Storymania - The Promise Ese by June M Harcourt

The Promise Ese (25)
June M Harcourt

Ah, thought Hector impressed, she seems like a good sort.

"I am one of them. One is at school and the other, you can see before you, reeking havoc,” he said and gestured towards the girlishly clad boy.

Evelyn and Nanny were both trying to wrench the 'View Book' from Percy’s clawing grip without detonating his infantile frustrations."Please, little pet...” Evelyn was insisting. "I like to look at it. You would enjoy the pictures too. I'll sit over here and show them to you." Percy held out his arms compliantly for the young miss who, with a delighted whimper, hoisted him beside her onto a couch and began by pointing out the queen, photographed during a descent of the Crystal Palace stair way, she slender, and the steps exuding grandeur.

"What is that?" Hector asked. Emily had returned with a tea-tray and the maid.

"Its a souvenir from the very great Pageant of London, 19ll," obliged Lady Moncrieff, bustling over to assist her hostess.

"I'm awfully sorry, Phyllis," she was saying whilst dealing the crockery.

"Not at all. During the war we shut off half of our country place because all the girls were off doing ambulance work and such-like. Even Arthur learned to boil potatoes. I can see a time in the near future when service will be a thing of the past. The girls are leaving school, well-educated, with minds of their own and who would have sanely predicted this shortage of manpower across all our industries. No I'm afraid people like us will just have to start getting our hands dirty like every other civilized human-being. Of course when one is away on a station in Africa or the pacific, its general mucking in, washing in the streams and cleaning the babies' sores, pounding the bananas for their porridge. Its no burden at all."

Laughter accompanied the lubricious strains of tea pouring into bone china. Percy had mistaken the stiff circles on the heads of match-size men, in one of the photographic vistas, for sucking peppermints. Evelyn was contentedly cuddling him on her knee.

"Hats,' she corrected, "boaters".

"Boats, that’s right, and this is a train Perky my boy. See that, it says 'red-route'." Hector had brought across a squat footstool to sit upon. Percy was three and had rarely seen his father up so close before. He stared at him, wanted to touch him, shyly. A while since they had all been together but then Miss Moncrieff made a dowdy substitute for Gwennie, beautiful and budding. Hector sauntered to the table for his tea.

"Em, do you recall the red-route train from 1911?'

"I'm afraid not, " she replied, then, "Oh yes, the diamond-mine train and the vineyard, Australia and the dried cod, Newfoundland." All of a sudden her memories dazzled.

"Always difficult to remember that far back, " was Alice's bold contribution. "I'm a forward-looking person myself."

"So is Hector," Emily smiled as if surrendering to some intangible. She was on tenterhooks, awaiting his coughs, yet somehow they had been swallowed with the cakes and tea.

"Of course the war blots out most prior things” Oh of course, of course.

        After the missionaries had gone he took off his shoes, collapsed on a chaise-lounge, read about Swaziland. He hated sherry, it was all that was about.

"Oh do sit up, won't you," chid Emily, straightening up the room. Percy had been taken for a pram-ride by Nanny in order to cool off following his hectic gambol with a quite boisterous Evelyn Moncrieff, once she had thawed a bit.

'Why", he said coldly, "I'm not an item of furniture you can re-arrange."

Obviously there was some issue pendant in the atmosphere needing to be snatched and opened and tussled with. "Do you wish me to launch a spasm of coughs? I can, if it will make you feel victorious otherwise the Baxter Company can employ me to promote their magic cough medicine. One swig and he just went right on with the commentary."

He drummed the few words in tacky Yankee fashion like a travelling medicine-man. "And," he went on, ceaselessly, "yes the darned witch of the east-coast, she with the flaxen tresses and devils lashes pinned me to the deck forced open my mouth and dripped in the sweet as honey remedy and behold, the magic worked for me and my splutter was cured as surely as the ocean is a dreadful place. You hear?"

