The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

by D. G. Compton

  She led Roddie on across the gravel, toward the main entrance. The Gerald she remembered liked to enter any situation with his thoughts in order. They went together up the shallow steps to the main entrance. The door was locked. Roddie stood quietly beside her, learning patience. She peered through the door’s glass panel at the polished corridor within and waited for Gerald to make up his mind. Finally he did.

  ‘Don’t ring the bell.’ Behind her his feet approached across the gravel. ‘The porter won’t — there’s nobody to answer.’

  She caught the correction. What wouldn’t the porter do? She turned. ‘I’d forgotten how tall you were, Gerald.’

  ‘It’s been a long time.’

  She nodded. ‘Six years . . . What won’t the porter do, Gerald?’

  He looked from Roddie to her and back again, and didn’t answer.

  ‘Gerald, this is Roddie.’

  ‘I thought it had to be.’

  Roddie held out his hand but Gerald stayed at the bottom of the steps, staring up. ‘Please don’t be awkward,’ Katherine said.

  Roddie took his hand back. ‘If he’s been watching the show and he cares about you,’ he said, ‘you can hardly blame him.’

  She held tightly onto his arm. ‘Do you care about me? Do you care about me, Gerald?’

  Suddenly Gerald moved and broke up the tableau. He turned and began to walk briskly away. ‘I’d rather you weren’t seen,’ he said. ‘My part is around here. Please hurry. The police came early this morning — I was to get in touch with them the moment you turned up . . .’

  He walked fast, so that she had difficulty in following. Roddie stumbled, nearly fell. Ahead of them Gerald disappeared through a gate in a high woven fence. When she reached the gate she saw beyond it a dappled green garden bright with yellow spring flowers and the fallen, drifting petals of a cherry tree. She went in, drawing Roddie through after her. Gerald was waiting behind the gate and closed it. ‘You look terrible, Kath. Really terrible. What can I get you?’

  The courage that had sustained her was suddenly all used up. She staggered and sank down, just where she was, on the grassy random stones of the path. Roddie stood beside her, one arm half-raised, quietly warding off.

  When Tracey burst into the office she saw Vincent taking a chicken and mayonnaise sandwich from a piled plate on his desk. Beside the plate were two paper cups of coffee. Another man was standing by the window, his forehead pressed against the glass. Both men were physically relaxed. Neither was calm or composed.

  ‘I can see there’s no news,’ she said.

  Nobody contradicted her. Vincent finished chewing his current mouthful and swallowed ‘I gave orders that you weren’t to be allowed up here.’

  ‘The girl on Reception has a husband. She feels about him the way I feel about mine.’

  The man at the window had turned. ‘I suppose it’s all over the papers,’ he said.

  ‘And the lunchtime news. How else would I know? You’d hardly expect our Vincent to tell a girl a thing like that. I’m only Roddie’s wife, that’s all.’

  Vincent took another sandwich. ‘You’re not his wife. Perhaps you forget.’

  ‘Like I said once before, someone has to pick up the pieces.’

  The other man straightened and came toward her. ‘I’m Dr Mason,’ he said ‘Mrs Mortenhoe was, still is, my patient. Believe me, we’re doing everything we can. I have to get to her very soon, within the next few hours. Otherwise it’ll be too late and she’ll die.’

  ‘How can you save her? I thought . . .’

  Vincent looked up, came in a little too sharply. ‘No doctor gives up hope, Tracey. Naturally Dr Mason will do what he can. Which is why we’re doing our damnedest to find her. To find them both.’

  ‘You mean you’ve paid for a death and now you’re worried sick you won’t be there.’

  But he wouldn’t be needled. ‘You’ll admit we paid handsomely, Tracey.’ He picked a shred of chicken from between his front teeth and stared at it. ‘You can hardly blame us for being concerned.’

  Dr Mason moved convulsively. ‘No. No, I disassociate myself from that attitude completely. I can save her. If we find her in time I can—’

  ‘You delude yourself, my dear Doctor. She has a terminal condition. I heard you tell her so myself.’

  Tracey looked at the two men. Power was being wielded: the whole force of Vincent’s personality, and something more besides. She knew his ways, his ruthlessness. Whatever their difference, the doctor would never have been a match for him . . . Roddie, for all his courage and imagination, had never been a match for him either. She was there because Roddie needed her. Because any activity was better than waiting at home by the TV. Because she had felt she would be nearer to him there in Vincent’s office than anywhere else. Now she saw there were other threads, complications she refused to guess at.

  ‘Whatever you’ve done so far to find them,’ she said, ‘you must do it again. There’ll be something you missed. You must go through it all again.’

  ‘Must? My dear Tracey—’

  ‘You’re tough, Vincent. I wonder if you’re that tough. I wonder if you wouldn’t rather know afterward that you’d done everything you could.’

  He looked at her sideways. ‘For the sake of the sponsors?’

  ‘For the sake of any damn person you like.’

  He sighed, wiped his greasy fingers on his handkerchief, and reached for the telephone.

