The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

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The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe Page 6

by D. G. Compton


  I came out of the viewing room in a state of intimate communion with all mankind. The people I saw in the corridor, the same old TV people, were invested with a new immediacy. I was painfully aware of the bones beneath their flesh, of the heroism that might at any moment be expected of them. I couldn’t imagine how they could possibly go about their lives so unprepared. When one of them slapped me on the shoulder I could have wept for his fleeting vigor.

  ‘Roddie . . . where you been?’

  ‘Out of town.’ The surgery was still a well-kept secret.

  ‘Lucky fella. Thought I hadn’t seen you.’

  ‘Vincent gave me some time off. For good behavior.’ »

  ‘And now you’re back in it.’ He leaned closer, deodorized out of his mind. ‘I hear there’s a new terminal. And they say you’re getting her.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Wise man. But you can’t go around with Vincent long these days without someone putting two and two together. He’s the king of the terminals. Or didn’t you know?’

  ‘He does other things.’

  ‘She’s all over the building, I tell you. Given three weeks. Some 36-26-36 number, working in an abortion clinic. Given three weeks. Absolute godsend.’

  ‘You don’t happen to know her name as well, do you?’

  ‘Matter of fact I do. Katie Mortenhoe. Not an easy one to forget. Absolute godsend. They say the series was on the skids, couldn’t find as much as a spastic. Vincent must be busting his Y-fronts over this one.’

  ‘He seemed cheerful enough this morning.’

  ‘That’s how you do it, Roddie. Hear all, see all, say nowt. But I’ve never known a buzz as loud as this be wrong. You’re getting our little Miss Mortenhoe, believe you me.’

  I watched him bulldoze his way on down the corridor and around the corner out of sight. His little Miss Mortenhoe was five-foot-nine, twice married, forty-four, with a face like a female politician and a figure she didn’t think much of, so that nobody else thought very much of it either. I knew also that she was capable, far more than he was, of suffering. Capable of. Capable of far more.

  The state of communion withered. The bones beneath people’s faces were just as true, and the heroism just as possible, but the people themselves were remote, totally alien. They were TV people. And Vincent had leaked the name Katie Mortenhoe so precisely that it was already all around the building, and would be all around the city by morning.

  I left. I wondered whom I was trying to kid that the people there were remote and alien. Remote from me? Alien to the man with the TV eyes? I took a taxi, thinking luxury for the rest of my life, and fought the inverse snobbery in me that despised it. Katherine Mortenhoe was the romantic, not I. Sitting comfortably in the back of the taxi I suddenly remembered something, and laughed. ‘Hear all, see all, say nowt,’ the man had said, staring, as if with a dirty story, into my eyes. If he’d known whose eyes he was really staring into, Vincent’s eyes, NTV’s eyes, he’d have shit a brick.

  I seem to remember I went to a cinema that night. Or it might have been a casino. The cinemas blur in my mind, and so do the casinos. The one safe thing to say is that I didn’t go home. If you didn’t sleep in it what else was a home for?

  ~ * ~

  Katherine had woken early that morning. Her sleep had been by courtesy of Dr Mason, and she felt her waking to be his doing also. One morning she would not wake, and would not sleep either. He had measured out her life for her, four weeks, twenty-eight days, give or take a day. He had hardly been generous. Presumably twenty-seven days now, give or take a day.

  She felt panic at the hours’ passing. She sat up, pushed the bedclothes hurriedly back.

  For what?

  She pulled them up again and lay down and stared at the early spring sunlight on the ceiling. Was the sun going to shine for her every day? She remembered a summer holiday, a children’s playground, paddle boats, a tiny village for guinea pigs, swings for her dolls, sunshine . . . and the helicopter pad beside it all with regular departure flights back to the city. She’d been six, or maybe seven, with a new mommy. After the first week she had refused to go to the playground, although it was the best place. Her father had thought her such a funny, brooding child, not to be able to bear the whir of her regular departing hours.

  It had been possible then, simple even, to deal with the difficulty. She played in another part of town.

  Harry had suggested this, suggested that they went away, suggested that they played in another part of town. But there was nowhere far enough. She said yes and no to him, and listened to his plans. But she knew that she would go on working at Computabook for as long as she could, and then -in self-defense, if not for Harry’s sake — she would kill herself. Organisms wore out, broke down, stopped. There was nothing to make a song and dance about.

  Harry slept on. She turned over in the bed and closed her eyes: it wasn’t a bonus that the sunlight was inexpressibly beautiful, it was a sentimental, unhelpful delusion. Beauty was one of the human mind’s most straightforward pleasure mechanisms. Beauty that broke your heart was sick. She got up soon after and made breakfast, quelling the shake in her hands that was new from yesterday.

