The Course of the Heart (25 page)

“Why did we come here?” he asked himself. “We might as well have met at the railway station.”

“Because you’re a romantic, Lucas.” He shrugged.

“You’d know,” he said. I laughed.

Lucas looked around him with a kind of amused helplessness. “This isn’t going to be one of my better days.” He offered me a copy of Bruno Bettelheim’s
The Informed Heart
. “Look at that,” he said in disgust. “He’s a saint.”

“Lucas?”

“He’s a saint,” Lucas explained impatiently, “and they want two pounds fifty for him, second hand.” He looked at his watch. “We’ve got hours before the train,” he complained.

Over the years the bookshop had been knocked haphazardly into dozens of finicky little rooms: section connected to section—however contiguous—by annex, passageway, steps up and down, often with bewildering changes of direction as each new builder strove to avoid knocking out structural members, so that you always seemed to end up back where you started. “Two pounds fifty for that?” Lucas would say in a high pitying voice every time he saw the Bettelheim, and glance back over his shoulder, trying to decide what other turning we should have taken. “It’s absurd.”

Two women stood irresolutely on a top-floor landing.

“Oh Christine!” one of them was saying as we passed. “And it was one of Daddy’s favorite plays!”

“Don’t touch my arm.”

Lucas glared at them. From somewhere below came a noise like a damp cardboard box full of books bursting as it fell down the stairs.

“Let’s get out of here!” he said suddenly. He looked savage and ill. “This old junk. I—Well, it isn’t funny any more.” He wrinkled his nose. He could smell the stifled front rooms, vicarage studies, failed private schools all over the north-west, which had given up all these cramped, affectless, unread collections of
Men and Books, Books and Characters, Adjectives and Other Words
. Eventually we found the main door of the shop and were able to leave.

“If you spent too long in there your spirit would heave itself inside out!”

Lucas stood looking up and down the pavement.

“Let’s meet Pam early!” he suggested. “If we get a bus to Lancaster and then on, we could leave here now, without waiting for the train—”

“We were supposed to wait for this train.”

“Does that matter to you?” he appealed.

“You said it was part of the instructions.”

“Let’s go now. Pam won’t know!”

I thought about the dreams I had had the night before. I said tiredly, “Of course she won’t. Lucas, Pam’s dead. She’s dead.” But he knew I would give him anything when he was in this mood, if only to prevent him damaging himself.

* * *

Even so, we didn’t get away by bus. For some reason he could only explain by saying, “I don’t like to carry a lot of things around with me,” his briefcase and most of his money were locked in the left-luggage office at the railway station. When he discovered there would be no attendant to unlock it for him until the arrival of the next train down from Silverdale at two o’clock, he could only murmur softly and miserably, “Fuck it, I always wondered what it would be like to be in Carnforth for more than an hour or two.”

“Now you know, Lucas.”

“There’s a whole class of places like this. They wait for you as patiently as Medusa.”

“Come on, Lucas, don’t be spoilt.”

Eventually we fetched up in the rain in front of the War Memorial. By that time it was only twenty minutes to wait for the train. Lucas was still tense but I could feel him relaxing. “‘Their name liveth for ever more’,” he quoted contemptuously. “I suppose we’re lucky it isn’t written as one word.” Out of his jacket he pulled the two volumes he had stolen from the bookshop,
Moments of Reprieve
by Primo Levi, and the unexpurgated
Journals of Anaïs Nin 1931-1934
. He threw them down at the foot of the memorial in a wet flutter of pages. “Forevermore,” he said. “Forevermoreland.” With this gesture something was finally eased in him. He shivered, then laughed recklessly and pulled me away towards the station, his arm round my shoulder.

“I thought I could hear something on those stairs back there,” he admitted.

Suddenly he began to tell me how, after they were first married, he and Pam had found a wristwatch in the street. “This will show you something about us, it really will,” he said. He gripped my shoulder and went on anxiously, as if he was afraid I might not be listening: “We had this thing for six months. No one had claimed it. Neither of us had a watch of our own. But it was one of these modern things—” He moved his wrist to show me that he had one now, all these years later“—and we had no idea what to do with it. Every morning at ten o’clock the alarm went off, and we didn’t know how to stop it. Every morning at ten o’clock it read eleven, because it was still on BST; and we had no idea how to adjust it. There it was, among all the other stuff—”

I could imagine it, on the sideboard next to the telephone, one of those items carefully picked up each morning so that Lucas Medlar’s dwarf could fling them insanely about that night: the mystery novels, the coffee mugs with macaws painted on them, the artificial flowers and silvered pine cones.

