WHEN KATHERINE woke again sunlight was streaming, crimson and blue, through the pointed Gothic windows high above her. She instantly remembered the circumstances of her disturbed night and, squirming, was cheered to find that she still hadn’t—such a charming phrase—pissed her pit. Next she looked for Roddie. He was nowhere to be seen. She didn’t blame him for leaving early, for going on wherever it was without her—now that it was morning she didn’t even mind. She could manage perfectly well on her own.
The noise that had wakened her was the voice of Vicar Pemberton, rising and falling in muddled echoes between the pillars and white marble monuments. Nobody in the dormitory stirred. She worked out that it must be Sunday morning, and that Vicar Pemberton must be praying. Her new freedom allowed her curiosity, so she sat up in bed, slipped on her shades and sou’wester, and then padded barefoot along the transept in her quilted under-robe.
Drawn by his voice, she approached the screen. Beyond it she saw him, stooping and straightening, bending one by one over a line of four kneeling women. Behind him thick white candles burned on the altar. It was all very holy, and she wished . . . Coming quickly to the end of his tiny congregation, the vicar turned away, faced the candles, and raised his voice, the words becoming louder but still confused against the surrounding ancient stonework. His getup, she thought, already a snob, was ever so klutzy.
Suddenly she knew she was being watched. She turned, backed against the smooth wooden columns of the screen. Roddie was standing, very still, at the far end of the nave, beyond the cookstoves and the lines of refectory tables. He moved, and came toward her, trailing his hands on the tabletops as he came. She felt his gaze. Was she so important?
“I’ve been out for a walk around. The rain’s blown over. We’ll be able to get off right after breakfast.”
Then his voice was so ordinary, so safe, that she could have cried. “Don’t talk so loudly,” she said. “People are praying.”
She turned back toward the altar and he came and stood behind her and looked over her shoulder. “I’d say the service is just over,” he whispered. “Early morning Communion.”
“I know that.” She noticed the big silver cup, no, chalice. “The giving of the body and blood.”
“That’s right.” She felt him shudder.
“I think it’s rather fine,” she said.
“Do you?”
“You sound surprised.”
“Frankly I am surprised.”
He was saying something more. She stiffened, and waited.
“I’m not saying I blame you, Katherine, but isn’t that more or less what you’re afraid of? People eating your body and blood?”
Katherine? “My name is Sarah.”
“If you say so.”
Katherine? She would have run, but his hands were closed tightly on her shoulders. The time and the place were wrong for an undignified scuffle. Besides, running away was useless. She tried to think. How had she been discovered? What should she do now to keep her freedom? Kill him? He had come so near to being her friend she could do it easily. But the idea was too high-pitched. Perhaps she could buy him.
“What do you want?” she said.
“I don’t want anything.”
“Of course you do.” People in the pews in front were turning around to stare. He was right. They would, if they knew, they would eat her. “Of course you want something. You recognized me last night. Without my get-up. My picture’d been in all the papers. On TV. If you didn’t want something you needn’t have told me. You could have pretended you didn’t know.”
“Katherine . . . Sarah . . . I want to help. Pretending between people like us never works.”
“That’s not true. Honesty’s easy and it’s overrated. Often pretending is so much kinder.”
•
I hesitated. Standing face to face there with Katherine I could talk about not pretending for only just so long. She’d given me my out. “If I stick around,” I said, “maybe I can help. These things are easier with two.”
Which was just another pretense. The trouble was—put baldly —the trouble was just that secretly being the Man with the TV eyes was so bloody exciting.
At least I faced it. If that helps.
And at least I could now call her Katherine.
In front of us the Communion service was over. I drew Katherine to one side to let the four sad celebrants out. They passed us with awkward sidelong glances, and went away down between the tables. They didn’t look as if they had just known their god. Pemberton came after them, very tall in his white whatever-it-was.
“Ritual,” he said, possibly apologizing. “We all need it.”
“I expect you’re right, Vicar.”
No need to tread on any toes. There would almost certainly be believers among NTV’s viewers. He went to one of the stoves and lit the gas under a huge tea urn, then trailed away in the direction of the vestry. I envied him his simple duties.
“Go back to bed,” I said to Katherine Mortenhoe. If we needed a big scene it could wait. “You’ll catch your deather, standing here on these stones in your bare feet. Not to mention what certain people may get up to with your boots. We can talk about blood and bodies later.”
And watched her pad away down the transept, and climb into bed, and cover herself, sou’wester and all, with her blanket . . . The whole point was, I’d already been out to talk to Vincent. It was much too early for him to be in the monitoring room, where I could reach him on audio, so I’d rung his flat from a call-box, and got past his answering service, and he’d told me I was doing fine. They’d called him down to see a rerun of my scene with Katherine in the middle of the night—it had everything, atmosphere, drama, pathos, everything. He was keeping the lid on my video implant, saving the technical break-through for the opening credits. A surprise bonus. My audio was good but they’d still tweak it. Preserve the element of mystery. No pics of me, of course. What camera took photos of itself? All Vincent needed now was a bit more light. The interiors were dim. Viewers liked to see what was happening. Now it was morning would I please hurry some along?
“What you’d really like,” I said, “is a close shot of the celebrated mole on her celebrated right titty.”
“Don’t take it to heart, old man.” As if I would. “Remember, we’re doing her a kindness in the long run . . . Just the simplest ident shots will do. The scene when you tell all can wait. I’m leaving that to you, lad. When you’re ready. It’ll be quite something. Dangerous material. Either a bomb or a chart topper.”
