RODDIE had turned in a winner. Vincent was never wrong about these things. He watched it this time in NTV’s official viewing room with some colleagues and a group of media people. This second night had everything: fine artwork, a strong narrative line, pathos, suffering, excitement, humor, offbeat characters, even some magnificently earthy female nudes. There were a couple of detractors, of course, but clearly the show was a certain award-winner. The telephone calls had started coming in even while it was being screened. It was a shame Roddie couldn’t be there. By midnight the critics had gone, suitably encouraged, to hack out their copy. Although modest to the last, privately Vincent agreed with them. The show was a winner. And Vincent was never wrong about these things.
His euphoria didn’t last. For the second night his sleep was interrupted. “What the hell are the two of them up to this time?” he muttered as he got himself dressed.
Down in the monitoring room Dr. Mason and the ten-till-four technician, Simpson, were staring at blank white screens. Suddenly Vincent’s night went cold on him. Seeing his boss, Simpson hastily leant forward over the control panel, rattled his fingers on keys, tried to get a signal. One screen gave him a replay, Katherine Mortenhoe past. The other stayed white.
“It’s been like this for hours,” he said.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Vincent pushed in beside him. “It can’t have been.” He tried for himself. The result was the same. There was no sound either.
“I was just dossing down,” Dr. Mason told him. He nodded at the cot he’d been given. “We’d agreed I’d be here. I thought young Patterson had just switched off.”
“It doesn’t work that way. I thought you fucking knew.” Vincent’s head was buzzing and he took a neutralizer. “Didn’t Simpson tell you?”
“He wasn’t here. There was no point in both of us sitting here twiddling our—”
Simpson cleared his throat. “I came at once. It could have been interference so I checked with the satellite people. The handbag beacon had been giving a stationary signal for quite a while, miles from where we knew the two of them were.” He cleared his throat again. “On account of the video and the man you sent with the packet.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Vincent turned on another screen and sat drumming his fingers, waiting for it to warm up. “You should have been here. It’s inexcusable negligence.”
Dr. Mason jerked into action. He looked half dead. “It wouldn’t have made any difference. The satellite was fine. The screen went like that straight after he threw his flashlight away.”
“Who threw whose flashlight away?” Vincent couldn’t believe it. “Who threw whose flashlight away?”
“Your man. Your Patterson. Haven’t I just told you? He threw his flashlight away. After that everything went dark and then suddenly bright. I waited for something to happen.”
Vincent sat back. He needed to see this. No he didn’t. The new screen came on and showed the same white rectangle. “When was all this?”
“I don’t sit here watching the clock.”
“It’s important, Doctor. Please try to remember.”
“. . . He’d gone to the pub and watched the show. It wasn’t at all bad. Very good really. Went down well in the pub too.”
“I’m so glad. Then what happened?”
Dr. Mason considered. “Well now . . .”
Time seemed to have slowed to a complete standstill. Vincent got up abruptly, feeling as if his head would burst. If bad things happened he was the last to know. “Don’t bother. You can tell me on the way over.”
“Where are we going? I can’t leave. I’ve got my patient to consider.”
“Certainly. That’s why you’re coming with me.”
He went to the telephone, started looking down the list for the extension number of the Air Transport Controller. By now, thank God, he knew roughly, from the delivery man and Roddie’s last camera contact on the pier, where the two of them were. The town at least. He needed clearance for NTV’s emergency helicopter team.
•
Hours can come, and hours can go. That night, by eleven, they’d got me down off the pier.
I should have had a plan. Right from the beginning I should have thought beyond the bargain I was striking and the price I would pay. If I didn’t have a plan then a price—though different—would be extracted from her as well. And I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have a plan because when I finally came to think about it I realized that no plan was possible.
So they’d got me down off the pier: Katherine, and Tommy, and two or three others. They thought I was drunk and I didn’t disillusion them. Not that they’d have been easy to convince—I mean, who really goes blind, suddenly, for no reason at all, in the middle of the night, on the end of a broken-down pier? So I let them lead me down and thought myself lucky to be spared immediate embarrassment. I’d reckoned without Mrs. Baker.
She turned us out.
To be precise, she didn’t even let us in. It was her moment of purest joy, I could hear it in her voice. She met us by the edge of the wind-breaks and read us her own private riot act. She had the other guests to think of, she said. Drunkenness was not allowed, never had been. Fringies was all the same. Give them an inch and they took a mile.
A confused mass of something hit my chest. Dropping most of it, I discovered it was made up of our possessions. I recognized the zipper around Katherine’s sleeping bag, and joined it, and between us we stuffed most of the things in. It was probably almost as dark there on the beach for her as it was for me. I and my lady friend, Mrs. Baker remarked behind us, could have our orgy somewheres else.
I kept a hand on Katherine as she hobbled away. Soon she sat down and I sat down beside her. She shivered. It was her own shiver, unrecorded, untransmitted, ungloated-over. We were both of us free.
“You hadn’t left me,” she said. “I’d thought perhaps you—”
“Of course I came back.”
“But you got pie-eyed first . . . I’ve never known about men getting drunk. Were you upset? You sounded as if you were upset.”
I put one arm around her shoulders. Out of all the thoughts in my head there was not one that I could tell her. Not even that I loved her. If that was the word. And there was no other. “I’ll keep you safe,” I said, forgetting that in all honesty I no longer could.
For as long as we sat there the future seemed unnecessary. Luckily for us there was someone rather less romantic. Footsteps approached across the pebbles. A throat was cleared. “Booze or no booze, I reckon you two’ll freeze to death come morning.”
It was Tommy. I stood up, suddenly terribly aware of my sightlessness. I didn’t know where he was, how far, in what direction. “Yes. Well, Tommy, I thought of going along to the—”
“The thing is, there’s always my old van. It’s a bit crowded, but at least it’s private. Never forget a face or a favor. The police moves you on if you kips in the shelters.”
He was right. His van was a bit crowded. It was a largish van, but filled with conjuring props, and puppets, and the Punch and Judy booth, and various lumps I couldn’t possibly identify. All the same, he fitted us in somehow.
I was dreading the moment when seagull clatter signified the coming of daylight.
Explanations would be necessary.
Always assuming that Vincent’s helicopter didn’t beat dawn to it.
He’d know where to come, of course, and I didn’t want to see him. See him? Well, talk to him. I didn’t want to talk to him. Which was the biggest understatement of my life. I detested the very idea of being within a hundred miles of him. And I detested that idea for Katherine too. He’d sent word that he loved my footage. He was a toxic presence.
