The Promise Ese (6) Hickox and Clara, having gagged the gramophone, retired silently to the farthest extent of the web where they were holding hands like a beleaguered couple of tarantulas. Hurriedly Clara said: "Walt insisted upon speaking to you personally, we've nothing decided." Pat lit up his pipe and whispered to her, inaudibly, their stray voices lost on the moor of room while a footmen loaded the fire and a deadpan maid rolled away the trolley of tea. It was life in a palace. Hopefully, an intimidating setting for the new man who shook Hectors hand, greedily, blurting: "You didn't know she was married, did you? Let me introduce you to Mrs Morris." Without allowing pause for thought, the man had backed toward Clara grabbed her arm and made his 'check'. Hector opened and closed a fist but otherwise maintained his insouciance whilst uttering drearily: "Is that all you have to say? That’s nothing to me. I've known it from the beginning." The man raised his shaggy eyebrows suspiciously and fingered Clara like a trinket. "Oh, have you, sir, then that makes it all the more reprehensible, playing about with a married woman...” Such emphasis upon the word 'married' as though it was some unique pedigree his genius had spawned. Clara suddenly gave voice to her damsel routine, "Really Walt, talk about the pot calling the kettle." then wrenched her arm away indignant and shrewishly faced him. "Mrs Mitchell, Mrs Karlsson, Mrs Vicary, Mrs Stimson, wives of some poor codgers, no doubt. It is you who disgrace the institution of marriage just by breathing your stale, stinking desires into any married-woman’s vicinity. And you have been doing just that long before I took off to find the air that’s cool and freshened by mountains." Clara’s reflexes had been refined by several turbulent years of childless, fruitless wedlock. She could read concerning symptoms in Walter's ramrod posture yet was unable to transcribe them for anyone else. She could only shoot arrows of code into the air and hope beyond hope that they met their intended targets. Pat may have got one because he mosied over a little nearer to the group. Still, she went on pushing: " You particularly sought out the ones with rings. Why? Shall I let these gentlemen in on the secret? To cover any bastards unfortunate enough to be pop from them, and now what? Passed you over, have they, the lonesome, sagging ingrates? Abandoned their Indian brave? You’ve aged, considerably, no wonder. Chief of the Navaho but deprived of the harem and no longer privy to the council of the sacred star-band. Nothing else for it but retreat. Take to the prairie, rejoin the herds for I won't be there to plait beads in your hair and I most definitely, never again will take the moon to my bosom. Its the end of the bloodline." The last few words she wickedly eked out like syrup then watched for his reaction, trancelike. Now they looked closer both Hector and Hickox imagined they saw a smattering of red-indian in Morris. He seemed to comprehend. Indians treated their squaws roughly. His fingers curled as if configuring to yank her hair out. "You are my rightful woman," he said, fidgety, "but as you know I have not come all this way to drag you off but to be rightfully rid of you." "What does that mean," asked Hector, wedging his voice between them. "A mercy-killing?" "Divorce", Hickox filled in, casually. "You know the old thing...” He palmed his free hand forward like a cigar-shop Indian, as if to say, well there you have it. Morris prickled. Stolen thunder. It was heating uncomfortably, this potted drama, thought Hector, wondering if Pat was up to punching a man, an action Hector had not been called upon to reproduce since the laying flat of a baiter on the 'Trueblood', in a storm, for his own good. "That’s right and you're the one who’s going to pay for it." Malevolent. "I see." "You have a choice." Malicious. Clara interrupted, "How dare you, you weasel..." and, being undeniably a physical type, suddenly sprang at him. Pat did respond, as Morris went to gather the hairs his fingers had been itching to, by blocking the arm, a manoeuvre which inflamed its owner into general attack. Clara managed to ram his shin with the pointy toe of her buckled shoe whilst drawing some Navaho hieroglyph in the air with her two licked fingers, as if cursing him. Now they will bay at the moon, a funny idea that plagued Hector's reasoning like a dream, like his dream of a sorceress, like his dream of the wax-white room with the flustered players, and gargantuan, curvaceous fireplace framing the