  Recurrent rigor, Dr Mason had said, but she quelled it firmly all the same. And took no capsules for the tightness, not exactly a headache, around her scalp. Her pulse rate was normal, and her morning visit to the lavatory not particularly traumatic. Progress would be slow at first. Above all, there was no longer any need for her to worry. Four years of listening and watching and wondering were over, and the realization made her curiously lighthearted. If there was one thing she hated, it was people who thought and talked of nothing but their health.

  Then Harry came into the kitchen with a careful, graveyard face.

  ‘You couldn’t sleep,’ he said.

  ‘On the contrary, I slept excellently.’

  It was only to Harry that she used phrases like ‘on the contrary.’ Harry, and difficult people on the telephone.

  ‘Nothing seems to keep me awake,’ he said guiltily.

  ‘I told you, I slept like a log.’

  ‘And now I’ve let you get the breakfast.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’

  He sighed, tiptoed meekly to the table, and sat down. She stood over him.

  ‘What’s the matter? Has somebody died?’

  He burst into tears. There were some things she didn’t have to put up with.

  ‘Coffee’s in the pot,’ she told him, grabbed her handbag, and went out.

  Left alone, Harry cried for a long time. Then he looked at his face in the bathroom mirror, rang the Licensing Bureau and told their answering service he wouldn’t be in that day because his wife was sick. The travel agent’s booklets for which he had made a detour on his way home the previous evening after Vincent had broken the news (so sympathetically) to him were lying on the table by the telephone. He picked them up and tore them systematically into little colored squares which he threw away down the garbage chute. Back in the kitchen again, he started to cry.

  Katherine was even earlier on the streets than usual. It was so quiet she could hear her own footsteps. Her high spirits returned. A giant vacuum truck came along the slip road on its way back to the depot, and she thought how tidy it would be simply to lie down in front of it (when the driver wasn’t looking) and disappear into the works forever. You’d meet the oddest people . . .

  Without thinking, she started as usual up the ramp of the street walkover. Below her the carriageways were clear as far as she could see in either direction, so she ran back down the ramp and, for the thrill of it, climbed the drag barrier, and crossed by the road itself. She paused on the center reservation: from where she stood the familiar blocks were strange and exciting, the sun extra bright on sands that human feet had never trod. A solitary truck whined in the distance and she clung to the center drag barrier, laughing as it blurred past her, unimaginably noisy, doppler-effecting itself away into a new distance, indistin
guishable from the old. She caught an instantaneous glimpse of the driver’s mad face, staring at her as if she were the one who was mad. Then he was gone, his apocalyptic moment traveling with him down the road. She climbed the barrier and crossed the remaining carriageways on her toes, like a cat.

  She was still so early that she decided she’d walk all the way to Computabook. The exercise would do her good. And nobody got mugged at five in the morning: the muggers and rapists were safely at home by then, counting their boodle or writing up their doings for the papers. But she stopped off at the neighborhood Post Office first, to see if there was any mail. There were three in the box, two for Harry and one for her.

  Hers had the discreet NTV symbol on the back flap.

  She replaced Harry’s two carefully for him to pick up later on his way to work, and stuffed her own conclusively into a slot marked Overseas Mail Only. She didn’t want it. She didn’t want anything to do with it. Then she spent the next half-hour getting it back, persuading the man at the sorting office counter three floors down that she’d posted it by mistake. He asked her for proof of identity, examined her driving license, her Computabook pass, her blood-group sticker, her travelator season ticket, her pedestrian’s permit, her Social Security card, currency card, diners’ card, voter’s card, civil offenses card (unmarked), and post box registration certificate, and then said he would have to ask his superior who didn’t get in till nine. So she screamed at him, and waved her arms about, and called him coarse names till he handed over the letter because he didn’t like to see a lady get upset.

  She took her letter upstairs, and out into the sun. The letter looked less dangerous there, less likely to go off. The pavements were filling up. She experienced the rigor again, and sat down in a little grass park with gravestones and daffodils, the letter on her lap, while she willed the rigor to go away. Then she opened the letter.

  My dear Katherine,

  I begin like that because I feel, after my long talk with your husband earlier this afternoon, that we are already old friends. Or perhaps old enemies would be more appropriate, for I gather from Harry that you and I are unlikely to see eye to eye on a number of points.

  Undoubtedly he has told you of my proposal, and I can guess that your initial reaction — as with most people — has been one of distaste and even total rejection. It is my experience, however, that such reactions are the result of an incomplete understanding of the issues involved.

  It would be impossible for me to present a rationale of my position within the span of this short letter. I can only assure you that others have found me a not insensitive person, and that I approach you at all only out of a sincere belief in the profound human value of what you and I together can create. It is possible even that you may find my experience helpful in your present trouble.

