The Promise Ese (27)
"Well, to tell you the truth, I'm on the verge... of another voyage." They both laughed at the verbal convergence, a mirth to oil the traces of his loan appeal. 'Watch myself sell my self'. Surely Hickox would ferret out the solution from the labyrinthine mesh of circumstance and euphemism. His mother had favoured him generously in her will. Loan Hector a few thousand links in his chain of escape and reap exclusive possession of the De Lune franchise. Hector must be seen as a threat to his command - a grass-seed in his sock. A bugbear. "Where will you go?" Pat asked, evidently considerate, stroking his glass. "Wherever the wind takes me." Hector could suddenly see the letter blowing towards him. " I can immediately start making arrangements. If you can oblige me, tomorrow?" Perhaps though Pat, if I write him a cheque straight away, he'll skedaddle. Merrytimes. "Tell me," said Hector stowing his leaveticket in his jacket and grinning and taking a cigar just to hold, " what it means when a strange woman, at least a past acquaintance pokes her tongue at you, in front of other people... admittedly in semi-darkness?" "Has that just happened to you?" "Mmm" They heard Clara’s tinkling tones approach. Pat whispered: "It either means she can't stand you or she is in love with you." Chapter 5 It was his. He had actually persuaded Lord Westgate to let Archie Craigie know of the Press Associations disdain for such airy-fairy gossip. Not a rag intended to as much as peruse the particle of Hunts innocent correspondence containing its bare revelation of Sir Hector Carpenters supposed heart complaint. Upon reflection, Hector had decided that that one stinging device would hobble him far more than any expression of Hunts abhorrence for him could assist in the winning of the sympathy stakes. So the price had dropped. Lady Hunts name proffered itself as the next runner in the customer field if Hector retired from the race. But he had two thousand pounds and that was enough. The transaction had transpired and Archie, blasé and calm, came away with a guarantee of bank-bursting profits teeming from the Antarctic supply business. Hector had proposed super velocity and freeze resistant instruments that could be towed from gliders to meteorologically map the upper atmospheres. And deep ocean thermometers to pinpoint the sites of fathomless gurgling, volcanic mouths. He even envisaged mansize tricycles for limited travel from camp to camp, once the primary problem of impacting ice-block waters had been negated by the invention of indestructible vessels or airships filled with gases that remained gaseous whatever the Fahrenheit. Now it was to Captain Hunt’s statue in Regents Park that he was drawn. The flapping of the letter paper cheeked him like the wind-bedraggled tent canvas or the scarfing sail on the sledge or the rasp of each mans Burberry hood as it strafed ears with the irritating propinquity of a mosquito’s tone. Then it was the immense dimensions of the statue tempting him like the promise of pony meat at the foot of Granite column nearly obscured impenetrably by a scour of fresh crisp snow-bullets. The far-seeing gaze breaking through and marking a trail to the East, diverting blistered, worn and bleeding feet from the reaching palms of crevasses to the thighs of rigid, stubbly snow plains and a good downwind run to the spine of the flocculent, ice-pitted sea. He was on the move at last. For weeks, Hectors future had been locked in a morass of encrusted floes blocking his relief and pushing inwards from every direction. Helpless. A skerrick of grey in the white wilderness. Then from the crowsnest he had spied a lead wending its way towards the horizon like an animals dislocated halter, a long, long skein of letter guiding him from a stewing past to a raw future. His ship had lurched into motion. Would the coal hold out? Heart trouble, who remembered or cared. Hunts pupil-less eyes stared into nothing and never down at the faulty contraption of a man lounging on the parkbench at the base of his giants’ pedestal. And no matter what hometruths Hector projected into his oasis of vision the eyes could not question nor sanction nor dispute their validity. In fact a volley of intrusive circumlocution fused by the rudeness of Hunts wife could but taint the stone like pigeon guano, which a paralysed image of Hunt, in non-existent dreams, vainly scratched at. Mackintosh beckoned from across the park, his quick walk full of intent then sat down next to him like a vagrant on the make. Such a hard won document yet grasped insubstantially like a napkin maybe with a number sketched upon it. "Don't you think you had best be careful with that? What if a bird seized it and flew off?" "The finest Basildon bond,” said Hector deliberately sheeting it into the wind. "Besides, I have made transcripts. Ones in the bank." Wouldn't it make more sense to deposit the original in the bank then if something simply had to be waved about, why not the copy? "What if the bank was to burn down?" Hectors gaze assailed him with this indisputable