Her little joke made, it was easy for me to return and help her over the fence. She slithered down the other side into the soft green water meadow. I tried to remember when she had decided to do without her goggles: if the psychiatrists were right it would mark a watershed in our relationship. She laid the dress out on the grass, took off her clogs and socks and fringie outer robe, and went down the bank into the stream. It must have been cold, but she waded out all the same, and dipped herself till she was sitting.
I should have left her to wash in private. But there was an old-masterishness about the scene that I couldn’t resist. The willows, and the gray lichened stones of the steep little bridge, and her robe swirling out in the water around her. Besides, our relationship had never been one of old-fashioned constrictions. To have looked away would have been a denial. We were too close, and far too wise. Not, of course, that all these complicated rationalizations went on in my head as I stood there by the bridge. I stayed because, at the time, I didn’t think of not staying.
If I need further excuse, I can only say that this was obviously the way she saw it too. For she knew I was there, and she took off her robe without fuss or display, and let it float away on the current. It caught on the reeds by the bridge, then whisked free and disappeared under the low stone arch. Her underclothes followed it . . . Now, the body of a forty-four-year-old woman is supposed not to be beautiful. Even less beautiful, therefore, the body of a frequently paralytic, hallucinating, incontinent forty-four-year-old woman suffering from a terminal syndrome. To deny this assumption is to be accused of ludicrous romanticism. Facts, after all, are facts. So I’ll just claim, and be done with it, that at that time, in that place, I found the sight of Katherine Mortenhoe washing her thighs, her arms, her shoulders, her breasts, to be right. Not beautiful, perhaps, but utterly right. Which has always been, to my mind, as good a definition of beauty as you’ll find.
~ * ~
The water bit into her, coldly purging her. Her trembling was glorious, not a rigor but her body’s innocent reaction to the teeming, sunlit water. Washing herself, she noticed her brown nipples huge with the cold. She didn’t hide them from the strange young man who leaned on the fence and watched. He was more than simply a man and she a woman. They were both of them human and, unreasonably, she found that somehow magnificent. To turn away would have been an insult. So she stayed in the water till she could bear the cold no longer, then waded out and climbed the bank to where she had left the towel. She dressed, and they had breakfast sitting on the grass by the car.
It was a strange meal, stolen in a tablecloth from Coryton Rondavel’s party: rye bread, smoked salmon, beef, pate, a bottle of wine, peaches. When they had finished enough remained for lunch.
‘How much money have you left?’ he asked.
She fetched her handbag from the holdall in the car and counted. After the previous day’s cafe she had only seven pounds sixty. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I’ve got enough to get us by.’
‘Did you steal some from the house?’
He hesitated, then shook his head. ‘I suppose it was silly, but stealing money seemed somehow wickeder. Besides, I wouldn’t have known where to look.’
‘Then you’ve got money of your own? Nobody’s nobody, you said. Do nobody’s nobodies always have money of their own?’
‘Shall we leave it?’
‘But, Rod—’
‘I said, shall we leave it?’
She looked at him, and left it. She smiled and shrugged, but the exclusion hurt and he knew it did. ‘Katherine . . .’ He turned away. ‘Katherine, you know nothing about me. Don’t expect so much. And keep your secrets.’
‘I have no secrets, not here, like this.’
‘Well, aren’t you the lucky one.’
He was angry now, and she didn’t blame him. They weren’t children, playing truth or dare. She changed the subject. ‘The police’ll be out looking for the car,’ she said.
‘I told you, Rondavel won’t say a word. Not after last night. He won’t want the publicity.’
She remembered his telling her, but as if in a dream. All the time they had spent in that house had a dreamlike quality. ‘A twenty-thousand-pound car?’
‘Cheap at the price.’
Again things were unsaid, and again she had to press him. ‘You say I wasn’t raped. So what happened last night? What is Mr Rondavel so afraid of?’
‘He . . . won’t be quite sure. When you’re high enough the distinctions blur.’
But—’
‘Don’t go on, Katherine. I promise you you weren’t touched. So don’t go on.’
There was a different, a gentler exclusion here, one that didn’t hurt. Not that she would have minded the details: they were obviously sexual and the drive to pleasure — no matter how devious — was universal enough. But she was willing to be spared, just because he wanted to spare her.
She watched him fold the remains of the food away in the tablecloth. Somehow his interest in her didn’t fit. She didn’t give him power, she didn’t give him sex, even her suffering appeared to give him no kicks. It was almost as if she explained something to him, something he had been curious about all his life. Something that was its own justification. She caught herself out in her earlier sentimentality. Her nakedness had been the academic nakedness of the mortuary slab. That was why it hadn’t mattered.
‘Shall we go now?’ He was calling her from the car. She went around and climbed in beside him.
‘Go where to?’
‘That’s a very good question.’ He rummaged in the door pocket. ‘Ah — I didn’t think Rondavel would let us down.’ He brought out a set of maps, found the right one, and spread it out across their knees. After a moment’s searching he found where they were, the lane, the bridge, the thin blue line of the stream. ‘There’s a commune just here,’ he said. ‘Here, on this old airfield. It can’t be more than thirty miles.’
