The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

by D. G. Compton

  ~ * ~

  Katherine Mortenhoe’s father, Clement Pyke, lived alone down in the old docks, aboard the converted fiberglass hull of an ex-river police hydrofoil. It took me nearly an hour to find him, weaving my scooter between old crane tracks and derelict warehouses and sky-high piles of rusting boiler tubing. It was real fringie country, though I didn’t on my way in see any.

  Pyke’s boat turned out to be one of probably thirty, stacked out from the side of a huge dry dock and floating right down at the bottom in two or three feet of scum. The ladder down was rickety, the whole setup — electric cables, freshwater hoses, gangplanks — terribly impermanent. The area, I knew, was scheduled for imminent high-density, Venice-style redevelopment.

  Clement Pyke was up on deck, leaning on the rail, taking the afternoon sun. He had the air of someone who has been in the same place in the same position for a long time. This time could much better have been employed on boat maintenance, but Mr Pyke was hardly dressed for doing-it-himself. In his late sixties, he wore — possibly for my benefit — an immaculate red sombrero, a curious, much-fringed and laced-up leather shirt, and tight green trousers that I could have told him only emphasized the inadequacies of his ancient equipment. His boots were crimson, and weighted down with brass buckles. Normally I like a man who takes thought for his appearance.

  I went down the ladder, breathing in a sudden green chill. Pyke must have spotted me about three boats off, for he abruptly jerked into action and began intently polishing a once-chromed ventilator with his yellow bandanna. I stumbled on, and finally hailed him from his own transom — or counter, or whatever the back end of those old H.F.’s was called. At the sound of my voice he took off his hat and shaded his eyes with it. He had an unnecessarily black black beard and hair combed forward so that it might have been a wig but probably wasn’t ... I noticed all this because I sensed that this was all I’d get: the attitude was the man; the continuous Clement Pyke was by now no more than the extension of one carefully-chosen moment.

  ‘Roddie child,’ he said, not overplaying the surprise bit, ‘you’ve come. Unscathed you’ve come. You’ve found our shitty little colony. Our rive gauche.’

  He held out his hand for me to shake, consciously archaic, so I joined him and did. ‘Mr Pyke,’ I began, ‘it’s really very good of you to—’

  ‘Clement child, Clement.’ He retained my hand. ‘Pyke sounds as if you think I’m going to bite.’

  Dutifully I chalked up the joke’s fifty thousandth polite smile. But he’d left me nothing to pin him with — total strangers’ first names don’t come to me all that easy. I disentangled my hand.

  ‘This isn’t an interview under the meaning of the Act,’ I said, just to get things straight. ‘I’m here to—’

  ‘I’ve been interviewed, buggered about by all sorts.’ He replaced his hat. ‘Belgrade, Tokyo, Sydney — I know the form. You’re after free fucking info. Something for nothing, child, in a hard, hard world.’

  ‘If you’d rather make it official I can perfectly well—’

  He held up a lordly hand. Evidently I wasn’t going to finish many sentences that afternoon. ‘I told your network when they rang, Roddie child. I said, it’s funny how some people are news for the way they live, while others achieve fame only in the fashion of their dying.’ He smiled, and waited for the applause that only he heard. ‘You’ll have noticed,’ he went on, ‘that poor Katherine is not exactly my favorite person.’

  From what I’d already seen of him, this didn’t surprise me, but I asked him all the same. ‘Why is that?’ I said.

  ‘It’s a bloody smashing afternoon,’ he said, looking up and around, as if discovering his surroundings for the first time. ‘Shall we stay up here for this interview that isn’t an interview?’

  I agreed. Crossing his deck I’d caught a glimpse through a skylight of the boat’s interior — weird posters, and mobiles, and outlandish musical instruments, and racks and racks of lurid books that were probably his. I felt I’d weather the blast of his ego better up here in the open air. He squatted boyishly on a hatch cover and I perched beside him. He hadn’t been dodging my question, merely building the tension.

