The Course of the Heart (4 page)

Eventually she got up with a sigh and pushed it on to the floor. “That’s where cats belong. Cats belong on the floor.”

Some paper flowers were knocked down. Stooping to gather them up she said, “If there is a God, a real one, He gave up long ago. He isn’t so much bitter as apathetic”

She winced; held her hands up to her eyes. “You don’t mind if I turn the main light off?” And then:

“He’s filtered away into everything, so that now there’s only this infinitely thin, stretched thing, presenting itself in every atom, so tired it can’t go on, so haggard you can only feel sorry for its mistakes. That’s the real God. What we saw is something that’s taken its place.”

“What did we see, Pam?”

She stared at me.

“You know, I was never sure what Lucas thought he wanted from me,” she said.

The dull yellow light of a table lamp fell across the side of her face. She was lighting cigarettes almost constantly, stubbing them out half-smoked into the nest of old ends that had accumulated in the saucer of her cup.

“Can you imagine? In all those years I never knew what he wanted from me.”

She seemed to consider this for a moment or two. She said puzzledly, “I don’t feel he ever loved me.” She buried her face in her hands.

I got up, with some idea of comforting her. Without warning, she lurched out of her chair and in a groping, desperately confused manner took a few steps towards me. There in the middle of the room she stumbled into a low fretwork table someone had brought back from a visit to Kashmir twenty years before. Two or three paperback books and a vase of anemones went flying. The anemones were blowsy, past their best. Pam looked down at
Love for Lydia
and
The Death of the Heart
, strewn with great blue and red petals like dirty tissue paper; she touched them thoughtfully with her toe. The smell of the fetid flower water made her retch.

“Oh dear,” she murmured. “Whatever shall we do, Lucas?”

“I’m not Lucas,” I said gently.

While I was gathering up the books and wiping their covers, she must have overcome her fear of the kitchen—or, I thought later, simply forgotten it—because I heard her rummaging about for the dustpan and brush she kept under the sink. By now, I imagined, she could hardly see for the migraine. “Let me do that, Pam,” I called impatiently. “Go and sit down.” There was a gasp, a clatter, my name repeated twice.

* * *

“Pam, are you all right?”

No one answered.

“Hello? Pam?”

I found her by the sink. She had let go of the brush and pan and was twisting the damp floor cloth so tightly in her hands that the muscles of her short forearms stood out like a carpenter’s. Water had dribbled down her skirt.

“Pam?”

She was looking out of the window into the narrow passage where, clearly illuminated by the fluorescent tube in the kitchen, something big and white hung in the air, turning to and fro like a chrysalis in a privet hedge.

“Christ!” I said.

It wriggled and was still, as though whatever it contained was tired of the effort to get out. After a moment it curled up from its tapered base, seemed to split, welded itself together again. All at once I saw that these movements were actually those of two organisms, two human figures hanging in the air, unsupported, quite naked, writhing and embracing and parting and writhing together again, never presenting the same angle twice, so that now you viewed the man from the back, now the woman, now both of them from one side or the other. When I first saw them, the woman’s mouth was fastened on the man’s. Her eyes were closed; later she rested her head on his shoulder. Later still, they both turned their attention to Pam. They had very pale skin, with the dusty bloom of white chocolate; but that might have been an effect of the light. Sleet blew between us and them in eddies, but never obscured them.

“What are they, Pam?”

“There’s no limit to suffering,” she said. Her voice was slurred and thick. “They follow me wherever I go.”

I found it hard to look away from them. “What are they?”

They were locked together in something that—had their attention been on each other—might have been described as love. They swung and turned slowly against the black wet wall like fish in a tank. I held Pam’s shoulders. “Get them away,” she said indistinctly. “Why do they always look at me?” She coughed, wiped her mouth, ran the cold tap. She had begun to shiver, in powerful disconnected spasms. “Get them away.”

Though I knew quite well they were there, it was my mistake that I never believed them to be real. I thought she might calm down if she couldn’t see them. But she wouldn’t let me turn the light out or close the curtains; and when I tried to encourage her to let go of the edge of the sink and come into the living room with me, she only shook her head and retched miserably. “No, leave me,” she said. “I don’t want you now.” Her body had gone rigid, as awkward as a child’s. She was very strong. “Just try to come away, Pam, please.” She looked at me helplessly and said, “I’ve got nothing to wipe my nose with.” I pulled at her angrily, and we fell down. My shoulder was on the dustpan, my mouth full of her hair, which smelled of cigarette ash. I felt her hands move over me.