  On a purely practical level, for example, our organization would be able to provide you with complete protection from the unscrupulous commercial pressures you are certain to be subjected to during the coming weeks. It would be mealy-mouthed of me not also to mention here the considerable financial advantages to your family should you agree to even a limited participation.

  The law, of course, protects your right to privacy as a citizen: we at NTV go further, having a lively respect for your privacy as a unique human individual. I am available at any time to answer your questions, and — even if there is no possibility of a central ground on which we as intelligent people may meet — I still look forward to talking to you at the earliest possible opportunity.

  Yours sincerely,

  Vincent Ferriman.

  She had hoped for a grasping, gushing letter that she could immediately hate. All that was left now was for her to resent Vincent Ferriman for his discreet professionalism. Not that, even so, she considered his letter worth answering: there was nothing that he and she — no matter how mutually intelligent they were — could possibly have to say to each other. If she had to die (which at that moment seemed incredible, even the gravestones among the daffodils confirming the fact that it was other people who died, not she) she would die in private. Dying was the one human activity still able to receive that privilege.

  She was not afraid of Vincent Ferriman’s rationale, his reasons, for she knew she was beyond them. If she met him or spoke to him, it would be her body that rebelled, not her mind. And her body would make her throw up on his feet.

  She refolded his letter and put it carefully away in her handbag. Then she sat among the noisy sparrows, her legs neatly together, and fought the grayness his letter had brought. Organisms wore out, broke down, stopped. There was nothing to make a song and dance about. She remembered she had come out without having a proper breakfast, remembered why, and felt ashamed.

  Then she understood her grayness. It wasn’t caused by Vincent Ferriman’s letter — hunger and shame were what were the matter with her, and both were remediable. She was still far too early for Computabook, so she got up and went in search of a cafe with a public telephone. There she could eat, and make her peace with Harry.

  Over on the far side of the park a small man in a gray-green jacket was eating sandwiches. He finished the last and shook the remaining crumbs onto the grass for the birds. Later he got to his feet a little stiffly and went in search of a place that, when he found it, turned out to be a cafe with a public telephone. He passed it quickly, without looking in the window, and went on to a bookshop a couple of hundred yards down the road where he bought, after long deliberation, a book by Aimee Paladine.

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘Kate? Where are you?’

  ‘Are you all right, Harry?’

  ‘Of course I’m all right.’

  ‘I wasn’t very nice.’

  ‘You couldn’t help it.’

  ‘Of course I could.’

  ‘It’s not a very nice situation.’

  ‘Harry — I’m sorry.’

  ‘What was I supposed to do, though — dance a jig?’

  The plastic telephone mount had numbers scrawled on it, and obscene comments. She began to lose interest in Harry.

  ‘If you were Chinese you might.’

  ‘If I knew what you wanted, then—’

  ‘They dress up in white and dance through the streets. Or they used to, long ago, in the year of the four blue dragons.’

  ‘What are you on about, Kate?’

  ‘Chinese funerals.’

  ‘If I only knew what you wanted.’

  ‘Harry, it says here, Have cunt, will grovel. I think that’s sad, don’t you?’

  ‘Kate, where are you? I’m coming to fetch you.’

  ‘You mustn’t.’

  ‘I’m coming.’

  ‘It’ll make you late for work.’

  ‘I’ve told them I’m not going in.’

  ‘Why on earth not?’ He didn’t want to answer, and she pressed him. ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘They’ll understand, even if you don’t.’

  ‘I understand perfectly. Perfectly.’

  ‘If I only knew what you wanted, Kate.’

  ‘I want to be married to someone else, Harry. For the last twenty-seven days of my life I want to be married to someone with courage.’

  She liked telephones: they gave her the power to end conversations exactly when she wanted to. She rang off and went slowly back to her table and her egg on toast. Hunger and shame were what were the matter with her, and both were remediable. With food she cured her hunger, and with fury she cured her shame.

  He was worried about the future, of course, his future. A Newly Single for the second time, and two years older than she (had he ever been, like her, young?), and not rich, and with a built-in shabbiness that by now would attract only the bossiest of the has-beens (she was bossy herself, perhaps, but never a has-been), she had to admit that his prospects were hardly rosy. Probably the best he could hope for was a future as stepfather to a trio of maintained minors whose real father preferred penury to the company of them and their distracted mother. I
t was a common enough situation, and attracted the doormat types. The types that made the fine understanding father figures in a dozen Celia Wentworths. But at least Harry’s future was life.

  A bossy has-been? Never. John Peel had tried to pick her up, had believed her to be thirty-eight. If she wanted a man she could get one any time at all. She finished her egg on toast. . . No, she couldn’t allow herself that one; that was the petty bureaucrat talking, the sexy, high-life government executive in charge of one thousand paper clips. If she wanted a man (unpaid) she’d really have to work quite hard. And she needed the energy for other things.

  Other things?

 

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