He was right of course—though she’d never thank us for it, by easing her back in we were doing her a favor. The alternative would be a court action and I didn’t put that past him. She shouldn’t have signed. So I doused my conscience, and wished Vincent sweet dreams, and on the way back to the church I tried out in my head the old honesty-between-friends spiel: These things are easier with two . . . A spiel, but I always mean it.
Back in the church now, with the ident shot dealt with, breakfast was all good stuff: rows of slurping, fractious people, whom Pemberton served with saintlike humility. Vincent would love him, would love the whole setup. I’d have stayed to get more footage, only Katherine was restless, and pressing to be off. I could hardly tell her she was as safe where she was as she’d ever be.
Outside the church we paused. The moment still wasn’t right. Vincent’s big scene, telling all, standing there in that dingy corner of Coronation Square? Time was running out though. Every minute I kept up the lie I felt was a mark against me.
“Do we walk?” I said. “Or do we use your money?”
“I haven’t any.”
“Don’t give me that. The papers said three hundred thousand.”
“That was for Harry. I’ve got just thirteen pence.”
Which showed, I supposed, a sort of integrity. “What were you planning on? Transients’ Benefit?”
She thought about it. “It’s Sunday morning,” she said.
“Seven-day week, twenty-four-hour service. They like to keep us moving.”
“They’ll ask all sorts of questions. You know I don’t want questions.”
She wasn’t planning a thing. The point was simply to humiliate Vincent and somehow get away with it. I had to admire her for that.
I told her, “If you’re leaving town they’re not nosy.” How little she knew about the social services. Few people did. They simply bitched at taxes. Maybe now Katherine and I could give them a lesson. “They hand out to transients virtually on demand. It’s only if you go back that they start being awkward.”
She picked up her holdall. “I’ve got a lot to learn,” she said. “And not much time to learn it in.”
She wrote her own fade lines, this girl.
We trailed untelegenically along to the Benefit Bureau, stood in line, had our fingerprints checked (names would have demanded literate checkers), and collected our tenner each. She nearly jibbed at the fingerprinting, but I shook my head reassuringly and she trusted me. Afterwards I told her that, thanks to the Civil Liberties people, Benefit computers were self-serving, kept separate from the National Data Grid . . . This was not exactly true, of course: if Vincent or just a few others put out a General Hold it fired off rockets in police stations right across the city. But she believed me. It didn’t escape my notice that she believed me. I must have seemed a very belief-inspiring sort of person.
The cash in hand cheered her up.
“Where to now?” she said, almost laughing at the excitement of it all. “I’m off to the west, but how about you?”
I gestured widely, following her mood. “All roads lead out of town.”
So we tossed a coin, which she loved, and took a bus as far as the Western Ring. Beyond that the buses weren’t running, on account of the marchers.
During the ride she had one of her shakes, but she controlled it very well and I got in several close shots to make the point. It showed most in her hands. We talked, for want of anything else, about the political situation. I’d been out of the stream of things for some time, and didn’t really know enough to live up to my agitator’s jeans, but she knew even less. Certainly she wasn’t ready yet to talk about the one thing that deeply interested both of us.
It was then that I made my decision. Vincent would have film ready for tonight. Till then we were safe. I could live one more full day as the Man with the TV Eyes and Katherine could live one more full day as a free woman. After that, before she discovered it herself, I’d tell her the truth and take my chances. Vincent would get his scene. The whole NTV world would. A bomb or a chart topper. I wasn’t laying any odds.
The bus put us down within sight of the Ring Road. She was thrilled, and hurried toward the marchers as if she were afraid of being late and missing something. They’d be still marching, I reckoned, long after she was dead. Her idiotic clogs were loose, and she almost fell. I didn’t want to watch her. She was like a child on her first visit to the zoo. I think that was the moment when I gave up trying to fit together the various Katherine Mortenhoes. What would emerge, would emerge. And a lot of it, surprisingly, might well be fun.
I caught up with her. Seeing the marchers again like that gave me a nasty feeling.
“They do it in relays,” I told her. “Day and night. Round and round. Like hamsters in a wheel.”
“Now you’re being flip. At least they believe in whatever it is.”
“Yes,” I said. “Like those hamsters.”
I wanted her to argue, but she didn’t. “We’re all hamsters,” she said, suddenly cross and earnest, and I felt ashamed of having loused things up.
A couple of marchers waved to us, wanting us to join them, and I put one arm around Katherine and shook my head, and they laughed and carried on, and I said, “They think you’re my girl,” and that one too fell on its face.
She broke away from me and pushed through the marching column. In her klutzy clothes she wasn’t one of them, but they let her through. They let me through also. At least neither of us was flash in the latest black three-hundred-horsepower convertible.
She was waiting for me on the far side of the road, looking into a clairvoyant’s shop window. There was a tattooist a couple of doors down. This section of the road wasn’t cheering. “You’ve been very helpful,” she said. “Now I’d rather manage on my own.”
“That’s your privilege.” I pointed at the long straight road ahead. “But there’s only one road. Would you rather walk in front or behind?”
I knew I must keep it light. But anything was a gamble: she could perfectly well sit down where she was and let me go on without her. That would leave me in a hole of my own digging.
•
He was mocking her. Of course he was. She was boring, and naive, and dressed up in ridiculous clothes, and low on a sense of humor, and she could not endure to be mocked. She sat down heavily on her sleeping bag holdall, ignoring the stacked-up cars behind her, waiting for a gap in the marchers.
“You go first,” she said. “Youth before beauty.”