"You're lucky to be alive Hector. Can't you simply bless every day that God has allowed you to be so?" Emily hovered above him in the power position, hands on hips, up to his challenge. Something had twanged. Their respectful charade, the saying and the never said, the riddles and poetry and correct, mannered tableaux of a simmering marriage, the frozen resentments splashed into the hoosh pot and seethed... the dollops of pure fat caught. Hector sat forward.

"And that’s what you do, is it, my dearest chuck, thank the holy Trinity for the wreck of a husband manacled to your side in the heat of summer, in the shadow of his returned and glorious ship, bang in the teeth of a rejected lover who walked weeping away? I know you thank me for our little boy, everyday you thank me for coming back from the dead and falling into your arms and defying the odds". Forty-four years old, past the age of child-bearing, they automatically assumed. Like Christ he had risen from the ice and she had wanted to be Mary. She had wanted to slake his lust. Everyone knows about Mrs Darwin, the forty-eight year old breeder. Emily flinched at the recollection of the night and searched for bombs. She threw up his penchant for the high-life, for bungling business then:

"What about your actress? She's even less to be grateful for. Were you her second or third choice?" What better than to next hit out at his bit of fluff, she thought? "Mac pointed her out to me on the pavement outside our grocers. She even came up and cooed at Percy, startled him. I didn't let on that I knew. I warrant your not much use to her in your present state, a woman like that, an extremely younger woman."

"There’s no virtue in celibacy. What ever happened to Raymond that beau ideal of yours? Is he a monk?"

  Emily was not normally one to dwell on the lascivious but naturally, the impinging sensate closeness, outside the grocers, of her replacement, the blush of her complexion, so peachy, so brazen had projected certain undesirable but insistent images into her daily ruminations. A picture of her and him, him and her, the legs, the arms, the embraces. Their private language. What did they say? The shame of her prurient thoughts. Until now they had mostly skirted the impact of his love-affairs, like skirting tramps asleep in the street. The impetus of organization and the thrall of new schemes had usually slapped him into consciousness. Lately he had become an indolent sea-bather idly scudding in the tepid shallows. Emilys purple thoughts chastened her accusations. Instead she said:

"Where have you been? People call for you and I have to fabricate excuses?”

Hector was still sitting on his hands, breathing heavily, gazing at Emily’s hemline. His deep brown, even hair was mussed from the hip of the chaise-lounge, awoken. He said:

"Leave me." Two words, two fangs.

"No, although,” she slowed, slowed, as if approaching a steep gradient, "maybe I’m tired of resourcing you. My allowance was always going to be an adjunct to your earnings from books or whatever. But its all there has ever been. I'm forced to be breadwinner, the woman in the family! Neither of us would like this to be generally known.... would we.”?

His couch was tree-stump height, his sphere of interest her ankle, his fingers operating pincers. His huddle that of an artisan intently at work, his breath a tap of the hammer. She was the venomous spectre of failure standing over.

"Your brother shows the same tendency, the habit of living off females, preying on them. The result of an over developed number of sisters. I can imagine the two of you lording it over your numerous, devoted sisters."

Very well, row then, woman, he thought, and probed her booted ankle with his nervous fingers.

"Oh," she squeaked, disgusted, " keep away from me with your insidious little niggles."

"Ah, Emmy you are so biting." He smothered his face with her petticoat. "You miss the shouting me?"

"I don't want to see you grovelling there, for pity sake, get up and control yourself." Emmy stepped back, hesitated, deciding whether to physically assist him to his feet. He wasn't such a large man; it was his manner that triggered the illusion. His chest was large yet his limbs were like twigs in comparison. His sore voice vaporous.

"If only you weren't such a seriously moral, small-seeing woman. Makes me scared to shit."

"Gracious!" she exclaimed, appalled.

