The Promise Ese (5) There existed in the neglected library of their house, a carbon-copy of the Hunt-Carpenter agreement, meticulously typed by the Carpenter himself, champion of type-writing machines and telephones and acetate recordings. Whilst he was rifling through years of documents, Emily noticed a playbill from the 'Collisseum' {London playhouse owned by Albert Colliss}, a promotion of the new Irish verse-play "The Secret Flower". Emily asked Hector if it was worth going to see. " If Brieux appeals to you, so it may." His irony was lost upon her, however. One of Brieux-s dramas revolved around the cancerous effects venereal disease reeks upon the innocents in a profligate society. She scanned the cast of characters and was about too...scream... when he lay out the wrinkled, faintly legible screed with the two prominent signatures and a counter sign and a pencilled addendum in a top corner; 'the promise that Providence compelled me to compromise'. He shut the door which divided the library from the dining room, shut out that rooms heat from the inhospitable, unlived in library cum storage area, or as far away from Ethel {the maid) that one could flee to. He could tell Emily was restive, eager to belt on her chatelaine’s keys and rush off to primp the cushions. What relevance could his' promise' exercise over a today dammed by fifteen years of effluvial yesterdays? He could put it plainly. He could say that he had lobbed upon some evidence in support of the 'Hunt was a sore loser' hypotheses, envious and suspicious and vacillating and weak , that in Carpenter he recognized a stronger man, a challenger, a free spirit who needed to be brought to his knees before a legislative council of Polar luminaries. At the time most people had thought Hunt’s gripe legitimate. He had staked out a claim to certain ice-fields therefore earnt the right to work them. Carpenter had just been the third officer on the 'Deliverer', third in line and whatsmore, debilitated... "But it so happens, Emmy my darling, this indignation and crying foul was merely a pretext to trap me and squash me down well and truly into the amateur class. You remember the wording., ‘ if at all possible.' Well the erudite and learned Royal Geographical Society and their vassal knew it would bloody well be impossible.... and I would end up a supreme cad and any discoveries made written off as lies." Emmy bided patiently, not discerning the point. She almost would have been happier arguing a little more about infidelities. She wondered how the 'De Lune' witch would appear at the Collisseum, how she would make up for the ‘Secret Flower.’ Cold, bleak room. Hector left it, reappearing shortly afterwards lugging a gramophone and two records. To connect audience to performer one had to inject commonality, tune the two wavelengths to identical pitch. "Nimrod,” he said holding up a record. "The music for the film, as you know, weathered many transformations and we tried it without music. At which time I had to use my voice as a type of musical essence. Then we tried an opera singer, mournful and dirgelike. But Nimrod proved the most successful ship theme, ploughing through the waves, erect on the ice like a monument to human endeavour. Ah, such waste." "I am not a stranger peering up at you from a draughty auditorium," she abjured, " what do I need convincing of, why do you want to enthral me? That Captain Hunt business. It was not important. I never considered your behaviour to be the least dishonourable. It was a stupid ploy and he's paid for it now, so leave it alone. Anyway where is this letter? Whom was it addressed to?" The threat of Nimrod seemed to have mobilized her attention. Hector snared her gaze and uttered slowly; "Many have reviled me, they have withheld their support. If it can be demonstrated that my actions developed as a consequence of deliberate provocations and machinations, and as hinted in the letter, ill-will harboured against me, personally by Hunt, the many might look for ways to assuage their consciences and repair relations with me. Do you realize how it spoilt friendships, divided loyalties? - ' Ah ha so now we see, he's not prepared to play the game according to the rules, he is a cheat and certainly no gentleman.' " "You've said you don't care about others opinions." "Only if they’re bad ones handicap my prospects of...” Escape? Enrichment? "Of living a contented life." * * * He promised Emmy that they could breakfast together next morning. Three days had passed with not a sign of him. Yet like a stray he had came back when hungry. But he wasn't to sleep in her room, even as a way to economize with the coal, rather their eldest sons room, as snug as the broom cupboard. Ethel could massage some feeling into its comatose habiliments. Hector could lie there and dream of wangling