Thursday

SHE PASSED the night in a grubby hotel. Her platinum credit card was in the Mortenhoe name but she doubted if the man would have heard of it yet. In any case, what she did with her time was none of his business. Her card clicked at him approvingly and he didn’t even read it. He leered at her though and he had hairy arms. Her anger kept her going.

It had faltered back by the crumpled taxi, by poor Mr. Mathiesson whom nobody was ever going to humiliate again. But she had clung to it for its comfort, through her long walk, away and away and away, across the aimless central precincts of the city, each dedicated to a newer, brighter lie. She had clung to it for the righteousness it gave her, leaving Harry, incapable of loyalty, of the simplest thing she needed, to the anxious emptiness of their flat and an endlessly ringing doorbell. She had clung to it right across the new city and into the gray residue of the old, up the steps of the first hotel she saw in a street that was somehow like her parents’ street, and on again up threadbare stairs to a studio room with a toilet annex.

And then, when she was finally alone, she’d looked down at the street, her parents’ street, the first street she remembered, and had understood the pathetic reasons why she had chosen it from a thousand others, and her anger had left her and she’d cried.

Later that evening she threw away her sheaf of computer jottings and went out of the hotel to find some food and a telephone booth. She had to ring Harry. He took his time answering and said he’d nearly let it ring. There’d been so many reporters. She told him she was staying the night with a friend from the office, a woman he’d met two or three times, and he wasn’t to worry. It was just that she needed a few hours on her own to think about things. She’d never lied so blatantly to him before but at least the last was true.

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 ate a greasy breakfast, same place as the night before, then 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 whiskey or Panidorm. He looked vulnerable and, Barbara prompted her, like a dormouse. Whatever a dormouse was. She took off her jacket and lay down on the bed beside him.

He wouldn’t hear her, not just now, 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 to come, 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 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. Since the bandages came off I was often down there early, seeking the mist that gathered under the bridges and around the stiff black skirts of the moored hovercraft. I was composing pictures in my head of silky water and seabirds, and police launches winking by. All right, so it was trite, but I had this picture poem in mind. I’d shape up the tapes back at base one day, and sell them to some art-house show. If you had a toy, a fifty-thousand-pound toy, the best toy ever, you might as well play with it.

Anyway, I was on my way back west to look for some breakfast—if it wasn’t from down by 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, of course, to catch up with her: if she’d signed with Vincent I’d surely have heard, and besides, I soon spotted the orange fluorescent glow from the Personal Grief 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 notice me. I don’t think she’d have noticed me if I’d been ten feet tall in a neon suit. She was dancing. Not theatrically, just these three little steps and an old-fashioned sashay, all the way down the sidewalk. Out there in the open street, forty-four, hair messed up, with Gordon’s Syndrome and only 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 troubled Dr. 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 wasn’t quite so apparent.”

“Briefly. A telephoned hymn of hate. I’d written her a letter. That’s all. There was nothing to tell.”

“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 keep to instructions. I’m saving the Roderick charm as my final clincher.”

“Sounds like good run-in stuff. Behind the titles. Upbeat. Kill the critics always shouting morbid.”

He laughed. “You artistic types are all the same. And ring me outside normal sleeping hours next time you want to spread your bonhomie around. We aren’t all blessed with the golden gift of sleeplessness.”

“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 NTV’s answering service if I called him back. I went out into the undimmed, Katherine-Mortenhoe-dancing-down-the-street morning.

Spring. That day spring was special. Not just a matter of cuckoos and poetic crocuses. That day spring was special, an affair in the blood that even the largest city could not arrest, a process that enlarged one’s perceptions till even oneself could 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 Implant Clinic at half-past nine. With three hours to kill I decided, quite unreasonably, to drop 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, NTV-funded 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 a sympathetic 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 after 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.

“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.

“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 asleep. He’s doing fine.”

I needed to start again. Smart reporter’s talk was no way in. Or out. Never had been. “May I sit down?”

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?”

“Go away, Roddie. Go away before we start shouting. Before Roddie Two wakes up and we’re all back down there in the shit.”

“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.

“You’ve a new show coming,” she said. “It’s probably Vincent and you’ve come back for me to tell you it’s OK.”

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 actually forgotten. At least I’d proved to myself that it could be done. But now I remembered, and was even more certain I shouldn’t stay.

“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, an ex-wife being interested in her ex-husband’s 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.”

“You’ve sold another bit of your soul,” she said. “Maybe I was wrong about Vincent. Maybe you’ve just sold another bit of your soul and you want me to clap my hands. You’ve come to tell me I was wise. You’ve completely lost your way and I was wise 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 might have come back.”

I didn’t remind her that it wasn’t my option. 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. These days Roddie Two’s got a rich daddy.”

“I’d like you two to find a bigger place. Somewhere he can see a field. Maybe a cow.”

And still she refused to drive me away. Worse: “Come to bed, Roddie.” She held out one hand. “There was always that.”

I wanted to make love to her. We made good 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 no. No, no, no.

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.”

I was finding it extraordinarily difficult to get out through that open garden door. And we’d been through the office talk stuff 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 sort of game when she was upset, I mean really upset. I closed my eyes and lowered my head so that she wouldn’t see them, 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 comments of the blacked-out viewing room technicians. Then I stood back from her and opened my eyes, and wished to God that for those guys she didn’t have to look so kissed.

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.

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.” 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 leapt and bounded. But for the memory of dancing Katherine Mortenhoe, I might have danced. The technicians could make what they liked of me. One was what one was, and I was a newsman. No conceivable set of circumstances could ever change that. And she was unalterably she. But I leapt and bounded. The impossible, I thought, if I thought, and I didn’t think, thinking it later 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 implants weren’t forever. 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 was still asleep. He’d been right to suggest going 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 Smoothit, 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. The old phrases. She hadn’t heard of a grave, not a real corpse-and-coffin grave, not in ten or fifteen years. Her writer ladies used them. 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. Finally she roused Harry.

He woke more easily now. “There were reporters,” he said. And then gathering consciousness, “Didn’t you have a hard time getting in?”

