The Course of the Heart (16 page)

Neither of them knew, in fact.

“That’s why you’re being so silly,” I told them. But Lucas would only repeat that he had suddenly felt suffocated under a weight of objects he had never meant to own; while Pam, though desperately miserable, repeated, “We fell out such a lot,” maintained that Lucas must do what he thought fit, because she only wanted him to be happy; and claimed that she had often wondered what it would be like to try being on your own. And so it all went ahead later that year.

They seemed in such bewilderment, afterwards, to find themselves apart from one another. Lucas kept trying to explain his rage, which was in the end directed less at Pam—or even himself—than at some incurable state of the world. “A thirty-five-year-old woman,” he wrote to me that winter, “holds up a doll she has kept in a cardboard box under a bed since she was a child. She touches its clothes, which are falling to pieces, works tenderly its loose arm. The expression which trembles on the verge of realizing itself in the slackening muscles of her lips and jaw is indescribably sad. How are you to explain to her that she has lost nothing by living the intervening years of her life? How is she to explain this to you?” Meanwhile Pam fell full length into herself, hour by hour, and was chronically hurt. “He always used to love the north. That’s why we came here.”

They had been not so much divorced, I suspect now, as wrenched apart by some metaphysical event none of us could imagine, precipitated by Yaxley’s death. Whatever the meaning of his intrusion into the Pleroma—however he had distorted its shape, however it had vomited itself inside out—one of its effects here had been to cause similar convulsions in all our lives. Pam and Lucas blamed themselves increasingly for living apart. They were bemused. But in the end the very inexplicability of the experience became something they could share. If nothing else, they had been given the fiction of the Coeur, to which they soon returned, developing it by letter.

* * *

Yaxley’s death, which I believed then would free us all, had filled me with a kind of excitement, to which the divorce only seemed to add. Unable to sleep more than an hour or two at a time, I took to the canal, rowing down to the empty lock basin every morning before anyone else was awake, in an old boat with peeling blue paintwork Katherine had found tied up at the bottom of the garden the day she moved into St. Mark’s Crescent. An acre of water waited for me, flickering in the cool sunlight. It was very quiet. On the towpath side stood a crescent of Edwardian houses, each with a long thin wedge of overgrown garden. Brambles, willow herb, and some kind of red-leaved ornamental ivy had rioted over the walls to within a few feet of the water. On the other bank wrecked cars glittered in a repair-shop yard; beyond them were the silent arches of a railway bridge.

It was the longest summer, Katherine often said, that anyone could remember.

One morning I lay back in the boat, my eyes half-closed against the reflections from the water, wondering if I could make myself operate the lock. I was never sure of myself with locks. As soon as I looked into one it would bring back some childhood afternoon when, kneeling down to peer at a swarm of fish-fry eight or nine feet below in the narrow cleft, I first suspected the depth of the water. I decided that if I wanted to go any further it would mean dragging the boat out. I let the oars trail. A dog began to bark monotonously from its wired run in the garage yard. A milk-float rattled past on the main road. Tufted ducks were diving in the basin, vanishing unpretentiously under the surface to bob up some seconds later like cork toys, bright of eye and beaded momentarily with drops of water.

A faint breath of air moved the willow herb.

I heard a voice say to me quietly but distinctly: “The woman that grows, and may be harvested for ever. The grown, not the natural woman.”

When I looked up I saw her watching me from the towpath, her outline filled with the leaves and stems of burnet roses, her eyes blind, intent, and speedwell blue. She raised her arm. Somebody in one of the houses behind her woke up and opened a window. The sun caught it and filled my eyes with light.