“—recording some rhythm of its previous owner!”

“Lucas, you could probably have got an instruction booklet from the manufacturer.”

He shook his head impatiently.

“Listen,” he said. We were halfway across the road in front of the station; further up, some lights had released a thin stream of afternoon traffic. He stood in front of me and stopped and made me look at him.

“Listen, that isn’t the point. It was just a tinny metonym of someone else’s life. ‘Peep peep.’ We thought we’d penetrated the Heart, and we couldn’t even work a watch!”

“Lucas, we’d better get out of the road.”

He made a bitter, impatient gesture.

“You, me, Pam Stuyvesant! Together we don’t make up one whole intelligence.”

“What do you want me to say? ‘Perhaps that’s the point’? I remember Yaxley telling me, ‘If you can comprehend the Pleroma you can never experience it.’ Lucas, please let’s get out of the road!”

He looked at me with contempt. He knew that at this point I could never bear his pain.

“Believe that and you’re worse than a romantic”

“What did you expect to find in the bookshop, Lucas?” I asked him unfairly. “The Library at Alexandria?”

He walked off without answering, and I let him go. The station was deserted. I could see him wandering up and down at The far end of the platform in the streaming rain, looking first at his watch and then up the line. He coughed once or twice. He seemed all right, so I left him to it. At least he was out of the traffic. In case Pam had run out when we met, I got her a couple of packets of cigarettes from the machine on the down-platform. Then I remembered Pam was dead, and threw them one by one across the rails into the waste ground on the other side. Lucas watched this performance and then came up and said:

“I’m sorry.”

“Lucas, you always are.”

“I did expect the Library at Alexandria.”

“Lucas, you always do.”

We laughed.

“Fasten your jacket up.”

Shortly after that the pay train arrived from Silverdale. It was full of children with sore red faces who by the smell had been copiously sick just before we got on; and old men with veins like cables on the backs of their hands who walked up and down in a buckled manner carrying suitcases too heavy for them while their wives changed seats relentlessly. Lucas watched them as if they might be a message from the Pleroma, or from Pam, and then, deciding perhaps that it was impossible to decode, took a copy of
The Tartar Steppe
out of his briefcase and pretended to read it. A few hours later we were stumbling about on the steep windy slopes above Attermire Scar in Yorkshire, looking for a dead woman who had given Lucas the grid reference NGR 842642 but who never turned up there.

It was the last place I wanted Lucas to be. Up on the limestone you feel miles from anywhere, and he was already soaked and cold. It would be a nightmare to get him down again. He raced about in the dark in the big deteriorating amphitheatres and steep hollows above the Victoria Escarpment, putting his feet down rabbit holes and coughing helplessly. “Pam, you bitch!” he shouted. “My feet are getting wet!” But after an hour he fell asleep suddenly in the mouth of one of the bigger caves, whose cracked, water-polished walls went above him in the moonlight like something made. I put my coat over him and poked about at the foot of the Scar until I heard him call out in his sleep, “Yaxley! Yaxley!”

By morning the whole of the Ribble Valley was under mist. Like the cloud you see from an airliner above the Atlantic, it was white, impeccable, solid-seeming. It shifted restlessly, though, against the sides of the hills.

Reluctant to go down into it, we sat on some clints above Settle in the bright horizontal sunshine. Every tussock of grass had a rich luminousness. Every shadow pointed into the mist—which, where it encountered the east wind blowing down the defile between Attermire and High Hill, advanced a little, retreated a little, boiled over a stile, lay there curling back on itself and pushing out faint wisps close to the ground, exactly like the mist in a sixties film. You had no idea whether it loved or hated the things it covered; you had no idea what they might be. Eventually it began to ebb, leaving a boulder which looked like a lamb, grassy slopes glowing like sun through a bottle. Across the valley the ridge leading up to Smearsett was revealed as a long, mysterious-looking island. Behind that Ingleborough, the ancient continent, inexpressibly bleak and far away.

