D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

‘Keep down,’ I said to Katherine. ‘Don’t let them see you.’

It was just possible, if Tommy kept his mouth shut, that Vincent wouldn’t find us. And if Katherine asked me why they shouldn’t see her, then I was cued in, with the script more, or less prepared. But, ‘You told them where to find me,’ she said, and it was as if she had looked over my shoulder and put a pencil through the first two pages. I wished I could see her face. The windows of the van would be steamed up, Vincent’s lights angling sharply down. I wished I could see her face, and tried to remember it, and it evaded me. I felt I had never properly seen anybody, and now I never would.

‘Why did you tell them? I must know.’

I tried to begin, but nothing came. She shifted, and found me with her good hand, and held on tightly. She could see me, of course. I felt indecent: I might be detestable, spotty, ugly, my fly might be undone, anything.

‘It’ll be all right, Rod. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t know that.’

So I began.

She stayed quiet, asking nothing, saying nothing, till he had done. Below them on the beach there was confused argument, and people walking to and fro, tripping and cursing. She heard Vincent’s voice, and Mrs Baker’s, and others she didn’t recognize. She heard them, and listened to them, and even tried to make out what they were saying. Rod’s whispered words were different, conveyed in a different medium. She knew and understood, almost without hearing, their smallest intonation. She occupied his reality. He offered no reasons, no excuses. Between the two of them excuses were unnecessary. And anyway she knew them all.

And anyway they were useless. In spite of them, because of them, he nauseated her: what he was, what he had done to her. It was, she knew quite well, obscene. Even his blindness was horrible, a self-mutilation that could only be another burden to her. His kindness within the framework he had accepted made no sense. She had put herself at his mercy, and now he was demanding an impossible forgiveness. Not with words, not even with humbleness, but demanding to be forgiven all the same. Mostly, of course, it was his shame that she could not tolerate.

Circuits, linkages, her whole life insisted that she reject him utterly. When at last he had finished she had nothing to say. Her silence would hurt him and she was immovably silent. He started heaving himself about. ‘Help me out,’ he said.

She found she was holding his arm, and let it go. He was trying to make her responsible, even for this. He wanted her to ask him to stay. Or he wanted her to force him to leave. And she would not.

‘So that you can tell them where I am?’

‘If I wanted to do that I could shout from here.’

‘Then why don’t you?’ He was on his hands and knees, feeling his way around things to the doors of the van. ‘Look at you now. Making all the noise you can. You want to have it both ways. Be honest. You want to turn me in so that fucking Vincent will go on loving you. And at the same time you want me to pat you on the head and say never mind, you couldn’t help it.’

He tried to stand up, caught his head on a sharp corner. ‘Help me out, Katherine. I’ll find the wall of the promenade and go along it. I’ll say I came across the road. You got a lift away. I shouted and they didn’t hear.’

‘And what am I supposed to do all this time?’

‘Stay put. If Tommy keeps quiet you’ll be safe enough till morning.’

‘And what then?’

‘How should I know what then?’

‘You ought to. You said you’d look after me.’

‘I lied.’

Such an overpitched, melodramatic, middle-of-the-night conversation to be having. ‘Please stay,’ she said. ‘Please stay…’

They had, one way and another, both been hurt enough.

Footsteps approached, left the pebbles, came up the steps onto the promenade. Vincent Ferriman’s voice: ‘You try the shelters along that way. I’ll try the old dance hall. They can’t have gone far.’

Somebody brushed along the back of the van. She held her breath. The footsteps went away. Rod groped around in the air above her head. ‘Katherine—’

‘Don’t talk. Just stay. Please.’

She helped him to sit down. After a long time the footsteps returned. First Vincent Ferriman’s, that stood, and paced, and kicked the tire of a car along the row as they waited, and then the others’. There was argument. This time Katherine recognized the voice of Dr Mason. She’d come a long way since that morning in his office. She was glad, for both their sakes, he hadn’t been able to keep away.

Vincent was in charge. Who else? But he wasn’t ever going to find her. ‘Right people. Can we have some order please? Thank you… Now, obviously we’re wasting our time. They’ve probably hitched a lift somehow. So we need grounds for calling in the police. Not even NTV can handle this sort of search on its own. Doctor, can we fairly say she’s in need of urgent medical attention?’

‘Of course we can. I’ve told you and told you. Unless—’

‘Good. In that case there’s no problem. Even if they’ve hitched a lift they’ve got to be put down somewhere. And I’ll lay on radio flashes. They’ll be picked up soon enough once it’s daylight.’

They were invisible. They’d never be picked up, ever. Vincent led his men away, crisply down the steps and across the beach. The helicopter started up and went, taking its lights with it, leaving the inside of the van suddenly intensely dark. Gradually the dim street lamps reasserted themselves. She eased her cramped body. ‘What now?’ she said. But Rod was asleep. She tucked the blanket from his duffle bag about him as neatly as her clumsy arm would allow, and settled to wait for the dawn. Ever since she had asked him, and he had stayed, they had not spoken. But they’d communicated. She wasn’t worried.

Tommy’s noisy arrival roused them both. He flung open the back doors of the van, pushed in an armful of his things from the beach, and then quickly shut the doors again. In a moment he was around the side, climbing in, starting the engine, moving off. ‘Looks like being a nice day,’ he said. ‘And I’d stay where you are. No sense in getting seen all over the place.’

The van threw them around. A crazy assortment of swords and vanishing cabinets and plastic goldfish bowls and old wickerwork hampers leaned and clattered about them. Conversation was impossible. ‘I’ll stow everything when we get out of town,’ Tommy shouted. ‘You never know who’s watching.’

From where she crouched Katherine could see the upper stories of houses reeling by. Rod sat hunched, with his arms over his head. After a few miles the houses thinned and were replaced by curving lamp standards. The van slowed, turned left, and finally pulled in under some trees. Tommy switched off, and sat massaging his hands. ‘I could tell them blokes was police, for all they said they wasn’t. I don’t know what you two done, and I don’t want to. Old Tommy never forgets a face or a favor.’

Katherine climbed out, and guided Rod after her. The clouds of the previous day were nearly all gone and the sun was warm and she had been nearly twelve hours without a rigor. Tommy watched them, and although he made no comment she felt obliged to offer some sort of explanation. ‘He’s got this… this thing wrong with his eyes,’ she said.

‘And you’re not all that spry yourself, pet.’

In fact, of course, they made a ludicrous couple. She shrugged, and the old man patted her arm and went around to the back of the van and started sorting out his possessions. Rod stood beside her, turning his face up to the sky. ‘It’s a fine day,’ he said. Then, abruptly, ‘What sort of a man is Gerald?’