‘Miss Wentworth,’ she had told the landlord. And then, ‘For just the one night,’ paying in advance and hoping he wouldn’t ask for her civil offenses card. He didn’t, but charged for this magnanimity in leers and heavy innuendos.
She savored him for his hairy arms, his nastiness, and would have opened her legs for him there and then (fifty years of love?) if she’d only known how. And then, when she was finally alone, she looked out at the street, her father’s street, the first street she remembered, and understood the pathetic reasons why she had chosen it from a thousand others, and cried.
Later that evening she threw away her sheaf of computer jottings and went out of the hotel to find a telephone booth and ring Harry. Ring him for different, clearer reasons. But the number was not available, and she quickly guessed why. She was glad he had had the sense to protect himself. Perhaps he had disconnected the doorbell as well.
She went to bed early, woke once in the night, sweating and gripped by rigor. She tried her limbs for paralysis, but it wasn’t yet ready for her. She didn’t take a capsule: she wanted to measure, to know her condition. The rigor lasted thirty-three minutes. After it she slept again, strangely content.
In the morning she left the hotel early, before the landlord was up. She called in at a nearby police station, made a formal statement of Private Grief, and received two plastic stickers, one for her lapel and one for her front door or car. She now had three days’ respite.
On the landing outside her flat a reporter was asleep on an inflatable mattress while another sat dozing against the wall. They roused themselves, read the sticker she put on her door, and started wearily packing up. She went in to Harry.
‘I’m home,’ she called, telling herself she was. ‘Harry love, I’m home.’
The flat had a hectic, besieged air. She went through to the bedroom, where Harry was stirring, trying to open his eyes against the early morning glare and undoubtedly (she didn’t blame him) a considerable weight of Panidorm. He looked vulnerable and, Barbara prompted her, like a dormouse. Whatever a dormouse was. Hibernatory? She took off her jacket and lay down on the bed beside him.
‘I was afraid you weren’t coming back,’ he said.
‘I was in a muddle, love. I’m sorry.’
‘I was afraid you weren’t coming back.’
He wouldn’t hear her, so she could explain. ‘I was angry with all the wrong things, Harry. People. And it’s not people’s fault. All this, it’s not people’s fault.’
‘And now you’ve come.’ He reached over the bedclothes for her hand. ‘You’ve come,’ he said.
There was more of her explanation, but the words died of their own ridiculous weight. She squeezed Harry’s hand, and let his sleep reach out and take her.
~ * ~
I think I watched the arrival of the following morning, the second morning after my first sight of the only true Katherine Mortenhoe, I think I watched it from down by the river. It’s a fair guess anyway. I was often down there early those days, seeking the mist that gathered under the bridges and around the stiff black skirts of the moored hovercraft, composing pictures in my head of silky water and seabirds, and police launches winking by. All right, so it was corny, but I had this picture poem in mind. I’d shape up the tapes back at base one day, and sell them to some Arts Show. If you had the Gift, the fourteen-thousand-pound Gift, you might as well make use of it.
Anyway, I was on my way back west to look for some breakfast — if it wasn’t from the river it was from somewhere else — when I saw the only true Katherine Mortenhoe cross the road at an intersection ahead of me. I made no effort to catch up with her, of course: if she’d signed with Vincent I’d surely have heard, and besides, I soon caught sight of the orange fluorescent glow from the sticker on her lapel. So I just kept on as I was going, and then paused at the corner to watch her out of sight. She didn’t see me. I don’t think she’d have seen me if I’d been ten feet tall in a neon suit. She was dancing. Not crudely, just these three little steps and an old-fashioned sashay, all the way down the sidewalk. Out in the street, forty-four, with four weeks to live, and dancing. There were others about, and they watched her just the way I did. Only they probably thought she was mad, or high, while I knew different.
I tell you, it made my day. Working with her wasn’t going to be so rough after all. She possessed what I liked to call the possibility of joy. It’s rare these days. Perhaps she had needed Dr well-meaning Mason to bring it out in her, but there it was. The real, the continuous Katherine Mortenhoe possessed the possibility of joy. I rang Vincent from the nearest phone, got him out of bed to tell him what I’d seen.
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ he said. ‘Yesterday her joy was something else again.’
‘You didn’t tell me you’d been in touch.’
‘Briefly. A hymn of hate. There was nothing to tell.’
‘You still think she’ll sign?’
‘With somebody. And we’re the first in the field.’
‘I’d have approached her myself, the mood she’s in, only she’s got herself a three-day sticker.’
‘Best thing. Give her time to learn the score. And you stick to instructions. I’m saving the Roderick charm as my final clincher.’
We talked of this and that. It was a friendly sort of morning.
‘You got good footage of this dancing?’ he asked.
‘Two minutes. Maybe more.’
‘Sounds like good run-in stuff. Behind the titles. Upbeat. Kill the critics always shouting morbid.’
‘They worry you?’
‘I thought they might worry you.’
‘That was two days ago.’
