The Course of the Heart (23 page)

“Lucas.”

“Fuck off. You killed her.”

“Lucas!”

As the day began to fade, he made for the pedestrianized streets and softly lit malls where, preyed upon by greeds aroused but unassuaged by Christmas, shoppers clogged the replicated space, drifting slowly from window to window—past the ethnic knits and Barbourwear, the soft toys and “collector” ceramics—looking for some way of relieving the emptiness between Boxing Day and New Year. Sensing this, wounded long ago in his own optimism, Lucas had no way of controlling his rage and misery.

“Look at these fucking bastards!” he said loudly. “Haven’t they got anything better to do?”

Women stared at him angrily.

He sneered.

“The middle classes are always on watch!”

I edged him along Market Street towards the monolithic tiled shed of the bus station. I still hoped to get him on a bus. Lucas gazed up into the dim ceiling structures, full of dust and diesel smoke from revving engines, then down at a Mars bar wrapper blowing along near his feet. Against the gray concrete it looked like a small dun bird. He nodded judiciously.

“See that?” he said.

Without waiting for me to answer he continued, “It was very important to her to buy me a birthday present. Maltesers. I had to eat some of them in front of her.”

He said: “I loved her, you know.”

A bus arrived, bouncing on its suspension with the weight of children inside. Lucas watched them nervily, but allowed me to buy him a ticket. We would be home in ten minutes: less. I felt able to relax. Two stops later he was on his feet. “Let me off! I’m going to be sick!” This amused the children, who got down at the same stop to watch. I asked the driver if he could wait. It was snowing again, and I had no idea where we were. The illuminated signs of bed-and-breakfast hotels, electrical dealers and Chinese chippies receded along a wide street brown with slush, seamed and sagging with old repairs: halfway down I could see the trees at the corner of a park, traffic lights green and steady at an empty junction. Lucas leaned over a low brick wall and groaned his vomit out into the car park of the Floral Hotel. The bus driver grinned and shrugged as if to say “Well that’s that then,” and drove away before we could get back on. For a moment the children tried to push one another under his wheels then lost interest and dispersed without warning into the shops and narrow side streets. Five minutes later I could still hear them howling and shrieking motivelessly in the distance. They seemed to be speaking another language, African or Asian. Echoing away between the dark walls of the houses, their voices conveyed only excitement inflated out of all proportion, cries of fear and panic, urgent, insistent, penetrating.

“Christ,” said Lucas, wiping his mouth.

I knelt down facing him and held his head between the palms of my hands. His cheeks were damp from the falling snow. I had the feeling that if I couldn’t get him to listen, things would slip away from us for good.

“It was never your fault, Lucas.” I made him look at me.

“None of it was your fault, Cambridge or any of it. All three of us chose to do it, whatever it was.”

He shook me off, stood up, and tried to turn away. “What do you know?” he accused. Suddenly, the thin, intelligent lines of his face went flabby, his eyes wide and appalled.

“Lucas!”

He wasn’t looking at me at all, but over my shoulder. He whispered something I couldn’t catch, then: “Not here. Please.” A small dark object came turning over and over out of the gloom behind me, landed on the snow at Lucas’s feet with a soft wet thud, and burst, spraying his trousers with sticky, fizzing liquid. Someone had thrown an open soft-drink can at us. I stared up and down the road. It was still empty. “Christ!” Lucas repeated. “Not now!” He walked off quickly. Ten or fifteen yards on the left was the lighted doorway of a pub, the Golden Crown, and beyond that a dimly lit sign in yellow day-glo: IDEO CLUB. As Lucas passed beneath it, two motorcycles parked at the curb fell down with a clatter. Lucas, who was nowhere near them, whimpered and brushed at his trouser legs. “Go away!” he shouted, and ran off into the residential maze behind the pub. These old crescents of glazed red brick seemed deserted despite their renovated windows, figured glass doors, gardens full of clipped laurel and shiny-leaved holly. Snow whirled and eddied in the lamplight; snow lay thick in the open gateways.

