D. Compton: The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

There was never a formal proposal on either side. They were both over forty, and both with a tenth year nonrenewal which, in spite of all the theories, was far harder to adjust to than a fifth year one. He was impressed by her work — she was completing Barbara’s phrase memory banks at the time — and she… she was sorry for him in his. It had been easy for them to fall into a sort of love.

And now they were already only a few months off their first renewal.

There was nothing wrong with their relationship. He read now, and not programmed books but the classics. He no longer sniffed. He kept his modeling things down in the block Hobby Room. He was faithful and kind, and the flat with him in it was never cold to come home to. They showed each other things, and enjoyed their holidays together. And he’d learned to hold his ejaculation off beyond the first six strokes.

There was, therefore, nothing wrong with their relationship. Except that it was a repeat of both their previous relationships, and if they were going to make it work this time it was because unconsciously they both knew this and were wiser now. They were going to make it work because life was long. They were going to make it work because the world of the Newly Singles was brassy and competitive. And they were going to make it work because they both believed (while never either of them actually doing anything about this belief) that one day something else, something really exciting would happen, and that until it did, until he, she, did, the present arrangement was a great deal better than any conceivable other.

And now they were already only a few months off their first renewal.

Left alone in the kitchen after Harry had gone down to the Hobby Room, she was reminded, with a twinge of anxiety, of the impending renewal. They’d talked about it, of course, and been in total agreement. But it now occurred to her that if Dr Mason’s news were bad enough, then perhaps Harry would be tempted to change his mind. She knew that sickness provided a Basis for Discussion: she could apply for a stay, if nothing else. She also knew that Harry was anyway far too delicate ever to voice such doubts as he might have. He was, in spite of his simplicity, perhaps because of it, a very delicate man. But a continuing relationship on such terms would be unendurable.

The tightness around her scalp intensified, and the whirr of the dishwasher seemed to take away all her powers of concentration. She left the kitchen and rummaged in her case for the Ethel Pargeter proofs. Then she took two of her capsules, as Harry had advised, and went to bed.

In the quiet of the bedroom, while she was waiting for the capsules to take effect, she decided that, whatever Dr Mason said, she would tell Harry everything was fine. Furthermore, she would choose surgery rather than a prolonged drug therapy — she could always pretend a short business trip to cover hospitalization. Even if the risks of surgery were high, she’d still accept them. For Harry, a dead wife would be better than one he hadn’t the heart to nonrenew.

Ten minutes later her mood had lifted, such was the chemistry of moods, and she knew that Harry would wait for her gladly, no matter how long her therapy took. He loved her. (He also wasn’t all that much of a catch, and knew it.) She propped up the proofs on her knee and took out her ballpoint… By the time Harry came in from the Hobby Room she’d checked thirty pages and really quite enjoyed them. Ethel was the frankest of Barbara’s three personae and in consequence Katherine was now feeling deliriously sexy. People might laugh at these old-fashioned romances, but there were marriages that survived half-a-dozen renewals, and fellatio at forty-four wasn’t simply an old maid’s dream.

With the day of her appointment firmly, safely, fixed in her mind as Wednesday (the day she was having her hair done), she endured the waiting period of wild emotional fluctuation as best she could. She reminded herself that neither the peaks nor the valleys were necessarily ‘true’: there was no ‘truth’ in human emotion, only differing degrees of chemical imbalance. Opinions and decisions — matters of faith even — were likewise a matter of chemistry, of electrochemical interaction. Although well-known facts, these were naturally to be carefully excluded from the (frank) programmed pages of an Ethel Pargeter.

One day, as Katherine watched spring put whiskers and tiny flowers on the moss on her office windowsill, she thought, I must really write my own book. A book about people as they really are. Neither despicable nor honorable, since neither term applies…. She drew patterns on her jotter. Neither abject nor dignified, since these are irrelevant concepts. Each one simply chemistry, simply a bundle of neurones, each bundle equipped with an internal communications system built up down life’s millennia for reasons mostly long obsolete, and disrupted randomly by the imperfections of the reproductive process. She scrubbed her jotter and began other patterns. My book will contain the only truth, that there is no truth, and it will make me famous. I shall write it possibly in the hospital, possibly dictating the last chapters as I die.

She was the Romance division of Computabook. It cocooned her, kept her warm. If she had ever read the literary magazines she would have known that such novels as the one she projected were published, micro-fleched and racked away every week of the year.

On Tuesday morning, however (as she had known he would?), Peter had to come and destroy the subtle fail-safe mechanism she had constructed around the sensitive matter of Dr Mason’s appointment.

‘Outies at ten,’ he said. ‘Or had you forgotten?’

She didn’t hear him. Ethel Pargeter now behind her, she was at the title stage of the new Celia Wentworth, and she did not hear him. She’d demanded six reruns from Barbara, and still she wasn’t satisfied. Incapable of impatience, Barbara was mulling over the seventh.

‘Outies at ten,’ Peter said. ‘Surely you’ve looked in your diary?’

For some reason she hadn’t turned over the pages of her diary since the previous Friday. Barbara ticked, and put out a small, polite blue tongue. A Fit for a Queen, Katherine read. She crumpled the blue slip and threw it away, then reached for her jotter. It had to be her fault Barbara had missed the epilepsy connotation: she must check the cross-associations in the word store. Apart from that it was neat. Every young girl’s dream. A Fit for a Queen. Very neat.

‘Mason, ten-thirty.’ Peter had leaned across and turned the pages of her diary for her. ‘So outies at ten. You don’t want to be late, love.’

And then she could be angry with him, angry for everything that Harry and Gerald, that her father and her stepmothers, that Dr Mason and the kind youngish man at the Medical Center, angry for everything that life and the whole vile function and malfunction of her oozing woman’s body had ever caused her to endure. For his interference in her private, utterly personal affairs she could justifiably be very angry indeed.

And then she could go, raw and unprepared, shaken -horrified even — by the intensity of her anger, hiding in the logistic misery of the journey (how much of city life was concerned with the weary process of getting from one undesirable place to another?), then she could go, without pause, to her appointment with Dr Mason in his office on the fourth floor of the Medical Center. The event could creep up on her unawares. Which was by far the best way.

Not that it mattered, she thought, waiting for her last connection. It was ridiculous, really, going to all this trouble for an appointment that was entirely the result of a clerical error.

She could be angry again when told by the receptionist that today Dr Mason wasn’t in his usual office, when sent up to a room on the sixth floor instead. Bundled about like a parcel. And his new room, when she reached it, was nasty. As she might have known. It was mustard-carpeted, soothing, with expensive teak-faced furniture and a mirror along one wall, not like a doctor’s office at all. She caught a glimpse of a woman in the mirror and found it difficult to connect the image with her own vivid sense of self.