Vaughan's Pursuit of Catherine is not a single attempted collision but a prolonged sequence of automotive rehearsals in which Robert Vaughan follows Catherine Ballard through the roads around the airport and Western Avenue. Its decisive significance lies in the way Vaughan converts pursuit into a ritual of eroticized violence: Catherine appears to be the object of his desire and attack, yet the narrator eventually understands that she is only a substitute in an elaborate rehearsal for another, more important death. The episode shifts the value of the relationship from guarded domestic intimacy toward an apparently inevitable collision, while the battered cars become records of the pursuit's escalating logic.

Causes and Background

The pursuit develops within Vaughan's established fusion of cars, wounds, sexuality, and death. Before this sequence, his calmest moments came when he described his imagined final crash with a film actress, Robert Vaughan treating the wounds to both bodies with the erotic tenderness of a separated lover. He deliberately used his sexual presence to hold the narrator's attention, while his scarred body preserved the memory of an earlier motorcycle crash that had ended his television career. His public identity had once been built around computerized control of international traffic systems, but his damaged face, missing canine teeth, and hostile appearance now made the body itself a visible archive of impact.

The pursuit also extends Vaughan's characteristic driving performance. In the Lincoln Continental, a ten-year-old vehicle associated in his mind with the limousine in which President Kennedy had died, he alternated between aggression, distraction, sensitivity, clumsiness, absorption, and brutality. The car had lost second gear after a road-race with Seagrave, and Vaughan could hold up traffic at ten miles an hour before suddenly jerking to a halt near a waiting taxi. His driving therefore performed both mastery and helplessness: he seemed to control danger while also parodying the incapacitated driver. When the narrator asked whether Vaughan regarded Kennedy's assassination as a special kind of car-crash, Vaughan replied only that the case could be made, leaving the association deliberately open but unmistakably present.

What Happens

The immediate alarm comes when Vera Seagrave tells the narrator that Vaughan is following his film actress, that the police are pursuing him, and that an American serviceman has been killed on the Northolt overpass. The disclosure establishes that Vaughan's activity is no longer private fantasy. It has entered public space, involved a fatality, and brought police attention, while Vera's statement that she had been with him in the car gives the pursuit a witness who is also implicated in its movement.

Unable to remain in the apartment while this courtship unfolds, the narrator drives to the airport and waits on the roof of the multi-storey car park beside the airfreight building. Vaughan is already waiting for Catherine at the junction of Western Avenue and the flyover. He makes no attempt to hide, instead pushing the heavy Lincoln bluntly into the traffic stream and lying against the door sill as if almost asleep at the wheel. When the lights change, he surges forward; his left hand drums across the steering-wheel rim, and he swerves repeatedly across the road as though reading the road through its tremors.

Vaughan's movement is at once pursuit and imitation. He cuts between lanes, advances in the fast lane until he is level with Catherine, then drops behind her, allowing other cars to intervene before taking up a watchful position in the slow lane. He begins to mimic her driving, including her trim posture and continual braking. Their synchronized brake-lights move down the expressway like a dialogue between a long-married couple, an image that makes the threat more disturbing by giving it the rhythm of domestic familiarity rather than the abruptness of an ordinary attack.

The narrator follows close behind, flashing his headlamps at vehicles that obstruct him. At the flyover ramp, Catherine is forced to slow behind fuel tankers, while Vaughan accelerates and turns left at the junction. The narrator races after him through the roundabouts and intersections beneath the flyover, jumping traffic lights as the airport traffic closes in. Above them, Catherine continues along the open deck, separated from the pursuers by the layered architecture of the road.

Vaughan then cuts through the afternoon traffic with increasingly dangerous precision. He brakes at the last possible moment and rolls the Lincoln onto its off-side wheels while circling the roundabouts at speed. Waiting at a junction for the fuel tankers to pass, he sees Catherine's small sports car appear and surges forward. His car crosses the marker lines on a direct collision course, but he pulls away at the last instant and fades behind her through the traffic. The immediate expectation of impact is therefore reversed: the collision is rehearsed, withheld, and preserved as a future possibility. Vaughan disappears beyond the roundabout on the northward carriageway, leaving the narrator with only a glimpse of his battered front fender and cracked headlamps flashing at a truck-driver.

