The Promise Ese (26) "Many have reviled me, they have withheld their support. If it can be demonstrated that my actions developed as a consequence of deliberate provocations and machinations, and as hinted in the letter, ill-will harboured against me, personally by Hunt, the many might look for ways to assuage their consciences and repair relations with me. Do you realize how it spoilt friendships, divided loyalties? - ' Ah ha so now we see, he's not prepared to play the game according to the rules, he is a cheat and certainly no gentleman.' " "You've said you don't care about others opinions." "Only if they’re bad ones handicap my prospects of...” Escape? Enrichment? "Of living a contented life." * * * He promised Emmy that they could breakfast together next morning. Three days had passed with not a sign of him. Yet like a stray he had came back when hungry. But he wasn't to sleep in her room, even as a way to economize with the coal, rather their eldest sons room, as snug as the broom cupboard. Ethel could massage some feeling into its comatose habiliments. Hector could lie there and dream of wangling investment capital from the island woman, Phyllis Moncrieff. Bloodthirsty lot, the esquimaux. The missionary society and Hector would set up a trading co-operative. Reindeer furs and seal skins to be replaced by stalwart English Burberry and Jaeger fabric. Hunts letter would rinse the slur from his name then abetted by the missionaries and their dollars he could survey all the arctic islands and live in an igloo. What was Emmy doing in her room while he lay stony cold on the almost nuns pallet? Was she thinking about her husband, wishing him dead? Or was she crooning to Percy unable to sleep from the excitement of seeing his ol man? Or maybe she answered letters at the ormolu escretoire that a Bavarian prince had thrust upon them. Or maybe she was yawning and curling up in bed trying to warm her feet. ‘ Dear little Gwen, You will be pleased to hear that Dads film and his little talks to very vast assemblages, have come to an end. He is free to plan his next adventure. One day, I’m sure, girls will be able to sail ships all the way around cape horn... but then it may be the aeroplane they wish to fly all the way across the great continents...’ Hector had done away with smoking for a few days which left him jittery. ‘To celebrate the finale of our film extravaganza, an enormous and starchy banquet was held in honour of the man who made the film and very many of the brave souls who featured in it and me of course but because I was feeling a trifle nervous and tired something happened that must amuse anyone who is told of it. For some reason the top of a bottle exploded, flew to the high ceiling and came down directly into a glass which only needed to be moved an inch. As this occurred so rapidly, my hand just couldn't steady itself, the glass pitched on to someone, a lady who in turn fell off her rickety chair and short-circuited a lamp which happens when water comes into contact with electricity, because she was drinking at the time. Now do you for a minute think the lamp which was tall and fancy, a statue of a lady holding aloft a torch, then itself fell over? It did. It tipped over backwards and smashed a frosted window to pieces, one of which glass splinters landed near me. Embossed on this tiny bit of glass was a star so you can believe I take this as a good omen. In olden times, sailors used stars to set their courses and the constellations each have meanings...’ Oh, well, it was likely he wouldn't remember this blotchy mental cablegram in the morning. For a homily, to caption his description of the event - "be Prepared for any mishap, because one can never be certain that the berg whirling into view is not the berg carved with your epitaph.' Hector looked at the night sky through his dormer window and perceived some stars. If he connected his fingers in geometric patterns before his eyes he could stitch them into rudimentary designs. Then squinting between thumb and forefinger, the stars could be plucked and held like chance diamonds in a young Brazilian stream. The biggest blinding star preserved itself for twilights. Chapter 4 Hector stationed Emily on the other side of the street in order to elicit gobsmacks. The new architecture, the Coney Island kind of pastiche, the candy-stick colonnades and wedding-cakes and luminous lime frescoes of satyrs and jokers and carnival revelry. If ever a man had aimed to scale way over the top it was Colliss. His new theatre uncrated in a teeny number of months from pre-fabricated, pre-rendered concrete and crumbly plaster besmirched the city outskirsts like a