D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

‘Please.’ He held up a hand in gentle protest. ‘No shop talk on Sunday. I work a five-day week as it is. In this house no one mentions television on pain of instant excommunication.’

He smiled, this time giving us the benefit of the full thirty-two. ‘You spotted the cars, of course. I should never have given that interview. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity…’

A literary gent. I let him think it was the interview. In point of fact, most people at NTV House were aware of the chairman’s little vulgarities. His eight cars and his eight bits of fluff all called Margaret. We’d never met, of course. If he knew of me at all it was as a figure on his capital expenditures sheet. And he wasn’t one to have his picture hanging in every office. All the same, I had to contrive an opportunity to make myself known, before the visit got out of hand. There are things it is better for a man not to know about his ultimate employer.

At that moment Katherine woke up. ‘We’ve arrived,’ she announced, pushing up her goggles and rubbing her eyes. Rondavel had turned away and was getting out of the car. He began to walk away. Evidently Katherine was no longer the sort of woman expensive men opened doors for. I opened the car door instead, and helped her out.

We stumbled after him, stiff from our walk and sudden short rest, to a walnut and beveled-glass elevator, reproduction 1930’s. He waited for me to hump in my duffle bag and Katherine’s holdall. ‘You mustn’t mind if things seem a bit decayed upstairs. That’s Sunday afternoon for you. They’ll brighten up astoundingly later on.’

Which was what, now more than ever, I was afraid of. I tried desperately to think of a way of getting him on my own. He pushed the second-floor button and turned to Katherine. ‘An overdue introduction, I think… You, my dear, are Sarah, I believe. You must call me Coryton.’

He held out a hand which she shook. Coryton Ansford Rondavel… I wondered if men had names like that before they became millionaires, or if the names grew on them afterward. Possibly naming your son Coryton Ansford was one way of instilling the vital millionaire’s spark. In that case I’d failed poor Roddie Two badly.

‘And you, John, what do they call you? Do you answer to “Hi,” or any such cry?’

‘I usually notice when I’m being spoken to.’

I had Katherine’s view of me to think of. And he could hardly expect manners from a fringie pickup. The elevator rose, and stopped. And there we were, John and Sarah, complete with luggage, and Coryton Ansford Rondavel, complete with smile, ready to meet our joint fates on the second floor of a nameless house somewhere in Fairhills. There was the sound of distant music, either hi-fi or someone extremely good on a synthetizer. Rondavel led us out onto a mirrored landing, opened a door, gestured.

‘I must go and change,’ he said. ‘You’ll find everything you want in there.’

The mirrors showed me us. Beside Rondavel, on his beige carpet, against his chaste silver furnishings, we might just as well have been daubed hottentots. We had to get out. I let Katherine go on in to the room he had indicated, and then followed him to his own door. Once I got the real interview over I had no doubt at all he would agree. We had to go.

‘Mr Rondavel,’ I said, ‘there’s something you—

‘Later.’ He closed the door in my face. After a moment it opened again, three inches. ‘And the name’s Coryton.’

The door closed and stayed closed. Disliking the silent corridor, I went back to Katherine.

The room was a sort of bathroom, but with a squashy black velvet settee, various luscious chairs, an elaborate ebony drinks dispenser, and, as outside on the landing, a great many mirrors. Now, mirrors in a bathroom — other than the basic one over the washbasin — make me feel uneasy. Images linger in them. Salacious images. No doubt I’ve a nasty dirty mind. Be that as it may, that bathroom, squashy settee, mirrors and all, was the nastiest, dirtiest bathroom I’d ever seen.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

Katherine had her hat and goggles off and was peering at herself in one of the mirrors. Her survival jacket was thrown over the back of a chair. ‘It’s raining,’ she said. ‘And he only wants to sleep with me.’

Which was a nice way of putting it. ‘Or with me,’ I said.

‘So? If you can cope, I’m sure I can.’ She peered more closely at her reflection. ‘Those goggles seem to boil my eyes. The skin’s all wet and wrinkly.’

‘Katherine — I don’t think you know what his sort of person can be like.’

‘You mean he’s a crazy goggles fetishist?’

‘I’m serious, Katherine.’

‘And I’m warm and dry and likely to be fed. Sometimes that’s what life comes down to.’

Apart from anything else, every minute we spent in Coryton Rondavel’s house was wasted footage. But I knew I wouldn’t shift her. I watched her slip her goggles on again and cram the sou’wester down over her ears. Perhaps with them on anything could happen because she wasn’t really there. The room was so hot that I removed my two sweaters, still watching her. She’d begun to pull hair down from under the sou’wester in a straggly fringe over what could be seen of her forehead. I went away into the lav, closing the door firmly behind me. I’d suddenly thought of another thing I didn’t like about mirrors: in my experience they had a nasty habit of being one-way.

When I came out Katherine was lying on the squashy settee, apparently asleep again. The easy way she slept taunted me. With the dubious jollities of the coming evening to be coped with I couldn’t even risk one of my relaxants. I propped myself up in one of the chairs… Had Rondavel meant it when he said TV was taboo in his house? Or would he set orgies aside and gather us all at eight-thirty sharp for the first of his company’s new Human Destiny shows? What would I do then? And what, come to that, about the problems of the morrow?

Deceiving Katherine, keeping her away from the media, had seemed simple enough in Vincent’s office. Play it by ear, he’d said… I was listening hard, not hearing a damn thing.

But we had a considerate host, and he didn’t keep us waiting long. ‘There’s a complicated story,’ he said, arriving in a flurry of orange brocade, ‘about a royal banquet where the guest of honor, not used to such occasions, drank the water in his finger bowl. The king, it is said, had the royal good manners to put his guest at his ease by doing the same. Personally, I think it was just something thoroughly naughty he’d wanted to do all his life.’

Possibly the history lesson was intended to explain, or to ease the shock of, our host’s costume. It didn’t. He was dressed like the original Arabian Nights — or perhaps like one of the Three Kings in a school charade. Except that the gold and the jewels and the ermine were real. It was a getup straight out of the dressing-up basket in some oil sheik’s family nursery.

To neither the anecdote nor the apparition could I think of any satisfactory response. Katherine, having woken up halfway through both, was even worse off. ‘My feet hurt,’ she said.

(This wasn’t quite the non sequitur it seemed, for she was in fact apologizing for having dirtied our host’s squashy settee. But he hadn’t, anyway, heard her.)

‘Klutzy?’ he said, revolving. ‘Real klutzy?’ He primped, as if Klutzy meant camp, which it never had. Then he abandoned his display, casually, like a ballerina coming down off her points. ‘An open mind, you know. Feeling right and looking right is half the battle. If John would like something a little more… exuberant, I’m sure we can oblige.’

‘Maybe I don’t feel exuberant.’