The Promise Ese (31)
Her “Ha’ sprayed up from the water-logged sward as, explosively, she merged into a lunatic, eurhythmic dance, a jiggle and bend, loop, bobbing erratically, scattering a tangible challenge to the chug-chug of a choking Dodge engine, to the motorcyclist. Performing an escape from uniformity to chaff them. She became the centre of the young night. Hector breathed expressively but stood passive, thinking of…what? She flung out further investigation: “Where did it come from? I did find the first page of that actual letter but…was it copied from the original? I’ve lost many…over the years…” One of his blue typescript copies of ‘the promise’ missive had indeed crawled under her door. Eventually, leaves vocal in their shedding of rain, the cars cough and her circular motion flicked some words askew from his comprehension. Thus annoyed, Hector sloshed up to her, broke the dance and said: “You see it was an antipathy on behalf of your husband. He knew he really had no rights over the naked, unclaimed ice. He wanted to scare anyone with a similar desire then barge in when he felt like it and make history. Who’s dishonourable?” Who indeed? Katherine smiled a smile of largesse, towards all on the front steps who had been watching and clapping her aborted fairy dance, then steamed lowly to him: “Read the expert opinion on it, there’s masses and, please will you cut out of the melodramatics? I don’t want to receive anymore anonymous, nasty harangues from you through the post. Say, say what you feel…you must feel like the victor, life is victorious. Even a slug has triumphed over dust.” She pressed his gruff intent as sinuous as the night. “Oh, I feel vital now after the fresh air. Goodbye, safe journey.” But wouldn’t shake his hand. Then whilst the backlit semi-human statues, cheery under the lintel, were loudly waving him away through colossal gates she ran over to Pink and said hurriedly: “Please G.E, I’m serious, can’t you take me away from here? I feel I cannot endure the babble anymore. You know Alice, surely her incessant, her incisive nosiness bores even you at the end of the day” “Where did you have in mind? I was going to stay the night at Winchester.” “Fine, do you think I could hang on all that way without falling off? “Its very chilly.” “I’ll borrow some wet-weather gear. I have my fur-coat. Please…” She firmly squeezed his forearm. This time he didn’t flinch. It was growing cold. “Very well, but I leave you to explain. I know a way to sweeten things, just tell them Carpenter has all the money he needs for his next venture, that he and you have reached an entente.” “I have no idea what you mean but I’ll say whatever you like” * * * Hector whisked down the blind having caught his own reflection in the train window and been thwacked by it. He had restaged, rewritten, re-enacted the scene tens of times in his head, each one a macabre impersonation of Truth. Morris shoots him. Morris shoots her. She immolates herself. He strangles Morris. Hickox raises the marble mantle-clock with both hands and – lights his pipe. Where the quicksilvery gift of gab? Grinding in his mind. Moony? “Let the blind up, honey-pie…” Face the unavoidable. He let it go, braced himself in the crotch of the seat, closed his eyes… try to relive the previous night. Vicious rain splashed the moving glass. His rudimentary features super-imposed against the thick window streaked with rain, each pore jolting runnels as if a toy maker had him by the shoulders and was cruelly trying the cord in his neck, flopping the head about, crashing his brains like conkers. What if they could be in the compartment together, if his Plymouth train could become the boat-train? They had kissed, voracious, and his face had bled and she had swilled his blood, fluttered her tongue along each ragged line. Now he let this pungent instance out to skip and dance at last in the dribbles of rain. The last, the best, Moony, his lantern somewhere in the dead of an ice-night, blipping across his physical memory her thousands of volts. Volts. Live. He had to be daring the gulf of oblivion for systems to be electrified. Leering at extinction, ribs cordoned by… harness, by wire, belt. She led him. Clara, the handler of his body, the purger of feelings controlled. She had unclipped his survivor’s instinct. Dumped inconsequentials- like table-frippery, like compass, like milk in tea, like decorum. With the sunrise her ice-fingers began crackling loose of him. And the last guy-rope loosed from him. Moony was extinguished. One super-nova, one night to forever after refuel heaven. He smoothed his hand across the glass as if fine human tissue lacquered his first-class carriage window. One last fantasy, the cream between her legs. At lunch each mouthful had been her. If Sorely-Sharpes dingy cortege could have moled a way into his skull and read his recollections… Perhaps it might have excited their atomic particles! Oh but the Potts and Handels, the queers, would’ve gagged. Female bodies made them wretch, the Ruskins of the world. They had lain on their backs talking to the dark. Last night at the ol’ ’boudoir’. Hickox had grudgingly consented. Hector thought to break it all down before he went away. “What do you mean, the ‘whipping-boy’?” Whip me, whip me… He had said it was part of a time-honoured strategy for quelling mutinies. “Isolate the discontent, drive it towards a single object – me, in this case. I’m reviled as the common enemy, almost a wife-beater, most definitely scoundrel but you, my darlingest Darling…you are safe. I have saved your splendid hide from THE scandal which would have scuttled any