The Promise Ese (41) He blushed. “Well we can do something about that can’t we?” “Goodness Carps,” she said spryly, “just have a regenerative rest on the cushions here, there’s a dear. You healed me the other week, with your breath, and your heat. Told you I never felt more blooming” “Please don’t call me that – it brings back repulsive memories.” “As bad as all that, eh?” Rest your heart, my love, she thought, and lovely eyelashes, as she squashed him into position. He fixed his eyes onto the plaster rifle-barrel, innocuous against the horse-belly but grabbed her apron before she could bolt. “Let me call you something,” he said, still tremulously heart-sick. “Let me call you rabbit – as a boy I used to watch the neighbours rabbit over the fence and wish it was mine. It was white with black patches, called ‘Fortnum’. I wish you were mine.’’ His voice had wound down to sentimental. She was touched; more than she cared to admit for no one had spoken so plainly and sincerely to her before. Boys had threatened to shoot themselves for her and Hunt had played the roué, Jansens had compared her to a neve – here a sentimental Irishman with fluid tendencies lyricized with five short words - must be the language of love. Katherine the washer-woman bustled about her tubs and buckets until the porridgey plaster saturated her wads of cloth like a bread and butter pudding. When he had made his confession she had snuffled her nose, rabbitlike and poked out her tongue very engagingly. Art, artfully assisted, bending the constructive fencing wire into a chassis for the soldiers ruffled head of hair and sweat and unquiet bamboozlement. His redness and muscularity set the scene from ‘L’assomoir’, the steamy sniffs of people at work in haste to get the task off their shoulders. Hector talked non-stop, feeling bouncy again, happy to be preserved young and strong for all time even his frame said old and weakening. He dashed of an autograph for the artless Art unnerved by the presence of seasoned greatness and told him his wife jobs mrs baked delightfully and kept the house spic and apart from the scuffled, webby conservatory, span to the point of monumentality – you know a monument like this here man’o’war to the virtues of domestic decency. Leastways, he was polite, Art thought compared to the other japing scions of art-school who mussed the floors and smelled of wax crayons and left aside Mrs Jobs teas, too full of lard for their lah-dy-dahing waistlines. Now Captain Hunt, he had o’erweened with his civility to the staff to the point where they preferred skulking by him to evade the pats on the back and the pay-rises and the patronizing waffle about teamwork and stiff uppers. And he also shied from the lardy dumplings. H.A. Carpenter was not the man to disparage cooking; one could tell by the way he ate up the mistress of the house. Guzzle too much more of her, and there won’t be any left for afters, quipped Jobs startlingly to himself. “Now we wait for it to dry a little. Thankyou Art…” She sort of taunted his loyalty by tossing her steamed together fringe of reddy-brown hair and hipping her ruddy hands like the laundry maid and winking for the teapot instead of bidding. Hector imagined he spotted a frisson of a little something between the man with the saw and the pliers and the ginger moustache and good-for-nuthin lounginess. And the lady alone who played in her room without blinds. Eventually the day pipped by and the tides of elation at a moderately well-executed lump of forehead washed into relaxation. Potts had long gone to primp his fifty lines of self-revelatory text. She chiselled at the fin of her soldiers tunic as Hector almost trotted from one statue to the next, the statues randomly disposed of like jumble-sale bric-a-brac. “Emily has gone away for the fortnight to Limerick with some girl-guides, the good-girl-scouts, to roam about the upland and refine their complexions, he laughed. “Is she vying for a berth on your ship then?” He said he had nowhere particular to stay the night and was wondering… “I don’t know, she said, inattentively, squatting beside the great white beast of caked powder. “I don’t even let Gerald sleep over. You were lucky to see my bedroom.” “A dump. M’dear, I shouldn’t wonder you keep the civilized masses from its shores.” He waved his tired cigarette at her like a wagging finger then pinched her bottom. “When I am working the scent of a challenge elates me, disembodies me…. you have been extremely cute to me today, cousin, but my wings are tied. I must get this finished. I work by candles and all the defective elements brilliantly reveal themselves, then I must smash them into willlessness.” “I made up a poem at the slideshow the other evening and now it invades my memory. Do you wish to hear It.”