He went. A few yards off he turned back. “Look, I’m sorry I was ham-handed. When I said I wanted to help I meant it.”
He was a kind man. She saw guilt in his face, and a sense of responsibility. She was nobody’s responsibility. And nobody was hers. Not anymore. “You have helped. I’m very grateful. But now I must manage on my own. Call it woman’s pride.”
Because she believed he wanted no alternative, she gave him none.
“Please yourself.” He shrugged, and set off away down the road. At fifty yards he looked back over his shoulder, and again at a hundred. She watched him diminish. She was free.
On one side of the road cars queued between closed Sunday morning shops and deserted Sunday morning pavements. The other side lay black and straight and empty. Behind her the marchers passed, horribly, in silence, like ants. Or like hamsters. There was no more anger, no more outrage in her head, no more Harry, or Barbara, or Private Grief, or Vincent. There were no more plans, no more alternatives. No more Roddie. She was nobody’s responsibility and nobody was hers. She was free of all these refuges. Free to warm her hands at her woman’s pride.
She shivered, not from a rigor but because she was cold.
When Roddie was out of sight at last around a distant corner she got up and followed slowly after him. She had made an important discovery. Her freedom was as restricted, as pragmatic, as it had always been. After the bus fare she had eight thirty-eight, and most of twenty-three days in which to spend it. She could not go back to the church hostel, and the farming country around Gerald’s house—which she now admitted might not be quite so filled with lover-accommodating haystacks as Ethel Pargeter made out—was still a long way away. In addition, Vicar Pemberton’s charitable breakfast was not being quite as supportive as she had hoped. And finally, although yesterday’s drizzle had passed over, the early morning sun had disappeared, the day was still chilly, and the drizzle anyway might easily come back.
She went slowly, not wishing to catch up with him. She did not regret his absence as a person—that had been the night’s nonsense—but she had to admit that as an authority on transience he could have been invaluable. No doubt it was possible to die with dignity even though cold and wet and hungry by an urban thruway . . . Even so, readily to accept, or even to seek out, such a situation seemed to her verging on the ostentatious.
Also she was going somewhere, she now knew where but she didn’t know why, and she wanted to get there.
So she didn’t dodge back out of sight when she rounded the once-distant corner and saw him sitting on the curb, one boot off, examining his foot. And when she went on up to him and he didn’t let her see his (non-existent?) blister but quickly put his sock and boot back on again, she felt it was a time for making compromises. For reasons that she did not even try to understand the relationship between them must have two-way advantages.
“We’re not very good at this,” she said. “Perhaps we should try for a lift.”
He tied his bootlace very slowly. “Have you looked at us?” he said finally. She was glad of his unwelcome. “You’ve changed sides, Katherine Mortenhoe. People don’t give lifts to the likes of you and me. We’re idle and probably oversexed. And we smell.” He stood up. “We walk as far as we can. And then we look for somewhere warm and cozy like a bus shelter.”
“If a bus shelter, why not a bus?”
“Not any more. Benefit has to last four days and/or fifty miles. We’re Transients. Do the sum yourself.”
She did the sum. “All right, so we walk.”
He took her holdall from her and she didn’t protest, and they set off. Cars passed them in clumps, let through by the marchers. Going the other way the road was solid with traffic, inching forward, transmissions whining.
“Do we have to walk here?” Katherine said.
“It’s the quickest way.”
“Where to? Where are we going to?”
“Out of town. You said you wanted to get out of town.”
She didn’t ask him what they would do when they got where they were going, when they got out of town. Her plan had been no plan at all. Gerald? Why on earth Gerald? A cozy barn would be better, a cave in a hillside, a woody bower, a Keatsian dream, a nowhere. They walked on. She noticed that Roddie would remember to limp, and then forget. He’d waited for her. Somehow, everything was going to turn out all right.
“Last night,” she said suddenly, “when you saw who I was, what did you think?”
“You mean, did I judge you?”
Of course, his sort—her sort now—didn’t judge. “No, I mean how did you work out what had happened?”
“I’d seen the papers. It made sense.”
“Didn’t you even blame me for taking all the money?”
“Let’s say I was surprised.”
She wasn’t getting anywhere. But she needed an attitude. Attitudes located her thoughts as clocks located her actions. “Desperate situations breed desperate measures,” she said.
“Not always. Mostly desperate situations simply breed despair.”
She had thought that it was she who was leading, appraising him. Now it seemed that the relationship might be the other way around. And she wasn’t yet ready. She lapsed into silence. Bugger his blister. The clogs made her feet hurt.
“This trip you’re on,” he said cheerfully. “NTV must be furious. How long do you think it’ll be, before they find you?”
“I’ve no idea.” Only she, in her thoughts, was allowed to be so direct. “Long enough. Longer than you’ll be around to see.”
He didn’t argue, though she wanted him to. “If you’re not to end up in a hospital you’ll have to be careful. Maybe a fringie commune’d be the thing. They’d never tell on you.”
She shook her head. She’d thought of that and rejected it. She noticed that he spoke as if he too were not really one of the Fringe People. “Who are you, Roddie?”
“You mean, what am I? I’m nobody’s nobody.” He was serious. “Fringe of the fringe, that’s me.”
She didn’t think it was fair of him to say she’d meant what rather than who. Certainly turning her question like that made it easier for him to answer. He seemed, she thought, to want to be truthful. “I don’t think a commune would do,” she said. “I’m looking for peace, you see.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He stopped walking, and turned, and stared at her. She stared back, her head on one side, frowning slightly. “I’m looking for peace.” He looked down at her hands, fidgeting with her plaited hair belt. She was sure he’d heard her the first time. “I suppose you think that’s naïve of me.”
