The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

by D. G. Compton

  She allowed herself a quarter of an hour more, and then went back to her office. Peter wasn’t there, but the cover proof for Queen’s Mate lay on her desk. She saw at once that the reds needed darkening. This color sense she had — it wasn’t something you could learn, either you had it or you didn’t. Peter didn’t. She looked up the color codes, typed a short message onto the teleprinter, and somewhere in the subbasement a relay shifted. She knew it shifted, actually physically shifted, because she’d done a three-week familiarization course down there during her first year. She checked Barbara’s progress show: the covers would go into a first printing in under three hours. She wouldn’t be there — she was going home on time for once — but Barbara wouldn’t need a second telling.

  She was going home on time for once. It was a sudden decision. And she had just time to set up the new Paladine. Aimee’s doctors were sympathetic. PALADINE, she typed. DOCTOR GROUPING. RANDOMIZE. The printout came back at her fast and she sorted sequences. Harry at three-thirty was a leisure man, down in the Hobby Room, doing what he could. Recently he’d talked to her deviously of moving — no doubt the men in their new block were a pushy lot, achievement-orientated. And Harry had ten thumbs. 7-5-3, she typed. 10-7-1-1-4-3-6. Men never grow up, she thought. And then remembered the different frailer vanities of women. Barbara scanned for familiarity, and returned a sequence four points similar, over a date two years old. Four points were too many, even after an interval of two years. She considered substitutions.

  Harry would be down in the Hobby Room when she got home, and wouldn’t expect to see her till six. She never worked the statutory minimum: even with the production schedule filled there were always jobs around the office she could find to save her going back to the empty flat or to some Leisure Fulfillment Course. So she could go home on time for once, and still not have to see him, not have to tell him, until six.

  There was always the possibility of not going home at all.

  She looked up the telephone services card, found Dial-A-Church, and rang the number. They were a long time answering.

  ‘Vicar Pemberton speaking.’

  So then it was too late for her to change her mind. ‘I’m going to die,’ she said.

  ‘You wouldn’t have rung me if you really believed that. What have you taken?’

  ‘I’ve taken umbrage.’

  ‘Believe me, my dear, today’s anguish is no more than tomorrow’s fading memory. Only death is lasting. Tell me what you’ve taken.’

  ‘I’ve not taken anything.’

  ‘Your ringing tells us both that you do not really want to die. Where are—’

  ‘I don’t want to die.’

  ‘We all die, my dear, but in God’s time, not our own. It’s impertinent, I think, to take upon ourselves that particular choice. Almost as if. . . tell me where you’re calling from.’

  ‘I don’t want to die.’

  ‘I can always ring off, you know. Get the exchange to trace the call. We have a lot of experience in this sort of—’

  ‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘You’ll get the building, not the extension number.’

  ‘You’re in a building, then. Office block? Residential block?’

  She wondered what she was doing, ringing this poor man. Perhaps he needed worries not his own. There were things s,he could tell him.

  ‘If you don’t answer, caller, I shall have to ring off. I beg you to—’

  ‘Father, I have sinned.’ Wasn’t that what one said?

  ‘Sin is a harsh word, my dear. You have failed, as we all have failed. The Lord Jesus, born of woman, understands the agony of our failure.’

  Katherine wondered what the hell that had to do with the price of tea in China. And what either of them was talking about.

  ‘Is that why,’ she said, ‘you sit on the end of a telephone, and your churches are deserted?’

  ‘It’s easy to see you haven’t been near one in a long time, my dear. Our churches are far from deserted.’

  ‘Filled with derelicts, then. Bunks for derelicts.’

  ‘You answer your own question.’

  She frowned. If he was going to play at being enigmatic, she was wasting her time. She was wasting her time. She was wasting her time. And he would call her ‘my dear.’

  ‘Christianity is dead, Vicar. As I shall be in another four weeks.’

  Which was what she discovered she’d called to tell him. So she rang off.

  Barbara was still showing her a sequence four points similar, over a date two years old. Some of Aimee Paladine’s readers would have ridiculously long memories. Katherine chewed her ball-point, considering substitutions.

  She was home by three-forty. Told that she was leaving, Peter had asked nothing and made only the lightest, unconcerned comment. He pressed his face sideways against the window glass after she had gone, trying to see her on the pavement far below. But the tiny trotting blobs were indistinguishable. He kicked the cold radiator under the window till it rang.

  Traveling in the rush hour for the first time in years, she was appalled, and fought furiously not to become just another casualty statistic. Promised four weeks, she was determined to keep them to their promise; him to his promise; Him to His promise.

  The flat wasn’t empty. As soon as she opened the door it gave her back a human presence, an indefinable displacement of the air somewhere. Harry. She wasn’t ready for him, and she closed the door again and went back toward the elevator. But if not the flat, where? And if not Harry, who? When she opened the door a second time he was waiting for her in the lobby.

  ‘I thought I heard you,’ he said.

