The Course of the Heart (22 page)

Beautiful Swimmers
took two hours to read, perhaps a little more. The final chapter began with such a barely coherent out-pouring of delight I could hardly tell whether Ashman was describing “the Coeur”, or the world we already know—

“A rainbow like fire pouring down from heaven. Bare trees glimpsed through the violet end of the rainbow, transfigured, delicate, fragile and complex as a sea-creature in a bowl of water. Gold light on everything. Every object or event in this moment has idealized itself, every hawthorn hedge or gate in the twilight, every fold of a hill, every peach and silver line of cloud above an orange sun, every conifer in a suburban garden black against the house with its strings of fairy lights round each yellow window.”

Later, though, he passed into doubt and anger—“We were all mad people, who heard voices and misinterpreted dreams”—to end with this strange and bitter cry:

“Willows bending over the roads, their leaves silver in the wind: comprehend the Heart, and you will never experience it.”

* * *

The flat was chilly, and I had eaten nothing since two o’clock that afternoon. Nevertheless, I sat for a long time with the manuscript on my knee, amused and thoughtful.

Remember, I knew nothing about this. In all those letters, miserable or elated, written to me over the years since their marriage, Pam and Lucas had been careful never to give anything away. I had never seen the word “Coeur” written on paper, or heard it spoken down a telephone line. I was a publisher. It was easy for me to assume that Lucas—that dark horse!—had almost completed rather a clever novel. So I was quite unprepared for what happened next.

He got back from Manchester just after midnight and parked the Renault exhaustedly, sawing it up and down for several minutes in the snow. Then he came slowly up the stairs and stood in the center of the room the way you stand in someone else’s house waiting for them to make you feel comfortable. Last night’s cut, inflamed and sore, embedded in its yellowing bruise, made his face look paler than it was. He had arrived at Christie’s just after I left, he told me. He had been there ever since. “That ward’s bloody noisy in the evenings,” he said. “You can’t hear yourself think.” Then: “She’s not good today.” To make things worse, there was fresh snow on that side of town. “I had a lousy drive back.” He blinked and rubbed the inside corners of his eyes with the tips of his fingers. I caught him staring in a vague way at the faded patches on the wall. Perhaps he was trying to remember where the pictures had gone.

“Lousy,” he repeated.

He took his coat off and sat down.

“Turn the fire on if you’re cold,” I said, “and I’ll make you some coffee.”

I held out the manuscript of
Beautiful Swimmers
. “What have you been hiding from me here?”

He took it, stared down at it in a shocked way, then up at me. Tears began to run down his face.

“Lucas! What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry.”

“What for? Lucas, it was a joke!”

“After Cambridge,” Lucas said, “we couldn’t believe that was the end.”

I stood over him. I touched his shoulder.

“Come on, Lucas. I only meant I didn’t know you’d written a book.”

He didn’t seem to hear.

“We’d done everything Yaxley suggested and nothing had come of it. Nothing could come of it. Pam was ill. Yaxley had vanished. You had lost interest in us.”

“All that was over years ago, Lucas.”

“Listen!” he said. He had to turn his head up at an odd angle to look at me. “Just listen, for once!—

“The Pleroma isn’t what the Gnostics thought it was. It’s terrifying. Impossible to understand. Without something like the Coeur to buffer it, Heaven is harder to bear than—” he made a helpless gesture “—all this. The world. Do you see? We had nowhere to turn. We had to believe something.”

I let him sob.

“What have you promised her, Lucas?”

“At least try to understand. It isn’t just a book. She’s the Heir. She’s the Empress.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“She is the Coeur. She won’t die. I’ve told her she won’t die.”

I hadn’t slept properly all week. Tomorrow I would have to get up early, catch the train home, buy Christmas presents, put an ordinary face on it for Kit and Katherine. And now this again. I went over to the window. If I looked into the street I wouldn’t have to look at Lucas. There was a clear moon through the trees. A few clouds high up redistributed its light, which had lent them the color of a fish’s skin. “Lucas…” I began, but I couldn’t think of anything I hadn’t said a hundred times before, and I got no further. Lucas wasn’t listening anyway. He had turned the gas fire up full and huddled close to it, his face lax and tear streaked.