molten blaze and the red of his temper so much in abeyance, saturated. What for it? Ruin? Gaol? Honour? Hickox's debonair leanness and pervasive innocuousness. Floes meshing together, pressuring him, gnashing like farcical marshmallows. What was he? A floundering ship or its master? Set the best course - he wrested Clara from the other two and slapped her in the face. It gonged all to their senses. Ensued a hiatus, disturbing with the predestination of a caught pendulum, everyone’s natural expectations of Times inexorable advance. She salved her cheek with both her hands, while Hectors hand, base authority impinging like a blade having sliced, Clara could but gaze at, disbelieving. A hand that had been everywhere upon her, through, around, inside, beyond her, approached the prospect of her rippling exterior, weakly tender, with frenzied impatience, levity, sanctity, teasingness, hesitancy. It had raped her and plotted precipitous treks through the canyons of impassable wastelands that composed her night body, and blotted tears. Hectors perceptions of her contused. He shut his eyes to the pools filling in hers, fed from that ever dependable subterranean spring of disconsolateness. He thought it universal. But her stream was brackish, it was impure, it was sullied by offence. One of her men had been supposed to throttle Morris. She had been deliberately goading him to buck. Hector had gone for the wrong neck. Hickox had at once, thrown his arm about her like chain-mail. Even Morris was stung. He could see The Name that he was plotting to trawl through the clags of the court until it was muck annihilating itself. What could Hector do further as a man, apologize? It was no big deal to hit an hysterical women, in the foetid slums of the East End, or in a yurt, even at sea if their dinghy was capsizing, or in the fury of passion. But in these grand confines of rare surfaces one might guarantee even balls of expectoration to ricochet endlessly, until the surfaces had flaked from age. It demanded the indifference of a lobotomised cerebellum to tap backs breezily and pass off this degree of bad form as bad luck, in that customary manner of the Carpenter male. I don't know, he thought. What to do? Who would advise him? A split second. Spiders all -a- slavering at the promise of a dying fly. Clara’s offended sense of control picked the moment his eyes retracted from the dilemma to have vengeance. She whipped a comb from her writhing tresses and slashed at his cheek, the left one, the heart-side, the same half of her own face he had chosen to smack. The iron teeth excoriated his bewilderment, redly. Pat recoiled. Then Clara, humming, gathered what she could of a slim linen skirt, kirtled it above her knees and sopped his blood. Hector let his arms fall to his sides as the soft underbelly of skirt licked the little leaking strips of his skin. Truly a witch. "Its not really the place for this kind of scene,” he said gravely to Morris who now looked a good-o husband sidling up to a quietening missus. "Come and see me at...how about the bank of England, thats where all the millions are, not with me." So saying, he utilized Pats delicate handkerchief, stalked from the house, disarming a condemnatory moue of the hat-peg, coat-peg butler with a smile wincing sideways from its wad. * * * A hotel again. Of course if he hunched and looked harried as an object of pity, they would be reverentially avoidant. Perhaps he presumed himself more familiar to strangers than was the case. Surely everyone had read the stories of the 'Stalwart's career as an impermanent sculpture of sugar-icing and dutifully gawked at his slides or noted his movie visage, flickering anxiously, as pasty as the snow. And they must have heard about his new adventure gummed up in the harbour of fantasyland. Boy Scouts everywhere plied the waterways of England in handwrought curricles trying to maroon themselves into its crewlist. "Toothache is it, this time", a porter had minced irreverently..."always something.' Some hotel staff made it their business to classify the maladies of their guests - any cosseting of cheeks or jaws spelt the aftermath of a fracas, a chipped tooth, a young bruise, mumps or sinus? - implausible. Such sufferers would be at home in bed whereas fugitives haunted the lobbies of certain hotels. The night-crowd. The battered. To peripheral observers such as London cabbies, a handkerchief pad told like an ice-pack on the pulped nose of a boxer. “Have you heard the latest, Sir?” ‘Wan’t ya get yer comeuppance, dearie?’ Wan’t ya get whats due? Ya fiddled and faddled and now its ‘Skedaddle!’ Dan’t give tuppence, Comeuppance fer you! “Heard that one, tops all the bills…?” “No.” “Thought as much” Resented the Sir’s miraculous dripfeed of credit courtesy of the hotel managers owing him something. Having learned to endure barely tolerable cold Sir Hector Aeneas Carpenter had learned to love barely tolerable heat. His guts, in expedition mode, had like a furnace taken the scalding cocoa and tea religiously as penance, as a saviour of life, probably charring his membranes irrevocably. His throat succumbed to the most minor eruptions of influenza and to smog. But an interchanging of extremes had de-sensitised his outer coating of skin. It required fires and agonies and frigidity in order to feel. He required a steaming hot tub in order to whittle his thoughts to their sheerest point of usefulness. He required a bathroom and definitely a mirror. The tiles were lilies of death in their whiteness bordered by the black of bowties, mourning stationary. The porthole of a mirror sprung out and magnified his clawprints - four, swollen reciprocal slaps. Ghastly. Perhaps he could swab them with alcohol. The bath fog arose and swabbed them for him so that the smudge of his reflection could be anyone’s. His face was as a pink petal. A single he-loves-me-loves-me-not reminiscence. He felt dizzy all of a sudden. He could feel the breath of her.... Her, just below the hairline on the back of his neck. He could see, surely, the bow of another despondent petal, the hand of wind about to swipe it for amusement. The occluding moisture beginning to try him. He panted. He might stamp away the condensation but not the feeling, the weals, left or right? Touch them left, righthand in the mirror, his right eye slightly higher than the other, queried him westerly and easterly the doorpost like a depot marker, hallucinatory, the gaping doorway and its promise of arrival. The Her. It was the Her from his crossing. The phantom presence as vague as a dash of honeysuckle of an evening somewhere about him, that late afternoon. The bird at his shoulder that had kept them all going, the soft little head sleepy against them, the food of perseverance. Sharply he switched around to see if she was there, his guiding moon. He couldn't believe he was alone. His breathing thumped. Well what was minxy Clara up to? All out to get him. All calving megaliths of crushing ice debris herding around his pristine floe, just so, She had warned him with her sighing as he hung in the bottomless crinkle of the continent, calling for aid. "Keep away from this place. It is the dreadful heaven for the dead man. I will grant you another chance at life, take it and never try my benevolence again." And then his companions had fished him up from the crevasse with the credo of the siren twirling, refraining, plaguing his inner ears and he had meant to, as bidden, go from there and keep from Her. He felt sure he had been spared but for the sake of the other men walking with him. If ever he were to try Her alone, she would, without hesitation, scrape him from her womb and expel him into stark oblivion. A lonely death. He slumped in the bath, cramped by his usual 'dyspeptic' discomforts, broiling as jam and She said: The steam-smeared white of this room is an untried field of snow. Claim your satisfaction here. You can be the first man to make footprints on this ceiling. And that will make me laugh. In the night Hector suffered what he termed a 'blinder', maybe a faint heart-attack. * * * "Which one would you like to hear?" Gwennie sat and said, a poetry book opened on her lap, thumb at her lip. Buxom for her age, like so many pubescent children she seemed to have siphoned off vital bulk from her parents and left them to dwindle, wizen. "'Reverie', the last one,” said her father, steering adoring glances towards her, his Renoir bather sprung to life, his jelly-blossom. “ Too long to memorize. You don't mind, O' Connor?" Gwennie turned to the back of the book and began in the faltering manner of school rote to hack at the idiosyncratic Mr Browning. Hector blew some questing smoke towards Lawrence O'Connor, whom Emily had striven to engross in a sudden litany of grudge against society. The young man nodded. He understood why anyone would feel an urge to run from the spiteful, mean-spirited conversation. Emily was not often this bad, but Hector had just told her that an omnibus and he had locked horns on a busy road - hence the ‘stains’ of accident borne upon his person. What..worse? No-one had helped! Shame