The Course of the Heart (6 page)

“The Upper World empties itself of everything which has previously choked it.”

It seemed to come from the canvas next to my shoulder; but there was no one there. Eventually, I looked down near my feet. There, I saw Yaxley’s face, craning up at me from where the tent fabric met the floor. He must have been lying full length in the mud outside. Visible eye as blue as a bird’s egg, stubbled jaw wrenched to one side, his head was at such an odd angle he looked as if he had deliberately dislocated his neck.

“Christ!”

“Something’s going on in the Pleroma,” he said.

No one else had seen him. I pushed my way out of the marquee in time to catch sight of his overcoat flapping away across the lawns towards the woods and the sea in the dark. I ran after him. “Yaxley!”

“It’s something big!” he shouted back over his shoulder. “All the signs point to something on a scale we can’t imagine!”

“Yaxley!”

“It’s trying to pull me in.”

I caught up with him and grabbed his wrist. Pulpy with new cuts, it twisted under my hand and he was off again into the stinging rain, heading for the beach. “Yaxley!” I blundered about in the woods, then burst out on to a low headland dark with gorse, from which I could hear the thin rim of the sea breathing tiredly over the sand a hundred yards away. “Yaxley! Yaxley! Leave them alone!” I called. But this time I had lost him, and my voice went away over the bay without effect. I stood awkwardly on the edge of the headland, certain suddenly that he had wormed his way into the gorse at my feet and would lie there grinning upwards with accumulated lunacy until I went away. Had he been trying to get into the tent? If he had come to warn us, why had he run off? I began to sense that he was as frightened as Pam or Lucas; of what, I couldn’t then imagine.

When I got back to the marquee the dancing had begun, and there was only white wine left to drink. Pam and Lucas shuffled round on the muddy coconut matting. Soaked to the skin, I watched them from a table near the back. I had cut my face in the woods, the knees and elbows of my suit were stiff with wet sand. Though they avoided me, no one mentioned this, even obliquely, until I was leaving. By then the party had moved out of the marquee and into “Castle Rock” itself. Pam’s father came up to me in the hall, where I was waiting for a taxi, and asked, “Have you been in the house before?” It was two or three o’clock in the morning by then, and he was slightly unsteady on his feet, a short man in preposterous clothes who said “the house” as if this was the only one in the world.

I told him I hadn’t.

“I’m one of the bridegroom’s friends,” I added. “Lucas’s. One of Lucas’s friends.”

He stared at me for a few seconds.

“Ah,” he said. “It’s just that someone rather like you came to the house a few years ago. About seven years ago.”

As far as he was concerned, his probably was the only house in the world. It occurred to me that I must look to him much as Yaxley had looked to me: something forcing its way in from outside, or up from inside, as deranging and unwelcome as his daughter’s epilepsy. In his mild, hospitable way he was trying to tell me so. I had drunk so much by then that I rather admired him.

“I think my taxi’s here,” I said.

* * *

Shortly after the wedding Pam and Lucas moved to West Yorkshire, where they lived in a large square unimaginative place, local stone, with one or two deteriorating outbuildings. Extensive gardens lay behind it, then the moors; at the front, on the other side of a quiet lane, the land dropped abruptly into the narrow valley below the reservoir. The view from its upper windows was gloomy and bare, even in summer when a hot brownish haze spread like a cloudy lacquer over the moors, so that you never knew whether to expect rain, an electric storm, or some property of the atmosphere which had never demonstrated itself before. That winter, though it was so raw and cold, no snow fell, only steady drenching rain. Mist hung above the scrub oaks or clamped down motionless along the sides of the valley. During the school holidays Lucas could be seen at all times of day trying to keep warm by digging over the unproductive garden, clearing undergrowth, lighting rubbish-fires, obsessed with his own thoughts. He was teaching just across the county boundary, in a Thameside comprehensive. He drove there and back along the Woodhead Road in a small Renault he called “the Tub”.

Pam, though she was uneasy on her own, had soon found how unbearably untidy he could be, and claimed, “I’m glad he’s out all day!”

It gave her a chance to clear up.

“Papers thrown everywhere,” she wrote to me. “The place always looks as if a bomb has hit it!”