Katherine didn’t have long. I faced it. If we could possibly evade him for another day or so she might be spared his evil charm, the poisonous understanding that he’d blast her with. No blame. He needed at least some measure of her cooperation. He’d welcome her as his prodigal daughter and hug every last drop of blood out of her. And if my implant was still transmitting he’d know just where to look. Our only hope was that my burn-out hadn’t trashed the overload fail-safe disconnection. That the transmitter had died too.
Vincent’s helicopter beat the dawn by quite a while.
“Isn’t that a helicopter?” Katherine said, suddenly very awake, sitting up in our cramped corner of Tommy’s van.
“It might be,” I said.
“Could it be from NTV? That wretched Vincent?”
“Possibly. Very possibly.” A dead cert if my implant was still transmitting.
The noise approached. Separated. There were two of them. Katherine gave a small cry of pain. I searched for her, found a puppet’s body, then the cover of her sleeping bag. “What is it?” I asked.
“Their lights—they hurt my eyes.”
I should have known that Vincent would bring the camera chopper, halogen floods, plus his own, the full production outfit. I always told him he overlit his night O.B.s. By now the beach would be flattened by the weight of lights.
It seemed as good a moment as any. “I can’t see any lights,” I said.
“Don’t be silly. Of course you can.”
“No.”
•
The helicopters landed a good way off, on the promenade along by the roundabout. Their engines coughed, subsided. If my implant wasn’t transmitting, if Tommy kept his mouth shut, and he would, it was still possible that Vincent wouldn’t find us.
Katherine shifted, and held me with her one good hand, and held on tightly. She could see me, of course, in Vincent’s lights. I felt indecent: I might be repulsive, snot-soaked, bloodshot eyes, my fly might be undone, anything.
“It’ll be all right, Roddie. What haven’t you said? Tell me.”
So I was cued in, and my reply was ready on the auto-prompt. I could imagine it waiting, ready to scroll.
“You’re working for NTV,” she said.
It was as if she’d looked over my shoulder, reached down, and deleted the first two pages of my script. I wished I could see her face. The windows of the van would be all steamed up. I wished I could see her face, and tried to remember it, and it evaded me. I felt I had never properly seen anybody, and now I never would.
I began.
•
She stayed quiet, asking nothing, saying nothing, till he had done.
Tommy kept himself to himself. Perhaps he heard Roddie talking. Perhaps he had his getting-up rituals. He left Roddie talking and went about his business. Along by the roundabout, on the promenade, police cars arrived. There was confused chatter, and people scuffing to and fro, tripping and cursing. Roddie’s whispered words were different, conveyed in a different medium. She knew and understood, almost without hearing, their smallest intonation. She occupied his reality. He offered no reasons, no excuses. His eyes had been sending pictures to NTV. Now they weren’t. The show was over.
Between the two of them excuses were unnecessary. And anyway she knew them all. And anyway they were useless. She hated him. Worse, she despised him: his betrayal, what he was, what he had done to her. It was, she knew quite well, obscene. Even his blindness was horrible, a self-mutilation that could only be another burden to her. His gentleness, within the appalling framework he had accepted, made no sense. She had put herself at his mercy, and now he was demanding an impossible forgiveness. Not with words, not a syllable, not even with humbleness, but demanding to be forgiven all the same. Mostly, of course, it was his shame that she could not tolerate.
Circuits, linkages, her whole life insisted that she reject him. When at last he had finished she had nothing to say. Her silence would hurt him and she was immovably silent. He started heaving himself about. “Help me out of this fucking van,” he said.
She found she was holding his arm, and let it go. He was trying to make her responsible, even for this. He wanted her to ask him to stay. Or he wanted her to force him to leave. And she would not.
“So that you can tell them where I am?”
“If I wanted to do that I could shout from here.”
“Then why don’t you?” He was on his hands and knees, feeling his way around things to the doors of the van. “Look at you now. Making all that noise. You want to have it both ways. Be honest. You want to turn me in so that Vincent will go on loving you. And at the same time you want me to pat you on the head and say never mind, you couldn’t help it.”
•
I tried to stand up, caught my head on a sharp corner. “Help me out of here, Katherine. I’ll find the wall of the promenade and go along it. I can tell them I was along at the gents. I can tell them you got someone to give you a lift out of town.”
“And what am I supposed to do till they find me ?”
“It’ll take a while.” Vincent’s information was hours old. It must be nearly daytime now. Five o’clock? Six? It would have been nine-ish when I left the pub. By now they could be anywhere. Unless of course the implant was still transmitting. “Stay put,” I told her. “If Tommy keeps quiet you’ll be safe enough.”
“And what then?”
“How should I know what then?”
“You ought to. You said you’d look after me.”
“I lied.”
•
Such an overpitched, melodramatic, unreal conversation to be having. She didn’t hate him. He was thoughtful, talented, gentle. Weak? No, a child. The game was over.
“Please stay,” she said. “Please stay . . .”
They had, one way and another, both been hurt enough.
Footsteps approached, tried the pebbles under the pier, then went back up the steps onto the promenade. Vincent Ferriman’s voice: “You try the shelters along that way. I’ll try the old dance hall. They could be anywhere. Timbuk-fucking-tu for all I know.”
She relaxed just a degree or two. The transmitter had died. That was a relief.
Somebody brushed along the back of the van. The footsteps went away. Roddie groped around in the air above her head. “Katherine—”
“Don’t talk. Just stay. Please.”
She helped him to find somewhere to sit down. After a long time the footsteps returned. First Vincent Ferriman’s, that stood, and paced, and kicked the tire of a car along the row as they waited, and then the others’. There was argument. This time Katherine recognized the voice of Dr. Mason. She’d come a long way since that morning in his office. She was glad, for both their sakes, that he’d cared enough to be here.
Vincent was in charge. Who else? But he wasn’t going to find her. “Right, people. Can we have some order please? Thank you . . . Now, they won’t have hung around so obviously we’re wasting our time. They’ve probably hitched a lift somehow. In which case we need grounds for calling in the police. Not even NTV can handle this sort of search on its own. Doctor, can we fairly say she’s in need of urgent medical attention?”
“Of course we can. I’ve told you and told you. Unless—”
“Good. In that case there’s no problem. Even if they’ve hitched a lift they’ve got to be put down somewhere. And I’ll lay on radio flashes. It’s a pity we’ve lost her beacon. I can’t think how. They’ll be picked up soon enough. It’s early. They’ll have nowhere to hide.”
She was invisible. So was Roddie. They didn’t exist. They’d never be picked up. They were somewhere else. And she knew of no beacon.
Vincent led his people away, crisply back along the promenade. The helicopters started up and went, taking their pounding with them, leaving the inside of the van wonderfully quiet. Gradually the sea noises reasserted themselves. She eased her cramped body. “What now?” she said.