? He was looking into the yard at a pair of fanning doves jousting upon the neat stack of lopped tree-flesh. “Yes she said, indeed. She swabbed her hands on a wet towel, examined the thread-like trails of plaster that skeletonised the creases of her palm then sat with her back against the old blocked fountain for a breather, laying her head on one of the Moorish cushions. And over the billowing furlongs The ships come more and more Clippers and cutters and barquentines Life-boats and sloops by the score Their engines a’grumble, their rudders befouled And all a’churning the sea Until one ship rises above them all The marvellous ship that is me! And Kate she stands near the back-door All hatted and coated and wan Her face is a mask, her gloved knuckles ask For the folly to be quickly done. For then they must shudder, then they must mould Her hands steer the ship on its way To the reaches of Hell, the buoy with its bell Tolls the ship of her Will out the bay. She had several drawings of Hector fanned in her hands like playing cards. She said, disgruntled: ‘You have a prodigious memory rabbit-tamer but I must say – the head won’t do. You have such a severely anguished look in your eyes….yes they laugh and plead but they are lonely and testament to suffering. Look, whatever it was. Now when I first met you the eyes were ravenous, eager, fighting things, now they have come through but not unscathed, come through battles…. I need a soldier who is ready and willing to fight until death for his country and honour. So I’m afraid the head needs be pulverized when the plasters dry. Fortunately it was only preliminary moulding. Meurat, you know used to smash his pieces with a mallet and then rejoin them differently to be the fragments of lives. But I think the sketches are worthy, in fact, here you are, penurious soul, give them away as mementoes, they may be valuable one day.” “Perhaps then you could adhere my head to the equine rear-end.” She fluttered six leaves of grey drawing paper into the dusty air and watched six fragments of Hector land in the dust – a sleepy, puzzled, putting-it-on, vanquished Hector. He was surprised and suggested she ask Potts to try and resuscitate his face from it superior attitude and assume the Jobs vernacular. The man of the people. Katherine sighed, her teeth a little rabbity, and said she felt hungry. “Why don’t you take me out Sir to alleviate this famishment?” She sat up waiting like meerkat for the danger to impinge itself –plucky but fatigued by holding the erect, wary shaft of spine. “Thought you be cross, wasted a day. I’d prefer to do the asking.” “Oh women, she said sagely, arching her back like another Millais, ‘Mariana’, blue and supple at the brambly window, “are all the same to you, whore, mumsie or sister; now if we come to friends, equal, a thing like asking would be of no account. Anyway, I thought you’d say: ‘oo what if someone sees us’. My betrothed probably would, my hon m.p esq.” “So what do you call him, pesky or equimaux boy?” She threw him a wicked smile. “Fancy the Café Royal, friend, I’ll pay if yer skint. The blubbers off in this establishment, seals have migrated to the North.” What drove them? Richard, how he would have drawn up a chair to the dining-room table and roughed a migratory map with all the species of petrel in red arrows, elephant seals, Adelies and of course rotifers migrating to the test-tubes of hot-under-the-collar physicists bound indoors by a passing blizzard or two, ten days at a time! Can’t have snow clouding the microscope, now, can we? ‘Minx”, said Hector and pounced taking all the liberties with his hands that the sick bath and bed had denied him. She fought. “That’s alright then,” struggled her words to extract themselves from his leaping eyes and exploratory fingers, “I have to change my clothes anyway.” Stroking his chin with his right-forefinger and observing her with the couturier glisten of vision, he said, deliberative: “Wear that thing you had on at the Colliseum. Be a rainbow.’ “Too cold.” “Fur-coat?” “For the sideshows at Brighton, maybe.” She had some white stockings that by now looked grimy. She peeled them down and curled one around his neck. “That’s a muffler to swathe the crux of your neck where my hammer strikes, oh flaking soldier of the South.” She tugged at it and led him away. * * *
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