smut in a mans beard. The turf which set it off like a satin cushion looked almost sub-lit, a swimming pool at night, chemical green. "Heck of a double bill they have playing there, sweetness." They stood arm in arm in the dark, in an unfamiliar jungle of assorted people and place she needed something to clutch. Whereas Hector, one could not legitimately append the phrase ill-at-ease to his condition of being, anywhere, with any one. Kings, commoners, clowns, the professorial - all props for his long running production called - life. Whatsmore, the seating inside the new playhouse encouraged intermingling. Naturally one could purchase a better view yet not a private one for the traditions of boxes and stalls and even pits had, in the name of egalitarianism been sacrificed and replaced with wrap-around terraced seating in the Roman, Shakespearean and gypsy campfire mode. All the action happened at the level core of the giant cartwheeling rotunda. This theatre would bring circus to a nation of bourgeois dinner jacketed nodder-offers. "We don't need to stay for the whole of it, however, see how you like the serious play.... I think the second half is more Vaudevillian. Personally I can't imagine how Britons will take to this avant-garde hodge-podge." Hector had begun to bowl their way through the groups of theatre-goers so struck by the Collisseum’s inventive exterior it probably wouldn't matter to them what shows were opening there. Emily was surprised to meet someone that she knew, one of a party who happily swapped seats so they could all sit together. What a piece of luck. Now Emmy could gab with the boon companion at her side and leave Hector to analyse the performance. Strangely Emily had begun to ask all sorts of questions about Clara as though she thought rubbing her face in the slop would somehow dissolve its pestilential quality. At breakfast they had debated the merits of well-known actresses. And how accomplished is Miss de Lune. Why is her picture never on postcards? Eventually the reverse psychology flummoxed him and Hector had raced away to do battle with the barber at least to banter with him about women. He liked Emmy when she acted up. It was as if the coastal winds, the sun-bleached sands, the weed-wrangled flotsam and the cuttlefish bones, pulped and liquefied, flushed her arteries again and neutralized the insipid ticking of the hallway clock and the insane drone of London traffic. Hector looked about the bobbing throng. The ceiling was tented, a dome, maypole ribbons of lights, a fire-trap. Several people glanced his direction, probably in recognition of his distinctly fascinating features but instead of melting into his seat he smiled expansively. This usually transformed their supercilious curiosity to embarrassment yet dead ahead a set of eyes twinkled at him across the breadth of centre stage, like singeing flares. At six-o’clock if he was at twelve noon on the clock face of encircling seating. Simultaneous with the waning of the houselights, a nudge from the insect-like chap beside him, the precursive lilt of an Aeolian harp to set the timbre Celtic, something twitched on the lower half of that six pm visage, something where a mouth should be. A tongue? Could she have poked out her tongue at him? Hector stared astonished but the face, again a fresco face too distant to be studied effectively by a student of portraiture, subsided into the dim hush. Hectors attention pressed at it. His night vision was as excellent as his long sight. Skipper of his own Titanic. The face was as a berg and he would steer hard from its path, or steam athwart it if the suicidal demon took over. No it must have been a trompeloiel. People in public did not pull faces at strangers. She must have been moistening her lips. But the head, so straight. Clara came on, into the ring, concealed by her fibrous cloak, her lips lush her teeth white, her brow in shade. The sawdusted beach and papery woods had given way to a cottage and a slashing fire made from red gauze and fanning air and orange filters. She began to strum a psaltery and chant, incandescent. Emily’s elbow fought his on the arm-rest. Her eyes were shining, wet. Impulsively he squeezed her gloved hand before it retracted with the speed of a mouse, to shiver deeply, warmly in the crook of her seat. On his right the beetle headed man was quietly sniggering over the inanity of fairy-tale theatre. He had come for the acrobatics of the second half. All poetry made him laugh. A true pest. Until the wonder of Clara dropping her homespun to the ground and shaking her hair free to somehow unite with the oscillating flame stoppered his breath. She was