The Course of the Heart (15 page)

* * *

The quarry stood bleached and empty in the sun. Heat clanged soundlessly from its walls until the air began to shiver and dance. I slept with my hands behind my head in a hollow between some boulders, dreaming vaguely. People parked their cars without ever knowing I was there, and went away again without my ever knowing they had been.

One afternoon I woke with a sense of confusion I couldn’t attribute directly, to a change in the light, for instance, or the sound from the baling machine which had been chugging to and fro all day in the fields above the headland, leaving a brown stain of exhaust smoke in the clear air. I lifted myself on one elbow and saw the blind woman hobbling round the quarry with her dog; or standing still, rather—as if something had caught her attention in the middle of her walk—and staring up at the spongy green pillows of moss, her head tilted to one side. A light wind animated the willow branches and rustled stealthily along the rose terraces; it stirred the dust round the woman’s feet in their square ungainly shoes. She smiled. The man in the car called out to her. Still smiling, she went back to get him into his wheelchair. I watched them for a few minutes then dozed off again, closing my eyes on an image of the wheelchair parked by the pool beneath the wall, so that drops from the waterfall spattered man, woman and dog as they looked up.

When I woke next it was to a coarse and screaming cry like a herring gull’s. Filled with panic, surfacing from dreams in which great masses moved against one another in a confused space, I could only imagine that the wheelchair had fallen into the pool. Still half asleep, I went running to see if I could help.

Nothing so simple.

The blind woman and the paraplegic had quarreled at last. They were at one another with a frightening muddled ferocity, pushing and shoving and panting while the wheelchair rocked precariously this way and that. Every so often one of them, I couldn’t tell which, let out that inarticulate animal cry. Then the woman knocked the chair over, spilling the man out and falling on top of him. He went down slowly and reluctantly, making a noise like a laugh and waving his arms. They struggled there, while the dog first rushed round them in circles then turned yelping and growling to attack me. Fending it off, I shouted:

“Are you all right? Can I do anything?” and “Stop it. Stop it!”

I was too disgusted and frightened to get close enough to separate them. They were murdering one another. Sick to death of its dependency on the dog, the wheelchair and the van, the violent, miserable half-creature they made had pulled itself apart. “Stop!”

Neither of them even looked up. Their faces were drawn into snarls of concentration; they were grunting and sobbing frustratedly. Suddenly I saw my mistake. I put my hands up to my face and laughed. Not murder, then. They were fumbling and ripping at each other’s clothes. In a moment they would be down to the pale, starved flesh. The dog was only defending their privacy.

I retrieved my things later: two days after that I was back in London.

We are so quick to look for closure, for the clear termination of sections of our life, that we often invent it. After the debacle at 17, Hill Park I had assumed I would never be caught up with Yaxley again. Indeed, obsessed with the Pleroma, he did leave me alone for two or three years. But after his failure with the infolding, everything failed. The fear that he would be absorbed grew daily, until his whole position was undercut by it. Associated phobias developed to include a horror of dirt. That, and the residue of one too many magical operations, drove him out of the rooms above the Atlantis Bookshop and into a spacious modern block on the north side of Upper Richmond Road, close to East Putney tube station. There I found him, on a rainy, morning in June. He needed me again.

I walked past the building twice. It reminded me less of Yaxley than Lawson, and perhaps it was in fact some fossil of their brief partnership, prepayment for a sleight of hand which never came off. The people who lived there worked in property or investment banking. Traffic labored under their windows all day, but double glazing muted the noise to a comfortable hum. By night their black European executive saloons lined up outside in rows. I went through a cold well-kept entrance hall, unrelieved by two shallow brick structures like small municipal flowerbeds filled with decorative gravel, and took the stairs to the top floor. Between landings I wavered; touched for reassurance the white painted metal handrail. Had I heard someone coming up behind me?

“Yaxley?”

