West

Sir Ernest Shackleton, retired explorer, finished his cigarette brusquely, stubbed it then grumbled to himself about the price of tobacco. His own company "The Hornpipe Cigarette" concern had fizzled like a candle ashamed by electricty so now he smoked "Camel", whining consistently as he coughed, vowing ,of course, to give it all up and suck sweets instead. But the headiness and rush kept him going.... Emily had once despaired for his lungs but Rosa well, she cared for his happiness and wasn't quite sure that the two states 'health and happiness' were connected. She herself suffered from a variety of minor indispositions including periodic 'turns' yet managed to keep a half-moon of her lips and astound all with her imperterturbable cheeriness. A 'joie de vivre' which prickled his nerves sometimes, oh but one had to 'keep going' as he himself well knew, smile in the face of gloom and joke away impending tragedy. "Good Old " Ernest had kept men alive by employing the method - just enough to see him through four and a half expeditions. Life with Rosalind made number five but this time 'the men' had become one woman and what a woman! His fulproof method would be tested again. She tried him with her dramas, her gargantuan appetite for frivolity, her prattle and gibes at his masculinity. Before his staged disapperarance she had respected at least that part of him,the manly part but now - he couldn't possibly return to sea at age fifty -three, could he, just in order to re-supply her with the Edwardian cum jazz-age Odysseus she had fallen for? Not likely, not after the world had given him up for dead. His career was over.
He picked up a book disdainfully, one of Rosalind's thrilling novels, selected a passage at random and began to read. The killer on the train ducking in and out of compartments as he stalked the succulent victim. Dream on, missy... He coughed up a further paragraph - the grappling, the staggers, the stifled breaths and the thud. Then with haughty aplomb, he slapped the trashy novel down on an octagonal side-table and lurched into a kind of reverie. He couldn't rightly chide Rosa for her book choice. For in his own prolonged youth he had substituted 'boys own' twaddle for life. Lapped up Holmes- marvelling at the hero's brain power while his own muscles filled out like sails in the billowing breezes. His deductions ran to tonnages or tares or yards...or in how long before his maidenly lover turfed him aside for her 'old flame, or in calculating when his star would be ascending. The prime of his manhood, thats right - the romping towards reality. He took up an object - a paper knife dimpled pressed metal handle with silver embossing. A present from the queen, 1910. Wedged in between the pages it looked like a knife in the back. Then he picked up a paper weight, rolling it around his palm smoothly and satisfactorily until the glass had warmed. This was the object to brain someone with. When he had left Emily, they were the only things he had taken, apart from clothes.
"Ern dear!" It was Rosa, of course with her breath of sunlit artificiality. "What are you up to, dreaming again?".
Yes, yes always doing that.
"Planning my next affair, if you must Know, with the ice of course. Harlot she is. Peary was fifty-two, think I could out-do that...'His words dwindled away. They really had no need of pointless explanations, how interlocked they were with one another. So many 'Yes, yes my dear's...' with Emmy. Yet, could he convince Rosa his haytime was over? No.
"Fall for the eskimo's charms, as Peary did" Rosa came up to him and peered over his shoulder. "Father their bastards, wonderful model..."she said. I fathered yours, he thought involuntarily.
Back to Emmy. He often wondered what she now would look like with her hair shortened. Someones modern Grandmama. She really ought to send him a snapshot. Then he remembered - she too thought him dead. Rosa's cheeks were rouged and her hair all puffed out, She pecked his ear with her deep-red lips. He humphed like a gruff bear.
"See this thing," he said, brandishing the paperweight, "what if we enact one of these..." He glanced at the gaudy paper-covered novel. " I dong you on the head then just before you lose consciousness you stab me in the ribs with the paper-knife. He handed her the implement then realized he had lost her place.
"Why not just have a drink and stop messing about"
She took the glass sphere from his hand and put it in his pocket.
"Whats that for." he queried with a small smile.
She whispered : "To replace your sliver of glass, of course. I miss it...It was sharp. She purred at him and lightly scratched his cheek with one claret-coloured nail. He stepped back.
"That went years ago."
"Well, I remember things..and you know what else, these stink," she said taking his camels from the table and depositing them loudly in a wastepaper bin. "Why not try a ladies'brand, smoking camels, yuck...
"You know what I would say to that?"
"Yes...better than smoking jackets", they snapped together."God I'm tired of that old one," she laughed.
