The Course of the Heart (17 page)

“They aren’t being honest. She knows there’s something else wrong with her.”

Pam drifted, ill in some unacknowledged way, assuaging her anxieties with
Love’s Stormy Heights
and
Dark Music of Delight
: suddenly, breast cancer was confirmed, and the mastectomy carried out in early July.

“We’ve caught it in plenty of time,” the consultant assured her. But when Lucas went to see her the day after, all she could do was shake her head and say:

“Something’s still not right.”

He was at the hospital as often as his work allowed, which was perhaps more often than he could cope with. I still have his letters of the time, addressed less to me than to himself, crammed foolscap pages typed out furiously at night on the old Lettera portable he had brought to his marriage like a statement of intent. Yellow with age, they break apart at the folds when you try to open them; but there inside are Pam and Lucas, as easily visible—and just as distant—as figures in a glass paperweight. He wavers between the appalled and the self-pitying. She is a woman already deeply ill, bemused by morphine (though as yet in quite light doses), uncertain of the future. Every time he sees her, she has grown thinner. The visiting hour breaks into her isolation; his appearance is always a relief. She clutches his hand so hard it hurts, but woe betide him if he should give her the wrong drink from the bedside table! Or if her back-rest needs adjusting, and Lucas, shy of seeing the amputation scar when she leans forward, makes a muddle of it—

“For God’s sake leave me alone, Lucas. You were always so useless!”

She has become more demanding, he tells himself, “only as a way of saying ‘We don’t have time for this any more.’ Not just because she’s in pain, but because these things are now the measure of our love for one another, our humanity.”

If he infuriates her, the doctors infuriate him.

“None of them will admit how ill she is,” he writes, after one of the endless courses of chemotherapy has come to nothing: “It’s always, ‘try this, try that’. With these people there’s always ‘hope’ and never any progress!”

No one will tell Pam anything. No one will tell him anything. “Worse,” he alleges, “she isn’t even given proper care. This morning she had a fall trying to use the lavatory on her own. At visiting time all she said to me was, ‘My knee’s gone red. The doctor’s going to come and paint it.’ Sometimes she has no idea what she’s saying. But this time she was wide awake. She wouldn’t let go of my hand. ‘Don’t go yet, Lucas. Don’t go.’ Those bastards had really allowed her to fall down and hurt herself!

“Why are they letting this happen?” he asks, and concludes wildly:

“Doctors need disease. It’s the source of their power.”

The hospital was a maze, with every exit marked “Oncology”. They were both trapped there. As a result they found themselves closer together than they had ever been. Whatever its source, Pam’s distress upset Lucas too. Her pain hurt him. The letters go on, shocked, bitter, uncertain, more and more underscored for emphasis. But what they don’t explain is how Lucas was trying to staunch the wound. Every evening after work in Manchester, he started up the Renault and edged it carefully into the dense eastbound traffic of the M62, leaning forward anxiously over the steering wheel to peer through the streaming rain for Junction 23: Outlane. An hour later Pam’s hands would be held tightly between his, and he would be reminding her, in a low, persuasive voice—

“Always remember: what we mean when we talk about the Heart is that it is a real place.”

He knew he mustn’t stop.

It was harder to catch her attention than it had been in Dun-ford Bridge, with the light going slowly out of the heavy old furniture and the brindled cat weaving about the woodblock floor. There he had only ever to ask “What would you like tonight?” to be answered: “
Beautiful Swimmers!
” Here, nervous and agitated, unable to concentrate, she would look away from him restlessly at first, up at the clock or the other visitors trooping in and out, or the ward television where
Emmerdale Farm
or
All Creatures Great and Small
unwound episodically and in silence the stories of shrewd but likeable locals, faces skewed by poor color-balance to a purplish red. Eventually, struck by a phrase—“disillusioned with the actual”; “bound in wood and velvet”—she would stare at Lucas as if he had only just begun to speak. From that moment the haunted look would gradually leave her face; and by the time the ward sister called cheerfully, “Come on now. Nine o’clock. Throwing-out time,” she would be smiling drowsily and ready to sleep on the complex promises he had begun to make her—

“At the end of his life, Michael Ashman seems to have lost his way. It’s hard to understand why. His own best explanation leaves us frustrated, wondering if he has quite deliberately left something out: ‘As a child I had often spent Christmas with my grandmother, who lived near Catesby in a biggish Victorian house of warm orange brick, to which fake Queen Anne chimneys and an overgrown garden lent an air of history I loved—’”

* * *

In that part of Northamptonshire (Lucas read on) the winter copses seem to hang for ever in the moment of darkening against a pale blue sky—as if it will take for ever for night to fall—in a gesture so perfect there will never need to be another day. Medieval strip-fields, Tudor gateposts; narrow lanes and banks choked with ivy awash in horizontal light; yew berries, waxy and tubular, somehow lit up from within so that they look like fairy lights in the gathering dusk: even without snow this is a landscape continually composing itself as a Christmas card. Even now, a chance configuration of cottages and bare elm trees will remind me how I trudged home across the cold ploughed fields at the close of an afternoon in late December: a boy thirteen or fourteen, composed only of the things he wanted at that moment—the warmth of a front room with its Christmas lights and strings of tinsel, the smell of toast.

I loved the holly that grew by my grandmother’s door. Every spring, among its new leaves, you found clusters of small flowers as complicated as ciphers, four petals and four white stamens arranged to make up a sort of eight-pointed star. The petals had an almost hallucinatory touch of purple near the tips. Male and female holly flowers grow on separate trees; only the females bear berries. In winter, my grandmother’s holly bore “a berry as bright as any wound”.

The holly and the ivy! Every time you hear that carol, whatever its provenance, you take the full weight of the medieval experience, which was itself just like a childhood. To them, words seemed mysterious and valuable in their own right; the berries so bright against the dark foliage of the tree! But rowan and yew berries are just as bright. So are hawthorn berries, especially when they are new. Hips and haws are as bright. All are instrumental and have their magical and symbolic associations, but none as dark and childlike as this myth of conscious sacrifice, organized, performed, expressed, as the matrix of a culture!

When I came back to that house to live, I was forty-five years old. “You can’t understand the Middle Ages,” I had just written to a friend, “until you begin to feel death treading on your own heels.” As for that “elasticity of boundaries” I had once recognized as the necessary prelude to the return of the Coeur: it had quickly exhausted itself. Kennedy was in Berlin. Europe was frozen into the postures of the Cold War. “
Ich bin ein Berliner”
! I told myself that I had been born into a world which, despite its horrors, had always promised more than this.

* * *

“That poor man!”

Caught up despite herself, Pam began to look forward to Lucas’s visits.

“Can’t you come in the afternoons too?” she asked him.

He didn’t see how he could.

“Because I get so bored here.”

Correctly reading “middle age” for “Middle Ages”, she had identified in Ashman’s despair the footprint of her own condition. But where Pam saw melancholia, fear, bewilderment (in some archaic sense of that word which implied lost bearings, night, tangled woods), Lucas saw only a failure of imagination.

“By this time Ashman could read the fifteenth century out of a damp cardboard box on a building site. He had built one of the most powerful metaphysical instruments in the history of European thought but he didn’t know what to do with it next.”

“Read me some more anyway,” said Pam. “Listen, then—”

The ward staff, a rich mixture of SENs, trainees, and unqualified “helpers” in green overalls—heavy women with big feet and grown-up families, who came in by bus from as far away as Bradford and for whom lifting and carrying had been a life’s work—were soon intrigued. Seven o’clock in the evening: Lucas would enter the ward carrying a plastic briefcase and a Salisbury’s carrier bag; sit on the side of the bed; and take out the round, steel-rimmed reading glasses he now affected. These made him seem vulnerable; or, as one of the women put it, “too young for his age”. They liked him anyway. Pam wasn’t much more now than a lot of bones and heat: they were impressed by the care with which he embraced her. And they grew used to his low, even reading voice. “You two and your stories!” they would call. “Whenever we come through here, you’re telling her some story! Has it got any rude bits?”

Lucas could only give a shy smile. “I’m afraid not.”

“Shame!”

