The Course of the Heart (10 page)

* * *

For Yaxley, everything had to be clouded, discerned with difficulty, operated at several removes. Even the simplest journey was only the superficial evidence—the diagram—of another, more difficult one. I had seen this clearly, even at Cambridge. It was not so much a belief or a method as a tendency, an intuition about the world. All along he had been trying to pass it on to us. Had he abandoned Pam and Lucas because they learned it too quickly and superficially? I was less in Soho that afternoon, I guessed, than in some scene of instruction, some teaching space of his. Later I would be able to understand the feeling that all of it had been mimed for my benefit. I would recognize St. Anne’s church, the signboard of the King of Corsica, the front door of 68 Dean Street, a few feathery strips of paper, as the furniture of an initiation. For now I could only sit looking furiously at the torn-up serviette while he left the restaurant, crossed the junction and hid himself in the side doorway of the Nellie Dean. The pub parrot ran nimbly to and fro in its cage above him. The sun broke through.

When Lawson finished his lunch a few minutes later and went off east along Carlisle Street, Yaxley allowed him fifteen yards’ start then slipped after him. I followed them in my turn, through Soho Square and into Sutton Row. It was a useless gesture. They were still ahead of me as I went past the dustbins outside the Society of Our Lady of Lourdes, but by the time I had emerged at the top end of Charing Cross Road they were nowhere to be seen. I wandered about in the shadow of Centrepoint, thinking of Pam and Lucas, and didn’t come back to myself until I saw the tower of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, with its eight white pillars and white spire, against a very blue spring sky. Four in the afternoon. The clock was a minute or two fast. I had been walking in aimless overlapping loops, like a fly on a television screen. “Ordinary destinations,” I remembered Yaxley telling us at Cambridge, “are unearned.” Around me, people were hurrying northwards into the wind, faces set for an hour’s commuting home. Even though the traffic was light they still looked suspiciously up and down the street before they crossed.

By then I was married, too.

My wife’s name was Katherine. She owned a house which backed on to the canal where it runs between Camden High Street and Regent’s Park.

An overgrown garden, with terracotta pots and little figurines, sloped down to the cut: from the upper windows you could look down across it to the surface of the water, green and gold, as solid in some lights as a polished floor, shadowed by trees in the summer, strewn with leaves in the autumn. That was some years before they cleaned up the locks, extended the markets and brought Disneyland to North London in the shape of TV-AM. I had often teased her when I first moved in:

“I can’t tell you and your house apart.”

“Touch me here, then.”

Her parents were dead, but remained embedded in the stories she told, like a fossil record in stone. A fortnight after their marriage, her mother had driven a milk float into a ditch. It was a manifesto, or tremor of intent. Later, sleepless in a Cambridge hotel, her father heard knocking late at night behind a bricked-up door. “That whole family were psychic” In some way the house still belonged to them. I loved its high, elegantly proportioned windows and polished wooden floors. Every room was full of light, which she encouraged inside—like someone encouraging a shy cat—with white walls, pale eggshell colors.

“Now touch me here.”

She would take my hand, lead me from room to room, and, pretend that by touching a cushion, a picture in its frame, the stem of a silk rose woven between the spokes of a dining chair, I was arousing her.

So we exhausted ourselves, dissolving into one another and then further, into a reflection from the bookcases in the lamplight, the smell of a perfume called Anaïs Anaïs. I dreamed of the fold of a velvet curtain, the inside of a cup, the long white curve of her back as she knelt in front of me. A bird sang confusedly in the middle of the night. Everything ran together. On my way downstairs to collect the post the next morning, I would stand still suddenly and say “Katherine” to myself, just to feel that quick lurch of excitement, like something alive inside, you get when you know that in the next instant you are going to be happy.

“What do you want me to do?” I had asked Yaxley at the Pizza Express.

When his instructions arrived a week later they were scrawled, along with a telephone number, on the back of a postcard. He had sent it from Kensal Rise. Some other project was occupying his time there, but the card, which depicted a street in Meudon in 1928, offered no clue to what it might be.

I rang the number and said: “I can’t drive.”

“Find someone who can then,” Yaxley said, and put the phone down.