“You’re always waking up at the exact moment your life goes away from you,” he said.

He added:

“That’s what Pam thought.”

Hot and tired and a bit nauseated, I stood as close to the window as I could and gently touched my forehead to it. My breath bloomed on the glass, but I could still see moonlight glittering in the long thin discolored icicles hanging from the sash windows on each side of the street, where condensation had run down the inside of the window panes to seep out yellow with tobacco smoke and cooking fumes.

“Life’s aware of itself,” Lucas proceeded, “even as you piss it down the drain. You’re forever catching its last signal: the urge to laugh or fuck or give your money away which you’ve just ignored.”

“Lucas, we’re free to change our minds.”

“Too late. As soon as you stop acting spontaneously, your life becomes a fiction.”

I could only laugh.

“That’s a simple philosophy,” I pointed out, “for a couple who invented their own Middle Europe.”

But he was already too confused to notice this. “I won’t live a lie—” he said.

An old Bengali woman came out of the house across the road and stood looking up and down the street. In the lighted passage behind her I could see a child’s bicycle, a pair of stepladders. She wore cheap Wellington boots, and over her traditional dress a council worker’s coat. To her, snow was an alien, Sisyphean substance. Every day since the first fall she had been busy trying to clear her front steps, using a small red plastic dustpan. Morning, afternoon, quite late at night, you could see her shuffling to and fro across the pavement, the dustpan held stiffly out in front of her. It was too small for the job. Much of its contents remained compacted inside each time she emptied it. She had an air of inexpendable patience. As I watched, the wind got up and blew a cloud of spindrift round her. She bent down. I heard the distinct scrape of the dustpan.

Live a lie: it was one of Pam’s phrases. You’re living a lie. They’re living a lie. I won’t live a lie. Like all the others, it had signaled only a need for medication.

“—and Pam never would, either.”

“That was her trouble, Lucas,” I said bitterly.

The Bengali woman stopped work for a moment and went inside. When she reappeared, she had wound a colored woolen scarf round her slack brown neck. Her breath puffed out white in the freezing air.

“Look, Lucas: the world’s ours. We make it, minute to minute. Pam would never admit that. It frightened her to have responsibility for her own needs. She wanted the universe personalized. A father who would look out for her. Happy accidents. Gifts. Things that came demonstrably from outside, so she felt special. That’s the biggest lie of all.”

“Why are you talking as if she’s already dead?” he shouted.

“Grow up, Lucas.”

I waited for a moment then added deliberately:

“Kicking this place apart every day isn’t going to help you, either.”

There was a brief awful silence.

“You don’t know anything!” he said. “What do you fucking know?”

“Lucas. Don’t. I’m sorry. I—”

He got up with such violence his chair fell over, and ran out of the room. “Lucas!” I heard his footsteps all the way down the stairs and into the hall. The front door slammed. From the window I could see him floundering across the square, trying to run against the resistance offered by the snow. The Bengali woman watched him too. She remained there for a moment, her breath visible in the sharp air, then emptied her dustpan for the last time, drew her clothes tightly round her and went up the steps into her house.

“Lucas,” I said. My head felt like an empty cinema.

* * *

He was back some time in the small hours. He had forgotten his keys. He stood there on the doorstep, frail, tense, resigned, incapable of organizing his own resources. It was his favorite act, and just for once I wanted to tell him so: all that came out was, “You look utterly buggered.” Inside, he crouched down over the gas fire, coughing and rubbing his hands together.

“Look,” he said. “You should go home tomorrow. Come back when you can. I really don’t mind.”

He did: but he was losing ground against himself.

“You do mind, Lucas.”

He nodded. He narrowed his eyes. I could feel him measuring something. It turned out to be me. “I do,” he admitted. “And so do you. You know you do.”

“You’re a bastard, Lucas.”

“You love her as much as I do.”