She sat down on the bed and told him. About Mr. Mathiesson, about the crash, about the leering hotel clerk, about her early morning visit to the police station. He enjoyed, as he always did, hearing about her exciting life. Neither of them spoiled the moment with allusions to the other’s bad behavior.

“So now we’ve got three days’ grace,” she said. “Getaway time. Over the hills and a great way off.”

“Not if we’re clever. We must make clever plans. Starting with those travel brochures you showed me.”

He withdrew a little. “You didn’t seem all that interested,” he said. “I . . . threw them away.”

“Never mind.” She kissed him on the cheek. “We can easily get some more.”

“What can he do, my darling? He’ll never have the face to take you to court.”

Harry fiddled with the bedclothes. “It’s all very well for you,” he said, almost inaudibly.

Katherine considered. It was indeed all very well for her: in a few weeks’ time she’d be out of it, beyond the reach of the longest legal arm. And poor Harry wouldn’t. He’d worry dreadfully. Perhaps she was asking too much of him.

“Harry . . .” She didn’t quite know how to say it. “Harry love, what exactly did you tell Mr. Mathiesson?”

She asked him, though she didn’t want to know. He frowned, trying to remember.

“He was from the Morning News. He was a clever one—I bet he looked us up the Registry. I just wondered what you’d told him about our renewal.”

“Oh, that one. You mean the one from the Morning News.” There was a long pause. “Do you really think I’d discuss our renewal with a reporter, Kate?”

“Reporters say anything. Anything at all. As if I’d discuss our renewal with—Anyway, what could I say?”

“He’s dead, Harry. A turbo-truck got him. And besides, I didn’t believe him. I knew perfectly well you’d never—”

She stood up. “He was a silly, squalid little newshound. And it’s time we had some breakfast.”

To turn him off she went out of the bedroom, along the passage, into the kitchen. But the connection remained, though faint, still inconveniently audible.

“You wouldn’t have brought him up, Katie, if you hadn’t at least partly believed him.”

She ran water loudly into the stainless steel sink. Brought him up . . . it was a good way of putting it. Mr. Mathiesson was vomit; sour, stinking vomit. She wouldn’t allow him, his lies, to take Harry away from her.

Harry appeared, naked, in the kitchen doorway. “You’d always” —baring his soul—“choose to believe other people rather than me.”

She smiled at him desperately, having no other refuge. He was protesting too much. Till the doorbell rang, and saved them both. She pushed past him, went to the door, opened the grille.

She set the door on its chain, and opened it. The postman passed the letters in through the crack.

“Thanks,” he said. “A lot of people paid a lot of money to get these letters to you on your doorstep.”

She took the letters and closed the door, and he called to her through the grille.

“Mrs. Mortenhoe? What’s it feel like, Mrs. Mortenhoe? I read about you in the papers, Mrs. Mortenhoe. At the office there was plenty wanted this job, Mrs. Mortenhoe, but it was me on the rota.”

She snapped the grille shut, and returned to the kitchen. Out of deference to the postman outside the door Harry had wrapped a towel around his waist. She gave him the letters, she didn’t want them, and stood reconstituting milk for his cereal. The last time a letter had been delivered was two years before, a court summons for excessive water use. Now, suddenly, at one time, there were thirty-two.

Harry opened them carefully, using a kitchen knife, fumbling the enclosures, telling her everything she didn’t want to know about each. The first he picked was from a bedding manufacturer, sending her a colored catalog, and promising her the bed of her choice, queen-size, “for as long as she might reasonably be deemed to have need of it,” plus five thousand, in return for the right to use her name in its worldwide advertising. The decision was hers, of course, but a representative would call that afternoon at three with demonstration models in case she felt, in her present situation, disinclined to visit her neighborhood showroom.

Other enterprises were less discreet. If she had been willing, with only four weeks left, to live her dwindling days to the full via a wide range of soft drinks, hair conditioners, chocolate bars, hi-fi sets, sexual appliances, nicotine-free cigarettes, and instant spray-on wallpaper, she could, Harry calculated, enrich her residual estate by some seventeen thousand. Furthermore, a mountain leisure center famous for its Rocky Haven Waffles offered her four weeks free accommodation for herself and her husband, plus a single room and exclusive use of the camp chapel for an additional seven-day period. All this in exchange for the simple statement that if she’d only discovered the mountain air (and the Waffles) sooner she was sure she’d have lived to a hundred and ten. Their representative would be calling at two-thirty.

There were wheelchair brochures, and some tasteful electronic respirators, both firms offering immediate delivery, no deposit terms, and representatives already on their way. Jesus Christ the Second, in orange ink on purple paper, offered no money and wanted none, demanding access to Mrs. Martin Lois’s immortal soul instead.

Among a crop of TV and newspaper proposals there were also, addressed to Harry but given away by their black-edged notepaper, several communications from morticians.

Reading all this lasted all through breakfast and on into the morning. Harry was a great one for letters, taking them very seriously, as proofs that he existed. Prepaid personal delivery letters proved additionally that people wanted him to exist. At first Katherine humored him. After the first six or seven, however, she began to find the whole thing funny. He joined in her laughter, but went on all the same, carefully putting on one side all those letters that contained firm offers of goods or cash. This made her laugh more than ever. Poor, dear, provident Harry . . . Her own collection was of representatives’ arrival times. Between two and six that afternoon seventeen salesmen were expected, eleven of these having chosen the peak period between two-thirty and four. And every single one of them, thank God, would get no farther than the front-door sticker.

“Harry,” she said, suddenly not laughing, “Harry love, just how much did Vincent Ferriman offer you when you talked with him a couple of days ago?”

Harry looked up from a casket catalog he was trying not to let her see. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“I told you, it doesn’t matter. None of all this matters. I wouldn’t touch a penny of their bloody money.”

“I might, Harry. If they paid quickly enough I could have a mink and two Cadillacs, and all those other things a girl is supposed to want.”

How sweetly pompous he was. “Is it really silly to want to be cosseted in my declining weeks?”

“I’m afraid we must, Harry.” She leaned across the table, gathered all the pieces of paper and tapped them into a neat pile which she kept on her lap. “We must talk properly,” she said, “about the future.”