"I wonder if you at all appreciate the state of things. When I go away, you will never see me again. All the glamour stuff and the world-tours and the hobnobbing with eminent folks gone for good. But you have your own life to cherish, those charities, the girl-guides. Being patroness suits you and our children can aspire and grow up and do good and remember their father as one who perished and in time my memory will blur with Captain Hunts and they will find it difficult to fathom who perished at the Pole and who just perished of drink or scuttled his head on the yard arm, But until these happenings do transpire why can't we not be friends? You need not be anxious for your friend or want to boss him and make him pick up his shoes and books and matches and frown at the people he can never bring home. Living two lives has worked me over, I'm afraid. When one has seen all things clearly, the not being able to behold them that way forever, is intolerable."

So it’s devolved to messianic gibbering, as she termed his pathos.

Then he stood up of his own accord, desisted from the intricate hand movements and looked her in the eyes, not with the'mother me' plead but with reclaimed intelligence. He coughed and said:

"Now we have had it out there is something you must know."

     There existed in the neglected library of their house, a carbon-copy of the Hunt-Carpenter agreement, meticulously typed by the Carpenter himself, champion of type-writing machines and telephones and acetate recordings. Whilst he was rifling through years of documents, Emily noticed a playbill from the 'Collisseum' {London playhouse owned by Albert Colliss}, a promotion of the new Irish verse-play "The Secret Flower".

Emily asked Hector if it was worth going to see.

" If Brieux appeals to you, so it may." His irony was lost upon her, however. One of Brieux-s dramas revolved around the cancerous effects venereal disease reeks upon the innocents in a profligate society. She scanned the cast of characters and was about too...scream... when he lay out the wrinkled, faintly legible screed with the two prominent signatures and a counter sign and a pencilled addendum in a top corner; 'the promise that Providence compelled me to compromise'.

      He shut the door which divided the library from the dining room, shut out that rooms heat from the inhospitable, unlived in library cum storage area, or as far away from Ethel {the maid) that one could flee to. He could tell Emily was restive, eager to belt on her chatelaine’s keys and rush off to primp the cushions. What relevance could his' promise' exercise over a today dammed by fifteen years of effluvial yesterdays?

       He could put it plainly. He could say that he had lobbed upon some evidence in support of the 'Hunt was a sore loser' hypotheses, envious and suspicious and vacillating and weak , that in Carpenter he recognized a stronger man, a challenger, a free spirit who needed to be brought to his knees before a legislative council of Polar luminaries. At the time most people had thought Hunt’s gripe legitimate. He had staked out a claim to certain ice-fields therefore earnt the right to work them. Carpenter had just been the third officer on the 'Deliverer', third in line and whatsmore, debilitated...

"But it so happens, Emmy my darling, this indignation and crying foul was merely a pretext to trap me and squash me down well and truly into the amateur class. You remember the wording., ‘ if at all possible.' Well the erudite and learned Royal Geographical Society and their vassal knew it would bloody well be impossible.... and I would end up a supreme cad and any discoveries made written off as lies."

Emmy bided patiently, not discerning the point. She almost would have been happier arguing a little more about infidelities. She wondered how the 'De Lune' witch would appear at the Collisseum, how she would make up for the ‘Secret Flower.’ Cold, bleak room. Hector left it, reappearing shortly afterwards lugging a gramophone and two records. To connect audience to performer one had to inject commonality, tune the two wavelengths to identical pitch.

"Nimrod,” he said holding up a record. "The music for the film, as you know, weathered many transformations and we tried it without music. At which time I had to use my voice as a type of musical essence. Then we tried an opera singer, mournful and dirgelike. But Nimrod proved the most successful ship theme, ploughing through the waves, erect on the ice like a monument to human endeavour. Ah, such waste."

"I am not a stranger peering up at you from a draughty auditorium," she abjured, " what do I need convincing of, why do you want to enthral me? That Captain Hunt business. It was not important. I never considered your behaviour to be the least dishonourable. It was a stupid ploy and he's paid for it now, so leave it alone. Anyway where is this letter? Whom was it addressed to?"

The threat of Nimrod seemed to have mobilized her attention. Hector snared her gaze and uttered slowly;

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