The Promise Ese (8)
South Chapter 1 ‘Once upon a time there were two little boys. One was fair and one was dark, like you Perky, even the whites of his eyes were greyish and his mother dressed him in a suit as violet as night and locked him in a cave where no light penetrated, every chink had been puttied – so the air was thin, a condition which he soon adapted to, like an underground animal-dweller unable to tell day from night…’ “Percy, come for your breakfast!” Hector was sitting on the edge of the bed tying his shoelaces with Percy nestled against him, watching and listening. Hector curtailed his story and said: “Off you go, Mama wants you…aren’t you feeling as hungry as a horse? Look it to me.” He smirked at the lad and spun him aloft before sailing him down. Emily wavered in the doorway, wearing a frothing, hot-cocoa expression like Supreme Comfort. She directed Percy downstairs, then rather than cold-shoulder her husband in the old way, clutched at his arm, needing to feel attached to him like a moveable banister, from tip to bottom stair. As she clutched, she plucked at bits of lint on his shoulder. No Em, he thought, I won’t stand for it. “Don’t,” he said, pausing mid-stair, “no more fussing with my clothes. That’s how it always starts – clothes then manners then friends.” But she was so infatuated; her submissive burble- of- simmering- chocolate smile melted his indignation. Incredible. Age and youth are twins. So he kissed her on the stair, lover-like, until her milky deliciousness boiled over. Oh, how she loved him. She wished he wouldn’t leave them for the sea. * * * “It’s New Year,” he said to Mac, “Year dot, eight months to go!” The office was neat, the furniture polished, some bills paid, a second man sat at a second table counting circulars. Hector felt so busy he’d decided to concoct a general newsletter to be copied and distributed amongst everyone, once a month, to keep them up to date with expedition happenings. ‘The Clause’, he dubbed it, this little foray into amateur publishing. Mac flicked him a postcard. A corny cow labouring under an ensemble of corny cowbells embarrassed the picture side, while the message side read: ‘My Dear Hector, Happy New Year! I can ski like Bergstrom. I am red and fat like a piggie, forsooth, and the Austrians call me ‘Lady Hickox’ which just goes to show where there’s no smoke-signals there aint no fire. Love to the missus and bairns [A tad for you}, Lady Clara Hickox De Lune’ “Happier or sadder?” he begged of Mac, say happier? “Happy,” Mac obliged, catching Hector’s eyes like the wiggle of a skirt in the street, then dropping them. Out of a perverse longing, Hector plonked the card on a shelf, drew the attention of their new man to it, then drolly said: “What do you think Morris, sick-looking beast, eh?” * * * Katherine Hunt spread out some newspaper over one half of her glass-sheet worktable, to muffle the clunk of her tools. A snippet of bold type caught her eye. ‘Famous Explorer Makes public for first Time Details of his Forthcoming expedition to Queen Astrid Land….The Irish Polar Explorer Sir Hector Carpenter says ‘I have a ship, by far the most suitable ever constructed for polar work.yet to be named….there is to be a competition…prize…’ Katherine shook her head, said to herself: ‘I can’t believe it…an overnight stay on a sub-antarctic island! With him? What a view to climb for, what a peak of Darien! * * * “Why shouldn’t Charles come?” “Look Hector,” she said, defiantly, “if our boy wants to distinguish himself in some other field, in medicine, is that so blameworthy? Your father raised ten children, he was moderately well-off…” oops. Their Bournemouth domicile rocked in the parachuting winds like a skiff. The parlour fire flared every so often, like a gas-jet in need of a gimlet. Emily anticipated a dressing-down but he merely garaged his hands in pockets, requested she continue, encouraging with an irresistible series of winks the flighty sometimes facile speech she employed since regaining love. “Its up to him what he wants to do with his life.” “Too true. But months are months and years make a lifetime.” “He fails to see the point…” Well, Hector thought, our son’s an oaf. Hector’s reformed self burst a rivet under the pressure of such thought. His old, ordinary, ornery self reiterated ‘oaf, oaf, oaf’. The only doctors he knew fond of their trade had been scotched from the expedition files. The grandeur of the ice-walls drove them batty. While others who ridiculed their practice, chore and bore, could practically trim a square-rigger blindfolded. “He’d be company for the Scouts. They could have fun – we are not trying to break records this time on my ‘ship of fools’, my dear. Anyhow, its such a clunker – might turn him off the sea-faring life.” Emily looked hard at him. “He will not go with you, Hector, under any circumstances. This much he has told me, in confidence. You know he and Richard Hunt’s son are both going to Harrow, and they have made a sort of anti-explorers pact. It’s very amusing. Yet I would have liked him to autograph my cloth.” Her cloth stretched over a chair. A going-away memento for all aboard to marvel over, a linen table-cloth embroidered with maritime symbols, pictures and with various signatures of members of the “polar family.’ She had been saving it from finger-marks, little boy’s finger-marks. Percy traipsed in from the rear garden, his hands gritty and numb, marched over to Hector and stammered; “Long or short?” “What have you been doing outside?” His father was unctuous and easy. “It’s far too cold, see the snow? It’s in love with the land but they can’t quite unite.” A saucy few renegade sleet- flakes tricked the panes into feeling a storm. Percy wiped his hands and hid them behind his back. He knew muck from snow. “Long or short,” he insisted, baked-on to his father. “Goodness,” said Emily, impatiently. “Won’t you do the game? You initiated it with all these ‘either ors’. He’s impressionable, think what you say…” She hovered over the cloth as if it was a decorated cake. Hector squatted so he would be better able to chafe warmth into his child’s bluish skin, traumatized by winter. Ruddy, nimble, Hector portrayed none of that cowardly stiffness, that he and everyone had found so depressing, demoralizing. His ligaments had been tenderised by a resurgent regimen of exercise about the torrid coastal paths, moorlands, side-roads. In the most pitiless of weathers. He felt like a bobbing bouncy ball of downy-hearted pig-iron, physically de-compressed. Teetotalling. The opposite of what had passed before. A crumbling, groaning mess. Emmy adored the new man. “I say short.” Hectors response to the quiz. The child refuted the choice cagily by presenting a zipped-up clownish smile and by shaking his head. “Must be long?” Percy swished his head again and this time brought out a snail-shell from under his woollen vest. “It’s not any,” he said. “It’s round.” Hector glanced over to Emily, “That’s a fact.” Whilst Percy giggled to hear the snail sizzling in the grate where he had just smashed it. Hector then looked less pleased. “Mustn’t be cruel to animals, my boy,” he reproved, with both palms cradling the gleaming-orange face so that it hooked to his own faintly stern one. Percy tore free. “Ah, not the cloth…” squealed Emily, darting to safety her sample of domestic, womanly ingenuity and safe creativity. Hector promised to retrieve the prodigal Hunt signature for her. ‘One day the fairer of the two boys happened to be passing by the airless den of his opposite number, when a tap, tap, tapping sound met his ears. It wasn’t like the tapping of a beetle or the crack of a woodpecker’s beak or even the tap of a stone against the crust of a shellfish flat upon an otter’s belly. No it was a finger-nail juddering, impatiently as finger-nails do upon things – out of boredom, the tap, tap, tap of a cryptogram.’ * * * It proved a trial for Katherine to be manhandling the raw materials of her art on the day she learned her teacher, Meurat, had died. The news of his death had left her feeling deflated, bobbing between inspiration and devastation, merely fumbling with the clay chilled and resistant – like punching brick butter. She wondered what Meurat would have done – sat on it? Would he have slapped his gauntlet at the elements or simpered in the face of the muse? Mmm, he may have heated some dampened rags by the stove and poulticed them on the clay to render it supple. A chequerboard of mullioned panes walling the conservatory-studio in which she strove to create had accumulated a kind of indoor fog so that trees, lifeless as limbs of bent wire hung-over, rasped a noise of no origin like a dryad trying to spook her, with only the hiss of the belching stove, odd clank of cartwheel or passing motor, shattering Winter’s concentration. She always suffered like a fast mouse with its high energy requirements when the sun switched off for the season. Greek relatives and empathetic friends were calling for her to come over to them, to the sun, but she had a commission so they excused her. Another ‘Unknown Soldier’. Visitors had been put off, pleasures had been postponed as she peeled the layers of life away to the onion and that became her core. The agreed obligation to produce a ‘great work’ then became her flavour. Potts readily proffered his extremities and even arranged for his brother to display his torso to her. For what she wanted was an assemblage of varied human pieces to symbolize the legions quarried from the girth and pith of empire like a Roman affair, garnered and then squandered, all ground up like mincemeat to be squeezed into the sausage skin of her monument. Meurat would have wagged his grizzled jaw and approved and slipped open his commodious drawers of modelled protuberant fingers and toes and thumbs and elbows like the skeletal beseeching mob of a catacomb clawing at passing sandals through the grill. And served her the hand of one and the foot of another, male and feminine, child and crone, monster and innocent chuck. A criminal’s head for St John. And for the