He got up, still wearing his ridiculous towel, and went about the kitchen arranging things that didn’t need arranging. He was rather fat. He needed her comfort, not her questions, but he couldn’t always be given in to. “After I’m dead,” she said firmly, pleased with her courage, “after I’m dead you must get away. You’ll have to leave your job. You’ll need a new one. You’ll need money.”

Indeed they did. Not a lot but more than most, That was why the flat was tiny. That was why they didn’t own a hologram, or rent a newspaper receiver. They were saving for a self-contained domestic unit in a good retirement area. They were saving for their old age. She tried to find this as funny as the brochures had been, and failed.

Self-pity wouldn’t stop her. A new life had to be envisaged for him, full of satisfactions he’d make for himself. He didn’t want to hear, of course. He wanted to be hugged, and told everything was going to be all right. She’d lie to him later, but not at this moment. He shouldn’t have let her see how fat he was.

“You don’t make friends easily. You should have a nice home, smart car, plenty of good cassettes and expensive food . . . Then again, how about job qualifications? I don’t expect you’ll find another place all that easily. You’ll need money for all this. Lots of money. And then there’s the question of another wife—”

He didn’t often turn on her. He believed himself henpecked, and was happy secretly to resent it and never do anything about it. He thought of this as self-control, and it made him feel superior. Just occasionally, however, the humiliations were too great.

“What’s the matter with you,” he said, “is that you don’t dare think about the things that really count. Instead you fill your head up with money, and bad jokes, and what’s going to happen to me, and who you hate and who you don’t, and how you’re going to fool the reporters, and . . . anything except what really counts.” He flapped his arms. “Soon you’re going to die, Kate. You’re going to get iller and iller, and finally die. That’s what you ought to be thinking about. Just stop nagging at me, Kate. There are more important things to be getting on with.”

He stopped. He’d made his speech. But he’d misjudged its length. Halfway through there’d been contact. But then her conception of him as a simple, malleable soul had conquered. He’d given her time to clothe his words in his paltry nakedness, in the areas of flab that joggled as he talked. If he got much more worked up, she thought, his towel would fall off.

She squared the papers briskly in her lap. His outburst was best not mentioned. “I tell you what,” she said, “if we’re both not going in to work today, let’s have an outing! Get out of this flat. We’ve got the sticker if anyone bothers us. Let’s go and see the Castle. It’s ridiculous how people living in a city never get to see the sights it’s famous for.”

She stood up, dazzled him with her smile, and went out of the room, taking the letters and brochures with her . . . Perhaps he deserved some response, some explanation. “You’ll feel better when you’ve got some clothes on,” she suggested over her shoulder, going into the sitting room and putting the papers carefully away in the desk.

I arrived at the Clinic punctually, full of my transport motel breakfast, full of spring and the old-fashioned joys of. The implant technicians were ready for me in their windowless, matte-black gadget box. The MEN. The Micro-Electro-Neurologists. Their white plastic casings closely resembled clothes; their means of audible communication went by the name of speech. Three of them, photosensitive, audio-linked, tactile-orientated, their discerners clicking, their programs running AOK, they locomoted around, hooked up to, the mechanism returning for final approval.

Which such, on that liberated, spring-in-the-blood morning, wasn’t much of a such.

They checked me out. “Try not to blink,” they said, and stared down dazzling needles. So I tried not to blink, and thought of wealth and fame and Vincent and Katherine Mortenhoe. And of Tracey who would wait until all these were miraculously behind me.

“Watch the point of light,” they told me. “Watch the pencil. Watch the red and then the green. Watch this film. Watch this different film. Wait for the injection. Now watch the point of light. Watch the pencil. Watch the red and then the green. Watch this film. Watch this different film. Wait for the EEG. Now watch the point of light. Watch the pencil. Watch the red and then the green. Watch this film. Watch this different film.”

Once, accidentally, they said, “Does this hurt?” to which I said, “Yes,” because it did. And thought of Tracey.

They told me at last, rubbing their sensitive, multidimensional manipulators and simulating joy, that Implant Function was up to expectation. I didn’t argue. Implant Function had been up to expectation from the moment the bandages came off. And in glorious Trucolor too. They hummed and buzzed, and proudly gave me their more elaborate version of my original consultant’s spiel. It sounded much cleverer, the way they put it.

Tapping into my existing neural pathways, they told me, had involved considerable impulse rerouting, new pathways that incoming visual information must learn to follow. Brain tissue was very good at this, they said—witness the synapses’ ability to bypass serious stroke damage—but establishing any new pathway took time and must be consistent and uninterrupted. Hence my continued need, for the next few weeks, while their neural modifications stabilized, to avoid protracted darkness.

I wasn’t to worry, though. Scar-tissue pain would give ample warning, should I ever carelessly wander into a darkened room. Brain tissue, they said, lacked pain receptors, nociceptors, but there were nociceptors in its three protective membranes and—not to put too fine a point on it—damage to these, especially if caused by neural retractions, would hurt like hell.

It would also permanently blind me, I remembered rightly, but they didn’t mention that.

They patted my shoulder. Total unconsciousness, on the other hand, was perfectly safe. It triggered complete sensor blackout. I wasn’t to worry. Worry caused hypertension, and that made people accident-prone. And weren’t the latest sleep deprivation drugs amazing?

They did suggest, though, that I carried a flashlight in case of emergencies. And a card too—they gave me one they’d had one printed—to go with my blood group and health insurance in case I had an accident. Apart from anything else, the power pack in my neck could become dangerously radioactive if tampered with.

They patted me again, so I thanked them and promised not to worry. They were just three crazy guys from the upstairs lab, but I wished they didn’t care so much. I told them the drugs were indeed amazing. I truly, honestly, hardly felt tired at all.

At least I understood my son a little better now. Possibly it was his closeness to me, his prophetic soul, that had made him congenitally afraid of monkey and owl who lived in the dark.

They released me from their various streamlined appliances and I went, trying not to run, out of their hushed and very expensive workplace, out through noisy, sunlit offices to the more human inquiries of my surgeons. And after my surgeons, to Daniel Klausen, my psychiatrist, in his psychiatrist’s glasses. When all I wanted was to get away and buy that flashlight, and a good supply of batteries.

