‘I visited one yesterday. I got these clothes there. And it wasn’t peaceful.’
‘You were an outsider.’
I am an outsider, everybody’s outsider . . . But she didn’t say it. If there was one thing she hated, it was people who thought and talked about nothing but their health. Instead she shrugged, and said, ‘All the same . . .’ and started walking again.
They walked on through the morning, sometimes quiet and sometimes talking, but never about very much. Even under the gray sky, down the hideous, endless road, Katherine found the walk pleasant. She was free. Her strange companion asked nothing of her. His presence was casual: even his help, carrying her holdall, made no demands. She could accept, and give nothing in return, or reject and receive nothing in return. She had never before been so safe, safe in the moment. She was free.
They stopped at a cafe and ate very cheaply. She found she was free of something else — of worry about the food she ate, the unhealthy additives, the low vitamin content. If she was going to die of anything, it wouldn’t be malnutrition.
They walked on. Katherine had never understood the size of the outer city. Lines of shops, housing estates, garages, industrial estates, garages, schools and leisure centers, garages, lines of shops again. The shops were all that was left of little village centers. After five hours of walking, open country was still as unimaginable as it had ever been. Maybe fifteen miles — in Harry’s motorcar ten minutes of flicking lamp standards and the back of the car in front. Ground you never walked over was unreal, bearable.
Their stops grew more frequent. Her tiredness became a sickness in her bones. She ceased to care. She pee’d on the verge where she sat. The fume-poisoned grass prickled her. But at least she still pee’d when she chose to pee, and didn’t when she didn’t. Rod stood with his back to her, tactfully watching the passing cars.
Suddenly one of these burned to a halt reversed back along the hard shoulder, wound down a window, showed itself to contain a human being.
‘Want a lift?’
She stood up, easing her panties up under her robes. Rod went forward to the curb. ‘Where to?’ he asked. She didn’t hear the answer. Rod came back to where she was standing. ‘Ten miles on, then he turns off for Fairhills. What d’you think?’
She nodded. Ten miles on were ten miles on. And it was beginning to rain. ‘He smiles too much,’ Rod said. ‘But I expect I can manage him.’
They got into the back seat of the car. The man was small and neat, with crinkly gray hair. Expensive.
‘Thank you very much,’ Katherine said.
‘My pleasure. No day to be on the road.’
They drove off. Katherine sat back and closed her eyes. Rod and the expensive man made sort of conversation.
‘Nice car.’
‘I’m glad you like it. Are you going far?’
‘Far enough.’
‘I’m sorry — silly question . . . You know, I’ve really got a lot of sympathy with you people.’
‘You must have. You picked us up.’
‘Surely, surely . . .’
Katherine was warm for the first time in hours, and slightly light-headed. The expensive man had an expensive car, big and very comfortable. She dozed.
‘. . . Of course, I give lifts to all sorts. Try not to be bigoted. I mean, everyone’s got a point of view, and I like to hear it.’
‘Point of view about what?’
‘Anything at all, John. Anything at all ... I keep an open house. Keep an open mind as well. Quite a little group. You know?’
‘I don’t think I do.’
‘Discussions. Shared experiences. Nothing too earnest, of course. But there’s nobody you can’t learn something from. Funny thing, actually, meeting you two like this. I was just—
‘I’m afraid we can’t. It’s very good of you, but we must—
‘Hold hard, John. What’s this, then?’
‘You were going to ask us back to wherever you have your groups.’
‘My home. Well, perhaps I was. But not just like that. Social intercourse needs lubrication. It needs—’
‘Yours may. Ours doesn’t.’
‘Besides, you make the suggestion sound faintly sinister.’ He broke off. ‘Is your lady ill?’ he said.
Katherine opened her eyes, met his in the mirror. The eyebrows above them were raised sympathetically. ‘Me? I’m fine. Tired, that’s all,’ and she stretched untidily, fringily, feeling her bones crack.
‘The man wants us to go home with him,’ Rod said.
‘There’ll be others there, my dear. My wife, of course. We have quite a little circle.’
‘They have quite a little circle.’
She wondered why Rod was being so rude. The man might be silly, but he was almost certainly very rich. Readily to accept coldness and wetness and hunger by an urban thruway seemed to her verging on the vulgar. ‘Do we get to stay the night?’ she said, uncaringly, as she had stretched.
‘I’ve told him we have to get on, Sarah.’ She wagged her wrists at him as she stayed stretched, thinking how clever he was to remember. ‘We’ve got a long way to go.’
‘We have?’
‘I thought we had.’
The expensive man looked at her again in the mirror. ‘The lady’s tired, John. Surely you can both stay the night. Surely . . .’
~ * ~
It was no use fighting it. I watched the rain beating on the windshield and imagined Katherine and myself out in it. The bus shelter had been a spur-of-the-moment improvisation: thruways didn’t have any, and sooner or later she would have noticed. Now she was warm and dry and, with any luck, would stay that way till morning. Admittedly it had been the quickest pickup in the business. But I’d had a good day with Katherine, some gut-tearing shots and appealing quotes, and I reckoned I could look after her. It wasn’t as if either of us had anything really to fear from our smiley friend. An earnest wife going in for contact sessions and a few pot-happy Sunday afternoon executive friends, if I knew the scene.
