The Promise Ese (37)
“Mac, stay behind and look after things. I’ll take Morris” Guard well the troublemaker. His motto. * * * Katherine Hunt lay in bed from which she rasped the precise words “Uh, I remember you without clothes”. This immediately divulged her state of seedy abandon. She splayed out on her stomach with her throat constricted and it was from one eye she beheld his solid respectable gentleman’s “holding off” in the doorway. “Come over and roll me up like a rug”, ensued, as she whipped up her knees and went from crucified to foetal, never taking her red, lank eyes from him. Hector then detected the limpness of the bed-coverings, their pasting to her form, the calling–card of fevers, if not dipsomania, that land of plenty trouble. So he tucked her in a little and reversed the damp pillows. She squeaked, pathetic, for a person who could speak lush. He felt sorry she was sick and told her he felt sorry. “Might be tonsillitis, I can’t swallow…agonizing but the worst is this cold, shivery and roasting both at once.” She was curling up more and more, moaning. “Please put something else on me.” He attempted to oblige but could only find Emmy’s cloth in its delivery box. The bedroom was a riot with stacks of documents, catalogues at the foot of the window seat, postcards of art wedged and pinned over every vertical, hairbrushes, withering fruit, a trail of underclothes leading from onset to prostration, and a cream, mushroom blown-glass lamp streaked with pink veins of dye. A sketchblock had been tossed on the floor. ‘The Adoration’ squiggled in it. There it was on the window seat, the stark original. It had been transplanted. It looked like an igneous rock someone had thrown through the window. Hector unfurled the mythical sheet of cure and laid it over the shuddering woman. There in chalk, was Paul Hunt’s autograph completing the ring, in fealty to the empty heart, the fraternal ring - coronet and neck-brace and noose. “There ye are m’dear. Dressed for the ball.” He suddenly pressed his hand into the nub of the world, a handprint in the metaphorical plaster… “in the plaster of eternity” but his hand left no trace on the linen hinterland nor could it even feel her bottom sheathed by something spongy. “Ooh that’s useless,” she swallowed excruciatingly, distorting her features, then kicked like a colt in juicy grass. Beneath was a hefty dressing gown underneath which he supposed her fervid, goose-pimply agony only. “It’s my brother’s,” she slowly referred to the dressing-gown.”It’s not ‘his’ or my fiancé’s. I wouldn’t choose it for myself. Big-boots and men’s ties have run their course with the suffragette marches of the old days.” He was gazing down with hands in pockets at the rack and ruin, smiling not for that but for the naturalness and candour of everything surrounding him. “Its ship-board chaos in here, m’dear.” Tears were welling in her eyes, “Please, I can barely, speak…help me in the bath? I feel I can rely on you. I want somebody to look after me, a bit…please. I need to get warm.” It was a husky shrill cry for help, “ stop smiling!” She tried to shout. “Real pain!” “Are you sure you haven’t a touch of a malady more serious?” “No, I would like to wait before calling the doctor.” She rose stiffly and laboriously, clutching her wrap then linked her arm in his and started to winch him towards the door shuffling her little bare feet Chinesely. How the mighty had collapsed! It dawned on him that her art-queen poo-poohing of the mundane and even her petulance with everybody in the years past might have been public policy – a slapping on of clay over vulnerabilities too angular to pass inspection. “This way,” he indicated, then with one great sigh of emboldened strength lifted her like a baby cuddled in a big rug into his arms. He winked roguishly but her disoriented skull with sopping hair merely lolled on him, her eyes rolled on him. Then she pointed like a lookout man to the corridor, cold and dispiriting, and breathed fast. Once in the bathroom she moaned louder. The heater had been lit earlier, the water had heated. The choking, glugging boiling water twanged against the hollow unplumbed tub and the brass bungle of piping smeared and juddered. She crouched on his lap on a spindly chair. He whistled a shanty into the matted hair at her neck, massaged her thighs through the gown. “Ca suffit’, she croaked. “What would you like in your bath, M’dear…we have lilac crystals and eau-de-cologne. Here is a jar of pearls.” He dropped a pearl in the water to see what happened, it fizzed as he swirled in some cold water. As inviting a puddle as one begrimed could hope for. “I want it hot.” She sounded as deadpan as a dead