"



They sat down to dinner together. Sydney was hot and the scent of Satinwood strong. They had had two of the shrubs potted for the front'verandah'to keep dangerous spiders away. "Whats a veranda?" she had said with mock naivete. "Indian..."he had replied with mock authority,"...bungalows et al" Yet their's was tiny, full of plants like a specimen garden and Rosa's private spot where she read or drank or cried in the early morning, cried for the luxuries she had abandoned and the child she had given up. Just looking beautiful for Hector was not enough. Resting on laurels skinned her elbows. So she had decided to audition for a new play.
"I'm calling myself Evie Wilder." Hector, with eyebrows raised, stared into his brandy and soda. 'Do you like the name?' She was gleefully insistent. He drew his chair back from the table, crossed his legs and looked more contemplative.
"Has a certain ring...'
"And it's flexible - Eve, Eva, Yvette, Evelyn...eventually." She giggled at her own pun.
"Bit young for you, Eventually." He gazed across at her with love and candour. "Seriously, I think just Eve..Of course there is an American writer with a similar name, Eva Glasson Wilder."
"Yes but who knows that?"
"NO-one apart from bookworms like me." He drained his glass and stood up, heaving with a kind of Dickensian goutiness, pausing to push his chair in correctly, smooth the tablecloth, do his bit. What would he be doing when she started acting again but managing the house? He thought he might try journalism again, under an assumed name of course or...he wished he could lecture. One day they would stop sending money. Her arms strayed about his waist. She rested her head and burbled into his shirt-front:
"So that's fine, tis, aint it hon...I'll be Eve, after her mess up and Wilder than Wilde" He accepted her sighs as contentment as his fingers accepted her hair as their wisp of cloud. What was it all about...the onset of gracious old age, the lying in ones bed that one had made. It was about decision and choice. 'Captain of my soul'
"Anyone in the theatre business will recognize you,"he murmured, tickled by the scent of her skin and hair as his entwined fingers seemed to summon perfumes from nowhere. Yet the notion of her wanting to act again worried him. They had to lie low.
"I'll change my hair to brown and as for postcards, well mine were always touched up, you know that. I'll just try and look as natural as possible." Her voice had become squeamishly bright and optimistic. She withdrew her head, looking mussed, flushed. "I'm going to act being a nobody, pretend you see I've no former acting experience in fact," she paused, "that I'm a housewife just wandered in from her shanty in the outback. I've been listening to people when I'm out oh..but they all speak differently. The gaffers barely have a language...the coalman says 'gawjuss' like a cockney"
If you meant outback Pennsylvania, I say full steam ahead." he egged.
"Ows 'bou Outback New York?" Her uncomfortably quick voice pounced. "No seriously, I'm going to be, as I have become, an Australian goyle, gal..how do they say girl? She looked up at him while still squeezing his middle in a prolonged embrace. One cheek was pinker than the other.
"Gillyflower" he answered. Suddenly her demeanour stiffened.
"Well I think we should wash the dishes, don't you." She had folded her arms, was frowning, said "Nothing, nothing nothing' when he held his arms out with a quizzical gesture and sighed apparently in frustration."nothing but this..." and she made to smell a flower.
"Not again, Clara." At his words she merely growled and curled her nose.
After bundling the crockery into the sink,they crowded together in the kitchen waiting for the washing-up water to boil. Hector fetched glassware which he soaked in a kind of potion called "Crystal Clear". She idly tumbled cutlery which clanked against the stony sides of the sink. The kettle steamed. Clara reached for a waisted bottle, right at the back of the sinks curtained underbelly, a dusty, golden bottle of dessert wine called "Wifely's".
"Where did you get that? Hector asked sounding as if the caked-on cooking pots irked him.
"swapped a set of earrings with Mrs Geeves?
"For a bottle of grog?"
Rosalind said it was special and that she would be retreating to the verandahhh..to partake of it in the cool, alone.
"And I'm not about to have one of my episodes, besides you can talk. What 'nervous breakdown', dear, hadn't you ever seen a pregnant lady before?" She staggered as if she were about to slip. "Dropping me bun, dearie..."
