The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

by D. G. Compton

  Suddenly she knew she was being watched. She turned, backed against the smooth wooden columns of the screen. At the far end of the nave, beyond the stoves and the lines of refectory tables, Rod was standing. He moved, and came toward her, trailing his hands on the table tops as he came. She felt his gaze. Was she so important?

  ‘I’ve been out for a walk around. The rain’s blown over. We’ll be able to get off right after breakfast.’

  Then his voice was so ordinary, so safe, that she could have cried. ‘Don’t shout so,’ she said crossly. ‘People are praying.’

  She turned back toward the altar and he came and stood behind her and looked over her shoulder. ‘It looks as if the service is just over,’ he whispered. ‘Early morning Communion.’

  ‘I know that.’ She noticed the big silver cup, no, chalice. ‘The giving of the body and blood.’

  ‘That’s right.’ She felt him shudder.

  ‘I think it’s rather beautiful.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘You sound surprised.’

  ‘Frankly I am surprised.’

  He was saying something more. She stiffened, and waited.

  ‘I’m not saying I blame you, Katherine, but isn’t that more or less what you’re afraid of? People eating your body and blood?’

  ‘My name is Sarah.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  She would have run, but his hands were closed tightly on her shoulders. The time and the place were wrong for an undignified scuffle. Besides, running away was useless. She tried to think. How had she been discovered? What should she do now to keep her freedom? Kill him? He had come so near to being her friend she could do it easily. But the idea was too high-pitched. Perhaps she could buy him.

  ‘What do you want?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want anything.’

  ‘Of course you do.’ People in the pews in front were turning around to stare. He was right. They would, if they knew, they would eat her. ‘Of course you want something. If you didn’t you would have pretended you didn’t know.’

  ‘Sooner or later you’d have remembered last night. Me seeing you without your getup. Pretending between people like us is always silly. There has to be honesty, if. . .’

  ‘If what?’

  He hesitated. ‘If I stick around,’ he said, ‘maybe I can help. These things are easier with two.’

  I hesitated. Even with her I could talk about honesty for only just so long and then no longer. ‘If I stick around,’ I said, ‘maybe I can help. These things are easier with two.’ And meant it.

  In front of us the Communion service was over. I drew Katherine Mortenhoe to one side to let the four sad celebrants out. They passed us, two visiting anthropologists, with awkward, sideways glances, and went away down between the tables. They didn’t look as if they had just known their god. Pemberton came after them, very tall in his white whatever-it-was.

  ‘Ritual,’ he said, possibly apologizing. ‘We all need it.’

  ‘I expect you’re right Vicar.’

  No need to tread on any toes. There might, after all, be some believers among the viewers. He went to one of the stoves and lit the gas under a huge tea urn, then trailed away in the direction of the vestry. I envied him his simple duties.

  ‘Go back to bed,’ I said to Katherine Mortenhoe. ‘We’ll talk about it later. You’ll catch your deather, standing here on these stones in your bare feet. Not to mention what certain people may get up to with your boots.’

  And watched her pad away down the transept, and climb into bed, and cover herself, goggles, sou’wester and all, with her blanket. . . The thing was, I’d been out to talk to Vintent. It was too early for him to be in the monitoring room, so I’d rung his flat, and got past his answering service, and he’d told me I was doing fine. They’d called him down to see a rerun of the scene in the middle of the night — it had everything, atmosphere, drama, pathos, everything. However — and there had to be a however — there unfortunately hadn’t been quite enough light for a positive identification. The viewers would want one, so would I please hurry one along?

  ‘What you’d really like,’ I said, ‘is a close shot of the celebrated mole on her celebrated right titty.’

  ‘Don’t take it to heart, old man.’ As if I would. ‘Remember, we’re doing her a kindness in the long run. What she never knows she’ll never grieve over.’

  He was right of course — though she’d never thank us for it, by cheating her rotten we were doing her a favor. The alternative, a court injunction and filming under police protection, had been found to please the viewers just as much. So I doused my conscience, and wished Vincent sweet dreams, and on the way back to the church worked out the old honesty-between-friends spiel. After all, I reasoned, I could perfectly well help her with one hand, even as I stabbed her painlessly in the back with the other. Ho ho.

  Breakfast was all good stuff: rows of shoveling, fractious people, whom Pemberton served with positively saintlike humility. Vincent would love him, would love the whole setup. I’d have stayed to get more footage, only Katherine was restless, and pressing to be off. I could hardly tell her she was as safe where she was as she’d ever be.

  Outside the church we paused. I could feel that even after the little talk we’d had under cover of the snuffling break-fasters, she was still suspicious of me.

  Feeling that some sort of eye to the main chance would make me more credible, I said, ‘Do we walk? Or do we use your money?’

  ‘I haven’t any.’

  ‘Don’t give me that. The papers said three hundred thousand.’