  ‘I thought I’d left something in the elevator.’

  ‘I’ve done that. Once I chased it down five floors.’

  He stood blocking the doorway. He laughed, but something had happened. It was as if she were a stranger.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘There wasn’t anything. It was all my imagination.’

  ‘So do I get to come in?’

  Making it a joke like that he couldn’t refuse. She walked past him into the kitchen and started putting away the food she had bought on the way home. The kitchen was tinier than she remembered. The whole flat was tinier. Between them they earned seven thousand: surely they could afford something better than this? She banged the door of the refrigerator.

  ‘I’m glad you remembered dinner,’ Harry said. ‘I was going to, but then I didn’t.’

  He came up behind her where she stood at the window, fiddled with his cuffs, and then suddenly put his arms around her, making her jump.

  ‘I don’t know how to say this to you, Kate.’ He gave her a reassuring little squeeze. ‘You see, I know.’

  There were blocks opposite, and blocks beyond, and people home from work in every one of them. From where she stood she could see easily seven hundred homes, sheltering seven hundred families. In not one single one of them was the husband holding the wife and saying that.

  ‘You can’t know.’ She had a vivid picture of her own home from the homes opposite: five windows, a balcony, modular. She knew it was her own home because of the curtains. >

  Harry said, ‘I didn’t want you coming in, pretending nothing had happened.’

  ‘But you can’t know.’

  ‘I want to look after you, Kate. I know I haven’t, but I want to now.’

  She leaned back against him, soothed. ‘How can you know?’

  ‘I thought we could go away together. He said he didn’t mind that. Somewhere easier. Friendlier. We could have all the fun of choosing. He said it was a good idea.’

  He took one arm away, fumbled in his pocket, and produced a fan of travel brochures which he held in front of her like a bad conjuror. She was supposed to choose one.

  ‘Who’s he?’ she said.

  ‘Vincent.’

  ‘Vincent?’

  ‘He insisted I was to call him that. He’s a program controller with NTV

  She smiled at the blocks opposit
e. It was just like Harry to get things not quite right. If anybody had told him, it would be someone from the Medical Center. They should have asked her first of course, or at least told her what they were going to do. But now the whole thing was out of her hands, and she was relieved. She was—

  ‘No!’ She beat at Harry’s hands, wrenching herself away. The travel brochures slipped, hot and shiny, down onto the floor.

  ‘No, Harry. No!’ She swung round on him. ‘No!’ she screamed in his face.

  She had made the connection. NTV ran the Human Destiny shows. And Vincent Ferriman. NTV ran Vincent Ferriman ran the Human Destiny shows. She’d never watched them, but she knew what they did. Peter talked about them, he watched them, he accepted the rationale, the simple social duty, he’d accept anything, and she knew what they did. What they did to people.

  ‘No, Harry. They can’t.’

  He stepped back. ‘Of course they can’t.’

  ‘Not to me.’

  ‘Of course not to you. Not if you don’t want them to.’

  The tone of his voice stopped her, his instant acquiescence. And the way he met her gaze in wide-eyed guilt. She tested him.

  ‘Of course, they’d pay a lot of money,’ she said.

  ‘What use is money?’

  ‘And the programs do a lot of good.’

  ‘Rubbish. They pander to the worst in people.’

  ‘And I’m sure they’ll be very tactful about the filming.’

  ‘The idea’s disgusting.’

  She moved carefully away, not touching him. ‘So what did you tell this . . . Vincent?’

  ‘I told him no. I told him to get stuffed. I told him even if you agreed he’d never get my signature on his disgusting piece of paper. I told him to get stuffed.’

  She was trembling violently. She let him sit her down at the kitchen table and fetch her whiskey, but she couldn’t hold the glass. So he held it for her, and mopped her chin when she spluttered. She hated whiskey — they only had it for Harry. And the spring sunlight was so brilliant on the corner of the table that it made her want to cry. If only he hadn’t been so vehement, she thought. So positive, so definite, so vehement. If only Harry hadn’t been so vehement I might have believed him. Then we could have told the whole bloody lot of them to get bloody stuffed.

  ~ * ~

  2

  Wednesday

  I spent most of the next day watching clips from previous Human Destiny Shows. So far Vincent had not been able to obtain authorities either from Katherine Mortenhoe or her husband, but he was confident that these could soon be fixed up. ‘Fixed up’ was a phrase I didn’t care to think about too closely. Anyway, I was in no particular hurry to start in on poor Mrs Mortenhoe: not having worked on any of the earlier programs, there was a lot, more than simply in terms of technique, for me to learn about them. You don’t come in on a series run of a high-rating show without first getting under the skin of the format. There’s an atmosphere, a style . . . it’s like a fashionable new suit: wearing it alters in a hundred subtle ways how you behave, and takes a bit of getting used to. Any new ideas I might have — and I hoped there’d be plenty — had to be thought into the right shape. So Vincent gave me a technician, and a stack of tapes, and the run of an NTV viewing room.

