The Course of the Heart (2 page)

“—I’m coming.”

Pam Stuyvesant took drugs to manage her epilepsy. They often made her depressed and difficult to deal with; and Lucas, who was nervous himself, never knew what to do. After their divorce he relied increasingly on me as a go-between.

“I don’t like the sound of her voice,” he would tell me. “You try her.”

The drugs gave her a screaming, false-sounding laugh that went on and on. Though he had remained sympathetic over the years, Lucas was always embarrassed and upset by it. I think it frightened him.

“See if you can get any sense out of her.”

It was guilt, I think, that encouraged him to see me as a steadying influence: not his own guilt so much as the guilt he felt all three of us shared.

“See what she says.”

* * *

On this occasion what she said was:

“Look, if you bring on one of my turns, bloody Lucas Medlar will regret it. What business is it of his how I feel, anyway?”

“It was just that you wouldn’t talk to him. He was worried that something was happening. Is there something wrong, Pam?” She didn’t answer, but I had hardly expected her to.

“If you don’t want to see me,” I suggested carefully, “couldn’t you tell me now?”

I thought she was going to hang up, but in the end there was only a kind of paroxysm of silence. I was phoning her from a call box in the middle of Huddersfield. The shopping precinct outside was full of pale bright sunshine, but windy and cold. Sleet was forecast for later in the day. Two or three teenagers went past, talking and laughing. (One of them said, “What acid rain’s got to do with my career I don’t know. That’s what they asked me. ‘What do you know about acid rain?’”) When they had gone I could hear Pam breathing raggedly.

“Hello?” I said.

She shouted, “Are you mad? I’m not talking on the phone. Before you know it, the whole thing’s public property!” Sometimes she was more dependent on medication than usual; you knew when because she tended to use that phrase over and over again: “Before you know it—”

One of the first things I ever heard her say was, “It looks so easy, doesn’t it? But before you know it, the bloody thing’s just slipped straight out of your hands,” as she bent down nervously to pick up the bits of a broken glass. How old were we then? Twenty? Lucas believed she was reflecting in language some experience of either the drugs or the disease itself, but I’m not sure he was right. Another thing she often said was, “I mean, you have to be careful, don’t you?” drawing out both
care
and
don’t
in such a way that you saw immediately it was a mannerism learned in adolescence.

“You must be mad if you think I’ll say anything on the phone.”

“I’ll come over this evening then.”

“No!”

“Pam, I—” She gave in abruptly.

“Come now and get it over with. I don’t feel well.”

Epilepsy since the age of twelve or thirteen, as regular as clockwork; and then, later, a classic migraine to fill the gaps: a complication which, rightly or wrongly, she had always associated with what Yaxley helped the three of us do when we were students. She must never get angry or excited. “I reserve my adrenaline,” she would explain. It was a physical, not a psychological thing: it was glandular. “I can’t let it go at the time.” Afterwards though the reservoir would burst, and it would all be released at once by some minor stimulus—a lost shoe, a missed bus, rain—to cause her hallucinations, vomiting, loss of bowel control. “Oh, and then euphoria. It’s wonderfully relaxing. Just like sex,” she would say bitterly.

“OK, Pam. I’ll be there soon. Don’t worry.”

“Piss off,” she said. She was dependent on reassurance, but it made her angry. “Things are coming to bits here. I can already see the little floating lights.”

As soon as she put the receiver down I telephoned Lucas. “I’m not doing this again,” I said.

Silence.

“Lucas? She isn’t well. I thought she was going to have an attack there and then.”

“She’ll see you, though? The thing is, she just kept putting the phone down on me. You’ve no idea how tiring that can be. She’ll see you today?”

“You knew she would.”

“Good.”

I hung up.

“Lucas, you’re a bastard,” I told the shopping precinct.