When Roddie didn’t answer she tucked the blanket from his duffle bag about him as neatly as her clumsy arm would allow, and settled to wait for what would happen next.. Since she’d asked him, and he’d stayed, they’d hardly spoken. But they’d communicated. She wasn’t worried.
Tommy’s noisy arrival roused them both. He flung open the back doors of the van, pushed in an armful of his things from the beach, and then quickly shut the doors again. In a moment he was around the side, climbing in, starting the engine, moving off. “Looks like being a lovely day,” he said. “And I’d snug on down back there. No sense in getting seen all over the place.”
The van threw them around. A crazy assortment of swords and vanishing cabinets and plastic goldfish bowls and old wickerwork hampers leaned and clattered about them. Conversation was impossible. “I’ll stow everything when we get out of town,” Tommy shouted. “You never know who’s watching.”
From where she crouched Katherine could see the upper stories of houses reeling by. Roddie sat hunched, with his arms over his head. After a few miles the houses thinned and were replaced by curving lamp standards. The van slowed, turned left, and finally pulled in under some trees. Tommy switched off, and sat massaging his hands. “I could tell them blokes wasn’t police, for all they pretended they was. I don’t know what you two done, and I don’t want to. Old Tommy never forgets a face or a favor.”
Katherine climbed out, and guided Roddie after her. The clouds of the previous day were nearly all gone and the sun was warm and she had been nearly twelve hours without a rigor. Tommy watched them, and although he made no comment she felt obliged to offer some sort of explanation. “He’s got this . . . this thing wrong with his eyes,” she said.
“And you’re not all that spry yourself, pet.”
In fact, of course, they made a ludicrous couple. She shrugged, and the old man patted her arm and went around to the back of the van and started sorting out his possessions. Roddie stood beside her, turning his face up to the sky. “It’s a fine day,” he said. Then, abruptly, “What sort of a man is Gerald?”
The name shocked her. “Gerald?”
“Your first husband. I never got to see him. What sort of a man is he?”
“It’s been a long time. I don’t know. I don’t—”
“Would he take you in?”
“Take me in?” Ten seconds before she would have denied any such idea, but now she knew with the utter certainty of hindsight that it was Gerald whom she had been circling, Gerald she had been resisting, not quite been making for, ever since she left the city. “I don’t know if he’d take me in. But I’d like to try.”
“If he doesn’t, you’re buggered.”
“I’ll think of something.”
“Besides, with the money I’ve got maybe you and old Tommy could—”
“Gerald’s house isn’t far. I’d like to see him.”
“He sounds like a man who gets about a bit. Maybe he won’t be there.”
“Maybe he will.”
“If NTV have any sense it’s the first place they’ll look.”
It was he who had suggested Gerald. Now he was hedging. Perhaps he was afraid of her being hurt. Gerald, she was sure, would never hurt her. “I’m willing to chance it. If you are.”
He turned away, felt for the side of the van. “I’m free of the lot of them. They’ll want money, of course. Their money back. Their money . . .” He smiled, and seemed to be seeing. His eyes were clear, and bright brown, and seemed to be seeing. “ . . . I’ve a wife and a son. Did I ever tell you that?”
“Mostly we talked about me.”
“Anyway, that’s all . . . She’s Tracey. I met her on a trip to Boston. We call the boy Roddie Two. I’ve a photograph somewhere.”
He dug his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans and held it out to her. She took it, but did not open it. After a pause she said, “He’s a fine little boy.”
“He’ll be grown, of course. That picture’s two—no, nearly three years old.”
She gave him his wallet back. She was glad he had another life, someone to go to, but she didn’t want to know about it. There wasn’t the time. “So we’ll ask Mr. Tucker if he’d be kind enough to give us a lift as far as Gerald’s house,” she said. “He’s sure to have a map.”
She couldn’t always be selfless and noble. She couldn’t always be happy for the people who would be here, and loved, when she wasn’t.
Tommy had a map. Gerald’s place was fifty miles off, maybe more. Tommy was in no hurry. If Gerald wouldn’t have them he offered them another night in his five-star van.
•
In the Clegg flat the telephone beside the bed rang for a long time before either of them stirred. Finally the woman put out a frowzy, motherly hand and lifted the receiver. She listened briefly, then shook Harry. “It’s for you, love. The TV man. He’s on the telephone. He wants a word.”
Harry straggled awake, saw her looking across at him, was relieved. “What time is it?”
“Not yet nine. Bloody cheek.”
He took the receiver from her. “Vincent? It’s not yet nine. What on earth are you—” He broke off. Listened. “Well, that’s your problem . . . No, I’ve no idea at all where she might go. I stopped trying to guess what she’d do years ago.”
He lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes.
“Gerald? After what he did to her? The things he said? You must be joking . . . No, unless she’s really lost it, Vincent, that’s the last place she’d go.” He opened his eyes and shoo’d the woman towards the kitchen and a cup of tea. “I told you, I’ve no suggestions at all. She had a thing about old places—if there’s a ruin around you might find her there . . . Her passport? It’s in the desk here . . . Of course I’m certain . . . All right, I’ll go and look.”
He put down the receiver, hauled himself out of bed and padded through to the living room, scratching as he went. A moment later he returned. From the kitchen there were comfortable noises of local radio news and the kettle being filled.
“Hello? It’s in the drawer like I said. Though from what I saw of her on the show last night she’ll hardly be trotting about the gay Continent, passport or no passport.”
He climbed back into bed and pulled the covers up to his chin, then reconsidered and pushed them down low across his stomach, ready for the arrival of the tea. “No. And you can give her father a miss too. She hated him. In fact she hated everybody. She even hated me, it seems . . . No—a ruin’s your best bet. She had this thing about old places.”
He was about to ring off. Then, “Vincent? Yes. I wonder . . . when you find her, give her my love, will you? Tell her I miss her. And let me know if you decide to bring her back here. Give me a chance to . . . tidy up the flat a bit.”
The tea arrived. He nodded as Vincent’s voice continued, and returned the receiver between forefinger and thumb to its cradle. He’d seen a man do it like that in a movie once.
“They’ve lost her,” he said. “There’s supposed to be some sort of radio beacon on her. Seems it’s broken down or something. Thought I might know where she’d go.”
“Bloody cheek.”
“Steady on. Go easy. I’m still her husband. If not me, then who?”
“It’s just the time, love. Not yet nine.”
“She was a very remarkable woman. Just you remember that.”
“Tea up, love. And you’re a very remarkable man.”
She placed the tray in the middle of the bed between them and around it they played little games with each other’s rudest parts. Then, before it got too cold, they drank their tea. It was Monday morning and neither of them cared. The time passed delightfully.