‘I shan’t ask you what brought about the necessary adjustment.’
‘Put it like that and you’ll make me wonder.’
He laughed. ‘You artistic types are all the same. And ring me out of sleeping hours next time you want to spread your bonhomie around. We aren’t all blessed with the golden gift of sleeplessness.’
Only Vincent could have grasped the nettle so firmly as to get away with it.
‘Right,’ I said, and laughed also. ‘The dawn patrol for you in the future. Half-hourly reports on Phoebus rising.’
But he’d hung up, and my sharp non-joke was wasted. I’d get his answering service if I called him back. I went out into the undimmed, Katherine-Mortenhoe-dancing-down-the-street morning.
Perhaps the spring was really for humans once a matter of externals, of cuckoos and poetic crocuses. Or perhaps it’s always been what it is today, an affair in the blood, a chemistry even the largest city cannot arrest, a process that bends one’s perceptions till even oneself can be almost beautiful. In March the sun may shine and the air may be balmy, but without April in the blood this lightheartedness never catches fire. The buildings may purr, but the body knows better. It wears its ugly winter, summer, autumn skin and, as in all these seasons, knows no other. Only in spring is the flesh new, and the spirit incorruptible. Which made, I thought on that sweetly sad, sadly sweet, Katherine Mortenhoe morning, the spring the only bearable time for dying.
Remembering these thoughts I know that I must have been down by the river that morning. Art Showitis tends to linger.
I was due for my final check at the Clinic at half-past nine. With three hours to kill I thought, outrageously, of dropping in on my son and ex. I suppose it was Katherine Mortenhoe’s fault. I told myself, as I slipped back into the booth and rang for one of my still-novel taxis, that my son and ex perhaps mightn’t have noticed the spring. Perhaps they could do with some of the bonhomie that had so cheered up Vincent.
I honestly believed that these were my motives: spring, Katherine Mortenhoe, and a simple desire to share something with someone. I could, I honestly believed, think of no other.
The suburb was just as it had always been, green baize lawns and never-fade Virginia creeper. I nearly got straight back into the taxi and went off for a ritzy breakfast on the far side of town. But they drew me,
the gate I’d knocked up in a couple of Sundays, our holograph aerial that at one time had been the first down our road. They all had them now, I saw, except the Richardsons (fancy them still being there) who had this reverse snobbery thing about the Joneses. Theirs was probably hidden in their loft.
Tracey answered the doorbell on the second ring. I remembered her as a sounder sleeper. The time was just on six. ‘You’ve grown a beard,’ she said. It was our first meeting in over two years. Tracey feels it’s some kind of weakness to show surprise.
‘You haven’t.’
‘Not for want of trying.’ She leaned on the edge of the door. ‘You wanted something?’
I wanted her to look at the spring. If I’d said so she might easily have shut the door in my face. ‘I’m lonely,’ I said instead.
‘That makes two of us.’
‘May I warm my hands at your simple hearth?’
‘You’ll never learn,’ she said. But she stood to one side and let me in. I went through to the kitchen. Looking around, I couldn’t see she’d changed a thing. ‘How’s our little Basis for Discussion?’ I said.
‘I wish you wouldn’t call him that. Roddie Two’s fine.’
I needed to start again. Smart reporter’s talk was no way in. Or out. Never had been. ‘May I sit down?’
‘You pay the rent.’
‘Please, Tracey. You know I’ve never been like that.’
She tied her bathrobe tighter. ‘What am I supposed to do? You come in here . . . Just tell me the script, Roddie. Reconciliation? Loving daddy? Tell me the script and maybe I’ll make it.’
‘There’s no script. It was a lovely morning. I. . . don’t sleep much. I just came.’
‘That’s my lovable, impulsive Roddie.’ She turned away abruptly, brushing her hair back from her face. ‘No — I didn’t mean that. I’m glad to see you, Roddie. Real glad. But what next?’
‘You could make me some eggs and coffee.’
‘Go away, Roddie. Go away before we start shouting. Before Roddie Two wakes up and we’re all back down there in the shit.’
I dared not move. One movement and I was gone.
‘Sit down, Tracey.’ Easily, easily. ‘You sit down and I’ll do the making.’
She could have blown up in my face, but she didn’t. She went to the cooker and flicked switches. I saw there was a big new chip off the enamel on the corner.
‘I don’t know what you want,’ she said, ‘but eggs and coffee I can just about run to.’
I sat down, and launched into the story about the middle-aged woman I’d seen dancing down Oakridge. I did a good job, and she saw straight through it. She understood me, so I always said, better than I understood myself.
‘This woman’s got a name,’ she said. ‘You didn’t say it, but you know it. You’re going to use her, and you’ve come back to me to tell you it’s OK.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
She filled the coffeepot and set it to perk. I’d been mad, and cruel to us both, to come. Such a bright clean, spring-filled kitchen.
‘We look out for you,’ Tracey said. ‘Roddie Two and me. You haven’t been around on the screen these four-five months. No trouble, I hope?’