fact, his eyes displaying specks of interwoven colours normally masked by low-lit rooms, greens and tans and ultramarine, the oceans stormy assortment. Spasms of frostbite and sunburn had engraven his features with their characteristic tracks of downturned bafflement, squint, oblique teariness, the dents of jutting rage and arcs of impish smile. But his brow, relatively smooth and broad but not high, advertised an honesty reinforced by widely spaced eyes that windowed a soul, unashamedly. Mac thought it was a beautiful face. Got him into strife, though. "Look at this," he said. They were now standing against the substantial stone plinth upon which captain Hunt steepled like a wedding-cake adornment. Hector spread the letter flat as though he was posting a bill and made Mac bend closely to peer at its text just legible in the shade cast by their bodies. Deftly he had planted his thumb across 'health being a question mark - heart trouble” even though the handwriting was difficult to crack without concentration. Mackintosh read "terrain and weather may compel him to renege'. Then looked quizzically at his boss, who said excitedly: "Lets me out of jail. Hunt admits, well virtually, that the promise is an unreasonable one that in all probability will need to be disregarded in order to save lives etc. Which of course is what happened; the shelf had broken away and we were unable to land where originally envisaged. Any decent leader with due regard to the success of his expedition and the welfare of his men would have taken the decision that we did, after much discussion, I might add. Hunt was always changing plans himself in the light of prevailing conditions on the ground.” While Hector nattered Mac was unobtrusively reading the rest of the letter visible to him. From what he could see the contents did not entirely correspond to the account given to him by Hector immediately subsequent to the events at Craigie's. But that did not mean Hector had intentionally redrawn its outline. The creepiness of the house and Murchison ogling him with the salivating, toothless urgency of a super-annuated Baskerville hound could account for the sizzling blurb. The fear. The surprise. The ultimatum. The money. Hectors retelling had led Mac to believe in the miraculous power of this letter, but now to him it seemed wishy-washy, scarcely worth its price, a lame duck. But of course he was too young to have been aware of the little fracas the broken promise had ignited amongst the union of "Deliverer" veterans, the learned society and the trash media. This Victorian obsession with 'dying like a gentleman'etc was a turkey that the French downpours did right to slosh along trenches of mud and excrement into the Marne or Loire, into the wallows for swine and into the seas surrounding Britain, then into folklore. Sir Hector belittled it himself. He stood in fact as the incarnation of its denial by having refused to martyr himself as a gentleman for any cause. "Its not that bit," he replied in answer to Macs query. "Its the RGS, always had it in for me. At last the dice are loaded against them. Hunt has rigged the game....” He chuckled and winked up at the dour volume of petrified explorer, then said, "Anyway why were you following me Mac. I'm in the country today, or will be on Sunday, didn't she let you know?" Hector employed the phrase 'spy-mistress', to deride his wife’s machinations. Mac clasped his hands behind his back. The letter was now protruding from Hectors breast pocket like an artfully placed silk handkerchief. It bothered him. "There’s a crisis,” he said, following its rise and fall with each breath, and the gusts tugging it and Hectors absent-minded fingering of it like a fob-chain. But then he folded down the top corner and forced Mackintosh to seek another eye-rest. “I've been looking for you to tell you. Your mi.....” He stopped short. "Miss DeLune has been to the office and so Lady Carpenter tells me to your private residence. She rang, sounded very...irate. She said the children were there and it embarrassed her... to have that particular lady calling at that...particular time." They began to trudge across the grass towards the park gates. "Go on," said Hector, sourly. "The way you said crisis I immediately thought of the factory, that it had burnt down or the little barque I've had my eye on had been torpedoed and is no more. Now you are waffling." Mac tightened up, awkwardly, hedging the boggy sections of grass. "She wouldn’t, Miss DeLune, couldn’t let me in on the nature of the trouble but said it could be catastrophic." "She's an actress. How else would she describe it, A spot of dirty weather? Oh well I suppose it involves more money as usual, my hopes of survival recede like the stern of my barque chugging gaily away down the Thames to the beginnings of Nowhere, hooting, yes hooting like a tug. So what am I to do?" Mac thought, consult a lawyer but said: "She’s waiting for you at her agents house in Mayfair." * * * Standing solitary near an immaculate grandpiano which imposed like the summit of an alp in