The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

by D. G. Compton

  By midnight the critics had gone, suitably encouraged, to hack out their copy. He began easing out the others. Tomorrow was another day, he said. He even reminded them that the Show Must Go On. They slapped his shoulder, and had just one more drink, and went. At one o’clock he set his secretaries emptying ashtrays and collecting dirty glasses. At two o’clock he personally closed the doors to the lounge, poured himself a final nightcap, and took the elevator up to his flat. He toasted himself, his triumph, in the elevator mirror. Then he changed his mind, stopped the elevator at the sixth floor and took it down to the monitoring room instead. His triumph ought to be shared. If La Mortenhoe was asleep he’d call up Roddie. People liked to be told they were appreciated.

  In the monitoring room he found Dr Mason asleep in front of a bright blank screen. Unreasonably the alcohol went suddenly cold on him. He put his half-filled glass down on top of the monitor and tried without success to get a picture. There was no sign of either Simpson or Dawlish. His head was buzzing and he took a neutralizer.

  ‘Where’s the duty engineer?’ he asked, unnecessarily loud.

  Dr Mason jerked awake. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

  ‘You were asleep. Where’s the duty engineer?’

  ‘Of course I wasn’t asleep ... I sent him home. We agreed I had to be here. There was no point in both of us—’

  ‘You had no right. Now the monitor’s gone on the blink.’

  Vincent turned on the second set and drummed his fingers, waiting for it to warm up. With a busy day ahead of him he ought to have been in bed hours ago.

  ‘Is that what it is?’ Dr Mason said. ‘I thought it was just night.’

  ‘Night is always brilliant white, of course.’

  Dr Mason mumbled. He looked half dead. The second set warmed up and showed the same blank white rectangle. There was no picture, and no sound either.

  ‘That’s right,’ Mason said. ‘It went like that straight after he threw his flashlight away.’

  ‘Who threw whose flashlight away?’

  ‘Your man. Your Roddie. He threw his flashlight away. After that it went dark and then suddenly bright. I waited for something to happen. I . . . suppose I may have dozed off.’

  Vincent sat down. Those neutralizers worked so bloody slowly. ‘When did all this happen?’

  ‘I don’t sit here watching the clock.’

  ‘It’s important, Doctor. Please try to remember.’

  ‘. . . He’d gone to the pub and watched the show. It wasn’t at all bad. Went down well in the pub too.’

  ‘I’m so glad. Then what happened?’

  Dr Mason considered. ‘Well now . . .’

  Time seemed to have slowed to a complete standstill. Vincent got up again, abruptly, feeling as if his head would burst. ‘It doesn’t matter. You can tell me on the way over.’

  ‘Where are we going? I can’t leave. I’ve got my patient to consider.’

  ‘Certainly. That’s why you’re coming with me.’

  He went to the telephone, started looking down the list for the extension number of the Air Transport Controller. A call at this hour of the night would take some explaining.

  Katherine sat up. She’d heard what I’d been listening for ever since we’d climbed into the van. I’d hoped she’d be asleep. I’d hoped in a makeshift sort of way that if she was asleep she wouldn’t hear the helicopter when it came. And if she didn’t hear it then maybe none of the next bit would ever happen. Our discovery, my explanations, their recriminations, his contractual reminders. But she wasn’t asleep. She heard the helicopter when it came at last, and she sat up.

  Of course, I should have had a plan. Right from the beginning I should have thought beyond the bargain I was striking and the price I would pay. If I didn’t have a plan then a price — though different — would be extracted from her as well. And I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have a plan became when I finally came to think about it I realized that no plan was possible.

  By then they’d got me down off the pier: Katherine, and Tommy, and two or three others. They thought I was drunk and I didn’t disillusion them. Not that they’d have been easy to convince — I mean, who really goes blind, suddenly, for no reason at all, in the middle of the night, on the end of a broken-down pier? So I let them lead me down and thought myself lucky to be spared immediate embarrassment. I’d reckoned without Mrs Baker.

  She turned us out.

  To be precise, she didn’t even let us in. It was her moment of purest joy, I could hear it in her voice. She met us by the edge of the windbreaks and read us her own private riot act. She had the other guests to think of, she said. Drunkenness was not allowed, never had been. Fringies was all the same. Give them an inch and they took a mile.

  A confused mass of something hit my chest. Dropping most of it, I discovered it was made up of our possessions. I recognized the zipper around Katherine’s sleeping bag, and joined it, and between us we stuffed most of the things in. It was probably almost as dark there on the beach for her as it was for me. I and my lady friend, Mrs Baker remarked behind us, could have our orgy somewheres else.

  I followed close as Katherine hobbled away. Soon she sat down and I sat down beside her. She shivered. It was her own shiver, unrecorded, untransmitted, ungloated-over. We were both of us free.

  ‘You came back,’ she said. ‘I’d thought perhaps you wouldn’t.’

  ‘Of course I came back.’