After that my life seemed to settle down again. The publishing industry was expanding greedily to meet the 1980s. Never comfortable with authors, I moved on to the production side of things. Katherine, meanwhile, exhibited pictures in London and then New York. She renewed her membership of the Chelsea Arts Club, and I would find her there sometimes in the evening after work, watching the players nose quietly round the billiard tables like fish in a lighted tank. We had a daughter we called Kit. Kit learned to talk early, then encouraged us to sit her out under the willow in the garden at St. Mark’s Crescent, where she could whisper at the muted reflections of the water in the foliage. She loved the seaside. At Fowey or Caswell Bay she spent each hot afternoon crouched on the tideline, sorting bits of nacre from the gravel of tiny colored stones and wave-polished glass. Once she called out in her sleep: “The lights in the shells. Daddy! The lights in the shells!” Kit turned out to be a dreamy, equable little thing, sensual, patient, pleased with everything she found. As if to compensate for this, Pam and Lucas were as demanding as children. Pam continued to write letters full of vague regrets, Lucas telephoned me in the middle of the night.

“I don’t like the sound of her voice,” he would say. “You try her.” And I would sigh and shrug and in the morning catch the Huddersfield train and visit whatever bleak village she had removed herself to this time.

“You try her. See what she says.”

What she said was always the same. She was lonely and ill. The Pleroma was aware of us, even after all those years. Lucas Medlar didn’t love her any more. I would hug her—though I got into bed with her only that once—and telephone him. “You should see more of one another,” I would tell them. “We never see enough of you,” they always replied; and I would promise to write more often. Each time, some kind of balance of anxieties would have to reassert itself before I could go home again. Nevertheless it was a relationship which suited us, until I saw the White Couple in the snow outside Pam’s kitchen window on the third anniversary of Yaxley’s death. Even then, something might have been salvaged. I admit that the White Couple frightened me. How could they not, after everything else that had happened? I had hated the look on their faces as they hung in the air in front of Pam’s kitchen window. I was angry with Lucas, and disappointed by his feeble attempt to avoid the issue. But whatever I told him the day after, in the Manchester Kardomah with the rain streaming into the crowded shopping streets outside, I would still have been happy to help (less out of guilt than he assumed, or at any rate, less out of—the guilt he knew about); and things would have gone on in the same way for ever if, in the following spring, Pam’s illness hadn’t flared up suddenly.

No one knew what was wrong. Migraines paralyzed her. Epileptic incidents increased in frequency and scale. She fell asleep, sometimes for a day, two days, at a time; then ranged restlessly about the cottage for a week, reading, smoking and shouting at the cats late into the night, unable to sleep at all. Her weight fluctuated violently over quite short periods. To these metabolic disturbances were added outbreaks of ulcers, ringworm, colitis, abscessed teeth. She became allergic to increasingly exotic forms of penicillin. Finally her skin flared up bright red with erysipelas—St. Anthony’s Fire, often called simply “the Rose”. (Afterwards, it would be easy to see this portfolio of symptoms as a secondary stage; a transition. It was as if the illness was searching for its own best expression. Her original symptoms, you will say, were so clearly hysterical—fits, headaches, a hallucination in a kitchen—that this must be a form of speech, the language of some quite common psychic disorder. I wouldn’t deny that, even now.)

Then, in April, Lucas telephoned me from Manchester. He was panicky and fey, he didn’t know what to do. Pam had been taken into Huddersfield General Hospital.

“She needs a heart bypass,” he said.

“Lucas, a week ago her heart was sounder than mine. It must be a mistake. What are they saying?”

“They don’t know what’s wrong with her!”

“Try and stay calm,” I advised.

“It’s easy for you. She isn’t just breaking to pieces in front of you.”

“I’ll come when I can.”

But spring is a difficult season. We were publishing as many books as we could print. It took time to extricate myself, and by then Pam was already recovering. I found her propped up in bed in the front room of her cottage, wearing a Marks & Spencer’s cotton nightdress and a blue woolen bedjacket with short puffy sleeves. Her hair was longer; she had tied it back with a piece of ribbon. Her face and arms were very white. Around mouth and eyes the skin had a soft, powdery, inflated look; the flesh was yielding, deeply cut with crow’s-feet and lines of strain. She seemed to have gained weight in the hospital rather than lost it; despite this you could feel the presence of the bones beneath.

“How are you?”

“Sore!”

