountains of dusty leaves against the door, even an odour. Sir Hec had eventually brought Mackintosh into the game. Once the strain of hint-dropping, harrowing stares, self-eulogizing in the grave tones of an archbishop, had pulverized his resolve to keep secrets secret, he had painted a florid expose of urban anarchy that shook Mac. Now, knuckles as bloodless as an imperilled mountaineer, Hector clutched at an awareness of Mac's vigilant patrol of the vicinity. Neither expected trouble. Even so, the man loitering in the badly-tailored overcoat was his man. The hulking steely-eyed man who edged open the door was emphatically not. However, he did emerge familiarly from an unanticipated quarter of Sir Hector Carpenter's ken. Hector remembered the shrunken face bloated with drink and....evil? He remembered the bruised whimper of the cabin-boy, the charred crossbeams, the brutal language and the sneer of incredulity as Hector ordered the miscreants dismissal from the sanctuary of the ship to the limbo of a foreign port. This was the face of a man Hector had failed to interpret and Hector always counted the reading of men as one of his talents. “If it isn't me old captain. Pleased to see you again, sir," said the man holding the door. His voice grated like a dry hinge. He had missed out on a Polar medal because of the thing preparing to cross the threshold. Hector wavered and said: "Well?" "Come right in, we've something to show you in here." Hector ruefully felt that to enter the narrow passage was to sandwich himself between the lurid pages of a third-rate novel, Yes there was a velveteen drape, plum-coloured separating the domestic from the business. Filthy hand and thumbprints around the lightswitch. The sickly whiff of broiling cabbage? Russian novels and Russian Jews and anarchists and Bloody Sunday and a beautiful girl somewhere in the back mopping the wounds, awaiting her freedom, awaiting her rescuer. For a second he glanced askance to see if his over-coated man had loitered into range yet it was simply the laggard autumn leaves that flapped on the other side of the street. Forever, it seemed, Hector had wrestled to suppress an overweening imagination. How often its embrace would topple him. Thankfully, the mutinous ex-expeditioner disappeared up a staircase, grunting. Initially Hector thought he had been left alone but then the porridgey accent of a Scot hailed him from within the doorless room to his left. Could it be Archie Craigie? Steepling shafts of boxes and instrument cases told that it could. With a pouff! The sinister forebodings that had incubated against his beating chest evaporated. He was light as a feather. But first he had to get a bearing on the voice. Boxes touched the ceiling. They blocked the window. Then a bespectacled gentleman arose from a leather-padded armchair, his solid ground wedged in a massive cardboard pack, and they shook hands. It was Archie. Oh, his hand felt good. Murchison, the ruffian, came in with some beer and then stomped away again. Archie’s chat rang true, the ale proved palatable and good feeling infested the very particles of gas called air, after ten minutes this is what Hector believed. Smith, who was he? The name that had sounded his knell scrabbled behind the boxes like a rat in a maze and a mislaid concept in the mind. It was Craigie who found it. "Sir Hector, you must be wondering, or perhaps have forgotten the intrusion of a lad called Smith into your recent affairs. He has a silver-tongue and you like to talk. Murchison suggested we employ a decoy. He thought the mystery of the thing might whet your appetite. Do you recall Murchison? He was sacked from your ship in Buenos Aires?" "He left it in disgrace." "That maybe, but he can spin a few yarns about its captain." Was this the loot then? Some cock-and-bull about a captain with a temper, adrift and dangerous? "He couldn't possibly have anything on me because my slate is clean. And I can tell you how I know this. For six weeks at sea he blubbered, swore, slacked, scratched... yes. Can you picture a grown man scratching his crewmates? He managed all the symptoms of derangement then to top it off embarked on a violent drinking spree and tried to incinerate the vessel. In other words, the deviance of his own behaviour proved so engrossing it screened out from his cloudy perception any tribulations on the part of others, including officers and cats. You see he had not the foggiest idea of what was happening around him. And he was at the very bottom, as far from the bridge as heaven from hell. That was my haunt, up top." The possibility of being beholden to a leech as repellently disgusting as Murchison seemed just half as nasty as a clean slice in the back with a clean blade. How could Archie, the suave purveyor of chronometers and theodolites have tripped into the Murchison snare? Fallen on hard times? Hector, who held the armchair, erupted from it. The fading puffs of good mixed with little curls of smoke until both became plain air. He couldn't see much of the outside through the fuzzy curtains. Archie had urged Sir Hector to remain calm, as friendly as before, because any malice he thought he could detect was not malice, merely speculation grounded on suspicion. "Smith made this out as a matter of business," began Hector, impatiently. "And since you and I have dealt reasonably in the past, lets sort this out