pan. He’d rolled up his sleeves workmanlike, assured her it was as hot as Hell. When she was in the blotchiness of her sweltering skin suffused into hot-dog parity. Sickness had destroyed the bashfulness, if it had ever existed. She said distantly: “Scoop it over me…no no…. I will sleep in the bath…the ghastliest offshoot of fevers, you know, is the tension of mind, the ghosts and ghouls of thought…I must drown them.” She seemed to be addressing his knee. Her olivey complexion had turned meat-red. What about her hair? It would dry in bed under the blankets, she said. Hector was instructed to anchor her arms as she slid under the water and to keep her steadied while the complete skin suffocated in water. He brought over the chair to save his back. Then as an elbow, she unflexed, unbent, unfolded and sank to the bottom leaving a little island of knees and a snorkel of nose, shut-eyes, weedy rafts of floating hair. Well, she trusted him not to drown her. She was fiercely gripping his forearms, squelching her mermaid’s body a little askew, to do so properly. Of course he had the chance to observe, to contemplate. “Lower me, like Ophelia, if you would be so kind,” gasping, she requested, thinking of the Millais painting as well as of her own refined imaginings of the placid, desirous scene. He stood, then they latched finger-tips and she submerged her head, bubbling, open-eyed, her practice from the pellucid Aegean, her much-admired feat. Hector shooed away the whizzing notion of dropping in on top of her and them drowning together, unless the bathroom flooded first and crashed ceiling, tiles and the lot of them into the basement. But she seemed an insular water-dweller, prune-wrinkling and black-haired in places and middle-aged, bony. It was inconceivable, the idea of anyone else he had ever been on terms with, lying there so completely at his command, so distinctly, threatened, vulnerable, oblivious, unselfconscious, naked, blithe, exposed, testing, asking – an exclamation or a question mark? So she was unique in her level of – faith placing. She was unique in her manner of action, although… He thought of Clara. She twisted the scripts once or twice. Yet Clara was dumpling enough for a fur-trimmed Christmas-card figure skater. Katherine hauled herself up and re-bent, then enclosed her hands around her cataleptic head pain. “Help me, I’m getting out.” She reached out. He braced her; She stepped over the steep enamel walls into the niche of his arms and many grating towels with hideous black and green borders. Immediately she shivered although Hector could only compare her temperature to that of a broiling mutton bone ladled from an active stockpot. “I’ve got to get back to bed” yet he tried at least to milk the bath-water from her lengthy, tepid, tresses. Then, regardless of protest, he carried her again, on the look out for Jobs Mrs, who it seems had snuck in to her lady’s bedchamber and made the bed whilst all was quiet. God knows how the servants interpreted this behaviour. May sick people be excused. The sheets, hospital tight, she fought asunder. Desperately she needed to retain the heat. Desperately she crawled into a tinier ball and zealously stropped one foot upon the other. Desperately she beseeched Hector to aid her. Desperately she suggested the infiltration of his own body-heat. “You owe me one. Paul, by the way wishes you well on the new voyage, tell your wife that. I can imagine she…repines about the either or. the either Hunts man or Carpenters man…thing. But I don’t believe in the ‘sins of the fathers’…do you?” Katherine was mumbling moistly into her hand cradling her chin with that particular recumbent abandonment of the dead-to-the-world infant. Clearly she was unwell. He had seen grubby, cantankerous men reduced to pitiableness by slighter but nevertheless relentless syndromes, the same shovelled out eye-sockets. He thanked her magisterially for contributing her time to the tablecloth and generously kissed her on the ear which provoked a sort of bull-frog titter of: “Get in, I’m for the pyre.” So Hector, being ever attentive to the poorly, scuffed off his shoes and bowled in beside her fully clothed. As if lightening had struck, she felt, with articles in his pockets and buttons, small change etc jabbing into her, the nonsensical aura attached to her request: yet concurrently the sudden surge of heat and comfort stifled her laughter with its wonder. She luxuriated. He curved one big shoulder over her upper-arm to her hand and clamped it; his legs paralleled hers, his upper-body, prominent chest provided the divinest insulation. Two in a tomb. “Head hurt?” he asked with a voice like melted cheese. She nodded so