The Promise Ese (40)
“She needs rescuing, “ he observed, cannily, then slipped a cigar into Hector’s pocket. “Congratulations for conning the missionaries.’ He grinned. “They’re alright.” Hector returned the grin. “Emily has been cultivating their charity…it means publicity for their cause. A missionary sponsored hydrographic expedition.” Wilkes, a wayfarer. Yet here he was, close to the bosom of Hector’s private affairs. As though his life was being sewn in a bag, the strands pulling together, the insignificant immensifying. Yes it was the lens effect. What was the lens? Was she it? “Go on, rescue the lady,” egged Winkun Wilkes who took it all on face value. Katherines face had been straining in their direction. So Hector broached the cordon of cloaks and cups and with Katherine on one arm, Emily the other escorted them into the hall again to view the ‘magnum-opus’, the cloth. Many had already gone home. “Now you see,’ he begun, magnanimous, waving his arms low across it, “this is the South pole in the centre here, then we have these perilous names lurking about the edges, look some ships have already hit the rocks and lost their cargoes – that is a sledge just floating about and there goes a dog doing dog-paddle and these are the flags of various nations.” “What’s that one?” someone asked. “That’s Norway and here are Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and the blessed Union jack, a little raggle-taggle? Maybe the name of our new ship could go right there, on the invisible pole. You see, Lady Carpenter understands me. Explorers can only see the next ridge ahead, they never know what is at the very heart, that is why this has been left vacant. We maybe able to use this as a surrender flag, or if the worst comes to the worst, a rescue flag. This is my favourite part, this Nunatak or is it Mt Katherine or Mt Alexandra. According to this map, it is the loneliest mountain in Antarctica…” Katherine asked Emily where the dribs of people heading upstairs were going. To the lavatories, it appeared. Some were also leaving through the side doors. Katherine attempted to excuse herself elegantly, determined to sit up there till he bloody well came. No on second thoughts: “Can I borrow your husband for a minute, Lady Carpenter? A library upstairs you say, not open of course…could he hail me a cab?” “Charles can do that.” “Oh well, Katherine said to herself, visibly huffy, “I may as well go then…bumpy journey home.” She plodded up the creaking stairs, feeling incredibly anxious. A little after Hector took his cigar and made up the stairs as if intending to smoke it. I am as I am, he thought, flawed to the marrow and cannot disguise the fact. Katherine, slumped on a padded bench-seat behind a pot-plant chewing on her glove, sat up immediately like a criminal in the dock. “You know why I came here tonight”, she said, “ask Emily. To give them some money, provided they pigeonhole it for exploration purposes – I fear the evangelicals. So that means it is for you and your men. Would you have accepted money from me otherwise, as a personal gift?’ She raced out the words defensively. “I don’t know.” “May as well smoke,” she said, glimpsing the cigar. “Break the fast, hmm?” She surveyed him, obliquely and asked him to have lunch with her sometime…. of course, the statue, it’s urgent. Come tomorrow? Living at Bournemouth…. makes it hard. Can it be arranged? Svengali, I’ve never felt so well since my last bath, except for my neck. Where on earth could this scratch have come from?” She steadied. “Look at my neck, now what blood-sucking eel-fish did that?” ‘On the ice it pays to leave little flags along the trail. In fact, it’s vital. Food or death.” He looked rather at sea. His hands were stretching themselves in their usual energetic routine, poised, whiling away the patience necessary to survive until the next moment. “If you are wondering about my tonsillitis, it wasn’t. Bronchial… Yes and what of ‘Promise’ for a name? I couldn’t imagine anything better, if we two were ever to strike another bargain similarly…sensitive. You look at me as if I was an ice-pack. You look incredulous. Carps!” she twitched, bedevilling… He said: “Check the ‘ladies’. See if they’ve all gone. You know privacy is a rare commodity. Its ‘privates on parade’, eternally, the glare of the sun.’ Once closeted inside the ladies lav she merely said: “Kiss me.” He flicked a little crumb from her lips and then with sparkling eyes did just that, feeding his hands under the heavy black fur around to her buttocks until he felt like Adam encountering woman for the first time. If he could drive her buttocks together he could seal, he could seam, he could jam the fragments of life into a cushion of completeness so that nothing could leak in or out, the earth couldn’t swallow him, his resolve would stay inviolate, his body, mind never fail him, the winds not touch him, the ice have something in it more than colourless, tasteless crystals…and the rift, brook it. “And now its time for this. Its time to leave.” He ran the cigar under her nose with a quizzical, lewd look. His whole mouth was shining wet and soft, his voice, often lilting, a grind of engines at idling speed. He bunched the fur up to her rather pointed face, opened the door and scanned the landing. “Feel me again, won’t you…” she begged. “Can’t.” he said. “No time.” Chapter 2 Potts made-up into a bamboo stripling Bergstrom. The northerners ate more and clambered about the birch forests and their nurses bound ski on their cradles, some grew tall, muscular, confident and not frightened of their own company and embracing whaling as a glorious profession, whilst the Brits flinched at a clubbing and powdery tea-cake bread ensured as runts they lived, but did not thrive. Yet what they lacked in punch they made up for in spirit. Diminutive Colonel Pink had freed a brown people from tyranny. Social freedoms, moral victories were won by English parliaments of reformist zealots and the high thinking throughout the past squalid century of European revolutions and factory children. Bergstrom hit the belly-button of the south, Jansens perfected sledging travel. Yes they truly made a difference to the world! Pink-Potts had such a wonderful face. It smiled intellectually and his compelling sky eyes, deep-set to the point of no return, and his lofty brow, would do for scuffles in the quad. Though Katherine doubted it would convince as the farming-boy turned Somme warrior mourning his pounds of shrapnel-pitted horse-flesh. Even if Hector had rusted with age and the impact of atrocious ordeals, he retained what she thought would suit. Her increasing fondness for him reinforced this view. She was acquiring a liking for little pieces of him. His round ears and eyelashes. But she thought it would be propitious to change the environment, to lay him out on a terrace in Mykonos where bodies baked. It was so grey, yet clearing in Kensington. It was with all this in mind that she jingled smartly through the frosted-glass doors in response to the door-bell, leaving Potts to carry on ‘installing’ her new gramophone. But he left it to look over her drawings of Carpenter, heavily washed and shaded and almost cherubic. He wasn’t so sure that the welding of artist and model improved the art, that her sudden fetish for Captain Hunt’s bete-noir would inspire the strumming fingers of her daemon. And would it soothe her restiveness? An imbroglio. Too many married men. They veered her away from Pinks direction, at least. Maybe her teasing had amused him, however, maybe. He certainly admired the headless great soldier, though. It was a St George falling on the dragon. The shoulder-blades of Pinks own brother, wrists of iron, tender soles, folds of a uniform pock-marked by her thumbs and a horse half inchoate, primordial rock, half smooth. Pink wiped the plaster shoulder then nodded at Jobs Mr, trimming trees outside the conservatory, his ginger hair the only daub of colour in the ashen kiln of garden. His horseshoe shaped saw cut lazily. Intentionally as it so happened. He found the goings-on in the Madams workroom a tonic and a stimulant to guts jaded by a diet of steak-and-kidney. Most bewildering of all – she had never censured him for malingering. When she was alone she liked to lie on the floor. G.E Potts tightened the connection on the gramophones party-hat horn and picked out their voices in the morning-room beyond the french-doors, then two ectoplasmic figures, hazily swaying to and fro. Her chirpy voice died as they lashed heads together. He could see them as one, one pane of the dimpled glass and he imagined her to be smiling – kissing and smiling? Was it possible? He edged a little closer to the doors, gaping like passions vent. Carpenter was stroking her cheek, shut-eyes. After what seemed an interminable time the chatter recommenced. Potts nipped away, unsleeved a brittle record, Beethoven, something traditional, and set the adagio movement from the seventh into slow, crackling motion. “As you can see,” She enticed him through the doors, courting, chirping “we have decided to extend your musical appreciation from palm-court to classical then to symphony concerts. Do you agree?” Uhh, the dull German march to the gallows, as dull as a stretch of lampwick. Nimrod – four minutes in its entirety! As British as mustard! Hector bid good-day to Colonel Pink then went to the monument. All her other statues had been pushed aside to accommodate the W.P. (work in progress). Tin wash tubs and sacks of plaster, and files and pliers to mangle the armature and snapshots of a horse-arse from every perspective clipped on to an easel. Hector noted the fellow sawing limbs. “Are you growing tired of trees’ he asked, sarcastically, “and changing down to shrubs?” “Why?’ She put her fist underneath her chin to consider then said: “Yes, I think Art’s going overboard with the pruning.” “Art?” “His name is Arthur Jobs.” G.E. volunteered to arrest him then went out through a potting porch into the garden. Soon the two men could be seen passing the time of day. Potts had trained himself to endure the low-life, to slum it in the airforce, but sometimes sneaked away from the barracks to nourish his friendships of an equal par. “Now m’dear, how d’ye plan to adhere my head to this splendiferous trunk,” tipped Hector, small and as live as a wriggling fish against a masonry, incumbent Neptune. “Poor coot, obviously fell to the saw, live by the saw die by one.” He wrapped his fingers as far around the headless neck as they could reach. She could see he was hovering in the Kiplingesque, ‘what larks’ type mood that had originally, years ago, weaned her from his causes, his hijinks, his gall. And confirmed her as a Hunt supporter. “What’s up with you?” she demanded. He said he had come for his sitting, neither funfair nor concert else. Strangle Beethoven, thanks. Katherine sighed resignedly and showed him where to pose. She also showed him the position she had decided upon after coughing up a ream of lightening-fast sketches. The ‘Adoration’ plinth, overflowing cushions and bolsters provided the stage for his prostrate soldier act. Then when he had cuddled down, pretending the tassels were horse-hair, she produced the callipers. “I have to measure your skull.” She extended the callipers like a pair of compasses preparing to plot the landmarks on his face. He fancied being chased around the glasshouse with those callipers and landing on the rug like they had before, yet the stove chugged on ordinary and the sky outside was bright and nosey, and there was not a tea-mug to be seen. “Then I mix up the plaster, slap it on thick, mould it then when its dry, rasp it and burnish it.” She transferred his measurements when she had made them onto a diagram like a phrenological illustration. Her smock of the day was sleeveless tunic, something a butcher might wear. When she came again to finetune his pose, he knelt straight, captured her right-hand and tucked it in on his shirt. ‘Feel that?” He raised his eyebrows, as he should for the memorial, questioning God, but for real. His heartbeat felt irregular. She looked seriously into his face, so suddenly sad and wondered if they all looked like that, sitting shivering in the snow waiting to die. This is dreadful, she thought, what if he goes before the work is done? He presumed that would be her prime concern, her damned art. “You know, she said, sweetly, we should go for a holiday after this. GE’s just bought a place on the heath, a romantic secluded place, a little ramshackle…but quiet and private, you know, straight from a Hardy novel.” “What inducement is that? His books document misery.” Nonetheless, he smiled at her sweetness. “I didn’t think you would be able to go abroad and I have a wedding to prepare for. We are honeymooning in Tasmania to co-incide with the monuments unveiling.” He wanted to kiss her but they were watching through the windows of wall, like undertakers. So she kissed him, covered his face with her hands like cloths soaked in plaster, left the eyes free and stared into them, wholly. He wanted so badly to be loved. Em fled from passion, Clara loved being in love, his comrades feared and admired and obeyed him, the ponies had loved him because he fed them maize, perhaps Billy had loved him as a brother for a while, his sisters loved him as a rover and various elderly benefactresses loved his eternal youth, but who loved him for being a nincompoop, and a charlatan and a promise-breaker and a drinker and rotten father and worse poet and gambler with lives, and loser of the Pole and bankrupt and a wet-eyes and a jester? He said: “I’ve been thinking of you, lately. You are part of the deal. I model, you pay with yourself.” “Strange, she said, I’ve also been considering you in….in a separate context, as the single person whose example drove my husband to his end.’ Hector felt savage. “He deserved it m’dear after deliberately cutting me out of the glory. Furthest point south in 1902 – Billie and he, Carpenter back at the tent minding the un-cooperative ‘curs’. He had no right to deny me that. I had kept up with the best of them, matched their pace, done my share of the relays and dog-whipping and dog slaughter, but when the hey-day arrived – someone, says Hunt, has to mind the animals. Dogs could have hightailed it into the mountains for all anyone cared. They were sick and wormy. One of the worst days of my life. And he expected me to thank him! ‘The hand that rocked the cradle’, rather the hand….” He curtailed the indictment. “The glass here is like a shop-window at Christmas …a smooch in the W.C, precious kafuffle on the rug…. what, you would deny me as well, carry on his dishonourable deeds? Don’t you like me a bit?” “I thought you would pose gratis.” “Doing is owing.” Oh he did resemble a ticked-off snitch. She took her hands right away and put them on her knees and sized up his hurt. Mild. “What do you mean,” she almost whispered, inoffensive, patient, cheerful, “you want to plant your pole, is that it? Messy and I’m still young enough to bear children…forty-two. I may be bohemian but I’m not brainless.”
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