  ~ * ~

  We sat in basket chairs, and ate salad out of wooden bowls. Or at least I did. I appreciated Gerald’s thoughtfulness — I could scoop around with my fingers and not spill all that much over the sides. I’d never thought before how blind men ate. A wooden bowl and fingers seemed by far the best idea. And a glass on the ground beside me with wine in it they told me was white. I mean, it had to be, on a headmaster’s lawn, chilled like that, and with salad. And with the sun warm on my face.

  Gerald was kind: a big, impressive-feeling man. Even from the beginning he hadn’t really been against me, just waiting for a lead from Katherine. I might have been her old man of the sea for all he knew. For all I knew, maybe I was. But she gave no sign, so I chose to think not.

  Not that she was one for signs. After all, she was dying — and I mean there, in that garden, dying — and she gave no sign of that either. At least, not to Gerald who might be expected to believe her. But I knew better. After her last rigor down by the van she’d been . . . different. Her breathing was different. There was no rhythm to it, to her walking, to her voice even. No continuity. It was as if she had to discover and then rediscover each necessary act as she went along. And the effort this required grew progressively greater. She was past rigor. She was past rigor, and paralysis, and coordination loss, and sweating, and double vision, and ... I stopped myself. She was dying.

  I knew what that meant. Of course I knew, every thinking person knew, what that meant. And boy, was I a thinking person. It meant ashes to ashes. It meant dust to dust. If the women don’t get you the whiskey must.

  I had no idea what it meant.

  ‘. . . Perhaps in a way things were made too easy,’ she was saying, ‘by us not having any children.’

  ‘How could we have had children? You seemed to have none of the qualities a mother needed.’

  Was it some kind of truth game they were playing, or had they always been so honest with each other? I scooped my salad and drank my wine.

  ‘You didn’t know everything about me, Gerald. But perhaps you were right about my qualities of motherhood.’

  ‘You have them now, Kath.’

  Their honesty made this a genuine compliment. Neither was it, in spite of her present situation, at all monstrous, just a nice, genuine compliment. ‘I hope you’re right, Gerald. It’s about time.’ Neither of them spoke for a while. Then, ‘You know, I’m glad you never remarried, Gerald.’

  ‘What difference would that have made?’

  ‘I was thinking of my father. He remarried all th
e time.’

  ‘How very Freudian of you . . . Was that why you left me? Because you thought you’d married your father and then found you hadn’t?’

  This was too much, even for her. ‘It was you who left me,’ she said.

  ‘Under the meaning of the Act, perhaps. But you’d left already, a long time before that.’

  I heard her chair creak. I’d wondered at first if they found me, on account of my blindness, either more intrusive or less. I needn’t have worried. They had more important things to think about. ‘You always wanted to change me, Gerald. I wasn’t ready to be changed.’

  ‘In those days I was always in too much of a hurry.’

  ‘Please don’t be smug.’ The concession wasn’t enough. ‘Just look at me. There’s a mechanism here, very much a mechanism, and it’s very much running down. Even you would be hard put to it to find much more.’

  ‘So you’d say you’ve not changed. You’d say you’re here just because you’re here.’

  ‘Not the clever schoolmaster stuff, Gerald. Not the Socratic method.’

  He sounded a nice man, comfortable in the sun, And she, Tommy Tucker had said, was a nice lady. I couldn’t understand the way they talked. I wanted, presumptuously, to help them.

  ‘She knows there’s more than just a mechanism—’ I had begun too loud, not pitching my voice quite right. ‘Ask her what the doctor told her. Ask her about the outrage.’

  ‘Roddie?’ She sounded surprised I was there. ‘Outrage, Roddie? What gnomic word is this?’

  She was, I recognized, playing to Gerald. ‘The outrage that is part of your condition,’ I said. ‘Dr Mason described it very well. Don’t forget I was there.’

  ‘You’re wrong, Roddie. Neurological overload . . . burned-out circuits . . . these are my condition.’

  Gerald quickly recognized the difficulty between us. ‘The poet Dylan Thomas,’ he murmured, ‘is said to have died of “insult to the brain.” At least, that is what they say appears on his death certificate. Insult or outrage . . . it’s a very small step.’

  ‘Mystical nonsense, Gerald. We both know Thomas died of drink.’

  I should have noticed that she was protesting overmuch. I didn’t. ‘Then there’s your book,’ I insisted. ‘From what Peter told me there was outrage in every—’

  ‘Book? There wasn’t any book . . . Anyway, I destroyed all my notes in that hotel. All that mattered. It was a silly thing, Gerald. Angry. Juvenile. A silly thing . . .’

  ‘But it tied in with what the doctor said. Surely you must remember?’

  Something must have dulled me to her desperation. Possibly the wine. I wish I could find excuse in my blindness. Certainly, as soon as the words were spoken I would have taken them back. Gerald might press her hard, but not I. Now of all times, not I. I heard her move, felt the weight of her full attention pin me in my chair.

  ‘I remember . . . remember all sorts of things.’ For all her firmness of voice she was tiring. ‘I remember, for instance, that you worked under Vincent Ferriman. Mr Ferriman is the most profoundly wicked, the most distressing person I have ever met. You worked under him. Willingly.’