investment capital from the island woman, Phyllis Moncrieff. Bloodthirsty lot, the esquimaux. The missionary society and Hector would set up a trading co-operative. Reindeer furs and seal skins to be replaced by stalwart English Burberry and Jaeger fabric. Hunts letter would rinse the slur from his name then abetted by the missionaries and their dollars he could survey all the arctic islands and live in an igloo. What was Emmy doing in her room while he lay stony cold on the almost nuns pallet? Was she thinking about her husband, wishing him dead? Or was she crooning to Percy unable to sleep from the excitement of seeing his ol man? Or maybe she answered letters at the ormolu escretoire that a Bavarian prince had thrust upon them. Or maybe she was yawning and curling up in bed trying to warm her feet. ‘ Dear little Gwen, You will be pleased to hear that Dads film and his little talks to very vast assemblages, have come to an end. He is free to plan his next adventure. One day, I’m sure, girls will be able to sail ships all the way around cape horn... but then it may be the aeroplane they wish to fly all the way across the great continents...’ Hector had done away with smoking for a few days which left him jittery. ‘To celebrate the finale of our film extravaganza, an enormous and starchy banquet was held in honour of the man who made the film and very many of the brave souls who featured in it and me of course but because I was feeling a trifle nervous and tired something happened that must amuse anyone who is told of it. For some reason the top of a bottle exploded, flew to the high ceiling and came down directly into a glass which only needed to be moved an inch. As this occurred so rapidly, my hand just couldn't steady itself, the glass pitched on to someone, a lady who in turn fell off her rickety chair and short-circuited a lamp which happens when water comes into contact with electricity, because she was drinking at the time. Now do you for a minute think the lamp which was tall and fancy, a statue of a lady holding aloft a torch, then itself fell over? It did. It tipped over backwards and smashed a frosted window to pieces, one of which glass splinters landed near me. Embossed on this tiny bit of glass was a star so you can believe I take this as a good omen. In olden times, sailors used stars to set their courses and the constellations each have meanings...’ Oh, well, it was likely he wouldn't remember this blotchy mental cablegram in the morning. For a homily, to caption his description of the event - "be Prepared for any mishap, because one can never be certain that the berg whirling into view is not the berg carved with your epitaph.' Hector looked at the night sky through his dormer window and perceived some stars. If he connected his fingers in geometric patterns before his eyes he could stitch them into rudimentary designs. Then squinting between thumb and forefinger, the stars could be plucked and held like chance diamonds in a young Brazilian stream. The biggest blinding star preserved itself for twilights. Chapter 4 Hector stationed Emily on the other side of the street in order to elicit gobsmacks. The new architecture, the Coney Island kind of pastiche, the candy-stick colonnades and wedding-cakes and luminous lime frescoes of satyrs and jokers and carnival revelry. If ever a man had aimed to scale way over the top it was Colliss. His new theatre uncrated in a teeny number of months from pre-fabricated, pre-rendered concrete and crumbly plaster besmirched the city outskirsts like a smut in a mans beard. The turf which set it off like a satin cushion looked almost sub-lit, a swimming pool at night, chemical green. "Heck of a double bill they have playing there, sweetness." They stood arm in arm in the dark, in an unfamiliar jungle of assorted people and place she needed something to clutch. Whereas Hector, one could not legitimately append the phrase ill-at-ease to his condition of being, anywhere, with any one. Kings, commoners, clowns, the professorial - all props for his long running production called - life. Whatsmore, the seating inside the new playhouse encouraged intermingling. Naturally one could purchase a better view yet not a private one for the traditions of boxes and stalls and even pits had, in the name of egalitarianism been sacrificed and replaced with wrap-around terraced seating in the Roman, Shakespearean and gypsy campfire mode. All the action happened at the level core of the giant cartwheeling rotunda. This theatre would bring circus to a nation of bourgeois dinner jacketed nodder-offers. "We don't need to stay for the whole of it, however, see how you like the serious play.... I think the second half is more Vaudevillian. Personally I can't imagine how Britons will take to this avant-garde hodge-podge." Hector had begun to