The Course of the Heart (26 page)

“Pass us that mistletoe, Harry!”

“Ay, old Tommy Walker. Me brother used to work for him. He lost all his fingers and half his thumb, working potato machine.”

“Cost her twenty pound.”

“No, I think they saved some of his fingers—took them in with him and sewed them back.”

“White bread! Now that’ll help your bowels come up.”

“Twenty pound? They’re having you on.”

“He needed to. He needed to. Bring it up. He probably needed to bring it up.”

“Sorry, Harry!”

“Ay lad, yer will be.”

A large man in his early fifties who had at some time lost his left arm at the elbow, Harry wore a greenish tweed jacket over a maroon pullover not quite long enough to cover his shirt, which in its turn had popped open over a belly fat, smooth and hard-looking. In his youth his face must have been straight-planed yet heavy, quick to redden in the wind, and to develop broken veins. Now it had thickened under and around the jawline, and his lively blue eyes looked out from a lapping of fat. Harry was the most animated of them all. He liked the other men to listen to him. He liked the women, to whose attention he was always bringing his missing limb, to be a little shocked at the things he said. His idea of a joke was to drain a pint of Tetley’s, exclaim loudly “Ah’m not shuwer ah enjoyed that,” and finish: “Now then! Ah’ll joost av some of that
Perrier
watter. Raght oop mah street.” I saw quite soon that something was going on between him and our waitress: they had some old score to settle, some business unfinished since early adulthood, perhaps even before. He would catch her eye and call challengingly across the room—

“Hey! You! Coom ’ere a minute! Ah’ve summat to tell you.”

“I bet you have, Harry. I bet you have!”

Then, to considerable laughter:

“I hope it’s nowt to do with that arm of yours.” And, with a direct look: “Because I haven’t got it!” Harry enjoyed this a good deal, and so did his friends.

She was a well-built lively woman, thirty or thirty-five years old, dressed in what may have been a Monsoon frock, who in addition to waitressing took care of the till. Her eyes were direct and brown, her hair unruly, her forearms freckled. As she talked she held her body towards you, and her skin had a light, pleasant perfume.

“Somebody’s having a good time,” I said.

She looked pleased.

“Ay, we’re just this minute picking up the debris. They’ve only been in an hour and a quarter. To get them in and serve them four courses in one and a quarter hours isn’t bad.”

“I think I’ll have some tea,” I said, mainly to stop her from staring at Lucas.

She leaned her hip unselfconsciously against the back of my chair and stared at him anyway, with a kind of half-amused concern. “You’ve been in the wars,” she advised him, “and no mistake. What would you like?” Her friendliness seemed genuine, but she had never had to deal with anyone like Lucas Medlar. When he failed to respond she shrugged and told me, “Well you’ll have to order for him, won’t you? Just two teas? Nothing to eat? Right.” When she came back with the teas a few minutes later she went on: “It’s been nonstop here all week. Turkey dinners! Every single table was packed.” She paused to shout in the direction of the kitchen, “They’re still waiting at table eight!” The sound of crockery answered her. “People who didn’t even know each other were sharing tables.” She drew my attention to Lucas, who was still staring over at the party. “Are you sure your friend’s all right?”

“Leave us alone,” said Lucas distinctly.

She laughed and returned to the till. There, she fussed with some receipts, changed the Muzak tape for a selection of popular choral classics, then, with a yawn, leaned her elbows on the counter and looked out across the café. Lucas and I drank our tea. One or two old ladies finished their lunch and, complaining about the weather, went out into the darkening air. The party, contemplating an afternoon at work with a bad head, had slid into an introspective mood. Even Harry was looking into his glass, sighing, and saying, “Ay, well.” The woman behind the counter seemed amused by this. She folded her arms under her breasts and said into the silence, as if to herself but quite loudly:

“I’m sure I don’t know what I’ve done to my neck, but it’s ached since Wednesday.”

Instantly, the one-armed man was on his feet and making his way across to her.

“Ah know joost what you need!”

“Harry! No!”

Before she could avoid him, he had taken her wrist and pulled her out from behind the counter. He made her sit down on an empty table, stood behind her, and began to massage the side of her neck with his good hand. At first she laughed like a schoolgirl. Then, as his hand began to move down towards her shoulder, she let her body relax and began a pantomime of sexual arousal, looking up and back at him with large eyes, pushing her shoulder-blades back against his belly like a cat being stroked and whispering in a stage contralto—

“Oh, Harry.”

The blues and golds of her frock glowed like a stained glass window.

“By God!” shouted the one-armed man.