I made him have a bath while I got him something to eat. Then I went to bed and left him to it, and in the morning caught an InterCity 125 to Euston so I could spend Christmas at home with my family. If they found me miserable and withdrawn they didn’t say so, for which I was grateful. “How are things up there?” Katherine asked me on Boxing Day. “Not good,” I answered. She put her arms round me. “It will soon be over.” Kit had given me some marker pens and a new shirt. “I wrapped them myself!” After some thought she had also given me her favorite postcard, featuring a Botticelli Venus with whom at that time she strongly identified. Lucas didn’t telephone. I returned to Manchester, as I had promised, on the morning of the 27
^th
. From the train, everything looked astonishingly beautiful: factory chimneys dissolving in a blaze of sunshine you couldn’t bear to look at, smoke wreathing in the clear blue sky. Some children were playing with a tire in a snowy field, enveloped in transparent, bitter air. The sun reflected pink and gold on the icy surface between them.

Lucas was at Piccadilly to meet me.

“I’m sorry,” we said to each other in unison.

As if she had been waiting for us to be reconciled, Pam hung on another day or so and then died.

* * *

“Make the most of your life,” she often repeated. “It doesn’t matter how,” She clutched Lucas’s hands. “Promise me you’ll make the most of it.” In her brief moments of lucidity she could still be optimistic. She would look out of the window and say, “Do you know, I don’t regret a day that I was sent. Isn’t that odd? Not a day!” Much of the time, though, she was in despair. You would have a job to recognize her in the games this caused her to play with us.

“Sit here. By me. I want to watch you commit suicide.”

She would open her eyes drowsily and smile.

A moment later, terror forced her back to the safety of childhood, from which she recited nursery-rhymes, hymns, the nominees for skipping or ball-games, some of which had a deadly irony: “Touch your head, touch your toes,” Manchester children recite when they see an ambulance, “Never go in one of those.” Lucas was distressed. She eluded him increasingly in this surreal half-world of pain and morphine addiction. That is a bad way to put it, I know. It was Lucas and I who found it “surreal”, because of the contrast between the catheterized woman with the amputated breasts—nightdress riding up round her white body, emaciated, bedsored and perpetually trembling—and the childish voice. God knows how she experienced it.

Somewhere down inside herself, you sensed, she was holding on with both hands when all she wanted to do was let go. She wouldn’t relinquish the promises she and Lucas had made to each other. The Coeur, and through it the Pleroma, was all to be hers; and through her, his. She was the Heir. She could not die. She was determined to dispatch the “pained clue” of herself into the future, accomplish on Lucas’s behalf that extraordinary act of prophecy and sacrifice Michael Ashman had talked of in
Beautiful Swimmers
. Her glazed, taut expression was as much the result of determination as it was of fear, pain, the animal need to endure. Whatever Lucas had intended—and I’m sure it was comfort—he had ensured that her death would be as much of a struggle as her life. I couldn’t forgive him that, despite what happened later.

“As children none of the women in that family would ever go to sleep,” he had once written to me.

“You see them in photographs at three years old, almost blind with tiredness, puffy-eyed, heavy-lidded as vamps from a silent film, white, thin, with expressions as old and vulnerable as baby mice. They won’t let go. They won’t give in. In later life, rather than sleep, they smoke another cigarette, make another cup of instant coffee, read another page of
Lost Horizon
.”

At the very end, she wasn’t anything at all. Whatever they had promised each other was a rag in the wind, the disease took it all away. Lucas stayed with her and held her hand, but I couldn’t bear to look at her. I wanted to remember her ill but still human, saying something like, “I never get tired of the view from this window.” Out in the corridor the afternoon she died, a little nurse with frizzy orange hair offered me a cup of tea and said:

“You can’t imagine how we all admire her. We’ve never had a patient who sent her relatives away so happy.”

I stared numbly at the vases of flowers. “I’m not a relative.”

Pam shrieked.

“The white couple! The white couple!”

* * *

Lucas wouldn’t be comforted. His eyes vague with an undischargeable energy, he abandoned the Renault in Christie’s car park and set out to walk through the snow into central Manchester. I followed him along Oxford Road trying to persuade him to take a taxi. “Or at least get on a bus. Lucas!” I could hardly keep up with him. Every so often he turned back and said something unforgivable; but I could see that his hatred was for himself as much as me.