The Course of the Heart (11 page)

“Nothing wrong with this engine,” he boasted. “As long as you stay on top of it.”

Then:

“Look at him. No, him, him over there! Is he a wanker, or what? Three liters, fuel injection, antilock brakes. What’s he doing? Fifty miles an hour.

“Fifty fucking miles an hour!”

When there was no one to overtake he became restless, switching the radio on and off, opening and closing the ventilators. He had a trick of swapping his left foot to the accelerator pedal, tucking his right foot up between the seat and the door. He could do this with hardly a blip in the engine revs; although sometimes while his attention was diverted the car itself lurched disconcertingly through the slipstream of a sixteen-wheeler. Spray shattered the light on the windscreen, blowing in all directions through a haze of sunshine and exhaust smoke. We watched two crows flopping heavily away from the hard shoulder, reluctant to leave something they had been eating there.

“I used to drive a van,” he volunteered suddenly. “Rented van, for a firm of builders. We took it back to the rental place and said, ‘It’s overheating if you do a hundred for any length of time.’” He chuckled.

“The bloke said, ‘A van like this won’t do a hundred.’ Fuck that, mate!” He looked sideways at me to see if I believed him. “I had that job a month.”

“Why don’t we try the A5 for a few miles, then join the M6 near Rugby?”

“Why not.”

As we turned off the motorway, a Ford Sierra station wagon, logy with children, spare bedding and pushchairs, wallowed past us in the middle lane.

“Can you believe that?”

By the time we got to Cheshire, he had worn himself out. “I could do with a cup of tea.” He put his feet up on the dashboard, rubbed his eyes, stared emptily out across the Little Chef car park at a strip of bleak grass rising to newly planted trees, where, in the gathering twilight, some children were running around the base of a pink fiberglass dragon fifteen feet high. “Who would build a thing like that for kids?” he asked me, wriggling about behind the wheel until he could get one arm into his donkey jacket and pull it awkwardly over his shoulders. He looked genuinely puzzled. “Who would want their kids playing in that?”

“Stay here,” I told him. “I’ll fetch you the tea.”

“Fucking hell.”

The Little Chef franchise includes a carpet with a repeating pattern of swastikas, each arm of the symbol a tiny chef who smiles all day while he holds up a dish. Inside, three sales reps were eating cheeseburgers, fries, a garnish of lettuce shiny with fat. Every so often one of them would read out a paragraph from
Today;
the other would laugh. I found Lawson’s daughter waiting quietly in the No Smoking section. “Be certain it’s her,” Yaxley had warned me, as if he expected his substitution to be trumped before he could make it. When she saw me comparing her to the Polaroid, she pretended to be looking out of the window, from which, if she moved her head slightly, she could see the parked cars; the line of the Derbyshire hills a long way in the distance south and east; and against them the fiberglass dragon with its slack, Disney Studio jaw signifying helpless good humor. She had on the identical pleated skirt, with a white blouse; but her hair was in a plait. Close to, she smelled of Wright’s soap.

“Your father sent me to fetch you,” I said. Yaxley had schooled me: “Be certain to say that first. ‘Your father sent me.’” A waitress arrived at the table. I ordered a pot of coffee and sat down while she brought it. Then I added—because what else could I say?—“He’s looking forward to seeing you.”

David came to the door to find out if his tea was ready. “For God’s sake!” I called. “I’m bringing it!” He ducked away, and I saw him walking quickly back to the car, his shoulders hunched under the leatherette yoke of the donkey jacket. I got Lawson’s daughter and her things together and went up to pay.

“Everythink all right for you, sir?” asked the woman at the cash desk.

“Yes thanks,” I said.

“Want anythink else?”

I could see her looking worriedly at the girl.

“No thanks,” I said.

The M6 was deserted. From the moment David launched us down the access ramp into a rushing darkness broken only by the occasional oncoming light, someone else’s will clung round us like the smell of the car. Despite our speed we were in a kind of glue. David wouldn’t speak to me. If Lawson’s daughter had isolated me from him, what I knew about her seemed to detach all three of us from our common humanity. “The sacrifice,” Yaxley had taught me at Cambridge, “has its own powers.” She made herself comfortable in the back, and sat so quietly at first that after a few minutes I asked:

“Are you all right?”