he began stroking the shiny trails of hair across her brow. She could smell the fizzing pearl on his hand. He told her, graphically, about the unmatchable iniquity of high-altitude headaches, to make her feel less special. Not for an instant did a piercing awareness of her shivery hot body leave him. He felt like her overcoat. Is that how an overcoat must feel? How frustrating for the overcoat. Katherine burned with all his weight against her. Undoubtedly a ‘gentleman’ held her. That’s all he did, despite…she felt the vestigial animal in the gentleman wanting more. The small of her back felt him. Then as the euphoria, that sense of blankness bearing the buds of another’s ambience, permeated, the trickles of delirium began. Her voice wobbled like a little girls and sprinkled his hand because she found it so parching to swallow. “What are you like…? I can tell you what I’m like. I’m like all the rubbish in this room. No you, man of action, man of business, man of the moment, what?’ “Man of the imagination.” “So you can build castles in the air.” “I can imagine ways out of them.” A huge hanging photograph of a fading- into- black Captain Hunt as bare as the babe in his arms, above the bedstead, gave symmetry to the scene below except that one wasn’t bare and one wasn’t her father but she was the babe and he could rock her to sleep with Browning’s ‘Youth and Art’…Still there? Try one of my own – I want to feel the arms of God about me, Bathe in the stream of Lethe, Wrestle with the standing enemy Until, obedient he lies beneath me. Only then may laze to slumber turn, And the patient arms of God relax, Only then the child champing to be born Might mask its birth, claiming attack. He did have another verse scrambled away, but the above served him well enough for girl’s keepsake annuals. “Now you can see why I’m not a poet,” he fizzled far off…sssss like a firework into her low, abating consciousness. “And why I have let you.” Because she was asleep. Her whimpers of misery had ceased, like the sparklets of a Katherine wheel. ‘Chicken! Chicken.’ In the fireplace wind skirmished but it was belligerent rather than verbose. She opened her eyes, listened. The whatnot at the vistas-end of her preliminary glance displayed mute carnival glass. ‘Chicken!’ Aslant, her gaze zoomed back to the hand on her arm, dipped. Then she startled and turned but lion-heart, he couldn’t be there. What was his voice exactly? She grazed her left hand all over the sheet where Hector’s solicitous body had nursed her. Flat. Cold. Sad. In her right hand – a tickle of paper. She zipped under again like an incorrigible jack-in-the-box. The letter! She had unfolded a quarter; enough. ‘Leo,’ she called back to him. ‘Chicken,’ he replied as nebulous memories do. On her breast she put the fledgling letter to stop its heart failing through heat loss. ‘Come in my little dugout with me,’ she whispered to the paper. I’m sick but does anyone care. He was most kind. You said he was a cur.’ Katherine’s fever was running a crèche for ousted memories, a joining of hands in the spirit of reconciliation under the sweating bed-clothes tree. ‘Deary me, the promise, the promise, the promise. Won’t you venture down here with me – ham in the sandwich of thighs…’? She fanned some fresh air. Leo had been her first man. ‘For years I saved myself up for someone such as you, healthy and virtuous and strong… and with a straight back and then what a time squandered.’ How many of those willing boys she could have taken. ‘Now make up for the lost time, petty pois.’ Queer how she could remember Richard’s (Leo’s )‘bit’, but fought to reconstruct the notes of his voice. ‘Well-disciplined bit’, she snickered. ‘Wiggle it for me – wiggle bit! At Once, Sar – do it for the Royal Navy – you would, wouldn’t you, blushing. Show-off. What about Jansens? Never made enough headway with him to elucidate. My Eagle, Jansens.’ She sighed. ‘No not a wiggler. A bergschrund. A peak! Snatch a peek? Thankyou Dr. Jansens, might take you up on that. So old now, missed out, missed Meurat. Hectorrr, let me tell you about your colonial enfant tres beau, closer than a eucalypt to heaven. The heroic great sentinel gum.’ Katherine heaved her breaths harder and harder as the oxygen diminished then broke out and gulped like a fish. Then she thought of the beautiful young men on Hunt’s ship when she toured it the final time – the horsy one with the look of death. And Billy’s wife savaging her in the lobby at cocoa-time. Why? Didn’t she long to consume her husband on that last night? Richard and I – we are orgiastic. Mm pray together, you two highest church. My God Priapus.
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