D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

At last he replied. ‘The choice wasn’t mine at all, Kath. You made it for yourself, days ago. I could only respect it. I could only respect you for making it.’

And still she waited. How nicely we pick over our words: love, admiration, regard, respect… In my dictionary he loved her. But my dictionary took no account of the careful, protective intelligence of these two strange people. Their precisions weren’t cold. Theirs was a relationship fourteen years deep, interrupted but not yet ended. He was Gerald Mortenhoe and she Katherine. My reasoning had been cheap, making her hope for the word love. Rather had she to risk his offering, for her sake, for easy comfort, the mere word. The word that would devalue them both. She had to tempt him.

The silence lengthened. I suppose I had come with her to that place, to that man, expecting sensational revelations, Clearly he knew she was dying. It can’t have been easy, but he held out.

Vincent’s office was crowded. Tracey looked around at the pitiful few people conceivably capable of helping who had been brought together there at her insistence. Mrs Mortenhoe’s husband, Harry; her assistant at Computabook, Peter; her doctor, Dr Mason; and finally, as a long shot, Roddie’s psychiatrist, Dr Klausen. Dr Mason was lecturing them, his concern painful to watch, while Vincent sat at his desk reading a sheaf of program reviews, his unconcern equally painful.

‘If we can find her I can save her. Deep narcosis possibly. A reversal of patterns. It can be done. I know Dr Klausen here will agree it must be tried. But we don’t have much time. We—’

‘What I cannot understand,’ said Dr Klausen mildly, ‘is how this situation could ever have arisen.’

Vincent looked up from his clippings. ‘A medical matter,’ he said. ‘Hardly one for this present discussion. Naturally Dr Mason accepts full responsibility. An error of judgment, shall we say? They have been known, even in the medical profession.’

Tracey wanted to help: not Vincent, never Vincent — but then, Vincent would never need her help. ‘We’re not here to hand out blame,’ she said. ‘We’re here to think of some way of finding Mrs Mortenhoe. And my husband.’

‘And to do that,’ Dr Mason repeated, ‘we must all search in our minds for the smallest thing she may have said, the vaguest clue she may have given, the slightest deduction any of us might make from what we know of her.’

There was an uneasy silence in the room. Harry shifted peevishly. ‘Quite mad,’ he said. ‘That’s the only deduction I’d care to make. One moment we’re all set for Tasmania, the next moment she’d run away, tarted herself up like I don’t know what, no thought for me, no thought for how I might look, stuck there in that shop like—’

‘I take it she was usually considerate of your feelings?’ Dr Klausen had already sized up Harry.

‘Of course she was. We were married. Happily married. How else—’

‘Then we are looking for atypical behavior, certainly stemming from her atypical situation. Even in this, though, we ought to be able to find some sort of logic. She seems to have been an intensely logical person… I wonder, was she running away, or running to? Was she basically afraid or, as we say, looking forward?’

Harry actually laughed. ‘Looking forward to what? The gutter? I tell you, she was crazy. Of course she was. She couldn’t face the truth, so she ran away.’

Up to that moment Peter had been quiet. Now he sprang to his feet. ‘No. You would say that. All you think about is the fool she made you look. You never knew anything about her, anything at all.’

‘And you did, I suppose.’

Yes. Yes, I did.’

The two men glared at each other. Then Harry turned to Vincent. ‘I didn’t want to come here. Must I put up with—‘

‘My dear Harry. Please… we must remember that Peter was the last among us to see your wife. It is just possible that he knows something the rest of us do not.’

Peter sat down again. ‘All I know is… is that she wasn’t in the least crazy. Or afraid. Yes, she was looking forward to… to whatever was going to happen to her.’

Harry snorted. Klausen had been reading over the notes Vincent had provided for him. ‘Peter — you talked with her for four or five minutes. Was there nothing she said in all that time that seemed to you odd in any way? Inconsequent? Not what you’d have expected?’

Peter struggled with his memory. ‘Everything she said was a bit… disjointed.’ Harry snorted again. Peter plowed on. ‘But I understood her perfectly well. She was saying just that — that she wasn’t running away, but running to… I said I’d help her if I could. For some reason this made her cry. I lent her my handkerchief.’

Harry crossed his legs. ‘Must we have these touching—’

‘And then — yes, she did say a funny thing. She said, “I’m not an armed destroyer.” Something like that. “I’m not an armed destroyer.”‘

Harry sighed. ‘Armored cruiser,’ he said. ‘You might as well get it right. She would have said that. It always preyed on her mind. It was what her first husband had called her. You may say I didn’t know anything about her, but at least…’ He trailed off, aware of a change in the atmosphere of the room.

Dr Klausen sat back, took off his glasses. ‘As simple as that,’ he said. ‘A sensitive woman who did not want to be thought of as an armored cruiser.’

‘My dear Klausen.’ Vincent shuffled papers on his desk. ‘My dear Klausen, you’ll see if you look at your notes that we covered that possibility right at the beginning. We’re not complete fools. The police called on Gerald Mortenhoe and left instructions that they were to be contacted at once, should his ex-wife turn up.’

‘Would he have obeyed these instructions? Would any man in his position?’

‘He’s a responsible citizen. I’m sure the police explained the situation to him.’

‘But you have to admit that his loyalties would be, to say the least, divided?’

Vincent patiently put away his press cuttings and, in the manner of someone humoring an extremely wayward child, got in touch once again with the Air Transport Controller.

Lunch was long over. She wondered if Gerald had noticed how she had eaten nothing. She’d felt that to eat would be… unsuitable. Since then they had sat on, the three of them, in the sun, saying less and less. They made her feel safe. She remembered Gerald’s strength, had resisted it before, could have resisted it again. It came from being of a piece. But she, unready, had resisted him, worn him down, driven him away. She no longer felt ashamed of this, for nothing — not even he -could have hurried her.

Roddie’s strength was different. It was without reason, obstinate in the face of self-disillusionment. It came from an intuitive certainty that beyond all the fragmentation there was still the possibility of… wholeness. It had faltered, and taken wrong turnings, but it had never lost faith in the possibility.

So she sat, the three of them sat, in the dappled green garden, and her mind that had been running away with her faster and faster, from way back, slowed, and examined each individual necessity. She experienced herself. She was one. She was as old as the soil beneath the grass beneath her feet. She was home. She could have gone on living forever — one breath after another was all that was needed — but it seemed much more reasonable, and gentle, and wise, to die.

I suppose I had imagined my hearing would become immediately one hundred percent better, just because I was blind. It wasn’t so, of course. No sooner had I decided tactfully not to mention the first faint approaching clatter of the helicopter than Gerald mentioned it for me.