Lucas hadn’t got far when a small figure slipped out from between two parked cars and began to follow him closely along the pavement, imitating his typical walk, head thrust forward, hands in pockets. When he stopped to button his jacket, it stopped too, I thought at first it was a boy or girl about six or seven years old, in an adult coat which trailed around its feet. But when I called “Lucas!” and started running to catch up, it paused under a street lamp to look back at me. In the sodium light I found myself looking at neither a child nor a dwarf but something of both, with the eyes, gait and pink face of a large monkey. Its gaze was quite blank, stupid and implacable: warning me off, but frightened of me too. Lucas became aware of it suddenly and jumped with surprise; he ran a few aimless steps, shouting, then dodged round a corner, but it only followed him hurriedly. I thought I heard him pleading, “Why don’t you leave me alone?” and in answer came a voice at once tinny and muffled, barely audible yet strained as if shouting. Then there was a terrific clatter and I saw some large object like an old zinc dustbin fly out and go rolling about in the middle of the road.

“Lucas!” I called.

When I rounded the corner I found that he was alone. He had fallen—or been knocked over—on his back in the slush at the side of the road, then turned half over and, like a dead insect contracting, curled up into the fetal position. His clothes were sodden. He was clutching his left wrist or forearm with his right hand. As I approached him, he tried to sit up.

“Christ,” he said thickly. “Not again. Give me a chance. Oh, it’s you.”

“What was that thing, Lucas?”

He laughed bitterly. “That’s my little gift from the Pleroma,” he said. “That’s what I got for wrecking my life all those years ago.” He winced, and sat down again in the half-melted snow. “Once it starts, you never get free. I think the fucker’s broken something this time.”

“Where does it hurt most, Lucas?”

After a moment he laughed wildly and pointed at his own head.

“Here,” he said. “In here.”

He ignored the arm I was offering, struggled on to his knees, looked down at himself. “It’s hurt in here for forty fucking years,” he said. “Ever since I was born.” He brushed disgustedly at the mess. “What can you, a mere priest, do about that?”

“Lucas,” I warned him.

He shrugged and held out the heel of his hand. “I scraped that when I fell.”

“You’ll live.”

“I’m buggered if I will,” he said. “Not this time.” He staggered off into the sodium light.

“Lucas!”

Suddenly he stopped and turned back to face me.

“So much for the fucking Pleroma!” he shouted. “Eh? So much for fucking magic! I got the dwarf. Pam got the white couple. What did you get? I’ll tell you. You fell in the shit and came up smelling of flowers. No wonder you can afford to be so fucking patronizing!”

“I’m going home, Lucas,” I said.

But I didn’t. Sooner or later someone would have to spend time at Pam Stuyvesant’s last cottage and there sort out her life—order it, if only in the sense of finding a home for the cats; ask, “Is the father still alive?” and try to get in touch if he was; bring things to a close. It might as well be me, if only because it was always me. Lucas would never face up to it. I left him to his despair and his vile little familiar, walked back to the city center, and then, after an hour’s wait in the raw cold at Victoria Station, boarded a train to Huddersfield.

It was raining on the other side of the Pennines. Outside Huddersfield station I got into a taxi which smelt warm and sweaty, as if it had been used all day to transport dogs. The driver was wearing two or three unraveling cardigans; as I opened the door he reached out and turned the heater up. We went slowly through the town center—it had a varnished appearance in the rain and orange light—while he carried on an interminable argument with his dispatcher. “Well if you can’t find it there,” he kept repeating, “get Addie to try downstairs.” Once he said, “Get her off her arse then.” Outside the town, he drove boredly, treating intersections and traffic signs with a kind of indolent irony as if he was too clever for whoever had put them there, occasionally looking sideways at the stone walls and farmhouses with no show of interest. “Don’t bother,” he told the radio eventually, his eyes focused somewhere off past the windscreen. “I’m coming in. I’m getting nothing but rubbish tonight anyway.”

“This will do.” I said, although I knew I would have to walk another four hundred yards to Pam’s house: “I’ll get out here.” He looked round at the empty village.

“Please yourself.”

He drove off slowly. I could see him staring at me over his shoulder, one arm stretched along the back of the passenger seat. I swapped my bag from my left hand to my right and wondered what he was saying to the dispatcher. The rain was still coming down. If I had wanted to look I could have seen my face in the gleaming pavement.