upon you humanity! He had bravely hobbled home, unaided, ignored, to seek out the ministrations of wife and daughter. Percy, angelic, had there tried to paint out the gashes with a lemon-yellow until providentially, this doubtful acolyte by the name of O’Connor had blown in bearing the news of his vice-chancellor wishing to contribute to the up-coming expedition three of that university’s brightest lights - a philosopher, a physicist and a linguist, as well as some money and some technical equipment for an expedition designed seemingly to never get off the ground. Everyone at Ermine street seemed sound compared with the stratospheric gang of the Hickox mansion. Emmy had even inveigled him to resume his incessant smoking once more. Their intermittent ‘carry ons' flensed her bonny good-humour into rotting refuse. Sick and tired, sick and tired, the ditty of her life, but for several godforsaken reasons she pitied Hector, lovingly, that day at least, so they could wither together and commonsense be damned. But how she managed to hold in, like a bloated stomach, the impact of Clara’s unforgivable house call, mystified him, holding it in to presumably belch it forth over his face scarred by inexcusability, most probably. Although he hoped she would in time, find his elementary justification of Claire’s panic to be irresistable, conclusive and bloat-pricking. "Why don't you hate me like a balanced woman should?” obtruded his premise, inquisitive, many a time on the prowl for understanding. “Perhaps it is because you seem alive.” Anyone who had ever escaped death became doubly so. And she had never met anyone else as quite alive as he. Even when still, the sparks of compressed life jumped from his eyes, in the queer little jerks of his hands and in his tight clinch of lip. Anyway she did hate him for one thing - Percy. It didn't seem fair. Not a cell of a child had his few elusive liaisons with others generated. Right and proper. Yet having had one, the cogs in her body steadily ground out the next as though being a wife meant being a queen-bee. Auspicious she having married comparatively late otherwise the grotesque sac of bee may have continued to squeeze out the semblance of a whole new hive, thousands of wormy little organisms programmed to inevitably abandon their maternal egg-bag and forget it. The poetry dried up between them. Yet the time of Percy’s conception it was as though Hector too forgot the transparent sack of woman could pump eggs machine-like until an age unknown. How old? It was the poetry again. And he was her champion and she wished it would have stayed thus. But a grub squirmed and she wanted to disembowel herself and tear its head off with her teeth and free her desires from their bondage of an omnipotent machine programmed simply to replicate then die. Savage, unchristian musings that a conscience is powerless to override. Listen to the animal self howling down its souls defence. She listened and despised it. Pent up, hidden from even diary eyes. Then how tired and frumpish and banal it made her feel to have had another baby, even if it earned her status in the social pages of propriety. An expanding family wrought Hector ordinary in comparison with the flighty and aloof Swedish club of explorers, the ones without wives but just ambition, the ones with the hollow eyes and authoritarian style, the creepy ones that masticated seal-skin with the esquimaux women. Captain Hunt as well had a wife and son to broaden the sorrow of his tragedy. British heroes of exploration arose safely from respectable families. Yet maybe that eccentric, rootless Viking intrepidity would suit her hero more. Their bald ferocity. Gwennie circumspectly surveyed her father, after muddling the poem, and felt relieved to find that his indisposition had commandeered his attention, although it saddened her to see him so absorbed by woes. She had visited war sanatoria with her aunt where listless, patched patients in bath chairs groped at their injuries, with that orphan look of kittens. A doctor had twined a diaphanous bandage around his head across his nose. and then been bawled from the house, Hector swearing that doctors, as distinct from surgeons were the male equivalent of bedridden spinsterish Nightingales leeching their fame from soldiers too groggy to protest. His father being a heart doctor whose patients invariably died before the average life expectancy whilst their supposed life-preserver, the Carpenter patriarch, lived on and on. Hectors fluting poetry voice cut in to Gwennies futile resumption: "One who never turned his back but Marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph......." 