“I quite like this gray fur,” she said, touching the seat covers. “It’s soft as a cat.”

Then: “I’m not often car sick.”

“Are you warm enough?”

“The last time we went on a motorway with Daddy, there were three dead cats,” she said suddenly.

“When we got home we found our own cat had been hurt by a lawnmower and had all the flesh stripped off one front leg. You could see all the lines under the skin. You never know whether it’s bones or tendons, or what, do you? He kept pawing us and howling, there was blood all over the kitchen top. Mummy was funny after that. Every time she saw something in the hedge or in the gutter, she made us stop the car.”

She laughed.

“‘Is that a dead bird?’” she mimicked.

“‘Is that somebody’s walking stick, or just a broken umbrella?’”

Unnerved perhaps, David began to talk too—

He had seen the most brilliant film when he was small. “
Flying Tigers
, fucking amazing!”

He was reading a book about the Auschwitz museum.

“In Birkenau,” he said, “they cut the hair off the women prisoners before they gassed them. It was sold to manufactures for mattress stuffing. Can you believe that?”

I admitted I could. He added:

“But the worst thing is, tell me if I’m wrong, some of those mattresses could still be on beds. Couldn’t they?”

He was worried about his mother.

“She’s due to go into the Maudsley for a couple of days soon.” It turned out that she had some kind of bone disease. A broken wrist had failed to heal after two months in plaster, and would have to be pinned. “It always happens to someone else, doesn’t it? Cancer, air crashes, drink-driving, it’s never you it happens to.”

He stared ahead for a moment.

“It always happens to someone else.”

He meant to be ironic, but only wound up sounding wistful. “Look!”

Our shadows had been thrown on to an enormous exit sign by the headlights of the car behind. Briefly we became monumental and cinematic—yet somehow as domestic as the silhouettes of a married couple caught watching TV in their front room—then the journey resumed itself as a series of long, gluey moments lurching disconnectedly one into the next until we reached the outskirts of London, where the traffic, inching along under a thick orange light, filled the steep cuttings with exhaust smoke. Two men fought on the pavement outside the Odeon cinema, Holloway. Lawson’s daughter had gone to sleep, her face vacant, her head resting loosely against the window, where every movement of the car made it slide about uncomfortably. She didn’t seem to notice when I reached back and tucked a folded pullover under it. Later—or it might have been in the same moment—I looked up and thought I saw roses blooming in a garden on top of the Polytechnic of North London. Between the lawns were broad formal beds of “ballerinas” grafted on to standard stock, with lilies planted between them. Dog-rose and guelder spilled faint pink and thick cream over old brick walls and paths velvety with bright green moss. White climbing roses weighed down the apple trees. Two or three willows streamed, like yellow hair in strong winter sunshine, over the parapets of the building; briars hung there in a tangle. A white leopard was couched among the roses. It was four times the size it would have been in life, and its tail whipped to and fro like a domestic cat’s. Other buildings had put forth great suffocating masses of flowers; other animals were at rest there or pacing cagily about among the service gantries and central heating machinery—baboons, huge birds, a snake turning slowly on itself. “The Rose of Earth is the Lily of Heaven.” The scent of attar was so strong and heavy it filled the street below: through it like flashes of light through a veil came the piercing human smells of fried food, beer, petrol.

David braked suddenly.

“Jesus!” he said.

The back of a refrigerated truck filled the windscreen, TRASFIGURANTE painted across it in huge white letters. I jumped out of the car in the middle of the road and shouted back through the open door, into the heat and smell and David’s surprised white face:

“I’ll walk home from here.”

“What?”

I slammed the door. “I’ll walk.”

* * *

That night at home I had a nightmare about hiding from people. I was rushing about trying to keep trees, buildings, cars, anything between me and them. I heard a voice say, “The double paradox. Life is not death, and neither is death,” and woke up to an empty bedroom. It was three o’clock, pitch dark. A rhythmical thudding, with the muffled but determined quality of someone banging nails into a cellar wall or knocking on a heavy door two or three houses further down the street, had carried over from the dream. When it failed to diminish I got up unsteadily. The bedroom door was open, the stairwell dark.

