D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

She savored him for his hairy arms, his nastiness, and would have opened her legs for him there and then (fifty years of love?) if she’d only known how. And then, when she was finally alone, she looked out at the street, her father’s street, the first street she remembered, and understood the pathetic reasons why she had chosen it from a thousand others, and cried.

Later that evening she threw away her sheaf of computer jottings and went out of the hotel to find a telephone booth and ring Harry. Ring him for different, clearer reasons. But the number was not available, and she quickly guessed why. She was glad he had had the sense to protect himself. Perhaps he had disconnected the doorbell as well.

She went to bed early, woke once in the night, sweating and gripped by rigor. She tried her limbs for paralysis, but it wasn’t yet ready for her. She didn’t take a capsule: she wanted to measure, to know her condition. The rigor lasted thirty-three minutes. After it she slept again, strangely content.

In the morning she left the hotel early, before the landlord was up. She called in at a nearby police station, made a formal statement of Private Grief, and received two plastic stickers, one for her lapel and one for her front door or car. She now had three days’ respite.

On the landing outside her flat a reporter was asleep on an inflatable mattress while another sat dozing against the wall. They roused themselves, read the sticker she put on her door, and started wearily packing up. She went in to Harry.

‘I’m home,’ she called, telling herself she was. ‘Harry love, I’m home.’

The flat had a hectic, besieged air. She went through to the bedroom, where Harry was stirring, trying to open his eyes against the early morning glare and undoubtedly (she didn’t blame him) a considerable weight of Panidorm. He looked vulnerable and, Barbara prompted her, like a dormouse. Whatever a dormouse was. Hibernatory? She took off her jacket and lay down on the bed beside him.

‘I was afraid you weren’t coming back,’ he said.

‘I was in a muddle, love. I’m sorry.’

‘I was afraid you weren’t coming back.’

He wouldn’t hear her, so she could explain. ‘I was angry with all the wrong things, Harry. People. And it’s not people’s fault. All this, it’s not people’s fault.’

‘And now you’ve come.’ He reached over the bedclothes for her hand. ‘You’ve come,’ he said.

There was more of her explanation, but the words died of their own ridiculous weight. She squeezed Harry’s hand, and let his sleep reach out and take her.

I think I watched the arrival of the following morning, the second morning after my first sight of the only true Katherine Mortenhoe, I think I watched it from down by the river. It’s a fair guess anyway. I was often down there early those days, seeking the mist that gathered under the bridges and around the stiff black skirts of the moored hovercraft, composing pictures in my head of silky water and seabirds, and police launches winking by. All right, so it was corny, but I had this picture poem in mind. I’d shape up the tapes back at base one day, and sell them to some Arts Show. If you had the Gift, the fourteen-thousand-pound Gift, you might as well make use of it.

Anyway, I was on my way back west to look for some breakfast — if it wasn’t from the river it was from somewhere else — when I saw the only true Katherine Mortenhoe cross the road at an intersection ahead of me. I made no effort to catch up with her, of course: if she’d signed with Vincent I’d surely have heard, and besides, I soon caught sight of the orange fluorescent glow from the sticker on her lapel. So I just kept on as I was going, and then paused at the corner to watch her out of sight. She didn’t see me. I don’t think she’d have seen me if I’d been ten feet tall in a neon suit. She was dancing. Not crudely, just these three little steps and an old-fashioned sashay, all the way down the sidewalk. Out in the street, forty-four, with four weeks to live, and dancing. There were others about, and they watched her just the way I did. Only they probably thought she was mad, or high, while I knew different.

I tell you, it made my day. Working with her wasn’t going to be so rough after all. She possessed what I liked to call the possibility of joy. It’s rare these days. Perhaps she had needed Dr well-meaning Mason to bring it out in her, but there it was. The real, the continuous Katherine Mortenhoe possessed the possibility of joy. I rang Vincent from the nearest phone, got him out of bed to tell him what I’d seen.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ he said. ‘Yesterday her joy was something else again.’

‘You didn’t tell me you’d been in touch.’

‘Briefly. A hymn of hate. There was nothing to tell.’

‘You still think she’ll sign?’

‘With somebody. And we’re the first in the field.’

‘I’d have approached her myself, the mood she’s in, only she’s got herself a three-day sticker.’

‘Best thing. Give her time to learn the score. And you stick to instructions. I’m saving the Roderick charm as my final clincher.’

We talked of this and that. It was a friendly sort of morning.

‘You got good footage of this dancing?’ he asked.

‘Two minutes. Maybe more.’

‘Sounds like good run-in stuff. Behind the titles. Upbeat. Kill the critics always shouting morbid.’

‘They worry you?’

‘I thought they might worry you.’

‘That was two days ago.’

‘I shan’t ask you what brought about the necessary adjustment.’

‘Put it like that and you’ll make me wonder.’

He laughed. ‘You artistic types are all the same. And ring me out of sleeping hours next time you want to spread your bonhomie around. We aren’t all blessed with the golden gift of sleeplessness.’

Only Vincent could have grasped the nettle so firmly as to get away with it.

‘Right,’ I said, and laughed also. ‘The dawn patrol for you in the future. Half-hourly reports on Phoebus rising.’

But he’d hung up, and my sharp non-joke was wasted. I’d get his answering service if I called him back. I went out into the undimmed, Katherine-Mortenhoe-dancing-down-the-street morning.

Perhaps the spring was really for humans once a matter of externals, of cuckoos and poetic crocuses. Or perhaps it’s always been what it is today, an affair in the blood, a chemistry even the largest city cannot arrest, a process that bends one’s perceptions till even oneself can be almost beautiful. In March the sun may shine and the air may be balmy, but without April in the blood this lightheartedness never catches fire. The buildings may purr, but the body knows better. It wears its ugly winter, summer, autumn skin and, as in all these seasons, knows no other. Only in spring is the flesh new, and the spirit incorruptible. Which made, I thought on that sweetly sad, sadly sweet, Katherine Mortenhoe morning, the spring the only bearable time for dying.

Remembering these thoughts I know that I must have been down by the river that morning. Art Showitis tends to linger.

I was due for my final check at the Clinic at half-past nine. With three hours to kill I thought, outrageously, of dropping in on my son and ex. I suppose it was Katherine Mortenhoe’s fault. I told myself, as I slipped back into the booth and rang for one of my still-novel taxis, that my son and ex perhaps mightn’t have noticed the spring. Perhaps they could do with some of the bonhomie that had so cheered up Vincent.

I honestly believed that these were my motives: spring, Katherine Mortenhoe, and a simple desire to share something with someone. I could, I honestly believed, think of no other.

The suburb was just as it had always been, green baize lawns and never-fade Virginia creeper. I nearly got straight back into the taxi and went off for a ritzy breakfast on the far side of town. But they drew me, the gate I’d knocked up in a couple of Sundays, our holograph aerial that at one time had been the first down our road. They all had them now, I saw, except the Richardsons (fancy them still being there) who had this reverse snobbery thing about the Joneses. Theirs was probably hidden in their loft.