The Course of the Heart (3 page)

“Excuse me, please,” they murmured. “Excuse me.” Yaxley became irritated almost immediately.

“Dog muck,” he said loudly in a matter-of-fact voice. I think their politeness affected him much more than the disturbance itself. “Three generations of rabbits,” he jeered, as a whole family were forced to push past him one by one to get the table in the corner. None of them seemed to take offence, though they must have heard him. A drenched-looking woman in a purple coat came in, looked anxiously for an empty seat, and, when she couldn’t see one, hurried out again.

“Mad bitch!” Yaxley called after her. “Get yourself reamed out.” He stared challengingly at the other customers.

“I think it would be better if we talked in private,” I said. “What about your flat?”

For twenty years he had lived in the same single room above the Atlantis Bookshop. He was reluctant to take me there, I could see, though it was only next door and I had been there before. At first he tried to pretend it would be difficult to get in.

“The shop’s closed,” he said. “We’d have to use the other door.” Then he admitted:

“I can’t go back there for an hour or two. I did something last night that means it may not be safe.”

He grinned.

“You know the sort of thing I mean,” he said.

I couldn’t get him to explain further. The cuts on his wrists made me remember how panicky Pam and Lucas had been when I last spoke to them. All at once I was determined to see inside the room.

“We could always talk in the Museum,” I suggested. Researching in the manuscript collection one afternoon a year before, he had turned a page of Jean de Wavrin’s
Chroniques d’Angleterre
—that oblique history no complete version of which is known—and come upon a miniature depicting in strange, unreal greens and blues the coronation procession of Richard Coeur de Lion.

Part of it had moved; which part, he would never say.

“Why, if it’s a coronation,” he had written almost plaintively to me at the time, “are these four men carrying a coffin? And who is walking there under the awning—with the bishops yet not a bishop?”

After that he had avoided the building as much as possible, though he could always see its tall iron railings at the end of the street. He had begun, he told me, to doubt the authenticity of some of the items in the medieval collection. In fact he was frightened of them.

“It would be quieter there,” I insisted.

He sat hunched over the
Church Times
, staring into the street with his hands clamped violently together in front of him. I could see him thinking.

“That fucking pile of shit!” he said eventually. He got to his feet.

“Come on then. It’s probably cleared out by now anyway.” Rain dripped from the blue-and-gold front of the Atlantis. There was a faded notice, CLOSED FOR COMPLETE REFURBISHMENT. The window display had been taken down, but for the look of things they had left a few books on a shelf. I could make out, through the plate glass, W. B. Yeats’s
The Trembling of the Veil
—with its lyrical plea for intuited ritual “Hodos Chameliontos”—leaning up against Rilke’s
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
. When I drew Yaxley’s attention to this accidental nexus, he only stared at me contemptuously.

Inside, the shop smelled of cut timber, new plaster, paint, but this gave way on the stairs to an odor of cooking. Yaxley fumbled with his key. His bedsitter, which was quite large and on the top floor, had uncurtained sash windows on opposing walls. Nevertheless it didn’t seem well lit. From one window you could see the sodden facades of Museum Street, bright green deposits on the ledges, stucco scrolls and garlands gray with pigeon dung; out of the other, part of the blackened clock tower of St. George’s Bloomsbury, a reproduction of the tomb of Mausoleus lowering up against the racing clouds.

“I once heard that clock strike twenty-one,” said Yaxley.

“I can believe that,” I said, though I didn’t. “Do you think I could have some tea?”

He was silent for a minute. Then he laughed.

“I’m not going to help them,” he said. “You know that. I wouldn’t be allowed to. What you do in the Pleroma is irretrievable.”

* * *

“All that was over and done with twenty years ago, Pam.”

“I know. I know that. But—”

She stopped suddenly, and then went on in a muffled voice, “Will you just come here a minute? Just for a minute?”

The house, like many in the Pennines, had been built right into the side of the valley. A near-vertical bank of earth, cut to accommodate it, was held back by a dry-stone revetment twenty or thirty feet high, black with damp even in the middle of July, dusted with lichen and tufted with ferns like a cliff. Throughout the winter months, water streamed down the revetment day after day and, collecting in a stone trough underneath, made a sound like a tap left running in the night. Along the back of the house ran a passage hardly two feet wide, full of broken roof slates and other rubbish.

