The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

by D. G. Compton

  She didn’t argue, but said she’d be there, and made a note in her desk diary, and immediately forgot all about it. Or, more precisely, misremembered it, edging it forward in her mind to Wednesday, which was also the day she was having her hair done. For she knew perfectly well, and faced the fact bravely, that there was really only one possible reason why Dr Mason should ask to see her. The Center didn’t make mistakes. If Dr Mason wanted to see her it must be because she was ill: not genteelly neurotic (highly-strung, her grandmother would have said), but ill. Physically ill.

  She toyed briefly with the idea that she was dying. It was dramatic, but unlikely. It was what came of having a novelist’s mind — of, if you like, being a novelist. It was a graceful idea, charmingly old-fashioned. In the real world practically nobody died of anything except senescence. For God’s sake, at forty-four she was a long way off that.

  She told Harry about the Center’s phone call that evening, after dinner, while they were loading the dishwasher. She dropped the news in very lightly, believing it was he she was sparing. He froze, a clump of dirty cutlery in his hand.

  ‘What do you think they want?’ he said.

  ‘They don’t want anything. I told you. They more or less admitted it was all a mistake.’

  ‘That’s all right then.’ He smiled at her, and bent down to put the cutlery in the holder. But he didn’t believe her.

  ‘My dear man, if they say it’s a mistake, I’m sure that’s what it is. After all, you of all people must know the sort of mess these big offices get into.’

  ‘Of course I know.’ He racked plates while she watched him, then closed the dishwasher and started it. ‘Anyway, a chat with Mason won’t do you any harm. You always feel better when you’ve been to see him.’

  ‘Meaning that there’s never really anything the matter with me.’

  ‘Nothing physical, Katherine. We both know that.’

  As if to prove his point she felt the approach of one of her fits of dizziness, and the familiar tightness around her head. Not exactly a headache, more a feeling of tightness, as if her scalp were shrinking. How she hated people who thought and talked of nothing but their health.

  ‘The computer may have come up with something,’ she said.

  He was drying his hands. ‘Don’t you wish it would? The physical things are so easy these days.’ He dried his hands carefully, as he always did. Then he carefully threw away the towel. ‘Chess?’ he said. ‘I can always get on with my model if you’d rather.’

  ‘I’ve brought home some proofs.’

  ‘You’ll sit and brood.’

  ‘Barbara needs them by Friday.’

  ‘Come down to the Hobby Room with me.’

  ‘I shall take one of my capsules and work in bed.’

  He was already on his way out of the door. ‘Take two,’ he said, over his shoulder.

  She leaned against the kitchen table. ‘My appointment’s for ten-thirty,’ she called after him. ‘I’ll ring you afterward. Ten-thirty Wednesday. The day I’m having my hair done.’

  He came back, and smiled, and kissed her forehead which he could reach, and went away again.

  She’d met Harry across the desk of a License Bureau cubicle. He was a green form, and a pen, and a necessary rubber stamp. Her marriage to Gerald was up for its second five-year renewal, and he wasn’t renewing. She had no Basis for Discussion — even if she’d wanted one — for there were no children and she was a Grade I wage earner in her own right. Gerald hadn’t warned her of the nonrenewal. The official notification was simply in the box one morning when she went to the Post Office to pick up her mail, together with the form for her signature. And that evening he didn’t come back to the flat after work. He never came back to the flat again, but sent a friend for his things. The friend told her, unnecessarily, that Gerald couldn’t go on living with what he described as ‘an armored cruiser.’ She was not so much shocked as astonished.

  Harry had helped her to fill in the simple form and — more importantly — had provided someone with whom she could share this astonishment. He was far too straightforward a person to have guessed it might be the cover for something more. Just by way of something to say, or possibly to comfort her, he’d mentioned casually that he was in the same boat himself. A nonrenewal at the second option . . . Of course, it was harder for her, harder for the woman — everyone knew that. But he’d heard his ex-wife was getting along very nicely. The cases weren’t quite the same, mind, the nonrenewal being her idea not his, but there hadn’t been another man or anything like that, and his ex-wife was finding her new status in society quite pleasant. There were plenty of clubs and associations. His ex-wife had been a great one for clubs and associations.

