D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

Pinched up. All elbows. Was that really how she appeared to others?

You will remember I had this thing about people only being true when they were continuous. Put differently, that taped snippets taken out of context could be made to prove anything, it was of course a truism. But I used words like existential, and continuum, and realismus, and got the job. Got the vision implant. (What an innocent phrase that was.) Which wasn’t in the least immoral of me, for I honestly believed — and still do for that matter — that I was a far better man for that particular job than any of the other runners.

In practice, what all this theory boiled down to was that, as far as the viewer was concerned, he never got even the shortest interview without a dozen or so inserts over sound, taped by me over many days or weeks or, ideally, months. He got the true, the continuous person. And as far as I was concerned, it meant that I totally disregarded first impressions. People grew, filled out, became real and true only as they went along. My first sight of Katherine Mortenhoe, therefore, was unmemorable.

Presumably I stared at her while she stared at herself, at the herself in the mirror between us. Vanity? I don’t remember judging either way. I have no clear idea of what she looked like at that moment, or of what she was wearing even. Undoubtedly her clothes were those she was wearing five or ten minutes later when my impressions began to clear, but my recollections of that first moment are hopelessly overlaid by the Katherine Mortenhoe, the continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, that I came over the next six weeks to know and, yes, in some fashion, love. The only true (I believe) Katherine Mortenhoe.

‘Come in, Katherine. Glad you could make it.’

‘I don’t like this new place they’ve given you.’

‘It’s only temporary. We’ve got the decorators in downstairs.’

‘The decorators?’

We were taping the conversation. She sounded incredulous. Or disappointed. I was to go over the tape later, interpreting and reinterpreting her smallest intonation.

‘Sit down, Katherine. Tell me how you’ve been getting along.’

‘I nearly didn’t come. They said over the phone it was all a balls-up.’

‘I must speak to Appointments about their language.’

‘“Balls-up” was mine.’ Somehow she used this line to sit down on. And even at the second repetition the word still wasn’t hers. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Was it a balls-up?’

A direct question, but fearful. I’ve always admired Dr Mason’s reply: using one established lie to evade another.

‘I hate being forced to see my patients in rooms they aren’t used to,’ he said. And then went on quickly before she could pick at it. ‘How’s Barbara? I hope you’re not feeding her with words like “balls-up.”’

‘The words for the sexual parts’ — she seemed to be quoting — ‘are pure and beautiful, and only to be used in situations of purity and beauty. Moonlight… golden sands… Italian olive groves… How, in fact, we’d all like to think of them.’

‘I suppose that’s what you tell Peter.’

‘That poor boy…’ Mason knew how to keep her moving, moving away from why she was there. ‘You know, Doctor, he has some very strange ideas of purity and beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, he says. I tell him poetic descriptions of oil refineries at sunset are no good at all. Half our readers work in them. Homo or hetero, they’re all the same — they want to be told the world is a beautiful place. Tell them the world they know is beautiful and they’ll spit in your face.’

I was risking opinions — far too early, of course, but Katherine Mortenhoe was one of those people (when would I ever learn?) you can read like an open book. She was a romantic. She thought of her vocabulary as manly, and used it as a device for getting on in what no doubt her father had described as a ‘man’s world.’ There weren’t many of her left. She had the romantic’s distaste for the present and the romantic’s belief in some other time, either past or future, that had been or would be better. It was going to find her, with her love-is-all-so-who-needs-a-bra-type clothes, very difficult to work with. I thought.

Dr Mason let her talk, then led her around, without much difficulty, to her symptoms over the last few weeks. These were formidable. She discussed them readily enough, although -again in the romantic tradition — only in the most general terms, as if palpitations or cloudy urine or double vision were likewise pure and beautiful, only to be thought of in situations of purity and beauty. They were quite unreal to her, closely related to the vapors and discreet declines of her Victorian models.

Then she burst into tears.

Certainly I’d been expecting flailing and wailing, but hardly as early in the session as this. I thought of the White Queen who got all her crying over well before she was hurt. But Katherine Mortenhoe was no White Queen. Before, during, and after, if I knew anything… Beside me Vincent tried to knock ash that wasn’t there off the end of his cigar. He wasn’t like me, embarrassed. Other people’s emotions excited him.

‘What is to become of me?’ she said. But the pretty period effect was ruined by soggy Kleenex.

‘Aren’t you rushing things a bit, Katherine?’

‘I can’t go on pretending.’

‘Pretending?’

‘Pretending not to know why you got me here.’

He could have blocked even that. I was glad he had the grace not to.

‘An administrative balls-up wasn’t all that improbable.’ How easy it was to be gentle, when you were god. ‘There was a fair chance you might have believed in it.’

‘You knew me better than that, Doctor.’

He offered her his hands. ‘What was I to do?’ he said.

‘You needn’t have kept me waiting.’ God’s lies were quickly forgiven. ‘You could have seen me at once.’

The delay had been our fault. It takes time to set these projects up… I think that was the moment when I began to hate Katherine Mortenhoe for what was going to happen to her.

‘I’m sorry, Katherine. It’s like a madhouse here. I fitted you in as soon as I could.’

‘I’m here now. So get on with it.’

He did things with his hands, reached in the drawer of his desk for the printout. ‘It’s rather complicated. We ran a check program, just to be sure.’

I was seeing her now. She was calm, her tears in abeyance, and unafraid. Her attitude was nunlike, one of submission before an expected (deserved?) chastisement. I liked ‘nunlike.’ The viewers would like it too. But she and I both had a long way to go.

‘I don’t want the technicalities. Just tell me.’

‘As I said, it’s rather complicated.’

‘I want surgery.’

‘It’s not as simple as that.’

‘I want surgery, whatever the risk.’

‘Listen to me, Katherine.’

‘Surgery, Doctor. There’s my renewal coming up. It must be out of the way before my renewal.’

‘Katherine, listen to me.’

But she was listening to herself. ‘He’s too kind. He’ll renew out of kindness. So it’s got to be surgery. He mustn’t renew out of kindness. I want surgery, whatever the risk.’

He let her run down. I saw that the nunlike calm depended on her chastisement being what she had decided was just. I doubted if even she, so romantic, had enough guilt for the real penance.

Vincent nudged my arm and grinned. He must have guessed I needed encouragement.

‘Katherine, you must understand that no surgery is possible.’

‘But that’s nonsense. It’s always possible.’

‘People like to think that. Unfortunately it’s not entirely true.’

I told myself the scene had overrun. Bad movies always choked me up. It’s horrible the way bad movies choke up most people far more than reality. It’s the simplification, I suppose. Certainly my feelings for Katherine Mortenhoe at that moment were laughably simple.