Lucas who had got to his feet suddenly said in a savage voice: “It was a real nightmare for her, you know. Fuck your common sense. Fuck it. You were in the Pleroma too, all those years ago!”

“Lucas—”

He stared intently out over the mist and said quickly so that I couldn’t interrupt:

“Gallica, who called herself ‘the Slave of God’ but who certainly loved Michael Neville, may not after all have died at the Carolingian Gate.” Soon he was shouting. “Many of the wounded claim to have seen her after four o’clock, in the citadel itself, where she brought them great comfort. She was glimpsed several times during the three days of massacres which followed. Michael Neville, who though he lay all that time in the heap of dead and dying in front of the Eastern Basilica never saw her himself, recorded twenty years later: ‘Wherever she moved among them the smell of blood was transformed briefly to that of attar.’”

He shivered and wiped his eyes.

“I made that up for Pam, years ago. It was a real dream. Fuck your common sense.”

“She never wanted to be the Empress, Lucas.”

Lucas looked round confusedly, exactly as he had done in the bookshop.

“She wanted to be the daughter,” I said. “Let’s go down.”

* * *

We took a wrong turn in the mist and were forced to walk for some time across rough grazing and moorland. Inside the mist it was silent, damp, cold. Lucas swayed and stumbled; he couldn’t stop shivering. I pulled his jacket round him but it didn’t seem to help. His shoes were coming to pieces.

“Where are we?” he kept saying. “We should be down now.” And then:

“I hate it here.”

“I know you do, Lucas.”

Suddenly we were standing at the edge of a deep Gothic ravine in the limestone, at the dry bottom of which a well-defined path curved away between overgrown screes. Half a mile or less to the south white crags rose under the gray sky, their tiers of collapsing rock like teeth in a dead gum. Northwards, the path climbed abruptly into the recesses of the cleft and vanished. Light rain had begun to fall; I could hear it pattering quietly in the little bare larchwood at the lip of the ravine. We walked in silence along the cliff edge and stood in the rain to stare at the long featureless green sweeps of moorland stretching north.

“Christ!” said Lucas. But he seemed more cheerful.

The head of the ravine was a stony cleft hardly wide enough to admit two men. There the path came up to meet us, and we followed it down until we came to a village. Ducks honked from the shallows of the stream. A woman in a headscarf and gumboots stopped gardening to watch us pass, trowel in hand. Out on the main road, we waited half an hour for the Settle bus. When it came it was empty but for one bronchitic old man and his sly red-eyed collie.

* * *

Lucas was waxy and vague with hypothermia. I got him off the bus as soon as it stopped and took him into the first café I saw. That was a mistake. Warmth, laughter, and the smell of hot fat billowed into our faces as I opened the door: a New Year party was in progress, with a dozen people from one of the local agricultural businesses shouting, laughing and singing disconnectedly at a long table down one side of the room. They were wearing paper hats quartered in red, yellow and green. They all had red, polished, cheerful faces. The floor round their feet was littered with spent Christmas crackers, crumpled serviettes and strings of dried party-foam. Two or three middle-aged women in waitress outfits—old-fashioned belted black dresses with a severe little white collar—were beginning to clear the disordered remains of a second course of roast pork and apple sauce, in preparation for the pudding. Meanwhile a boy ten or eleven years old had the job of pouring out glasses of Tetley’s for the men. A bit drunk himself, he ran about in his white shirt, little bow tie and neat black trousers asking hysterically, “Would you like a beer? Would you like a beer?” The women in the party, who had decked themselves with tinsel and mistletoe, drank white wine. Lucas stood eyeing it all with horror, while the Muzak played first a xylophone rendering of “Jingle Bells”, then “The Little Drummer Boy”. He didn’t know what to do with himself. His shoulders were hunched under the sodden cashmere jacket, and he was shivering.

“I don’t think I—”

“Lucas, at least have a cup of tea.”

I sat him down at a corner table where he turned helplessly away from the fun, his upper body stiff with rejection, while bits of talk floated round his head like strips of print on a clever advertisement—