Lucas had manhandled the bed downstairs and arranged it by the window so she could look out at the great bars of sun and shadow chasing each other all day across the moors towards Holme. There was more light in the room than I remembered from my last visit, falling on the lively red and black design of the quilt-cover, where it found scattered an invalid’s things: Kleenex, the
Guardian
folded tightly to display yesterday’s half-completed crossword puzzle, a spectacle case, two or three paperbacks with predominantly pink-and-lavender covers and titles like
Sweet Dawn of Desire
.

“You can’t be serious about this,” I complained. Knowing her taste, I had brought her Willa Gather’s
A Lost Lady
.

“They belong to the woman next door,” she said. “It was very kind of her to think of me. And look at all these flowers! You never know how nice people are until you’re ill.” Everyone had been kinder than she had a right to expect: they fed the cats, they did the housework even though a home help came in twice a week; they went shopping for her. “The old man two doors along offered to lend me his television.” She laughed. “And it’s cleaner in here than I ever managed to get it. So keep your literary pretensions to yourself! Here. Let me hug you. Oh, it’s so nice to see you!”

She blinked, blew her nose.

“I cry very easily now. Make us some coffee, eh?”

“I’m not sure I want to be in that kitchen,” I said, trying to make a joke of it. “Remembering the last time.”

There was a silence. To occupy herself, she moved her books about; smoothed the quilt with quick deft movements of her hands.

“Do you still see them, Pam?”

“The cats?”

“The White Couple.”

She lay back on the pillows and turned her head away from me.

“What do you think? What did you expect? That it would all go away like magic once you became involved?”

I couldn’t think of an answer to this.

“Don’t worry,” she reassured me tiredly. “They’re not out there now. I’d know.” Silence drew out again. She asked it, as if I wasn’t there, “Do you remember the Moors Murders? All those dead children buried up behind Saddleworth? They weren’t the only ones.”

“A moor is only a moor,” I said.

She wiped her eyes again—“I know. I know.”—then sat up suddenly and took both my hands in hers. “Go into the kitchen and make some coffee,” she said. “All that’s changed is that we’ve admitted something to ourselves.”

“I hope you’re right.”

In the event, there was a yellow roller-blind to pull down over the window.

“I haven’t seen this before,” I called. “No.”

Pam’s neighbors, Yorkshirewomen with determined views, had scrubbed down the Formica surfaces and pine shelves. They liked order and optimism; they liked to see a place clean. New coffee-mugs, with cheap and cheerful artwork and optimistic slogans, had replaced her old chipped favorites. When I needed a tea towel, I found them all freshly laundered. Even the stainless steel cat-bowls had been polished until they shone. The kitchen was a kitchen. I filled the kettle. Nothing happened to me.

“You see?”

We drank the coffee. We talked about this and that. We tried to finish the crossword. The afternoon darkened towards evening. Eventually I asked her: “Do you see Lucas much?” I meant something like: Does Lucas fulfill his responsibilities to you? Instead of answering directly, she showed me a pendant he had bought her nearly twenty years before. It was a teardrop of Iranian mother-of-pearl, about an inch by one and a half, mounted in a silver filigree of tiny roses and decorated with peacocks and flowers, in blues, oranges and greens which glowed in the darkening room like paint from Byzantium. God knows where Lucas had found it, or what he had paid.

“It’s beautiful, Pam.”

“Isn’t it? He bought me that when he was in London the first time.”

“Lucas?”

“Oh yes. He often went down during those first few years, to see if he could find Yaxley and make him help us. Poor Lucas! He was frightened: he didn’t know where to look. He wandered about, I expect, and then just came home again.”

“I had no idea.”

She smiled drowsily at me. “Lucas does his best.” Then: “It wasn’t that we didn’t trust you. Our own feelings let us down.” I could see that she was tired. I got up to leave.

“Take care of yourself, Pam,” I said. “I’ll come again soon.”

“Do you know what I’d like?”

“What?”

But she was asleep.

* * *

I talked to Lucas a day or two later.

“She’s much better,” we reassured each other: “Isn’t she? So much better.”

Within weeks she was back in Huddersfield General. A nagging discomfort in her left hip had migrated to her chest on that side, where it settled in the ribs previously broken for cardiac surgery. A consultant described this condition as “arthritis”, but kept her on hand anyway, for observation.

Lucas was frantic.