* * *

February. Valentine’s Day. Snow and sleet all over the country. For thirty minutes or so, the bus from Huddersfield wound its way through exhausted mill villages given over to hairdressing, dog breeding and an under-capitalized tourist trade. I got off it at three o’clock in the afternoon, but it seemed much later. The face of the church clock was already lit, and a mysterious yellow light was slanting across the window of the nave, as if someone was doing something in there with only a forty-watt bulb for illumination. Cars went past endlessly as I waited to cross the road, their exhausts steaming in the dark air. For a village it was quite noisy: tires hissing on the wet road, the bang and clink of soft-drink bottles being unloaded from a lorry outside the post office, some children I couldn’t see, chanting one word over and over again. Quite suddenly, above all this, I heard the pure musical note of a thrush and stepped out into the road.

“You’re sure no one got off the bus behind you?”

Pam kept me on the doorstep while she looked anxiously up and down the street, but once I was inside she seemed glad to have someone to talk to.

“You’d better take your coat off. Sit down. I’ll make you some coffee. No, here, just push the cat off the chair. He knows he’s not supposed to be there.”

It was an old cat, black and white, with dull, dry fur, and when I picked it up it was just a lot of bones and heat that weighed nothing. I set it down carefully on the carpet, but it jumped back on to my knee again immediately and began to dribble on my pullover. Another, younger animal was crouching on the windowsill, shifting its feet uncomfortably among the little intricate baskets of paper flowers as it stared out into the falling sleet, the empty garden.

“Get down off there!” Pam called as she hung my coat up in the tiny hall.

Both cats ignored her. She shrugged.

“They act as if they own the place.” It smelled as if they did. “They were strays. I don’t know why I encouraged them.” Then, as though she were still talking about the cats:

“How’s Lucas?”

“He’s surprisingly well,” I said. “You ought to keep in touch with him, you know.”

“I know.”

She smiled briefly.

“And how are you? I never see you.”

“Not bad. Feeling my age.”

“You don’t know the half of it yet,” she said. She stood in the kitchen doorway holding a tea towel in one hand and a cup in the other. “None of us do.” It was a familiar complaint. When she saw I was too preoccupied to listen, she went and banged things about in the sink. I heard water rushing into the kettle. While it filled up, she said something she knew I wouldn’t catch: then, turning off the tap:

“Something’s going on in the Pleroma. Something new. I can feel it.”

“Pam,” I said, “all that was over and done with twenty years ago.”

* * *

The fact is that even at the time I wasn’t at all sure what we had done. This will seem odd to you, I suppose, but all I remember now is a June evening drenched with the half-confectionery, half-corrupt smell of hawthorn blossoms. It was so thick we seemed to swim through it, through that and the hot evening light that poured between the hedgerows like transparent gold. I remember Yaxley because you don’t forget him easily. But what the three of us did under his guidance escapes me, as does its significance. There was, undoubtedly, some sort of loss: whether you described what was lost as “innocence” was very much up to you. Anyway, that was how it appeared to me: to call it “innocence” would be to beg too many questions.

Lucas and Pam made a lot more of it from the very start. They took it to heart.

And afterwards—perhaps two or three months afterwards, when it was plain that something had gone wrong, when things first started to pull out of shape—it was Pam and Lucas who convinced me to go and talk to Yaxley, whom we had promised never to contact again. They wanted to see if what we had done might somehow be reversed or annulled, what we’d lost bought back again.

“I don’t think it works that way,” I warned them, but I could see they weren’t listening.

“He’ll have to help us,” Lucas said.

“Why did we ever do it?” Pam asked me.

* * *

I went down the next day. The train was crowded. Across the table from me in the other window seat, a tall black man looked round smilingly and cracked his knuckles. He had on an expensive brown silk suit. The seats outside us were occupied by two middle-aged women who were going to London for a week’s holiday. They chattered constantly about a previous visit: they had walked across Tower Bridge in the teeth of a gale, and afterwards eaten baked potatoes on the north bank, admiring a statue of a dolphin and a girl; they had visited Greenwich. On their last day it had been the zoo in Regent’s Park where, gazing diffidently into the little heated compartments of the reptile house, they were surprised by a Thailand water lizard with a skin, one of them said, “like a canvas bag”.

She relished this description.

