D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

‘Except that, being uninvited in a Private Area, your presence here constitutes a clear infringement of the IPA.’

‘Not uninvited, Mrs Mortenhoe. Your Press Officer knows all about my visit.’

‘Did you tell him why you wanted to see me?’

‘I don’t think he asked me. He probably thought I was interested in the origins of the romantic novel.’

At last she had a worthy opponent a focus for her rage. She smiled at him, and waited. She knew the law.

‘Could we stop sparring, please? My name is Mathiesson. Morning News.’ He showed her his press card and the pass he had got from Computabook’s Press Officer.

‘I have nothing to say to you, Mr Mathiesson.’

‘Then you do not deny that the news of your terminal condition came as a terrible shock to you?’

She knew the law. ‘I have nothing to say to you.’

‘And you do not deny that your husband is planning a final fling dream holiday for the two of you?’

‘I have nothing to say.’

‘And you do not deny that you have been offered seven hundred thousand pounds for an NTV exclusive?’

As much as that? Was it really as much as that? ‘I have nothing to say.’

‘Mrs Mortenhoe, what does it feel like to know you’re dying?’

She knew the law. ‘I… have nothing to say.’

‘Do you deny that prior to receiving this tragic news, your husband had been in two minds about your coming renewal?’

‘Did he tell you that?’ Oh God.

‘Your husband is very dear to you, Mrs Mortenhoe?’

‘I don’t have to stay here and listen to your questions.’ And still she knew the law.

‘Of course not. You’re free to leave any time you want to.’

A worthy opponent. She thought of the men downstairs, the men who hadn’t had the foresight to get to the Press Officer before he went home. Out on the street she was public property. Harry wouldn’t have told the reporter a thing like that. It wasn’t even true.

‘I wish to make a formal statement of Private Grief,’ she said.

You need two witnesses.’

‘I shall get them.’

‘There’s a girl on Reception. Everyone else has gone home. And you can hardly expect me to oblige.’

‘I wonder what you hope to gain, Mr Mathiesson, using these sort of tactics.’

‘You’re talking to me, Mrs Mortenhoe. And, like every other good newspaperman, I hope to gain the truth.’

She let her silence show what she thought of that one. He opened his eyes very wide, as if he agreed with her.

‘NTV may have the money, Mrs Mortenhoe, but are you sure you like their methods? They tell me you can’t even take a crap without a camera counting the poops. Sign with us and we’ll guarantee you certain privacies, and the presence of never more than one reporter. And for a maximum of fourteen hours in any twenty-four.’

‘You work long hours.’

He shrugged. ‘You owe it to the public, Mrs Mortenhoe. They’re pain-starved. It’s a serious psychic deprivation: you know that as well as I do.’

She smiled at him, rang down to reception and asked for a taxi to be sent around to the loading bay at the back of the building. There would be no reporters there — it was a Private Area.

He leaned across her, keeping her finger on the switch. ‘Mathiesson here,’ he said. ‘Better make that two.’

She smiled at him again. She was enjoying herself, enjoying her hatred, enjoying how she was going to humiliate him.

‘I’m going home now,’ she said.

‘Mind if I tag along?’

‘There’s no law against it.’

‘Right. But lay one finger on you and you’ll prosecute?’

‘Right.’ She gathered up her handbag and a sheaf of her day’s jottings. ‘My pain is my own affair, Mr Mathiesson. I do not propose to sell it to you, or to anyone else.’

‘I can see you’ve not yet heard from the merchandisers.’ He picked up his tape recorder and followed her out into the corridor. ‘They’re a persistent lot. Almost as persistent as we are.’

They stood together by the elevators.

‘You won’t get past my front door,’ she said.

‘Squatter’s rights, Mrs Mortenhoe. If the boys see me arrive with you they’ll know I have a prior claim.’

An elevator arrived and they got in. She pressed for the ground floor, then slipped out of the last nine inches as the doors were closing. There was a caretaker’s entrance she could make her own way to, and bugger the waiting taxi. But Mr Mathiesson was too quick, and held the elevator on the emergency button.

‘Forgotten something, Mrs Mortenhoe?’

‘The ladies. If you’ve no objection.’

‘Be my guest.’

He went with her back along the corridor, and settled to wait. She crossed the washroom, broke the seals on the fire escape window, and stepped out. Mr Mathiesson was some ten feet away, waving cheerfully out of the corridor fire exit.

‘A breath of fresh air, Mrs Mortenhoe?’

Looking down at the vertiginous pattern of steps below her, she knew she could anyway never have faced them. She and Mr Mathiesson went down together, standing silently side by side in the elevator, down to the ground floor. With only one ploy left she was no longer enjoying herself.

She gave the waiting taxi driver her address, watched her companion climb into his taxi, then went straight through her own and out the other side. Mr Mathiesson was waiting for her.

‘Conan Doyle,’ he said. ‘Circa 1890.’

She capitulated. Above all, she would give him no further opportunity for the exercise of his repulsive wit. He could have his squatter’s rights, if they were so important to him. She returned to her taxi and sat in it miserably, hugging her knees, as the driver slotted it neatly, complete with succubus, into the passing traffic. He could have his bloody squatter’s rights, she thought if they were so important to him.

Ironically enough it was the city, in the end, that made the fool of Mr Mathiesson. A turbine truck absentmindedly ran into the back of his taxi at the first thruway intersection, killing him instantly. She made her driver stop, paid him off, and walked back to look at the mess. Mr Mathiesson’s neck was broken, and his face was imprinted with crumbled lozenges of shatterproof glass. The truckdriver, with several teeth missing, was bleeding tidily into a litter bin. Unseen around the back of the truck a small man in a gray-green jacket leaned against a parking meter, finishing the last pages of his Aimee Paladine.

Katherine gathered from onlookers that the taxi driver was in the telephone booth over the road, phoning for the Accident Instant Disposal Service. She returned for one last look at Mr Mathiesson, and then went quietly away through the crowd. Organisms wore out, broke down, stopped. There was nothing to make a song and dance about.

She passed the night in a grubby hotel. And woke with her anger gone. The change had begun right back by the crumpled taxi, by poor Mr Mathiesson whom nobody was ever going to humiliate again. But she had preserved her anger for its comfort, through her long walk across the aimless central precincts, each dedicated to a newer, brighter lie, of the city. She had preserved it for its solutions, for the righteousness it gave her, leaving Harry, incapable of the simplest thing she needed, to the anxious emptiness of the flat and an endlessly ringing doorbell. She had preserved her anger right across the new city and into the gray residue of the old, up the steps of the first hotel in a street like her father’s street, and on again up threadbare stairs to a studio room with a toilet annex.

‘Miss Wentworth,’ she had told the landlord. And then, ‘For just the one night,’ paying in advance and hoping he wouldn’t ask for her civil offenses card. He didn’t, but charged for this magnanimity in leers and heavy innuendos.