bowl their way through the groups of theatre-goers so struck by the Collisseum’s inventive exterior it probably wouldn't matter to them what shows were opening there. Emily was surprised to meet someone that she knew, one of a party who happily swapped seats so they could all sit together. What a piece of luck. Now Emmy could gab with the boon companion at her side and leave Hector to analyse the performance. Strangely Emily had begun to ask all sorts of questions about Clara as though she thought rubbing her face in the slop would somehow dissolve its pestilential quality. At breakfast they had debated the merits of well-known actresses. And how accomplished is Miss de Lune. Why is her picture never on postcards? Eventually the reverse psychology flummoxed him and Hector had raced away to do battle with the barber at least to banter with him about women. He liked Emmy when she acted up. It was as if the coastal winds, the sun-bleached sands, the weed-wrangled flotsam and the cuttlefish bones, pulped and liquefied, flushed her arteries again and neutralized the insipid ticking of the hallway clock and the insane drone of London traffic. Hector looked about the bobbing throng. The ceiling was tented, a dome, maypole ribbons of lights, a fire-trap. Several people glanced his direction, probably in recognition of his distinctly fascinating features but instead of melting into his seat he smiled expansively. This usually transformed their supercilious curiosity to embarrassment yet dead ahead a set of eyes twinkled at him across the breadth of centre stage, like singeing flares. At six-o’clock if he was at twelve noon on the clock face of encircling seating. Simultaneous with the waning of the houselights, a nudge from the insect-like chap beside him, the precursive lilt of an Aeolian harp to set the timbre Celtic, something twitched on the lower half of that six pm visage, something where a mouth should be. A tongue? Could she have poked out her tongue at him? Hector stared astonished but the face, again a fresco face too distant to be studied effectively by a student of portraiture, subsided into the dim hush. Hectors attention pressed at it. His night vision was as excellent as his long sight. Skipper of his own Titanic. The face was as a berg and he would steer hard from its path, or steam athwart it if the suicidal demon took over. No it must have been a trompeloiel. People in public did not pull faces at strangers. She must have been moistening her lips. But the head, so straight. Clara came on, into the ring, concealed by her fibrous cloak, her lips lush her teeth white, her brow in shade. The sawdusted beach and papery woods had given way to a cottage and a slashing fire made from red gauze and fanning air and orange filters. She began to strum a psaltery and chant, incandescent. Emily’s elbow fought his on the arm-rest. Her eyes were shining, wet. Impulsively he squeezed her gloved hand before it retracted with the speed of a mouse, to shiver deeply, warmly in the crook of her seat. On his right the beetle headed man was quietly sniggering over the inanity of fairy-tale theatre. He had come for the acrobatics of the second half. All poetry made him laugh. A true pest. Until the wonder of Clara dropping her homespun to the ground and shaking her hair free to somehow unite with the oscillating flame stoppered his breath. She was it, now. But the thing would flop, Hector could see, a grotesque choice for the comic, Byzantine movie-palace of palaces, the ‘Collisseum’. He urgently wished for the interval. He had business and he had the berg. He could feel the face jagging at twelve like a tardy hour-hand. He imagined he could feel its steady eyes, like fingers. Thankfully Clara delivered her final threnody, then mute applause and reviving houselights, and harp, launched her surreally into a descending alley where surviving gladiators may have dragged their slivers of bodies. Hector instantly obeyed the oncoming lights and telescoped his vision across the vault. Katherine Hunt was sitting there. She acknowledged his little salute with a brief smile. It could only have been a mistake. There was not a single soul in the universe who disliked him more than the widow Hunt. Then would that not give a tongue reason? Both were then enveloped in the jockeying melee. Hectors head hurt. Off with the Joneses to opine, shuffled Emmy like a grandma. The mints and pinks and creams, everyone’s most detested flavours of ice-cream, swirling in toffee streaks and gelatinous bands winding around necks and tripping and the brilliant lights hacking at a dazed and chortling, chattering team... he descended to into the crater of Erebus. Clara’s cohorts had for the duration sat prominent front row. The stage was being chaotically remodelled for the second spectacular of the