At the big Fairhills intersection he turned the car off to the left and we began to climb a winding road that was screened from the pervading housing estates by high evergreen hedges. There should have been a lodge, and a serf touching his forelock. At the top the hedges separated to enclose the crests of two connected hills on which were built possibly a dozen large, beautiful houses. They were beautiful individually, and together formed a beautiful whole. You tended to forget that, given enough money, beauty was still possible. Among the houses, undisturbed on the exact top of the higher hill, stood one of those isolated clusters of ancient elms that only England seems to go in for, sad and fine and precise even against the rain-blurred sky. The city around was under mist, with only point blocks and the black lump of the castle showing, and away to the west other hills that were surely country.
At first, driving along the thruway, I’d been amused that two people as rich as Katherine Mortenhoe and myself should be accepting charitable — and slightly sinister.....beds for the night. Now I saw that our smiley friend’s wealth made ours look like chicken-pickings. The thought, while salutary, did nothing to dispel my misgivings. Great wealth seldom sits easily on its possessors.
Since leaving the thruway our host had been silent, as if, having got what he wanted, his bright chat was no longer necessary. I glanced at Katherine: she seemed to have dozed off again. Evidently she was no great walker. Not that this either surprised or worried me — after tonight, when the first of her programs went out, if our darling public spotted us by the roadside we’d be mobbed anyway. My problem — so far unsolved was to keep her out of sight without appearing to do so. That was why I’d suggested the commune: fringies rejected the media more or less as an article of faith. I was still hoping to bring her around to the idea of a nice, peaceful fringie commune.
We drove around the service road and down a sudden tunnel into a large garage and workshop under one of the fancier houses. Lights came on. While our host was fussing w
ith the automatic transmission I counted seven other desirable motorcars, registration numbers CAR 1-8, with 6 missing. I was willing to bet that we were sitting in CAR 6. Suddenly I knew the identity of our smiley friend, and I was appalled.
We reversed into a space. He turned to look at us. ‘I make myself poor,’ he said, ‘by making my wants simply enormous.’
A man who had read — and no doubt despised — his Emerson. But he’d given me my opening. ‘You’ll never manage it, Mr Rondavel,’ I said. ‘Not this side of the telly heaven.’
‘Please.’ He held up a hand in gentle protest. ‘No shop talk on Sunday. I work a five-day week as it is. In this house no one mentions television on pain of instant excommunication.’
He smiled, this time giving us the benefit of the full thirty-two. ‘You spotted the cars, of course. I should never have given that interview. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity . . .’
A literary gent. I let him think it was the interview. In point of fact, most people at NTV House were aware of the chairman’s little vulgarities. His eight cars and his eight bits of fluff all called Margaret. We’d never met, of course. If he knew of me at all it was as a figure on his capital expenditures sheet. And he wasn’t one to have his picture hanging in every office. All the same, I had to contrive an opportunity to make myself known, before the visit got out of hand. There are things it is better for a man not to know about his ultimate employer.
At that moment Katherine woke up. ‘We’ve arrived,’ she announced, pushing up her goggles and rubbing her eyes. Rondavel had turned away and was getting out of the car. He began to walk away. Evidently Katherine was no longer the sort of woman expensive men opened doors for. I opened the car door instead, and helped her out.
We stumbled after him, stiff from our walk and sudden short rest, to a walnut and beveled-glass elevator, reproduction 1930’s. He waited for me to hump in my duffle bag and Katherine’s holdall. ‘You mustn’t mind if things seem a bit decayed upstairs. That’s Sunday afternoon for you. They’ll brighten up astoundingly later on.’
Which was what, now more than ever, I was afraid of. I tried desperately to think of a way of getting him on my own. He pushed the second-floor button and turned to Katherine. ‘An overdue introduction, I think . . . You, my dear, are Sarah, I believe. You must call me Coryton.’
He held out a hand which she shook. Coryton Ansford Rondavel ... I wondered if men had names like that before they became millionaires, or if the names grew on them afterward. Possibly naming your son Coryton Ansford was one way of instilling the vital millionaire’s spark. In that case I’d failed poor Roddie Two badly.
‘And you, John, what do they call you? Do you answer to “Hi,” or any such cry?’
‘I usually notice when I’m being spoken to.’ »
I had Katherine’s view of me to think of. And he could hardly expect manners from a fringie pickup. The elevator rose, and stopped. And there we were, John and Sarah, complete with luggage, and Coryton Ansford Rondavel, complete with smile, ready to meet our joint fates on the second floor of a nameless house somewhere in Fairhills. There was the sound of distant music, either hi-fi or someone extremely good on a synthetizer. Rondavel led us out onto a mirrored landing, opened a door, gestured.
‘I must go and change,’ he said. ‘You’ll find everything you want in there.’