  ‘But you got drunk first . . . I’ve never known about men getting drunk. Were you upset? You sounded as if you were upset.’

  I put one arm around her shoulders. Out of all the thoughts in my head there was not one that I could tell her. Not even that I loved her. If that was the word. And there was no other. ‘I’ll look after you,’ I said, forgetting in all honesty that I no longer could.

  For as long as we sat there the future seemed unnecessary. Luckily for us there was someone rather less romantic. Footsteps approached across the pebbles. A throat was cleared. ‘Orgy or no orgy, I reckon you two’ll freeze to death come morning.’

  It was Tommy. I stood up, suddenly terribly aware of my sightlessness. I didn’t know where he was, how far, in what direction. ‘Yes. Well, Tommy, I thought of going along to the—’

  ‘The thing is, there’s always my old van. It’s a bit crowded, but at least it’s private. Never forget a face or a favor. The police moves you on if you kips in the shelters.’

  He was right. His van was a bit crowded. It was a largish van, but filled with conjuring props, and puppets, and the Punch and Judy booth, and various lumps I couldn’t possibly identify. All the same, he fitted us in somehow . . . And it was then, as we climbed up and tried to make ourselves comfortable, that I started listening. Listening for Vincent’s helicopter and hoping that Katherine would be asleep when it came.

  ‘Isn’t that a helicopter?’ she said, sitting up, very awake.

  ‘It might be,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t think helicopters flew much after dark.’

  ‘They don’t usually.’

  The noise approached. Suddenly Katherine gasped. I searched for her, found a puppet’s leg, then the cover of her sleeping bag. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘The lights hurt my eyes.’

  I should have guessed that Vincent would bring the camera chopper, halogen floods, the full production number. I always told him he overlit his night O.B.’s. By now the beach would be flattened by the weight of lights.

  It seemed as good a moment as any. ‘I can’t see any lights,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be silly. Of course you can.’

  I left it. There’d be other moments just as good. Or better. The helicopter note changed, a gale blew up around the van as the helicopter hovered, then settled. Finally it switched off and flailed slowly down to silence. Feet hurried, stumbling, across the beach. They were going in the direction of the pier. Away in the town somewhere a church clock struck four. Four in the morning . . . Vincent wasn’t going to be exa
ctly popular with Mrs Baker.

  ‘Keep down,’ I said to Katherine. ‘Don’t let them see you.’

  It was just possible, if Tommy kept his mouth shut, that Vincent wouldn’t find us. And if Katherine asked me why they shouldn’t see her, then I was cued in, with the script more, or less prepared. But, ‘You told them where to find me,’ she said, and it was as if she had looked over my shoulder and put a pencil through the first two pages. I wished I could see her face. The windows of the van would be steamed up, Vincent’s lights angling sharply down. I wished I could see her face, and tried to remember it, and it evaded me. I felt I had never properly seen anybody, and now I never would.

  ‘Why did you tell them? I must know.’

  I tried to begin, but nothing came. She shifted, and found me with her good hand, and held on tightly. She could see me, of course. I felt indecent: I might be detestable, spotty, ugly, my fly might be undone, anything.

  ‘It’ll be all right, Rod. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t know that.’

  So I began.

  ~ * ~

  She stayed quiet, asking nothing, saying nothing, till he had done. Below them on the beach there was confused argument, and people walking to and fro, tripping and cursing. She heard Vincent’s voice, and Mrs Baker’s, and others she didn’t recognize. She heard them, and listened to them, and even tried to make out what they were saying. Rod’s whispered words were different, conveyed in a different medium. She knew and understood, almost without hearing, their smallest intonation. She occupied his reality. He offered no reasons, no excuses. Between the two of them excuses were unnecessary. And anyway she knew them all.

  And anyway they were useless. In spite of them, because of them, he nauseated her: what he was, what he had done to her. It was, she knew quite well, obscene. Even his blindness was horrible, a self-mutilation that could only be another burden to her. His kindness within the framework he had accepted made no sense. She had put herself at his mercy, and now he was demanding an impossible forgiveness. Not with words, not even with humbleness, but demanding to be forgiven all the same. Mostly, of course, it was his shame that she could not tolerate.

  Circuits, linkages, her whole life insisted that she reject him utterly. When at last he had finished she had nothing to say. Her silence would hurt him and she was immovably silent. He started heaving himself about. ‘Help me out,’ he said.

  She found she was holding his arm, and let it go. He was trying to make her responsible, even for this. He wanted her to ask him to stay. Or he wanted her to force him to leave. And she would not.

  ‘So that you can tell them where I am?’

  ‘If I wanted to do that I could shout from here.’

  ‘Then why don’t you?’ He was on his hands and knees, feeling his way around things to the doors of the van. ‘Look at you now. Making all the noise you can. You want to have it both ways. Be honest. You want to turn me in so that fucking Vincent will go on loving you. And at the same time you want me to pat you on the head and say never mind, you couldn’t help it.’

