The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

by D. G. Compton

  ‘I was only upset that first afternoon,’ she said. ‘Since then I’ve been thinking about your Vincent’s offer very carefully. All in all, I think it has a great deal to recommend it.’

  ‘You do?’

  Dear Harry — perhaps there were limits even to his credulity. ‘Well no. Not really. But now that this afternoon has shown us just what can happen, I don’t see that we have any alternative.’

  Lying to him bothered her. But he would never agree to what she was planning, would never admit the relief it would bring. And anyway, she was going to have to do without the luxury of superficial truthfulness on many of the twenty-five days that remained. If she wanted really to live, she was going to have to fight. So she got up, and went to him, and bent to help him pick up his letters (they were his letters now, whatever was on the envelopes), and said, ‘I’ll go and see Vincent Ferriman in the morning. On my own, Harry, while I’ve still got some of my Private Grief time left.’

  She glided, pleased with herself, her decision, out of the room. He watched her go, and absently put the remaining letters behind the clock on the mantelpiece, and wondered what the hell she was up to. She was as changeable as a weathercock, but he supposed it was only to be expected. Later, when she was rummaging in her handbag for the NTV letter, he nearly told her about the miniature transmitter (for her own protection) that Vincent had got him to slide in under the lining. But in the end he didn’t, for you could never be quite sure of the sort of thing that would make her fly off the handle.

  And down in the street it was change-of-watch time for the man in the gray-green jacket. He handed his tiny bleep receiver over to his relief, and gratefully sloped off home. The relief settled down in his motorcar for a long and boring night.

  ~ * ~

  4

  Friday

  I first heard of the kidnapping of Katherine Mortenhoe on the all-night telly in the Night Hawk’s coffee bar. At three in the morning you find yourself watching anything, even the Tokyo Stock Market slotted into fifth reruns of your own shows. You watch too much, and you drink too much coffee, and you eat too many doughnuts. It’s funny how hungry you can feel, even at that dead, overlit, hopeless hour. A few years of being the man with the TV eyes and I wouldn’t be able to see out of them for fat.

  The Mortenhoe flash woke up even the joe behind the counter. I asked if I could use his phone, and rang Vincent, but he’d wisely turned off for the night and I only got his answering service. I thought of going around to her place, but since she was no longer there, there didn’t seem to be much point. Besides, half the media world was there already, and the other half on its way.

  The flashes came through at fifteen-minute intervals. She’d been snatched as a hostage by a group of university students demanding the immediate release of a hundred and twelve of their fellows at present awaiting trial on charges of insurrection. They’d been waiting now for nineteen months, like most people, I’d forgotten the case. Now that they’d made their point, I thought, maybe they’d bring her back. Or dump her. She was, I thought, drunk as I was on coffee and doughnuts, too young to die. Twenty-five days too young.

  A quarter of an hour later the police had the students’ car in sight. An arrest was expected at any minute. ‘That’s quick,’ I said to the joe.

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Computers,’ he said, as if that explained everything and without computers he’d have been a master of crime himself.

  The commercials were next, then a talk show called Owl People. The link man was elderly, and obviously on speed. A tramp wandered in to the coffee bar, blowing from the cold and flapping his arms. ‘Let’s see your fucking money,’ the joe said, and the tramp wandered out again.

  I hurried after him, wanting to give him fifty, a hundred pounds, anything to make that joe look small, but he’d disappeared. By the time I got back — and Christ, it can be cold at three a.m. even in spring — the police had cornered the students up in the north of the city and there was talk of guns. That was all Katherine Mortenhoe needed: an early morning bullet behind the ear in some garish tower suburb. That way we’d all (she also?) be spared a great deal of trouble. And never get to know the answers to a lot of our questions. And never — just possibly — get a lift out of a dying fellow-creature’s possibility of joy.

  Even without Owl People the next fifteen minutes would have been long. With it they were interminable. The speedy link man hit a reaction, and let his guest tell four long bad jokes in a row. After that even the commercials were cute. Sitting by the chattering telly in that garbage dump of a coffee bar, it seemed to me infinitely worse that Katherine Mortenhoe, whom I had never met, should be denied a mere few weeks than that forty years of life should be taken from some other normal, healthy person. Unless of course that other normal, healthy person should happen to be me.

  All right, so I was being flip. No doubt I was afraid of being anything else. If I need an excuse, well, it was nearly four a.m. and the new drugs were marvelous, weren’t they, weren’t they?

  So the fifteen minutes passed, and the next news flash had Katherine safe and sound, already on her way to a hospital, suffering from nothing worse than shock. The students, once surrounded, had bleakly decided against yet another ‘students’ last stand’ and had chosen instead to live. And to fight another day. So they’d given themselves — and Katherine Mortenhoe -up, only one of them being shot actually to death in the process. Even so, the another day’s fight of the remaining three was likely to be delayed for around twenty-five years (with good behavior).

