D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

They stopped at a cafe and ate very cheaply. She found she was free of something else — of worry about the food she ate, the unhealthy additives, the low vitamin content. If she was going to die of anything, it wouldn’t be malnutrition.

They walked on. Katherine had never understood the size of the outer city. Lines of shops, housing estates, garages, industrial estates, garages, schools and leisure centers, garages, lines of shops again. The shops were all that was left of little village centers. After five hours of walking, open country was still as unimaginable as it had ever been. Maybe fifteen miles — in Harry’s motorcar ten minutes of flicking lamp standards and the back of the car in front. Ground you never walked over was unreal, bearable.

Their stops grew more frequent. Her tiredness became a sickness in her bones. She ceased to care. She pee’d on the verge where she sat. The fume-poisoned grass prickled her. But at least she still pee’d when she chose to pee, and didn’t when she didn’t. Rod stood with his back to her, tactfully watching the passing cars.

Suddenly one of these burned to a halt reversed back along the hard shoulder, wound down a window, showed itself to contain a human being.

‘Want a lift?’

She stood up, easing her panties up under her robes. Rod went forward to the curb. ‘Where to?’ he asked. She didn’t hear the answer. Rod came back to where she was standing. ‘Ten miles on, then he turns off for Fairhills. What d’you think?’

She nodded. Ten miles on were ten miles on. And it was beginning to rain. ‘He smiles too much,’ Rod said. ‘But I expect I can manage him.’

They got into the back seat of the car. The man was small and neat, with crinkly gray hair. Expensive.

‘Thank you very much,’ Katherine said.

‘My pleasure. No day to be on the road.’

They drove off. Katherine sat back and closed her eyes. Rod and the expensive man made sort of conversation.

‘Nice car.’

‘I’m glad you like it. Are you going far?’

‘Far enough.’

‘I’m sorry — silly question… You know, I’ve really got a lot of sympathy with you people.’

‘You must have. You picked us up.’

‘Surely, surely…’

Katherine was warm for the first time in hours, and slightly light-headed. The expensive man had an expensive car, big and very comfortable. She dozed.

‘…Of course, I give lifts to all sorts. Try not to be bigoted. I mean, everyone’s got a point of view, and I like to hear it.’

‘Point of view about what?’

‘Anything at all, John. Anything at all… I keep an open house. Keep an open mind as well. Quite a little group. You know?’

‘I don’t think I do.’

‘Discussions. Shared experiences. Nothing too earnest, of course. But there’s nobody you can’t learn something from. Funny thing, actually, meeting you two like this. I was just—

‘I’m afraid we can’t. It’s very good of you, but we must—

‘Hold hard, John. What’s this, then?’

‘You were going to ask us back to wherever you have your groups.’

‘My home. Well, perhaps I was. But not just like that. Social intercourse needs lubrication. It needs—’

‘Yours may. Ours doesn’t.’

‘Besides, you make the suggestion sound faintly sinister.’ He broke off. ‘Is your lady ill?’ he said.

Katherine opened her eyes, met his in the mirror. The eyebrows above them were raised sympathetically. ‘Me? I’m fine. Tired, that’s all,’ and she stretched untidily, fringily, feeling her bones crack.

‘The man wants us to go home with him,’ Rod said.

‘There’ll be others there, my dear. My wife, of course. We have quite a little circle.’

‘They have quite a little circle.’

She wondered why Rod was being so rude. The man might be silly, but he was almost certainly very rich. Readily to accept coldness and wetness and hunger by an urban thruway seemed to her verging on the vulgar. ‘Do we get to stay the night?’ she said, uncaringly, as she had stretched.

‘I’ve told him we have to get on, Sarah.’ She wagged her wrists at him as she stayed stretched, thinking how clever he was to remember. ‘We’ve got a long way to go.’

‘We have?’

‘I thought we had.’

The expensive man looked at her again in the mirror. ‘The lady’s tired, John. Surely you can both stay the night. Surely…’

It was no use fighting it. I watched the rain beating on the windshield and imagined Katherine and myself out in it. The bus shelter had been a spur-of-the-moment improvisation: thruways didn’t have any, and sooner or later she would have noticed. Now she was warm and dry and, with any luck, would stay that way till morning. Admittedly it had been the quickest pickup in the business. But I’d had a good day with Katherine, some gut-tearing shots and appealing quotes, and I reckoned I could look after her. It wasn’t as if either of us had anything really to fear from our smiley friend. An earnest wife going in for contact sessions and a few pot-happy Sunday afternoon executive friends, if I knew the scene.

At the big Fairhills intersection he turned the car off to the left and we began to climb a winding road that was screened from the pervading housing estates by high evergreen hedges. There should have been a lodge, and a serf touching his forelock. At the top the hedges separated to enclose the crests of two connected hills on which were built possibly a dozen large, beautiful houses. They were beautiful individually, and together formed a beautiful whole. You tended to forget that, given enough money, beauty was still possible. Among the houses, undisturbed on the exact top of the higher hill, stood one of those isolated clusters of ancient elms that only England seems to go in for, sad and fine and precise even against the rain-blurred sky. The city around was under mist, with only point blocks and the black lump of the castle showing, and away to the west other hills that were surely country.

At first, driving along the thruway, I’d been amused that two people as rich as Katherine Mortenhoe and myself should be accepting charitable — and slightly sinister…..beds for the night. Now I saw that our smiley friend’s wealth made ours look like chicken-pickings. The thought, while salutary, did nothing to dispel my misgivings. Great wealth seldom sits easily on its possessors.

Since leaving the thruway our host had been silent, as if, having got what he wanted, his bright chat was no longer necessary. I glanced at Katherine: she seemed to have dozed off again. Evidently she was no great walker. Not that this either surprised or worried me — after tonight, when the first of her programs went out, if our darling public spotted us by the roadside we’d be mobbed anyway. My problem — so far unsolved was to keep her out of sight without appearing to do so. That was why I’d suggested the commune: fringies rejected the media more or less as an article of faith. I was still hoping to bring her around to the idea of a nice, peaceful fringie commune.

We drove around the service road and down a sudden tunnel into a large garage and workshop under one of the fancier houses. Lights came on. While our host was fussing with the automatic transmission I counted seven other desirable motorcars, registration numbers CAR 1-8, with 6 missing. I was willing to bet that we were sitting in CAR 6. Suddenly I knew the identity of our smiley friend, and I was appalled.

We reversed into a space. He turned to look at us. ‘I make myself poor,’ he said, ‘by making my wants simply enormous.’

A man who had read — and no doubt despised — his Emerson. But he’d given me my opening. ‘You’ll never manage it, Mr Rondavel,’ I said. ‘Not this side of the telly heaven.’