Up to that moment, for as much as an hour, I’d forgotten. At least I’d proved to myself that it could be done. But now I remembered, and was even more certain I should go.
‘No trouble,’ I said. ‘I’ve been . . . negotiating a new contract. In the future I’ll be more behind the camera than out front.’
‘Directing?’ She turned from the cooker, being interested in my career. ‘Will you like that?’
‘It’s more money,’ I said. I wanted to tell her. There was nobody in the whole world I wanted to tell, only Tracey. But Vincent there behind my eyes said no. ‘Look, I can’t say much about it now, Tracey. You’ll hear soon enough, once PR says the moment’s right.’
She pushed her hair back again. It was longer now, two years longer.
‘You’ve sold another bit of your soul,’ she said. ‘I was wrong about that woman, Roddie. You’ve sold another bit of your soul and you want me to clap my hands and cheer. You’ve come to tell me I was right. Right not to renew.’ She moved toward me, leaned across the table, tried to look into my eyes which I couldn’t allow. ‘Why are you here, Roddie?’
I stood up. ‘I’d better go,’ I said. ‘It was misguided of me to come.’ Hopefully that would annoy her. Then I could go away, and feel aggrieved, rejected.
‘Misguided?’ She didn’t annoy that easily. ‘I like that word misguided. You know, Roddie, for all of two minutes I thought you’d come back.’
I didn’t remind her it was she who hadn’t renewed. I went at last to the garden door, unlocked it. As always, the key stuck a bit. ‘I meant it about the more money, Tracey. Roddie Two’s got a rich daddy.’
‘Won’t you stay and see him?’
‘I’d like you two to find a bigger place. Somewhere he can see a field. Maybe a cow.’
And still she refused her dislike. ‘Come to bed, Roddie.’ She held out one hand. ‘There was always that.’
I wanted to make love to her. We made the best love. I’d wanted to make love to her from the moment she’d said she was lonely too. But Vincent there behind my eyes said yes. Yes, yes, yes.
She didn’t need much telling. Two seconds and she lowered her outstretched hand. ‘I don’t have a lover,’ she said. ‘If that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘They’re all the rage,’ I said.
I was finding it extraordinarily difficult to get out through that open garden door. And we’d been through that kind of talk ten minutes ago.
‘Now I do give up.’ She held up fingers, counting them off. ‘If it’s not sex, and if it’s not guilt, and if it’s not Roddie Two, and if it’s not my home cooking, then I do give up.’
She only played that kind of game when she was upset, I mean really upset. I closed my eyes and lowered my head so that she wouldn’t see, and crossed the room to her, and put my arms around her. I felt her shoulder blades under my hands and her breasts against my chest. She welcomed me, and I kissed her. I meant wait for me.
We stood like that for a long time, just remembering each other, till the pain behind my eyes began to build, and the salacious giggles of the blacked-out office boys. Then I stood back from her and opened my eyes, and wished to God that for those office boys she didn’t have to look so kissed.
‘I must go,’ I said. And meant wait for me.
I meant what I had no right to mean, what I had no right to offer, what I had no right even to want. She looked at me, into my violated eyes.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose you must.’
I went out of the kitchen and quickly around the side of the house, leaving her to the coffee percolating steadfastly on the stove.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose you must.’ No regret.
Green baize lawns and never-fade Virginia creeper.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose you must.’ No pleasure.
Swollen crocuses, outsize beyond the call of duty.
Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose you must.’ Risking nothing, afraid of commitment afraid of being hurt. . .
It was all I had to go on. Knowing Tracey, it was a lot. I ran. I leaped and bounded. But for the memory of dancing Katherine Mortenhoe, I might have danced. One was what one was, I believed: and I was a newsman. No conceivable set of circumstances could ever change that. And she was unalterably she. But I ran. The impossible, I thought, if I thought, and I didn’t think, thinking it now instead, the impossible takes slightly longer. I ran, gasping, and walked, and came to a thruway, and found a transport motel, and ordered a man-size breakfast. The office boys could make what they liked of me. I had within me, like Katherine Mortenhoe, the possibility of joy.
~ * ~
She woke again at half-past eight and immediately grasped the day ahead. It would be one of plans, decisions. Harry had been quite right to suggest g
oing away somewhere. The farther the better. She bounced off the bed, caught sight of her crumpled clothes in the mirror, rubbed them down with her Smoothie, and revolved slowly, considering her reflection. Not bad for forty-four, and the grave only twenty-six days off. She went in search of Harry’s travel brochures. It was odd how the old ways of thought lingered. She hadn’t heard of a grave, not a real corpse-and-coffin grave, not in ten or fifteen years. Herself, she’d give her altered organism to a medical school: young ones — well, middle-aged ones — must be fairly hard to come by. She looked in the desk, and behind the clock, and in the drawer of the kitchen table. Then she tried the bedroom. Finally she roused Harry.
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe Page 8