  ‘That was for Harry. I’ve got just seventy-three pence.’

  Which showed, I supposed, a sort of integrity. ‘Then we’d both better go on Transients’ Benefit.’

  She thought about it. ‘It’s Sunday morning,’ she said.

  ‘Seven-day week, twenty-four-hour service. They like to keep us moving.’

  ‘They’ll ask all sorts of questions. You know I don’t want questions.’

  ‘If you’re leaving town they’re not nosy.’ It surprised me that she hadn’t done her research. Her efficiency had odd gaps in it. ‘They hand out to transients on demand. It’s only if you go back that they start being awkward.’

  She picked up her holdall. ‘I’ve got a lot to learn,’ she said. ‘And not much time to learn it in.’

  She wrote her own fade lines, this girl.

  We trailed untelegenically along to the Benefit Bureau, stood in line, had our fingerprints checked, and collected our ten pounds. She nearly jibbed at the fingerprinting, but I shook my head reassuringly and she trusted me. Afterward I explained that, thanks to the Civil Liberties people, Benefit computers were self-serving, kept separate from the National Data Grid . . . This was a lie, of course: if Vincent had put out a General Hold her prints would have fired off rockets in police stations right across the city. But she believed me. It didn’t escape my notice that she believed me. I must have been a very belief-inspiring sort of person.

  The cash in hand cheered her up.

  ‘Where to now?’ she said, almost laughing at the excitement of it all.

  I gestured widely, following her mood. ‘All roads lead out of town.’

  So we tossed a coin, which she loved, and took a bus as far as the Western Ring. Beyond that the buses weren’t running, on account of the marchers.

  During the ride she had one of her shakes, but she controlled it very well and I needed several close shots to make the point. It showed most in her hands. We talked, for want of anything else, about the political situation. I’d been out of the media for some time, and didn’t really know enough to go with my jeans, but she knew even less. Certainly she wasn’t ready yet to talk about the one thing that deeply interested both of us.

  The bus put us down within sight of the Ring Road. She was thrilled, and hurried toward the marchers as if she were afraid of being late and missing something. They’d be still marching, I reckoned, long after she was dea
d. Her idiotic clogs were loose, and she almost fell. I didn’t want to watch her. She was like a child on her first visit to the zoo. I think that was the moment when I gave up trying to fit together the various Katherine Mortenhoes. What would emerge, would emerge. And a lot of it, surprisingly, was going to be fun.

  I caught up with her. Seeing the marchers again like that gave me a nasty feeling. ‘They do it in relays,’ I told her. ‘Day and night. Round and round. Like white mice.’

  ‘Now you’re being flip. At least they believe in whatever it is.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Like white mice.’

  I wanted her to argue, but she didn’t. ‘We’re all white mice,’ she said, suddenly quite cold, and I felt ashamed of having loused it all up. Some marchers waved to us, wanting us to join them, and I put one arm around Katherine and shook my head, and they laughed and carried on, and I said, ‘They think you’re my girl,’ and that one too fell on its face.

  She broke away from me and pushed through the marching column. In her klutzy clothes she wasn’t one of them, but they let her through. They let me through also. At least neither of us was flash in the latest three-hundred-horse-power drophead.

  She was waiting for me on the far side of the road, leaning against a lamp post. ‘You’ve been very helpful,’ she said. ‘Now I’d rather manage on my own.’

  ‘That’s your privilege.’ I pointed at the long straight road ahead. ‘But there’s only one road. Would you rather walk in front or behind?’

  I knew I must play it easy. But anything was a gamble: she could perfectly well sit down where she was and let me go on without her. That would leave me in a hole of my own digging.

  ~ * ~

  He was mocking her. She was old, and naive, and dressed up in ridiculous clothes, and low on a sense of humor, and she could not endure to be mocked. She sat down heavily on her sleeping bag holdall, ignoring the stacked-up cars waiting for a gap in the marchers.

  ‘You go first,’ she said. ‘Youth before beauty.’

  He went. A few yards off he turned back. ‘Look, I’m sorry I was ham-handed. When I said I wanted to help I meant it.’

  She saw guilt in his face, and a sense of responsibility. She was nobody’s responsibility. And nobody was hers. Not anymore. ‘You have helped. I’m very grateful. But now I must manage on my own. Call it woman’s pride.’

  Because she believed he wanted no alternative, she gave him none.

  ‘Please yourself.’ He shrugged, and set off away down the road. She could sense his relief. At fifty yards he looked back over his shoulder, and again at a hundred. She watched him diminish. She was free.

  On one side of the road cars queued between closed Sunday morning shops and deserted Sunday morning pavements. The other side lay black and straight and empty. Behind her the marchers passed, horribly, in silence, like ants. Or like white mice. There was no more anger, or Harry, or Barbara, or Private Grief, or Vincent. There were no more plans, no more alternatives. No more Rod. She was nobody’s responsibility and nobody was hers. She was free of all these refuges. Free to warm her hands at her woman’s pride.