“Just like an old green canvas bag,” she repeated. “Didn’t it make you feel funny?” she insisted. But her friend seemed bored. “What?”

“That skin!”

At this the black man leaned forward and said, “It only makes me feel sad.”

His voice was low and pleasant. The women ignored him, so he appealed to me, “I couldn’t say why. Except that a lizard’s skin seems so shabby and ill-fitting.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen one,” I said.

“What if evolution were ideological after all?” he asked us. “With aesthetic goals?”

The women received this so woodenly that he was forced to look out of the window; and although he smiled at me once or twice in a preparatory way, as if he would have liked to reopen the conversation, he never did.

Later I went down the carriage to the lavatory, and then on to the buffet. While I was there the train stopped at Stevenage; when I returned to my seat I found that the women had moved to an empty table, and the negro had been replaced by a fat, red-faced man who looked like the older H. G. Wells and who slept painedly most of the way to London with his hands clasped across his stomach. He had littered the table with sandwich wrappers, plastic cups, an empty miniature of whisky, the pages of a newspaper. Just before the train pulled in, he woke up, glared at me suspiciously at this mess, and pushed something across to me.

“Last bloke in the seat left this for you,” he said. He had a thick northern accent.

It was a square of folded notepaper, on which had been written in a clear, delightfully even hand, “I couldn’t help noticing how you admired the birch trees. Birchwoods more than any others are meant to be seen by autumn light! It surprises them in a dance, a celebration of something which is, in a tree, akin to the animal. They dance even on cold still days when the air leaves them motionless: limbs like illuminated bone caught moving—or just ceasing to move—in a mauve smoke of twigs.”

This was unsigned. I turned it over but nothing more was written there.

I laughed.

“Was he black?” I asked.

“Aye, kid,” said the fat man: “He were.” He hauled himself to his feet and began, panting, to wrestle his luggage off the rack. “Black as fuck.”

As the train crawled the last mile into London, I had seen three sheets of newspaper fluttering round the upper floors of an office block like butterflies courting a flower. The Pleroma demands of us a passion for the world which, however distortedly, reflects it.

I still remember the intelligent eagerness of the negro’s smile—how he always had to talk about the world—the way his sharp-edged elegant cheekbones seemed, like tribal scars or a silk suit, to be more designed than organic.

* * *

Though he hated the British Museum, Yaxley had always lived one way or another in its shadow.

I met him at the Tivoli Espresso Bar, where I knew he would be every afternoon. The weather that day was damp. He wore a thick, old-fashioned black overcoat; but from the way his wrists stuck out of the sleeves, long and fragile-looking and dirty, covered with sore grazes as though he had been fighting with some small animal, I suspected he had no jacket or shirt on underneath it. He looked older than he was, the top half of his body stooped bronchially, his lower jaw stubbled with gray. I sometimes wonder if this was as much a pretence—although of a different order—as the
Church Times
he always carried, folded carefully to display part of a headline, which none of us ever saw him open.

At the Tivoli in those days they always had the radio on. Their coffee was watery and, like most espresso, too hot to taste of anything. Yaxley and I sat on stools by the window, resting our elbows on a counter littered with dirty cups and half-eaten sandwiches, and watched the pedestrians in Museum Street. After ten minutes a woman’s voice said clearly from behind us: “The fact is that the children just won’t try.”

Yaxley jumped and looked round haggardly, as if he expected to have to answer this.

“It’s the radio,” I reassured him.

He stared at me the way you would stare at someone who was mad, and it was some time before he went on with what he had been saying:

“You knew what you were doing. You got what you wanted, and you weren’t tricked in any way.”

“No,” I admitted.

My eyes had begun to ache: Yaxley soon tired you out.

“I can understand that,” I said. “That isn’t at issue. But I’d like to be able to reassure them somehow—”

Yaxley wasn’t listening.

It had come on to rain quite hard, driving the tourists—mainly Germans and Americans in Bloomsbury for the Museum—off the street. They all seemed to be wearing brand-new clothes. The Tivoli filled up quickly, and the air was soon heavy with the smell of wet coats. People trying to find seats constantly brushed our backs.