evening. Wires, ladders, backstage boys, management. As the gangway towards the alley cleared, Hunts wife reappeared, expostulating to a front-rower queerly dressed in a sequinned smock. She was beyond medium-height, willowy. Hector had forgotten. When last they had encountered each other as bystanders, the monumentality of her snub had been apparent to all who publicly witnessed it. Undoubtedly he had played up to the occasion, expressly cajoling whatever were her wounds into suppurating down the entire length of a station platform, as she waved her husband away, to glorious prospects long since obliterated. Unbeknownst, Sir Hector, summed up changes Hunts end, and the march of time, had wrought upon her. The puppy fat, gone. The rosewood hair, less voluminous. A stoop? Freckled hands. A gown like a crinkled bag but a feather for the coiffure. Unfortunately one of Clara’s chums, near them, summoned him. Amaranthus picked up a scent of mischief. She turned and snubbed him, again, a covert snub. Then walked away before their probable re-introduction by friends whom Hector curtly amused, before progressing to the dungeons where performers prayed for swift annihilation and their masters for a kind press. The portal of the hole where they had told him Miss DeLune could be located displayed its innards deeply, darkly and brownly. One end. Partitioned by what one could only deem an exalted shower-curtain, the far end enticed like Aladdin’s den, its glow made rain from the curtains cascading beads. Beyond which Hickox was murmuring "my dream girl", their vague heads nuzzling like albatross, it seemed to Hector, his stooped to hers in a chair and smoke clouding like the steams of Erebus. He strode through loudly and peeled back the curtain. It was no compromised situation. Hickox did have his hand wading in her décolletage, though. "Hector!" Claire cried, almost knocking the fumbling Hickox to his knees. "Darling where have you been? I thought you must have jumped on the first boat out." She child-like hung her arms about him and laid her head against him and whispered, "you look fine. Has your cold gone?" Pat judiciously had resorted to the dependable affections of his champagne glass. Hector was watching him over her trembling head. He raised his eyebrows and Pat shrugged and butted her forgotten cigarette and dithered with the glasses. "Hec," she said, bleary eyed, " why weren't you up front tonight? I saw you with your wife, remember where I call to the winds, well I look up and around. I didn't think you two ever went about together. But God wasn't the thing a titanic crash? Pat says I was good, then perhaps its too powerful for that kind of audience; they’re not attuned to it. What do you think? Was the role good for me, did I do it well? Was I as beautiful as the flaming flower?" Gently Hector assured her she had shone and stunned the audience into their reticent appreciation. Her body against his was still burning from the fake fire and the exertion and her disappointment. "By the way," he added, "there’s a couple of reporters from some ladies journal waiting in the mine- shaft." "Really, they’re here now? Beauty aids." She turned to Pat for champagne and gulped it, smudges of grease-paint all over the glass. " The soap and water brigade, want to be let in on the secret of eternal beauty, they believe it should be made available in jars from Selfridges? Really not interested in my acting at all. Colliss has a kind of meeting room I'll take them there. Now I hope the tear-stains have all faded, yes?" Pat went with her to the door. Her Lady Macbeth had done well abroad. Primarily because seven years spent in mythical England had hydrated her with rose-water and high-culture. Yet what swung for her overseas, could just as readily swing her overboard, over here. "watch myself sell my self,” The line carolled over and over in Hectors mind. He could hear them now, on the reverse, dark side of the curtain planning her marketing attack. Hickox was already replete with wealth. Perhaps he hoped to buy a knighthood. Easier ways, thought Hector, with pride. "Wait for me, won't you Hec? "Of course. I'm not going anywhere." To illustrate he plumped down in the chair of cane, its creaking audible, and drank from her fizzing glass. What was the most effective and least insulting way to badger someone for a loan? Pat returned and also sat, on a chest beside the mock gothic folding mirror. One could gratify ones vanity five times over by shifting feet before that mirrors five concertina panels. They posed at it for a minute and admired each other’s napes. Hector declined a cigar explaining that he liked to test himself every so often. "Why," said Pat, dismissively, in case you get stuck somewhere without much?" "Precisely." Next Pat begged him to tell again, what can happen to a man who