'That’s not from this poem". Gwennie interjected. This is the 'Power' poem - "Where amid what strifes and storms May wait the adventurous quest," Emily had overhead and automatically conjoined: " Power is Love - transports, transforms Who aspired from worst to best..." Then the fragments blended with laughter so that each singer wistfully believed in a strike of golden memories. And each singer shivered with a passing dread. "Happens all the time," explained Emmy to O'Connor who looked startled, "Care to stay for lunch and another serving of the same?" "Well, we’ve had enough hijinks," demurred Hector in a distracted state. When he did but snigger, the tender cuts on his pivot of cheek-bone split and blood defied the dressings. Rather adopt a compulsive twitching towards the alternate doors, ominous, at each end of their dining room, which manic movement confounded Emily. She kept asking why, whom did he expect? “Its my watch.” Gwennie remarked about that same blood-sucking doctor conscripting an army of attendants from the lunatic asylum that she would be able to fend off with the poker and her mother saw the girls jaw set, paternally intransigent. Hector’s stretching across to pinch her arm in agreeance, his fake merry eyes waning like doleful crescent moons, proved anything but supportive to a girl trying to gee up her father. His ribs must have been tearing at their cumbrous shell. He grimaced in addressing the phantom form of young O'Connor, who up until then had been internally refining an expose of this fantastical luncheon-table odyssey to various scoffers of the common room. He started at the apparent cue. Dissect the characters of the three? A philologist, baker and tinker are we. Lawrence first commenced dissertation fashion to flesh out the philosopher’s intellectual skeleton, respectfully, but Hector’s dismissive hand soon hushed him. “That’s not the way to sum ‘em up,” said Hector, voice tracing hand like an aerialist. “ Ask yourself three things. Is the fellow a drinker, does he have a mother, can he play solitaire…oh and…how is his appetite?” Lawrence pondered for a moment. “And whether or not he has a better’s luck?” he produced, insinuating. What did it mean? Hector sat back, somewhat piqued by his temporary disability which dissuaded him from putting hands behind his head in the ‘well, well, well…’ style of deliberation. They pattered idly on a blank plate, waiting for cheese. Winter was upon them; the dining room had fully revived from its estivation. It was dark and dismal by early afternoon, lights projected star-rays on the street, unreally. Vagrantly, as if through a shutter-slat of bandage, he surveilled O’Connor. “Perhaps,” he sighed, pensive. “No-one has conclusively rated chance in the odds of a successful expedition. Weather looks like chance, but some think it’s a malign force determined to rout them. When we provision the parties we try to ensure against every kind of chance but a slip is the main problem then, and one can’t predict the crevasses. I would say the chance of surviving a crevasse depends on one’s personal quality of luck. I could ask if someone has survived any near misses previous then we can at least weigh up his providential history against the potential dangers.’ “If I was luck-poor there wouldn’t be much history to examine.” O’Connor discerned he might gamble with Hector, so apparently weakened by this ‘accident’. “What about the two souls who disappeared at the tail end of the ‘Stalwart’ traverse?” “What about them?” Carpenter looked intensely serious. Had anyone analysed their past record of risk and response? “Bergstrom has said that the excuse of ‘luck’ is used by the ill- prepared to explain away their persistent failures. He’s justified in saying so, I think. He’s the only one to have surmounted every obstacle. Surely the conditions he faced couldn’t have been so different.” “But the tragic deaths of those poor men can in no way be attributed to luck, isn’t that right, dear?’ Emily’s tone, so supportive, impressed her husband. “Fools, they were fools, those men,’ muttered Gwen. “Certain pitfalls are undoubtedly avoidable, providing proper caution is taken and one pays due respect to Nature,” It was a sensitive issue for him. Hector’s bandage stanchioned responsibility, quailing before this new reef knocking at his trusty record secured for having no man perish under his command, directly. The women could buttress him too, if it threatened to become one of those days when the masculine degree of him scurried into wainscotting and the maidenly, worrisome, fretting part resignedly took the floor. A telephone bell battering the sanctity of the vestibule, he knew the door bell would duly peal; he could feel O’Connor’s forensic heat. But it was only an amicable conversation. “Now, he said, if we can take your philosopher along with us the culpability aspect can just be raved away. Destiny, why are some lucky and the rest unlucky? Why is it that an error of judgement for some can turn to gold for the courageous and quick decision maker? Perhaps it is all a matter of perspective” Hector had proffered one of his ‘old chestnuts’ – it’s the way of seeing things that designates their substance. “A simplistic notion which apportions to personality a weight of autonomy the anatomist has yet to quantify,” said their guest, succinctly. Gwennie smiled as if she concurred. O’Connor truly owned a Browningesque grip of phrase. He turned to her, warming, after her lugubrious mother had ducked out to speak on the telephone. “And what do you think, Miss Carpenter, can a view from one window encapsulate the scene for the viewers at all other windows?” She blushed and said she thought it could. Hector snorted approval while his ear canals clawed at the span between table and hall-doorway, beyond which a disjointed monologue of Emmy to receiver spasmodically sailed towards them on the draught. ‘Accident’… very bad…no, that’s not necessary………children.’ Was it her? Father can make the sun come out just by glancing at the clouds, Gwennie felt like saying, embarrassed by the naïve fancy. She also wondered who it was at the invisible end of the telephone, whether it was the beautiful, tremulous lady who had bewitched her little brother. Hector sallied forth to investigate. When Emily sensed her husband nearing, she broke off and held out the telephone receiver, the heavy, moulded object that’s appealed like the derriere of some ebony idol, blemished by finger-prints, glossed by her breath. Her arm was straight. She waited for the swift impact of his hand against hers as he retrieved it, then satisfied, returned to the table. It was, she thought, in an uncharacteristic brittle pitch he crunched out the words ‘invisible man’ to the second- in- line, online. Because all sorts and sizes of rubble panned in his head. 1.misunderstanding. 2. Amazement. 3.self-sacrifice. 4. responsibility for all on board. 5.Hurt. 6.Love? 7.Saving oneself. “I am at the theatre. What was that smack for? Why must you keep running away? Accident? Can’t you look after yourself for a ‘bloomin’ second. Not supposed to see you…Walt and Pat have buddied. Are you trying to tell me – that was your intention? In effect. Well, he sure feels sorry for me, both do. Pat’s finished with you. Marvellous? I started it…Walter started it but one little tickle and Hecs the villain and all my friends are tense…and I’m so lonely and you have her and your darling kids – and I’m going to strum my lute. Didn’t Walter surprise you, Hunn, a little bit? You don’t know what there’s been in my life. How could you have said you knew? Suspected? Be straightforward with me – of course she’s eavesdropping…I like to give the impression of wide experience, to some, but Walt’s, he’s the only long-term thing, up until us. He hauled me over as much as any man’s entitled to with his ‘missus’- your word, Mister. Monosyllables. All listening. Yes, yes, anyway…. Walt’s weakening, good? Pat got him drunk, better? We might all go away to the south of France for a holiday, the new three, bar one. Lawyers. I’m only hinting, you work it out but you already know my acting improves after a nip or two and now – the end of the week. Normally we’d be together when she’s off at the Mouth…Oh…it’s wrecked. These phones aren’t that clear now no-one can hear me but you, sweetiest, scratchiest..”I’m so sorry. How’s your face? Like me to lick it over again, this time, by tongue, all wet – should have done it then and there. Pat thinks I need a rest, that I’m overwrought, OUT OF THE PICTURE Even so, you might enjoy it,…what if we score each other, all over- slowly – first the soft little dip behind the ear… then all the way down the back… then the tingling soles of our feet … up the front of the leg…Don’t say ‘speak up’, you can hear me, just dream what I’m saying, sweet-pie- very slowly – very slow pain… Gosh I wish I was warm in bed with you – I can’t look forwards to Christmas and no pudding!” Chapter 6
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