I found Pam’s gate hanging open and a woman in a pale-colored raincoat knocking at her front door. She seemed to have been waiting there in the shadows for some time.

“Can I help?” I called from the pavement, “No one’s here now.”

She stood away from the door with a sudden apologetic movement.

“Pam?” I said.

* * *

But it wasn’t her. The face was that of a much younger woman, about my own height, with heavy dark hair which she pushed patiently out of her eyes, revealing them to be gray, rather large and childlike. They gave you the odd idea that at some time they had seen something she had not. I had no conception of what it might be, but later I was unable to stop thinking about it. Her smile had a kind of warmth and sensuousness. If her face lacked animation, the broad, full-lipped mouth warmed it; and the eyes, which knew something she didn’t—or at least something I didn’t—illumined it: together they rescued it from blankness and lack of affect and made it deeply attractive.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s the light. I mistook you for someone else.”

“Are you the owner?”

“A friend of mine lives here,” I caught myself saying.

“I see.”

I wondered if she did. As far as I could understand, she was collecting for some charity, Oxfam or Christian Aid; or at least conducting on its behalf a preliminary survey.

“We don’t reach as many people as we’d like to.”

“I’m not very religious,” I said.

She would have a Volvo parked further along the road; two children at a local school; she would live in a converted cottage on the road to Manchester, where her husband worked during the day in the personnel office of an insurance company. I could imagine her drying her hair with a white towel in front of the mirror when she got home, repeating, “Not as many as we’d like,” to someone in another room. She had a very faint accent I couldn’t identify.

Suddenly she said: “Isn’t this beautiful?”

Almost filling the little garden at the front of the house was a blackcurrant bush which Pam Stuyvesant had allowed to grow tall and woody because, she said, it obscured part of the lounge window and made net curtains unnecessary. Now the night was full of its pleasant musty odor.

“Isn’t it?” I agreed.

The flowers, which I knew would be pink in the daylight, looked like yellow wax. I pulled some of them towards me—drops of water showered down—and broke them off. I was glad to have something to talk to her about.

“This smell always reminds me of my childhood—”

But when I turned back to offer her the flowers I found that she had walked off without a word. Her pale figure moved rapidly up the street into the rain, shoulders hunched as if she had lost interest.

“I can’t think why, though,” I finished. “Still, you often can’t.”

Pam’s house was exactly as I remembered it, a little colder, a little dustier from disuse. Her neighbors had been feeding the cats, which ran up purring, tails high, as soon as I switched the lights on inside, and began to weave about in front of me, rubbing their heads against the furniture. I went straight through to the kitchen and put the kettle on. Staring out at the passage where in another life Pam had been compelled to witness the mating of the white couple, I shuddered; I closed the blind. I gave the cats a tin of meat and liver dinner.

Then I remembered how late in the year it was. “Christ!”

I rushed back out into the front garden, where the damp air was still haunted by the breath of flowers. I stood there in a kind of fury of understanding, staring first at the blackcurrant with its freight of delicate yellow candles, then along the empty street. I had been in the house for no more than a minute or two. I listened, and thought I could hear, a long way off, the tap of high heels.

“Hello?” I shouted. “Come back!”

The door slammed behind me and I was filled with panic. I couldn’t get my key into the lock. For a moment I thought I had the wrong one, but when I held it up to the stuporous orange light I saw that embossed on it was the logo “Mr. Minnit”. Soon after Pam became ill, Lucas had had two or three of these duplicates cut somewhere in Manchester, and they never seemed to fit as well as the original. Eventually it turned.

As I let myself back in the smell of the blackcurrant grew acrid and overpowering, and the sense I had of understanding something faded. I knew that if I looked back there would no longer be any blossom on the bush, only drops of water like tears on every stem.

By then, the conversation on the doorstep seemed distant and confused. At one point, I believed, I had heard her say, “I wanted to die.” (Her eyes had closed, as if she were testing the idea briefly, then opened again.) I thought about this in Pam’s front room while Pam’s cats sat licking themselves companionably on the carpet. Rain blew against the window behind me; I turned up the gas fire and drank my tea. If she had been collecting for charity why had she talked of dying, and let so many silences fall between us?