D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

He had gone ahead of her down the beach and into the shadow of the pier. She ran to catch up to him.

There was, as I knew there would be, a guy in charge. This is the age of leaders. They feed on the habit of structure. They sprout from the ground, and people accept them, and they’re usually on the make. This one was a woman, small and thin and very important. She wore a dark brown overall and carried a shawl-like piece of knitting. She came and stood very close in front of me, somehow making my greater height into a disadvantage.

‘Yersss?’ The final sibilant went on much too long.

‘I was hoping there might be room for two little ones,’ I said jollily.

‘We don’t like fringies,’ she said, smiling complacently around the hiss.

‘We’re not really fringies.’

‘Your lady-friend isss.’ Behind her several of her existing tenants were taking notice.

‘She’s not my lady-friend. We’re just… traveling together.’

‘We don’t have no dirty stuff here neither.’

‘Of course not.’

‘We keep a nice place. And we don’t like fringies.’ I wasn’t going to argue. There’d be other places on the beach. I took Katherine’s arm and began to move off. ‘However, if it’s only for the one night… We never likes to turn nobody away, not even when it’s fringies.’

I glanced at Katherine and she nodded. She was trying not to laugh. ‘We’ve got no money,’ I said.

‘Fringies never hasss. I don’t know what they does with it, I’m sure. Orgies, most like.’

She made it rhyme with corgis, helping me to keep my temper. ‘Can we stay or can’t we?’

‘Place up there by the middle pillar.’ She pointed with her knitting. ‘Leaks a bit so just pray for fine weather. Name of Baker. Missis.’

I peered into the gloom. ‘Thank you very much, Mrs Baker.’

‘Last one in keeps the beach swep’. That’s you two. And there’s a convenience up on the prom for your necessaries. No fires after dark, no pets, no drunken behavior. And no orgies.’

‘And leave the bath as clean as you would like to find it… I wondered what had happened to deprive Mrs Baker of a boarding house she so richly merited. Mr Baker, possibly, drunk and orgiastic. ‘It sounds very reasonable,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think so, Katherine?’

But Katherine had gone in to the center pillar and was prodding the pebbles, feeling the bed. ‘It will do us very nicely, thank you, Mrs Baker. We’ll just go and fetch our luggage, and then—’

‘Broom’s with me any time you want it. Tide’s flowing now — it’s the ebb as keeps you busy. Still, there’s the two of you, and we don’t bother once it gets down to the end of the breakwater.’

We thanked her again, and took our leave. She stood, needles clicking, and watched us go. As long as we acknowledged her position in the structure of things she would love us. She was a find. She was just what Katherine needed. With my selfish attempt at confession I had nearly spoiled it, the beach, the sea, the silly freedom she had contrived for us.

A couple of hundred yards away we tumbled into the shelter of a breakwater and could laugh. No doubt Mrs Baker wasn’t all that funny. But we thought her so. We rested, and retold the funniest bits, and laughed again. Then we heaved ourselves up and started back along the beach.

At the swimming pool the man in the water was still flailing, but his friend had pooped out and was leaning on one of the diving boards. He still shouted occasionally, but it was doubtful if the swimmer heard him. Farther on the Punch and Judy show had started, to an audience of the same three bored children. Katherine pulled me over, and we joined them.

It was all terribly ethnic. Punch was whacking at a policeman and shrieking like a mad dictator. Most of his squeaks were lost on the wind, but his meaning was clear enough and horribly, inexplicably comic. We glanced at each other and smiled. When, a moment later, the policeman’s head suddenly came off and rolled about the stage we laughed aloud. The three children turned to stare at us. We laughed even more, at their solemn faces, even perhaps at Mrs Baker again.

Up on the stage the policeman’s body had been dragged away and replaced by Judy, complete with fire-engine-red-faced baby. It was then, however, that the wind chose to gather itself and catch at the striped front of the booth like a sail. The whole contraption staggered and blew over. It became a recumbent mess of sticks and flapping canvas and the wild legs of the Punch and Judy man inside. The children sat, interested at last, waiting to see what would happen next.

Naturally we went forward to help. Katherine sorted through the heaving mass and found the fasteners to the entrance up the back. The language of the man inside was mercifully muffled: not that the kiddies, those particular kiddies, seemed to need much protection from the wickednesses, of the world. Finally he emerged, sitting up, very indignant, in the wreckage of his show. I avoided Katherine’s eye. ‘You’re not hurt?’ I said.

The Punch and Judy man grimaced, and removed a small shiny cylinder from his mouth. ‘Me call,’ he said. ‘Helps with the squeak. Pure silver, in case of accidents. Swallering like. Which has been known.’

We helped him up. He wore a tidy, thirty-year-old suit, double-breasted, with a red-and-white striped bow tie. Although an old, old man, his face was surprisingly smooth and pink around its eager, professional smile. He dusted himself down and straightened his tie. ‘Ta very much. A friend in need is a friend in deed.’

Then he remembered his audience. He held his arms wide to command their attention. ‘Kiddies, kiddies… Owing to un foreseen circumstances, kiddies, the show is temp orar ily suspended…’ He lowered his arms and bowed. ‘But mind you tell your chums, mind, old Punch’ll be up to all his old tricks again this afternoon, sharp as paint. By royal charter, two o’clock pip emma.’

The children sat on. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ Katherine asked.

‘Not the first tumble, missis, and won’t be the last.’ He rummaged under the canvas and brought out an armful of dolls, half a dozen Punches in different costumes, Judies, a policeman, a judge, a hangman, a bright green crocodile. ‘If the troupe’s all right, then Tommy’s all right. Know what I mean?’ He held out his hand. ‘Tucker by name, Tommy by popular acclaim. Clean but clever. Established 1920, still going strong. Ta all the same.’

Obviously he didn’t want us hanging around to watch the humiliating business of putting his show together again. We shook hands and left him, taking the children with us. We were sure, we said, that their mommies would be wondering where they were.

‘I hope he gets a better audience at two o’clock pip emma,’ Katherine said as we watched them run off. ‘Do you think he will?’

‘I expect he’s on a grant from the Folk-Arts Society.’ I’d done a feature once on old-style entertainers. ‘So it doesn’t really matter what sort of an audience he gets.’

‘Doesn’t it?’

Of course it did. Her question wasn’t based on sentimentality but on sentiment, a proper respect for Mr Tucker, Tommy by popular acclaim. I’d long ago stopped trying to piece together the bits of Katherine Mortenhoe, of the only true continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, but this particular bit kept sticking out: respect for other people. It had been typically wrong-headed of her father to suggest that she wanted to die. I’d watched her fight her way out of her circumstances. She was more alive than anybody I knew. Except perhaps my wife. My ex-wife. My future wife.

Our things weren’t disturbed in the hollow of stones where we’d left them. We divided the remaining food into two meals: after them we’d go hungry unless something happened, unless we made something happen. Katherine wasn’t worrying. She ate her ration cheerfully, talking about other vacations she had had, mostly awful, that now could be made funny. I didn’t feel she was making her future my responsibility, but simply that she found the present far more important.