•
Peter was having a cooked breakfast with his friend when the telephone called him away from the table. He liked a cooked breakfast and he always had a cooked breakfast, so he took it with him out into the hall.
“Who? Mr. who? Ferriman . . . oh yes, the man from NTV.” He stopped chewing. “My God. It’s bad news. You’re ringing to tell me she’s dead. Poor Katie-Mo. Poor, poor Katie-Mo . . .”
. . . A long while later he returned to the breakfast table. His friend saw his face, and sat him down, and fetched him fresh coffee from the hot plate on the side.
“They should leave me alone . . . How should I know where she’s gone? I told them I hadn’t a clue . . . They knew she’d been here—perhaps she’d given me some kind of hint. I tried to remember . . . You were there—I expect you heard most of it. All about going away, and . . . sort of saying good-bye. There wasn’t anything else, was there?”
His friend sorted out what Peter was talking about. He shook his head. There’d been, he was sure, nothing. Only sort of saying good-bye.
•
Clement Pyke’s telephone rang on an empty boat—empty, that is, of the living. He had died by his own hand some ten hours before, after watching his daughter, his only blood relation, caper about on a gray pebbly beach. There were things that had long been beyond him. He left a large number of notes but the police, when they finally came, were to suppress them every one.
Vincent let the telephone bell ring for a long time before giving up. “Evidently not at home,” he said.
Dr. Mason took his ball-point out of his pocket, stared at it and put it back. “There’ll be a pattern,” he said. “She knows she’s not got long. Last night she slept somewhere. She can no longer afford just to let things happen.”
“Unless of course that’s all she can afford to do.”
“You’re playing with words.”
“Perhaps I am. But the two of them couldn’t be picky. They’d have taken the first lift that came along. They could be anywhere.”
“We’ve got to find her.”
“I know that. The police have their roadblocks. Now we’ve got them checking ancient monuments. I don’t see what else we can do. The beacon was in her handbag. We found it by the road a way back. The place where those bikers stopped them.”
“Ring your man Patterson’s wife. Perhaps she’ll have some suggestions.”
“I will not ring Tracey. All that would do would be to bring her along here, emoting all over the place. She’s hardly seen him in three years . . . Klausen’s the man who could help if anybody could. And all he talks about is transference, and mutilation trauma, and Roddie being saner than anyone here imagined.”
“Saner?”
“That’s what he said.”
“I’d like to meet this Dr. Klausen.”
“No you wouldn’t, old son. He keeps a sense of humor. And he’s got his guilts well in hand.”
The telephone rang, making both men jump. But it was only Search HQ phoning in a negative report on the instructions of the Chief Inspector. Dr. Mason got up, visited Vincent’s toilet. Vincent phoned down to the cutting room—unless something happened pretty damn quickly he’d have to start knocking together some fill-in footage with what little they’d got left.
Roddie’s behavior he did not think about at all. The surgeons weren’t hopeful. An appalling betrayal. The man would never work again, if he had anything to do with it.
•
It was comedy spy-thriller stuff. Katherine and me squashed into the vanished part of one of Tommy Tucker’s vanishing cabinets. It had been designed for one occupant, and a pretty skinny occupant at that. But neither of us laughed much. I had no idea, no idea at all, what was going on in her head. I hadn’t destroyed her and that was sufficient. We accommodated ourselves to each other as best we could, and waited . . . The van slowed at a roadblock and stopped. After a brief conversation the back door of the van was thrown open. I felt Katherine take a deep breath. If she had one of her shakes now, we were done for.
The van sagged as someone heavy climbed in. Grunting ensued as things were shifted about. “You’ve got enough stuff in here, grandad. What’s it all in aid of?”
“Royal Charter, that’s what. That’s what it’s in aid of. I tell you, some old king, George it might have been, or William, give Punch and Judy the right to twenty minutes, any time, any place.”
“Yeah. Well, there hasn’t been no George or William around for a year or two now . . .” The policeman was clambering nearer. “You got a license?”
“A license?” Tommy sounded worried. I held my breath. Were we going to be caught just because he didn’t have some bloody silly bit of paper?
“That’s right, dad. A showman’s license.”
“I sets up my show, see. Never cause no trouble. It’s the kids, they—”
“Kids or no kids, you need a license.” The policeman’s head was turned, looking out of the van. When Tommy didn’t answer he swore under his breath and started working his way out again. At his nearest he’d been a foot, maybe two, away.
Under cover of his banging about Katherine uncramped her legs, and shifted her head against my chest. The policeman slithered down onto the road, followed by what sounded like a small avalanche of Tommy’s pots and pans. “I tell you, grandad, if you’ve not got a license you’re in dead trouble.”
“My brother taught me the way of it. He never had no license.”
“That’s as may be.”
There was a long pause. “I got a permit. Is that what you mean? All showmen got permits.”
They went away around the side of the van, arguing. We relaxed. Good old Tommy. To any self-respecting policeman a license in the hand was worth two missing persons in the bush any day . . . Finally Tommy climbed back into the driving seat.
“Now remember,” the policeman said, leaning in, “if you see a couple like that by the road, don’t pick ’em up. Just drive on to the next phone box and give HQ a tinkle. The number’s there on that bit of paper.”
“Me pick up a couple of loonies? You must be joking.”
He drove off. After what seemed a very long time he stopped the van and came and let us out. “They must want you bad,” he said. “But I tell you one thing though—a couple of saner loonies I never seen.”
It was a testimonial I really needed. I smiled at him, hoping he’d notice. One way and another over the last couple of hours the blindness had been getting me very low, getting me so I no longer knew myself, no longer knew who or what I was. But Tommy knew.
You see, in the past I’d often imagined being blind. I’d thought of it in terms of how I’d do things, get about, not hurt myself. And I’d been wrong. Even in totally unknown surroundings you can feel safe by a wall, or in a chair, or against some tree. No, the worst vulnerability is to be seen and not to see. There is nothing, no cloak, no box, nothing that will protect you from the eyes of those you know are there yet cannot see. I no longer had a sense of self. I’d felt it first in the night, talking in the van with Katherine. I’d felt it again standing in the sunlight, remembering Tracey. I no longer knew myself. Katherine and the old man, they talked together, and with me, and they didn’t seem any different, but I got back from them nothing of me.
Then Katherine jolted me out of my self-concern, had one of her shakes, a bad one. I helped her. At these times she needed exactly the one thing I could give: closeness. Poor Tommy was embarrassed and went away, I’ve no idea where. A long time later he came back with a bottle of milk and Katherine drank some. Later still I heard him pumping up a primus and prepared myself for the arrival of more all-purpose stew. But I’d underestimated him—it was water he was heating. The lady might like a wash, he said, over his shoulder, going again.