  The whole episode therefore, as far as it concerned Katherine, was over in little under an hour. It was trivial, only briefly exciting, and not really worth having detailed, except that it gave her possibly her final nudge into Vincent’s arms. At least, that was how I saw it at the time. Its opportuneness told me two things: first, that Vincent knew his job (which I was already aware of), and second, that Vincent was in a hurry. He must be feeling, I decided, that Katherine Mortenhoe’s days were slipping away through his fingers like sand.

  I was glad there was no one around to tell those students whose cause they were really going to rot their youth away in jail for. Only me, and I wasn’t that sadistic.

  ~ * ~

  Katherine had hated the students, grotesque in their moment of glorious revolution. Among themselves they spoke an intentionally incomprehensible guerrilla slang, emphasizing their separation from past and present and future. They even wore a sort of uniform, the necessary tattered flak-jacket. And Guevara dead and you’d have thought buried these many years. She despised their thinking, which was no more than feeling. It gave them an uncaring freedom. When there was nothing to do, you did something. You short-circuited forty million years. She despised them, and even found them slightly shocking.

  For their part, the students resented her, and treated her as a commodity. And they put the blame on her when the police appeared on their tail not three minutes after getting away from her block. They accused her, ridiculously, of having someone to watch her flat — as if her fucking life were so fucking precious. In jail men and women died every day of the year, young men and women, brave men and women — what right had she to think herself so fucking special?

  It wasn’t worth telling them that their premises were wrong or, worse still, unimportant. Their words, like their lives, were rhetorical, a gesture that undoubtedly something at some time had made necessary. Katherine saved her energy for holding on to the back of the seat in front as the car skidded through the deserted city. They would have spat her pity back at her.

  Then the hump of a roundabout had loomed improbably, impossibly, in front of them, its massed flowerbeds colorless in their searing headlights, and the car had mounted it, and turned over, and stopped. She realized suddenly that she might, at any time since her abduction, have been killed. And recognized, as she lost consciousness, the heavy, childhood scent of wallflowers.

  She woke to a rigor. Dr Mason was standing by her bed,
watching her pulse and respiration on the screen, and it was some seconds before she worked out why she shouldn’t be glad to see him. Then Vincent’s letter came to her, and his sincerity over the telephone, ‘So many people involved, Mrs Mortenhoe ... A leak is possible at so many levels . . . ,’ and the whole affair was suddenly terribly long ago and unimportant, and she needed Dr Mason as her only way in through the professional carapace.

  He saw she had opened her eyes, and smiled at her. ‘You bumped your head,’ he said. ‘Not even very hard. You’re fine.’

  ‘And those silly students?’

  He frowned. ‘When you get these rigors, Katherine, you should try to relax. If you do they’ll take less out of you. Try breathing deeply.’

  She tried breathing deeply. The rigor eased. She didn’t repeat her question — if he wanted to spare her unpleasantness she’d let him. The students had never managed to be particularly real to her, more like actors in a bad film. And she’d read about how they filmed all those bullet wounds: they stopped the camera and painted them on.

  ‘I wrote to you,’ Dr Mason said. ‘Special Delivery. I wanted to keep in touch.’

  She remembered the remains of Harry’s bundle of letters. ‘I got so much mail,’ she simplified, ‘in the end I just stopped opening it.’

  ‘I was afraid of that. I had no other means of contact.’

  ‘You’ve got contact now,’ she said, and turned over, and went to sleep.

  When she woke properly it was midmorning. Dr Mason was back, or had been there all the time. ‘You’re getting up,’ he said. ‘Can’t have you lying there feeling sorry for yourself. Harry called and I told him you were fine. He wanted to come over but I said you’d be home after lunch.’

  She remembered Harry. ‘He’s not very good at hospitals,’ she said.

  ‘That’s what I thought. Well now, breakfast first, and then we’re getting you up.’

  Over breakfast he asked her about her paralysis up in the Castle, and she told him what she could. He was fascinated. So much so that she almost wished she could have another one there and then, just to oblige. But it wouldn’t quite come.

  Then he changed the subject. ‘You’re keeping cheerful?’ he said.

  She couldn’t quite believe the question. ‘Cheerful?’ she repeated.

  ‘It’s very important. I can easily give you some cheerers if you’re not.’

  ‘I haven’t really thought about it.’

  ‘Of course not.’ He hesitated. ‘I sometimes underestimate you, Katherine. I’m sorry.’

  She finished her breakfast in silence. If he was going to fail her like that he could go away. Come to that, why was he there at all, he with his closely stacked appointments at the Medical Center?

  ‘I suppose I’m a very interesting case.’ She brushed toast crumbs off the sheet. ‘I suppose you’ll do a paper and you’re here to take notes.’

  ‘Not altogether.’ So he didn’t deny it. ‘I’m also here because I think I can help.’

  ‘You told me nothing would help.’

  ‘With the progress of the syndrome, no. With your attitude to its progress, yes.’

  Her attitude was nobody’s business but her own. ‘My attitude at the moment is that I want to go home to my husband. Later I may look in on Computabook to tidy a few things up.’ She didn’t mention what she intended to do in between. ‘I’ve got a lot to get through before my three days of Private Grief run out.’