  At first Katherine had suspected the whole story of being a social worker’s ploy. But the name of the ex-wife in a social worker’s ploy would have tripped readily off the tongue: it wouldn’t still, months after nonrenewal, have been too painful to speak even. This betokened a faithful heart. Besides, the man in front of her across the desk had been obviously no social worker. He’d been too evidently lonely. And too undevious.

  She reasoned that in his daily work he must have had to deal with dozens of women in her situation. Therefore she allowed his unusual concern to flatter her. Further, she allowed him to take her out to things, ostensibly to meet other people, other Newly Singles. They went to parties, and lectures, and on a couple of cultural exchange trips. After the first two or three outings he stopped even pretending to introduce her around. They discovered a common interest in chess: he a follower of Moldenev, and she of Fu Tsong. So they sat at the back of the meetings and played, and thought how silly they were to go home afterward to their separate beds.

  There was never a formal proposal on either side. They were both over forty, and both with a tenth year nonrenewal which, in spite of all the theories, was far harder to adjust to than a fifth year one. He was impressed by her work — she was completing Barbara’s phrase memory banks at the time — and she . . . she was sorry for him in his. It had been easy for them to fall into a sort of love.

  And now they were already only a few months off their first renewal.

  There was nothing wrong with their relationship. He read now, and not programmed books but the classics. He no longer sniffed. He kept his modeling things down in the block Hobby Room. He was faithful and kind, and the flat with him in it was never cold to come home to. They showed each other things, and enjoyed their holidays together. And he’d learned to hold his ejaculation off beyond the first six strokes.

  There was, therefore, nothing wrong with their relationship. Except that it was a repeat of both their previous relationships, and if they were going to make it work this time it was because unconsciously they both knew this and were wiser now. They were going to make it work because life was long. They were going to make it work because the world of the Newly Singles was brassy and competitive. And they were going to make it work because they both believed (while never either of them actually doing anything about this belief) that one day something else, something really exciting would happen, and that until it did, until he, she, did, the present arrangement was a great deal better than any conceivable other.

  And now they were already only a few months off their first renewal.

  Left alone in the kitchen after Harry had gone down to the Hobby Room, she was reminded, with a twinge of anxiety, of the impending renewal. They’d talked about it, of course, and been in total agreement. But it now occurred to her that if Dr Mason’s news were bad enough, then perhaps Harry would be tempted to change his mind. She knew that sickness provided a Basis for Discussion: she could apply for a stay, if nothing else. She also knew that Harry was anyway far too delicate ever to voice such doubts as he might have. He was, in spite of his simplicity, perhaps because of it, a very delicate man. But a continuing relationship on such terms would be unendurable.

  The tightness around her scalp intensified, and the whirr of the dishwasher s
eemed to take away all her powers of concentration. She left the kitchen and rummaged in her case for the Ethel Pargeter proofs. Then she took two of her capsules, as Harry had advised, and went to bed.

  In the quiet of the bedroom, while she was waiting for the capsules to take effect, she decided that, whatever Dr Mason said, she would tell Harry everything was fine. Furthermore, she would choose surgery rather than a prolonged drug therapy — she could always pretend a short business trip to cover hospitalization. Even if the risks of surgery were high, she’d still accept them. For Harry, a dead wife would be better than one he hadn’t the heart to nonrenew.

  Ten minutes later her mood had lifted, such was the chemistry of moods, and she knew that Harry would wait for her gladly, no matter how long her therapy took. He loved her. (He also wasn’t all that much of a catch, and knew it.) She propped up the proofs on her knee and took out her ballpoint ... By the time Harry came in from the Hobby Room she’d checked thirty pages and really quite enjoyed them. Ethel was the frankest of Barbara’s three personae and in consequence Katherine was now feeling deliriously sexy. People might laugh at these old-fashioned romances, but there were marriages that survived half-a-dozen renewals, and fellatio at forty-four wasn’t simply an old maid’s dream.