One trouble was that when Katherine was better she was so very much better. She was gay. There was a lightness about her presence that I couldn’t match. Tommy drove very slowly. I crouched beside her in the back of the van and thought about Tracey. What would she see? Me? Me as I remembered myself, or me as a self-mutilated lunatic? And how would I know what she saw? Even if I asked her, how could she tell me what she really saw? They were pointless questions. They went round and round so that I was glad when Tommy announced another roadblock up ahead and we had to hide. At least the danger gave me something else to think about.
Gerald Mortenhoe’s house was at the top of a long slow hill. Tommy was one hell of a map-reader. Katherine asked him to stop when he thought there was about half a mile to go.
“Find a place where we can get out without being seen. If the police did happen to be there and you drove us in, you’d be in trouble.”
“Old fool like me, they’d only chew me up a bit.”
“Please, Tommy. I wouldn’t want you chewed up, not after all you’ve done for us.”
“You know me. Never forget a face or a favor . . . Besides, you’re a real nice lady.”
He drove on a bit, then turned off the road and bumped along some sort of rough track.
“It’s not far from here. Just across the fields. You can see the house between them trees.”
He stopped the van and we climbed out. “Tommy,” I began, “you’ve been—”
“Just across a couple of fields. Not too difficult.” He leaned closer. “And mind you look after her. She’s not all that spry.”
If he wouldn’t be thanked, he wouldn’t. I respected that. “I’ll do my best,” I said.
Katherine called from a little distance away: “We’ll miss you, Tommy.”
“Huh. You’ll be the first as ever has then.” He bashed his suffering gears into reverse. “Mind how you go.”
“And you.”
He ground away, his engine yowling fretfully. In the distance it changed its note, checked, and climbed again through the forward gears, fading into silence. Other cars passed, going up and down the hill. Birds sang. There was a smell of wild garlic warmed by the sun. Far overhead an airplane hissed in the wake of its own echo.
Blindness. Among the sighted blindness is usually imagined as a lack. For me that day it was an intrusion. It pressed in on me from all sides.
I was alone there with Katherine Mortenhoe, on a track that was a track because Tommy’d said so, by two shapeless fields, below unnamed trees and an inconceivable house. I heard her move behind me, a rustling of clothes as if she were sitting down. I went toward her, feeling the space about me with my ears, my skin. Learning. My foot struck something soft. “I’m finding it harder to stand,” she said.
But she got up again neatly enough when I helped her.
•
Halfway up the side of the second field Roddie groped around and stopped.
“We’re out of the sun here,” he said. “It’s cool. Is it a high hedge? Would I be noticed if I stayed put?”
“I’ll wait with you if you’re tired.”
“It’s not that. I don’t know your first husband. He doesn’t know me. It would be better if you went on up alone.”
“I’d rather you came with me.” He’d said he’d look after her. He’d promised he’d look after her. “I can’t do this alone. Please come with me.”
Do what alone? Visit an old friend? Talk over old times? Perhaps at last find someone she could fairly blame? She’d no idea. He went on with her up the side of the field and over the gate at the end. She placed his hands and he climbed it easily.
They were among the trees now, the house only a few hundred yards away, beyond the edge of a copse and across a gravelled drive. Nothing moved. She leaned against a flimsy silver birch, gathering her strength. Then she went on between clumps of bluebells, Roddie close behind her. On the drive she paused. In front of her the house told her it had been there a long time. Gerald had good taste. Also wealth. She turned right and followed the drive past a bed of wall-flowers. The drive widened into a turning space with grass in the middle and a tall aluminum abstract sculpture streaked with bird-lime. She wondered if she should tell Roddie everything she was seeing. Where did one start?
“It’s a fine house,” she said. “It’s white and plain and well-proportioned. Red tiles. Blue paintwork. A green-blue. Turquoise really. Two windows on each side of a turquoise door. A glass porch and a path with steps up to it. Grass.” She was so bad at this. “There are fir trees with swings on long ropes from the lower branches. Perhaps children come.” She trailed off.
“I can smell the fir trees.” He sniffed. “And wallflowers?”
But she was seeing into the deep shadows under the trees. She lowered her voice. “And Gerald’s standing under one of them. He looks very much the same. He’s seen us and he thinks we haven’t seen him. He’s making up his mind what to do.”
She led Roddie on up the path across the lawn. The Gerald she remembered liked to enter any situation with his thoughts in order. They went together up the shallow steps to the main entrance. The door was locked. Roddie stood quietly beside her, learning patience.
She peered through the door’s glass panel at the polished corridor within and waited for Gerald to make up his mind. Finally he did.
“Don’t ring the bell.” Behind her his feet approached across the gravel. “There’s nobody to answer it.”
She turned. “I’d forgotten how tall you were, Gerald.”
“It’s been a long time.”
She nodded. “Six years . . . going on seven. You’re looking well.”
He turned his gaze from Roddie to her and back again, and didn’t answer.
“Gerald, this is Roddie.”
“I thought it had to be.”
Roddie held out his hand but Gerald stayed at the bottom of the steps, staring up. “Please don’t be awkward,” Katherine said. To both of them.
Roddie took his hand back. “If he’s been watching the show and he cares about you,” he said, “you can hardly blame him.”
She held tightly onto his arm. “Gerald? Do you care about me? Do you care about me, Gerald?”
He moved and broke up the tableau. He looked at his watch. He wasn’t giving much. Not so soon. Perhaps never. He cleared his throat and began to walk briskly away. “I’d rather you weren’t seen,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m not expecting anybody but you never know. Please hurry. The police came very early this morning—I was to get in touch with them the moment you turned up . . .”
He walked fast, so that she had difficulty in following. Roddie stumbled, nearly fell. Ahead of them Gerald disappeared through a gate in a high woven fence. When she reached the gate she saw beyond it a dappled green garden bright with yellow spring flowers and the fallen, drifting petals of a cherry tree. She went in, drawing Roddie through after her. Gerald was waiting behind the gate and closed it gently. He wasn’t going to call the police.
“You look terrible, Kath. Really terrible. What can I get you?”
The courage that had sustained her was suddenly all used up. She staggered and sank down, just where she was, on the grassy random stones of the path. Roddie stood beside her, one arm half-raised, quietly warding things off.
•
When Tracey burst into the office she saw Vincent taking a chicken and mayonnaise sandwich from a piled plate on his desk. Beside the plate were three paper cups of coffee. Two other men were standing by the window, one of them, with dark-rimmed glasses, leaning with his forehead pressed against the glass. Both men were physically relaxed. Experienced professionals. Neither was inwardly calm or composed and it showed.