  Her words didn’t hurt me as much as they might have done. Accommodations that had once been made could not later be taken back. She had no right. But then, previously, neither had I. All the same, I’d already been through that one and reckoned I was out the other side. I’d lived with self-distaste far too long. So, though she was refusing to admit it, had Katherine Mortenhoe.

  I said nothing. Eventually she turned back to Gerald.

  ‘Peter’s a ... a dear boy,’ she said, ‘but he doesn’t know a plot loop from a ... a denouement phase. I’ve left him nothing to go on. Thank God.’

  Gerald had this curious ability not to need explanations. It was as if she came to him already footnoted. ‘I’m glad to hear it, Kath. Denials are a waste of time. You can’t work with children without discovering that.’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘They haven’t had garbled Freud thrown at them. They’re free to expect something bigger. They don’t often find it, of course. But they search.’

  She might have accused him of mystical nonsense again. It was, after all, he who had quoted Freud at her not three minutes before. She was, I thought, fighting my battle for me, and that was what I would have done. But, ‘I’d have expected you to be the one to remarry,’ she said. ‘Not me.’

  ‘I don’t believe you remarried. Any more than you dared do more than turn out computer books.’

  There was a long silence. When she spoke again it was the continuation of a private line of thought I didn’t immediately follow. ‘I understand there have been . . . programs. You watched them . . .’ The words came very slowly, connected only with great effort. ‘Is that why . . . why we’re here, talking? Is that why you didn’t run to the police?’

  ‘The programs made me very angry. Of course they made me angry. But the argument for turning you in now is that you need urgent medical help. I’d need more than anger with some wretched TV company to make me keep you from that.’

  ‘Pity, then?’

  ‘I can’t say I saw you as being pitiable.’

  ‘Then why?’

  Uncharacteristically, he hesitated. Suddenly I saw what she was doing, and that her battle wasn’t mine at all. She’d made her mind up on that one long before coming here and had already managed, with difficulty, to tell him so. Now she was asking for something else. She was asking him to acknowledge love. Of a husband, of a father, of a man, simply of a human being. She knew she had mine, but that was easier, born of mutual pain. She needed his, born of what she had been before, unlikable, shut away. I held my breath, willing him ..to feel it. A cuckoo called, very close, passing overhead.

  At last he replied. ‘The choice wasn’t mine at all, Kath. You made it for yourself, days ago. I could only respect it. I could only respect you for making it.’

  And still she waited. How nicely we pick over our words: love, admiration, regard, respect... In my dictionary he loved her. But my dictionary took no account of the careful, protective intelligence of these two strange people. Their precisions weren’t cold. Theirs was a relationship fourteen years deep, interrupted but not yet ended. He was Gerald Mortenhoe and she Katherine. My reasoning had been cheap, making her hope for the word love. Rather had she to risk his offering, for her sake, for easy comfort, the mere word. The word that would devalue them both. She had to tempt him.

  The silence lengthened. I suppose I had come with her to that place, to that man, expecting sensational revelations, Clearly he knew she was dying. It can’t have been easy, but he held out.

  ~ * ~

  Vincent’s office was crowded. Tracey looked around at the pitiful few people conceivably capable of helping who had been brought together there at her insistence. Mrs Mortenhoe’s husband, Harry; her assistant at Computabook, Peter; her doctor, Dr Mason; and finally, as a long shot, Roddie’s psychiatrist, Dr Klausen. Dr Mason was lecturing them, his concern painful to watch, while Vincent sat at his desk reading a sheaf of program reviews, his unconcern equally painful.

  ‘If we can find her I can save her. Deep narcosis possibly. A reversal of patterns. It can be done. I know Dr Klausen here will agree it must be tried. But we don’t have much time. We—’

  ‘What I cannot understand,’ said Dr Klausen mildly, ‘is how this situation could ever have arisen.’

  Vincent looked up from his clippings. ‘A medical matter,’ he said. ‘Hardly one for this present discussion. Naturally Dr Mason accepts full responsibility. An error of judgment, shall we say? They have been known, even in the medical profession.’

  Tracey wanted to help: not Vincent, never Vincent — but then, Vincent would never need her help. ‘We’re not here to hand out blame,’ she said. ‘We’re here to think of some way of finding Mrs Mortenhoe. And my husband.’

  ‘And to do that,’ Dr Mason repeated, ‘we must all search in our minds for the smallest thing sh
e may have said, the vaguest clue she may have given, the slightest deduction any of us might make from what we know of her.’

  There was an uneasy silence in the room. Harry shifted peevishly. ‘Quite mad,’ he said. ‘That’s the only deduction I’d care to make. One moment we’re all set for Tasmania, the next moment she’d run away, tarted herself up like I don’t know what, no thought for me, no thought for how I might look, stuck there in that shop like—’

  ‘I take it she was usually considerate of your feelings?’ Dr Klausen had already sized up Harry.

  ‘Of course she was. We were married. Happily married. How else—’

  ‘Then we are looking for atypical behavior, certainly stemming from her atypical situation. Even in this, though, we ought to be able to find some sort of logic. She seems to have been an intensely logical person ... I wonder, was she running away, or running to? Was she basically afraid or, as we say, looking forward?’