  He was restless. She guessed he must have something difficult to say, for he distanced himself by wandering away to the nurses’ table and sitting down. ‘I. . . don’t want you to feel your condition is a trap, Katherine. And I must advise you against taking on any binding agreements concerning it.’ Did he suspect the left out, the most important item? ‘You see, no condition is a trap. There are always ways out and I wouldn’t be doing my duty if I didn’t tell you of them.’

  ‘Euthanasia?’

  In the pause that followed he took his ball-point out of his pocket, pressed it against the table and slid his thumb and forefinger down it. Then he turned it the other way up and slid his thumb and forefinger down it again. It skidded unpleasantly on the table’s surface.

  ‘Never,’ he said, ‘under any circumstances whatsoever. I like my patients to be able to trust me. Completely.’ He looked up. ‘Besides, the conditions under which it was once arguable no longer arise.’

  ‘Cheerers, cheerers, and more cheerers,’ she said, not quite sure why the idea repelled her.

  ‘Don’t dismiss them too easily, Katherine. If there’s one thing a doctor learns it’s that there’s nothing inherently noble about suffering.’ He put his ball-point away. ‘I want you to get dressed now, Katherine, and come with me. Before you dismiss the euphoria-producing drugs I would like you to see them in action.’

  She shied away, drawing the bedclothes up to her neck. ‘No.’

  ‘You must. Your decision will have no dignity if it’s based merely on ignorance and fear.’

  She didn’t care a bugger whether her decision had dignity or not. Pompous word-making. Dignity was no more than a weapon in the armory of the will to power — when the time came she’d no doubt she would grovel with the rest. . . To be accused of ignorance and fear, however, was another matter.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Just give me five minutes to put my face on.’

  The hospital Katherine had been taken to had a large Retirement Wing. According to Dr Mason at any one time there would be over a thousand men and women in Retirement there. The euphemism, for so long an accepted part of her vocabulary, was suddenly menacing. She began to sweat. The first Residence she was taken to was for the Absent-minded. In one nice little room an old, old man was propped up in bed, staring at a jigsaw puzzle laid out on the table in front of him. While Katherine and the doctor were there a nurse came in and put two pieces into the corner of the jigsaw -blue sky and sea gulls. The old man smiled.

  ‘A simple narcosis,’ Dr Mason murmured. ‘He really believes he’s doing it himself.’

  In another sun-filled room there was a double bed. Katherine wouldn’t have been surprised if the wrinkled couple lying in it had both been men, or both been women, but it turned out that they were a married couple now on their eighth renewal. ‘They’re lucky,’ Dr Mason said, ‘to have become Absent-minded more or less together.’

  Occasionally the bed gave a little electric jiggle, and the couple squeaked faintly, possibly with pleasure. ‘Of course, they sleep a lot as well,’ said Dr Mason.

  Farther down the corridor they came to a room with several beds in it, and a continuous high twittering of wordless speech. ‘For some people,’ Dr Mason said, ‘communication is the important thing.’

  Katherine closed the door and leaned on it. ‘Is all this supposed to encourage me not to feel trapped?’ she said.

  Dr Mason shook his head. ‘You’ll never be like these. Absentmindedness only comes with extreme old age. Perhaps we should have started with cases that were more applicable.’ He walked away and, afraid to be left, she followed him. ‘All the same, your reaction interests me. Every one of these patients is happy, busy, and — as far as their concentration permits — interested. Would you rather we left them to empty vegetation?’

  Yes. Yes, she would rather they had left the patients to empty vegetation. But she couldn’t say so. She couldn’t justify. She could only feel. They went up in the elevator to the third floor, to cases that were more applicable.

  People up here were mobile, and alert. They knew Dr Mason and greeted him cheerfully, then turned back to their bridge or chess or newspapers or knitting parties or coffee with their friends. If their legs no longer worked they had trollies, if their arms were withered they had prostheses, if their digestions had fallen to pieces they were fed by alternative means. If one of them fell down, or wet the floor, nobody except the nurses seemed to notice. They were all, as far as Katherine could tell, happy. It was a Happy Place.

  By way of demon
stration Dr Mason spoke to a dwindled old man with paralyzed hips. ‘You there, Charlie, come and tell the lady what the hell you’ve got to be so cheerful about.’

  Charlie roared with laughter. ‘Never had it so good, Doc.’

  ‘That’s nonsense. Your legs don’t work, your heart’s bad, and you might pop off at any minute. Your family doesn’t come to see you, and you’re trapped in here for the rest of your days.’

  ‘He’s trying to put me off.’ Charlie maneuvered his trolly till he could nudge Katherine. ‘The way I look at it, dearie, is like this. It’s a good life, all right but nothing goes on forever. This here’s a sort of halfway place, where we can make up for things. The one place where it’s all love.’

  He spoke neither mawkishly, nor with embarrassment. ‘If it’s took pills,’ he said, ‘to show me life ain’t all rotten, then give me pills every time.’