He slapped his hand to his forehead, slid agilely out of his jacket and pretended to undo his braces at the front. He panted loudly. His friends cheered and laughed at this demonstration of how his missing arm had somehow granted him more vigor than ordinary people. She, meanwhile, ducked away, darted round behind him suddenly and massaged his neck in turn. Harry rolled his eyes with appreciation; lolled his head; and let his tongue hang out comically. The waitress leaned forward; gave him a quick kiss near the mouth; then, before he could reciprocate, put the counter between them again. Further cheering broke out, and while Harry was bowing to the applause she slipped away into the kitchen.

What did this exchange mean? All you could say was that it was their party piece. Harry and the waitress knew one another of old, and they had done it before, and probably other things too. I was reminded of Ward Three at the cancer hospital, where among all the other wasted, wayward old dears (like a lot of molting but cheerful parrots driven to testify at random from their smelly cage) there had been a woman called Doris. Against the odds of that place—indeed against all odds—Doris, seventy-eight years old, no hair and no teeth, pink flock dressing gown which shed all over the ward, radiotherapy implant and all, still enjoyed a rich and colorful fantasy life. “I’ll do most things,” she would carol out at the top of her voice in the middle of visiting hours, “but I won’t be buggered or bitten.” Or, “Christ, that finger’s been up two arses today. Look at it!” It was always unclear to me whether these were actually sexual memories of Doris’s, or just some kind of loosening of the internal censors in the proximity of death. Much of the time, Pam told me, Doris irritated or upset the other women on the ward. “It spoils their own memories.” But on occasion, especially in the middle of the night, when the building was full of their quiet, inturned, lunar despair, she actually seemed to give them an obscure comfort.

On balance, Pam had found her liveliness contagious. “I think in the end the women did too, although they never joined in.”

I thought this might cheer Lucas up, but all he said was:

“Jesus Christ”

He finished his tea and walked out. I wanted to stay, but in the end followed him wearily.

* * *

Outside it was heavy snow. The air was flurried with it, and there was a thin, milky skim upon the setts. Whenever the wind catches falling snow, you seem for a moment to be rushing forward, as if your life has accelerated. Snow has been magical to me since as a child I stayed up late to gaze out of a downstairs back window and watch it fall through the night on to the dark lawn—soft, silent, huge as pennies. (It’s easy to tell yourself: “Memory is the great mythologizer. You were small. It was the first snow you had ever seen. Images like that become magnified out of proportion.” Now I wonder.) Pam Stuyvesant loved snow too. “Yet if it falls for any length of time,” she used to say, “I get the sense I’m watching something in slow motion which shouldn’t be. It’s very unnatural.”

Trying to find the bus stop, Lucas had become disoriented and was walking across the old Settle square—now a car park—towards some narrow lanes on the north side, where Castlebergh rises steeply, wooded like a Chinese rock, above the town. He seemed intent on something: NGR 842642 perhaps, and the image of Pam drawing him back. Halfway across the square, though, he stopped as if puzzled, a gloomy, stooped figure in the poor light. I could see him moving his head from side to side. He gazed up into the whirling snow. He put his hand out to gather some of it, suddenly dropped what he had caught as if it had scorched him. I stood in the shelter of the café doorway and called—

“Lucas!”

He didn’t seem to hear me.

“Lucas!”

When I stepped out into the square, I found that it wasn’t snowing at all. White rose petals were falling out of the sky. Their thick, Byzantine perfume filled the air.

We were folded into the heart of a rose. The heart of a rose! The whole square beat with it. Lucas Medlar stood distraught and lonely, lapped in attar. He shouted my name: and then, “Someone’s here!” Attar! We were in the heart of the rose, and it was already occupied. People say of someone, “She filled the place with her personality,” without a clue of what they might mean. Perfume was like a sea around us. If we could not learn to swim in it we would drown. I was gripped by the panic of irreversible events. “Hello?” I whispered. No one answered, but Lucas called again, more urgently, “Someone’s here! Someone’s here!” Now she walked out of the great soft storm of rose petals, the goddess herself, the green—the grown—woman, the woman made of flowers. Her outline was perfectly sharp, it seemed to have no surfaces, and flowers came and went within it as she turned her head deliberately this way and that. She was like a window opened on to a mass of leafage after rain, branches of blackthorn, aglet and elder interwoven, plaits of grass and fern, all held together with rose briars, over and between which went a constant trickle of water. Her eyes were a pitiless chalky blue, without white or pupil. They were flowers, too. She knew we were there. She stretched her arms, standing with one leg bent and the other stiffened to take her weight.

“You are never simply yourselves,” she whispered.

