D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

She watched him fold the remains of the food away in the tablecloth. Somehow his interest in her didn’t fit. She didn’t give him power, she didn’t give him sex, even her suffering appeared to give him no kicks. It was almost as if she explained something to him, something he had been curious about all his life. Something that was its own justification. She caught herself out in her earlier sentimentality. Her nakedness had been the academic nakedness of the mortuary slab. That was why it hadn’t mattered.

‘Shall we go now?’ He was calling her from the car. She went around and climbed in beside him.

‘Go where to?’

‘That’s a very good question.’ He rummaged in the door pocket. ‘Ah — I didn’t think Rondavel would let us down.’ He brought out a set of maps, found the right one, and spread it out across their knees. After a moment’s searching he found where they were, the lane, the bridge, the thin blue line of the stream. ‘There’s a commune just here,’ he said. ‘Here, on this old airfield. It can’t be more than thirty miles.’

‘I don’t want a commune.’

‘I know you said that. But you need a roof, and a proper bed.’

‘We’ve got the car.’

‘Suppose you need looking after?’

‘I don’t want a commune.’

How could she tell him? She was not, she was not an academic nakedness. How could she tell him about her onetime list of choices, all of which — even dignity — were now irrelevant? How could she tell him she no longer needed either to think or to do, that the slush of people got in the way, that to learn to be was all she had time for? ‘I clean up after myself,’ she said. ‘And when I can’t, you leave me.’

‘You know that’s not what—’

‘Take me to the sea, please.’ She pointed on the map, at the nearby coastline. She had wished simply to shut him up, as once in a different life she had used Tasmania to shut up Harry. But as soon as she said it she knew that the sea was what she really wanted. She shouldn’t have treated him like Harry. He was so much more. ‘Take me back,’ she said, hiding in a joke, ‘to the mother from whence I came.’

He didn’t laugh, but folded the map and put it away and started the car engine. Just as they were about to move off she clutched his arm. ‘How long have I got?’ she said, scarcely audible.

‘What a question. How the hell should I know?’

She was ashamed. It was a cry from the pit she thought she’d climbed out of. ‘Your arm,’ she said, ‘feels as thin as a piece of string.’ Though she knew quite well it was young and muscular.

And then, as she began to shake, she rehearsed — she thought silently — her private litany: rigor, paralysis, sweating, coordination loss, double vision, incontinence, hallucination, autonomic breakdown, anoxia, terminal phase… Terminal phase was a fine and dandy euphemism — a euphemism, one might say, to end all euphemisms. A—

‘I’ll drive on, then, shall I?’ She’d forgotten he was there, and let his arm go. ‘Just tell me if you want me to stop.’

The car went forward, over the little bridge and on down the lane. She closed her eyes against the jangled trees and sky. Double vision was no longer an amusing novelty.

I’d had a rough old half-hour. Why did she have to go on about the money? Of course I had money — what self-respecting-media man would move an inch without a handout from the petty cash? So she pushed me into that corny old you-don’t-know-a-thing-about-me routine. Vincent would think I’d gone stark staring mad, and perhaps I had. I was there to ferret out her secrets, not to bury them.

Then again there were her questions about the party. Did she really want to know how she’d screamed and carried on and hauled her clothes up above her head till in the end there wasn’t a man even in that unfussy group who would touch her? How they’d laughed, and then not even been able to laugh, and pulled their clothes together, and gone? How I’d cleaned her, and held her till she was still?

And now, on top of all that, her terrible incantation, destroying me, taking me back to the surgery, to the old world, even — I was beginning to hope — to the old me. The vacation brochure, I’d called it. The conducted tour. Maybe I was losing my sense of humor, but the sick joke shamed me. Fooling Katherine Mortenhoe, even supposedly for her own good, was a disgusting operation. I’d have packed the job in there and then if I’d had the courage to tell her.

The lane wound between vast fields of pale, misty green wheat. Soon it joined one of the old main roads leading seaward, almost deserted now with the thruway carrying all the traffic. Clouds were beginning to gather, high and windy. At my side Katherine was silent fighting her own battles. It was a quiet time: a time, alas, for thinking.

After this job, another. And after that job, another. And all filled with moments another reporter might wait a lifetime to fix. How lucky I was. What was I, after all, but what I’d always wanted to be — a reporter? The reporter? I kicked down on the transmission, angrily, unnecessarily. The speedometer climbed. I wasn’t a reporter, I was a reporting device. I was the world’s morbid curiosity made flesh.

It was an exaggerated, self-dramatizing mood, and I checked it. What one had sold was buyable again, if not with money then with something else. I thought of Tracey. If I had the courage the death of Katherine Mortenhoe could be made an end rather than a beginning… When the first of the motor cycles came by I glanced instinctively at my speedometer, and slackened off. It was too late, of course — I’d been doing well over ninety. More motor cycles came by till there were four of them riding abreast in front of me, waving me down. In the mirror I saw two more close on my tail. They weren’t police. Their bikes were totally black and they wore plastic carnival masks under their helmets. Skulls, of course. I pulled out to overtake, but they eased over ahead of me and continued politely to wave me down. Their civility was probably the most menacing part of the whole exercise. I stopped the station wagon and waited.

‘So sorry to trouble you, sir. And madam. We’re the Collectors. We’re collecting for the Society for the Encouragement of Cruelty to Everybody. It’s a terribly good cause.’

A juvenile joke, but one that put the situation succinctly enough. ‘You’ve come on a bad day,’ I said. ‘I’m a bit short myself, just at the moment.’

‘You won’t believe this, sir, but that’s what they all say.’ His voice smiled to suit the death’s-head grin of his mask. ‘And there’s usually some little thing in a pocket somewhere that they’ve forgotten.’

My door was wrenched open and I was helped out. ‘You seem to have tripped over something, sir. Charlie, assist the poor gentleman.’

The assistance was predictably a boot. The lads had slipped into a familiar and well-loved routine. I struggled to my feet. ‘Look at me. Do I honestly look as if I’ll be much good to you?’

‘Your car, sir, belies your tattered appearance. I suggest a fancy dress of some kind. Or—’

‘Or a stolen car?’

This was a new idea. He looked from me to the station wagon and back again. Then he looked again at the station wagon, stooping to get a better view of Katherine. ‘She’s ill,’ I said quickly. ‘Very ill’

‘She certainly appears to be hardly in the pink.’ He turned back to me. ‘Tripped out?’ he said.

I nodded a minimal agreement. She was through her shakes and sat sideways, fiddling at the folds of her dress with crabbed hands, a trail of dribble down the side of her face. He obviously hadn’t recognized her. Probably his lot weren’t exactly telly fans. ‘We’re collectors too,’ I said. ‘Ours is the Society for the Preservation of Indigent Fringies.’