“I can see there’s no news,” she said.
Nobody contradicted her. Vincent finished chewing his current mouthful and swallowed. “I gave orders that you weren’t to be allowed up here.”
“The girl on Reception has a husband. She feels about him the way I feel about mine.”
The leaning man at the window had turned. “I’m Daniel Klausen,” he said. “Jack Patterson’s psychiatrist. I take it you’ve seen the papers,” he said.
“And the lunchtime news. How else would I know? You’d hardly expect our Vincent to tell a girl a thing like that. I’m only Roddie’s wife, that’s all.”
Vincent took another sandwich. “You’re not his wife. Perhaps you forget.”
“Like I said once before, someone has to pick up the pieces.”
The other man turned and came toward her. “Dr. Mason,” he said. “Mrs. Mortenhoe was, still is, my patient. Believe me, we’re doing everything we can. I have to get to her very soon, within the next few hours. Otherwise we’ll be too late and she’ll die.”
“How can you save her? I thought . . .”
Vincent looked up from his sandwich, came in a little too sharply. “No doctor gives up hope, Tracey. Naturally Dr. Mason will do what he can. Which is why we’re doing our damnedest to find her. To find them both.”
“You mean you’ve paid for a death and now you’re worried sick you won’t be there.”
But he wouldn’t be needled. “Optic nerve implants don’t come cheap. We paid handsomely.” He picked a shred of chicken from between his front teeth and stared at it. “You can hardly blame us for being concerned.”
Dr. Mason moved convulsively. “No. No, I disassociate myself from that attitude. I may very well save her. At the very least, delay things. If we find her in time I can—”
“Tracey my dear, he’s deluding himself. Katherine has a terminal condition. I heard him tell her so.”
Tracey looked at the two men. Power was being wielded: the whole force of Vincent’s personality, and something more besides. She knew his ways, his ruthlessness. Whatever their differences, the doctor would never have been a match for him . . . Roddie, for all his courage and imagination, had never been a match for him either. She was there because Roddie needed her. Because any activity was better than waiting at home by the TV. Because she had felt she would be more help to him there in Vincent’s office than anywhere else. Now she saw there were other threads, ethical complications she refused to guess at.
“Whatever you’ve done so far to find them,” she said, “you must do it again. There’ll be something you missed. You must go through it all again.”
“Must? My dear Tracey—”
“You’re callous, Vincent. I wonder if you’re that callous. I wonder if you wouldn’t rather know afterwards that you’d done everything you could.”
He looked at her sideways. “For the sake of the sponsors?”
“For the sake of any damn person you like.”
He sighed, wiped his greasy fingers on his handkerchief, reached for the telephone.
•
We sat in basket chairs, and ate salad out of wooden bowls. Or at least, with the blindness pressing in, I did. And I appreciated Gerald’s thoughtfulness—I could scoop around with my fingers and not spill all that much over the sides. I’d never thought before how blind men ate. A wooden bowl and fingers seemed by far the best idea. And a glass on the ground beside me with wine in it that they told me was white. I mean, it had to be, on the lawn of a man like Gerald, chilled like that, and with salad. Considered, passionate guitar music wafting out of the house, or perhaps a lute, and the sun warm on my face.
Gerald was very aware: a big, impressive-feeling man. Even from the beginning he hadn’t really been agin me, just waiting for a lead from Katherine. I might have been her old man of the sea for all he knew. For all I knew, maybe I was. But she gave me no sign, so I chose to think not.
Not that she was one for signs. After all, she was dying—and I mean there, in that garden, dying—and she gave no sign of that either. At least, not to Gerald who might be expected to believe her. But I knew better. After her last rigor down by the van she’d been . . . different. Her breathing was different. There was no rhythm to it, to her walking, to her voice even. No continuity. It was as if she had to discover and then rediscover each necessary act as she went along. And the effort this required grew progressively greater. She was past rigor. She was past rigor, and paralysis, and coordination loss, and sweating, and double vision, and . . . I stopped myself. She was dying.
I knew what that meant. Of course I knew, every thinking person knew, what that meant. And hey, wasn’t I a thinking person? It meant ashes to ashes. It meant dust to dust. If the women don’t get you the whiskey must.
I had no idea what it meant.
“ . . . Perhaps in a way things were made too easy,” she was saying to Gerald, “by us not having any children.”
“How could we have had children? You seemed to have none of the qualities a mother needed.”
Was it some kind of truth game they were playing, or had they always been so honest with each other? I scooped my salad and drank my wine.
“You didn’t know everything about me, Gerald. But perhaps you were right about my qualities of motherhood.”
“You have them now, Kath.”
Their honesty made this a genuine compliment. Neither was it, in spite of her present situation, at all inappropriate, just a nice, genuine compliment. “I hope you’re right, Gerald. It’s about time.” Neither of them spoke for a while. Then, “You know, I’m glad you never remarried, Gerald.”
“What difference would that have made?”
“I was thinking of my father. He remarried all the time.”
“How very Freudian of you . . . Was that why you left me? Because you thought you’d married your father and then found you hadn’t?”
“Please, Gerald, not the Freud game. It was you who left me,” she said.
“Under the meaning of the Act, perhaps. But you’d left already, a long time before that.”
I heard her chair creak. I’d wondered at first if they found me, on account of my blindness, either more intrusive or less. I needn’t have worried. They had more important things to think about. “You always wanted to change me, Gerald. I wasn’t ready to be changed.”
“In those days I was always in too much of a hurry.”
“It upsets me when you’re smug. It always did.” The concession wasn’t enough. Where was she going? “Just look at me. There’s a mechanism here, very much a mechanism, and it’s very much running down. What more do you want?”
“So you’d say you’ve not changed. You’d say you’re here just because you’re here.”
“Not the clever academic stuff, Gerald. Not the Socratic method.”
He sounded a nice man, comfortable in the sun, And she, Tommy Tucker had said, was a nice lady. I couldn’t understand the loveless way they talked. I wanted, presumptuously, to help them.
“She knows there’s more than just a mechanism—” I had begun too loud, not pitching my voice quite right. “Ask her what the doctor told her. Ask her about the outrage.”
“Roddie?” She sounded surprised I was there. “Outrage, Roddie? What gnomic word is this?”
She was, I recognized, playing to Gerald. “The outrage that is part of your condition,” I said. “Dr. Mason described it very well. Don’t forget I was there.”
“You’re wrong, Roddie. Neurological overload . . . burned-out circuits . . . these are my condition.”