  He tried to stand up, caught his head on a sharp corner. ‘Help me out, Katherine. I’ll find the wall of the promenade and go along it. I’ll say I came across the road. You got a lift away. I shouted and they didn’t hear.’

  ‘And what am I supposed to do all this time?’

  ‘Stay put. If Tommy keeps quiet you’ll be safe enough till morning.’

  ‘And what then?’

  ‘How should I know what then?’

  ‘You ought to. You said you’d look after me.’

  ‘I lied.’

  Such an overpitched, melodramatic, middle-of-the-night conversation to be having. ‘Please stay,’ she said. ‘Please stay . . .’

  They had, one way and another, both been hurt enough.

  Footsteps approached, left the pebbles, came up the steps onto the promenade. Vincent Ferriman’s voice: ‘You try the shelters along that way. I’ll try the old dance hall. They can’t have gone far.’

  Somebody brushed along the back of the van. She held her breath. The footsteps went away. Rod groped around in the air above her head. ‘Katherine—’

  ‘Don’t talk. Just stay. Please.’

  She helped him to sit down. After a long time the footsteps returned. First Vincent Ferriman’s, that stood, and paced, and kicked the tire of a car along the row as they waited, and then the others’. There was argument. This time Katherine recognized the voice of Dr Mason. She’d come a long way since that morning in his office. She was glad, for both their sakes, he hadn’t been able to keep away.

  Vincent was in charge. Who else? But he wasn’t ever going to find her. ‘Right people. Can we have some order please? Thank you . . . Now, obviously we’re wasting our time. They’ve probably hitched a lift somehow. So we need grounds for calling in the police. Not even NTV can handle this sort of search on its own. Doctor, can we fairly say she’s in need of urgent medical attention?’

  ‘Of course we can. I’ve told you and told you. Unless—’

  ‘Good. In that case there’s no problem. Even if they’ve hitched a lift they’ve got to be put down somewhere. And I’ll lay on radio flashes. They’ll be picked up soon enough once it’s daylight.’

  They were invisible. They’d never be picked up, ever. Vincent led his men away, crisply down the steps and across the beach. The helicopter started up and went, taking its lights with it, leaving the inside of the van suddenly intensely dark. Gradually the dim street lamps reasserted themselves. She eased her cramped body. ‘What now?’ she said. But Rod was asleep. She tucked the blanket from his duffle bag about him as neatly as her clumsy arm would allow, and settled to wait for the dawn. Ever since she had asked him, and he had stayed, they had not spoken. But they’d communicated. She wasn’t worried.

  Tommy’s noisy arrival roused them both. He flung open the back doors of the van, pushed in an armful of his things from the beach, and then quickly shut the doors again. In a moment he was around the side, climbing in, starting the engine, moving off. ‘Looks like being a nice day,’ he said. ‘And I’d stay where you are. No sense in getting seen all over the place.’

  The van threw them around. A crazy assortment of swords and vanishing cabinets and plastic goldfish bowls and old wickerwork hampers leaned and clattered about them. Conversation was impossible. ‘I’ll stow everything when we get out of town,’ Tommy shouted. ‘You never know who’s watching.’

  From where she crouched Katherine could see the upper stories of houses reeling by. Rod sat hunched, with his arms over his head. After a few miles the houses thinned and were replaced by curving lamp standards. The van slowed, turned left, and finally pulled in under some trees. Tommy switched off, and sat massaging his hands. ‘I could tell them blokes was police, for all they said they wasn’t. I don’t know what you two done, and I don’t want to. Old Tommy never forgets a face or a favor.’

  Katherine climbed out, and guided Rod after her. The clouds of the previous day were nearly all gone and the sun was warm and she had been nearly twelve hours without a rigor. Tommy watched them, and although he made no comment she felt obliged to offer some sort of explanation. ‘He’s got this . . . this thing wrong with his eyes,’ she said.

  ‘And you’re not all that spry yourself, pet.’

  In fact, of course, they made a ludicrous couple. She shrugged, and the old man patted her arm and went around to the back of the van and started sorting out his possessions. Rod stood beside her, turning his face up to the sky. ‘It’s a fine day,’ he said. Then, abruptly, ‘What sort of a man is Gerald?’

  The name shocked her. ‘Gerald?’

  ‘Your first husband. I never got to see him. What sort of a man is he?’

  ‘It’s been a long time. I don’t know. I don’t—’

  ‘Would he take you in?’

  ‘Take me in?’ Ten seconds before she would have denied any such idea, but now she knew with the utter certainty of hindsight that it was Gerald she had been cir
cling, Gerald she had not quite been making for ever since she left the city. ‘I don’t know if he’d take me in. But I’d like to try.’

  ‘If he doesn’t, you’re landed.’

  ‘We’d think of something.’

  ‘Besides, with the money I’ve got maybe you and old Tommy could—’

  ‘Gerald’s school isn’t far. I’d like to see him.’