Modern flats have a precision, a bleak openness to their angles, which encourages hygiene. Yaxley’s was painted off-white throughout, with white woodwork. Every wall, every wainscot, was spotless. There were some rather nice carpets in a kind of flushed pink. Furnished properly, it might have been comfortable if rather affectless. But all I could find was a telephone on a table and, in the middle of the lounge floor, a state-of-the-art VCR. (When I switched it on, an unlabelled tape began to play. I switched it off again immediately.) The kitchen was fitted expensively enough, with oak units, Creda Solarspeed hob, butcher-striped roller blinds. Under the immaculate stainless-steel double sink I found Flash, Jif, sponge floor-mops, plastic buckets and Marigold rubber gloves—several of everything, all brand new, as if he had cached them against a siege; or agoraphobia.

The night before I had received a telephone call, I don’t believe from Yaxley himself. After I picked up the receiver there was a prolonged silence, into which I prompted—

“Hello? Hello?”

Nothing. Then someone said softly: “Go to this address—”

Other instructions followed, some infantile, some meaningless. I did not recognize the magical operation to which they referred. The voice was hard to hear, let alone to identify. It paused, failed, picked up again. Once or twice it laughed. “Two fucks and a pig,” it said. It seemed to come from a long way away, and there were other voices behind it. “Two fine fucks and a pig. Go to this address.”

* * *

Yaxley was in the bedroom.

He lay naked on his side in the middle of the uncarpeted floor, knees drawn up slightly. One hand was curled gently under the side of his head to support it. The other cupped his genitals. Death had aged him. With his long deceitful face, gray stubbled jaw, and lips drawn back over blackened or yellowish teeth, he might have been seventy or eighty. He looked like an old untrustworthy dog, shrunk, famished, reduced. Before he died, he had been trying to make something with two sticks. Above him on the wall was pinned a postcard reproduction of the steps of the British Museum. Under this he had scrawled in soft pencil the words “The Place of the Cure of the Soul”, a description reputed to have been carved over the doors of the Library at Alexandria. Otherwise the room was empty. There was no furniture, not even a bed. It stank. Yaxley hadn’t washed since I last saw him. The dirt was glazed on, as if he had spent the intervening years living in a doorway off the Charing Cross Road. In addition some sort of fat was smeared all over his emaciated upper body, perhaps as lubrication. He had been frightened the Pleroma would invaginate him. In the event though he seemed to have been not so much sucked in as sucked.

Behind him on the floor I found an envelope; inside that the key to a safety deposit box in the City. In the box, I knew, there would be two thick black notebooks. I had seen them before. I collected them that afternoon, and over the next two days, coming and going under Yaxley’s dead ironic eye, fetched his papers, his pictures and other magical paraphernalia from locations to which the notebooks gave access. Some of the larger items—an old-fashioned Dansette record player, a wooden chair with awkwardly curved arms, two crates of books—I was forced to move by taxi. Decaying ring-binders burst and gave forth yellow papers, upon which I read in a scrawled hand:

“The door! The rosy door!” Or:

“…two distinct and irreconcilable worlds,
pleroma
or fullness—which has come down to us as the muddled Christian promise of ‘Heaven’; and
hysterema
or
kenoma
, pain, illusion, emptiness—the life we must actually live. Between them, it used to be said, lies the paradox or boundary-state
horos
. But the great discovery of this century has been to knock at the door of
horos
and find no one at home.
Horos
is the wish-fulfillment dream, the treachery of the mirror…”

Eventually I had assembled it all in the stinking bedroom. The rest of the instructions proved harder to follow. I was required to set certain small objects—including a stoppered bottle half full of rose-water and a Polaroid photograph of someone’s left hand—in precise relationships to one another on a small wooden table, about five feet in front of the corpse. The table itself must stand at the apex of a precise triangle, the other two points of which were represented by a burned-out electric kettle from some Tufnell Park bedsitter; and a split PVC bucket. I was to turn on the old Dansette in its peeled gray leatherette case, play a certain record, then to undress and masturbate. That was the difficulty. At that time I rarely needed manual relief. If I did, I would think automatically of Katherine, and one of her favorite ways of making love—

How she would lie on her side with her legs drawn a little way up and encourage me to enter her from behind, then move one leg gently and rhythmically over the other, so that her body rocked while I remained still. How after a minute or so she would moan and stop—the signal for me to begin moving inside her until her breathing became ragged and harsh, she sighed and began to rub one leg against the other again so that her body rocked and rocked on the pivot of the lower hip.

