conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a description for a book titled The continuous Katherine Mortenhoe about Arrow with the genre: Science Fiction & Fantasy
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: 1st Arrow 1975 edition paperback vg to vg+ book In stock shipped from our UK warehouse
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first five paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The continuous Katherine Mortenhoe
  A reporter picked them up almost immediately, and then two more. She kept walking. Harry, puffing but enjoying himself, gave them an interview on the move. He'd miss all this media chat, she thought, when the NTV exclusive took over at four.
  Outside the dress shop, statutorily, they left the reporters, Harry in mid-sentence. Katherine sat him firmly down on a spindly gold chair while she went around gathering armfuls of summery clothes from the racks. Then she kissed him lightly on the forehead and patted his arm good-bye. He looked up, pleased, remembering their morning. She whisked away to one of the trying-on cubicles.
  She hovered at the back of a tall showcase, then looked cautiously around its end. Harry was no Mr. Mathiesson. He was where she had left him, dutifully, his legs crossed, jiggling his top foot and watching it. He would stay there for a long tune. Half an hour. Longer even. He was patient. And endearingly trying to be smart, legs casually crossed, showing a lot of sock. She evaded an approaching assistant and quietly made her way out of the shop by another entrance. No other good-bye was possible. Or desirable.
  She hailed a taxi, climbed in, and asked to be taken to a residential block a few minutes' walk from the heliport. No doubt Vincent would eventually trace her as far as the heliport, but she saw no reason to make things easy for him. She sat back in the taxi, and relaxed, and watched the people and cars stream by. And was suddenly committed.
  The taxi driver took her to the nearest phone booth, and then on. Peter lived, she discovered, in a block very like her own, in a flat very like her own. Only the furnishings were different, sitting uneasily, impertinently, against the familiar walls. It seemed that Peter had been in bed when she rang. This shocked her: in bed, wasting the day, at nearly noon. But he belted his dressing gown and asked her in, and made her unquestioningly welcome.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: another paragraph
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: She looked at him, and left it. She smiled and shrugged, but the rejection hurt and he must have known it did.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: 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.
  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...
  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.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: 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.
  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...
  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.