soldier perhaps a fisherman. Having given up for the moment, she snugly primed her tools, called hands, around a cup of witches brew blended from some hedgerow weeds, herbs, tea-leaf – toxic and empowering. It smelt of cassia bark. Visions of Pinks magnificent feet, forearms preoccupied her.. Certainly looked a squiff in a bear-suit when he came in his new uniform. She suspected his preference for eastern garb over western drab disguised his less than classically creditable proportions. Aint’ alf so foppy as her first husband prancing around with his neater, thicker proportions, stamping out the wrinkles and enhancing whatever he wore and gracing all with ‘good teeth’. And wanting her to feel his proportions….one husband. Was there to be another? She didn’t ask them to earn the privilege anymore. What was there to withhold? Matronly age? Win me…proud of my aloneness. She drank all her tea, before idly kneading her clay again. Never an optimal temperature. If London was Capri she could slab all the pots on a roof for the sun to temper. Suddenly her housekeeper, Mrs Jobs popped through the frosted conservatory door to announce a visitor, even though Katherine had sent out warnings of tantrums if disturbed. She supposed it didn’t really matter. Apart from the droll ‘unknown’ her head was full of Meurat, memorial services, lacklustre skies and the upcoming husband, Mr M.P, he of the shooting lodge and grouse meadows. Hector walked in. Carpenter! He looks extremely sheepish, she thought initially, barely rattled and not really surprised to see him. Then in addition a thought flashed– ah, the head! Just the right contours, maybe she could slice a few years off because he still had the boyish, sparkling wide-eyes despite the sags – no perhaps not, more a pirate. She pondered the set of his skull not quite absorbing his reason for being there. A compact head. He proffered pleasantries – she barely exchanged them. She tripped about observing. His nose was very straight, mouth…full, eyes ever so slightly upturned, in the middle, puckered, puzzled. Exactly how someone off to a war they had no understanding of might look, might look up at the sky and wonder…. why was it raining? “Try some of this tea”, she ordered, not meaning to order or even to organize. Then she noticed him gazing on the forest of plaster casts that grew in the glass room as potted palms would normally. They were tall on beautiful stands and pedestals. Copies of Meurat, the master. Blatantly erotic. Well, Carpenter wasn’t an artist, he was middle-class, a child of the era, one of those men who took satisfaction from…ships, undiscovered lands, grog? Katherine didn’t rightly know. Hunt had been a secondary wheel in a system, captive in a hierarchical hutch, nibbling at the cabbage refuse, fawning at the feet of Admirals, shilly-shallying his advancement, more an explorer by default. A bureaucratic cog. She must not assume they all were of his ilk, though. Particularly after her ‘mesalliance’ with the great Norseman. He as free of cant, of restriction as the eagle! As noble and as unsparing, as strong and cruel! That was her idea of the pioneer and the subduer of lianas. He had shown her husband up, as a pea. She asked Hector whether he liked the casts. There was one bronze – a wedding-present, which had been balustered on the basic square of a disused plastered-up fountain. The greenish, water-coddled paintwork, wan and woebegone kissed at the rich, rolling bronze like the hairy lips of an ancient grisette. She suggested he go up and ’twiddle its ears’ since everyone did. Katherine regularly tested untried visitors on the sculpture. Where would he lay his hand? Slide his finger? From her floating vantage, a will-o-wisp in the grove of gnarling faux-humanity, Katherine followed the passage of his knuckles as they stroked thrice downwards from under the arm, to the hip of the unfolded swooning female half of the bronze whose piquant breasts beckoned to the obsequious male portion of the old equation in this, one of Meurat’s early art-world shakers. It was masculinity in decline. The sculpted male supplicant was the toe-rag. The female figurine was an unburdened stem. A back of the hand type, Carpenter, Katherine perceived somewhat cheaply to herself, rare. “One of my sisters used to attend the Slade. She’s in Canada now, sketching. Art’s a safe bet…” He was going to say ‘for the girls’, “for anyone who likes to draw.” He changed tack quickly by comparing the menacing black bust of Sorely-Sharpe witnessed at their home with this – “what’s this called?” “The Adoration.” “Obviously a lover of the female form.” Oh, many, many. She took in the curve of his neck, mostly collar, as he leant forward to peer at the filmy, ill-defined recess of adoring bronze chin meets adored bronze diaphragm. Almost a Meurat himself in a shabby working coat. They guzzled her special tea, not entirely immune to its soporific quality. No chloroform, she assured him, just herbs prescribed by the Muse. Then having examined some feet of the Meurat