  With the day of her appointment firmly, safely, fixed in her mind as Wednesday (the day she was having her hair done), she endured the waiting period of wild emotional fluctuation as best she could. She reminded herself that neither the peaks nor the valleys were necessarily ‘true’: there was no ‘truth’ in human emotion, only differing degrees of chemical imbalance. Opinions and decisions — matters of faith even — were likewise a matter of chemistry, of electrochemical interaction. Although well-known facts, these were naturally to be carefully excluded from the (frank) programmed pages of an Ethel Pargeter.

  One day, as Katherine watched spring put whiskers and tiny flowers on the moss on her office windowsill, she thought, I must really write my own book. A book about people as they really are. Neither despicable nor honorable, since neither term applies. . . . She drew patterns on her jotter. Neither abject nor dignified, since these are irrelevant concepts. Each one simply chemistry, simply a bundle of neurones, each bundle equipped with an internal communications system built up down life’s millennia for reasons mostly long obsolete, and disrupted randomly by the imperfections of the reproductive process. She scrubbed her jotter and began other patterns. My book will contain the only truth, that there is no truth, and it will make me famous. I shall write it possibly in the hospital, possibly dictating the last chapters as I die.

  She was the Romance division of Computabook. It cocooned her, kept her warm. If she had ever read the literary magazines she would have known that such novels as the one she projected were published, micro-fleched and racked away every week of the year.

  On Tuesday morning, however (as she had known he would?), Peter had to come and destroy the subtle fail-safe mechanism she had constructed around the sensitive matter of Dr Mason’s appointment.

  ‘Outies at ten,’ he said. ‘Or had you forgotten?’

  She didn’t hear him. Ethel Pargeter now behind her, she was at the title stage of the new Celia Wentworth, and she did not hear him. She’d demanded six reruns from Barbara, and still she wasn’t satisfied. Incapable of impatience, Barbara was mulling over the seventh.

  ‘Outies at ten,’ Peter said. ‘Surely you’ve looked in your diary?’

  For some reason she hadn’t turned over the pages of her diary since the previous Friday. Barbara ticked, and put out a small, polite blue tongue. A Fit for a Queen, Katherine read. She crumpled the blue slip and threw it away, then reached for her jotter. It had to be her fault Barbara had missed the epilepsy connotation: she must check the cross-associations in the word store. Apart from that it was neat. Every young girl’s dream. A Fit for a Queen. Very neat.

  ‘Mason, ten-thirty.’ Peter had leaned across and turned the pages of her diary for her. ‘So outies at ten. You don’t want to be late, love.’

  And then she could be angry with him, angry for everything that Harry and Gerald, that her father and her stepmothers, that Dr Mason and the kind youngish man at the Medical Center, angry for everything that life and the whole vile function and malfunction of her oozing woman’s body had ever caused her to endure. For his interference in her private, utterly personal affairs she could justifiably be very angry indeed.

  And then she could go, raw and unprepared, shaken -horrified even — by the intensity of her anger, hiding in the logistic misery of the journey (how much of city life was concerned with the weary process of getting from one undesirable place to another?), then she could go, without pause, to her appointment with Dr Mason in his office on the fourth floor of the Medical Center. The event could creep up on her unawares. Which was by far the best way.

  Not that it mattered, she thought, waiting for her last connection. It was ridiculous, really, going to all this trouble for an appointment that was entirely the result of a clerical error.

  She could be angry again when told by the receptionist that today Dr Mason wasn’t in his usual office, when sent up to a room on the sixth floor instead. Bundled about like a parcel. And his new room, when she reached it, was nasty. As she might have known. It was mustard-carpeted, soothing, with expensive teak-faced furniture and a mirror along one wall, not like a doctor’s office at all. She caught a glimpse of a woman in the mirror and found it difficult to connect the image with her own vivid sense of self.

  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 alwa
ys 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.’