Today events pooled, blurred and showed only part of their pattern. Meanings overlapped and contradicted themselves. I was meeting the solicitor to execute my mother's will. I drove down my mother's road, to my mother's house. No one, least of all she, could ever have imagined how that might feel. Then I drove back across the sunlit afternoon, along the same route I must have driven fifty times with and without the children - when my father and mother were both alive. Each recognisable bend of road, each crest of hill, each roadside copse or house appeared strangely transformed - rinsed of the associations they once held. At dusk, I sat in my garden at home and looked at the pear tree and remembered, trying to discern colours and outlines. |