Harry actually laughed. ‘Looking forward to what? The gutter? I tell you, she was crazy. Of course she was. She couldn’t face the truth, so she ran away.’
Up to that moment Peter had been quiet. Now he sprang to his feet. ‘No. You would say that. All you think about is the fool she made you look. You never knew anything about her, anything at all.’
‘And you did, I suppose.’
Yes. Yes, I did.’
The two men glared at each other. Then Harry turned to Vincent. ‘I didn’t want to come here. Must I put up with—‘
‘My dear Harry. Please . . . we must remember that Peter was the last among us to see your wife. It is just possible that he knows something the rest of us do not.’
Peter sat down again. ‘All I know is . . . is that she wasn’t in the least crazy. Or afraid. Yes, she was looking forward to . . . to whatever was going to happen to her.’
Harry snorted. Klausen had been reading over the notes Vincent had provided for him. ‘Peter — you talked with her for four or five minutes. Was there nothing she said in all that time that seemed to you odd in any way? Inconsequent? Not what you’d have expected?’
Peter struggled with his memory. ‘Everything she said was a bit. . . disjointed.’ Harry snorted again. Peter plowed on. ‘But I understood her perfectly well. She was saying just that — that she wasn’t running away, but running to ... I said I’d help her if I could. For some reason this made her cry. I lent her my handkerchief.’
Harry crossed his legs. ‘Must we have these touching—’
‘And then — yes, she did say a funny thing. She said, “I’m not an armed destroyer.” Something like that. “I’m not an armed destroyer.”‘
Harry sighed. ‘Armored cruiser,’ he said. ‘You might as well get it right. She would have said that. It always preyed on her mind. It was what her first husband had called her. You may say I didn’t know anything about her, but at least . . .’ He trailed off, aware of a change in the atmosphere of the room.
Dr Klausen sat back, took off his glasses. ‘As simple as that,’ he said. ‘A sensitive woman who did not want to be thought of as an armored cruiser.’
‘My dear Klausen.’ Vincent shuffled papers on his desk. ‘My dear Klausen, you’ll see if you look at your notes that we covered that possibility right at the beginning. We’re not complete fools. The police called on Gerald Mortenhoe and left instructions that they were to be contacted at once, should his ex-wife turn up.’
‘Would he have obeyed these instructions? Would any man in his position?’
‘He’s a responsible citizen. I’m sure the police explained the situation to him.’
‘But you have to admit that his loyalties would be, to say the least, divided?’
Vincent patiently put away his press cuttings and, in the manner of someone humoring an extremely wayward child, got in touch once again with the Air Transport Controller.
~ * ~
Lunch was long over. She wondered if Gerald had noticed how she had eaten nothing. She’d felt that to eat would be . . . unsuitable. Since then they had sat on, the three of them, in the sun, saying less and less. They made her feel safe. She remembered Gerald’s strength, had resisted it before, could have resisted it again. It came from being of a piece. But she, unready, had resisted him, worn him down, driven him away. She no longer felt ashamed of this, for nothing — not even he -could have hurried her.
Roddie’s strength was different. It was without reason, obstinate in the face of self-disillusionment. It came from an intuitive certainty that beyond all the fragmentation there was still the possibility of. . . wholeness. It had faltered, and taken wrong turnings, but it had never lost faith in the possibility.
So she sat, the three of them sat, in the dappled green garden, and her mind that had been running away with her faster and faster, from way back, slowed, and examined each individual necessity. She experienced herself. She was one. She was as old as the soil beneath the grass beneath her feet. She was home. She could have gone on living forever — one breath after another was all that was needed — but it seemed much more reasonable, and gentle, and wise, to die.
~ * ~
I suppose I had imagined my hearing would become immediately one hundred percent better, just because I was blind. It wasn’t so, of course. No sooner had I decided tactfully not to mention the first faint approaching clatter of the helicopter than Gerald mentioned it for me.
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he said. ‘They’re too late. Thank God.’
And I was hurt. More than anything else at that moment,. I was hurt. That I shouldn’t have known. That she shouldn’t have told me.
Simply because there’d been less and less to say, we’d been saying less and less. But there should have been a moment, something more than just a mere cessation, that I in my closeness, in my blind closeness, might have known. An event between us. An importance. As if there hadn’t been enough events and importances.
But I was hurt, and stood up, knocking over something, a table, something that had been too close. My eyes cried. I ran across the grass toward the approaching, egg-beating clatter. And stopped. She was dead, and I ought to have known better. I did know better. I did.
Gerald came after me only slowly. He didn’t snatch or pull. ‘They’ll come down in the playing field by the gym,’ he said. ‘It’ll be some minutes before they get here.’
I had a sudden, precise, imaginary picture from the helicopter now low over the trees. The school with its swooping roof and blue glass, turquoise really; the lawn behind its woven fence, striped neatly, shadowed with foreshortened trees; us, staring up; near us Kate, Katie-Mo, Kathie, Kath, Katherine . . .
‘She’s all right?’ I asked, ashamed now.
He caught my meaning at once. ‘Tired,’ he said. ‘Nothing more.’
Anyway, how could it matter? Hadn’t I seen puke and shit and piss, and loved her? He led me back across the lawn and let me help him pick up the table I had spilled. Groping around, I found bowls and cutlery. I set them on the table, carefully, the right way up. Then we sat down to wait.
I don’t know what he was waiting for. Me, in all the shouting and anger and confusion that followed, I was listening for just one voice. I heard Vincent, and the doctor too late to do his irrelevant doctoring. Both of them were to avoid me: Vincent I would hear from later, through NTV’s solicitors; Dr Mason, for his own unexplained reasons, never. I heard some cameraman, worrying about the light. Then I heard Tracey. She was very close to me, and spoke softly.
‘You’ve come back,’ she said.
I hadn’t of course. Nothing is that easy. But I was well on the way.
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe Page 28