“Not really. Communes are peaceful. That’s their whole point.”
“I visited one yesterday. I got these clothes there. And it wasn’t peaceful.”
“You were an outsider.”
I am an outsider, everybody’s outsider . . . But she didn’t say it. If there was one thing she hated, it was people who talked about nothing but their health. Instead she shrugged, and said, “All the same . . .” and started walking again.
They walked on through the morning, sometimes quiet and sometimes talking, but never about very much. They were still getting to know each other. Even under the aluminum saucepan sky, down the hideous, endless road, Katherine found the walk pleasant. She was untrammelled. Her strange companion asked nothing of her. His presence was casual: even his help, carrying her holdall, made no demands. She could accept, and give nothing in return, or reject and receive nothing in return. She had never before been so safe, safe in the moment. She was free of context.
They stopped at a café and ate very cheaply. She found she was free of something else—of worry about the food she ate, the unhealthy additives, the low vitamin count. Whatever she was dying of, it wasn’t her unhealthy diet.
As they were leaving the cafe Roddie noticed a telephone on the counter. He asked her quite lightly if there was anyone she’d like to get in touch with? Someone she loved, perhaps?
She picked him up on that. “Not my favorite word,” she said. “It’s worn to shreds. So easy. So unimportant. An all-purpose word is a no-purpose word, don’t you think?”
Getting to know each other could be taken too far. They went on out of the cafe. In the street she paused.
“Of course there are people. People I care for. Two or three. Care for a lot. Maybe I’ll give one of them a call and set their minds at rest. When I know better where I’m going to be.”
They walked on. Katherine had never understood the size of the outer city. Lines of shops, housing estates, garages, industrial estates, garages, schools and leisure centers, garages, lines of shops again. The shops were all that was left of little village centers. After three hours of walking, open country was still unimaginable. Maybe ten were needed—in Harry’s motorcar just a few minutes of flicking lamp standards and the back of the car in front. Ground you never walked over was unreal, bearable.
Their stops grew more frequent. Her tiredness became a sickness in her bones. She ceased to care. She peed on the verge where she sat. The fume-poisoned grass prickled her. But at least she still peed when she chose to pee, and didn’t when she didn’t. Roddie stood with his back to her, tactfully watching the passing cars.
Suddenly one of these burned to a halt, reversed back along the hard shoulder, wound down a window, showed itself to contain a human being.
“Want a lift?”
She stood up, easing her panties up under her robes. Roddie went forward to the curb. “Where to?” he asked. She didn’t hear the answer. Rod came back to where she was standing. “Ten miles on, then he turns off for Fairhills. What d’you think?”
She nodded. She’d never heard of Fairhills. Ten miles on were ten miles on. And it was beginning to rain. “I know his face from somewhere,” Roddie said. “He smiles too much but I expect I can manage him.”
They got into the back seat of the car. Expensive red leather. The man was youngish and neat, with crinkly sun-blond hair. Cared-for.
Katherine leaned forward. “Thank you very much.”
“My pleasure. No day to be on the road.”
They drove off. Katherine sat back and closed her eyes. Roddie and the cared-for man made sort of conversation.
“Nice car.”
“I’m glad you like it. Are you going far?”
“Far enough.”
“I’m sorry—silly question . . . You know, I’ve really got a lot of sympathy with you people.”
“You must have. You picked us up.”
“Surely, surely . . .”
Katherine was warm for the first time in hours, and slightly light-headed. The cared-for man had a cared-for car, big and very comfortable. She dozed.
“ . . . Of course, I give lifts to all sorts. Try not to be bigoted. I mean, everyone’s got a point of view, and I like to hear it.”
“Point of view about what?”
“Anything at all, John. Anything at all . . . I keep an open house. Keep an open mind as well. Quite a little group. You know?”
“I don’t think I do.”
“Discussions. Shared experiences. Nothing too earnest, of course. But there’s nobody you can’t learn something from. Funny thing, actually, meeting you two like this. I was just—”
“I’m afraid we can’t. It’s very good of you, but we must—”
“Hold hard, John. What’s this, then?”
“My name is William. This is Sarah. You were going to ask us back to wherever you have your groups.”
“My home. Well, perhaps I was. But not just like that. Social intercourse needs lubrication. It needs—”
“Yours may. Ours doesn’t.”
“Besides, you make the suggestion sound faintly sinister.” He broke off. “Is your lady ill?” he said.
Katherine opened her eyes, met his in the interior mirror. The eyebrows above them were raised sympathetically. “Me? I’m fine. Tired, that’s all,” and she stretched untidily, fringily, feeling her bones crack. She liked the name William.
“The man wants us to go home with him,” he said.
“There’ll be others there, my dear. My wife, of course. We have quite a little circle.”
“They have quite a little circle.”
She wondered why Roddie was being so rude. The man might be silly, but he was almost certainly rich. Readiness to choose coldness and wetness and hunger by an urban thruway seemed to her verging on the ostentatious. “Do we get to stay the night?” she said, as fringily as she had stretched.
“I’ve told him we have to get on, Sarah.” She wagged her fingers at him as she stayed stretched, thinking how clever he was to remember her name. “We’ve got a long way to go.”
“We have?”
“I thought we had.”
The man looked at her again in the mirror. “The lady’s tired, John. Surely you can both stay the night. Surely . . .”