models he could confidently speculate about her illicit yen for them. Maquettes of feet, three pairs as three pairs of muddy shoes on a boot-boys platform. Stick them on the furniture like lions-paws or peeping out from under things or hollowed out to hold tooth-picks. Fruit-cake! But he did genuinely wish to make jokes about her feet which she found so impossible as to be risible. She consented to talk a little offbeat, found that they could discourse impersonally with each other, spout poppycock and not take it to heart. She revealed the name of the foots true patron, the patron of the foot, the hard-on-himself Pink turned to Potts. But Meurat was dead. Yes, Hector had read the notice in the dailies. No he had been unaware of her life-changing connection with the renowned artist. No he never considered sculpture as relevant. Not even busts of Pliny. But then she didn’t collect art, either… her joy was to make it and worship it, not to keep it. “He died suddenly, if one can believe it,” she said, speculatively. “ I’m sure no-one ever does do it suddenly because… bodies must have an intrinsic pre-set clock which rings, or pips warning signals. Old people seem to know when it is about to happen.” “Do they? Might be coincidence – the fact that they’re old and sick and bound to go at some stage. Dying over time and the sudden moment of death are not the same” “Oh well, so if you are in a situation that suggests risk to life…” “You will automatically have the mind prepared,” he uttered authoritatively, smoothing his pants., watching her. “ Then, of course, losing hope is akin to dying.” Katherine thought. People like Hector, having diced with death, were rendered valid know-alls on the subject, yet she.said; “I have so much hope.. I…but it was as if he knew, I’m sure. Not greatly burdened by sickness but bursting.” She watched him too, wondering. “You should have seen Meurat work recently, with the haste of a groom late for a wedding, of a corpse hurrying for its memorials, of a tadpole desperate to grow before the pool stagnates. Normally he was a great one for taking it easy after the work was finished, after he had learnt to actually see a thing as done…. Because he sometimes liked to take them apart. On piece might live a tremendous number of lives and live as another piece…imagine if we could exchange arms, or you could see things through my pupils and I could feel what it was to be a man. Meurat.he could step into a revolving cabinet, a man and step out as a woman. The latest drawings, have you watched a master draw? Have you been privileged enough to see the pencil or stick responding to eyes direct without fingers or the fingers being the eyes? I cannot tell you about his so-called ‘naughty’ sketches, since you are neither an artist nor a woman, but one day…the world will be ready when its lusts are secured. I hope there will be a memorial service or suchlike here, what they call a ‘thanksgiving’ for his genius.” He smiled. “The Royal Academy will see to it. If it means an examination the naughty ones…” She sighed glassy-eyed, hunching on a little step beside the enormous European stove, white and gold, staring at a bulge of nice wet clay. She had planned to play around with a dead horse, then call Potts to come. He would be shivering. She conceived that very moment a flash of his cornsilk hair in his borrowed attic room, the cold thickening his ink, the pencils snapping, his feet like stateroom marble all official and uncaressed. As their talk wore on, of plans and people, this proud thing Hector had scraped against, not a season before, seemed seasonably limp while the tortured dying vessel dubbed ‘himself’ had held and resurrected itself. Opposites again. His biscuits of thawing floe rallied close to Katherine’s bows. Maybe – the Hunt rot. Their marriage had been short but long enough to infect the freakish Katherine with gangrene. He needed to find out about the cloth for Em. But he liked to talk – to discover. Men had fallen overboard out of frustration, for the sculptress. So he urged her to wax over the proposed ‘unknown soldier’. She wanted a half-asleep young man pillowed on a nag boasting its rigormortis up to its hocks and withers and other horsey venerables yet, “I’m not a horse dealer or a Gericault. The lathering sweat and the network of veins that thrills some sculptors, passes me by. Will you be the head for me, I need a sleepy, toasty dead-looking boy – over forty-five? Will do. Its only for positions and angles of features. Artists are mainly flatterers when it comes to the portrait. I can improve you. Then you can mount it on the ship for an ice-breaking ornament…” “With a pair of Pinks feet at the stern.” Katherine let out a bay of reckless amusement. She saw the thing at once in her head. “The clumsiest, most over-balanced boat ever to steam down the Thames, no wait…I know a worse one, you know it?” Her frown and consternation was a shut-eyed rendezvous with a memory. How the boat had been overloaded so ignobly. She opened her eyes, shimmied her