The Course of the Heart (21 page)

She was three years old, escaping towards the sea with some other child’s toy. It was an inflatable horse. It was blue. But what color of blue was it? Lucas didn’t remember. How could he?

“Go away then!” she told him. “Go away.”

Her other relationships were equally confused.

“They’ve been so wonderful, whatever happens,” she would say suddenly of the doctors or nurses; only to beg a few minutes later, “You’ve got to get me out of here! They won’t tell me anything!”

We shared the visits. Since Lucas could rarely get away until four, I went to see her in the afternoons. Lucas took over when he had finished work. In the evenings I left them together as often as I could. I would go to the cinema, eat at McDonald’s, call Katherine from a vandalized box on Oxford Road—“Hello. I love you.” “Hello?”—then go home and try to tidy up Lucas’s flat. Afternoons were Pam’s best time. On the cusp between one dose and the next, she sometimes salvaged half an hour of the Pam Stuyvesant I remembered. “Aren’t these gladioli beautiful?” she would insist: or, “Have you seen the view from my window? I never get tired of it!” Looking out through the wavy Victorian glass you found the snow had melted to reveal a few trees and tilting board fences touched at that time of year with deep green lichen. Some sunlight, bright but dilute, slanted across the street, making you wish for frost, holly berries, one vigorous figure, one event which might give it the effect of a Christmas card. This didn’t matter to Pam. “It cheers me up, it really does.”

But the recapture of lucidity had dangers of its own. Two or three nights before Christmas Lucas came home early and complained: “The whole time I was there, she just stared at the TV.
Celebrity Squares
. The whole fucking time! Can you understand that?”

Later, when he had calmed down, he added:

“She looked horrified. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know what she was actually seeing.”

I knew.

* * *

“How are you?”

Three thirty: Christie’s. Two beds along from Pam on the other side of the ward, a fat woman stood up, retrieved her handbag, sat down again abruptly. She wore an angora wool skirt with a matching scarf; pinned to her head was a kind of trilby hat apparently made out of carpet material. She had been trying to leave for half an hour. “Well, goodbye dear,” she said cheerfully each time she got up. “I expect I’ll see you this time tomorrow.” The air in Ward Three was brown and gloomy. Every so often, colored light from the television flickered through it like sunshine through moving branches; discovered Pam’s white face; and pulled the cheekbones this way and that in shifting relief. Her eyes were wide yet uninterested, her voice filled with a faint disgust.

“About the same.”

She seemed to be about to add something, but in the end only gestured tiredly at the screen. “That about sums it up today.”

“What’s the program?”

“What do you think?” she said.

It was hard to say. Faces and limbs in some sort of crisis, filmed at odd angles by hand-held camera and lost in interference, had been intercut with pictures of sheep and goats running to and fro in an empty stone building. Gradually these images were allowed to leak into one another until there emerged something like a damp watercolor landscape—mud and rocks in umber colors: indistinct animals: another face staring anxiously out. This in its turn flared and darkened into soft ungeometric shapes which pulsed gently like the organs of the body. After a moment or two the color faded entirely, as though the set had gone out of adjustment. Patches of whiteness began to merge and separate rhythmically against a uniform gray background. “There!” said Pam. The picture had resolved again. I caught a single glimpse of white limbs intertwined, and looked away as quickly as I could. At the same time the soundtrack came up. “In the afternoons.” I heard a faint dull voice say, “it was too hot to sit still. She lay on her back on the sofa with her skirt pulled up and her hand between her legs. Her knickers were always damp. At night she would crouch down over him, push his cock into her, and move strongly up and down on it grunting and panting until she came.”

“Christ!”

“Ask everyone else what they’re watching,” said Pam. “It won’t be this.”

“…this,” echoed the sound-track: “His cock detumesced and fell out. Mixed sperm and juices ran out to cool and dry between his pubic hair and hers.”

Poor Pam! She was shaking. When I tried to put my arm round her shoulders, she moved away.

“No. No.”

* * *

“It’s the morphine, Lucas.”

“I suppose so,” he conceded, “I suppose it is.”

Morphine, heart’s ease, hinge of truth. He had hauntings of his own, for which he had hardly begun to find comfort. It would only have distressed him further to know that she could see right through
Celebrity Squares
or
Take the High Road
to where the white couple hung just inside every TV set, smiling out at her while they clasped and pushed and panted and turned to and fro like a chrysalis in a hedge. To divert him I asked:

“What shall I do with this?”