“Pam! Pam!” I shouted.

I dragged myself from under her—she had begun to groan and vomit again—and, staring back over my shoulder at the smiling creatures in the passage, ran out of the kitchen and out of the house. I could hear myself sobbing with panic—“I’m phoning Lucas, I can’t stand this, I’m going to phone Lucas!”—as if I were still talking to her. I blundered about the village until I found the telephone box opposite the church.

* * *

I remember someone—perhaps Yaxley, though on reflection it seems too well-put to have been him—once saying, “It’s no triumph to feel you’ve given life the slip.” We were talking about Lucas Medlar. “You can’t live intensely except at the cost of the self. In the end, Lucas’s reluctance to give himself wholeheartedly will make him shabby and unreal. He’ll end up walking the streets at night staring into lighted shop windows. He’ll always save himself, and always wonder if it was worth it.” At the time I thought this harsh. I still do. With Lucas it was a matter of energy rather than will, of the lows and undependable zones of a cyclic personality than any deliberate reservation of powers.

When I told him, “Something’s gone badly wrong here,” he was silent. After a moment or two I prompted him, “Lucas?”

I thought I heard him say:

“For God’s sake put that down and leave me alone.”

“This line must be bad,” I said. “You sound a long way off. Is there someone with you?”

He was silent again—“Lucas? Can you hear me?”—and then he asked, “How is Pam? I mean in herself?”

“Not well,” I said. “She’s having some sort of attack. You don’t know how relieved I am to talk to someone. Lucas, there are two completely hallucinatory figures in that passage outside her kitchen. What they’re doing to one another is… Look, they’re a kind of dead white color, and they’re smiling at her all the time. It’s the most appalling thing—”

He said, “Wait a minute. Do you mean that you can see them too?”

“That’s what I’m trying to say. The thing is that I don’t know how to help her. Lucas?”

The line had gone dead.

I put the receiver down and dialed his number again. The engaged signal went on and on. Afterwards I would tell Pam, “Someone else must have called him,” but I knew he had simply taken his phone off the hook. I stood there for some time anyway, shivering in the wind that blustered down off the moor, in the hope that he would change his mind. In the end I got so cold I had to give up and go back. Sleet blew into my face all the way through the village. The church clock said half past six, but everything was dark and untenanted. All I could hear was the wind rustling the black plastic bags of rubbish piled round the dustbins.

Civilization—if it could be called that—made its bench-mark on the Pennine moors with water and railways, the great civil engineering projects of the nineteenth century. Things have been at ebb since. Over in Longdendale and the Chew Valley, the dams and chains of reservoirs endure, but their architecture is monolithic and not to scale. The human remains of these sites of obsession—handfuls of houses, some quarry workings, a graveyard—are scattered. There is nothing left for people. A few farmers hang on. Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, the “Moors Murderers” of the 1960s, had buried their victims not far from Pam’s cottage. Otherwise the spoil heaps and derelict shooting boxes have nothing to guard but an emptiness. I felt pursued despite that.

“Fuck you, Lucas,” I whispered. “Fuck you then.”

* * *

Pam’s house was as silent as the rest.

I went into the front garden and pressed my face up to the window, in case I could see into the kitchen through the open living-room door. But from that angle the only thing visible was a wall calendar with a color photograph of a Persian cat: October.

I couldn’t see Pam.

I stood in the flower bed. The sleet turned to snow. Eventually I made myself go in.

The kitchen was filled less with the smell of vomit than a sourness you felt somewhere in the back of your throat. Outside, the passage lay deserted under the bright suicidal wash of fluorescent light. It was hard to imagine anything had happened out there. At the same time nothing looked comfortable, not the disposition of the old roof slates, or the clumps of fern growing out of the revetment, or even the way the snow was settling in the gaps between the flagstones. I found that I didn’t want to turn my back on the window. If I closed my eyes and tried to visualize the white couple, all I could remember was the way they had smiled. A still, cold air seeped in above the sink, and the cats came to rub against my legs and get underfoot; the taps were still running.