  She shivered, not from a rigor but because she was cold.

  When Rod was out of sight at last around a distant corner she got up and went slowly after him. She had made an important discovery. Her freedom was as restricted, as pragmatic, as it had always been. After the bus fare she had eight pounds seventy-eight, and most of twenty-three days in which to spend it. She could not go back to the church hostel, and the country — which she now admitted might not be quite so filled with lover-accommodating haystacks as Ethel Pargeter made out — was still a long way away. In addition, Vicar Pemberton’s charitable breakfast had not been quite what she was accustomed to. And finally, although yesterday’s drizzle had passed over, the early morning sun had disappeared, and the day was gray and chilly, and the drizzle anyway might easily come back.

  She went slowly, not wishing to catch up to Rod. She did not grieve for him as a person — that had been the night’s nonsense — but she had to admit that as an authority on transience he could have been invaluable. No doubt it was possible to die with dignity even though cold and wet and hungry by an urban thruway . . . Even so, readily to accept, or even to seek out, such a situation seemed to her verging on the vulgar.

  So she didn’t dodge back out of sight when she rounded the once-distant corner and saw him sitting on the curb, one boot off, examining his foot. And when she went on up to him and he didn’t let her see his blister but quickly put his sock and boot back on again, she felt it was a time for making compromises. For reasons that she did not even try to understand the relationship between them must have two-way advantages.

  ‘We’re not very good at this,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we should try for a lift.’

  He tied his boot-lace very slowly. ‘Have you looked at us?’ he said finally. She was glad of his unwelcome. ‘You’ve changed sides, Katherine Mortenhoe. People don’t give lifts to the likes of you and me. We’re idle and oversexed. And we smell.’ He stood up. ‘We walk as far as we can. And then we look for somewhere warm and cozy like a bus shelter.’

  ‘If a bus shelter, why not a bus?’

  ‘No more Benefit for four days and fifty miles. We’re Transients. Do the sum yourself

  She did the sum. ‘All right, so we walk.’

  He took her holdall from her and she didn’t protest, and they set off. Cars passed them in clumps, let through by the marchers. Going the other way the road was solid with machinery, inching forward, transmissions whining.

  ‘Do we have to walk here?’ Katherine said.

  ‘It’s the quickest way.’

  ‘Where to? Where are we going to?’

  ‘Out of town. You said you wanted to get out of town.’

  She didn’t ask him what they would do when they got where they were going, when they got out of town. Her plan had been no plan at all: a cozy barn, a cave in a hillside, a woody bower, a Keatsian dream, a nowhere. They walked on. She noticed Rod would remember to limp, and then forget. Somehow, everything was going to turn out all right.

  ‘Last night.’ she said suddenly, ‘when you saw who I was, what did you think?’

  ‘You mean, did I judge you?’

  Of course, his sort — her sort now — didn’t judge. ‘No, I mean how did you work out what had happened?’

  ‘I’d seen the papers. It made sense.’

  ‘Didn’t you even blame me for taking all the money?’

  ‘Let’s say I was surprised.’

  She wasn’t getting anywhere. But she needed an attitude. Attitudes located her thoughts as clocks located her actions. ‘Desperate situations breed desperate measures,’ she said.

  ‘Not always. Mostly desperate situations breed simple despair.’

  She had thought that it was she who was leading, appraising him. Now it seemed that the situation might be the other way around. And she wasn’t yet ready. She lapsed into silence. The clogs made her feet ache.

  ‘This thing you’ve got,’ he said cheerfully, ‘how long d’you think it’ll let you keep mobile?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ Only she, in her thoughts, was allowed to be so direct. ‘Long enough. Longer than you’ll be around to see.’

  He didn’t argue, though she wanted him to. ‘If you’re not to end up in the hospital you’ll have to be careful. Maybe a fringie commune’d be the thing. They’d never tell on you.’

  She shook her head. She’d thought of that and rejected it. She noticed that he spoke as if he too were not really one of the Fringe People. ‘Who are you, Rod?’

  ‘You mean, what am I? I’m nobody’s nobody.’ He laughed. ‘Fringe of the fringe, that’s me.’

  She wondered if it was fair to say she’d meant what rather than who. Certainly turning her question like that made it easier to answer. He seemed, she thought, to want to be truthful. ‘I don’t think a commune would do,’ she said. ‘I’m looking for peace, you see.’

&n
bsp; ‘I beg your pardon?’

  He stopped walking, and turned, and stared at her. She stared back, her head on one side, frowning slightly. ‘I’m looking for peace.’ He looked down at her hands, fidgeting with her plaited hair belt. She was sure he’d heard her the first time. ‘I suppose you think that’s naive of me.’

  ‘Not really. Communes are peaceful. That’s their whole point.’