We had decided we would clean the kitchen. A baking tray, earthenware casseroles of different sizes, the scorched oven glove shaped like a fish: Lucas had a way of handling each object as if he hoped to recognize something he had mislaid when he moved house years before. He took hours to cook anything and longer to wash up.

“I don’t know.”

That evening it started snowing again. Wintery weather was moving across the north-west on a broad front. Falls would be quite heavy, the television predicted; winds light. I went to bed early, and woke surprised not long after. Midnight. Laughter amplified by the cold air. Couples were still floundering past outside with linked arms, feet turned out, heads wrapped up dark and globular against the cold. People love snow. I lay there listening to them for a moment or two, wondering what had woken me. Then I heard a thud and a low cry from Lucas’s room, followed immediately by an extraordinary outbreak of banging and crashing, as if someone was breaking up the front-room chairs and then throwing pieces of them about. “Lucas!” I called. “Are you all right?” Never a good sleeper, he was up and down all night, disturbed by his nightmares or making his way to the lavatory to pee noisily into the silence. Despite this, he would never switch on the lights. I assumed he had fallen over something at last. “Lucas?” He said something indistinct but reassuring, then cried out suddenly in such an appalled voice I got straight out of bed and went to the door. Nothing sounds worse than a raised voice in someone else’s house at night. Bad dreams, illness, self-pity in the small hours: you have no idea how to respond. Both bedrooms opened on to a short narrow passage painted white, an uncurtained window at one end of which admitted snow-light reflected up from the street. In this cold but buoyant illumination I could easily make out the pictures on the walls either side of Lucas’s door, clip-framed photographs of a visit to some exotic country, Turkey perhaps, or Afghanistan, where very bright sunshine flooded through a deeply recessed window on to broad-striped orange and ochre rugs. I stood there in my underpants, shivering, and knocked. The noise redoubled. Something was flung heavily against the door itself, which flexed under the impact. I pushed. It resisted. Everything went quiet again.

“Lucas?”

Nothing.

“Lucas!”

I was about to turn away when the door jerked open and Lucas stuck his head out so suddenly that I backed into the wall of the passage. It was hard to see what was wrong with him—the bedside lamp in the room behind him was flickering like a damaged fluorescent tube—but his face seemed both white and dirty, and there was blood running down one side of it from a cut above his eye.

“What do you want?” he said irritably, as if it was me who had called for help in the middle of the night.

“Lucas—”

“There’s no need to come in,” he said. “I had a bit of an accident. Go back to sleep now.” He closed the door until all I could see was his left eye and the cut above it, swollen, blue with bruised tissue. He was trembling. “Go back to sleep,” he repeated. “It’s all right.”

“Lucas—”

The door closed suddenly.

“Lucas!”

Silence.

I went back to the spare room and stood at the window for some time with the duvet wrapped round my shoulders, staring down into the street. The snow directly beneath each sodium lamp was orange: a little further away it became a fragile tremulous pink, a color on the edge of tenure, unassuming, shy, threatened. Though Pam was still alive, Lucas already felt bereaved. The bereft, we say, are less dismayed than in a rage; and I was afraid Lucas’s rage would damage him. How can you protect someone from a grief which causes him to throw his furniture about in the middle of the night? This may have been the wrong question to ask. By now the street was empty. Parked for the night, the cars had grown strange and shapeless. In the morning, I knew, they would look as if they had been molded from styrofoam—blind, blunt models in some early, uninteresting stage of design.

* * *

The next day Pam was moved into a small side-ward. Her bouts of pain and delirium had been upsetting other patients, the ward sister told us; it would be easier to manage her there.

“Easier to manage her death,” Lucas said bitterly.

Pam put a brave face on it. “How nice to have a room of your own.” In the end though I think she would have preferred to stay where she was. “They were real characters in Ward Three,” she said to me, as if I had been there to: “Weren’t they?”

She laughed.

“Oh, Lucas, aren’t people funny?”

“I’m not Lucas,” I said.

She took my hand.

“I know that, really. Tell him I love him.”

That was one of the last lucid things she said to me.

* * *

When I got back to Lucas’s flat late that afternoon, I found that he had been in at lunchtime and wrecked it. All the internal doors were propped open. The plates had been taken out of the kitchen and smashed in the bath; fragments of the bedside table from the spare room were scattered round the kitchen. Though he had chosen the hall outside his bedroom as the best place in which to wrench the house plants out of their pots, the earth they had been potted in now formed a thin careful layer over every carpet in the house. The bathroom wash-basin was cracked where it had been hit repeatedly with a ball-peen hammer. Some of the kitchen cupboards had been emptied and their contents thrown around under the intense bleak light of the fluorescent strip—packets of dried soup, pasta, and tortilla chips, Marks & Spencer’s coffee beans, bottles of vegetable oil and Hungarian red wine, in a congealing slick on the tiled floor. But the front room was the preferred site of destruction. The shades were off the lamps. The chairs were on their backs. Awed, I gazed round at Lucas’s pictures, broken in half as if they had been snapped across someone’s knee; the bookcases which lay on their faces in the center of the room, volumes spilling out from under them like talus; the shattered plastic molding and sheaf of colored threadlike wires which was all that remained of the telephone. Lucas’s grief had led him to tear up his own shirts. Finally, he had pulled all the papers out of the filing cabinet in his bedroom and thrown them in on top of the pile. It looked as if he had planned to make a bonfire in his lounge.

I stood there trying to take in the scale of it. The flat was so quiet you could almost hear him dragging the bulkier items from room to room, panting with effort, sobbing perhaps, repeating over and over again, “Easier to manage her death. Easier to manage her death.”

“Lucas, for Christ’s sake.”

An hour later I had righted the bookcases, vacuumed the carpets and cleaned the kitchen floor, thrown the pictures in the dustbin. Most of the books were undamaged, but it took another hour to pack them back on to the shelves. By eight o’clock I had gathered all his papers into a pile, made myself a cup of coffee, and come back to start sorting them out. I was pushing crumpled sheets of A4 into an old blue concertina file, when my eye caught the first sentence of the following paragraph:

“For two nights and a day the harbor had been in flames. In any case, there is no escape from inside the meaning of things. The Empress Gallica XII Hierodule, mounted and wearing polished plate armor but—in response some thought to a dream she had had as a child at the court of Charles VII of France—carrying no weapons, waited with her captains, Theodore Lascaris and the twenty-three-year-old English adventurer Michael Neville (later ‘Michael of Anjou’), for the last assault on the citadel. The outer walls were already weakened by three weeks of bombardment from landward. The labyrinthine powder magazines were exhausted. Smoke from the besieging cannon drifted here and there in the sunlight, sometimes like strips of rag, sometimes like a thick black fog.”

I looked for the title at the top of the page.
Beautiful Swimmers.

“What are you up to Lucas?”

I was fascinated. I put the sheets in order, made another cup of coffee, and began at the beginning—

“Concrete only yields more concrete. Since the war the cities of the Danube all look like Birmingham. When I was a boy you could still see how they had once been the dark core of Europe. If you travelled south and east, the new Austria went behind you—like a Secession cakestand full of the same old Austro-Hungarian cakes—and you were lost in the steep cobbled streets which smelt of charcoal smoke and paprika, fresh leather from the saddler’s.”

The manuscript, though it amounted to sixty or seventy thousand words, was incomplete: the life of “Michael Ashman” between 1947 and 1968 being sketched in with annotated cuttings from the
News Chronicle
and other newspapers of the time, a faded snapshot or two labeled “Ashman in the Garden at Catesby” or “Ashman’s aunt”, and a few thousand words of notes. Ashman’s creative revision of history was documented at length, along with the conclusions he had drawn from it, in footnotes which referred to writers as far apart as Gilbert Murray
(Five Stages of Greek Religion
, 1933) and Norman Cohn
(The Pursuit of the Millennium
, 1957). One or two elements were preserved on the original postcards Lucas had sent to Pam in the early years of their marriage. Most of the text was typed, single-spaced and with very small margins, on the old Olivetti; much, though, had been handwritten at high speed in ball-point pen on the kind of ruled, punched paper students use. After the events at Burrington Combe, all pretence of an autobiography or memoir was abandoned. Instead, Ashman embarked on a dense, disconnected meditation around the theme of self-sacrifice (which he had originally described as “the narcissism at the center of Christianity”). He was trying to convince himself of something, though it was difficult to see what. “Every sacrifice is a ‘sending on before’, an attempt to prophesy or bring about the conditions of prophecy. All art, all religion, all ‘history’, is only this pained clue dispatched to the future.”