I rang him again. “Be reasonable, Yaxley.” There was a kind of scraping noise on the line. “I’ll send someone,” he said.

He sent David.

* * *

David, a tall lad perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three years old, who wore jeans and a donkey jacket over faded T-shirts and frayed pullovers, lived with his mother in Peckham. He had worked only once or twice since he left school. His face was thin, already muscular about the mouth from the effort of suppressing some internal tension. His eyes, though, remained clear and childish, and he had a habit of staring at you after he had spoken, as if anticipating some response you could never make. He knew you could never make it, never guess what he wanted. Disconcerted, you stared back.

When I asked him what he did with his time, he said, “Oh, read a lot mostly.”

He enjoyed science fiction, of which he had gathered quite a large collection; or books about concentration camps bought from the non-fiction shelves of W. H. Smith’s. He had read Primo Levi, but preferred Wieslaw Kielar. Growing up on this stuff in his mother’s one-bedroom flat—the third of four in a gloomy Victorian house with gabled upper stories—he had failed to notice the gas water-heater above the bath, the loose floorboards, the doorframes which changed shape every summer as the London clay dried out. His mother, who tended to doze off during
News at Ten
or earlier, had the bedroom. This left David to sleep on the convertible sofa in the lounge; more often than not he kept the television buzzing instead and drank Harp lager out of a tin in the wavering half-light.

Two young Asian women lived on the floor below. One of them was a paranoid schizophrenic on community release, who often shouted and screamed deep in the night.

“Get that filth out of here!” David would hear her call suddenly after a long silence.

“The People next door,” he told me, “had to get rid of their dogs. They used to join in when she started. They’d howl until it got light.” She wasn’t too bad at the moment, he believed, because he played his stereo loudly during the day. “That keeps her awake, so she sleeps more at night.” He was solicitous about her, despite the trouble she caused. “We keep an eye on her when we can,” he said. “Her friend has to go out to work.”

The flat above was empty. In that lay much of David’s usefulness to Yaxley and Lawson. Sometimes I can still smell the fire that ended all this, and hear the crash of air brakes as the fire-engines sawed back and forth across the street. Eventually they blocked their own access. You could read by the blue lights. David ran aimlessly about until he was exhausted. Because I was careful never to go into his relationship with those two, I have no idea what he owed them. As for his mother, they didn’t even know her, although Lawson—who believed in what he called “family values”—once said:

“God knows what she cooks all day down there. It smells like somebody’s bad breath.”

* * *

That was typical of the way Lawson spoke. If you rendered his pronunciation of “car park” as “caw pawk”, you would be close but not quite there. The initials BMW weren’t short enough for him—he was always comparing his “BM” with someone else’s “Jag”. He said “on the drip” to mean hire purchase. Sensitized to his voice by half an hour in the Pizza Express, I heard it, or thought I did, every lunchtime thereafter. A glimpse of his shoulders and the back of his neck, two or three places in front of me on the escalators at Tottenham Court Road underground, the sight of a suit I thought was his, in a crowd trying to cross Oxford Street opposite Marks & Spencer’s, would be enough to send me hurrying in another direction. He always seemed to be eating something. Once, in the restaurant at Smith’s Gallery in Covent Garden, he actually spoke to me.

I came in from Neal Street, hung my coat on the rack by the bar, and realized he was sitting with his back to me at one of the tables near the bottom of the steps, less than ten feet away.

Like David, Lawson was never more than a victim: even so, he had appalling energy. Perhaps in the end this is what attracted Yaxley to him. He was never still. Some barely contained greed caused him to rock about in his seat as he ate, touch his hair and face with his hands, move the chair next to his, move it back to its original position. He called for pepper: let the waiter go: immediately called him back for more.

“Most people want to be pastry,” I heard him say to the woman he was with. “Don’t you think?” Instead of answering, she looked up and saw me standing there helplessly.

“Do I recognize you?” Lawson said loudly, turning to face me. I shook my head.

“Well then can I do anything for you?”

“I—”

“It’s just that when I catch people staring at me like that, I wonder if I can do something for them,” he said. “But if I can’t—”

As I walked away he was leaning across the table to whisper something to his companion—or at any rate to thrust his face into hers—and laugh.