is deprived of the basic comforts for any extended period. "You've heard I suppose of the stone eaters,” began Hector, drawling his yarn, purring his yarn, "charlatans for the most part, simpletons men of the land, the outcasts, the men with little to sell apart from what god has granted them as babies - iron constitutions, a dollop of cunning, showmanship and the driving instinct of self-preservation. They would murder another even such as themselves, in order to stave off the inevitable brute death for another month or year or, for the time it takes to blink an eye. Some men as these chose to hunt the Leviathan, some took to the battlefield but some thought it a fair test of their mettle to remain where they had rooted, be city or farm, and demonstrate to others the unyielding strength of their physical capacities. Therefore, they would pick from the road a mineral of any composition, place it on their tongue, close their mouths and swallow. Then a bystander might select one himself, slightly larger, more lumpy, harder even, hand it to the great bear of a man who would proceed the crunch it up like a walnut before swallowing again, the fragments joining other such fragments swilling around his belly in a kind of skeleton gnashing of bones. The dancing soup of stones. Stone upon stone, pebble against pebble until the taste of mineral became to him as the softest whitest loaf ever baked. How he would relish the granites and the dolerite and the quartz and the mudstone. Eventually the crowds thrust into their purses, almost out of pity as much as wonder, insisting he go at once to the victuallers for food of sweeter quality, which reluctantly he would do to dumb down the horror and to still their guilt-ridden hearts. This led to fire-eating, and the consumption of broken glass amongst other feats of a crazed but enduring legacy. Of course it follows that if a man will eat stones for money he will eat them also for survival, or at least try to. You see where this is leading to old man..." Pat was mesmerized. " Well," he said, "the swallowing of rocks and the actual chewing...Can it be done? Have you seen it?" Hector laughed. "Just start with bones, raw bones. Then hide, then tussock grass. It is possible, it can be done." He sighed wistfully. " When I think of those marbly black pebbles on our beach, it almost makes me hungry, for what they represent, that is. The true nature of isolation, the lure of the unknown interior of ones own soul. Its rough and stern but it is solid to the touch." "When you need it that badly you'd better go. Claire thought you'd signed on to some ship or other just to get away. She cried." What all down his lapel? How seldom Clara’s name was tussled with between the two. Had Hickox been a man and had Hector been free from misery they might have cleared the air with a brawl but Hickox was a swarthy tango dancer and too charming for fists. It was always the knowing nods and obsequious respect for her feelings that chilled their shared champagne. "Well, to tell you the truth, I'm on the verge... of another voyage." They both laughed at the verbal convergence, a mirth to oil the traces of his loan appeal. 'Watch myself sell my self'. Surely Hickox would ferret out the solution from the labyrinthine mesh of circumstance and euphemism. His mother had favoured him generously in her will. Loan Hector a few thousand links in his chain of escape and reap exclusive possession of the De Lune franchise. Hector must be seen as a threat to his command - a grass-seed in his sock. A bugbear. "Where will you go?" Pat asked, evidently considerate, stroking his glass. "Wherever the wind takes me." Hector could suddenly see the letter blowing towards him. " I can immediately start making arrangements. If you can oblige me, tomorrow?" Perhaps though Pat, if I write him a cheque straight away, he'll skedaddle. Merrytimes. "Tell me," said Hector stowing his leaveticket in his jacket and grinning and taking a cigar just to hold, " what it means when a strange woman, at least a past acquaintance pokes her tongue at you, in front of other people... admittedly in semi-darkness?" "Has that just happened to you?" "Mmm" They heard Clara’s tinkling tones approach. Pat whispered: "It either means she can't stand you or she is in love with you." Chapter 5 It was his. He had actually persuaded Lord Westgate to let Archie Craigie know of the Press Associations disdain for such airy-fairy gossip. Not a rag intended to as much as peruse the particle of Hunts innocent correspondence containing its bare revelation of Sir Hector Carpenters supposed heart complaint. Upon reflection, Hector had decided that that one stinging device would hobble him far more than any expression of Hunts abhorrence for him could assist in the winning of the sympathy stakes. So the price had dropped. Lady Hunts name proffered itself as the next runner in the customer field if Hector retired from the race. But he had two thousand pounds and that was enough. The transaction had transpired and Archie, blasé and calm, came away with a guarantee of bank-bursting profits teeming from the Antarctic supply business. Hector had proposed super velocity and freeze resistant instruments that could be towed from gliders to meteorologically map the upper atmospheres. And deep ocean thermometers to pinpoint the sites of fathomless gurgling, volcanic mouths. He even envisaged mansize tricycles for limited travel from camp to camp, once the primary problem of impacting ice-block waters had been negated by the invention of indestructible vessels or airships filled with gases that remained gaseous whatever the Fahrenheit. Now it was to Captain Hunt’s statue in Regents Park that he was drawn. The flapping of the letter paper cheeked him like the wind-bedraggled tent canvas or the scarfing sail on the sledge or the rasp of each mans Burberry hood as it strafed ears with the irritating propinquity of a mosquito’s tone. Then it was the immense dimensions of the statue tempting him like the promise of pony meat at the foot of Granite column nearly obscured impenetrably by a scour of fresh crisp snow-bullets. The far-seeing gaze breaking through and marking a trail to the East, diverting blistered, worn and bleeding feet from the reaching palms of crevasses to the thighs of rigid, stubbly snow plains and a good downwind run to the spine of the flocculent, ice-pitted sea. He was on the move at last. For weeks, Hectors future had been locked in a morass of encrusted floes blocking his relief and pushing inwards from every direction. Helpless. A skerrick of grey in the white wilderness. Then from the crowsnest he had spied a lead wending its way towards the horizon like an animals dislocated halter, a long, long skein of letter guiding him from a stewing past to a raw future. His ship had lurched into motion. Would the coal hold out? Heart trouble, who remembered or cared. Hunts pupil-less eyes stared into nothing and never down at the faulty contraption of a man lounging on the parkbench at the base of his giants’ pedestal. And no matter what hometruths Hector projected into his oasis of vision the eyes could not question nor sanction nor dispute their validity. In fact a volley of intrusive circumlocution fused by the rudeness of Hunts wife could but taint the stone like pigeon guano, which a paralysed image of Hunt, in non-existent dreams, vainly scratched at. Mackintosh beckoned from across the park, his quick walk full of intent then sat down next to him like a vagrant on the make. Such a hard won document yet grasped insubstantially like a napkin maybe with a number sketched upon it. "Don't you think you had best be careful with that? What if a bird seized it and flew off?" "The finest Basildon bond,” said Hector deliberately sheeting it into the wind. "Besides, I have made transcripts. Ones in the bank." Wouldn't it make more sense to deposit the original in the bank then if something simply had to be waved about, why not the copy? "What if the bank was to burn down?" Hectors gaze assailed him with this indisputable fact, his eyes displaying specks of interwoven colours normally masked by low-lit rooms, greens and tans and ultramarine, the oceans stormy assortment. Spasms of frostbite and sunburn had engraven his features with their characteristic tracks of downturned bafflement, squint, oblique teariness, the dents of jutting rage and arcs of impish smile. But his brow, relatively smooth and broad but not high, advertised an honesty reinforced by widely spaced eyes that windowed a soul, unashamedly. Mac thought it was a beautiful face. Got him into strife, though. "Look at this," he said. They were now standing against the substantial stone plinth upon which captain Hunt steepled like a wedding-cake adornment. Hector spread the letter flat as though he was posting a bill and made Mac bend closely to peer at its text just legible in the shade cast by their bodies. Deftly he had planted his thumb across 'health being a question mark - heart trouble” even though the handwriting was difficult to crack without concentration. Mackintosh read "terrain and weather may compel him to renege'. Then looked quizzically at his boss, who said excitedly: "Lets me out of jail. Hunt admits, well virtually, that the promise is an unreasonable one that in all probability will need to be disregarded in order to save lives etc. Which of course is what happened; the shelf had broken away and we were unable to land where originally envisaged. Any decent leader with due regard to the success of his expedition and the welfare of his men would have taken the decision that we did, after much