•
It was no use fighting them. I watched the rain beating on the windshield and imagined Katherine and myself out in it. The bus shelter had been a spur-of-the-moment improvisation: thruways didn’t have any, and sooner or later she would have noticed. Now she was warm and dry, and at least it wasn’t as if either of us had anything really to fear from our new smiley host. I’d suddenly recognized him. Bloody hell, I should have at once. He was Coryton Ansford Rondavel, son of the newspaper tycoon fellow. It’s a small world. A few years back I’d interviewed him as a shaker and maker. My picture of an earnest wife going in for contact sessions and a few pot-happy Sunday afternoon executive friends had been a mite downmarket.
In which case, all other things being equal, an overnight stay would have come in handy. One of the plusses being that Vincent would hate it. The Rondavel press would have NTV’s balls if we used a minute of his boy’s rural retreat. But I couldn’t risk it. The program would be out on air at eight and I couldn’t risk her seeing it. I must find an excuse to move on.
At the big Fairhills intersection our host turned the car off to the left and we began to climb a winding road that was screened from the pervading housing estates by high evergreen hedges. There should have been an entrance lodge, and a serf touching his forelock. At the top the hedges separated to enclose the crests of two connected hills on which were built possibly half a dozen large, beautiful houses. They were beautiful individually, and together formed a beautiful whole. You tend to forget that, given enough money, beauty is still possible. Among the houses, undisturbed on the exact top of the higher hill, stood one of those isolated clusters of tall, ancient trees that only such hilltops seem to go in for, sad and fine and precise even against the rain-blurred sky. The city around was under mist, with only point blocks and the black lump of a castle showing, and away to the west other hills that were surely country.
I wondered, though. It was my experience that wealth as great as this seldom sat easily on its possessors.
Since leaving the thruway our host had been silent. Katherine, too: she seemed to have dozed off again. I didn’t blame her. We’d had a wearing day. But the younger Rondavel’s offer still wouldn’t do, not with the show looming. That was why, back down on the road, I’d pushed for the commune: it was my best hope. Fringies rejected TV more or less as an article of faith. Somehow I must bring Katherine round to the idea of a nice, peaceful fringie commune before peak viewing time. She’d said she was looking for peace.
We drove around the service road and down a sudden tunnel into a large garage and workshop under one of the fancier houses. Lights came on. While our host was fussing with the automatic transmission I counted seven other desirable motors, registration numbers CAR 1 to 8, with 6 missing. I was willing to bet that we were sitting in CAR 6. Coryton Ansford Rondavel.
We reversed into a space. He turned to look at us. “I make myself poor,” he said, “by making my wants simply enormous.”
A man who had read—and no doubt despised—his Emerson. “You’ll never manage it, Mr. Rondavel,” I said. “Not this side of telly heaven.”
“Please.” He held up a hand in gentle protest. “No media talk on Sunday. I work a full five-day week as it is. In this house no one mentions television on pain of instant excommunication.”
I missed a heartbeat. We couldn’t be that lucky. I didn’t believe him. “I don’t believe you,” I said.
His smile was a little weary. “Not a set in the house.”
He turned back and opened his door. “I lie. My wife has one in her yoga room.”
He sighed. “You’ve spotted who I am, of course. It’s these wretched cars. All my own fault. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity . . .”
It was indeed. In point of fact, the whole nation was aware of Rondavel’s son’s little vanities. His eight cars and his eight bits of fluff all called Margaret. And none of this altered my need to get us out of there.
At that moment Katherine woke up. “We’ve arrived,” she announced, pushing back her hat and rubbing her eyes, still behind their shades. Rondavel hadn’t recognized her. He’d turned away and was getting out of the car. He began to walk away. Evidently Katherine was no longer the sort of woman expensive men opened doors for. I opened the car door instead, and helped her out.
We stumbled after him, stiff from our walk and sudden short ride, to a walnut and beveled-glass elevator, reproduction 1930s. He waited for me to hump in my duffle bag and Katherine’s holdall. “You mustn’t mind if things seem a bit decayed upstairs. That’s Sunday afternoon for you. They’ll brighten up astoundingly later on.”
Which was what, now more than ever, I was afraid of. I tried to think of a way of getting him on my own. So that I could tell him what? He pushed the second-floor button and turned to Katherine. “An overdue introduction, I think . . . You, my dear, are Sarah, I believe. You must call me Coryton.”
He held out a hand which she shook. Coryton Ansford Rondavel . . . I wondered if men gave their sons names like that before they became billionaires, or if the names grew on them afterwards. Rondavel was bad enough. Possibly naming your boy Coryton Ansford was one way of passing on the vital billionaire’s spark. In that case I’d failed poor Roddie Two badly.
“And you, John, what did you say they call you? Do you answer to “Hi,” or any such cry?”
“I usually notice when I’m being spoken to. William’s the name, if you can bear to remember it.”
I had an image to live up to. He could hardly expect manners from a fringie pickup.
The elevator rose, and stopped. And there we were, William and Sarah, complete with luggage, and Coryton Ansford Rondavel, complete with smile, ready to meet our joint fates on the second floor of a nameless house somewhere in Fairhills. There was the sound of distant jazz, either hi-fi or someone extremely good on a synthesizer. Rondavel led us out onto a mirrored landing, opened a door, gestured.
“I must go and change,” he said. “You’ll find everything you want in there.”
The mirrors showed me us. Beside Rondavel, on his beige carpet, against his chaste silver furnishings, we might just as well have been daubed hottentots. We had to get out. I let Katherine go on in to the room he had indicated, and then followed him to his own door. Once I’d told him whatever it was I was going to tell him I was sure he’d understand. We had to go.
