The Course of the Heart (7 page)

* * *

With its low ceiling, paneled walls and red velvet sofa, the lounge at Dunford Bridge was like the lounge of some comfortable “country” hotel. It was full of indoor plants which Pam had planted in brass jugs, casseroles, bits of terracotta balanced on tall awkward wooden stands, even a coal scuttle made of some orange-blond wood—“Anything,” Lucas pretended to complain, “but proper pots.” Every evening Pam’s footsteps would go tap-tapping restlessly across the polished wood-block floor, as, increasingly nervous, she looked for something to do. She rustled the newspapers and magazines they kept in a wicker basket by the fireplace; went from picture to picture on the wall—a head in pencil, turned at an odd angle away from the artist; a still life with two lutes more real than the room; a bridge. In the end she would flick the ash off her cigarette and sit down with a copy of
The Swan in the Evening
or
A View of the Harbour
, each of which she had read half a dozen times before.

She could not put away a feeling of dread, even with the doors closed, a life settled.

“Was that a noise in the garden?”

And she was up again, tap-tapping in and out of the shadows among the bulky old furniture she had chosen at some auction in Halifax.

“It’s the cat,” Lucas would tell her.

“I must have a cat!” she had said when they were married.

But she showed no interest in the kittens her neighbors offered, or anything Lucas could find in a Manchester pet shop, and in the end adopted an old, blind-looking torn; brindled and slow. In the summer evenings this animal would move thoughtfully round the garden, marking each station of its reduced territory with a copious greenish spray. Suddenly it became bored and jumped in through the open French window. All evening it weaved about in the open spaces of the wood-block as if it were pushing its way through a thicket of long entangled grass. It smelled strongly, and its ears were full of mites. Pam put down her book. In a flash the old cat had jumped lightly on to her lap!

“Do you think he’s in pain?” she would ask Lucas.

“He’s not in pain. He only wants attention.”

“Because I couldn’t bear that.”

And to divert her, Lucas would take down Michael Ashman’s autobiography,
Beautiful Swimmers
, again. It was a strange book. Every so often you found interrupting the slow powerful stream of his journey from Cuxhaven at the mouth of the Elbe to Constanta on the Black Sea, weirs, rapids, passages so strange and personal they belonged in another kind of book entirely.

“The Expressionists chained to their mirrors—Rilke and Munch, Schiele and Kafka—never able to turn away or look anywhere else. A column of doomed and disintegrating soldiers in the long war against the father and the society he has created to imprison them. The mirror is not a simple weapon. It is their only means of defense, their plan of attack. In it they are allowed to reassure themselves: their nightmare is always of an identity so subsumed under the father’s that it becomes invisible to normal light, causing them to vanish as they watch.”

At one moment he was full of the direct human details of the trip—“I started walking again as soon as the rain eased off, then sat through the next shower in the doorway of an empty church, eating cheese and watching the clouds cross Augsburg”—the next, stimulated by the miraculous westwork of Aachen chapel, “font of the German Romanesque”, he would be speculating again about the nature of the Heart:

“We must sound the historical topboard, then, like someone testing a musical instrument, if we wish to hear the fading resonances of the Coeur—its convulsion, its fall, its disappearance as a kingdom of the World. Less acute researchers allow themselves to be deafened by a catastrophe which, they reason, goes through the fabric like the explosion of a bomb: but we know that by now it is only a whisper, an event implicit in the way other events are organized; less an event, in fact, than what rhetoricians might call a ‘gap’. We can never be sure we have found the Coeur except by its absence!

“Falling into the gap we may glimpse that great light—which, though it takes a million years to fade, would otherwise remain invisible to us even if we knew where to look—in the shape of a ripple in the sand, the position of an empty cardboard box on a building site, the angle of a woman’s head as she turns joyfully to listen to three notes of music, a playing-card King seen in a sidelong light.”

“How beautiful,” Pam said. She blinked hard; buried her face in the old cat’s fur. “Do you think it could ever really be like that?”

* * *

The point of everything they did was to hide.

