The Promise Ese (38) Katherine light-headedly tumbled from her bed to the bales of documents, journals and correspondence, eventually fishing out a blue leaf of writing paper before crawling back into her salubrious hollow, where the two writing papers could be married. She laid them margin to margin and propped herself on one elbow. Buff meet blue. She read Hectors typing thoroughly then read leonine Richard’s lovely curlicues. Oh, they went their separate ways at one point. Hector had expunged any reference to his health when issuing his blue copy. Now he seemed not to care. But still she had conjectured about Hector’s dicey heart if that’s really what his condition amounted too. Richard and Billy had made the ad-hoc diagnosis, arrogantly and delighted in letting the penny drop at the feet of various influential people. The rumours origin, she thought. Then she traced some fading words with a sucked finger – Am-ar-Amaranthus…heartsease. Tosh, she thought, which Hector had seen fit to include. On the blue was a scratchy star in lieu of signature, like a paw-print. Some either kind of secret dig, she supposed, his crooked sixpence star yet it added whimsy to what was pride. Why untrustworthy, Richard? she asked. She rummaged around for page one of the Promise letter. That too was eventually found and after some years of apartness, reunited with its second. Nothing further, merely family references and complaints about auxiliary power and the loader. That’s right; lumber your wife with bellyaching, pour out your troubles… Katherine groaned out of bed, put on the dressing gown then screwed up the incipient Amaranthus portion and poked it in between the bars of the grate where it burned slowly as tight balls of paper burn. Next she took Hectors copy and kissed it to page one – married, folded the pair in half, called to Jobs Mrs for tea and to find out what had happened to the noble Carpenter… feel woozy. * * * Everyone had made their suggestions. Hundreds of letters had been flooding the newspaper office. Now here was hers – ‘Christen Ship Promise.’ A telegram. Hector imagined the revelation to have swept upon her after she had opened her hand. Swept over her like the flushes. So the housekeeper had not got to it beforehand, nor the fantasies, nor a draught. ‘Get Well Soon’ he cabled back, concerned. Mac and the boys at the office had advised him against the park, since the sky looked stormy. However he needed somewhere to rest. He wanted to create distance. Captain Hunt, through his statue, as usual, lived as far away from mankind as anyone ever could, in legend and in the stellar mists. A mite of a bird must have decided his statue presented refuge. In command of thyself, indeed! It buzzed and bothered the impassive countenance. Stoical it remained. It pushed into Time. The teardrop- bodied bird pecked at the concrete Burberry coif, it pecked at the eye. The memorial showed Hunt in full polar regalia, impregnable, planting a pole, questioning the Yonder, aping the slim, strong, blonde disdain of the Norse Jansens who set the fashion for all Seigfrieds in the future to follow. One had to exude modesty and reclusiveness. One had to embody geographic and scientific piety. But one also had to growl and be master. Hunts chiselled-out pupils brought to mind the browny areolas of Katherines nipples, held in suspension, distended by bath water. Look in your notebook and study accounts, implored the more dutiful Hector, think of the “Promise’, already named the ship in truth, have you, in your mind? I can think of what I like. The supine promise of the treasures at hand in the bath-tub. What if she wasn’t his ‘type’! She was game. Obviously he was game. Every adventurer was game to the very core. “Most definitely, but Loyalty, where does that come in? Now really, Carps there’s a safer bet. She’s frilly, I fancy, and young. Couldn’t find one more nubile or more tight….’ A bright, young shop-girl marched by squeezed almost to death by a scarf and knitted cloche-type hat. She didn’t look twice at the miserable chunk of Hector on the bench but she smiled…she smiled momentarily. The vulgar comment had frozen him to the slats. Its tone dumped on him like a tsunami. The content undermined the tone. The teller….racier than his own conscience. “Yes, I admit, a bit too bar-room for the Navvy.’’ And he said Navvy! It was Captain Hunt! Ogling the fair sex? Hector had his doubts. He had been holding his talisman shard of star-glass which he kept in his silver cigarette case. His grip tightened upon it. He wanted to peer through it to see if the apparition dissolved in the process. “Not on your life”, said the apparition, “and incidentally I know what you did to my wife with that glass implement. She sick and all, shame on you. Nothings changed, has it Carps. Once a cad, always a cad.” Captain Hunt seemed apparelled for his own funeral in a well-cut black frock-coat, white silk stock, but hatless. With his old pipe. His legs-crossed, one arm along the top of the bench, untouched by the militant winter air, a sort of balding dandy. He purred and puffed. “She’s a very handy woman,” he smiled, off-centre, suddenly arose like an enormous phantom jackdaw, and tapped his pipe at the statue’s winning physiognomy. “As you have discovered, a percentage of you has discovered. Take the lead, dear boy. Take the lead. Give her a shock. Lead her by the nose. For too long she has had it over men with her free and easy ways. Inconsistently persistent like this Southern Corngrinder. Birds!” Finally the birds buzzing had riled him, he, the statue…interchangeable. In Hector’s view, this was the worst Hunt, that fortunately he had had very little truck with whilst the best Hunt had lit the sky albeit briefly on the very first expedition, the seminal ‘Deliverer’. The two young Turks had been able to speak to each other, then, with single entendres and fulsome respect, both endeavouring to advance the Antarctic map and oceanography and British interests and their own incompatible ambitions. The apparition slithered towards Hector, “Anything to say for yourself, hmm? I believe you have ‘known’ God, ha,” he laughed vaporously, “in not the way you have known Ama, but tell me, it’s the pay-off for the Second Degree, may I be corrected if I’m wrong?” “Third degree.” “Of course, the gaining of this knowledge foredooms the recipient to an eternal and compulsive lust for more. The