Sometimes the three of us would go down to Tunbridge in the Volvo after Sunday lunch, to walk on the downs; increasingly, though, Katherine preferred to drive herself, and meet us later. On a sunny Sunday, Coulsdon hemorrhages its BMWs and Jaguars into the surrounding tissues of Redhill, Reigate and Dorking, which flush and bruise suddenly under the strain. She hated to be in queues. One afternoon, following her at a leisurely pace down the M23 just south of Salfords, Kit and I found lines of stationary traffic winking in the sun. All three lanes were jammed solid. A police Land Rover, a small ambulance and a rescue vehicle raced down the hard shoulder. Every so often a kind of peristalsis shuddered through the lines of cars, a ten or twenty-yard gap which opened and closed to give each driver the illusion of movement. A quarter of an hour later we were still inching our way towards the accident. Up ahead we could see a tall black plume of smoke, its base somewhere near Outwood or Wasp Green; and once or twice we got a confused glimpse of flames through a hedge.
“There’s a church near it!” cried Kit, craning her neck out of the open window. “I can’t see anything else!”
“Why would they be burning a church, Kit?”
“They’re a funny lot in Wasp Green.”
But when we finally crawled past the base of the column, we found that a small black car had left the motorway and gone through the hedge into the churchyard, where it had shed its bonnet and one door then fireballed itself among the gravestones. A disgusting smell blew in through the windows and Kit threw up suddenly across the back seat. I stopped the car and shut her in it. She had begun to scream and kick. I walked back up the hard shoulder and said to the first policeman I saw, “Does anyone know what make of car it is?” They weren’t sure, but I was. The goddess gives, the goddess takes away.
A few weeks later, clearing up Katherine’s papers, I came upon some letters, addressed to her from the Chelsea Arts Club, sympathizing with her feelings of being “stifled” by marriage and speaking of “our long sexy afternoons together”. They were about ten years old. I didn’t recognize the man’s name. Kit and I drew apart in the following years. After she left home I couldn’t seem to be bothered with the house, so I sold it. Bereavement numbed my hyperesthesia. Then a year or two ago, for a few minutes one afternoon in May, it returned:
I had been sorting books all day. I still have a lot, some of which I have owned since Cambridge. They look their age now, browned by the tobacco smoke, gas fumes and evaporated cooking oil of the places I have lived in since things fell apart. By the shelf load they have a faint smell of dust. It is a cured odor, as if my way of life had been designed to preserve them by bringing about organic and chemical changes, in one-roomed flats like a chain of smokehouses across London. I was thinking about that, and looking through an old paperback copy of War in Heaven, when up from it came a smell like corn flour, or even vanilla, so strong I thought a door had opened and someone I once knew had come in. It was the smell of the individual book—not dust, not decay, but corn flour and vanilla, some transformation of the glues and inks and paper: corn flour, vanilla, then hawthorn blossom like a drug!
I sat there on the floor and burst into tears:
It will soon be fifteen years since Katherine died. Kit has moved to New York, from where she sends me letters I don’t understand, about politics and AIDS. Pam and Lucas walked away from me somehow, that scented, dew-soaked morning in Cambridge. I remember them all with such happiness.
The Course of the Heart Page 22
