D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

‘I don’t want to die.’

‘We all die, my dear, but in God’s time, not our own. It’s impertinent, I think, to take upon ourselves that particular choice. Almost as if… tell me where you’re calling from.’

‘I don’t want to die.’

‘I can always ring off, you know. Get the exchange to trace the call. We have a lot of experience in this sort of—’

‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘You’ll get the building, not the extension number.’

‘You’re in a building, then. Office block? Residential block?’

She wondered what she was doing, ringing this poor man. Perhaps he needed worries not his own. There were things s,he could tell him.

‘If you don’t answer, caller, I shall have to ring off. I beg you to—’

‘Father, I have sinned.’ Wasn’t that what one said?

‘Sin is a harsh word, my dear. You have failed, as we all have failed. The Lord Jesus, born of woman, understands the agony of our failure.’

Katherine wondered what the hell that had to do with the price of tea in China. And what either of them was talking about.

‘Is that why,’ she said, ‘you sit on the end of a telephone, and your churches are deserted?’

‘It’s easy to see you haven’t been near one in a long time, my dear. Our churches are far from deserted.’

‘Filled with derelicts, then. Bunks for derelicts.’

‘You answer your own question.’

She frowned. If he was going to play at being enigmatic, she was wasting her time. She was wasting her time. She was wasting her time. And he would call her ‘my dear.’

‘Christianity is dead, Vicar. As I shall be in another four weeks.’

Which was what she discovered she’d called to tell him. So she rang off.

Barbara was still showing her a sequence four points similar, over a date two years old. Some of Aimee Paladine’s readers would have ridiculously long memories. Katherine chewed her ball-point, considering substitutions.

She was home by three-forty. Told that she was leaving, Peter had asked nothing and made only the lightest, unconcerned comment. He pressed his face sideways against the window glass after she had gone, trying to see her on the pavement far below. But the tiny trotting blobs were indistinguishable. He kicked the cold radiator under the window till it rang.

Traveling in the rush hour for the first time in years, she was appalled, and fought furiously not to become just another casualty statistic. Promised four weeks, she was determined to keep them to their promise; him to his promise; Him to His promise.

The flat wasn’t empty. As soon as she opened the door it gave her back a human presence, an indefinable displacement of the air somewhere. Harry. She wasn’t ready for him, and she closed the door again and went back toward the elevator. But if not the flat, where? And if not Harry, who? When she opened the door a second time he was waiting for her in the lobby.

‘I thought I heard you,’ he said.

‘I thought I’d left something in the elevator.’

‘I’ve done that. Once I chased it down five floors.’

He stood blocking the doorway. He laughed, but something had happened. It was as if she were a stranger.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘There wasn’t anything. It was all my imagination.’

‘So do I get to come in?’

Making it a joke like that he couldn’t refuse. She walked past him into the kitchen and started putting away the food she had bought on the way home. The kitchen was tinier than she remembered. The whole flat was tinier. Between them they earned seven thousand: surely they could afford something better than this? She banged the door of the refrigerator.

‘I’m glad you remembered dinner,’ Harry said. ‘I was going to, but then I didn’t.’

He came up behind her where she stood at the window, fiddled with his cuffs, and then suddenly put his arms around her, making her jump.

‘I don’t know how to say this to you, Kate.’ He gave her a reassuring little squeeze. ‘You see, I know.’

There were blocks opposite, and blocks beyond, and people home from work in every one of them. From where she stood she could see easily seven hundred homes, sheltering seven hundred families. In not one single one of them was the husband holding the wife and saying that.

‘You can’t know.’ She had a vivid picture of her own home from the homes opposite: five windows, a balcony, modular. She knew it was her own home because of the curtains. >

Harry said, ‘I didn’t want you coming in, pretending nothing had happened.’

‘But you can’t know.’

‘I want to look after you, Kate. I know I haven’t, but I want to now.’

She leaned back against him, soothed. ‘How can you know?’

‘I thought we could go away together. He said he didn’t mind that. Somewhere easier. Friendlier. We could have all the fun of choosing. He said it was a good idea.’

He took one arm away, fumbled in his pocket, and produced a fan of travel brochures which he held in front of her like a bad conjuror. She was supposed to choose one.

‘Who’s he?’ she said.

‘Vincent.’

‘Vincent?’

‘He insisted I was to call him that. He’s a program controller with NTV

She smiled at the blocks opposite. It was just like Harry to get things not quite right. If anybody had told him, it would be someone from the Medical Center. They should have asked her first of course, or at least told her what they were going to do. But now the whole thing was out of her hands, and she was relieved. She was—

‘No!’ She beat at Harry’s hands, wrenching herself away. The travel brochures slipped, hot and shiny, down onto the floor.

‘No, Harry. No!’ She swung round on him. ‘No!’ she screamed in his face.

She had made the connection. NTV ran the Human Destiny shows. And Vincent Ferriman. NTV ran Vincent Ferriman ran the Human Destiny shows. She’d never watched them, but she knew what they did. Peter talked about them, he watched them, he accepted the rationale, the simple social duty, he’d accept anything, and she knew what they did. What they did to people.

‘No, Harry. They can’t.’

He stepped back. ‘Of course they can’t.’

‘Not to me.’

‘Of course not to you. Not if you don’t want them to.’

The tone of his voice stopped her, his instant acquiescence. And the way he met her gaze in wide-eyed guilt. She tested him.

‘Of course, they’d pay a lot of money,’ she said.

‘What use is money?’

‘And the programs do a lot of good.’

‘Rubbish. They pander to the worst in people.’

‘And I’m sure they’ll be very tactful about the filming.’

‘The idea’s disgusting.’

She moved carefully away, not touching him. ‘So what did you tell this… Vincent?’

‘I told him no. I told him to get stuffed. I told him even if you agreed he’d never get my signature on his disgusting piece of paper. I told him to get stuffed.’

She was trembling violently. She let him sit her down at the kitchen table and fetch her whiskey, but she couldn’t hold the glass. So he held it for her, and mopped her chin when she spluttered. She hated whiskey — they only had it for Harry. And the spring sunlight was so brilliant on the corner of the table that it made her want to cry. If only he hadn’t been so vehement, she thought. So positive, so definite, so vehement. If only Harry hadn’t been so vehement I might have believed him. Then we could have told the whole bloody lot of them to get bloody stuffed.

I spent most of the next day watching clips from previous Human Destiny Shows. So far Vincent had not been able to obtain authorities either from Katherine Mortenhoe or her husband, but he was confident that these could soon be fixed up. ‘Fixed up’ was a phrase I didn’t care to think about too closely. Anyway, I was in no particular hurry to start in on poor Mrs Mortenhoe: not having worked on any of the earlier programs, there was a lot, more than simply in terms of technique, for me to learn about them. You don’t come in on a series run of a high-rating show without first getting under the skin of the format. There’s an atmosphere, a style… it’s like a fashionable new suit: wearing it alters in a hundred subtle ways how you behave, and takes a bit of getting used to. Any new ideas I might have — and I hoped there’d be plenty — had to be thought into the right shape. So Vincent gave me a technician, and a stack of tapes, and the run of an NTV viewing room.