D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

Tracey answered the doorbell on the second ring. I remembered her as a sounder sleeper. The time was just on six. ‘You’ve grown a beard,’ she said. It was our first meeting in over two years. Tracey feels it’s some kind of weakness to show surprise.

‘You haven’t.’

‘Not for want of trying.’ She leaned on the edge of the door. ‘You wanted something?’

I wanted her to look at the spring. If I’d said so she might easily have shut the door in my face. ‘I’m lonely,’ I said instead.

‘That makes two of us.’

‘May I warm my hands at your simple hearth?’

‘You’ll never learn,’ she said. But she stood to one side and let me in. I went through to the kitchen. Looking around, I couldn’t see she’d changed a thing. ‘How’s our little Basis for Discussion?’ I said.

‘I wish you wouldn’t call him that. Roddie Two’s fine.’

I needed to start again. Smart reporter’s talk was no way in. Or out. Never had been. ‘May I sit down?’

‘You pay the rent.’

‘Please, Tracey. You know I’ve never been like that.’

She tied her bathrobe tighter. ‘What am I supposed to do? You come in here… Just tell me the script, Roddie. Reconciliation? Loving daddy? Tell me the script and maybe I’ll make it.’

‘There’s no script. It was a lovely morning. I… don’t sleep much. I just came.’

‘That’s my lovable, impulsive Roddie.’ She turned away abruptly, brushing her hair back from her face. ‘No — I didn’t mean that. I’m glad to see you, Roddie. Real glad. But what next?’

‘You could make me some eggs and coffee.’

‘Go away, Roddie. Go away before we start shouting. Before Roddie Two wakes up and we’re all back down there in the shit.’

I dared not move. One movement and I was gone.

‘Sit down, Tracey.’ Easily, easily. ‘You sit down and I’ll do the making.’

She could have blown up in my face, but she didn’t. She went to the cooker and flicked switches. I saw there was a big new chip off the enamel on the corner.

‘I don’t know what you want,’ she said, ‘but eggs and coffee I can just about run to.’

I sat down, and launched into the story about the middle-aged woman I’d seen dancing down Oakridge. I did a good job, and she saw straight through it. She understood me, so I always said, better than I understood myself.

‘This woman’s got a name,’ she said. ‘You didn’t say it, but you know it. You’re going to use her, and you’ve come back to me to tell you it’s OK.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

She filled the coffeepot and set it to perk. I’d been mad, and cruel to us both, to come. Such a bright clean, spring-filled kitchen.

‘We look out for you,’ Tracey said. ‘Roddie Two and me. You haven’t been around on the screen these four-five months. No trouble, I hope?’

Up to that moment, for as much as an hour, I’d forgotten. At least I’d proved to myself that it could be done. But now I remembered, and was even more certain I should go.

‘No trouble,’ I said. ‘I’ve been… negotiating a new contract. In the future I’ll be more behind the camera than out front.’

‘Directing?’ She turned from the cooker, being interested in my career. ‘Will you like that?’

‘It’s more money,’ I said. I wanted to tell her. There was nobody in the whole world I wanted to tell, only Tracey. But Vincent there behind my eyes said no. ‘Look, I can’t say much about it now, Tracey. You’ll hear soon enough, once PR says the moment’s right.’

She pushed her hair back again. It was longer now, two years longer.

‘You’ve sold another bit of your soul,’ she said. ‘I was wrong about that woman, Roddie. You’ve sold another bit of your soul and you want me to clap my hands and cheer. You’ve come to tell me I was right. Right not to renew.’ She moved toward me, leaned across the table, tried to look into my eyes which I couldn’t allow. ‘Why are you here, Roddie?’

I stood up. ‘I’d better go,’ I said. ‘It was misguided of me to come.’ Hopefully that would annoy her. Then I could go away, and feel aggrieved, rejected.

‘Misguided?’ She didn’t annoy that easily. ‘I like that word misguided. You know, Roddie, for all of two minutes I thought you’d come back.’

I didn’t remind her it was she who hadn’t renewed. I went at last to the garden door, unlocked it. As always, the key stuck a bit. ‘I meant it about the more money, Tracey. Roddie Two’s got a rich daddy.’

‘Won’t you stay and see him?’

‘I’d like you two to find a bigger place. Somewhere he can see a field. Maybe a cow.’

And still she refused her dislike. ‘Come to bed, Roddie.’ She held out one hand. ‘There was always that.’

I wanted to make love to her. We made the best love. I’d wanted to make love to her from the moment she’d said she was lonely too. But Vincent there behind my eyes said yes. Yes, yes, yes.

She didn’t need much telling. Two seconds and she lowered her outstretched hand. ‘I don’t have a lover,’ she said. ‘If that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘They’re all the rage,’ I said.

I was finding it extraordinarily difficult to get out through that open garden door. And we’d been through that kind of talk ten minutes ago.

‘Now I do give up.’ She held up fingers, counting them off. ‘If it’s not sex, and if it’s not guilt, and if it’s not Roddie Two, and if it’s not my home cooking, then I do give up.’

She only played that kind of game when she was upset, I mean really upset. I closed my eyes and lowered my head so that she wouldn’t see, and crossed the room to her, and put my arms around her. I felt her shoulder blades under my hands and her breasts against my chest. She welcomed me, and I kissed her. I meant wait for me.

We stood like that for a long time, just remembering each other, till the pain behind my eyes began to build, and the salacious giggles of the blacked-out office boys. Then I stood back from her and opened my eyes, and wished to God that for those office boys she didn’t have to look so kissed.

‘I must go,’ I said. And meant wait for me.

I meant what I had no right to mean, what I had no right to offer, what I had no right even to want. She looked at me, into my violated eyes.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose you must.’

I went out of the kitchen and quickly around the side of the house, leaving her to the coffee percolating steadfastly on the stove.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose you must.’ No regret.

Green baize lawns and never-fade Virginia creeper.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose you must.’ No pleasure.

Swollen crocuses, outsize beyond the call of duty.

Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose you must.’ Risking nothing, afraid of commitment afraid of being hurt…

It was all I had to go on. Knowing Tracey, it was a lot. I ran. I leaped and bounded. But for the memory of dancing Katherine Mortenhoe, I might have danced. One was what one was, I believed: and I was a newsman. No conceivable set of circumstances could ever change that. And she was unalterably she. But I ran. The impossible, I thought, if I thought, and I didn’t think, thinking it now instead, the impossible takes slightly longer. I ran, gasping, and walked, and came to a thruway, and found a transport motel, and ordered a man-size breakfast. The office boys could make what they liked of me. I had within me, like Katherine Mortenhoe, the possibility of joy.

She woke again at half-past eight and immediately grasped the day ahead. It would be one of plans, decisions. Harry had been quite right to suggest going away somewhere. The farther the better. She bounced off the bed, caught sight of her crumpled clothes in the mirror, rubbed them down with her Smoothie, and revolved slowly, considering her reflection. Not bad for forty-four, and the grave only twenty-six days off. She went in search of Harry’s travel brochures. It was odd how the old ways of thought lingered. She hadn’t heard of a grave, not a real corpse-and-coffin grave, not in ten or fifteen years. Herself, she’d give her altered organism to a medical school: young ones — well, middle-aged ones — must be fairly hard to come by. She looked in the desk, and behind the clock, and in the drawer of the kitchen table. Then she tried the bedroom. Finally she roused Harry.