The drugs caused her to sleep late and wake exhausted: loaded with propranolol she would come down at eleven in the morning to find that Lucas, up late the previous night, had thrown everything around in a fit of rage. “Even the furniture, even his precious bloody books!”

Sometimes at weekends, though she had only left the room for a moment or two, she would return to find him shamefacedly putting records back on the shelves, picking up the sofa cushions, righting a chair. She suspected him of a deep frustration (unable to sound it, grew afraid; unable to absorb or assuage it, blamed herself) but never drew it to his attention. And if in his turn Lucas caught Pam fey and scared, staring with a drowsy helplessness out of the kitchen window into the drizzle at the end of the day, he said nothing either: though he may for all I know have offered comfort. They were twenty-two years old. Already their skills were those of avoidance. They let each encounter slide past them. Off it rumbled, at the last moment, top-heavy with its emotional freight like a train swaying away down a tunnel. As a result, Pam’s attacks became more frequent.

“I can’t help it,” she would tell herself: “I can’t.”

While Lucas, halfway across the Woodhead Pass in “the Tub” in the morning, banged the palms of his hands on the steering wheel and repeated savagely, “I can’t help her! I can’t!” He hated his heart for lifting when he got out of the house; himself for noticing the way the early sunshine fell across the broad heathery slopes of Longdendale.

To me he wrote, “It can tire you out, never being allowed to be miserable, or vague, or preoccupied.”

It was in the face of this, I think, that they began constructing between them the fairy-tale of the Pleroma which was to cheer them up in the years when Yaxley and I seemed to have abandoned them. Going through a shoebox of old postcards one lunchtime in an Oxfam shop in Hyde or Stalybridge, Lucas came across a photograph of the Cuxa Cloister in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. “This cloister contains important architectural elements from Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa,” he read, when he turned it over, “one of the most important Romanesque abbeys of the XII Century.” No one had ever sent it to anyone. Struck by the enormous tranquility of the scene, amused at the idea of sending her a card from only ten miles away, he put a stamp on it and posted it to Pam. Half dressed in the hall the next morning, she stared at it. “Let your heart beat/Over my heart,” he had written on the back. She was so delighted this soon became a habit. He chose only exotic or medieval cards, “The Creation and the Fall” from the British Library’s collection, or Altdorfer’s “Battle on the Issus”; and on the back of them he would always scribble something from one of his favorite writers or painters. “Every discovery is a rediscovery of something latent,” he informed her owlishly one day, only to advise the next: “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.”

He often read to her when she felt ill. A few days after he had sent the Cuxa postcard, he read her some chapters from the autobiography of Michael Ashman, a minor travel writer who had walked across Europe in the late Thirties, which began: “Concrete only yields more concrete. Since the war the cities of the Danube all look like Birmingham.” Ashman, who—as the professional successor of Freya Stark rather than, say, Robert Byron or Christopher Isherwood—had travelled culturally rather than morally, and on behalf of his audience rather than himself, now found he was able to write a more truthful or at any rate a more intimate history of his formative trip—

* * *

When I was a boy (he went on) you could still see how they had once been the dark core of Europe. If you travelled south and east, the new Austria went behind you like a Secession cake-stand full of the same old stale Viennese Whirls, and you were lost in the steep cobbled streets which smelt of charcoal smoke and paprika, fresh leather from the saddler’s. The children were throwing buttons against the walls as you passed, staring intently at them where they lay, as if trying to read the future from a stone. You could hear Magyar and Slovak spoken not just as languages but as incitements. There in the toe of Austria, at that three-way confluence of borders, you could see a dancing bear; and though the dance was rarely more than a kind of sore lumbering, with the feet turned in, to a few slaps on a tambourine, it was still impressive to see one of these big bemused animals appear among the gypsy girls on the pavement. They would take turns to dance in front of it; stare comically into its small eyes to make it notice them; then pirouette away. As performers themselves, they regarded it with grave affection and delight.

I loved sights like this and sought them out. I had some money. Being English gave me a sense of having escaped. I was free to watch, and conceive there and then the Search for the Heart.