Gerald quickly recognized the difficulty between us. “The poet Dylan Thomas,” he murmured, “is reputed to have died of ‘insult to the brain.’ That is what people say appears on his death certificate. Insult or outrage . . . it’s a very small step.”
“Mystical nonsense, Gerald. We both know Thomas died of drink.”
I should have noticed that she was protesting overmuch. I didn’t. “Then there’s your book,” I insisted. “From what Peter told me there was outrage in every—”
“Book? There isn’t any book . . . Anyway, I destroyed all my notes in that hotel. All that mattered. It was a silly thing, Gerald. Angry. Juvenile. A silly thing . . .”
“But it tied in with what the doctor said. Surely you must remember?”
Remember? Something must have dulled me to her desperation. Possibly the wine. Of course she remembered. But could she admit that? Certainly, as soon as the word was spoken I would have taken it back. Gerald might press her hard, but not I. Now of all times, not I. I heard her move, felt the weight of her full attention pin me in my chair.
“I remember . . . remember all sorts of things.” For all her firmness of voice she was tiring. “I remember, for instance, that you worked under Vincent Ferriman. Mr. Ferriman is the most profoundly wicked, the most distressing person I have ever met. You worked under him. Willingly.”
Her words didn’t hurt me as much as I think she hoped they would. Accommodations that had once been made could be regretted but not lightly taken back. She had no right. But then, previously, neither had I. All the same, I’d already been through that one and reckoned I was out the other side. I’d lived with self-distaste far too long. So, though she was refusing to admit it, had Katherine Mortenhoe.
I said nothing. Eventually she turned back to Gerald.
“Peter’s a . . . a dear boy,” she said, “but he doesn’t know a plot loop from a . . . a denouement phase. I’ve left him nothing to go on. Thank God.”
Gerald had this curious ability not to need explanations. It was as if she came to him already footnoted. “I’m glad to hear it, Kath. Denials are a waste of time. You can’t work with children without discovering that.”
“Children?”
“They come here. From the village. We play music together. They haven’t had garbled Freud thrown at them. They’re free to expect something bigger. They don’t often find it, of course. But they search.”
She might have accused him of philosophical nonsense again. It was, after all, he who had invoked Freud at her not three minutes before. She was, I thought, fighting my battle for me, which was hers. But instead she changed the subject. Or appeared to. “I’d have expected you to be the one to remarry,” she said. “Not me.”
“I don’t believe you remarried. Not in any important sense. Any more than you dared do more than turn out computer books.”
There was a long silence. When she spoke again it was the continuation of a private line of thought I didn’t immediately follow. “I understand there have been . . . programs. You’ve watched them . . .” The words came very slowly, connected only with great effort. “Is that why . . . why we’re here, talking? Is that why you didn’t run to the police?”
“The programs made me very angry. Of course they made me angry. But the better argument for turning you in now would be that you need urgent medical help.”
“Better argument?”
“I’d need more than anger with some wretched TV company to make me keep you from that.”
“Pity, then?”
“I can’t say I see you as being pitiable.”
“Then why?”
Uncharacteristically, he hesitated. At last I saw what she was doing, and that her battle wasn’t mine at all. She’d made her mind up on the ghost in the machine issue a while before coming here and had already managed, with difficulty, to tell him so. Now she was asking for something else. She who had seemed so militantly loveless, she was asking him to acknowledge love. Of a husband, of a father, of a man, simply of a human being. She knew she had mine, but that was easier, born of mutual pain. She needed his, born of what she had been before, unlikable, shut away. I held my breath, willing him to feel it. A cuckoo called, very close, passing overhead.
At last he replied. “The choice wasn’t mine at all, Kath. You made it for yourself, I don’t know when. Recently, I think. I respect it. I respect you for making it.”
And still she waited. How nicely we pick over our words: love, admiration, regard, respect . . . In my dictionary he loved her. But my dictionary took no account of the careful, protective intelligence of these two strange people. Their precisions weren’t cold. Theirs was a relationship fourteen years deep, interrupted but not yet ended. He was Gerald Mortenhoe and she Katherine. My reasoning had been cheap, making her hope be for a mere, undemanding, overworked word. I’d been mistaken. Rather than that, deep inside, perhaps unconsciously, she’d needed to test his scrupulousness, to risk his offering, for her easy sake, for her easy comfort, that same easy word. Love. What had she called it, just a short time ago, back on the road out of town? Worn to shreds? That tired, all-purpose no-purpose word? Life, their life, wasn’t that simple. She’d avoided it herself. But she was here.
She needed to test him.
Words, words . . . Yuk. But they do matter.
The silence lengthened. I suppose I had come with her to this place, to this man, expecting sensational revelations. Clearly he knew she was dying. But she was here and so was he. If they didn’t know by then what they felt for each other, then it wasn’t worth saying.
Now, wiser blind men than I say that the special perceptions expected of them by the seeing world are mostly wishful thinking. On that lawn, though, in the company of those two people, I do believe that my blindness granted me something of their shared awareness.
•
By now Vincent’s small office was crowded. Tracey looked around at the pitiful few people conceivably capable of making themselves useful who had been brought together there at her insistence. Mrs. Mortenhoe’s husband, Harry; her assistant at Computabook, Peter; her doctor, Dr. Mason; and finally, as a long shot, Roddie’s psychiatrist, Daniel Klausen. Dr. Mason was lecturing them, his concern painful to watch, while Vincent sat at his desk reading a sheaf of program reviews, his unconcern equally painful.
“If we can find her I can save her. Deep narcosis possibly the answer. A reversal of patterns. It can be done. I know Daniel Klausen here will agree it must be tried. But we don’t have much time. We—”
“What I cannot understand,” said Daniel Klausen, mildly adjusting his glasses, “is how this situation could ever have arisen.”
Vincent looked up from his clippings. “A medical matter,” he said. “Hardly one for this present discussion. Naturally Dr. Mason accepts full responsibility. An error of judgment, shall we say? They have been known, even in the medical profession.”
Tracey, who had never even met Katherine Mortenhoe, wanted to be of some help: not to Vincent, never to Vincent—but then, Vincent would never need her help. “We’re not here to hand out blame,” she said. “We’re here to think of some way of finding Mrs. Mortenhoe. And my husband.”
“And to do that,” Dr. Mason repeated, “we must all search in our minds for the smallest thing she may have said, the vaguest clue she may have given, the slightest deduction any of us might make from what we know of her.”
There was an uneasy silence in the room. Harry shifted peevishly. “Quite mad,” he said. “That’s the only deduction I’d care to make. One moment we were all set for Tasmania, the next moment she’d run away, tarted herself up like I don’t know what, no thought for me, no thought for how I might look, stuck there in that women’s clothing shop like—”
“I take it she was usually considerate of your feelings?” Klausen had already sized up Harry.