“Katherine?”

Pounding, as distant as before.

“Katherine? Are you there? Are you all right?”

I went from room to room looking for her. All the internal doors were open. Orange street light had established itself everywhere, lodging within the mirrors, slicking along each mantelpiece, discovering something in every room. In the lounge that evening a book,
Painting and the Novel
, had been pulled partly off a shelf—the shadow of its spine fell obliquely across five or six others. In the kitchen, a knife, a breadboard and a loaf of bread lay next to a Braun coffee-grinder like a little white idol. Up in the studio, near the top of the house, something had fallen and broken in the empty grate.

“Katherine?”

She wasn’t there. Outside, St. Mark’s Crescent was full of parked cars; behind the house, the Regent’s Canal lay exhausted and motionless. Though I was naked I felt languorous and comfortable, as if I was surrounded by some warm fluid; I had a partial erection which hardened briefly when it touched the fabric of the living-room curtains. At the same time I was filled with anxiety. Its cause was hidden from me, but like that noise it never stopped.

“Katherine?”

Eventually I went back to bed and found her lying there awake in the dark.

“What’s the matter?” she whispered.

“I—”

“What is it?”

“I thought you’d got up,” I said. “That noise—”

“I can’t hear anything.”

“Didn’t you get up?” I said. And: “There! Listen!”

“I can’t hear anything.”

I had begun to shiver. “I went all round the house,” I said. “I can’t get warm.”

Katherine put her arms round me.

“What have you been doing to get so upset?”

“Listen!”

Some dreams, I know, detach themselves from you only reluctantly, amid residual flickers of light, sensations of entrapment, effects which disperse quite slowly. Everything is trancelike. You wait to understand the world again and, as you wait, fall back into the dream with no more fear. But there was something awful about that thudding noise, its remoteness, its persistence.

“How do you feel?” Katherine asked next morning.

“Oh fine, fine,” I told her.

But I knew that something had been knocking. Something had come into the house.

“I hope you are,” she said.

She was a painter. We had met one night two or three years before, at an exhibition at Goldsmith’s. Somewhat older than me, she had been recovering from an affair I never asked about. At first she was unwilling to commit herself. But soon we couldn’t be away from each other for a day, or even pretend to be: so she woke one morning in her perfect house to find me propped on one elbow, staring down at her with a kind of slow delight, and smiled and said, “I can always feel you near me, even when I’m asleep;” and that was that for both of us. We were married almost immediately. I loved to look at her, in those first few weeks. I would hold her head gently between my hands and stare down into her face and think: She’s
in
there.

“I’m fine.”

* * *

Later that morning I went up to her studio. There, a ghost of the canal-light, reflective and mobile, lived like a quiver at the edge of vision in the matte white ceiling and walls. I don’t know whether she ever noticed it, any more than the smell of the turpentine she kept in a Victorian glass inkwell; but it resides in her paintings too, whatever their subject—the flicker of summer sun off water and green trees.

For Katherine, painting was about space. “You should always sit,” she had told me the first time I visited her, “in the middle of a studio, not along the edges of it.” I wandered about now as I had then, leafing through a shoebox in which she kept small sketches on French watercolor paper—wavering pencil lines and little dabs of paint, clues to her inner life; inspecting the brushes—dull orange, blue and brown—laid out on the varnished floorboards beside her on a sheet of corrugated paper to stop them rolling about; or turning over the tubes of oil paint in their wire basket. Vandyke brown, Indian red, crumpled tubes leaden in the dull light. Their names will always delight me. Oxide of Chromium. Monestial green. Speedball oils from America. I still own the picture she was working on that morning. In it a woman stares out at the viewer. Behind her are some other people, and an unfinished, ghostly background of desks in a school or typing pool.

A kind of hypnotic tranquility always seemed to issue from Katherine as she worked. She had an extraordinary calming effect. You could hear the dab and whisper of the brush on canvas; and behind that, so faint as to be an illusion, the sound of her breathing. It was like watching my mother, ironing in the kitchen on a September evening. I touched the place where the nape of her neck made its soft but powerful transition into the muscles of her freckled upper back. After a moment she turned her face up to me and said, “Kiss me then.”