Every morning, Lucas drove off into Longdendale. Unnerved by the tight bends and fast local traffic, he would peer anxiously into the sunshine or rain for the spire of Mottram church (known since the fifteenth century as “the Cathedral of East Cheshire”), which signaled that his journey was almost over. At night the moon’s reflection raced him home under the rusty pylons, across the chains of reservoirs. Meanwhile—even if the plans of previous owners had left its walls a confusing patchwork of filled-in doorways, bare stone alcoves, and sections of stripped-pine paneling which didn’t quite come down to the floor; even if the connecting doors almost always opened into some odd corner of a room, behind the oak sideboard—Pam waited for him as if theirs was the only house in the world. She would have her own modifications in hand as soon as the builders could be bothered to arrive.

When did it become clear to her that “Michael Ashman”, as Lucas presented him, did not exist?

We can imagine her coming down one morning late. She stares helplessly at the reference books and concertina-files spilled across the living-room carpet, a standard lamp tipped over with its pink silk shade crushed out of shape, the pictures awry on the walls. Before leaving for work, Lucas—who often types on the Lettera portable they keep in a bulky old roll-top desk opposite the French windows—has crumpled up a lot of typing paper and thrown that around too. She smoothes out a sheet of it and finds the draft version of a paragraph from
Beautiful Swimmers
, a version without Michael Ashman’s deftness:

“The Expressionists chained to their mirrors—Rilke and Munch, Schiele and Kafka—never able to turn away or look anywhere else. A column of doomed and disintegrating soldiers in the long war against the father and the society he has created. Like the assault rifle or the rocket launcher, the mirror is not a simple burden. It is their only method of defense. It is their only means of attack. In it they are able to reassure themselves of their own continuing existence; their fear is of an identity fragmenting, dissolving, fading to a wisp. The mirror assures them—or seems to—that they are still more than a twist of light at its heart. Those faces ravaged by egotism and insecurity still exist, modified by what is expected of them but not yet quite absorbed or transformed. Rilke and Schiele, glue on to what you can prove!—the bent light, the hard glass. Narcissism was hardly in it for you, your survival was so at stake! (By the same token there is endless despair at the center of every narcissistic self-portrait.)”

The phone starts to ring, then stops before she can answer it. She stands indecisively in the hallway, barefoot on the cold quarry-tiled floor. The old cat runs up and rubs its smelly head on her ankles. Having seen their furniture moved in, everyone else in the village believes she and Lucas are antique dealers. A rumor is already growing up that they have another house just like this one, in Ireland, piled up with valuable sofas and Japanese fire screens. Staring first at the paper in her hand and then out of the window at the mist on the other side of the valley, Pam tells herself aloud, “I must make a start.”

* * *

Shyly at first, each of them demarcated areas of interest: established a personality. Lucas was the creative one. From the start, his intention had been magical, calming. Pam was the critic. This enabled her to pretend for a long time that her interest in the Heart was archaeological, practical, cynical; she would, had she ever spoken openly, have claimed to be testing the theories of “Michael Ashman” rather than swallowing them. But they never spoke openly, Pam Stuyvesant and Lucas Medlar. Instead, they sat in that huge front room of theirs, plaiting the quotes on one side of Lucas’s postcards into the pictures on the other, until, by degrees, over the next year, perhaps two, they had extended Ashman’s researches and woven between them, while pretending it was someone else’s, a whole world. By two o’clock each afternoon, whatever time of year, twilight was already in the massive old sideboards and bits of pseudo-medieval art. Her prints of “Ophelia” and “The Scapegoat” glowed from the wall. He often looked across at his shelves of books by Alfred Kubin, Rilke and Alain-Fournier. The old cat sat first on his lap, then, yawning and straightening its arthritic legs, stepped cautiously over to hers.

What they believed separately about the Coeur when they began—to what extent, for instance, Lucas saw it as a useful fiction—I can’t say. But what they came to agree later, by a sort of sign language, seems to have been this: that somehow, and in special circumstances, the Pleroma breaks into ordinary existence, into political, social and religious life, and becomes a country of its own, a country of the heart.

For a time it blesses us all, then fades away again, corrupted or diluted by its contact with the World. Consequently we can detect its presence as a kind of historical ghost.