  Not the directors’ viewing room, which was being used by some gigantic Icelandic genius who nearly flattened me on the one occasion we met (I was coming out of the gents), but the tiny VIPs’ viewing room on the same floor. I was grateful to the leave-it-to-the-last-minute Icelander: NTV surely knew how to treat its Very Important People. For a start, the decor was Presidential Baroque, and probably bulletproof. The seats, eight of them, grouped informally, were white true-sheepskin, and fully servo-adjustable. And beside it stood a charming red plastic console offering individual Autosec facilities, an instantaneous translation service in the four World languages, memory-linked jotters, an intercontinental telephone, lines to the Information Center and the Personnel Data Bank, customized air-conditioning and dispensers for various beverages, hot and cold, sweet and sour, hard and soft. All that was lacking, maybe, was a silent vibro unit to take the labor out of jacking off in the bluer movies.

  Mostly I stood at the back, unawed, making my notes on a couple of old envelopes.

  It is hard for me now, when remembering that ten-hour session, not to color my recollections with understanding that came later. But if I’m to explain, let alone excuse, my behavior at that time, it’s absolutely vital that I do my best. You see, I’d caught very few of the original Human Destiny transmissions: I worked odd hours and, anyway, unlike some professionals, I’d never dedicated my every waking moment to the medium. I reckoned there were other ways of approaching the world than through a twenty-seven-inch oblong. So most of the material was new to me. And, packed into ten hours’ concentrated viewing, it was a staggering experience.

  I should make it clear that not all the series were about terminals, not all of them ended in a clear death. There was, for example, a haunting case of progressive and incurable insanity. There were six cathartic shows analyzing the social rehabilitation of a totally limbless accident victim. There was even one sequence that ended in the surprise recovery of a woman whose compulsory abortion had been strongly opposed on psychiatric grounds. The camera hung around, waiting for her promised breakdown, but it never came. The director used the hoary old miracles-of-modern-science angle instead. It was strangely moving.

  Different as they were, therefore, the programs all had one thing in common: they all aimed at total truthfulness about the human condition. ,

  Each was an open-ended half-hour series, often — especially toward the ends of the terminal subjects — screened daily, and probing frankly and honestly into the mental and physical states both of the prime sufferers and of those family or nursing staff who accompanied them on their anguished journeys. They were sagas of human endurance, of the human spirit in extremis. Every one of them was a memorable viewing experience. I do not mean to suggest that in all the programs everyone was noble and everyone was brave: there was selfishness and degradation, cowardice, the petty jealousy of neighbors for the camera’s attention, the eager family grubbing for bequests, also the hatred of nurses working long unprofitable hours for demanding, stupid, hopeless, unworthy people. But these were real reactions, truthful reactions, human reactions. They struck home. They were without artifice, the ordinary reactions of ordinary people. They could not fail to remind each individual viewer of his or her own personal potential for good or bad, for the courageous or the shabby. They presented a clear choice -and with the choice the outcome, in terms of misery or joy. The effect on me of these programs, pounding in one after the other, was shattering.

  Detractors of this level of truthful reportage always claimed that constant exposure to the spectacle of suffering dulled the sensibilities. The point about the suffering in the Human Destiny shows was that it was progressive. It could continue to excite horror and compassion because there was always a new agony in store. And, because there was time for study in depth, the participants could be shown as individuals, not merely as newsreel symbols — the burning soldier, the starving baby, the headless bomb victim. They were real people, with real mothers-in-law, and real dinners burning on the stove unheeded. It was details like this that kept the show alive, kept alive its capacity to involve.

  Even now I can still remember that burning dinner, observed by the cool eye of the camera, cut back to, while the man lay on the sitting room floor in a seizure, urine staining the crylon carpet, a chair broken, the brother swearing cunt and bugger at the telephone, the wife (who could have been taking the children away, could have been turning down the gas) pushing at her husband with one red leather toe to see if this time he was really dead. And the full-face close-up when she found that he was not, and knew that the whole charade would be gone through again.

  These were the moments a reporter might wait a life-time to capture. These were the moments the Human De
stiny show came up with time and time again.

  And the ratings showed that NTV was right in judging the public’s deep unconscious need. Its life was false, prettified into a bland, painless, deathless advertiser’s dream. The public wanted, and deserved, to be reminded that this was only a half of life, the half allowed by technology run wild.

  For me there would be logistic problems, of course. Being my own camera was an inestimable advantage in terms of spontaneity, but it limited the angles. It meant that I would have, in some measure, to compose the scene in advance, and cut and direct it as I went along. Vincent would naturally reshape my material, but if I didn’t happen to be looking in the right direction at the right moment, then the moment was lost. And I’d be on my own, with no helpful floor manager to nudge my arm. It was just the challenge I’d been looking for. I’d do Katherine Mortenhoe proud.