D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

‘So you’ll know I’m all right? When the papers start screaming, you’ll know I’m going on? You’ll know I’m somewhere, and all right?’

‘I’d never have doubted it.’

He put his arm around her and comforted her. He was so young, and he didn’t know a plot loop from a denouement phase. Oddly, for Gerald had been as hetero as they came, he reminded her of her first husband. But she and Gerald had both been young then.

‘I’m not an armored cruiser,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I ever was.’

He patted her, and moved her gently away. ‘Come along now. If this goes on much longer we’ll be making Somebody jealous.’ He found a crumpled handkerchief in his dressing gown pocket and gave it to her for her face. It had lipstick on it, but she didn’t mind.

‘Good-bye then.’

‘Good-bye, Katie-Mo.’

Going down in the elevator she looked at her watch. The half-hour she had allowed Harry was long expired. If Harry found she was gone, and rang Vincent, then Vincent might put out a general alarm. She wished now that she had chosen somewhere other than the heliport — it swarmed with policemen at the best of times. She gave up any idea of covering her tracks and got the taxi driver to take her straight there. The sooner she did what she had to do and got away out of it, the better. She told him, as an afterthought, that she was hoping to catch the twelve-forty-five to Amsterdam.

For all she knew, there might even be a twelve-forty-five for Amsterdam.

The driver set her down at the main entrance. Beyond the edges of the awning drizzle fell in a steady gray screen. Fumbling in her handbag for the fare money she had never felt more conspicuous. She had run up an enormous bill on the meter and had scarcely enough money. She emptied out her purse down to the very last coin and gave him the lot. The tip turned out to be quite generous — as the last taxi driver in her life he deserved it. She was leaving the money world behind.

He accepted it with little joy. ‘I hope NTV knows where you’re off to, Mrs Mortenhoe.’

‘Of course.’ She smiled at him brightly. Up to then he hadn’t spoken. Perhaps he was a Vincent spy. ‘I’m not staying. I’m going to choose some bulbs. Pretty daffodils in pots.’

‘You won’t like Amsterdam,’ he said, signaling to drive off. ‘It’s full of these Americans.’

She laughed, more than the joke demanded, if it was a joke, and watched him drive away. He wasn’t a spy, she decided, just one of her public jealous of his rights.

She was recognized again just inside the foyer.

‘Need any help, Mrs Mortenhoe?’ Two policemen, friendly, before she had time to run, time to be afraid even. She told them the Amsterdam story, which they believed. ‘Bet it’s raining there too, Mrs Mortenhoe.’ But their radio-phones might at any time betray her. ‘Well, ma’am, ticket office over there. If you need any help, just say.’

She thanked them calmly and walked, did not run, away in the direction they indicated. She changed direction only when she was sure she was lost in the crowd. There was a notice on the wall of the left luggage office. It told her what she should have known, what she really did know, already: Passengers Withdrawing Luggage Should Place a $op Piece in the Slot Provided.

She did not have a 50p piece. She had rushed into symbolic poverty five minutes too soon.

Her first crazy impulse was to run out after the taxi driver and demand her money back, her tip that his surliness did not deserve. Then she took herself in hand and wondered instead what she had with her that she could possibly sell — in the environs of the heliport probably nothing, not even her dear old fanny. Well then, if you needed money in a hurry, and the banks were closed for the weekend, and you had nothing to sell… well then, you begged or borrowed or stole. Of these three she decided briskly that the last would be the least emotionally demanding.

For a quarter of an hour or so she wandered vainly around the public departments of the heliport, looking for a pocket she could pick or a purse she could snatch. Then she tried banging coffee machines for rejected coins. The situation was rapidly tipping over into farce. In her head she was screaming with laughter. Screaming with screaming.

In the end she did what she had once actually seen another woman do, and been too astounded to intervene. She walked quickly into the nearest shop, took a packet of stockings openly from a display rack and went with it to the busiest counter. Desperate situations called for desperate remedies.

‘Excuse me,’ she said grandly. ‘I bought these here about ten minutes ago, and—’

‘Not from me, you didn’t.’

The face across from hers was a rat-trap. ‘No, from one of the other girls. When I got them out into the daylight I saw they were quite the wrong color.’

‘Where’s your bill, then?’

‘Bill? I suppose it’s still in the bag.’

‘Let’s have a see then.’

‘Oh dear.’ She did her best to sound fluffy. ‘Should I have kept it?’

‘You should.’

There shouldn’t have been a rat-trap. There should have been a nice motherly woman who would pay up without question. That was what there’d been on the other occasion.

‘…I’m afraid. I put it in one of those bin things. I suppose I could go and dig it out…’

‘Yerse. I suppose you could.’

The rat-trap was examining Katherine, her clothes, her nice expensive handbag (an engagement present from Harry, the handbag), her face. Her face made the rat-trap tighten, hesitate, then open. ‘Give ‘em here, then.’

The stockings were snatched out of her hand. ‘Can’t have Mrs bloody fancy Mortenhoe dirtying her bloody fancy hands in the litter basket now can we?’

‘They were one twenty-eight,’ Katherine said, keeping her voice steady. She was a thief. She was planning to cheat Vincent. She was planning to cheat the shop. She could expect humiliation.

‘Innit bleeding funny? The more some people got, the more they bleeding want.’

The money came back across the counter, tossed insultingly. Katherine scrabbled it up and went. Behind her somebody was being told loudly about Mrs bleeding Mortenhoe who could afford a hundred pairs of bleeding stockings, and anyway who was going to look at her bleeding legs, her with this bleeding nasty disease and all?

Back in the left luggage department Katherine leaned against her locker and counted the hard round coins in her hand. One twenty-eight. Her humiliation had been worth it. Incidental. She had never felt so rich. She retrieved her sleeping bag holdall and still had seventy-eight. Even after the lavatory cubicle slot she still had seventy-three. She was rich.

Changing in the confined space was awkward. On either side of her women came, and flushed, and went. She’d seen sinisterly shut cubicle doors herself, and heard inexplicable noises, and imagined uncomfortable lesbiana. Now at last she knew what had really been happening. Behind the closed doors women had been taking off their old lives and shrugging themselves awkwardly into the new.

The under-robe fitted fairly well, but the outer one was much too long, so she hitched it up at the waist and let it hang down over the plaited belt. The necklace looked really quite pretty. She wondered if fringe women wore panties and bras. She decided she didn’t care very much either way: they wouldn’t show under the rest of the ridiculous outfit, and she’d feel safer with them on. She found she still had Peter’s lipsticky handkerchief, and used it to wipe off most of her makeup, leaving her face suitably dirty-greasy. She folded her Katherine Mortenhoe clothes and put them in the holdall, together with her handbag and shoes. She’d have liked to be rid of the clothes, and with them all reminders of her old self, but there was no point in telling Vincent’s men that she was now revised, reformed, made over. She’d dump them later, somewhere they wouldn’t be so easily found.