“My favorite cyborg,” he said, not rising. “You must come and tell me all about it.”

A degree of aggression would be expected. Not that I cared. Dr. Klausen didn’t sit at a desk, but in one of those plastic womb-things hanging on a chain from the ceiling. There were three other chairs in the room, and he did nothing to help me choose. Presumably the one I picked would be significant. Of something. To put the interview on its right footing I chose a hard, upright chair that left me facing the window, with Klausen almost in silhouette against it. If I was to be interrogated, then I was to be interrogated. I knew that I was up to it.

“You’re the professional interviewer. You know how much time can be wasted by the subject pretending not to understand the question.”

“I also know how much time can be wasted by making the question too unspecific.”

I was expecting him to twiddle his chair on its piece of chain, but he didn’t. “If you want a battle, we can easily have one. This isn’t a selection board—you went through that months ago. If I was wrong then, it’s certainly far too late to reverse my decision now.”

That “typically” got me. “And, equally typically, you’re going to tell me all the same.”

He looked over his glasses. “It annoys you that any of your actions should be predictable?”

“No. It annoys me that you should think yourself so clever for predicting them.”

He might have been sincere. But interrogators went in for sincerity: they took a course in it at Interrogators’ School.

He had it planned. “You were an outsider. You were also exceptionally stable.”

My anger was not so much at his lie as at the way he’d tricked me into denying it. “Yes,” Tracey had said, “I suppose you must.” And cared. Something—my famous stability?—prevented me, but only just, from laying violent hands on him, where he sat, quite motionless, observing, on the end of his long black chain. I had no words, words that could not be ridiculed, for my secret hope. And no violence either.

“You’re wrong, Klausen,” was all I could say. “Believe me, you’re wrong.”

He moved at last, lifting his feet so that the chair swung slowly. “Convince me,” he said.

“Because you bothered to contradict me in the first place. We both know it was my report more than anything else that got you the job. We weren’t always on opposite sides.”

He was saying he’d given me something to blame. He’d also provided himself as a scapegoat for the blame for the blame. I might have known any coin Klausen tossed would have two heads.

“I’m sure you realize, Roddie, that your alienation is not basically from other people but from yourself.”

His priestlike complacency no longer bothered me. “So that’s what I’m here for? So that you can tell me how much I hate myself?”

“Telling you what you already know is one thing. Getting you to admit it is another.”

Once this incredible man had impressed me. But in those days, of course, he’d had something I needed . . . I caught myself shifting my ass from one flabby side to the other, and went right on doing it. He could watch me and smile to himself at his wisdom as much as he liked.

I told him, “Know thyself, saith the prophet.” Anyway, the fucking chairs were hard, so what did he expect? “Which, being interpreted, Klausen, means jack off like crazy.”

He made like he’d heard it all before. “I doubt if you can do even that now, with Vincent watching.”

Too late I saw he’d won the point. But he graciously let it pass. “Did you turn down the sound before you came in here?” he asked.

“I’m not even wearing the audio. It came off for the surgeons, and I carefully didn’t put it back.”

“I’m glad.” He heaved himself out of his chair, needing a new paragraph, and went to the window. The Clinic had Clinic grounds, a Clinic fountain, Clinic trees. “This stability of yours,” he said to the Clinic grass, “it’s going to be strained. I wanted you to understand how much.”

“And I think you do. You’re nobody’s fool, Roddie. You understand very well. I really do hope you make it.”

He seemed to have finished, so I got up and left. It seemed to me that the score was fairly even. And I had work to do, even if he hadn’t. I had an appointment after lunch with Clement Pyke, father to the only true Katherine Mortenhoe.

Katherine found the Castle packed solid with parties of children and afternoon shift workers whiling away the sunny morning. Movement inside its walls was possible only in the wake of the half-hourly conducted tours. She and Harry waited in line, then tagged along, across the drawbridge (labeled Drawbridge), through the keep (labeled Keep), around the roped-off (and labeled) inner courtyard, and into the undeniably great Great Hall. They moved slowly, keeping as far back as they could from the guide’s piercing PA system.

In the Armory (labeled, of course) beyond the Great Hall there was a long wait, people piling in behind, while the party strung itself out up the famous 300-step spiral staircase. The ascent was slow and claustrophobic, and, as it progressed, was made increasingly difficult by breathless climbers sitting on the steps to rest. Kate was proud of Harry: he made it to the top in one. So did she.

The Castle stood on a steep little hill in the middle of the city, its gray towers higher than all but the tallest of the surrounding point blocks. The guide interrupted his intoned but lurid description of past glories and spent several minutes identifying present landmarks. His party, showing their first signs of real animation, hung over the labeled Battlements, shrieking and gesticulating as they picked out their own areas, and possibly even their own windows in their own residential buildings. The past meant nothing to them. Their security lay in recognizing the ornaments on the windowsill of this year’s flat. Katherine drew Harry out of the circulation flow, into an embrasure. These same people, on the moors or by the sea, would stay within the safe, six-foot ambience of their motorcars.

Harry squared his shoulders. “Just think of being a sentry,” he said, “up here on a windy night.” He gazed around proprietorially, stamping his halberd and clinking his coat of mail.

And then, suddenly and inconveniently, quite without warning, she had her first paralysis.

She’d expected the rigor first, and the tight feeling around her scalp, but neither of these happened. She just lurched against Harry and he sensibly propped her up. It wasn’t a bad paralysis, just one leg as far as the knee really, but she was grateful to Harry for being there, and for being so sensible. Otherwise she could easily have fallen down and bumped herself.

He whispered kind things to her and she leaned on the comfortable (not fat) bulk of him, trying to think if there had been some sensation in the last few minutes that might have warned her. She’d heard, for example, that epileptics saw flashing lights or smelled funny smells. Either would be useful. But she could remember nothing of the sort . . . A Castle Attendant pushed toward them through the landmark-spotting crowd.

“None of that,” he said. “The Castle Trustees don’t have to stand for none of that.”

Harry, a naturally proper man, went very red. “My wife felt faint, officer.” He moved away from Katherine, letting her stagger. “You can see for yourself she can hardly stand.”