spring, was a man Hector had not set eyes on before. A man of bristling hair, moustache and ruddiness, a man twisting and reeling a coffee cup into its saucer. A man tapping one shoe to the pulse of a fashionable tune wheezing from the gramophone, a man with luggage, with a confident air and with eyes glued to Clara who had buried herself in a low-slung sofa and was evidently thinking. As soon as she heard Sir Hector announced, however, she hopped up, even before Hickox, at the apex of an awkward human triangle almost scorching the back of his trousers in front of an impressive fire, could clear his throat. Yet her greeting lacked the ardour of ones previous. Hector felt the six eyes of the three people, swarm. She would have preferred to take him aside to privately stammer out the gist of her 'catastrophe', had it not been for a speedy advance of the moustachioed man, the played- out record, grating, and Pats victim smile, "My name is Walter Morris", said the man. A stilted, less hairy combination of both Whitman and the designer-poet Morris now confronted Hector with a pregnant exhortation which seemed so popular among strangers he had met recently. "I'm Sir Hector Carpenter. What can I do for you?", he replied, awaiting the pregnant exhortation to drop its litter. Hickox and Clara, having gagged the gramophone, retired silently to the farthest extent of the web where they were holding hands like a beleaguered couple of tarantulas. Hurriedly Clara said: "Walt insisted upon speaking to you personally, we've nothing decided." Pat lit up his pipe and whispered to her, inaudibly, their stray voices lost on the moor of room while a footmen loaded the fire and a deadpan maid rolled away the trolley of tea. It was life in a palace. Hopefully, an intimidating setting for the new man who shook Hectors hand, greedily, blurting: "You didn't know she was married, did you? Let me introduce you to Mrs Morris." Without allowing pause for thought, the man had backed toward Clara grabbed her arm and made his 'check'. Hector opened and closed a fist but otherwise maintained his insouciance whilst uttering drearily: "Is that all you have to say? That’s nothing to me. I've known it from the beginning." The man raised his shaggy eyebrows suspiciously and fingered Clara like a trinket. "Oh, have you, sir, then that makes it all the more reprehensible, playing about with a married woman...” Such emphasis upon the word 'married' as though it was some unique pedigree his genius had spawned. Clara suddenly gave voice to her damsel routine, "Really Walt, talk about the pot calling the kettle." then wrenched her arm away indignant and shrewishly faced him. "Mrs Mitchell, Mrs Karlsson, Mrs Vicary, Mrs Stimson, wives of some poor codgers, no doubt. It is you who disgrace the institution of marriage just by breathing your stale, stinking desires into any married-woman’s vicinity. And you have been doing just that long before I took off to find the air that’s cool and freshened by mountains." Clara’s reflexes had been refined by several turbulent years of childless, fruitless wedlock. She could read concerning symptoms in Walter's ramrod posture yet was unable to transcribe them for anyone else. She could only shoot arrows of code into the air and hope beyond hope that they met their intended targets. Pat may have got one because he mosied over a little nearer to the group. Still, she went on pushing: " You particularly sought out the ones with rings. Why? Shall I let these gentlemen in on the secret? To cover any bastards unfortunate enough to be pop from them, and now what? Passed you over, have they, the lonesome, sagging ingrates? Abandoned their Indian brave? You’ve aged, considerably, no wonder. Chief of the Navaho but deprived of the harem and no longer privy to the council of the sacred star-band. Nothing else for it but retreat. Take to the prairie, rejoin the herds for I won't be there to plait beads in your hair and I most definitely, never again will take the moon to my bosom. Its the end of the bloodline." The last few words she wickedly eked out like syrup then watched for his reaction, trancelike. Now they looked closer both Hector and Hickox imagined they saw a smattering of red-indian in Morris. He seemed to comprehend. Indians treated their squaws roughly. His fingers curled as if configuring to yank her hair out. "You are my rightful woman," he said, fidgety, "but as you know I have not come all this way to drag you off but to be rightfully rid of you." "What does that mean," asked Hector, wedging his voice between them. "A mercy-killing?" "Divorce", Hickox filled in, casually. "You know the old thing...” He palmed his free hand forward like a cigar-shop Indian, as if to say, well there you have it. Morris prickled. Stolen thunder. It was heating uncomfortably, this potted drama, thought Hector, wondering if Pat was up to punching a man, an action Hector had not been called upon to reproduce since the laying flat of a baiter on the 'Trueblood', in a storm, for his own good.
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