‘I don’t want a commune.’
‘I know you said that. But you need a roof, and a proper bed.’
‘We’ve got the car.’
‘Suppose you need looking after?’
‘I don’t want a commune.’
How could she tell him? She was not, she was not an academic nakedness. How could she tell him about her onetime list of choices, all of which — even dignity — were now irrelevant? How could she tell him she no longer needed either to think or to do, that the slush of people got in the way, that to learn to be was all she had time for? ‘I clean up after myself,’ she said. ‘And when I can’t, you leave me.’
‘You know that’s not what—’
‘Take me to the sea, please.’ She pointed on the map, at the nearby coastline. She had wished simply to shut him up, as once in a different life she had used Tasmania to shut up Harry. But as soon as she said it she knew that the sea was what she really wanted. She shouldn’t have treated him like Harry. He was so much more. ‘Take me back,’ she said, hiding in a joke, ‘to the mother from whence I came.’
He didn’t laugh, but folded the map and put it away and started the car engine. Just as they were about to move off she clutched his arm. ‘How long have I got?’ she said, scarcely audible.
‘What a question. How the hell should I know?’
She was ashamed. It was a cry from the pit she thought she’d climbed out of. ‘Your arm,’ she said, ‘feels as thin as a piece of string.’ Though she knew quite well it was young and muscular.
And then, as she began to shake, she rehearsed — she thought silently — her private litany: rigor, paralysis, sweating, coordination loss, double vision, incontinence, hallucination, autonomic breakdown, anoxia, terminal phase . . . Terminal phase was a fine and dandy euphemism — a euphemism, one might say, to end all euphemisms. A—
‘I’ll drive on, then, shall I?’ She’d forgotten he was there, and let his arm go. ‘Just tell me if you want me to stop.’
The car went forward, over the little bridge and on down the lane.
She closed her eyes against the jangled trees and sky. Double vision was no longer an amusing novelty.
~ * ~
I’d had a rough old half-hour. Why did she have to go on about the money? Of course I had money — what self-respecting-media man would move an inch without a handout from the petty cash? So she pushed me into that corny old you-don’t-know-a-thing-about-me routine. Vincent would think I’d gone stark staring mad, and perhaps I had. I was there to ferret out her secrets, not to bury them.
Then again there were her questions about the party. Did she really want to know how she’d screamed and carried on and hauled her clothes up above her head till in the end there wasn’t a man even in that unfussy group who would touch her? How they’d laughed, and then not even been able to laugh, and pulled their clothes together, and gone? How I’d cleaned her, and held her till she was still?
And now, on top of all that, her terrible incantation, destroying me, taking me back to the surgery, to the old world, even — I was beginning to hope — to the old me. The vacation brochure, I’d called it. The conducted tour. Maybe I was losing my sense of humor, but the sick joke shamed me. Fooling Katherine Mortenhoe, even supposedly for her own good, was a disgusting operation. I’d have packed the job in there and then if I’d had the courage to tell her.
The lane wound between vast fields of pale, misty green wheat. Soon it joined one of the old main roads leading seaward, almost deserted now with the thruway carrying all the traffic. Clouds were beginning to gather, high and windy. At my side Katherine was silent fighting her own battles. It was a quiet time: a time, alas, for thinking.
After this job, another. And after that job, another. And all filled with moments another reporter might wait a lifetime to fix. How lucky I was. What was I, after all, but what I’d always wanted to be — a reporter? The reporter? I kicked down on the transmission, angrily, unnecessarily. The speedometer climbed. I wasn’t a reporter, I was a reporting device. I was the world’s morbid curiosity made flesh.
It was an exaggerated, self-dramatizing mood, and I checked it. What one had sold was buyable again, if not with money then with something else. I thought of Tracey. If I had the courage the death of Katherine Mortenhoe could be made an end rather than a beginning . . . When the first of the motor cycles came by I glanced instinctively at my speedometer, and slackened off. It was too late, of course — I’d been doing well over ninety. More motor cycles came by till there were four of them riding abreast in front of me, waving me down. In the mirror I saw two more close on my tail. They weren’t police. Their bikes were totally black and they wore plastic carnival masks under their helmets. Skulls, of course. I pulled out to overtake, but they eased over ahead of me and continued politely to wave me down. Their civility was probably the most menacing part of the whole exercise. I stopped the station wagon and waited.
‘So sorry to trouble you, sir. And madam. We’re the Collectors. We’re collecting for the Society for the Encouragement of Cruelty to Everybody. It’s a terribly good cause.’
A juvenile joke, but one that put the situation succinctly enough. ‘You’ve come on a bad day,’ I said. ‘I’m a bit short myself, just at the moment.’
‘You won’t believe this, sir, but that’s what they all say.’ His voice smiled to suit the death’s-head grin of his mask. ‘And there’s usually some little thing in a pocket somewhere that they’ve forgotten.’