  ‘Katherine and I,’ he announced, ‘are like oil and water. I don’t grieve for her dying because I don’t feel she has ever lived. She’s never got her nose up out of the shit. There’s no tragedy, child, in losing what you’ve never had.’

  I wasn’t there to argue with him. ‘Why do you think she got like that?’

  ‘You mean, whose fault was it? Certainly not mine. I’ve lived my life. I didn’t start writing till I was forty, you know. It was my third wife knew I had it in me. Before that I’d had at least three different and successful careers. Since then . . . well, a hundred and thirty books isn’t exactly dragging my feet.’

  I didn’t ask him about the ‘different and successful careers’ -they’d certainly been different but hardly what most people would have called successful. And his present shabby life-style told me all I needed to know about the hundred and thirty books.

  ‘At least you’ll be pleased that your daughter has done so well in a field associated with literature.’

  ‘No.’

  His flat denial managed to encompass both his own total lack of pleasure and Computabook’s total disassociation with anything he could possibly regard as literature. I felt like challenging this position pace his own hundred and thirty books . . . but I was there to gather information on Katherine Mortenhoe, not to parade the inadequacies of her father. Vincent, I was sure, in his padded viewing room, would appreciate my forbearance.

  ‘Perhaps Katherine would have been happier with a brother or a sister,’ I suggested.

  This seemed a new idea to him. He considered it. ‘My second wife had children ... As far as I know, Katherine hated the sight of them. She certainly came to me quickly enough when I moved on.’ He stretched his legs out straight and innocently leaned back on his elbows. ‘I’ve always been bloody young, you see. Accessible, full of enthusiasm. If she’s told you she was lonely, she never had any fucking need to be.’

  ‘I haven’t yet spoken to her.’ There’d been only one baby in Clement’s marriages, and that one hadn’t been Katherine. ‘Can you tell me anything about her first husband?’

  ‘Gerry? A complete drear. The only bright thing he ever did was to move on. Even then, he wasted it. Child, so many people don’t understand the pace of life. Everything changes. Every fucking thing. Security . . . personal progress . . . finish one thing before you start another — all a load of cobblers. Look at me. But Gerry stuck with his old thing, whatever it was. Haven’t heard of him in years.’

  Gerald Mortenhoe’s ‘old thing’ was teaching. He was headmaster now in a big rural comprehensive. On the face of it, he and Katherine had been ideally suited. Another father might have been able to tell me why it hadn’t worked.

  ‘Was it your idea,’ I said, sticking to facts, ‘that Katherine should go into computers?’

  He screwed up his eyes. ‘I doubt it. I was probably in Rome at the time . . . Of course, it was just the sort of thing I knew she’d be good at. No flesh and blood, if you know what I mean. No fucking enthusiasm. Ha — that’s good.’

  I headed him off. The sex-is-good-for-a-giggle line is decidedly old red sombrero hat these days. ‘You’ve traveled a lot,’ I said. ‘Did you often take Katherine with you?’

  I knew the answer, but hoped for the reason. He gestured widely. ‘Campaigning, always campaigning . . . The time in Rome, for example, was overpopulation. We held a real jumpin’ rally outside St Peter’s. Then there was a whistle-stop on pollution took me across three continents. You couldn’t cart a girl around on things like that.’

  Another man might have, and made a total mess of her: little girls went big on campaign platforms. So at least he’d spared her that. . . Also his causes had been good causes, so why did I feel that his association with them somehow lessened them? I thought of that ‘real jumpin’ r
ally’ outside St Peter’s and knew I wasn’t getting anywhere. Yet there must be something, some one concrete thing that only a father would know, that he could tell me about his daughter.

  I stood up and went to the rail. ‘The experts think she has a very special sort of mind,’ I said. ‘Did you see any signs of this when she was younger?’

  ‘Load of shit. Don’t believe a word of it. If she’s really dying it’s because she wants to. Millions of them do, you see. Only the simpler ways aren’t allowed.’