Half an hour later, in the basement garage of the apartment house, the narrator feels the imprint of Vaughan's car in the body panels of Catherine's sports car. The marks are described as rehearsal-marks of a death, material traces that transform an aborted collision into evidence of an event that has not yet occurred. During the following days, the rehearsals continue. Vaughan follows Catherine around the expressways and airport perimeter roads, waits in the damp cul-de-sac beside the drive, and appears in the high-speed lane of the overpass with his battered car tilted over on its near-side springs.

Escalation and Interpretation

Each appearance allows Vaughan to test a different accident pattern. The narrator watches him waiting at intersections and understands that he is mentally examining head-on collisions, side impacts, rear-end collisions, and roll-overs. The pursuit is thus a form of technical experimentation as well as stalking: Vaughan treats traffic, bodies, road geometry, and vehicle damage as variables in a design. The police cannot catch him even after removing his photographs and equipment from Vera Seagrave's dark-room, suggesting that the pursuit is supported by a broader archive of visual investigation and that its apparent spontaneity conceals method.

The narrator's response changes as the sequence continues. He sometimes stands on the grass verge by the flyover's western descent ramp, knowing that it is Vaughan's favourite zone, and watches him lunge after Catherine in the evening rush hour. Rather than remaining simply horrified, the narrator experiences a growing euphoria and a surrender to an inevitable logic that he had once resisted. He compares his attitude to watching his own daughter begin a love affair, an unsettling transformation that recasts the pursuit as a courtship whose consummation would be death.

Catherine never mentions Vaughan's pursuit. Between Catherine and the narrator, an ironic calm takes shape, resembling the stylized affection they display at parties when either is openly taking another lover. Their relationship therefore absorbs the pursuit without confronting it directly. At this stage the narrator does not understand that Catherine is a stand-in; only later does the structure become clear, and the apparent triangle between Vaughan, Catherine, and the narrator is revealed as a rehearsal for a further death rather than a conventional rivalry over Catherine.

The physical deterioration of the Lincoln records the pursuit's repetition. Its right fender and doors carry deep impact points, forming a rusting fretwork that turns increasingly white, as if a skeleton were showing through the metal. Two rear windows are broken when the narrator waits behind Vaughan in a traffic jam on the Northolt expressway. The vehicle no longer functions merely as transport. It becomes an external body, accumulating wounds as Vaughan repeatedly approaches the collision he both seeks and postpones.

Consequences and Significance

The pursuit changes the narrator's understanding of Vaughan's violence by revealing that Vaughan's apparent targets can be provisional. Catherine is placed in danger, but the danger also serves a larger choreography in which Vaughan practices timing, approach, braking, and impact. The sequence's central reversal is therefore not that Vaughan fails to kill Catherine, but that failure itself is part of the design. The withheld collision intensifies the threat because it converts the road into a space of continuing expectation.

The episode also binds intimacy to technical control. Vaughan's imitation of Catherine's braking makes their cars converse; his lane changes resemble advances and withdrawals; and the narrator's own pursuit turns observation into participation. The road supplies a moving stage on which masculine authority is repeatedly tested through speed, risk, damaged machinery, and the capacity to force other vehicles aside. Yet Vaughan's mastery is inseparable from disfigurement: the driver who once promoted computerized traffic control now carries a scarred face and a progressively ruined car, while treating accident patterns as erotic possibilities.

The final significance of Vaughan's Pursuit of Catherine emerges retrospectively through the narrator's later recognition that Vaughan cannot simply die in a car-crash. Vaughan's identity survives, in the narrator's imagination, through twisted radiator grilles and cascading windshield glass, as though wreckage were a medium of rebirth. His pursuit of Catherine consequently anticipates the final crash rather than resolving itself in her death. It prepares the story's larger premise: when desire is organized around impact, repetition does not reduce violence but gives it ritual form, allowing an intended death to approach through a series of increasingly intimate rehearsals.