head and rubbed at one of the fudgy panes to find that it had at last begun to snow. The bough had ceased its infernal scratching at the glass as had all sound slunk under the snow in awe. Hector was charging the stove. Its hinges squawked. “I’ll boil some fresh brew, some saintly tea…weak by one part to a thousand of snuff.” He looked completely at home, a kind of fixture, floating like a leaf from where, what for, a person she had never had time for. Stranger things had happened. She gracefully, winsomely smiled then said: “Care to dance with me, famous explorer?” The apparently charming request threw him. He supposed her preference was for novel, modern, wavy stuff? No a plain old polka. Obstructions, no music, uneven floor. “I’ll take off my shoes, then.” She did, then brushed her soles over the Chinese silk rug before the stove. Underneath the floor was tiled and chalky with plaster dust, the patina of Victorian soils and slug-slime. Its funny but the rug dreamed inviting to Hectors captive toes so he followed suit. Katherine jiggled with excitement. Risqué indeed! His feet weren’t leopard’s pads, unfortunately. She told him –upon primary inspection your feet appear or.di..naary, tres petite. Yes, we know they nearly got you to the Pole. Walloping out a polka with her variable singing voice, she galloped him, sure-footedly about the conservatory keeping to an indented path, it seemed to him, the bridle path of her sculpture herbarium. “Uh, what are obstacles for, if not overcoming? No, no not you..” they captured ‘Approaching Spring’, “we’ll lop off your head.” Statues tempted her as obstacles. For him one consolation was of silliness - shared. And not being spied at. And not a money-bag to regale with funding pleas. And not a child running in. And emphatic hands clasping his. She was fleet. Their path blurred, giddily. They toppled over onto the rug, the rug of pretend lichen and the rose-pink algae that softened Antarctic white and blue floor-tiles. The rug that was sun-cooked by the tremendous stove and he could not but think of his adversary, Richard Hunt, yearning for this throbbing woman, maybe as the muss of blizzard death rustled in his throat and the strychnine of hunger hacked his vision furry and the germ of will suffocated in its nutrient solution until he was dead. The buttons of her workaday blouse had popped open, provocatively. Katherine’s eyes leapt to semi-alertness and picked out his grim watching. “No respiratory trouble?” she suddenly said, rhetorically, breathlessly, almost against her will, seeing the words ‘health’ and ‘problem’ like lights in a moonless night. He panted but shook his head and deprived the venerable snow of polluting speech. Then she did something. She tripped to the frosted french-doors and locked the two of them from the house. Then lay down again, then sat up. She said, drifting: “You know we sculptors live through touch. Meurat…Close your eyes, mine are.” They were on their knees, facing each other without sight. She began to run her finger-tips across his brow then down his cheeks then under his chin, up to his ears, through his hair, across below his eyes to his nose and down its straightness and to his top lip where she said; “and we get to know the body from the inside to the out” Then she pushed her forefinger into his mouth and he sucked, involuntarily, clay-sprinkle and soot and clammy vigour and he sucked and tasted until she took the finger tip and painted his lips with saliva and down his chin her finger travelled to halt at his collar. Her hands relayed. She cupped his face in her palms then worked with her thumbs, gently at the pleats of skin beneath his eyes. He had shuddered. Now his skin was on fire. Her hands were brisk yet soft. They lapped up the dessert of skin, meals of clay but the bombe, the soufflé was always living, pulsing skin, the skin of the man, the rough skin of his cheeks, the fluid skin of shoulders, the boned skin, the nipple skin, the tufted skin, the raw skin, the membranes of eyes, the tongue and the drooling lip skin and his straining, drawn out, arching skin, the muscular tubes of power skin the thighs and the skin that kissed skin. Katherine nudged his nose with her nose, palpated his face like a sponge and said: “open your eyes,” not wanting to find his eyes were known eyes, but new eyes. They opened their eyes in synchrony. She searched into the black circles. Momentarily they emptied of him and she felt exultant, so exultant that she kissed him, pumped into him, her plunging skin draining skin sucked and renewably wet until poignant waters washed his eyes into themselves again and stymied the future of that single long and lonely drink. He may look baffled. He looked thirsty. He looked out. She looked closed. Then why had she locked the door? Hector waited, took off his jacket. She made to rise. She wasn’t offering anyone her face to massage, not him but he thought yes then thought, sad? He rolled up his jacket to cushion her head.
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