My door was wrenched open and I was helped out. ‘You seem to have tripped over something, sir. Charlie, assist the poor gentleman.’
The assistance was predictably a boot. The lads had slipped into a familiar and well-loved routine. I struggled to my feet. ‘Look at me. Do I honestly look as if I’ll be much good to you?’
‘Your car, sir, belies your tattered appearance. I suggest a fancy dress of some kind. Or—’
‘Or a stolen car?’
This was a new idea. He looked from me to the station wagon and back again. Then he looked again at the station wagon, stooping to get a better view of Katherine. ‘She’s ill,’ I said quickly. ‘Very ill’
‘She certainly appears to be hardly in the pink.’ He turned back to me. ‘Tripped out?’ he said.
I nodded a minimal agreement. She was through her shakes and sat sideways, fiddling at the folds of her dress with crabbed hands, a trail of dribble down the side of her face. He obviously hadn’t recognized her. Probably his lot weren’t exactly telly fans. ‘We’re collectors too,’ I said. ‘Ours is the Society for the Preservation of Indigent Fringies.’
It wasn’t as good as his, but he’d had longer to work his out. It was a line, a possible way of reaching him. And there wouldn’t be many. His mask, of course, betrayed nothing. ‘I can’t say I’ve heard of it,’ he said.
‘They’re springing up all the time.’
A car approached, slowed as it passed us, then accelerated away. The lads didn’t appear to notice it. They were sure of themselves. He allowed the car’s engine to fade. ‘A nice try, old man. But your psychology’s wrong: at a time like this we can’t both do the funnies. That represents a challenge, which of course I could never allow.’ He pulled at the cuffs of his huge black gauntlets and kicked the car door. ‘Search it,’ he ordered, and turned away.
They left me standing, of no importance, and started dragging things out into the road. Not wanting to watch, I joined their self-parodying leader. Eventually, no doubt, Vincent would let the police see my tapes. ‘That car just might stop at the next telephone,’ I said.
‘When lightning strikes the house next door, old man, you’re delighted it was his and not yours. You don’t ring up and complain. That would be tempting providence.’
‘Psychology again.’
‘No.’ He turned his ridiculous mask to face me. ‘Not psychology, old man. Cheap cynicism.’
There was a shout from one of the searchers. I turned, expecting them to have found my duffle bag, and what it contained. But they were clustered around the open driver’s door, pointing. We hurried over to see. A panel in the door had been opened, revealing a minor arsenal: tear-gas and dye aerosols, a small automatic of some sort, a weighted truncheon, a knife, handcuffs . . . If I ever got as rich as Coryton Rondavel no doubt I’d fit the same. Which was one more reason for not getting as rich as Coryton Rondavel.
My companion pocketed the automatic and threw the rest of the stuff away into the hedge. ‘You really should be more careful the people you steal your cars from,’ he said. ‘One day they’re going to get you into serious trouble.’
Around the other side of the car a couple of the lads were attempting to bundle Katherine out. She was quite unable to help herself, and began to make loud shapeless noises. I was on my way around the hood but the noise stopped the lads better than I could have done. They let go and backed away like frightened children. Like certain party-goers I could remember. I propped Katherine up and kissed her forehead.
‘Very touching. Will she belt up now?’ He’d followed me around.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘She gets these fits.’
‘To each his own.’
She bubbled into silence, her eyes watching every movement. I was glad I couldn’t tell what she made of the grisly carnival gear. I just stayed beside her, my hand on her shoulder.
They took her handbag, of course, and rifled it. They found the food, and mauled it, but were mercifully unable to eat it on account of their masks. Other cars passed, all of them slowing to stare, none of them stopping. Inevitably the lads came eventually to the duffle bag. And, equally inevitably, to the unassuming brown envelope at the very bottom. It was opened and the ten-pound notes counted. ‘Evidently, old man, there’s more to being an indigent fringie than meets the eye. You must tell me about it some time.’
He made me empty my pockets, then added up on a bit of paper the Benefit I had left, and Katherine’s wretched seven pounds sixty, and Vincent’s five hundred pounds, and gave me a careful receipt. Signed, and initialed S.E.C.E.
> ‘It’s a tired joke,’ I said.
‘I know. That’s Monday morning all over.’
They drove away, leaving me to pick up Rondavel’s Margaret’s clothes off the road and stuff them back into the car. As I worked Katherine watched me, only her eyes moving, her thoughts locked in, her questions unasked, her fears unexpressed. I wondered about the pain. Her Dr Mason had promised she would have none. I wondered if he was really all that powerful.
I finished packing the car and climbed in. The silence between us needed breaking. Somehow. ‘The money doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘We won’t starve. And we’ve still got the car.’
Why losing all our money didn’t matter, and how we wouldn’t starve, and what difference still having the car made I wouldn’t have been able to say. But neither had I a story, a lie ready that would explain Vincent’s five hundred pounds. As I felt at that moment I’d have told her the truth had she asked me. Which, since she could ask me nothing at all, was a safe enough generosity.
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe Page 22