By day the girls often told fortunes with cards, favoring a discredited but popular Etteilla. (I don’t know how old it was. Among its major arcana it included a symbol I have never seen in any traditional pack, but its langue was that of post-Napoleonic France: “Within a year your case will come up and you will acquire money”; “You will suffer an illness which will cost considerable money without efficacy. Finally a faith-healer will restore your health with a cheap remedy”; “Upside down, this card signifies payment of a debt you thought completely lost”; and so on. It was like having bits of Balzac, or Balzac’s letters, read out to you.) They would stand curiously immobile in the street, with its seventy-odd unwieldy cards displayed in a beautiful fan. While the crowds whirled round them head down into the cold wind of early spring. By night many of them were prostitutes. This other duty encouraged them to exchange their earrings and astonishing tiered skirts for an overcoat and a poor satin slip, but they were in no way diminished by it.

To me, anyway, the services seemed complementary, and I saw in the needs they filled a symmetry the excitement of which, though it escapes me now, I could hardly contain. Huts and caravans amid the rubbish at the edge of a town or under the arches of some huge bleak railway viaduct, fires which made the night ambiguous, musical instruments which hardly belonged in Europe at all: increasingly I was drawn to the gypsy encampments, as stations of the Search. It was in one of them I first heard the word “Coeur”.

Was I more than eighteen years old? It seems unlikely. Nevertheless I could tell, by the way the dim light pooled in the hollow of her collar-bones, that the girl was less. She raised one arm in a quick ungainly motion to slide the curtain shut across the doorway; the satin lifted across her ribby sides. I thought her eyes vague, short-sighted. When she discovered I was English she showed me a newspaper clipping, a photograph of Thomas Maszaryk, pinned to the wall above the bed. “Good,” she said sadly. She shook her head then nodded it immediately, as if she wasn’t sure which gesture was appropriate. We laughed. It was February: you could hear the dogs barking in the night forty miles up and down the river, where the floodwater was frozen in mile-wide lakes. She lay down and opened her legs and they made the same shape as a fan of cards when it first begins to spread in the hand. I shivered and looked away.

“Tell our fortunes first.”

When I drew the heterodox card, she placed the tip of her right index finger on its picture of a deserted Romanesque cloister and whispered, “Ici le Coeur.”

Her accent was so thick I thought she had said “Court”. Maszaryk had died not long before; the war was rehearsing itself with increasing confidence. Like many European gypsies, I suppose, she ended up in some camp or oven. Birkenau was in the room with us even then. A burial commando drunk on petrol and formalin was already waiting rowdily outside like the relatives at the door of the bridal suite, as she dosed the curtain, spread the cards, then knelt over me thoughtfully to bring me off in the glum light with a quick, limping flick of the pelvis. However often I traced the line of her breastbone with my fingers, however much she smiled, the death camp was in there with us. Any child we might have had would have lived out its time not in Theresienstadt, the family camp, but in Mengele’s block. Its number would have been prefaced with a Z.

The Heart!

The war ended. The cold war began. It was clear that Europe would continue to settle elastically for some time, shedding the energy of its new political shapes as they jostled against one another. Then, not long after the Communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia, Thomas Maszaryk’s son Jan, Czech foreign minister, was found dead in the courtyard beneath an open window in the ministry. I remembered the young prostitute, and the faith she had placed in his father. We don’t so much impose our concerns on others as bequeath them, like small heirlooms. They lose one significance then, rediscovered in a drawer years after, suddenly gain another. I saw that the Search grounds itself—that perhaps the Heart itself speaks to us!—in such short-circuits of history. I spent the days in a fever of suppressed excitement: correspondence with European, Mediterranean and near-Eastern exiles had convinced me that their search and mine were the same. Many of us, remembering how the restless, apparently aimless overlapping of boundaries during the early and high Middle Ages had occasionally exposed the Coeur—wavering, equivocal, interstitial, but never less than a kingdom in its own right—felt that in these conditions it might surface again. It never did. And though I may have hoped for this myself in the bitter winters of the late forties and early fifties, by then I knew as well as anyone how final had been its downfall: a Czechoslovakian prostitute had shown me how to listen for it along the sounding board of history.