The attendant watched her. “This is Castle Property, mate. If she’s drunk or high I shall have to report the matter.”

The attendant shaded his eyes against the sun. “I’ve got it now. I reckon she’s this Mrs. Whatsit there’s all the fuss about. I seen her picture in the paper.”

He moved closer, and stared into her face. Afraid that he was going to help her, Katherine tried to tell him to go away. Her jaw flapped up and down. The paralysis was only in one leg, so why couldn’t she speak? But it was all right: the attendant had no intention of helping her.

With her face on a hundred million screens and front pages, Katherine had been able to reach the Castle unnoticed. Ordinary people on the street did not see their fellows—that was how they kept sane. But now, however, by behaving unsuitably in an embrasure on the Castle battlements, she had drawn attention to herself.

“Keep back!” the attendant shouted, putting into people’s minds the fact that there was something to be kept back from. So they kept back, closer and closer.

“Push her off? Do me a favor—not if he knows which side his bread’s buttered.”

While at the back of the crowd a man stood quietly watching, his gray-green jacket slung over his shoulder on account of the heat.

Katherine closed her eyes against the jostling mouths. And behind her the smooth stone parapet, and beyond it the wind. By the time she could speak again there was nothing she wanted to say. Sensation returned to her leg, and she walked.

The conducted tour schedule was now seriously out of joint. The guide had phoned down and called a halt in the Armory, but still the people were two abreast on the spiral staircase, and shouting angrily, and feeling faint. Since going back was clearly impossible, and the emergency stairs were only for real emergencies, Katherine and Harry were forced on their aggrieved companions for the entire allotted route. The guide wisely abbreviated his spiel, for few now cared, and got them out as quickly as he could. Possibly the Castle had known less worthy occasions in its seven hundred years, but somehow Katherine doubted it.

“Disgusting. She oughtn’t to be allowed out, not among normal healthy people.”

These then were her audience, the grief-starved public of Vincent Ferriman. And he was right, of course: sanitize her agony, interpolate a TV screen, a director’s sensibility, and these same people would experience veritable orgies of compassion. It was only face to face that they feared her. It was only face to face that, given a leader, they’d have torn her limb from limb.

Outside the Castle, beyond the drawbridge, a group of reporters was waiting. She and Harry, unclean, had been allowed to the head of the party filing out through the turnstile. She was first onto the drawbridge, leaning on Harry’s arm. Seeing her, the reporters shouted and surged, and popped their cameras. People clicked eagerly through the turnstile behind her, pushing her forward. The reporters, knowing the law, eased her to one side and closed in on Harry.

“After this, do you feel you were justified in bringing her to a public place?”

Harry tried to force his way through to her. “Private grief,” he shouted. “Leave us alone. Private grief . . .”

Somebody laughed. “Where’s your sticker, Mr. Mortenhoe? Suppose you tell us what it feels like, knowing you’re married to a loony?”

Harry lowered his head and pushed through, beating at them as he went. He wasn’t very good at it. But a reporter’s nose was bloodied and a camera spun out of another’s hand and was trampled upon. The reporters, knowing their rights, grew angry. Harry was tripped, and fell heavily. People of all sorts gathered around.

Katherine stood, unmolested, in a still circle of legality, and watched him being helped to his feet. Watched him being accidentally shoved so that he fell down again.

She screamed. It was the only thing she could think of to do. Coarse, humiliating, painful, detestable, the only thing she could think of to do. She screamed again, and then in steady, unremitting blasts, her hands linked loosely across her stomach, her handbag tucked under one arm, well aware of her acute ugliness. She sounded ugly, she looked ugly. But the crowd’s attention, which had been Harry’s, was hers again.

In the sudden silence her screams beat back at her from the gray walls of the Castle. Once started, it was easy to continue. It was all that seemed right on that sunny, grief-starved morning. Harry went to her, was permitted to go to her. His coat was torn, his hair untidy, but otherwise he seemed unhurt. Something, possibly shame, lay heavily on the still, angry crowd. And she went on screaming because she daren’t stop.

There were taxis waiting, taxis that had brought the reporters and their gear. Harry led her to one of these—no one else would touch her, know her—opened the door and, treading a knife-edge of high-handedness, helped her in. The crowd moved then, slowly closer. He told the driver where to go, them climbed in after her. He said to her, “I don’t believe it.”

She sat in the back of the taxi, blubbering now, loudly but subsiding. As the driver started to move off the crowd pressed around, trying—now that it was impossible—to reach her, hands catching at the door handles, scrabbling at the windows. Harry said, “That’s enough now, dear.”

He would never firmly stop her. He would sit there, patiently wanting her to stop. He would be embarrassed by her but he would never make her stop. He was Harry. She held tightly onto the edge of the seat, and watched the shopfronts reel by, and abruptly stopped making noises, fighting the terrible need that continued in her body. In her mind too, one part of it, the need was almost irresistible. Harry said, “Well done.”

They reached home without further incident, without further conversation. Safe finally behind their PG-stickered front door, they stood together in the lobby, the sweat cooling under their arms, and with it the last of their sustaining fear. Harry stepped away from her. “Sorry about that,” he said, generously pretending that some of it, somewhere, somehow, had been his fault.

She dragged her feet slowly through into the sitting room, and lay down on the settee. His fault? She closed her eyes. Whose fault? If she had had an excuse for going to the Castle—other than her obvious need to deal with his flab-joggling, towel-imperilling harangue—it had been the possibility of reaching back into the past, of finding perspective there. Seven hundred years, seeable and touchable, would surely make death seem right and proper . . . It had been a reasonable hope. So that in a way (although he’d never see it) her non-answer to Harry’s harangue would answer him after all. And fault wouldn’t come into it.

But the seven hundred years had been unavailable. People had got in the way. She lay with her eyes closed, quietly testing the dexterity of her hands. She could still oppose her thumbs. She had a long way yet to go.

The morning’s events had taken Harry differently, made him restless, full of plans. He ranged about the room, throwing out suggestions, places to go. She listened to him, felt affectionate, even loving, but isolated all the same on her slippery, twenty-six-day decline. In the end she had to interrupt.