In her confusion Pam had opened all the kitchen cupboards and strewn their contents on the floor. Saucepans, cutlery and packets of dried food had been mixed up with a polythene bucket and some yellow J-cloths. She had upset a bottle of household detergent among several tins of cat food, some of which had been half opened, some merely pierced, before she dropped them or forgot where she had put the opener. It was hard to see what she had been trying to do. I picked it all up and put it away. To make them leave me alone, I fed the cats. Once or twice I heard her moving about on the floor above.

She was in the bathroom, slumped on the old-fashioned pink lino by the sink, trying to get her clothes off.

“For God’s sake go away,” she said. “I can do it.”

“Oh, Pam.”

“Put some disinfectant in the blue bucket then.”

* * *

“Who are they, Pam?” I asked.

That was later, when I had put her to bed. She answered: “Once it starts you never get free.”

I was annoyed.

“Free from what, Pam?”

“You know,” she said. “Lucas said you had hallucinations for weeks afterwards.”

“Lucas had no right to say that!”

This sounded absurd, so I added as lightly as I could, “It was a long time ago. I’m not sure any more.”

The migraine had left her exhausted, though much more relaxed. She had washed her hair, and between us we had found her a fresh nightdress to wear. Sitting up in the cheerful little bedroom with its cheap ornaments and modern wallpaper, she looked vague and young, free of pain. She kept apologizing for the design on her continental quilt, some bold diagrammatic flowers in black and red, the intertwined stems of which she traced with the index finger of her right hand across a clean white background. “Do you like this? I don’t really know why I bought it. Things look so bright and energetic in the shops,” she said wistfully, “but as soon as you get them home, they just seem crude.” The older cat had jumped up on to the bed; whenever Pam spoke it purred loudly. “He shouldn’t be in here and he knows it.” She wouldn’t eat or drink, but I had persuaded her to take some more propranolol, and so far she had kept it down.

“Once it starts you never get free,” she repeated.

Following the pattern of the quilt with one finger, she touched inadvertently the cat’s dry, graying fur; stared, as if her own hand had misled her.

“It was some sort of smell that followed you about, Lucas seemed to think.”

“Some sort,” I agreed.

“You won’t get rid of it by ignoring it. We both tried that to begin with. A scent of roses, Lucas said.” She laughed and took my hand in both of hers. “Very romantic! I’ve no sense of smell—I lost it years ago, luckily!”

This reminded her of something else.

“The first time I had a fit,” she said, “I kept it from my mother because I saw a vision with it. I was only a child, really. The vision was very dear: a seashore, steep and with no sand, and men and women lying on some rocks in the sunshine like lizards, staring quite blankly at the spray as it exploded up in front of them; huge waves that might have been on a cinema screen for all the notice they took of them.”

She narrowed her eyes, puzzled.

“You wondered why they had so little common sense.”

She tried to push the cat off her bed, but it only bent its body in a rubbery way and avoided her hand. She yawned suddenly. “At the same time,” she went on, after a pause, “I could see that some spiders had made their webs between the rocks, just a foot or two above the tideline.” Though they trembled and were sometimes filled with spray like dewdrops so that they glittered in the sun, the webs remained unbroken. She couldn’t describe, she said, the sense of frailty and anxiety with which this filled her. “So close to all that violence. You wondered why they had so little common sense,” she repeated. “The last thing I heard was someone warning me, ‘On your own you really can hear voices in the tide—’”

She smiled.

“Will you come in with me?” she said, holding back the top of the continental quilt. “Just for a moment? After all, Lucas can’t mind any more, can he?”

“Pam, you’re not—”

“Take your clothes off. Come in and hug me, if nothing else.” She made room. She said, “You’ve stayed young while I got old.”

And then: “There, touch. Yes.” I held her until she fell asleep. All night the old cat moved about uncomplainingly but restlessly on the continental quilt, as if it could no longer be comfortable anywhere. I smoothed the fur on its bony head. Its huge purr filled the room. Once, Pam seemed to wake up suddenly: finding that I had rolled away from her, she murmured: