The Course of the Heart (18 page)

“Now do you like seafood, because they do a really nice seafood platter here, dear—”

“Seafood platter? Seafood platter?”

“Oh no, not for me, dear!”

When the food came they shoveled it down themselves vigorously, then chewed with inturned expressions as if they weren’t quite sure what they were eating. Forty-five minutes passed. The sky darkened and a few spots of rain dashed against the windows. At this the men consulted their watches, while their wives smiled indulgently at a toddler. (It ate for them a cream cake, then banged its blue plastic cup repeatedly on the table.) They were less certain about the mother. She was chain-smoking Players Number Six and kept saying, “I’m never satisfied with anything.” To this her companion, a woman of about forty with a deep, measured voice and pulled-back hair which made her face look like a bone on the shore, only replied: “You should wait until you see something you really like, then buy it. You can always throw away something you don’t like as much. You can pass on something you’ve grown tired of.”

She sniffed suddenly and added: “Can you smell that?”

The child stopped banging its cup and stared at them both. Suddenly, everyone was getting up agitatedly.

“That smell!”

“Is it the bus already? It’s the bus!”

“I can’t smell anything.”

“What is it?”

The old men gathered round the war memorial in the square, staring up at a huge plume of dark gray smoke which rose, out of proportion to any possible cause, from behind the houses. Rain streamed down their tilted faces, darkened the shoulders of their jackets. “Oh dear, oh dear, what is it?” called the women anxiously from the café door, their expressions vague, loose, expectant.

We all ran down towards the church. Intense heat met us at the gate. The graveyard had caught fire.

A rake lay abandoned in the empty field next door, and two or three figures were running in and out of the edge of the smoke. I could hear them calling to one another, their voices distant and panicky beneath the roar and crackle of the fire. One of them toppled over; confused, the others took hold of his feet and pulled him inwards, towards the church. “This way!” shouted the old men. They began to take off their coats, but nothing could be done. “Over here!” Too late. However it had started, the blaze seemed to have seated itself everywhere at once, crackling and hissing in the saplings, racing through the grass between the railed and caged graves. (Through the heat mirage they seemed to bob like small boats on a burning sea, their ironwork glowing a dull plum color. They remained unexpectedly afloat.) Tangle by tangle, the brambles quivered like red hot barbed wire and fell into ash. The elms nearest the church went up like bunches of straw: from where I stood, thirty or forty yards away, I could feel the heat on my skin.

The woman with the toddler held it up to see the flames. “Look,” she urged. “Timmy, look!” Her friend, who was occupied lighting a cigarette, said neutrally:

“It’ll be the church next.”

This stopped the old men short. While they were considering it, the wind shifted a point or two and blew the flames towards us. Smoke roiled and eddied, alive with sparks. Eyes watering, I stepped back, expecting the acrid, powdery but reassuring smell you get from a garden bonfire on a wet day. Instead it stank of chlorine and putrefying bodies, then the crematorium chimney; and I heard a voice speaking as if from a great distance, in a middle-European accent so thick I could understand only a phrase or a sentence here and there. “Ice,” it whispered. Then something that might have been, “Our clothes.” And then, quite clear: “They took us from Theresienstadt without warning at night.” I was in Birkenau. It was October. I could hear dogs barking somewhere a long way off across the river Sola, which had frozen early. The huts were dark, filled with the smell of exhausted women. “All killed. Killed by injection.” Birkenau! How can I explain? History, not smoke, had enveloped me. Racked and nauseated, I stumbled across the road away from the church gate, knelt down, and vomited copiously into the grass verge. By the time I felt like standing up again, the fire in the churchyard had consumed itself. I thought: “You’re nearly fifty years old.”

It was the year of the Prague Spring. Dubcek had yet to be defeated; Jan Palach had yet to make his appallingly confused gesture of hope and desolation in Wenceslas Square.

Were the borders beginning to move again?

The dead remain with us, passed down as the things that concerned them while they were alive. I recalled, suddenly and in succession: the prostitute in her booth above the Danube, light pooling in the hollow of a collar-bone; the orgasm of an eighteen-year-old boy, sad as an exhaled breath; the yellowed photograph of some old statesman who had meant so much to her. Had she died in Birkenau?

“I know you’re here!” I shouted. I knew she wasn’t.

I wiped my mouth, raised my eyes, and found the toddler staring at me in bewilderment from his mother’s arms. The rain poured down on us both.

* * *

Lucas closed his briefcase. The ward was quiet.

“What happened to Ashman that afternoon? He can only answer: ‘I’m not sure.’ It’s almost as if he wants us to decide for him—”

Pam touched Lucas’s arm tiredly.

“Lucas, what had he found in the church?”

“A cup, a map, a mirror. A rose. The real heritage of the Empress. The real clue to the Heart.”

“Lucas…”

“He had found the record of a marriage.”

“Will you come and see me in the afternoons?”

“I’ll try.”

However Pam had described Lucas to herself, however she had thought of him during their life together—as a demanding but perfect child; as the mirror of her own supernatural guilt; as the author “Michael Ashman”—he had always been able to comfort and convince her. What he now achieved in this direction was as extraordinary as his original success with the Coeur. Folding her pain across itself repeatedly until it was so small she had no sensation of it, he placed it exactly at the heart of the Heart (that Romanesque cloister, he said, where whatever our anxiety we are always able to listen to the fountain playing in silence). There, though she could feel it once more, it was very distant; perhaps even a blessing.

“The first great echoes had died away,” he began. “Yet visions and revelations were still possible. Put your ear to the cavity of history and you can still detect them—sighs, confused harmonies, ripples of ripples intersecting across the whole surface of a lake after some great significant object has submerged!

“1683:

“William Perm was founding Philadelphia. In Britain, Christopher Wren had abandoned astronomy for urban renewal. A bracing pragmatism seemed to rule. But while the modern world had its back turned, the Ottoman Empire besieged Vienna with scimitars, polished brass culverins, horsetail banners in gorgeous reds and yellows, and camels whose tulipwood saddles glowed in the sun less like earthly wood than some perfect Platonic material. And in the Low Countries, Christian Huygens was intuiting his way towards a wave theory of light! As an approach to the day-by-day meaning of the world, the dream might have fallen into disfavor; but that great European bestseller
The Judgement of Dreams
had entered its fifteenth edition since 1518. Nicholas Coleman of Norwich experienced visions of ‘an army of men’ whose beggar’s rags disguised finery beneath, ‘burning the market towns of England at night’. A tailor from Stamford was encouraged by dreams to try ‘the miraculous healing of the deaf and blind’. And then, suddenly hallucinating a rose which opened ‘not in but somewhere behind’ her sleep, a Bristol woman, christened in the year of the Great Fire with the extraordinary name Godscall St. Ives, renounced her faith to marry a gardener named Joseph Winthrop.

“Winthrop was a man of his time. Commercial and scientific botany delighted him equally. He had corresponded with the younger Tradescant, and worked with Philip Miller on what they hoped would be a new centifolia rose. His Dutch connections balanced a distant relationship to the governor of Massachusetts: he was able to exploit both.

“Three of their children chose the New World. We know nothing of them. The fourth, Liselotte, prone to chlorosis, melancholy from an early age, married a Leiden pump-engineer called Boerhaave. At this, saddened perhaps by the whole charade of Enlightenment, Godscall fell prey quite suddenly to a quartan ague—of which Winthrop, plant-collecting in the Netherlands, learned only on his return—and died. ‘Something burns within me,’ she had written in her diary in 1695, ‘but I am never consumed.’”

Pam loved this.

Lucas was delighted by her delight. It would be oversimplifying, whatever my opinion, to claim he had been disappointed by his life since the divorce. Nevertheless, an unfamiliar excitement now filled him whenever he thought about her. At first, surprised to find himself daydreaming in the school staff-room after lunch, he would shake his head and go back to marking books. Soon, though, the work itself began to bore him. The children seemed willfully slow and uncooperative, the things he was trying to teach them rang with meaninglessness. Clearly, he was approaching the crux of things. He and Pam had been telling themselves the story of the Coeur for twenty years: its worth as an invention—never mind as solace—now depended as much on his ability to convince as on her desire to be convinced. This was the moment of greatest danger. Despite that, he wanted to be at the hospital as often as possible. He wanted to be next to her. Stuck in the classroom, he yawned; heard himself tell some twelve-year-old boy, “For God’s sake go, then. But don’t ask me again this afternoon;” and stared out of the window.