He stared after them. Then he said:

“Ashman continued the research with a kind of wan intensity. After all, it represented the years of his life since that formative European journey; and sometimes brought back to him—with a shiver of delight now only the memory of a memory—images of a dancing bear, the frozen floodwater of the Danube, the legs of the Czechoslovakian girls as they spread their tiered skirts like a fan of Tarot cards. But he had begun to believe that the historical past of the Coeur was only a kind of involution of his own life, a way of twisting or folding the outside of his experience to imply an inside, a meaning.”

Lucas thought for a moment.

“It’s not entirely clear what changed this,” he said. He took his spectacles off and rubbed his eyes.

“Don’t tease me,” Pam warned him.

“Early one April morning, Ashman caught a train from Birmingham Central station and made his way first to Bath, then Weston-super-Mare on the Bristol Channel. From there he went ten or fifteen miles inland, to a small village near Burrington, on the northern edge of the Mendip Hills. What he found in the parish church there is important to us, and easy to understand. The rest is more difficult—”

“Lucas!”

Lucas took the point, and read on—

* * *

I left the church quickly.

There were two churchyards, the inner one well-kept and intimate, with trimmed squares of box hedge, little curving lawns and paths. Yew and elm surrounded it; lesser celandines edged each path; daisies and dandelions were already out in the grass. There I sat down for a few minutes, listening to the song of a thrush as it shaped and defended its spring territory among the ornamental shrubs. The church itself was Norman, small but massy: nave, choir and sanctuary quarried block by block, with all the enormous energy of that time, out of a rosy limestone which reminded me of Tintern and the Wye Valley. Faint shadows of the surrounding trees, cast by the light falling across its south flank, were like the shadows traced on a white cliff by a warm winter day. All this filled me with delight. When I got up to go, much of the excitement of my discovery had drained away into the thrush’s song, the pale but warm sunshine on the grass: but it was replaced by an extraordinary happiness.

The outer churchyard was less secluded. In an acre of obscure untended sites among colonies of rhododendrons, masses of bramble, and thickets of sapling trees, it served a less favored clientele. I looked for them as I made my way towards the gate. Some lay completely hidden under the coarse, tangled grass. Headstones were rare. Instead the graves had rusty ornamental chains, and over them a kind of iron cage, as if something were needed to hold in the dead. From the three or four stones I was able to find—all greenish, and with shoulders carved to represent a scroll—I read messages incomplete, ordinary, strange:

“…also his Beloved Wife.”

A little way in from the gates, attempts had been made to clear the vegetation. Here for some reason the graves were simply heaps of earth with unpainted wooden crosses at the head of them: an unaccustomed sight, shocking and yet somehow exciting in that it bared a process usually so well hidden under marble chippings, urns, angels standing on great pillars. Across this raw ground, you had a view into a long bleak sloping field, where not far from the churchyard wall some men were tending a fire, staring at it aimlessly but with a certain satisfaction as one of them turned it over with a rake. Going through the gate and out into the road, I wondered what they could be burning, on a Saturday afternoon in April.

The village smelled of furniture polish. A fat woman with red arms sat in her garden eating an apple. From inside the house behind her came the sound of a vacuum cleaner.

They were used to visitors. Someone had converted the old toll house into a bookshop. In the square, with its chestnut trees and limestone cross, I found three whitewashed cottages knocked together to make a café called the Naked Man, a popular starting place for parish outings to Burrington Combe, where, caught in the rain nearly two hundred years earlier, Augustus Toplady had taken shelter in the famous cave and been inspired to write “Rock of Ages, cleft for me”. That morning a lot of old people had come down from Bristol: frail but lively men in braces, flannel trousers and straw hats with a black ribbon, who trooped in and out of the public lavatories; women with faces like buns, sailing along in their cotton print frocks only to stop and exclaim over a baby as if they had just found it. Now they were waiting for the bus to take them home. It would be another hour. Meanwhile they packed the Naked Man, where under the low ceiling beams and in front of a fireplace decorated with paper flowers and ears of corn dyed transparent green, they examined a sepia photograph entitled “Washday c. 1900” (three or four sullen-looking women outside a stone building) and asked one another: