D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

But the seven hundred years had been unavailable. People had got in the way. She lay with her eyes closed, quietly testing the dexterity of her hands. She could oppose her thumbs. She had a long way yet.

The morning’s events had taken Harry differently, made him restless, full of plans. He ranged about the room, throwing out suggestions, places to go. She listened to him, felt affectionate, even loving, but isolated all the same on her slippery, twenty-six-day decline. In the end she had to interrupt.

‘We’re not going anywhere,’ she said. ‘We’re staying here. We’re talking in whispers, and drawing the blinds against the helicopters, and disconnecting all the bells. We’re staying here, in the one place where we’re safe.’ And sliding quietly, privately. down to death.

He stopped his pacing. ‘What about the shopping?’ He was patient with her. ‘Remember I’m known in the district. If I go—’

‘In a few hours you’ll be known in every district. And where you aren’t known, you’ll be followed. We’ll have the shopping delivered.’

‘I don’t like to say this, Katherine, but I think you overestimate public interest in your case.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes. A few more days and they’ll be on to something else.’

‘From a find to a check, from a check to a view, from a view to a death in the morning…’

‘You’re upset, Katherine.’

‘It’s a quotation, Harry. Peel’s view halloo… You’re forgetting I majored in Folk Lore.’

‘You told me Computer Science.’

She felt her scalp tightening. ‘We’re staying here,’ she said quietly. ‘Here where we’re safe.’

He sat down beside her and took her still dexterous hands and looked into her still nonhallucinating eyes. ‘Katherine love, we’d go mad. Nobody could live like that. We’d start hating each other. We’d go mad.’

Of course he was quite right. ‘Of course you’re quite right,’ she said. And suddenly saw that the only way for her to endure what remained was totally on her own. Where the madness would be hers only, and perhaps a comfort. ‘We’ll think of somewhere we can go. There must be somewhere.’

She gripped his hands, and pulled him closer, and kissed him on the mouth, and afterward whispered, ‘I’m sorry, love,’ in that intimate, unspecific way that allows no answer. He patted her and they kissed again, Katherine wondering all the while just how she was going to be rid of him, and he of her. The burden they presented to each other was intolerable.

Katherine Mortenhoe’s father, Clement Pyke, lived alone down in the old docks, aboard the converted fiberglass hull of an ex-river police hydrofoil. It took me nearly an hour to find him, weaving my scooter between old crane tracks and derelict warehouses and sky-high piles of rusting boiler tubing. It was real fringie country, though I didn’t on my way in see any.

Pyke’s boat turned out to be one of probably thirty, stacked out from the side of a huge dry dock and floating right down at the bottom in two or three feet of scum. The ladder down was rickety, the whole setup — electric cables, freshwater hoses, gangplanks — terribly impermanent. The area, I knew, was scheduled for imminent high-density, Venice-style redevelopment.

Clement Pyke was up on deck, leaning on the rail, taking the afternoon sun. He had the air of someone who has been in the same place in the same position for a long time. This time could much better have been employed on boat maintenance, but Mr Pyke was hardly dressed for doing-it-himself. In his late sixties, he wore — possibly for my benefit — an immaculate red sombrero, a curious, much-fringed and laced-up leather shirt, and tight green trousers that I could have told him only emphasized the inadequacies of his ancient equipment. His boots were crimson, and weighted down with brass buckles. Normally I like a man who takes thought for his appearance.

I went down the ladder, breathing in a sudden green chill. Pyke must have spotted me about three boats off, for he abruptly jerked into action and began intently polishing a once-chromed ventilator with his yellow bandanna. I stumbled on, and finally hailed him from his own transom — or counter, or whatever the back end of those old H.F.’s was called. At the sound of my voice he took off his hat and shaded his eyes with it. He had an unnecessarily black black beard and hair combed forward so that it might have been a wig but probably wasn’t… I noticed all this because I sensed that this was all I’d get: the attitude was the man; the continuous Clement Pyke was by now no more than the extension of one carefully-chosen moment.

‘Roddie child,’ he said, not overplaying the surprise bit, ‘you’ve come. Unscathed you’ve come. You’ve found our shitty little colony. Our rive gauche.’

He held out his hand for me to shake, consciously archaic, so I joined him and did. ‘Mr Pyke,’ I began, ‘it’s really very good of you to—’

‘Clement child, Clement.’ He retained my hand. ‘Pyke sounds as if you think I’m going to bite.’

Dutifully I chalked up the joke’s fifty thousandth polite smile. But he’d left me nothing to pin him with — total strangers’ first names don’t come to me all that easy. I disentangled my hand.

‘This isn’t an interview under the meaning of the Act,’ I said, just to get things straight. ‘I’m here to—’

‘I’ve been interviewed, buggered about by all sorts.’ He replaced his hat. ‘Belgrade, Tokyo, Sydney — I know the form. You’re after free fucking info. Something for nothing, child, in a hard, hard world.’

‘If you’d rather make it official I can perfectly well—’

He held up a lordly hand. Evidently I wasn’t going to finish many sentences that afternoon. ‘I told your network when they rang, Roddie child. I said, it’s funny how some people are news for the way they live, while others achieve fame only in the fashion of their dying.’ He smiled, and waited for the applause that only he heard. ‘You’ll have noticed,’ he went on, ‘that poor Katherine is not exactly my favorite person.’

From what I’d already seen of him, this didn’t surprise me, but I asked him all the same. ‘Why is that?’ I said.

‘It’s a bloody smashing afternoon,’ he said, looking up and around, as if discovering his surroundings for the first time. ‘Shall we stay up here for this interview that isn’t an interview?’

I agreed. Crossing his deck I’d caught a glimpse through a skylight of the boat’s interior — weird posters, and mobiles, and outlandish musical instruments, and racks and racks of lurid books that were probably his. I felt I’d weather the blast of his ego better up here in the open air. He squatted boyishly on a hatch cover and I perched beside him. He hadn’t been dodging my question, merely building the tension.

‘Katherine and I,’ he announced, ‘are like oil and water. I don’t grieve for her dying because I don’t feel she has ever lived. She’s never got her nose up out of the shit. There’s no tragedy, child, in losing what you’ve never had.’

I wasn’t there to argue with him. ‘Why do you think she got like that?’

‘You mean, whose fault was it? Certainly not mine. I’ve lived my life. I didn’t start writing till I was forty, you know. It was my third wife knew I had it in me. Before that I’d had at least three different and successful careers. Since then… well, a hundred and thirty books isn’t exactly dragging my feet.’

I didn’t ask him about the ‘different and successful careers’ -they’d certainly been different but hardly what most people would have called successful. And his present shabby life-style told me all I needed to know about the hundred and thirty books.