  I looked out across the scummy, gray-brown water. ‘Then you think the experts at the Medical Center are wrong?’

  ‘I fucking know they are.’ He heaved himself up and came to lean beside me. ‘There’s nothing special about Katherine. She was a boring child and she grew into a boring woman and now she’s going to die a boring death. And she’ll eke it out — she always was afraid of hurting herself.’

  Perhaps he was trying to shock me with his picture of progressive, dispassionate parenthood. But I could well imagine that Katherine hadn’t been altogether an endearing child.

  ‘I tell you — I took her away on a holiday once. Couldn’t have been more than seven. Smashing playground, right beside the hotel. I’d just got married, you see.’ He nudged me, just in case I didn’t. ‘Couple of days, and the bloody child wouldn’t go near the place. Had to cart her every morning to a park the other side of town.’ He broke off. ‘Don’t mind me,’ he said, and unzipped his trousers and peed his disgust in a manly fashion over the side. I waited.

  ‘. . . The playground had this paddling pool. We reckoned the bloody little cunt was afraid of tumbling in and drowning. Unless of course she’d guessed my mind was on other things and didn’t like it. Played all hell with the honeymoon.’ He finished, waved to a couple of workmen up on the side of the dock, and made a business of re-confining himself. ‘Oh, she’s dying all right. But not of Gordon’s fucking syndrome. Believe me, Roddie, she’s a thoroughly boring woman. And, like most boring people, she needs attention. You’d do yourself a favor if you forgot the whole affair.’

  I almost believed him. Till I remembered her face in that brief moment in the doctor’s office before she got the screen up. ‘And did a feature on you instead,’ I said. But my irony was wasted.

  ‘You might do worse,’ he murmured. ‘A hundred and thirty books in twenty-odd years. If SF’s on the map today, you know who put it there.’

  I left him soon after. He’d got through five wives, this pathetic old man who couldn’t bear for his daughter to have anything, not even a rare and fatal condition. By all accounts he was well on his way to a sixth at that moment. I just hoped she wasn’t looking forward to being fathered.

  I found my scooter in the middle of a group of the fringie kids who were camping in the surrounding warehouses. It wasn’t a proper village, not like in the old Container Depot a couple of miles away: just some people who were on the way from somewhere to somewhere, and pausing. They hadn’t damaged the scooter, but it was covered with little cut-out cows and Earth Mother stickers. The cow was a great nature symbol that month. The kids stood around, waiting to see what I’d do. And they weren’t all kids either. I didn’t tell them I was a newsman: a few years back the media had taken up Fringe Groups in a big way, and it had got so that the fringies were virtually putting on shows twice nightly for the visiting cameramen. So they’d started saying no, and the media men had started getting nasty, and attitudes had solidified the way they always do. So, not wanting a necklace of boiler tubing, I smiled, and mimed like me was heap good fella, and motored discreetly away, taking my cut-out cows and Earth Mother stickers with me.

  I hadn’t seen any of the other inhabitants on Clement Pyke’s mooring, but if they were anything like him I reckoned they gave the fringies a fair amount of innocent amusement.

  On my way back to NTV House I tried to convince myself that the afternoon had been profitable. I tried to see my inner picture of the continuous, the only true, Katherine Mortenhoe filling out. But it just wasn’t so. Her father had shown me convincing bases for a selfish, joyless, death-wished woman. Yet I’d seen her only that morning — Christ, how long my days were — dancing down the street. And earlier, in the doctor’s office, I’d seen the angry despair of a woman with a lot to do and no longer any time to do it in. Nothing fitted. And I didn’t even know yet why she called herself Mortenhoe.

  A note from Vincent was waiting on my desk when I got in: he wanted to see me soonest.

  ‘I got news for you, Roddie.’ He handed me a bundle of stills. ‘Things are moving nicely . . . The silly girl went on an outing and our friends nabbed her. They’d have had her cold if they’d kept their nerves.’