“We’re not going anywhere,” she said. “We’re staying here. We’re talking in whispers, and drawing the blinds against the helicopters, and disconnecting all the bells. We’re staying here, in the one place where we’re safe.” And where we can slide quietly, privately, down to death.

He stopped his pacing. “What about the shopping?” He was patient with her. “Remember I’m known in the district. If I go—”

“In a few hours you’ll be known in every district. And where you aren’t known, you’ll be followed. We’ll have the shopping delivered.”

“I don’t like to say this, Katherine, but I think you overestimate public interest in your case.”

“From a find to a check, from a check to a view, from a view to a death in the morning . . .”

“It’s a quotation, Harry. Peel’s view halloo . . . John Peel. His coat so gay . . . at the break of the day. . . . Some say the word was originally gray. You’re forgetting I majored in Folk Lore.”

She felt her scalp tightening. “We’re staying here,” she said quietly. “Here where we’re safe.”

He sat down beside her and took her hands with still opposing thumbs, and looked into her still non-hallucinating eyes. “Katherine love, we’d go mad. Nobody could live like that. We’d start hating each other. We’d go mad.”

Of course he was quite right. “Of course you’re quite right,” she said. And suddenly saw that the only way for her to endure what remained was to be totally on her own. Where the madness would be hers only, and perhaps a comfort. “We’ll think of somewhere we can go. There must be somewhere.”

She gripped his hands, and pulled him closer, and kissed him on the mouth, and afterward whispered, “I’m sorry, love,” in that intimate, unspecific way that allows no answer. He patted her and they kissed again, Katherine wondering all the while just how she was going to be rid of him, and he of her. The burden they presented to each other was intolerable.

Katherine Mortenhoe’s father, Clement Pyke, lived alone down in the old docks, aboard the converted fiberglass hull of an ex–river police hydrofoil. It took me nearly an hour to find him, weaving my scooter between old crane tracks and derelict warehouses and sky-high piles of rusting boiler tubing. It was real fringie country, though I didn’t on my way in see any.

Pyke’s boat turned out to be one of probably thirty, stacked out from the side of a huge dry dock and floating right down at the bottom in two or three feet of scum. I stood and panned around the area. Vincent would find more than enough for establishing shots and local atmosphere. The ladder down was rickety, the whole setup—electric cables, freshwater hoses, gangplanks—dangerously impermanent. The neighborhood, I knew, was scheduled for imminent high-density, Venice-style redevelopment.

Clement Pyke was up on deck, leaning on the rail, taking the afternoon sun. He had the air of someone who has been in the same place in the same position for a long time. This time could much better have been employed on boat maintenance, but Mr. Pyke was hardly dressed for doing-it-himself. In his late sixties, he wore—possibly for my benefit—an immaculate red sombrero, a curious, much-fringed and laced-up leather shirt, and tight green trousers that I could have told him only emphasized the inadequacies of his ancient equipment. His boots were crimson, and weighted down with brass buckles. Normally I like a man who takes thought for his appearance.

I went down the ladder, breathing in a sudden green chill. Pyke must have spotted me about three boats off, for he abruptly jerked into action and began intently polishing a once-chromed ventilator with his yellow bandanna. I stumbled on, and finally hailed him from his own transom—or counter, or whatever the back end of those old H. F.s was called. At the sound of my voice he took off his hat and shaded his eyes with it. He had an unnecessarily black black beard and hair combed forward that was almost certainly a wig . . . I noticed all this because I sensed that this was all I’d get: the attitude was the man; at this stage in his life the continuous Clement Pyke was by now no more than the extension of one carefully-chosen moment.

“Roddie child,” he said, not overplaying the surprise bit, “you’ve come. Unscathed you’ve come. You’ve found our shitty little colony. Our rive gauche.”

He held out his hand for me to shake, consciously archaic, so I joined him and did.

“Clement, dear child, Clement.” He retained my hand. “Pyke sounds as if you think I’m going to bite.”

Dutifully I chalked up the joke’s fifty thousandth polite smile. But he’d left me nothing to pin him with—total strangers’ first names don’t come to me all that easy. I disentangled my hand.

“This isn’t an interview under the meaning of the Act,” I said, just to get things straight. “I’m here to—”

“I’ve been interviewed, buggered about by all sorts.” He replaced his hat. “Belgrade, Tokyo, Sydney—I know the form. You’re after free fucking info. Something for nothing, child, in a hard, hard world.”

He held up a lordly hand. Evidently I wasn’t going to finish many sentences that afternoon. “I told your network when they rang, Roddie child. I told them, it’s funny how some people are news for the way they live, while others achieve fame only in the fashion of their dying.” He paused, and waited for the applause that only he heard. “You’ll have noticed,” he went on, “that poor Katherine is not exactly my favorite person.”

From what I’d already seen of him, this didn’t surprise me, but I asked him all the same. “Why is that?” I said.

“It’s a bloody smashing afternoon,” he said, looking up and around, as if discovering his surroundings for the first time. “Shall we stay up here for this interview that isn’t an interview?”

I agreed. Crossing his deck I’d caught a glimpse through a skylight of the boat’s interior—weird posters, and mobiles, and outlandish musical instruments, and racks of clothing best ignored. I felt I’d weather the blast of his ego better up here in the open air. He squatted boyishly on a hatch cover and I perched beside him. He hadn’t been dodging my question, merely building the tension.

“Katherine and I,” he announced, “are like oil and water. I don’t grieve for her dying because I don’t feel she has ever lived. She’s never got her nose up out of the shit. There’s no tragedy, child, in losing what you’ve never had.”

“You mean, whose fault was it? Certainly not mine. I’ve lived my life. I didn’t start song-writing till I was forty, you know. It was my third wife knew I had it in me. Bloody manager . . . he robbed me blind and dumped me. Before that I’d had at least three different and successful careers. Wrote books a bit too. Since then . . . Well, there was this fucker here on the mooring. He was selling speciality underwear, virtually door-to-door. I talked him into mail-order. Plain packaging, a professional catalogue. It took off. We run a sort of club now, for satisfied clients.”

I didn’t ask him about the “different and successful careers”—they’d certainly been different but hardly what most people would have called successful. And his present shabby life-style told me all I needed to know about crotchless black leather briefs.

“At least you’ll be pleased that your daughter has done so well in a field associated with literature.”

His flat denial managed to encompass both his own total lack of pleasure and Computabook’s total disassociation with anything he could possibly regard as literature. I felt like challenging this position pace his own output—Vincent’s research interns had already pulled up his one contribution—but I was there to gather information on Katherine Mortenhoe, not to parade the inadequacies of her father. Vincent, I was sure, in his padded viewing room, would appreciate my forbearance.

“Perhaps Katherine would have been happier with a brother or a sister,” I suggested.

This seemed a new idea to him. He considered it. “My second wife brought kids, a couple of them . . . As far as I remember, Katherine hated the sight of them. She certainly didn’t mind when we moved on.” He stretched his legs out straight and innocently leaned back on his elbows. “I’ve always been bloody young, you see. Accessible, full of enthusiasm. If she’s told you she was lonely, she never had any fucking need to be.”

“I haven’t yet spoken to her.” There’d been only one baby in Clement’s marriages, and that one hadn’t been Katherine. “Can you tell me anything about her first husband?”

“Gerry? A complete drear. The only bright thing he ever did was to move on. Even then, he wasted it. Child, so many people don’t understand the pace of life. Everything changes. Every fucking thing. Security . . . personal progress . . . finish one thing before you start another—all a load of cobblers. Look at me. But Gerry stuck with his old thing, whatever it was. Haven’t heard of him in years.”

Gerald Mortenhoe’s “old thing” was music too. He wrote about music, mostly its history. Katherine loved Tallis and Bach, and the baroque was his speciality. On the face of it, the two of them had been well suited. Another father might have had ideas on why it hadn’t worked.

“Was it your idea,” I said, sticking to facts, “that Katherine should go into computers?”

He screwed up his eyes. “I doubt it. I was probably in Rome at the time . . . Of course, it was just the sort of thing I knew she’d be good at. No flesh and blood, if you know what I mean. No fucking enthusiasm. Ha—that’s good.”

I headed him off. The sex-is-good-for-a-giggle line is decidedly old red sombrero hat these days. “You’ve traveled a lot,” I said. “Did you often take Katherine with you?”

I knew the answer, but hoped for the reason. He gestured widely. “I’d have been campaigning then. Issues. Nerve gas was big. Over-population. She’d have been out of school, of course. On her own. The rally in Rome was overpopulation. Around that time there’d been a whistle-stop on pollution took me across three continents. You couldn’t cart a girl around on things like that.”

Another man might have, and made a total mess of her: teen-age daughters went down well on campaign platforms. So at least he’d spared her that . . . Also his causes had been good ones, so why did I feel that his association with them somehow lessened them? I thought of those three continents and knew I wasn’t getting anywhere. Yet there must be something, some one concrete thing that only a father would know, that he could tell me about his daughter.

I stood up and went to the rail. “The experts think she has a very special sort of mind,” I said. “Did you see any signs of this when she was younger?”

“Load of shit. Don’t believe a word of it. If she’s really dying it’s because she wants to. Millions of them do, you know. It’s just that the simpler ways aren’t allowed in this Christian country.”

I looked out across the scummy, gray-brown water. “Then you think the experts at the Medical Center are wrong?”

“I fucking know they are.” He heaved himself up and came to lean beside me. “There’s nothing special about Katherine. She was a boring child and she grew into a boring woman and now she’s going to die a boring death. And she’ll eke it out—she always was afraid of getting hurt.”

Perhaps he was trying to shock me with his picture of progressive, dispassionate parenthood. But I could well imagine that Katherine hadn’t been altogether an endearing child.

“I tell you—we took her away on a holiday once. Couldn’t have been more than seven. Smashing playground, right beside the hotel. I’d just got married, you see.” He nudged me, just in case I didn’t. “Couple of days, and the bloody child wouldn’t go near the place. Had to cart her every morning to a park the other side of town.” He broke off. “Don’t mind me,” he said, and unzipped his trousers to pee his disgust in a manly fashion over the side. I waited.

“ . . . The playground had this paddling pool. We reckoned the bloody little cunt was afraid of tumbling in and drowning. Unless of course she’d guessed my mind was on other things and didn’t like it. Played all hell with the honeymoon.” He finished, waved to a couple of workmen up on the side of the dock, and made a business of re-confining himself. “Oh, she’s dying all right. But not of Gordon’s fucking Syndrome. Believe me, Roddie, she’s a thoroughly boring woman. And, like most boring people, she needs attention. You’d do yourself a favor if you forgot the whole affair.”

I almost did believe him. Till I remembered her face in that brief moment in the doctor’s office before she hid it. And that other moment, this very morning, with no one (only me) to see her, down by the river. “And did a feature on you instead,” I said. But my irony was wasted.

“You might do worse,” he murmured. “Speciality underwear. There’s money in it.”

I left him soon after. He’d got through five wives, this dreadful old man who couldn’t bear for his daughter to have anything at all, not even a rare and fatal condition. By all accounts he was on his way to a sixth at that moment. I just hoped she wasn’t hoping to be fathered.

I found my scooter in the middle of a group of the fringie kids who were camping in the surrounding warehouses. It wasn’t a proper village, not like in the old Container Depot a couple of miles away: just some people who were on the way from somewhere to somewhere, and pausing. They hadn’t damaged the scooter, but it was covered with little cut-out cows and Earth Mother stickers. The cow was a great nature symbol that month. The kids stood around, waiting to see what I’d do. And they weren’t all kids either.

I didn’t tell them I was a newsman: a few years back the media had taken up Fringe Groups in a big way, and it had got so that the fringies were virtually putting on free shows twice nightly for the visiting cameramen. So they’d started saying no, and the media men had started getting nasty, and attitudes had solidified the way they always do. So I waved cheerily, not wanting a necklace of boiler tubing, and mimed like me was heap good fella, and motored discreetly away, taking my cut-out cows and Earth Mother stickers with me.

I hadn’t seen any of the other inhabitants on Clement Pyke’s mooring, but if they were anything like him I reckoned they gave the fringies a fair amount of innocent amusement.