“You’re all right,” I told Pam, who was staring, puzzled, into the gathering dark, her head on one side and the tea towel held up to her mouth as if she thought she was going to be sick.

“It knows who we are,” she whispered. “Despite the precautions, it always remembers us.”

She shuddered, pulled herself away from the window, and began pouring water into the coffee filter so clumsily that I put my arm round her shoulders and said, “Look, you’d better go and sit down before you scald yourself. I’ll finish this, and then you can tell me what’s the matter.”

She hesitated.

“Come on,” I encouraged her. “All right?”

“All right.”

She went into the living room and sat down. One of the cats ran into the kitchen and looked up at me expectantly. “Don’t let them have milk,” she called. “They got some this morning, and anyway it only gives them diarrhea.”

“How are you feeling?” I asked. “In yourself, I mean?”

“About how you’d expect.”

She had taken some propranolol for the migraine, she said, but it never seemed to help much. “It shortens the headaches, I suppose.” As a side-effect, though, it made her so tired. “It slows my heartbeat down. I can feel it slow right down.” She watched the steam rising from her coffee cup, first slowly and then with a rapid plaiting motion as it was caught by some tiny draught. Eddies form and break on the surface of a deep, smooth river. A slow coil, a sudden whirl. What was tranquil is revealed as a mass of complications that can be resolved only as motion.

I remembered when I had first met her:

She was twenty then, a small, excitable, attractive girl who wore moss-colored jersey dresses to show off her waist and hips. Later, fear coarsened her. With the divorce a few gray streaks appeared in her astonishing red hair, and she chopped it raggedly off and dyed it black. She drew in on herself. Her body broadened into a kind of dogged, muscular heaviness. Even her hands and feet seemed to become bigger.

“You’re old before you know it,” she would say. “Before you know it.”

Separated from Lucas she was easily chafed by her surroundings; moved every six months or so, although never very far, and always to the same sort of dilapidated, drearily furnished cottage, so you suspected she was looking for precisely the things that made her nervous and ill; and tried to keep down to fifty cigarettes a day.

“Why did Yaxley never help us?” she asked me. “You must know.”

* * *

Yaxley fished two cups out of a plastic washing-up bowl and put tea bags in them.

“Don’t tell me you’re frightened too!” he said. “I expected more from you.”

I shook my head. I wasn’t sure whether I was afraid or not. I’m not sure today. The tea, when it came, had a distinctly greasy aftertaste, as if somehow he had fried it. I made myself drink it while Yaxley watched me cynically.

“You ought to sit down,” he said. “You’re worn out.”

When I refused, he shrugged and went on as if we were still at the Tivoli:

“Nobody tricked them, or tried to pretend it would be easy. If you get anything out of an experiment like that, it’s by keeping your head and taking your chance. If you try to move cautiously, you may never be allowed to move at all.”

He looked thoughtful.

“I’ve seen what happens to people who lose their nerve.”

“I’m sure,” I said.

“They were hardly recognizable, some of them.” I put the teacup down.

“I don’t want to know,” I said.

“I bet you don’t.”

He smiled to himself.

“Oh, they were still alive,” he said softly, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“You talked us into this,” I reminded him. “You talked yourselves into it.”

Most of the light from Museum Street was absorbed as soon as it entered the room, by the dull green wallpaper and sticky-looking yellow veneer of the furniture. The rest leaked eventually into the litter on the floor, pages of crumpled and partly burned typescript, hair clippings, broken chalks which had been used the night before to draw something on the flaking lino: among this stuff, it died. Though I knew Yaxley was playing some sort of game with me, I couldn’t see what it was. I couldn’t make the effort, so in the end he had to make it for me. He waited until I got ready to leave.

“You’ll get sick of all this mess one day,” I said from the door of the bedsit.

He grinned and nodded and advised me:

“Have you ever seen Joan of Arc get down to pray in the ticket office at St. Pancras? And then a small boy comes in leading something that looks like a goat, and it gets on her there and then and fucks her in a ray of sunlight?

