That afternoon they spent mainly in John Lewis (an hour among the lamps, two among the linens), and it was dark—in spite of Sunday’s shift to summer time—when Philippa dropped her in Packington Street. ‘See you nice and early tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We haven’t even started on the living room yet.’ Kate waved at the parting Peugeot and unlocked the door. We haven’t even started on the living room yet… There was something depressing about those words. How much stuff was there in a house? And in every house. To imagine the same mass of stuff they had just spent the day so expensively and systematically marshalling in every house in London, in England, in Europe, in the world… It made her feel queasy and depressed.
On Wednesday morning it was suddenly all too much. She had just parked the Peugeot in the John Lewis lot—they were there again, with much to do—when she found herself in tears.
‘Darling?’ Philippa said. ‘What is it?’ Philippa was not at her most assured in these situations. She put out a hand. ‘What is it?’
Katherine shook her head.
She had shed a few tears the previous night when, having let herself into the flat, she opened her mail. Among various other mailshots were two appeals for money. (Her small portfolio of monthly direct debits—a sponsored orphan in Sri Lanka, the RSPB, Shelter—meant that she was flooded with further appeals. The hungry, the persecuted, the terminally ill—every day she hurried them into the plastic tub on the kitchen floor.) One was something to do with polar bears, whose unique and pathetic plight was well known. The other, orang-utans. They were shamelessly sentimental. The polar-bear one featured a picture of a sad-looking mother and her young. The other was about an orang-utan orphaned at only a few months old—and thus presumably doomed—in some sort of logging incident. They tried to make the point, those well-meaning flyers, that while things were terrible, they were not yet hopeless. Weren’t they though? They seemed hopeless to her as she stood next to the table in the living room, shedding her few surprising tears. What was the point of even pretending? The straight line that led from how she had just spent the day to what was happening in the Arctic, in the Indonesian jungle—what was left of it—was too obvious to overlook, whether she wanted to or not. And it was equally obvious which was the stronger force, the stronger by many orders of magnitude—those sentimental leaflets or the force they were up against. Her. Katherine Persson. She was the stronger force, and there was simply no way it was going to be stopped.
She filled in the forms and set up two new direct debits—a total of £10 a month. And just that day she and her mother had added a thousand times that to the strong force. (And what was that, if not a mammalian mother single-mindedly providing for her young? The house in West Kensington, with its hundred and ten per cent mortgage, its wealthy tenants, was intended as a sort of trust fund for Katherine and Marc.) Yes, it was hopeless. Nevertheless, she went to the pillar box on Essex Road and posted the forms. She did not do it thinking it would make a difference. It was just her way of saying that she knew what she was doing, she understood, she felt terrible. But she wouldn’t stop doing it. She just didn’t want to enough.
Setting off the very next morning to add another £10,000 to the strong force was, however, too much. As she switched off the engine, she lowered her head. Tears fell onto the steering wheel.
‘Darling?’ Philippa said. ‘What is it?’
And of course it wasn’t just the poor, puzzled species being steadily shunted into oblivion, being shunted out of existence without ever understanding what was happening or why. (And they would do the same to us. We were just doing what any animal would.) It wasn’t just the hopelessness of that situation. That was there all the time. It was a much more personal hopelessness, of which that was nothing more than an echo. The love was dead. It was dead. She did not love him any more. The terrible thing was she did not love him any more.
*
It was still those memories. The hotel that week in October. The tambour of her heart. The flat in Battersea that first night. The lift in the morning—‘I’m in love with you.’ The experience had acquired a definitive quality. It had turned into a definition of what love was. She had thought, that October—Yes, this is what people mean when they talk about love. She had previously been in love once or twice. Fraser was not the first. And those experiences were not nothing. They were still important to her. In some significant way, though, they were lesser. With them, she had not felt with the same heart-walloping surety that this was what people meant when they talked about love. There were moments there which seemed qualitatively different from everything else in her life. They would be the moments she thought of at the end. They would be the things she thought of at the end of her life. In a sense, they were her life. Specific moments, mostly from that first week, or the first few weeks, or the first few months. When she tried to write them down, however, they had none of their force. Writing them down, trying to transcribe them, made them seem mundane, normal. Nothing special. She stopped trying. What was the point anyway? Only that she wrote down everything else, so it seemed strange that the most important, the most significant things were not there.
It was still those memories. It seemed impossible that any other man would ever be able to lessen their importance. Even if she were to have a similar experience with someone else in the future, which was not impossible, what it would lack would be the feeling that it was unique, that it was the final word. It would be hard to have that kind of faith in any feeling in the future. When she said, ‘The love is dead,’ she had a terrible sense that what she was in fact saying was, ‘For me, love is dead.’ She wondered whether her experience of this was unusual, or whether it had just happened to her unusually late in life. (She had started sleeping with men unusually late in life, after all, not until she was twenty.) Did most people have an experience like this, she wondered, when they were much younger—in their early twenties, even in their teens?
Those memories.
She was unable to escape the sense that the most intense love of her life was now in the past. The love was in the past. The love itself was in the past—she no longer felt it, not even in a lesser, hugely watered-down form. She no longer felt it. It no longer existed. In Edinburgh she had wondered why she had once loved Fraser. It didn’t even seem to make sense any more.
The love is dead…
For me, love is dead…
She had perhaps known, the whole time she thought she wanted to stop loving Fraser, that this was the situation she would find herself in if she ever did. It seemed she had staked everything on him, and now she had nothing left for anyone else. Perhaps that was why she never truly did want to stop loving Fraser. And it had been easy—it had been easy not to stop loving him—when he wasn’t there. She thought of the words of that poem—
In the mind ever burning;
Never sick, never old, never dead,
From itself never turning…
Yes, something like that. Except it does have to turn from itself when its object finally is sitting there with sad eyes in a silly polo neck that misguidedly flaunts his paunch…
Thoughts like that tended to make her question everything. Tended to undermine the very idea of things. That was indeed the whole problem perhaps.
More words, more poetry—Never such innocence again…