Some boys were bowling pine-cones down the dusty street. To them Rosalind may as well have been a cat, so silently she melted into the whicker and twilight curtained by potplants. she rested her feet on a crate. Intermittent revs of an engine, the cries Of Hector as he scalded himself with the hot water, her glass on the tesselated tiles and creeping sounds as insects emerged from their nests. Two stars dimpling the poignant blue heaven. What was her boy in South America up to, she wondered, squinting to make out the lads in the street mounding their cones like skittles before tossing one on to a roof and running off. "clack, clack, clack as it rolled into the spouting. A wire door sqeaked as someone came out to shoo the perpetrators away. She poured the syrupy liquor slowly into a fine glass and tilted it to catch the skies final nighty-night reflection.
It burned her throat. "Wifely's" was pure bliss. She wondered again what Francis Edgar was doing and for a time felt the need so strong, the need to hold her son that tears dribbled down to her lips and polluted the wine. Crickets chirruped mournfully playing the theme to her evening depression - monotone with rattle. Something about the lovely Australian dusks always wrought tension. "Frankie" she whispered into the night air and a little Spanish voice replied Si, mama for he would be a spanish speaker now...lost to her...Why had she given away the one life most precious to her? For love, what else, for the love more precious to her.
Hector loomed behind the screen door. Once the dishes were over she knew he would be close by, somewhere, crammed in their wee terrace hive yearning for the ice. Chilled drinks was about as much as he could hope for in that department. She pretended to be unaware of his presence. Her sobs sank into his heart - were they a string in the bow of her act or genuine? He rolled his sleeves a little bit higher past beads of rinse water that peppered his forearms. The movement shook Rosalind to attention. She sniffed and made as if 'pulling herself together'for him to see. He breathed loudly but continued to stand wavering slightly, on watch.
"I want our boy." Her voice came ghostly in the impermanent deepening dusk. He even heard her gulp then the whicker crackled under an elbow, her shoes shuffled and dinged a brass pot..
"You know," He felt he had mentioned the great silence often enough but the nightmarish crickets seemed to rile him. "Down south we can here the celestial harmonies, god at work on his harp strumming the futures of each man. The only sound there comes from him, his toil or slumber or heartbeats that spell fear." Or gurgling bellies and flatulence she thought. Always the tiresome South pole. Rosa blinked at him and as she poured, mused provocatively:
" We agree its a noisy country and raucous..."Then directed her gaze at his shadowy bulk behind the door. "Do you think our boy makes noises, talks, asks for me." Her breaths were fast yet voice quiet. The fly-wire was starting to look big before Hector's eye pressed against it. He came out, sat on the step. She shifted stare to the sudden night, sipped then continued, faster:
"Do you think he has forgotten me? What if they never show him my photograph or yours?
"Hortensia promised."
"She is a friend of yours, not mine."
"I'm sure he asks for you" Hector said, reassuring.
"If he can talk. What would they say back, they'd say 'gone from here, but don't worry little mite...'with their Spanish accents, waving their arms yonder," she points, "then when he says 'I miss her, and has one of those fits that children have and bangs his head and demands mama and threatens them with tiny fists..here she is in this picture carrido"
"Probably can't even walk let alone fight," hector corrected, drily.
"Little boys can't control themselves besides What right have you Mr Blase hippocrite. Its fine to care for a bunch of grown-up men but when I mention frankie it as if you didn't care. When is he coming back? When? I've been waiting a year already. He and I died, what a story, my god, do you think anyone believes that, that you went missing...its ridiculous...if I was an auter who...Buchan, Bennett, I couldn't dream up tripe like this..
"People believe anything if its in writing."
Yes so we fix all the papers..we have..yes I know dearest heart, editors accept bribes. She had begun to grab at herself, her breast and hair, covering her face in her hands. Her glass edged over and smashed with a soft tinkle. He wished he could assuredly say he had not seen her this way before but she often drank, it relieved her longings.
You haven't answered me, when will it be, huh, when..will...he.. come.. here? Hec, I'm begging.
Rosa began to cry, hunched in her crackling chair. Boldly fell her tears for a minute or so then she stopped, wiped her face and sucked in her cheeks.
"Uh Oh, disloyalty is death, isn't that so, I know we'll have our little boat soon..."
"When things are wound up."
"Yes, I know, things, money...then new life," she sighed, half-smiling through sweat, tears and the promise of uncertainty. Hector sat seemingly lifeless. Once attracted by her bluff hysteria, he now sensed gurgling words, physicality, the odour of grog, as if it stung or mangled him. When she sidled over and accosted him on the step, instead of offering sympathy, his hand merely lay sleepily in hers. Wasn't she 'one of the boys' anymore?