D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

She nearly struck him. ‘You laugh at me, and you laugh at them. You’re not fit to be a doctor.’

His face stilled and he looked away, far more hurt than she would have expected. ‘Whatever else my failings may be, I can promise you that I find neither you nor the afflictions of the old in the least amusing.’

It was a ridiculous conversation. People pushed past them, got into the elevator. He seemed totally unaware. ‘Obviously you will want another doctor. I believe you saw Dr Clarke a couple of times. If you need any help, phone the Center and they’ll put you through to him. I’ll make sure he receives your documents. And good luck.’

He bowed very slightly, and left her. She wanted to protest: she hadn’t meant it. She didn’t want Dr Clarke, she wanted him. He knew her. He understood her. He was her only way in through the professional carapace. And yet, knowing her he had brought her to this terrible building, and the people he had shown her frightened her more than death itself.

She watched him walk away across the crowded foyer. She would never see his Dr Clarke. Wherever she was, whatever happened to her, she now had no one to turn to. Which was, after all, the historic animal condition. She pulled herself together and walked out of the hospital, out into the sunny late morning of her twenty-fourth remaining day. If she hurried she might get to Vincent Ferriman before lunch.

The next on my list of people who I reckoned would help me to understand the only true and continuous Katherine Morten-hoe was the man she worked with at Computabook. I arrived at his office around ten, when I could be sure that Katherine would still be hospitalized and not liable to come barging in. Vincent had warned me he was still keeping me very much in reserve as far as she was concerned. I’d finally got through to him while he was having his breakfast: I had questions I wanted to ask about the poor bloody students. He fielded the questions so neatly that he might in fact not have been fielding them at all. Except that from what I knew of him, the better he fielded the more he had to field.

Katherine’s Peter was a disappointment. Either he liked her very much, and so wasn’t telling, or he disliked me very much, and so wasn’t telling. He said she came to work early and went home late. She was a thoughtful boss, he said. She didn’t despise her work, but she didn’t over-revere it either. She kept a sense of proportion in all things… Well, no, he said, perhaps she didn’t have all that much of a sense of humor. The woman he described was nobody, certainly not Katherine Mortenhoe.

Maybe I wasn’t his type. Some fags went for me, others didn’t. Either way, there were many things I’d do for NTV, but that had never been one of them.

I tried a different line. ‘Did she ever talk to you about her first husband?’ I asked.

‘Should she have?’

‘Come on. He must have been important to her. After all, she kept his name even after her second marriage.’

‘Perhaps she liked it. It’s a nice word. Words mean a lot to her.’

I doubted if it was as simple as that. ‘Then she never mentioned him?’

‘If I said never, then you’d go away and make something of it. Of course she mentioned him. But she never confided, not about him or about anything else. We worked together, that’s all.’

They’d worked together for three years, which is a long time in these progressive days. Was she really such a private person? ‘So she mentioned him. What did she say?’

He looked at me sideways. ‘I tell you one thing,’ he said, ‘she was wasted here on these romances.’

‘Was that what her first husband said?’

‘He couldn’t know. He was one of those ugly men, all chin and rugged good sense.’ So she hadn’t confided, merely shown him a photograph. ‘He couldn’t know anything. Even I didn’t know till a couple of days ago.’

I waited, sort of neutral. If he’d decided to tell me something, he would. ‘She could’ve been a great writer,’ he said. ‘A really great writer.’

‘You can’t mean those novels she did while she was still at college.’

He shook his head. ‘This was very recent. I’ve been going over her notes. She was on to something really big. If you media men hadn’t got at her she’d have done something fantastic. A totally new approach to computer fiction.’

He must have caught my expression. ‘All right, so computer fiction isn’t all that it might be. But you only get out what you put in. And she knew she had so little time… What she was putting in was great — the book would have been real, and all hers. Huge. Savage. Angry.’

He was terribly excited. He might have been talking about his favorite man, but hardly about the work of the Katherine Mortenhoe I thought I knew. ‘Gould I see these notes?’ I said.

‘You’re welcome. But they won’t mean much. Rebuilt associations, situations freed, word-stores relinked — you need training for that sort of thing.’

I allowed him his little victory. Which was big of me, seeing I’d no alternative. ‘So?’ I said, cool like.

‘So I’m going to work on it. It could be great. I always knew there was more to her than she let show. If there’s enough to give me her intentions, I’ll finish it. The testament of a tomorrow person. Wow.’

Wow indeed. Of course, I’d always imagined (silly me) that tomorrow people would somehow be calm and compassionate and all-wise — if they were going to be huge and savage and angry I didn’t see they’d be much of an improvement on today people. But I thanked her Peter for the tip. As guardian of her greatness he needed all the encouragement he could get.

Obviously my next call had to be on Gerald Mortenhoe. Apart from anything else, the business of the name still niggled at me. Certainly it was a nice word: but old-fashioned Harry would hardly have agreed to it without a fight. And in those early, romantic, new-beginning days, would a fight have been worth it, simply for the sake of a nice word? A word that linked her to an ugly man, all chin and rugged good sense?

Katherine was a puzzle. I’d seldom come across anybody with so few contacts, so few friends, so little family. After Gerald there was nobody. Except Harry, and I’d have to wait on him till we were formally introduced. Vincent’s hack scouts had even been around to her Residential Block and drawn a blank on hello-across-the-hallway acquaintances. Harry had his Hobby Room rivals, but Katherine had nobody. And according to her case history she didn’t even have b.o.

The day was still sunny, so I decided to drive the eighty-odd miles out of the city to Gerald Mortenhoe’s school, top down, feeling big and shiny. My car was sharp, and very expensive, part of the new rich life I hadn’t quite grown used to. I drove out through the streets of the inner city slowly, catching the cool reflection in shop windows whenever I could. People turned their heads, and I felt for once not gray with three months’ sleeplessness (the drugs were wonderful, weren’t they, weren’t they?), but young and vivid. Incognito behind my hirsute fur-suit, but somebody all the same. Somebody.

If I’d been less of a Somebody the marchers might have let me through.

I came on them first as I tried to cross the southern Ring Road. I was fifth in a queue of cars, and they let the first four over. Me they decided they didn’t like. I didn’t altogether blame them — in that car I had to be someone high up either in business or government or the trade unions. Or — worst of all from their anti-pap point of view — a commercial entertainer. So they sat down on the road in front of me and the police started hauling them away. More marchers were arriving all the time, of course, so that every time a space got emptied it was immediately filled again. Besides, arrests on that scale were impossible, so those hauled away would quietly pick themselves up and wander back to sit again. The police began to sweat, and to lose whatever cool they had ever possessed, and the truncheons came out, and the boots. Beyond the marchers I could see water cannon arriving.