The mirrors showed me us. Beside Rondavel, on his beige carpet, against his chaste silver furnishings, we might just as well have been daubed hottentots. We had to get out. I let Katherine go on in to the room he had indicated, and then followed him to his own door. Once I got the real interview over I had no doubt at all he would agree. We had to go.
‘Mr Rondavel,’ I said, ‘there’s something you—
‘Later.’ He closed the door in my face. After a moment it opened again, three inches. ‘And the name’s Coryton.’
The door closed and stayed closed. Disliking the silent corridor, I went back to Katherine.
The room was a sort of bathroom, but with a squashy black velvet settee, various luscious chairs, an elaborate ebony drinks dispenser, and, as outside on the landing, a great many mirrors. Now, mirrors in a bathroom — other than the basic one over the washbasin — make me feel uneasy. Images linger in them. Salacious images. No doubt I’ve a nasty dirty mind. Be that as it may, that bathroom, squashy settee, mirrors and all, was the nastiest, dirtiest bathroom I’d ever seen.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
Katherine had her hat and goggles off and was peering at herself in one of the mirrors. Her survival jacket was thrown over the back of a chair. ‘It’s raining,’ she said. ‘And he only wants to sleep with me.’
Which was a nice way of putting it. ‘Or with me,’ I said.
‘So? If you can cope, I’m sure I can.’ She peered more closely at her reflection. ‘Those goggles seem to boil my eyes. The skin’s all wet and wrinkly.’
‘Katherine — I don’t think you know what his sort of person can be like.’
‘You mean he’s a crazy goggles fetishist?’
‘I’m serious, Katherine.’
‘And I’m warm and dry and likely to be fed. Sometimes that’s what life comes down to.’
Apart from anything else, every minute we spent in Coryton Rondavel’s house was wasted footage. But I knew I wouldn’t shift her. I watched her slip her goggles on again and cram the sou’wester down over her ears. Perhaps with them on anything could happen because she wasn’t really there. The room was so hot that I removed my two sweaters, still watching her. She’d begun to pull hair down from under the sou’wester in a straggly fringe over what could be seen of her forehead. I went away into the lav, closing the door firmly behind me. I’d suddenly thought of another thing I didn’t like about mirrors: in my experience they had a nasty habit of being one-way.
When I came out Katherine was lying on the squashy settee, apparently asleep again. The easy way she slept taunted me. With the dubious jollities of the coming evening to be coped with I couldn’t even risk one of my relaxants. I propped myself up in one of the chairs . . . Had Rondavel meant it when he said TV was taboo in his house? Or would he set orgies aside and gather us all at eight-thirty sharp for the first of his company’s new Human Destiny shows? What would I do then? And what, come to that, about the problems of the morrow?
Deceiving Katherine, keeping her away from the media, had seemed simple enough in Vincent’s office. Play it by ear, he’d said ... I was listening hard, not hearing a damn thing.
But we had a considerate host, and he didn’t keep us waiting long. ‘There’s a complicated story,’ he said, arriving in a flurry of orange brocade, ‘about a royal banquet where the guest of honor, not used to such occasions, drank the water in his finger bowl. The king, it is said, had the royal good manners to put his guest at his ease by doing the same. Personally, I think it was just something thoroughly naughty he’d wanted to do all his life.’
Possibly the history lesson was intended to explain, or to ease the shock of, our host’s costume. It didn’t. He was dressed like the original Arabian Nights — or perhaps like one of the Three Kings in a school charade. Except that the gold and the jewels and the ermine were real. It was a getup straight out of the dressing-up basket in some oil sheik’s family nursery.
To neither the anecdote nor the apparition could I think of any satisfactory response. Katherine, having woken up halfway through both, was even worse off. ‘My feet hurt,’ she said.
(This wasn’t quite the non sequitur it seemed, for she was in fact apologizing for having dirtied our host’s squashy settee. But he hadn’t, anyway, heard her.)
‘Klutzy?’ he said, revolving. ‘Real klutzy?’ He primped, as if Klutzy meant camp, which it never had. Then he abandoned his display, casually, like a ballerina coming down off her points. ‘An open mind, you know. Feeling right and looking right is half the battle. If John would like something a little more . . . exuberant, I’m sure we can oblige.’
‘Maybe I don’t feel exuberant.’
He refused to be put down. ‘I think you’re right. I think you’ll rave them best the way you are.’
I touched my shirt buttons, making sure they were done up right to the neck. The time for making myself known to my company chairman was long past. And if his friends were to be raved, they’d have to make it without the help of my nipples. He turned to Katherine. ‘If you’re rested now, we’ll go on down.’
We went.
He’d said we might find things a bit decayed. Presumably he’d meant people. The ground-floor living area — I never quite know what to call these multileveled expanses of knee-deep carpeting and kinetic art the rich go in for — was littered with sprawling, pot-happy freaks. Or rather, since I recognized several of the faces, littered with normal, establishment people who were working quite hard at being sprawling, pot-happy freaks. It was all depressingly what I had expected.
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe Page 19