  The stills showed a riot of some kind: angry faces, the familiar ugliness. I looked closer. ‘You say she got away?’

  ‘She screamed. Would you believe it? She made a fuss and they let her go. If they were mine they’d be looking for jobs as of now.’

  ‘Made a fuss? That doesn’t sound like Katherine Mortenhoe.’

  ‘A put-on, I’d say. Utterly calculated. You’ve got to hand it to her.’

  One of the pictures was a close-up of Harry. His wife stood behind him, caught by the camera with her face screwed up as if expecting to be struck. In another she had her mouth wide open, horribly unattractive. Her eyes were cold — possibly she was screaming. And in another I could dearly see a trail of saliva down her chin, and her hand possibly on its way to wipe it off.

  ‘Even so,’ Vincent said encouragingly, ‘I understand it was pretty nasty.’

  I gave him back the photographs. Katherine Mortenhoe and her tormentors were indistinguishable.

  ~ * ~

  Late in the afternoon more personal delivery letters arrived at the flat, a different postman, but equally avid. Harry dealt with him, disappointing him, and brought the letters through to the living room where Katherine was watching the third regional rebroadcast of the scene outside the Castle. Ingenious editing kept her off the screen in compliance with her Private Grief order, and the sound track fluffed over her screams. With each replay the item concerned her less: the attractive, forty-four-year-old Mrs Mortenhoe of the announcers was not she, neither was the aggressively sturdy Mr Blount her own poor frightened Harry. They were creatures with only a tape reality. They were part of the image machine. Even the names were unrecognizable in the microphonic mouths of the reporters.

  Harry opened the first of the letters. It was from a group of spiritualists. ‘They want to make an appointment with you six weeks from now,’ he said.

  She wondered why he told her these things. Perhaps, like the news item, they made the present less real, and therefore the future. It was a feeling that could be allowed to grow, and it was dangerous. Once, long ago, two days ago, the choices had been simple: to fill her days with living, to write her book, to do her duty by Peregrine, or to go for dignity instead. Now she had to fight, if it was worth fighting, even to remain in touch with what her choices might be. She could, if she wanted, lose herself in the image machine.

  Harry’s attention was attracted by a yellow telegram envelope halfway down the bundle. He pulled it out, opened it, read it, and passed it to her.

  DISGUSTED BY COVERAGE OF CASTLE INCIDENT STOP ASHAMED OF COLLEAGUES UNPROFESSIONAL BEHAVIOR STOP RENEW OFFER OF FULLEST PROTECTION SOONEST STOP FERRIMAN.

  She read the message twice, then the small print on the back of the form, the time of acceptance, the stamp of the receiving office, the limitation of liability in the event of nondelivery.

  ‘How much did this man offer you, Harry?’

  This time he didn’t prevaricate. ‘Three hundred thousand pounds.’

  The words mingled in her head with the equally improbable TV noises. She reached out and turned off the set. ‘Mr Mathiesson said seven.’

  ‘I expect he was making a wild guess. Vincent said three. He put it in writing.’

  ‘Did he now?’ She’d always thought there was more to Harry tha
n met the eye. ‘And the piece of paper you sort of signed?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Come along, Harry. You agreed to let him know if we left town. Surely he didn’t expect you to do that for nothing?’

  ‘. . . I took the money for us, Kate. There were no other strings -just a thousand pounds to help us get away at once.’

  He twitched, and dropped his bundle of remaining letters and didn’t like to stoop to pick them up.

  ‘I know it was silly. Thoughtless. Not . . . worthy. I just didn’t think at the time how upset you’d be.’

  She turned away, not able to watch him grovel. The horribleness of these conversations with Harry was entirely her fault. She made him something he didn’t need to be. The conversations were bad for them both, and likely to get worse, and should be stopped as soon as possible. Their need for each other was devious, and anyway no excuse. Its denial would bring them both a painful sort of freedom.