hope of success in the future. Imagine the scandal-mongers and their awful hyena’s cackle disgracing the lawn of the ‘Collisseum’. But now you must soldier on until, ‘Vanity Fair’ ordains Claire De Lune the greatest actress of the century. Morris is a zero. Can’t you feel yourself a leading light, the brightest in the firmament, already?” “With Sir Hector Carpenter still the greatest and bravest explorer, and smartest. But we should have talked about it. It was very shocking, that sort of thing demands a run through.” “I wasn’t entirely sure that you hadn’t gone mad with the red- indian stuff.” Clara had giggled and pinched a little piece of him under the covers. “It’s true…I was trying…probably wouldn’t have been good to fight. I so longed to see him laid out. Thinks he’s an anthropologist, ever since we honeymooned in the mock-up reservation and ‘ howed’ around the great campfire and smoked whatever root gets jammed into the peace-pipe and, I don’t know, borrowed wives and braves. Imagine if the tourist department created a cartoony village where the stone-age peoples of Briton could feed up the customers with millet husks or whatever meal they ate, dress them up in skins, transport them into a prior, hazy time of innocent marauding… What do you think it would do for the consciousness of your empire? African natives would no longer frighten the masses the same as Martians do. Brotherhood. I suppose you and your wife sometimes play pet games. What’s your little married ‘thing’?” He had emphasized for her, ticklishly, the English predilection for chivalrous tales of esprit-du-corps, quests, the lady of the lake, husbands away on crusades, love-potions and grails and of course Guinevere and Lancelot, and Arthur, the quintessential cuckold. “Every major poet has taken up the thread and woven it into various concoctions. So I was just another traditional Knight riding away to retrieve an honourable…reputation, or treasure to spread at her feet.” But snow was snow. Snow was a screen for the moon to project light on. “She’s a wonderful woman. We must have something in common if you like us both.” Then they had made love in earnest, the last, the best, the best, the worst…blinding. And Hector had given back his key and wished her happiness and promised he had a scheme for fixing Morris if he started swinging again the big ‘D’ for divorce. And he had said Hickox was a straight, reliable man who loved her and could provide riches and….only then had Moony begun to snivel. Snivels breed snivels. Then it was though she was the South pulling away from the relief ship, glaring white, growing distant and all his tears were freezing his lashes and the ship was clearing the pack until the South was bittersweet horizon. He shut the blind. He was crying and Teignmouth was nearing, where he had to get out and meet people, benefactors. “I had to find out if she was hiding you away” Quiet. He rubbed his itching eyes and again he could feel her consoling caresses, “sacrifice, for me…?” Oh, I can trust you can I, but “I had to find out if she was hiding you in the attic. I was worried, it wasn’t an act..” And all the garbage swashed into his house “contaminate your children, me? Oh Hec..’ Don’t cry Moony…He loved her, it was true. She had slipped and they had both looked silly and he had loved her more because. the ship had shivered way, way down on the sea-bed, his arm had wormed up with the letter – she had re-assumed her professional, unflappable, sophisticated, fashionable demeanour then cut him and cut him…”Oh what has that unmentionable wanton street-thing done to you?” In the cupboard with you Em. I can kill myself anyhow, wouldn’t that surprise you? Emily’s voice was the Harpy rain that changed rivers to torrents…death-traps. He tidied and took up his book and his hat and his umbrella and his coat, flicked up the blind and suddenly there was no one there, just an illuminated station. At the same moment, G.E turned his bike off the road so Katherine could re-arrange herself. She wanted to stop at Stone-Henge. Clouds were moving overhead. Then, strangely a vision of Sir Hector, crooked like an Easter Island rock, scud before her eyes, blaring that scowl of his from the old photograph, his cheek tattooed as she had witnessed, with injury. Like a bat, like a shudder. “Well, I can honestly say this is the coldest I have ever been” His face passed like a cloud across the moon. Her teeth chattered. South Chapter 1 ‘Once upon a time there were two little boys. One was fair and one was dark, like you Perky, even the whites of his eyes were greyish and his mother dressed him in a suit as violet as night and locked him in a cave where no light penetrated, every chink had been puttied – so the air was thin, a condition which he soon adapted to, like an underground animal-dweller unable to tell day from night…’ “Percy, come for your breakfast!” Hector was sitting on the edge of the bed tying his shoelaces with Percy nestled against him, watching and listening. Hector curtailed his story and said: “Off you go, Mama wants you…aren’t you feeling as hungry as a horse? Look it to me.” He smirked at the lad and spun him aloft before sailing him down. Emily wavered in the doorway, wearing a frothing, hot-cocoa expression like Supreme Comfort. She directed Percy downstairs, then rather than cold-shoulder her husband in the old way, clutched at his arm, needing to feel attached to him like a moveable banister, from tip to bottom stair. As she clutched, she plucked at bits of lint on his shoulder. No Em, he thought, I won’t stand for it.
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