eternal lust.” ”The infernal lust”. Hector lashed at the pipe and crumbled it to dust then as he moved to strangle with the cravat, Hunt stayed his arms. “Isn’t there something you would care to have resolved?” He seemed to be growing larger again. “Yes, was it scurvy that killed you?” he asked the funereal splodge. Now that one Hector could auction off to the newspapers yet he surmised a wicked silence from the ghost story of his own weaving. Captain Hunt bowed his head of thinning hair, grew smaller and winced; “I wanted to leave my son a father of substance and leave my wife her hero. There was no other option. “There are always other options.” “Billy said so. You see that is where we differed.” Hector refused to strangle a man when he was down. Mercifully, the apparition walked back into the statue, wearing his hangdog depressed face that the ashlar absorbed, using a transfiguring beauty-gel of Clara’s, because Katherine had grafted a hero from the relics of an ordinary and worried man. Hector crowed to himself then he berated himself for neglecting to confront the ghoul about the letter. Take the Pole and be damned. What can anyone do with a plot full of Pole? Lunacy. He took a substantial gulletfull of wintry air and watched the people whisking through the park in their disguises. * * * “The little bird is the herald of death. Why I thought you would have known it.” Emily. D. Carpenter. * * * “Morris, I can readily take along someone such as yourself. He would never waste the penal code on someone so…common, common garden civilian.” Hector had dined on five-star hoosh for five days before departure and felt his knuckles itching for retribution. Captain Hunt and his confounded rocks. “Rocks in the head. One question in the examination, I recall, “If one man had one sledge and there was two tons of rocks to carry but only one day of rations plus a blizzard, how many hours would he spend packing the food and how many calibrating the rocks?” “Huh.” Walt’s broomhead moustache had crusted in particle snow “and did anyone know the answer?” “One did, the Tundra King but when asked the next day he had simply forgotten what it was.” Hector saw it wasn’t to be a convivial, chatty slapdash after the Captain. He had chosen to plod unassisted by beast with neither tent nor provisions, just a tailored polar bear pelt and pockets stuffed with Belgian marzipan. Lord knows what the tracks were that he and Morris were hot on. Like a treble width ski with dinner forks at intervals. Soundless and sightless until the dark mast of a tent drew nigh. “Steady yourself, old man, you never know what we may find inside.” “Only Greaves, is that you Boss, so glad..” The lad fell a–blubbering, sprawling on the inadequate floorcloth. One of his feet was big. “Dunno, can you have the fever partway up your body. My foot, Boss, think it has a separate heart, cause the rest of me’s fine except – I don’t like that Tundra Hunt, Boss, I should never have deserted you, we thought you was for it, but…. he is a bad man.” The poor chap fainted in the arms of his beloved leader who cursed softly. “Well, well, well heres a sick ‘un. What shall we do Walt. What would they do up in the Yukon?” “Shoot him dead.” Hunt had not left even one ski, a stove, or a wafer or more pertinently, a sledge. “So we carry him with us, and ‘the lone trail lures us on’”. Then suddenly a steady grumbling blew their direction, the grumbling of a thousand glaciers discharging at once, hurricane grumble, grumble of dyspeptic earth farting quakes. A tractor tilling a field on a still summer afternoon. On they plodded, feeling a tractor in the poppy-field summer would be gladdening to their snow-sore eyes, when out of a cloud what should appear but a tractor on packing case and dinner-fork ski! A-ha, the troops! Oh they thought they were the pharaohs of the frozen south in their super chariot but even two men with a limp body over their shoulders hiked faster. The gawping tractor crew were strangers to Hector, but they recognized Morris the Alaskan anthropologist. “Boss Carpenter,” he said laconically to the crew. “He will save women.” “Exactly so I am leaving Greaves in the tractor with you hoods. Take care of him.” Carpenter’s beetling brows pummelled opposition, but a little man like a parrot threw Hunts usual argument at him – the sick man is a drain on resources and hampers the fitter. “Buffoon,” the boss’s fury answered with an attempted swipe but his fur-cast arm was stiff. “Who would think…” muttered the swayings of loyalty among the brethren. In unison their heads turned to South, their tractor column continuing at strolling pace. Even above the engine a furore became audible. “Blast, blast, damn and blast, I love doggies you know. I thought I had it cinched – two ponies fore, doggies aft and the all-terrain tub floating between. And now, well the doggies are just too tired and the horses have begun to nibble each other – so I’ve left them to forage out there, see, let them off their wires for a while. Its purely a question of morale with the ponies.” Captain Hunt lifted his green-tinted goggles for a moment to wipe away the condensation. “What! Oh no…” He shaded his hand across his eyes to pan the vicinity – not a pony in sight. “Can you believe it?” he said, “They’ve absconded, the ungrateful good-for –nothings. The finest vitamin enriched fodder, felt-lined stalls and raised pony bunks to keep their hooves from the icy ground. How dare they do this to me! What do…Oh its you, is it really the commanding bumpkin from neo-Georgia?” He snapped to attention. “Muscling in on my territory again. This is a RN, RGS, RS, RA sponsored and funded rescue bid and I am its leader.” All the self-pity, disbelief and grizzle ticked off into the rosary-pouch of the Crusader; Hunt of handsome fetlock, regular teeth and stern, haughty visage, uprose. “Apparently,” remarked Hector dryly, “ but its curtains without transport.’ “What do you mean – here comes my tractor.” As he spoke, its engine died. “Well what rhymes with Hunt, C - - -? How could you have been so brainless as to have let the Vikings pillage your hut? As it stated in all the briefs – be on the aware for Bergstrom and co, located North east of the pole and still searching for it.’ “He didn’t read the briefs,” a traitorous voice blared from the tractor. “He was too busy filing his finger-nails.”
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