“Because if I can’t do anything for you,” he called after me, “perhaps you could stare at somebody else.”

Smith’s was full of people from design agencies, brand new PR firms. I felt them watching amusedly as I followed the waitress between the pillars, through the heat and buzz and the smell of food. I had been expecting to meet a friend of mine who worked in the academic division of Allen & Unwin. I sat down and stared hard at the tablecloth, then the menu; the pictures on the walls.

Lawson’s voice was clearly audible from across the room. “Ba-luddy caw pawk attendants,” I heard him say. “Ba-luddy little Stalinists!” It was easy to imagine him, still implacable with greed, following his “daughter” home every afternoon in the rain. How accurate, how sustainable, was the facsimile? Perhaps, when Yaxley’s attention was elsewhere, it ran like watercolor, grew blurred and unsatisfying, failed to nourish. And did the real daughter feel any of this, staring out of a stockbroker-Georgian window across the darkening Wirral at the end of the school week? Waiting to hear the low-profile tires of the BMW crackle up the gravel drive, she would be sticking pictures of ponies and Barbour jackets into a book. “Term is over. Today the holidays begin.” Did she feel her danger?

When the waitress asked me, “What would you like with that, sir?” I realized that I couldn’t remember what I’d ordered.

* * *

That afternoon I rang Yaxley.

“Oughtn’t we to move soon?” I suggested. “He saw me. He may have recognized me from the Pizza Express.”

But although Yaxley had finished his business in Kensal Rise, he still seemed indecisive. The instant he picked up the phone I had received a clear impression of him, sitting in his room above the Atlantis Bookshop, staring straight ahead of himself while the clock of St. George’s Bloomsbury struck twenty-one and the light fell across his furniture like a kind of yellow varnish that would never set.

“Yaxley?”

I wanted him to succeed with Lawson. By now I was frightened of what might happen if he didn’t.

“Don’t bother me now,” he said vaguely.

Thirty or forty seconds passed. He still had the phone to his ear.

“Yaxley? Hello?”

* * *

David owned an old Hillman Avenger. It was a fawn color, patched with maroon where he had sanded and primed it for re-spraying. Inside, it smelled of oil, Halford’s air-freshener and foreign food, like a Peckham minicab. His mother, as undeterred by this as by its scabbed chrome and deteriorating wheel-arches, redeemed it every week with a new soft toy. She bought him a sticker which warned, “You toucha my car, I smasha your face.” On Saturdays in the summer they Blu-Tacked a crocheted blanket to the inside of the glass to keep the sun off the back seat, and David drove her slowly round the Rye into Dulwich Village, so that she could enjoy the posh houses with their oriel windows and hundred-year-old trees. David was her youngest child. He had arrived late and learned slowly. Prone, especially after his father died, to obsessions and enthusiasms—model fighter aircraft, weekly encyclopedias of military history, anything you could collect or assemble—he had puzzled her by becoming self-contained. “Very much his own person,” she told people. “Not like the other three.” That innocent obsessiveness lay curled inside him, waiting until Yaxley—surfacing from dreams of the Pleroma to take a few long ragged breaths—eventually found a use for it. Three days after I had run into Lawson, David arrived at my office, where he undid his coat nervously, gawping like a tourist at the rows of books.

* * *

“I’m ready if you are,” he said. “Where we going?”

Yaxley had told him nothing.

“It’s half past three,” I complained. “I haven’t finished work.”

He sat down. “I can give you another ten minutes or so,” he offered, “but I’d prefer to be there before it gets dark.” The car had developed an electrical fault: once he turned its headlights on, we wouldn’t be able to stop. “Electrics can be complicated.” Parking had been a problem, too. “I’ve left it over in Poland Street.”

He thought for a moment. “It’s probably not what you’re used to.”

“We’ll go up the M1,” I said.

On the motorway he turned out to be an impatient driver, pushing aggressively through the Friday afternoon traffic with the speedometer up against the stop, where he kept it until near Luton all three lanes began to back up.

“Nice to be out, anyway,” he said.