it, now. But the thing would flop, Hector could see, a grotesque choice for the comic, Byzantine movie-palace of palaces, the ‘Collisseum’. He urgently wished for the interval. He had business and he had the berg. He could feel the face jagging at twelve like a tardy hour-hand. He imagined he could feel its steady eyes, like fingers. Thankfully Clara delivered her final threnody, then mute applause and reviving houselights, and harp, launched her surreally into a descending alley where surviving gladiators may have dragged their slivers of bodies. Hector instantly obeyed the oncoming lights and telescoped his vision across the vault. Katherine Hunt was sitting there. She acknowledged his little salute with a brief smile. It could only have been a mistake. There was not a single soul in the universe who disliked him more than the widow Hunt. Then would that not give a tongue reason? Both were then enveloped in the jockeying melee. Hectors head hurt. Off with the Joneses to opine, shuffled Emmy like a grandma. The mints and pinks and creams, everyone’s most detested flavours of ice-cream, swirling in toffee streaks and gelatinous bands winding around necks and tripping and the brilliant lights hacking at a dazed and chortling, chattering team... he descended to into the crater of Erebus. Clara’s cohorts had for the duration sat prominent front row. The stage was being chaotically remodelled for the second spectacular of the evening. Wires, ladders, backstage boys, management. As the gangway towards the alley cleared, Hunts wife reappeared, expostulating to a front-rower queerly dressed in a sequinned smock. She was beyond medium-height, willowy. Hector had forgotten. When last they had encountered each other as bystanders, the monumentality of her snub had been apparent to all who publicly witnessed it. Undoubtedly he had played up to the occasion, expressly cajoling whatever were her wounds into suppurating down the entire length of a station platform, as she waved her husband away, to glorious prospects long since obliterated. Unbeknownst, Sir Hector, summed up changes Hunts end, and the march of time, had wrought upon her. The puppy fat, gone. The rosewood hair, less voluminous. A stoop? Freckled hands. A gown like a crinkled bag but a feather for the coiffure. Unfortunately one of Clara’s chums, near them, summoned him. Amaranthus picked up a scent of mischief. She turned and snubbed him, again, a covert snub. Then walked away before their probable re-introduction by friends whom Hector curtly amused, before progressing to the dungeons where performers prayed for swift annihilation and their masters for a kind press. The portal of the hole where they had told him Miss DeLune could be located displayed its innards deeply, darkly and brownly. One end. Partitioned by what one could only deem an exalted shower-curtain, the far end enticed like Aladdin’s den, its glow made rain from the curtains cascading beads. Beyond which Hickox was murmuring "my dream girl", their vague heads nuzzling like albatross, it seemed to Hector, his stooped to hers in a chair and smoke clouding like the steams of Erebus. He strode through loudly and peeled back the curtain. It was no compromised situation. Hickox did have his hand wading in her décolletage, though. "Hector!" Claire cried, almost knocking the fumbling Hickox to his knees. "Darling where have you been? I thought you must have jumped on the first boat out." She child-like hung her arms about him and laid her head against him and whispered, "you look fine. Has your cold gone?" Pat judiciously had resorted to the dependable affections of his champagne glass. Hector was watching him over her trembling head. He raised his eyebrows and Pat shrugged and butted her forgotten cigarette and dithered with the glasses. "Hec," she said, bleary eyed, " why weren't you up front tonight? I saw you with your wife, remember where I call to the winds, well I look up and around. I didn't think you two ever went about together. But God wasn't the thing a titanic crash? Pat says I was good, then perhaps its too powerful for that kind of audience; they’re not attuned to it. What do you think? Was the role good for me, did I do it well? Was I as beautiful as the flaming flower?" Gently Hector assured her she had shone and stunned the audience into their reticent appreciation. Her body against his was still burning from the fake fire and the exertion and her disappointment. "By the way," he added, "there’s a couple of reporters from some ladies journal waiting in the mine- shaft." "Really, they’re here now? Beauty aids." She turned to Pat for champagne and gulped it, smudges of grease-paint