“Come back when you know what you want. Get rid of Lucas Medlar, he’s an amateur. Bring the girl if you must.”

“Fuck off, Yaxley.”

He let me find my own way back down to the street.

That night I had to tell Lucas, “We aren’t going to be hearing from Yaxley again.”

“Christ,” he said, and for a second I thought he was going to cry. “Pam feels so ill,” he whispered. “What did he say?”

“Forget him. He could never have helped us.”

“Pam and I are getting married,” Lucas said in a rush.

What could I have said? I knew as well as they did that they were only doing it out of a need for comfort. Nothing would be gained by making them admit it. Besides, I was so tired by then I could hardly stand. Yaxley had exhausted me. Some kind of visual fault, a neon zigzag like a bright little flight of stairs, kept showing up in my left eye. So I congratulated Lucas and, as soon as I could, began thinking about something else.

“Yaxley’s terrified by the British Museum,” I said. “In a way I sympathize with him.”

As a child, I had hated it too.

Every conversation, every echo of a voice or a footstep or a rustle of clothes, was gathered up into its high ceilings in a kind of undifferentiated rumble and sigh—the blurred and melted remains of meaning—which made you feel as if your parents had abandoned you in a derelict swimming bath. Later, when I was a teenager, it was the vast shapeless heads in Room 25 that frightened me, the vagueness of the inscriptions. I saw clearly what was there—“Red sandstone head of a king…” “Red granite head from a colossal figure of a king…”—but what was I looking at? A description is not an explanation. The faceless wooden figure of Rameses emerged perpetually from an alcove near the lavatory door, a Rameses who had to support himself with a stick: split, syphilitic, worm-eaten by his passage through the world, but still condemned to struggle helplessly on.

“We want to go and live up north,” Lucas said. “Away from all this.”

* * *

As the afternoon wore on, Pam became steadily more disturbed. “Listen,” she would ask me, “is that someone in the passage? You can always tell me the truth.”

After she had promised several times in a vague way, “I can’t send you out without anything to eat. I’ll cook us something in a minute, if you’ll make some more coffee,” I realized she was frightened to go back into the kitchen. She would change the subject immediately, explaining, “No matter how much coffee I drink, my throat is always dry. It’s all that smoking;” or: “I hate the dark afternoons.”

She returned often to the theme of age. She had always hated to feel old.

“You comb your hair in the mornings and it’s just another ten years gone, every loose hair, every bit of dandruff, like a lot of old snapshots showering down. We moved around such a lot,” she went on, as if the connection would be clear to me: “after university. It wasn’t that I couldn’t settle, more that I had to leave something behind every so often, as a sort of sacrifice.

“If I liked a job I was in, I would always give it up. Poor old Lucas!”

She laughed.

“Do you ever feel like that?”

She made a face.

“I don’t suppose you ever do,” she said. “I remember that first house we lived in, over near Dunford Bridge. It was so huge, and falling apart inside! And always on the market until Lucas and I bought it. Everyone who had it tried some new way of dividing it to make it livable. People would put in a new staircase or knock two rooms together. They’d abandon parts of it because they couldn’t afford to heat it all. Then they’d bugger off before anything was finished and leave it to the next lot—”

She broke off suddenly.

“I could never keep it tidy,” she said.

“Lucas always loved it.”

“Does he say that? You don’t want to pay too much attention to him,” she warned me. “The garden was so full of builders’ rubbish we could never grow anything. And the winters!” She shivered. “Well, you know what it’s like out there. The rooms reeked of calor gas. Before we’d been there a week Lucas had every kind of portable heater you could think of. I hated the cold, but never as much as he did.” With an amused tenderness she chided him—“Lucas, Lucas, Lucas”—as if he were in the room there with us. “How you hated it and how untidy you were!”

By now it was dark outside, but the younger cat was still staring out into the grayish, sleety well of the garden, beyond which you could just make out—as a swelling line of shadow with low clouds racing over it—the edge of the moor. Pam kept asking the cat what it could see. “Nothing but old crimes out there,” she told it. “Children buried all over the moor.”