discussion, I might add. Hunt was always changing plans himself in the light of prevailing conditions on the ground.” While Hector nattered Mac was unobtrusively reading the rest of the letter visible to him. From what he could see the contents did not entirely correspond to the account given to him by Hector immediately subsequent to the events at Craigie's. But that did not mean Hector had intentionally redrawn its outline. The creepiness of the house and Murchison ogling him with the salivating, toothless urgency of a super-annuated Baskerville hound could account for the sizzling blurb. The fear. The surprise. The ultimatum. The money. Hectors retelling had led Mac to believe in the miraculous power of this letter, but now to him it seemed wishy-washy, scarcely worth its price, a lame duck. But of course he was too young to have been aware of the little fracas the broken promise had ignited amongst the union of "Deliverer" veterans, the learned society and the trash media. This Victorian obsession with 'dying like a gentleman'etc was a turkey that the French downpours did right to slosh along trenches of mud and excrement into the Marne or Loire, into the wallows for swine and into the seas surrounding Britain, then into folklore. Sir Hector belittled it himself. He stood in fact as the incarnation of its denial by having refused to martyr himself as a gentleman for any cause. "Its not that bit," he replied in answer to Macs query. "Its the RGS, always had it in for me. At last the dice are loaded against them. Hunt has rigged the game....” He chuckled and winked up at the dour volume of petrified explorer, then said, "Anyway why were you following me Mac. I'm in the country today, or will be on Sunday, didn't she let you know?" Hector employed the phrase 'spy-mistress', to deride his wife’s machinations. Mac clasped his hands behind his back. The letter was now protruding from Hectors breast pocket like an artfully placed silk handkerchief. It bothered him. "There’s a crisis,” he said, following its rise and fall with each breath, and the gusts tugging it and Hectors absent-minded fingering of it like a fob-chain. But then he folded down the top corner and forced Mackintosh to seek another eye-rest. “I've been looking for you to tell you. Your mi.....” He stopped short. "Miss DeLune has been to the office and so Lady Carpenter tells me to your private residence. She rang, sounded very...irate. She said the children were there and it embarrassed her... to have that particular lady calling at that...particular time." They began to trudge across the grass towards the park gates. "Go on," said Hector, sourly. "The way you said crisis I immediately thought of the factory, that it had burnt down or the little barque I've had my eye on had been torpedoed and is no more. Now you are waffling." Mac tightened up, awkwardly, hedging the boggy sections of grass. "She wouldn’t, Miss DeLune, couldn’t let me in on the nature of the trouble but said it could be catastrophic." "She's an actress. How else would she describe it, A spot of dirty weather? Oh well I suppose it involves more money as usual, my hopes of survival recede like the stern of my barque chugging gaily away down the Thames to the beginnings of Nowhere, hooting, yes hooting like a tug. So what am I to do?" Mac thought, consult a lawyer but said: "She’s waiting for you at her agents house in Mayfair." * * * Standing solitary near an immaculate grandpiano which imposed like the summit of an alp in spring, was a man Hector had not set eyes on before. A man of bristling hair, moustache and ruddiness, a man twisting and reeling a coffee cup into its saucer. A man tapping one shoe to the pulse of a fashionable tune wheezing from the gramophone, a man with luggage, with a confident air and with eyes glued to Clara who had buried herself in a low-slung sofa and was evidently thinking. As soon as she heard Sir Hector announced, however, she hopped up, even before Hickox, at the apex of an awkward human triangle almost scorching the back of his trousers in front of an impressive fire, could clear his throat. Yet her greeting lacked the ardour of ones previous. Hector felt the six eyes of the three people, swarm. She would have preferred to take him aside to privately stammer out the gist of her 'catastrophe', had it not been for a speedy advance of the moustachioed man, the played- out record, grating, and Pats victim smile, "My name is Walter Morris", said the man. A stilted, less hairy combination of both Whitman and the designer-poet Morris now confronted Hector with a pregnant exhortation which seemed so popular among strangers he had met recently. "I'm Sir Hector Carpenter. What can I do for you?", he replied, awaiting the pregnant exhortation to drop its litter.
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