The myth of the Coeur was centered on its Fall:

“In the beginning of course,” Lucas used to say, with a smile across the room at Pam, “it must still have been perceptible as a catastrophe, the World and the Coeur a great wreck burning in the fabric of the Pleroma like two lovers in the glorious wreck of desire, a funeral done in Byzantine colors on cloth-of-gold—blazing ships, breached walls, smoke towering over everything! If only one had been close enough to hear that huge cry of love and loss, echoing and re-echoing across Europe through the remainder of the fifteenth century (so that, for instance, even the wars of York and Lancaster must be seen as a response—however characteristically cold and sluggish—an unconsciously constructed metaphor not so much of the politics of the Coeur as of its inmost griefs) and well into the sixteenth. We should know much more!”

“We know nothing,” Pam would remind him shortly, opening another packet of cigarettes.

Lucas tried to teach her to be willing to guess instead, taking the whole of the Middle Ages as his resource and ranging in his analogies from the Field of Blackbirds to Duns Scotus and the pursuit of Nominalism; from Courtly Love to the ecstasies of le roi Tafur, that shadowy European knight who relinquished armor and horse to fight on foot in sackcloth, and led the plebs pauperum to the Holy City (“What do I care if I die, since I am doing what I want to do?”). “On one hand,” he said, “We have the heresy of the Free Spirit, with its emphasis on the singularity and self-possession of the soul, on the other the beautiful staggered apses
en echelon
of the Romanesque cathedral. Love and order: the very polarity of these visions demands the Coeur as a higher level of appeal, which will reconcile them by containing them as elements of its own structure, just as the Pleroma reconciles the World and the Coeur.”

But this only made Pam laugh.

“What was it like to live there, Lucas? What did they eat? What sort of pottery did they piss in?”

“We don’t know.”

“No.” She smiled. “We don’t, do we?”

* * *

“For two nights and a day the harbor had been in flames. In any case, there is no escape from inside the meaning of things. The Empress Gallica XII Hierodule, mounted and wearing polished plate armor but—in response some thought to a dream she had had as a child at the court of Charles VII of France—carrying no weapons, waited with her captains, Theodore Lascaris and the twenty-three-year-old English adventurer Michael Neville (later ‘Michael of Anjou’), for the last assault on the citadel. The outer walls were already weakened by three weeks of bombardment from landward. The labyrinthine powder magazines were exhausted. Smoke from the besieging cannon drifted here and there in the sunlight, sometimes like strips of rag, sometimes like a thick black fog.

“At ten in the morning a force of Serbs and Albanians, on ladders of their own dead, breached the inner defenses; by noon they were still only halfway across the citadel, fighting grimly uphill street by street.

“Lascaris was killed there early in the afternoon. Neville, trying wildly to come to his aid with the remains of the small English contingent, seems to have been ambushed and awfully wounded, and it is possible the Empress thought both of them dead. She was last seen on foot at four o’clock, near one of the gates. By then, someone said, she was weeping openly and had picked up a sword. Her armor, though spattered with blood, remained so bright that when the smoke cleared you could not bear to look directly at her. Several people saw her fall. Not content with killing her the Serbs trampled her unrecognizable.

“The invading kings—it seems hardly worth our while at this distance to know who they were—allowed their followers three days in the sacred city before they took possession of it. When at last they rode through the great arch they received into their care a city which seemed to have been in ruins for a thousand years. They wept to see that birds were nesting in the fallen basilicas, weeds growing up between the paving stones.” Lucas told this story a number of times. At this point he would always pause and look at Pam before finishing.

“What had happened? The Coeur would no longer let itself be known, though it did not perhaps breathe its final breath in the world until they identified Gallica by her beautiful armor, and displayed the mutilated head.”

There was a silence.

Into it Pam said. “That’s all very well. We read ‘death’ where we should read ‘transformation’. But when will it allow itself to be known by us?” And she lit one Churchman’s from another, looking steadily at Lucas until he lifted his hands, palms upwards, in a gesture of puzzlement as if she had asked the wrong question.