He could see Pam, sitting up in bed reading a book!

Four in the afternoon. Time to be off. It was a momentary relief to throw his stuff into the back of the Renault, slam the door, start the engine: but predicating his whole day on this gesture solved nothing. An hour later he was as impatient as ever.

He loathed the drive out through Rochdale, with its debilitated public buildings and small businesses. “The Pine Brunch Bar & Coffee Lounge” replaced “Carol’s Wools”, to be replaced in its turn by “A Maze of Pine & Roses”. These fantasias of transformation and escape—pursued with increasing anguish as they approached the depressed outskirts—chafed him into misreading familiar traffic signs, so that he missed a turning he always took. Or he would brake suddenly for an imaginary dog or child. Further east there was only moorland, successive arcs of waterlogged peat, elegant concrete bridges connecting nothing to nothing across the motorway. It was dark even in the afternoon, and the traffic was always bad. The aggression of the other drivers as they jostled nose to tail at eighty or ninety miles an hour through this desolate landscape made him nervous and contemptuous at once.

“They look so stupidly greedy,” he wrote to me, “you wonder how they ever managed to learn to drive at all. I suppose none of us do more than the minimum necessary to get what we want.”

He would arrive at Huddersfield General in a mood impossible, he said, to describe; though he tried hard enough, and in fact it wasn’t hard to recognize—“Impatience, anger, elation, all at once: sometimes so intense I can feel myself draining away out of my own body, like water.” It made him look through the nurses as though they weren’t there; and advise the hospital florist, always slow to calculate change from a five-pound note, “Keep it!” The lifts had been full so often he no longer bothered with them but took the stairs instead, three at a time. Every evening there seemed to be more people in his way. New patients with sheafs of documents en route for Hematology, new visitors on timid quests for husbands in Cardiac or daughters in Maternity, they were easily snared in the web of primary-colored lines painted on the corridor floors, which is where Lucas came upon them. “Excuse me. We’re looking for…”

He stared at them as if they were deranged.

“…X-rays.”

“I can’t help. Sorry.”

He pushed open the door of Primrose Ward at last. “Lucas,” Pam called: “Here.” They had moved her bed again! For a moment he stood confused in the middle of the polished floor; then she waved and suddenly he could relax. She took the flowers from him. His heart was pounding. He had been walking so quickly, he found, that he was out of breath.

“Lucas, they’re beautiful!”

“Listen,” he said—

“‘Something burns within me, but I am never consumed!’” But whatever it was, it clearly failed to kindle in Godscall’s daughter. Boerhaave settled in East Anglia, where—encouraged by the success of the Haddenham Level project in 1727—he planned to drain and farm. But his capital proved insufficient, Liselotte soon died of smallpox, and, its income fallen radically, its only issue daughters, the family followed her into oblivion.

“We have only glimpses of them after that.”

Liselotte’s children, Lucas maintained, were to marry into the hand-looming industry which had grown up around Norwich. As for their descendants:

“For nearly a hundred years, they drift north. Norwich to Nottingham and then Manchester; flying shuttle to spinning jenny; figured cloth to stockings and lace. Their names have not survived the famines, wage cuts and migrations, the long slow tragedy of the eighteenth-century cottage industries. When they re-emerge, it is with the invention of the power loom, and the death of Paul Sturtevant, a middle-aged artisan from Horrocks’ Stockport factory who walked all the way to Manchester one day in August 1819, because he wanted to hear the radical Henry Hunt speak in St. Peter’s Fields.”

Sturtevant fell under the hooves of the cavalry as they swept across Peterloo to break up the meeting. He survived hideous injuries to his head, only to die of an infection twelve days later. “In his delirium,” Lucas told Pam, “he dreamed of ‘the perfect time which will come to us all’. He was able to describe it: but it was nothing like the life we have now. Six daughters huddled round the deathbed. The youngest, Alice, only seven years old, records:

“‘Before he died he cried out, “What does it matter that I’m dying, since I am doing what I want?” ’