“Mr. Rondavel,” I said, “there’s something you—”
“Later.” He closed the door in my face. After a moment it opened again, three inches. “And the name’s Coryton.”
The door closed and stayed closed. Disliking the silent corridor, I went back to Katherine.
The room was a sort of bathroom, but with a squashy black velvet settee, various luscious chairs, an elaborate ebony drinks dispenser, and, as outside on the landing, a great many mirrors. Now, mirrors in a bathroom—other than the basic one over the washbasin—make me feel uneasy. No doubt I’ve a nasty dirty mind. Be that as it may, that bathroom, squashy settee, mirrors and all, was the nastiest bathroom I’d ever seen.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Katherine had her hat and shades off and was peering at herself in one of the mirrors. Her survival jacket was thrown over the back of a chair. “It’s raining,” she said. “And he only wants to sleep with me.”
Which was a nice way of putting it. “Or with me,” I said.
“So? If you can cope, I’m sure I can.” She peered more closely at her reflection. “Those goggles seem to boil my eyes. The skin’s all wet and wrinkly.”
“Katherine—I don’t think you know what his sort of person can be like.”
“You mean he’s a crazy goggles fetishist?”
“I’m serious, Katherine.”
“And I’m warm and dry and just about to be fed. Sometimes that’s what life comes down to.”
I’d done my best. Maybe Rondavel hated the media so much he didn’t have a TV set. In any case, at least every minute we spent in Coryton Rondavel’s house was wasting Vincent’s footage. I watched her slip her shades on again and cram the sou’wester down over her ears. Perhaps with them on nothing bad could happen because she wasn’t really there. The room was so hot that I removed my two sweaters, still watching her. She’d begun to pull hair out from under the sou’wester in a straggly fringe over what could be seen of her forehead. I went away into the lav, closing the door firmly behind me. I’d suddenly thought of another thing I didn’t like about mirrors: in my experience they had a nasty habit of being two faced.
When I came out Katherine was lying on the squashy settee, apparently asleep again. The easy way she slept taunted me. With the dubious jollities of the evening coming ever closer I couldn’t even risk one of my relaxing non-sleepers. I propped myself up in one of the chairs . . . I could just imagine Rondavel setting his groups and discussions aside and gathering us all at nine o’clock sharp for the first of NTV’s spanking new series. What would I do then? And what, come to that, about the problems of the morrow?
Deceiving Katherine, keeping her away from the media, had seemed simple enough in Vincent’s office. Play it by ear, he’d told me . . . I was listening hard, not hearing a damn thing.
But we had a considerate host, and he didn’t keep us waiting long. “There’s a complicated story,” he said, arriving in a flurry of orange brocade, “about a royal banquet where the guest of honor, not used to such occasions, drank the water in his finger bowl. The king, it is said, had the royal good manners to put his guest at his ease by doing the same. Personally, I think it was just something thoroughly naughty he’d wanted to do all his life.”
Possibly the history lesson was intended to explain, or to ease the shock of, our host’s costume. It didn’t. He was dressed like the original Arabian Nights—or perhaps like one of the Three Kings in a school charade. Except that the gold and the jewels and the ermine were real. It was a getup straight out of the dressing-up basket in some oil sheik’s family nursery.
To neither the anecdote nor the apparition could I think of any satisfactory response. Katherine, having woken up halfway through both, was even worse off. “My feet hurt,” she said.
This wasn’t quite the non sequitur it seemed, for she was in fact apologizing for having dirtied our host’s squashy settee with them. But he hadn’t, anyway, heard her.
“Klutzy?” he said, revolving. “Real klutzy?” He primped, as if klutzy meant camp, which it never had. Then he abandoned his display, casually, like a ballerina coming down off her points. “An open mind, you know. Feeling right and looking right is half the battle. If William would like something a little more . . . exuberant, I’m sure we can oblige.”
“Maybe I don’t feel exuberant.”
He refused to be put down. “I think you’re right. I think you’ll rave them best just the way you are.”
I touched my shirt buttons, making sure they were done up right to the neck. If his friends were to be raved, they’d have to make it without the help of my wispy chest hair. He turned to Katherine. “If you’re rested now, we’ll go on down.”
We went.
He’d said we might find things a bit decayed. Presumably he’d meant people. The ground-floor living area—I never quite know what to call these multileveled expanses of knee-deep carpeting and kinetic art the rich go in for—was littered with sprawling, pot-happy freaks. Or rather, since I recognized several of the faces, littered with establishment people who were working quite hard at being sprawling, pot-happy freaks. It was all depressingly what I had expected.
Apart from us, the only animated guest at the party was a young man, dressed totally in black, who sat drooped over the synthesizer console producing beautifully ordered free association stuff. He ignored us.
“Don’t mind him,” Rondavel said. “He’s on his own out. All that’s left is a little psycho-motor in the fingers.”
He gave us drinks, he called them ice-breakers (I should have been wary), then led us off between amoebic mounds of translucent upholstery, stepping over spilled legs and arms and exotic drapery. I nudged Katherine. “Weekend fringies,” I murmured. “Most of the vices and none of the virtues.”
She nodded, and drew her skirts closely about her ankles.
“You must excuse us,” Rondavel said, at last having the sense to hand us food from the main service unit. “We do tend to go rather overboard at these little gatherings. Myself, I neutralized, then split for a touch of the realities. The open road. Poop-poop. Mr. Toad himself . . . No objection to hoof beef, I take it?”
I accepted the condescension. As a fringie I wouldn’t have touched non-analogue meat in years. Katherine had already bolted hers, and was being offered more. The room was ridiculous, like some bad director’s idea of after-the-orgy. No doubt that was where they’d got it from.
“We’re very innocent,” Rondavel said, astutely reading my thoughts. “We try for the best of both worlds. I suppose you despise us.”
Tolerance was the prime fringie thing. I smiled. “You do what you do. It’s not what I do. It’s a fragmentation. But who’s counting?”
“You are, William. I know you are.” He was working himself up. “You disapprove. I can see you do. You come in here radiating disapproval. You have this terrible reverse snobbery about the rich. You sit up on your high moral mountain, and—”
“We’d better go.” But I had little hope. Maybe this was why he’d brought us here, to talk about his guilts.
We glared at each other, neither moving. Katherine yawned, saved us. “It’s all so boring . . .” She could, of course, still surprise me. “We use each other. People always do. Let’s agree on that and then get on with . . . whatever’s got to be got on with.”
It wasn’t mainstream fringie, but it shut him up. He relaxed, went around prodding people gently with his Turkish-slippered foot. They roused, scratched themselves, farted, sniggered. Rich or poor, the human body never lets up on you.
“Visitors, my children. Bestir yourselves. Waifs of the storm. Interrupted on the long journey from nowhere to nowhere. Before your very eyes. Kindly here to give us of their wisdom.”
If he was mocking himself, he was mocking us also. We stood, and munched our hoof beef, and waited.
“Don’t take any notice of Corry. The clothes go to his head. I’m Margaret.”
We introduced ourselves, non-introduced ourselves. Beneath her klutzy wig this particular Margaret was a singularly beautiful young woman. “I’m so glad you could come. Corry doesn’t mean to insult you—he’s just embarrassed. I expect you are too.”
“Not us,” said, Katherine. “We have this built-in superiority thing. It’s so restful. In a world where everybody believed themselves superior there’d be no more wars.”
She was really doing extraordinarily well. I should have known she would. Margaret laughed. “Does that work between men and women too?”
“More than ever. I know I’m superior to William here, and he—poor fool—believes he’s superior to me. That’s why we get on so well.”
Another woman, intense, aware of her overlarge teeth, joined us. “But who,” she said, stretching her upper lip, “who gets on who? That’s what I want to know.”
And there we were, in thirty seconds flat, talking about sex. If it wasn’t drugs with us fringies, it was sex. No wonder we were envied.
“Please, no mechanics,” said Margaret quickly. “It’s far too early in the day for that.”
The woman took her teeth away, disappointed.
•
Katherine knew that she was losing control of her mind. She heard herself saying things she detested, impossible things. And laughing. Laughing . . . In this room—what was this room?—she was as much on show as if she had been in front of Vincent Ferriman’s cameras. And she was, or a part of her was, a part of her was certainly enjoying it. Because it was a performance? A lie? She who had planned to escape into truth, was enjoying the lie?
But then there was the tunnel. The tunnel back again. Always the tunnel. Peter was a dear, but he didn’t know a plot loop from a denouement phase.
She felt as if time were reeling past her: hours, days, weeks, speeded up into computer chatter. She struggled to catch at it, understanding for the first time truly what was the matter with her. There was logic and anti-logic, sequence and anti-sequence, phase and anti-phase. The curve was exponential. They were burning her up.
She was given things to eat, and ate them. She was given things to drink, and drank them. And as she fell, the music that wasn’t music rampaged on, a car factory gone wild. And people, dancing shapelessly, flung themselves about.
She knew she was losing control of her mind.
They leaned towards her, peered into her face, terrible gaudy people. Sometimes she heard them. “Society is corrupt. Is that why you don’t mind living off it?”
“Corruption isn’t a bad thing. Out of corruption grow the most beautiful lilies.”
“That sounds like the Bible—Consider the lilies of the field.”
“I don’t know. I’ve only just thought of it. Perhaps they weren’t the same lilies.”
Laughing. Laughing. Bouncing off things and laughing. Pinball—was that the analogy? Her answers were as pointless as the questions. Sometimes she simply walked among the terrified, terrifying people, and murmured “Care.”
The places where she stood were sometimes very bright and sometimes very dark. Compositions of tiny mirrors flashed, pricking her skin. They were burning her up. She stopped hearing the questions, stopped hearing everything but the music and the hissing of the mirrors. She had a rigor. The people retreated: she caught hold of them and still they retreated. Then they laughed as she ran among them, catching at their silks and burlap. They retreated, cloth coming away in her hands. They danced and laughed, not they but she—naked now? surely not?—and a path led away between them, up steps, through music, across aeons of crimson to Roddie, tiny in the distance, growing as she ran.
She reached him, held him close, felt him drift out of her arms like smoke. But the path had closed behind her and he was there, still there. Still. There. Roddie. Rod . . . A rod of iron. A rod for her own back. She clutched at his arms, his waist, his smoky bum. Around her people cheered silently, huge mouths over juddering pink and orange and blue. He was angry, arguing, shaking his head, shaking his head. Shaking her head?
They took her away from him. There was a machine on huge silent wheels, smooth and beautiful. They placed it beside her, around her. She marveled, no longer afraid, at the terrible playthings of the rich. There was sex in the air, in the smooth and beautiful maneuvering of the machine. It took her up with a sigh. Roddie was far away, very small, held by them tightly. The noises burst in on her, wordless, only to fade to a sudden quiet, with just the thin roar of the music and the breath of the machine in her face. She didn’t struggle. She looked out, past the machine, at Roddie where he stood in the shifting flakes of light, still tiny.
