D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

‘At least you’ll be pleased that your daughter has done so well in a field associated with literature.’

‘No.’

His flat denial managed to encompass both his own total lack of pleasure and Computabook’s total disassociation with anything he could possibly regard as literature. I felt like challenging this position pace his own hundred and thirty books… but I was there to gather information on Katherine Mortenhoe, not to parade the inadequacies of her father. Vincent, I was sure, in his padded viewing room, would appreciate my forbearance.

‘Perhaps Katherine would have been happier with a brother or a sister,’ I suggested.

This seemed a new idea to him. He considered it. ‘My second wife had children… As far as I know, Katherine hated the sight of them. She certainly came to me quickly enough when I moved on.’ He stretched his legs out straight and innocently leaned back on his elbows. ‘I’ve always been bloody young, you see. Accessible, full of enthusiasm. If she’s told you she was lonely, she never had any fucking need to be.’

‘I haven’t yet spoken to her.’ There’d been only one baby in Clement’s marriages, and that one hadn’t been Katherine. ‘Can you tell me anything about her first husband?’

‘Gerry? A complete drear. The only bright thing he ever did was to move on. Even then, he wasted it. Child, so many people don’t understand the pace of life. Everything changes. Every fucking thing. Security… personal progress… finish one thing before you start another — all a load of cobblers. Look at me. But Gerry stuck with his old thing, whatever it was. Haven’t heard of him in years.’

Gerald Mortenhoe’s ‘old thing’ was teaching. He was headmaster now in a big rural comprehensive. On the face of it, he and Katherine had been ideally suited. Another father might have been able to tell me why it hadn’t worked.

‘Was it your idea,’ I said, sticking to facts, ‘that Katherine should go into computers?’

He screwed up his eyes. ‘I doubt it. I was probably in Rome at the time… Of course, it was just the sort of thing I knew she’d be good at. No flesh and blood, if you know what I mean. No fucking enthusiasm. Ha — that’s good.’

I headed him off. The sex-is-good-for-a-giggle line is decidedly old red sombrero hat these days. ‘You’ve traveled a lot,’ I said. ‘Did you often take Katherine with you?’

I knew the answer, but hoped for the reason. He gestured widely. ‘Campaigning, always campaigning… The time in Rome, for example, was overpopulation. We held a real jumpin’ rally outside St Peter’s. Then there was a whistle-stop on pollution took me across three continents. You couldn’t cart a girl around on things like that.’

Another man might have, and made a total mess of her: little girls went big on campaign platforms. So at least he’d spared her that… Also his causes had been good causes, so why did I feel that his association with them somehow lessened them? I thought of that ‘real jumpin’ rally’ outside St Peter’s and knew I wasn’t getting anywhere. Yet there must be something, some one concrete thing that only a father would know, that he could tell me about his daughter.

I stood up and went to the rail. ‘The experts think she has a very special sort of mind,’ I said. ‘Did you see any signs of this when she was younger?’

‘Load of shit. Don’t believe a word of it. If she’s really dying it’s because she wants to. Millions of them do, you see. Only the simpler ways aren’t allowed.’

I looked out across the scummy, gray-brown water. ‘Then you think the experts at the Medical Center are wrong?’

‘I fucking know they are.’ He heaved himself up and came to lean beside me. ‘There’s nothing special about Katherine. She was a boring child and she grew into a boring woman and now she’s going to die a boring death. And she’ll eke it out — she always was afraid of hurting herself.’

Perhaps he was trying to shock me with his picture of progressive, dispassionate parenthood. But I could well imagine that Katherine hadn’t been altogether an endearing child.

‘I tell you — I took her away on a holiday once. Couldn’t have been more than seven. Smashing playground, right beside the hotel. I’d just got married, you see.’ He nudged me, just in case I didn’t. ‘Couple of days, and the bloody child wouldn’t go near the place. Had to cart her every morning to a park the other side of town.’ He broke off. ‘Don’t mind me,’ he said, and unzipped his trousers and peed his disgust in a manly fashion over the side. I waited.

‘…The playground had this paddling pool. We reckoned the bloody little cunt was afraid of tumbling in and drowning. Unless of course she’d guessed my mind was on other things and didn’t like it. Played all hell with the honeymoon.’ He finished, waved to a couple of workmen up on the side of the dock, and made a business of re-confining himself. ‘Oh, she’s dying all right. But not of Gordon’s fucking syndrome. Believe me, Roddie, she’s a thoroughly boring woman. And, like most boring people, she needs attention. You’d do yourself a favor if you forgot the whole affair.’

I almost believed him. Till I remembered her face in that brief moment in the doctor’s office before she got the screen up. ‘And did a feature on you instead,’ I said. But my irony was wasted.

‘You might do worse,’ he murmured. ‘A hundred and thirty books in twenty-odd years. If SF’s on the map today, you know who put it there.’

I left him soon after. He’d got through five wives, this pathetic old man who couldn’t bear for his daughter to have anything, not even a rare and fatal condition. By all accounts he was well on his way to a sixth at that moment. I just hoped she wasn’t looking forward to being fathered.

I found my scooter in the middle of a group of the fringie kids who were camping in the surrounding warehouses. It wasn’t a proper village, not like in the old Container Depot a couple of miles away: just some people who were on the way from somewhere to somewhere, and pausing. They hadn’t damaged the scooter, but it was covered with little cut-out cows and Earth Mother stickers. The cow was a great nature symbol that month. The kids stood around, waiting to see what I’d do. And they weren’t all kids either. I didn’t tell them I was a newsman: a few years back the media had taken up Fringe Groups in a big way, and it had got so that the fringies were virtually putting on shows twice nightly for the visiting cameramen. So they’d started saying no, and the media men had started getting nasty, and attitudes had solidified the way they always do. So, not wanting a necklace of boiler tubing, I smiled, and mimed like me was heap good fella, and motored discreetly away, taking my cut-out cows and Earth Mother stickers with me.

I hadn’t seen any of the other inhabitants on Clement Pyke’s mooring, but if they were anything like him I reckoned they gave the fringies a fair amount of innocent amusement.

On my way back to NTV House I tried to convince myself that the afternoon had been profitable. I tried to see my inner picture of the continuous, the only true, Katherine Mortenhoe filling out. But it just wasn’t so. Her father had shown me convincing bases for a selfish, joyless, death-wished woman. Yet I’d seen her only that morning — Christ, how long my days were — dancing down the street. And earlier, in the doctor’s office, I’d seen the angry despair of a woman with a lot to do and no longer any time to do it in. Nothing fitted. And I didn’t even know yet why she called herself Mortenhoe.

A note from Vincent was waiting on my desk when I got in: he wanted to see me soonest.