On my way back to NTV House I tried to convince myself that the afternoon had been profitable. I tried to fill out my inner picture of the continuous, the only true, Katherine Mortenhoe. And what did her father’s view tell me? Wretched early years, certainly, but how had they shaped her? Into the joy-filled woman I’d seen this morning? And earlier, in the doctor’s office, the angry despair of a woman with a lot to do and no longer any time to do it in? Nothing quite fitted. Death-wished? I couldn’t see it. And I still didn’t know yet why she called herself Mortenhoe.

A note from Vincent was waiting on my desk when I got in: he wanted to see me soonest.

“I got news for you, Roddie.” He handed me a bundle of stills. “Things are moving faster . . . The silly girl went on an outing and the darling public nabbed her. Could have got herself hurt.”

The stills showed a riot of some kind: angry faces, the familiar ugliness. I looked closer. “You say she got away?”

“She screamed. Would you believe it? She made a big enough fuss and they let her go. Harry stuck up for her.”

One of the pictures was a close-up of Harry. He looked terrified. His wife stood behind him, caught by the camera with her face screwed up as if expecting to be struck. In another she had her mouth wide open, horribly ugly. Her eyes were wild—presumably she was screaming. And in another I could clearly see a trail of saliva down her chin, and her hand possibly on its way to wipe it off.

I gave him back the photographs. Katherine Mortenhoe and her tormentors were indistinguishable.

In any case, I was in NTV House because I urgently needed studio time. Cutting room sessions. Once Katherine had signed we’d be going to air within a few hours and the job would be total immersion. Vincent’s busy interns had come in with background stuff, birthplace, school, college, first job, boyfriends, a neighbor’s home movie. Today might be my last chance to hang it all together. Still photos. Voice over. Scene setting. Keep it to a minimum. They’d found period film of her high street, not quite the right year but perhaps it could be faked. A reporter’s life wasn’t all fascinating interviews with glamorous people.

Late in the afternoon more personal delivery letters for Katherine arrived at the flat, a different postman, but equally avid. Harry dealt with him, disappointing him, and brought the letters through to the living room where Katherine was watching the third regional rebroadcast of the scene outside the Castle. Ingenious editing kept her off the screen in compliance with her Private Grief order, and the sound track fluffed over her screams. With each replay the item concerned her less: the attractive, forty-four-year-old Mrs. Mortenhoe of the announcers was not she, neither was the aggressively sturdy Mr. Clegg her own poor frightened Harry. They were creatures with only a tape reality. They were part of an image machine. Even their names were unrecognizable in the microphone mouths of the reporters.

Harry opened the first of the letters. It was from a group of spiritualists. “They want to make an appointment with you over at their place six weeks from now,” he said.

She wondered why he told her these things. Perhaps, like the news item, they made the present less real, and therefore the future. It was a feeling that could be allowed to grow, and it was dangerous. Once, long ago, two days ago, the choices had been simple: to fill her days with living, to write her book, to do her duty by Peregrine, or to go for dignity instead. Now she had to fight, if it was worth fighting, even to remain in touch with what her choices might be. She could, if she cared to, simply lose herself in the image machine.

Harry’s attention was attracted by a yellow telegram envelope halfway down the bundle. He pulled it out, opened it, read it, and passed it to her.

DISGUSTED BY COVERAGE OF CASTLE INCIDENT STOP ASHAMED OF COLLEAGUES UNPROFESSIONAL BEHAVIOR STOP RENEW OFFER OF FULLEST PROTECTION SOONEST STOP FERRIMAN.

She read the message twice, then the small print on the back of the form, the time of acceptance, the stamp of the receiving office, the limitation of liability in the event of non-delivery.

The words mingled in her head with the equally improbable TV noises. She reached out and turned off the set. “Mr. Mathiesson said seven.”

“I expect he was making a wild guess. Vincent said three. He put it in writing.”

“Did he now?” She’d always thought there was more to Harry than met the eye. “And the piece of paper you sort of signed?”

“Come along, Harry. You agreed to let him know if we left town. Surely he didn’t expect you to do that for nothing?”

“ . . . I took the money for us, Kate. There were no other strings—just a thousand to help us get away at once.”

He twitched, and dropped his bundle of remaining letters and didn’t like to stoop to pick them up.

“I know it was silly. Thoughtless. Not . . . worthy. And I should have told you. I just didn’t think at the time how upset you’d be.”

She turned away, not able to watch him grovel. The horribleness of these conversations with Harry was entirely her fault. She made him something he didn’t need to be. The conversations were bad for them both, and likely to get worse, and should be stopped as soon as possible. Their need for each other was devious, and anyway no excuse. Its denial would bring them both a painful sort of freedom.

“I was only upset that first afternoon,” she said. “Since then I’ve been thinking about your Vincent’s offer very carefully. All in all, I think it has a great deal to recommend it.”

Dear Harry—perhaps there were limits even to his credulity. “Well, no. Not really. But now that this afternoon has shown us just what can happen, I don’t see that we have any alternative.”

Lying to him so completely bothered her. But he would never agree to what she was planning, would never admit the relief it would bring. And anyway, she was going to have to do without the luxury of truthfulness many more times during the twenty-five days that remained. If she wanted really to live, and sort out things, she was going to have to fight. So she got up, and went to him, and bent to help him pick up his letters (they were his letters now, whatever was on the envelopes), and said, “I’ll go and see Vincent Ferriman in the morning. On my own, Harry, while I’ve still got some of my Private Grief time left.”

She glided, pleased with herself, with her decision, out of the room. He watched her go, and absently put the remaining letters behind the clock on the mantelpiece. She was up to something and he wondered what the hell it was. She was as changeable as a weathercock, but he supposed that was only to be expected. Later, when she was rummaging in her handbag for the NTV letter, he nearly told her about the miniature beacon transmitter (for her own protection) that Vincent had got him to slide in under the lining. But in the end he didn’t, for you could never be quite sure of the sort of thing that would make her fly off the handle.

And down in the street it was change-of-watch time for the man in the gray-green jacket. He handed his tiny bleep receiver over to his relief, and gratefully sloped off home. His relief settled down in their motorcar for a long and boring night.

THURSDAY