“Is that good? Is that good?”—turning her head to look at me over her shoulder, sometimes reaching round to draw my face down to kiss it.

“Is that good?”

“Yes.”

How, after a few minutes of this, I would reach round to where the base of my penis emerged from her and dabble my hands there until they were wet. Then, with this lubrication, gently insert the middle finger of my right hand into her anus, slipping it in and out in a counter rhythm to hers. How this drove her quickly to orgasm, at the approach of which she would whisper:

“Do you want to fuck me?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to
fuck
me?”

“Yes.”

“Are you fucking me?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, fuck me then, come inside me. Fuck me, come inside me. Fuck me,
come
inside me. Fuck me,
come
inside me…”—until the words lost their meanings and became an intense, moaning, rhythmic incantation. How a deep pink flush spread across her shoulder-blades. How just before her orgasm I would straddle her with my right leg, press her half over on to her front, she would groan in anticipation and push my hand away from her anus. “Oh God Oh God Oh God. Yes. Oh
yes
. Oh God oh fuck me yes I’m coming I’m coming oh yes oh fuck me.” How, clutching her breast or hip I would drive into her as hard as I could until we both shouted and stiffened and groaned and relaxed, panting and smiling and beginning to laugh—

All men keep to themselves some image like this of love, exciting but at the same time valued, full of sentiment, even if it is only a memory of someone whispering “Make me wet,” at the beginning of the night. But when in Putney I set out to remember mine, I could see nothing. I took my clothes off and folded them up in the corner of the room. I knelt down before the table, with its burden of futile or malign objects. I pulled bleakly and unhappily at myself for perhaps ten minutes, but every time I felt the drowsy approach of orgasm, I seemed to snap back into a self-awareness, and feel upon me the dead magician’s amused, dispassionate gaze.

“Fuck me, come inside me—” whispered Katherine. “Yaxley never did anything to anybody,” Pam Stuyvesant reminded me. “He encourages you to do it to yourself.”

From the cloth-covered speaker of the Dansette, to a background of crackles and distant music, some chirpy prewar entertainer sang:

Suddenly I felt exhausted and ill. I gave up the attempt and instead was violently sick into the plastic bucket. Yaxley, I suppose, may have allowed for this. It was hard to see whether the act had been designed to free or redeem him; or as a last meaningless sneer. Anyway, nothing seemed to happen, so after a bit I left. I closed and locked the door behind me, and later threw the key and the notebooks off Putney Bridge and into the river.

As far as I know, Yaxley’s corpse is still there now.

* * *

When I got home that evening I found letters from Pam and Lucas. They had written separately: they were going to get divorced. They were never quite able to say how it had come about.

Lucas claimed they had grown out of one another, and raged with guilt:

“I always knew you couldn’t cure other people of their character. Now I see you can’t even change yourself. Anything in that direction is just thrashing around, a kind of panic. You haul yourself over the wall, you glimpse new country: good! You can never again be what you were! Just as you’re patting yourself on the back you see this string of stuff tied to your leg like the tail of a kite, and it’s all the fucking Christmas cards you ever sent. All the gas bills you ever paid. All the family snaps which will never, ever allow you to be anybody else: there you are, goggling out, nosing against the glass—your own pet fish.”

He had moved into a flat in Manchester, he said. “I’m getting a lot of work done.” He asked me to make sure that Pam was all right.

Pam wrote:

“I don’t feel as if Lucas knows what he wants.” What had upset her most was that he had left most of his things with her. “He said he was sick of the clutter, but he must need his books.” She asked me to make sure that Lucas was all right. “I don’t quite know what went wrong,” she added puzzledly.