This time she had brought for us a glimpse of her own place, the envelope of her eternal fall, which is perhaps of the Pleroma but not yet the Pleroma itself (thirtieth Aeon beloved of God, she cast herself out and fell into mirrors in Alexandria, Rome, Manchester, Birkenau): roses blooming in a garden. Between the lawns were broad formal beds of Old China Blush—“China’s in the heart, Jack. China’s in the heart!”—with lilies planted between them. Burnet and guelder spilled faint pink and thick cream over old brick walls and paths velvety with bright green moss. White climbing centifolias weighed down the apple trees. Two or three willows streamed, like yellow hair in strong winter sunshine. Beyond this garden spread an intimately folded arrangement of orchards and lanes, of sandy eminences and broad heathland stretching off to hills. There, late afternoon light enameled the leaves of the ilex, briars hung over the grassy banks, clematis put forth great suffocating masses of flowers. Everything was possible in that country beyond. A white leopard couched among the hawthorn; other animals paced cagily along its lanes—baboons, huge birds, a snake turning slowly on itself. I heard a voice not mine or Lucas’s say: “The Rose of Earth is the Lily of Heaven.” The scent of attar was as heavy as a velvet curtain: but through it, from the café behind me like flashes of light through a veil, came piercing human smells—hot fat, brandy sauce, perspiration, beer. I could feel the heat, see the yellow lights. For a moment it might have been possible to go back inside—

But the green woman!

She stared down at Lucas Medlar in his loneliness and offered him the whole garden.

To have it he must first accept her attendants. These creatures, denizens perhaps of the Fullness itself, have power over all transitional states, all redrawing of borders, all human change. They are always with her:

Around her feet runs the dwarf which haunted Lucas for so long, poisoning the central experience of his life. In the air beside her, naked and joined, hover the white couple. I saw now that under the Manchester street lights I had been mistaken. The dwarf was only a child, a toddler full of delight and charm one moment, full of rage and frustration the next, trying to eat up the world but hampered by some old coat of Lucas Medlar’s he forced it to wear. It was only Lucas’s own unruly future, made futile by too much longing. As for the white couple: they are five million years old. Sustained by their Tao on the perpetual edge between desire and release, they never sleep. Their faces are transitory, yet do not change. They are Harry’s stump and the waitress’s Monsoon frock; the unfastened buttons of the blind woman in the quarry, the sudden sweet smile on the face of her crippled boy. For a brief moment as I watched, they were Katherine and myself: “Touch me here, then.” For an even briefer one, like a promise of some admission not yet ready to be made, they presented themselves as Lucas Medlar and Pam Stuyvesant. In such moments, perhaps, out of delight and disorder, the Coeur—if there was ever any such place—is finally brought forth.

As if in earnest of this, the green woman seemed to melt and shift and grow huge, until she towered above the town and Lucas Medlar found himself hardly a speck beneath her. Slowly, and with vast grace, she knelt before him and sat back upon her heels, the palms of her hands flat on her vast open thighs. Lucas fell down before the rosy door, then recovered, pulling himself slowly to his feet again. In response, wavering above him like water, the green woman became his Empress, Gallica XII Hierodule, her plate armor shining through the smoke at the gates of the Coeur: “When the smoke cleared you could not bear to look directly at her. There is no escape from inside the meaning of things.” Immediately, she became the Empress’s daughter Phoenissa, running through the cool rooms of morning to meet Theodore Lascaris by a fountain. “Fuck me Theo oh fuck me now.” Now that the goddess is in the World, she is searching too. She sways on her heels above Lucas Medlar’s silent figure. Is it here? No. Panicked, she becomes the Roman prostitute Eudoxia, wife of Mathaeus; then Godscall St. Ives, then Godscall’s sickly daughter Liselotte, then Alice Sturtevant, caught in a moment of yearning she can never express. “Something burns within me,” Alice once imagined shouting as she stood looking in at her father who lay ill, “but I am never consumed!” She felt a terrible emptiness, and ran to John Duck. Now the goddess has fallen into the world, where is it? Michael Ashman’s gypsy prostitute offers Lucas the cards, brings herself off in the air above him with a quick limping flick of the pelvis. Is it here? (Floodwater was frozen in lakes, forty miles up and down the river.) For a terrified moment, the goddess finds herself as Lawson’s twelve-year-old daughter, lying across Yaxley’s table beneath Yaxley’s pictures and her father’s eyes. Then, with bewildering suddenness, she was Katherine; and Kit; and at last, leaping into stability and focus, Pam Stuyvesant as I had seen her that summer afternoon in her rooms at Cambridge, twenty years before, laughing up at me from the floor and whispering, “This room reeks of sex.” Is it here? “Don’t let him in!” It is never anywhere. It is everywhere at once. The goddess is all those women and none of them, we seek her, she seeks us, less mater than matrix—the bitter world we know, the Pleroma we desire, the Coeur which intercedes. We are wrapped in the heart of the rose. Pam’s face, now clear and specific, ages before us in the sky, after the divorce she is dyeing her hair, smoking fifty cigarettes a day, staring out into her garden. She has forgiven the world for not being ideal, and now bequeaths it to Lucas. The grown woman throws back her head in joy. A great open pink blossom fades like fireworks in the night.