“Of course she was. We were married. Happily married. How else—”
“Then we are looking for atypical behavior, certainly stemming from her atypical situation. Even in this, though, we ought to be able to find some sort of logic. She seems to have been an intensely logical person . . . I wonder, was she running away, or running to? Was she basically afraid or, as we say, looking forward?”
Harry actually laughed. “Looking forward to what? Dying in the gutter? I tell you, she was crazy. Of course she was. She couldn’t face the truth, so she ran away.”
Up to that moment Peter had been quiet. Now he sprang to his feet. “No. You would say that. All you think about is the fool she made you look. You never knew anything about her, anything at all.”
“And you did, I suppose.”
“Yes. Yes, I did.”
The two men glared at each other. Then Harry turned to Vincent. “I didn’t want to come here. Must I put up with—”
“My dear Harry. Please . . . we must remember that Peter was the last among us to see your wife. It is just possible that he knows something the rest of us do not.”
Peter sat down again. “All I know is . . . is that she wasn’t in the least crazy. Or afraid. Yes, she was looking ahead . . . to whatever was going to happen to her.”
Harry snorted. Klausen had been reading over notes that Vincent had given him. “Peter—you talked with her for four or five minutes. Was there nothing she said in all that time that seemed to you odd in any way? Inconsequent? Not what you’d have expected?”
Peter struggled with his memory. “Everything she said was a bit . . . disjointed.” Harry snorted again. Peter plowed on. “But I understood her perfectly well. She was saying just that—that she wasn’t running away, but running to . . . I said I’d help her if I could. For some reason this made her cry. I lent her my handkerchief.”
Harry groaned theatrically. “Must we have these touching—”
“And then—yes, she did say a funny thing. She said, ‘I’m not an armed destroyer.’ Something like that. ‘I’m not an armed destroyer.’”
Harry sighed. “Armored cruiser,” he said. “You might as well get it right. She might have said that. It often preyed on her mind. It was what her first husband had called her. You may say I didn’t know anything about her, but at least . . .” He trailed off, aware of a change in the atmosphere of the room.
Klausen sat back, took off his glasses. “As simple as that,” he said. “A sensitive woman who did not want to be thought of as an armored cruiser.”
“My dear Klausen.” Vincent shuffled papers on his desk. “My dear Klausen, you’ll see if you look at your notes that we covered that possibility right at the beginning. We’re not complete fools. The police called on Gerald Mortenhoe early this morning and left instructions that they were to be contacted at once, should his ex-wife turn up.”
“Would he have obeyed these instructions? Would any man in his position?”
“He’s a responsible citizen. I’m sure the police explained the situation to him.”
“But you have to admit that his loyalties would be, to say the least, divided?”
Vincent patiently put away his press cuttings and, in the manner of someone humoring an extremely wayward child, got in touch once again with the Air Transport Controller.
•
Lunch was long over. She wondered if Gerald had noticed how she had eaten nothing. She’d felt that to eat would have been . . . unsuitable. Since then they had sat on, the three of them, in the sun, saying less and less. They made her feel safe. She remembered Gerald’s strength, had resisted it before, could have resisted it again. It came from being of a piece. But she, unready in those days, had resisted him, worn him down, driven him away. She no longer felt ashamed of this, for nothing—not even he—could have hurried her growing.
Roddie’s strength was different. It didn’t need reason, was obstinate in the face of self-disillusionment. It came, she saw, from an intuitive certainty that beyond all the fragmentation there was still the possibility of . . . wholeness. Down the years it would have faltered, and taken wrong turnings, but it had never lost faith in the possibility.
Circuits?
Obviously.
Undeniably.
But also a tiny, triumphant something else.
So she sat, the three of them sat, in the dappled green garden, and her mind that had been running away with her faster and faster, from way back, slowed, and examined each individual necessity. She experienced herself. She was one. She was as old as the soil beneath the grass beneath her feet. She was home. She could have gone on living forever—one breath after another was all that was needed—but it seemed much more reasonable, and gentle, and wise, to die.
•
I suppose I had imagined—pace the public misapprehension—that just because I was blind my hearing would have become immediately one hundred percent better. It wasn’t so. No sooner had I decided tactfully not to mention the first faint approaching helicopter’s clatter than Gerald mentioned it for me.
“It doesn’t matter now,” he said. “They’re wasting their time. Thank God.”
Today, looking back on that sudden cold moment of loss, I have to admit that what I felt, more than anything else, was mere self-concerned regret. Regret that I hadn’t known, hadn’t sensed some diminishment in the world. Sadness too, that Katherine hadn’t included me, my presence, in her going.
Simply because there’d been less and less to say, we’d been saying less and less. But there should have been a contact, something more than just a mere cessation, that I in my closeness, in my blind closeness, could have known. An event between us. An importance.
As if there hadn’t been enough events and importances.
But I admit that I felt devalued, and I stood up, knocking over something, a table, something that had been awkwardly placed for a blind man. My eyes wept coldly down my cheeks. I ran across the grass towards the approaching, ear-beating clatter. And stopped. Why the hurry? I had nowhere to go to. She was dead, and I wanted to have experienced it.
Lordy, lordy . . . what if I had? She’d been tired. Nothing to make a song and dance about.
Gerald came after me only slowly. He didn’t snatch or pull. “They’ll touch down in the playing field beyond the hedge,” he said. “It’ll be some minutes before they get here.”
I had a sudden, precisely imagined picture from the helicopter now low over the trees. The house with its red roof and blue paint-work, turquoise really; the lawn behind its woven fence, shadowed with foreshortened trees; us two men, staring up; near us Kate, Katie-Mo, Kathie, Kath, Katherine . . .
“She’s all right?” I asked, wishing instantly that I hadn’t.
He caught my meaning at once. “Tired,” he said. “Dead. Nothing more.”
Why the hell had I thought it mattered? Hadn’t I seen puke and shit and piss, and loved her? He led me back across the lawn and let me help him pick up the table I had spilled. Groping around on the grass, I found bowls and cutlery. I set them on the table, carefully, the right way up. Then we sat down to wait.
I don’t know what he was waiting for. As for me, in all the shouting and anger and confusion that followed, I was listening for just one voice. I heard Vincent, and the doctor too late now to do any fatuous doctoring. Both of them were to avoid me: Vincent I would get word from later, through NTV’s solicitors; Dr. Mason, for his own understandable reasons, never. I heard some cameraman, worrying about the light. Then I heard Tracey. She was very close to me, and spoke softly.
“You’ve come back,” she said.
I hadn’t of course. Such things aren’t that easy. But I’d made a decent start. I was on my way.