She wept. Such a coarse expediency. For some stupid, stupid reason it seemed to help. If this was dying she wanted nothing to do with it.
•
She wept quite a lot. My attention tended to wander. Eventually I supported her and a woman came and assisted me. Many of the people lost interest and went away. Depravity was over-rated, and they weren’t—thank God—very good at it. One of them came and said it was all just a joke. They only took photographs. She was too old anyway.
I didn’t think the joke could ever have been very funny.
At some time Rondavel returned and told us we should find somewhere to crash. He’d pay us in the morning. Then he went away again.
Coryton Rondavel had this Enhancement Radiation couch. I’d read about them. Exactly what the radiation was it didn’t say. Very avant. Very illegal. It was supposed to jack up your jollies.
•
Later, except for him and her, the room, a different room, was quite empty. She roused herself, sat up. She hadn’t died. Incredibly, yards away, past hideous, lumpy somethings, Roddie was reading a book. She stared around: the place was a huge, idiotic shambles. Anybody could hang mirrors on plastic threads and twiddle them. Anybody could trundle in machines and out again. Anybody could blow up plastic bags and call them furniture.
He heard her move and looked up at her from the upholstered hollow in which he was sprawling. In the houses of the rich, apparently, nobody was expected to remain for long upright.
“Feeling better?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “Not much.”
“Did your mother never tell you not to accept lifts from strangers?”
“Which mother?”
She could be as clever as he, say as little, wait and see.
He scrubbed at his beard. “I reckon they spiked our drinks. How much do you remember?”
Then she did remember. “Was I raped?” she asked him.
“No—” Heaving himself up. “That wasn’t the plan. It was sexual but it wasn’t that. And it didn’t happen. You don’t need to know.”
“Where were you?” She remembered seeing him. How crazy had she been?
“They went away. I swear it. They said it was supposed to be a joke. Sidled out like naughty children.”
“Where were you?”
He reached out, tried to take her hand, but she hid it away. “Believe me, Katherine. When it came to it, they never touched you. That’s the truth.”
“But the machine . . .”
“They spiked your drink. You were confused.”
She remembered the breath in her face. “Where are they now?”
He shrugged. “It’s a big house. And there’s always next door. They’re all pals up here on Fairhills.”
“How long have I been—?”
“Not more than an hour. I tell you, Katherine, they spiked your drink. It must have played hell with your medication.”
She shook her head, remembered the tangled, jangled, never-to-be-repeated messiness of her dying. But she didn’t want to talk about it. “How much do you know about computers?” she said instead.
“Me, I don’t even know about people. One of them told me I’d lost my sense of humor.”
“I have a theory about computers. They don’t yet have self-knowledge.” She interlocked her fingers and stared at them. “On a fundamental level,” she said, “there’s no shared contact. Instead it’s just like an audio system. If a microphone hears what it transmits, it transmits what it hears. Louder and louder till something breaks.”
“Katherine, I wish I knew what the hell you’re talking about.”
“I’m a bit more than a computer, Roddie. I do have self-knowledge. I understand that I know what I understand that I know.”
“So do we all.”
“But you’re not dying of it. I am.” She let him take her hand. “I am.” She dared, in that dim and secret, no-place room, dared tell him anything. “And I’ve been told what to expect. When it’s microphones it’s called feedback. A doctor told me. Louder and louder till something breaks.”
He’d know about audio feedback. Any reporter would.
“We must go now, Katherine.”
She leaned away from him, closed her eyes. It was good to be so quiet. She remembered breath in her face where he said there’d been none. She believed him. And the machine, the smooth and beautiful machine, would have sighed in vain . . .
She felt another rigor coming, and dismissed it as feedback, back-feed, hysteria. Mere wishful thinking. The Irish poet was wrong. A gloopy romantic. Lord of Upper Egypt, anything was preferable to this: rigor, paralysis, sweating, coordination loss, double vision, incontinence, hallucination, breakdown of— She frowned, puzzled. Incontinence? Tut. It was untidy to have missed out on incontinence, untidy not to have every symptom, each in its proper place, every symptom every time. Something was wrong. Clearly her twenty-four days were dwindling down.
“Roddie? You mentioned a joke. Tell me the joke, Roddie.”
He squeezed her hand. “It doesn’t matter. They didn’t get to make it. It doesn’t matter.”
Her fingers were huge and swollen, so that they rubbed together like sausages where he held them. “I’ve got to get old,” she said. “There’s . . . so much more that I’ve got to understand.”
“So have we all.”
“Did it sound such pious bullshit the way I said it?”
“It didn’t sound pious bullshit at all.”
“Oh Lord . . .” Her mind was wandering off, meeting the rigor halfway. “The thing is . . . we expect the impossible. We always expect things to have to mean something.”
“And shouldn’t they?”
“Poor Roddie, of course they shouldn’t. They’re only . . . circuits.”
•
I sat beside her for a long time. Somewhere in the velvet spaces of the room a clock struck midnight. The sculptures turned and flittered. I sat beside her through the rigor and the paralysis, and beyond. Finally she slept.
The music stopped and the house was still. Distant voices could be heard, and cars starting up and leaving.
Somewhere in the course of the evening I’d realized that the Hum Dest show had come and gone. A neglected screen in Mrs. Coryton Ansford Rondavel’s yoga room.