like.... businessmen. I'm sorry to say most of our instruments you provided for our last jaunt, sank under the ice." "I'm glad that all of your men escaped, however", said Archie, graciously. "But even so, I'm not sure you have reimbursed me for all the equipment provided for the meteorologists." Archie sidled to the musty rear of the room. Hector withheld comment until the noise of boxes being lifted and replaced had decreased, and then he called: "As it so happens he preferred his own home-made devices, our meteorologist." His powerful voice he’d no difficulty carrying to whichever nether part of the dwelling. " If you have any outstanding accounts, Mackintosh can sort it out at the office." Hector smoked away and peeked through the sheer-fuzz of curtaining. At last, Archibald Craigie, Scottish ham, busying himself behind a stack, bounced on his toes to the fore like a premier danseur, flourishing a paper, truly the cats’ cream. "Now Sir Hector," he said, nervously, "this is what I have for you." Hector looked every inch the sea-wolf Murchison had made him out to be, and thus rendered, with a too garish flair, his mere impatience began 'throbbing like a great wave.' A dread of physical assault stole over Craigie, an awry perception which owed as much to imagination as any of Carpenter's overblown inventions. In truth, Sir Hector was peeved. He would rename" the Smith Show", "Payment in arrears” and recast the villains as bookkeepers. Murchison had oozed into the room where he towered as motionless as the crates, although snivelling constantly. "Well, let me see it. I'm not likely to hotfoot with it, am I,” Hector said. Archie handed over the single sheet of stationery, poured himself a mug of beer and sank into his chair leaving Hector to ponder. The blue-ish ink was wan, not fresh. A letter. A fragment. Creased and difficult to read. ' ... future is not alone in bearing down upon my mind these days for I have our separations to endure, my dearest Amaranthus, my fluffed-up chicken, my heartsease. Again the evenings seem lonely and wasted, the mornings cheerless, afternoons lazily ripe for conversation, as bereft of music as the tolling bell without your sweet piping to brighten them. Will it not always be thus? Now listen - You have heard that Carpenter is intending to push south next Antarctic summer, as a snub to me and the scientific community. Everyone refuses to back his ludicrous plans, so he is forced to act the private citizen and raise funds by whatever means, fair or foul. And then he anticipates basing his expedition at the 'Deliverer' hut, by my good grace still standing and supplied. I am very annoyed by his devious methods and by his not consulting anyone. I think he will find it well nigh impossible to make any headway on the ice - his health being a question mark. Heart trouble. Nonetheless, I will ask him to foreswear his intended use of my McMurdo Sound as a jumping-off point and to land further west. I am uncertain as to the worth of any promise, however, he has broken many in the past. And the terrain, and the weather may compel him to renege. The RGS{Sir Swithem} believe the Pole is for a gentleman to claim, thereforeH.A.C. is most definitely unsuited. Think of me and love me my darling Ama. As I most assuredly do you, R.B.H.’ The conspirators drooled. To an outsider this was a letter but to an insider it was dynamite, of a personal kind. The compact, neat, expansive handwriting daubed both sides of the page like swishing ski and for a second Hectors memory reproduced the gliding hand in human form, its author, his backside in fact, as he led a trio doggedly across the unmarked whiteness, trowelling with ski. Now, whenever Hector thought of Richard Hunt, if ever, it was as a corpse preserved for all time in the natural refrigerator at the bottom of the Earth. Archie waited for the veil to clear from Hectors fixed but vacant stare before applying the screws. Fifteen years ago the breaking of 'the promise' had been much publicized and Hector had never shirked from an airing of contempt for the Royal Society and its lackey Captain Hunt, amongst friends that is. To the hero-seeking public the two had been a self-effacing duo of flag-planters in league with the king, one forever congratulating the other. "What do you think, Sir Hector? Even Smith was not entirely aware of the contents of the document but then it requires that one be in the know to fully appreciate its implications? Of course, I can only assume a consistent interest on your own behalf. Perhaps with Hunts sad death, your interest has waned. It is authentic, I assure you, if someone were to manufacture such a letter, I'm sure the phrasing, content etc. would be more clear-cut. Forgers are not great literary craftsman. You can see it was written quickly by a distressed hand, a man suffering the pangs of indecision." Archie knew what a sensitive chap Hector was. He knew the debacle of the broken promise had marred his reputation. He knew much about the fraternity of polar expeditioners because for years he had supplied scientific instruments for many of them, at a discount. He also knew how the flakes of ice seemed to chill their blood so that even cold old England became too hot and they yearned to get away once more. Hector gave back the sheet to Archie, faced the bay-window again, and said:
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