all over the glass. " The soap and water brigade, want to be let in on the secret of eternal beauty, they believe it should be made available in jars from Selfridges? Really not interested in my acting at all. Colliss has a kind of meeting room I'll take them there. Now I hope the tear-stains have all faded, yes?" Pat went with her to the door. Her Lady Macbeth had done well abroad. Primarily because seven years spent in mythical England had hydrated her with rose-water and high-culture. Yet what swung for her overseas, could just as readily swing her overboard, over here. "watch myself sell my self,” The line carolled over and over in Hectors mind. He could hear them now, on the reverse, dark side of the curtain planning her marketing attack. Hickox was already replete with wealth. Perhaps he hoped to buy a knighthood. Easier ways, thought Hector, with pride. "Wait for me, won't you Hec? "Of course. I'm not going anywhere." To illustrate he plumped down in the chair of cane, its creaking audible, and drank from her fizzing glass. What was the most effective and least insulting way to badger someone for a loan? Pat returned and also sat, on a chest beside the mock gothic folding mirror. One could gratify ones vanity five times over by shifting feet before that mirrors five concertina panels. They posed at it for a minute and admired each other’s napes. Hector declined a cigar explaining that he liked to test himself every so often. "Why," said Pat, dismissively, in case you get stuck somewhere without much?" "Precisely." Next Pat begged him to tell again, what can happen to a man who is deprived of the basic comforts for any extended period. "You've heard I suppose of the stone eaters,” began Hector, drawling his yarn, purring his yarn, "charlatans for the most part, simpletons men of the land, the outcasts, the men with little to sell apart from what god has granted them as babies - iron constitutions, a dollop of cunning, showmanship and the driving instinct of self-preservation. They would murder another even such as themselves, in order to stave off the inevitable brute death for another month or year or, for the time it takes to blink an eye. Some men as these chose to hunt the Leviathan, some took to the battlefield but some thought it a fair test of their mettle to remain where they had rooted, be city or farm, and demonstrate to others the unyielding strength of their physical capacities. Therefore, they would pick from the road a mineral of any composition, place it on their tongue, close their mouths and swallow. Then a bystander might select one himself, slightly larger, more lumpy, harder even, hand it to the great bear of a man who would proceed the crunch it up like a walnut before swallowing again, the fragments joining other such fragments swilling around his belly in a kind of skeleton gnashing of bones. The dancing soup of stones. Stone upon stone, pebble against pebble until the taste of mineral became to him as the softest whitest loaf ever baked. How he would relish the granites and the dolerite and the quartz and the mudstone. Eventually the crowds thrust into their purses, almost out of pity as much as wonder, insisting he go at once to the victuallers for food of sweeter quality, which reluctantly he would do to dumb down the horror and to still their guilt-ridden hearts. This led to fire-eating, and the consumption of broken glass amongst other feats of a crazed but enduring legacy. Of course it follows that if a man will eat stones for money he will eat them also for survival, or at least try to. You see where this is leading to old man..." Pat was mesmerized. " Well," he said, "the swallowing of rocks and the actual chewing...Can it be done? Have you seen it?" Hector laughed. "Just start with bones, raw bones. Then hide, then tussock grass. It is possible, it can be done." He sighed wistfully. " When I think of those marbly black pebbles on our beach, it almost makes me hungry, for what they represent, that is. The true nature of isolation, the lure of the unknown interior of ones own soul. Its rough and stern but it is solid to the touch." "When you need it that badly you'd better go. Claire thought you'd signed on to some ship or other just to get away. She cried." What all down his lapel? How seldom Clara’s name was tussled with between the two. Had Hickox been a man and had Hector been free from misery they might have cleared the air with a brawl but Hickox was a swarthy tango dancer and too charming for fists. It was always the knowing nods and obsequious respect for her feelings that chilled their shared champagne.
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