The Course of the Heart (9 page)

(“He was a child,” she became fond of saying later. “You couldn’t reason with him.” But her own desire was deeply passionate and impatient. She was chafed by the closeness of the Coeur, and perhaps she was less frustrated by Lucas’s rhetoric of the imagination than by the painstaking way he constructed it. “Phoenissa didn’t die,” she interrupted him one day. “Or if she did, she died into the World, and a bit of her is in all women.” And Lucas could not convince her of anything else.)

* * *

The third son, Theodore, had a son of his own when he was fifty. Beyond this his significance is slight. He took the family to Pesara or Pesaro in the provinces and began the Romanization of it which could be seen over the next two generations until with the birth of Andrew John Hierodule in 1575 the Coeur flared up again like a firework in the genetic material of its heirs. Andrew, Lucas’s researches led him to believe, was employed by the House of Orange, “perhaps as a soldier of fortune, perhaps as diplomat or spy”, in 1600. He must have travelled habitually, because he married in Tuscany a year later: the wife died giving birth to a daughter he called, with some irony and an acute sense of his historical position, Eudoxia.

“He disappears quite suddenly after that,” said Lucas, “but the Coeur is on fire in him, and our next sight of him is at the Hradschin Palace, where the Emperor Rudolph—a solitary and helpless figure more attached to his pet lion Ottokar than any human being—relies in his dealings with Spain on an adviser called ‘John Cleves’ or sometimes ‘Orange John’, who in all respects fits the descriptions we have of Andrew Hierodule. Later he witnessed the Defenestration of Prague. It was Orange John who shouted as Jaroslav Martinez and William Slavata fell fifty feet into the courtyard of the palace, ‘Let your Mary save you now if she can!’—and then, when Martinez actually began to crawl away: ‘By God, she has!’ Had he gone to Bohemia to hawk the rights of succession in imitation of Mathaeus a hundred and twenty years before? If so, he had been equally unlucky in his choice of Emperor; and he next turns up, still calling himself John Cleves, in England, where he seems to have served the notorious Earl of Lincoln.

“He died in 1638. His sons Leo and Theodore fought on opposite sides during the Civil War. With them—though Theodore, falling among the Royalists at Naseby, was said to have cried out, ‘Oh, the shiny armor!’—the Coeur withdraws itself again. Leo, less of a lion than his brother, became a pineapple planter in Barbados. Towards the end of his life he was warden of his parish church, and you can see his grave there as Michael Ashman claims to have done. Of his son Constantine we know nothing at all except that he came back to live near Bristol, where he changed his name to St. Ives, married twice, and left a daughter to whom he gave the eerie name of Godscall: this little girl, traditionally, is the last of them.

“Whatever happened to her, she carried in her bones the cup, the map, the mirror—the real heritage of the Empress, the real Clue to the Heart.”

Letters arrived from them at irregular intervals. I remembered them guiltily when I was tired or depressed. Though I never had much faith in their solution, which made me think of two monkeys huddled together at the back of a cage on a cold day, I allowed myself to be lulled by it. It was easier to assume they were happy. Of course I knew nothing about the story they had begun to tell one another; it would be nearly twenty years before I found out about “Michael Ashman” and the Search for the Heart. About a year after the wedding I moved to London, which I’d always wanted to do. Work—in the editorial department of an independent company specializing in reprints from American academic presses—kept me busy. For five or six years after that my life was my own. Then it all came to bits again.

Late May, Westminster Bridge, sudden gusts of wind like bad predictions from the City. A northbound Number 12 stopped briefly at St. Thomas’s Hospital to let an old man get on. He hesitated at the curb and looked up briefly, his face a blur. Despite the wind he wore only a pair of dirty white shorts and a singlet. I was on my way back from the London College of Printing, where I had spent most of the morning, I forget why. I was sitting upstairs at the front of the bus. He settled himself next to me, though there were plenty of empty seats, and—as the Number 12 pulled out on to the bridge and began to cross it—put his feet up companionably on the windowsill in front of us. He smelt rank and lively, like a small animal in straw.

“China’s in the heart, Jack,” he said, and laughed.

Careful not to answer, in case he was encouraged, I looked out over the river towards Hungerford Bridge. The tide was high. Light came up from the water, filling the space between Westminster Pier and Riverside Walk.

“That’s what they say. China’s in the heart!”

The bus edged past Parliament in fits and starts, eased itself through an orange light and turned up towards Trafalgar Square. From the corner of my eye I could see the backs of the old man’s hands with their prominent ropy veins, his ankles white and dirty above his old suede shoes. Suddenly he put his hand into the pocket of his shorts and brought out a handful of thorns and crumpled leaves. I thought he was going to roll a cigarette with this stuff: instead, palm out flat, he offered it for my inspection. At that moment the bus driver found a clear patch in the traffic and accelerated the length of Whitehall. I heard a familiar voice intone, “The burnet rose—” (or perhaps it was “the burnt rose”) “—five white petals with the light shining through to make a cup for its pale yellow stamens.” I jumped to my feet.

“Yaxley!”

I lurched down the gangway, down the stairs, waited trembling on the platform for the lights to stop the bus at Trafalgar Square.

Yaxley followed me more slowly.

“I’m getting off here too,” he said, showing me his handful of rose leaves again before he crumpled them up with a vague, distributory gesture, as though to scatter them over the stone lions, the dry boarded-up fountains, at the base of Nelson’s Column. They were blown under the wheels of a stationary taxi while I waited passively for whatever would happen next. I felt sick. What was I expecting? That he would perform some magical operation, there on the pavement outside the Whitehall Theatre? All he did was study me for a moment. “Never waste an opportunity!” he advised, then set off rapidly towards the lower end of Charing Cross Road.

I followed him.

“Yaxley,” Pam Stuyvesant pointed out a long time later, “never did anything to anybody. He always encouraged us to do it to ourselves.”

* * *

Up past the National Gallery, left across the toe of Chinatown by Gerrard Place, over Shaftesbury Avenue at the Queen’s. He knew I was there. He would step out deliberately in front of a car then stare back at me with a triumphant grimace from the other side of the road; or bump into a woman shopper and shout, “Fuck me! See that?” Under the tower of St. Anne’s Soho, with its skeins of dead ivy like a shriveled venous system, he turned and made pushing motions at me—“Go back. Go back.” Wardour Street was deserted. He turned left abruptly, to make a curious loop through the gut of the Berwick Street fruit market (where a stallholder’s call of “Twelve for a pahnd. Twelve for a pahnd ’ere!” prompted him to look up and shake his fist at the signboard of the King of Corsica, with its collage of brooding faces), along Broadwick Street, and back on to Wardour Street again. His gait was shambling and agitated. He wavered at the entrance to Flaxman Court. On Meard Street a few blackened pigeons scattered across the cobbles in front of him: he stopped on the corner in front of the old, boarded-up clockmaker’s shop—with its faded sign, dusty pillared doorway and stucco rosettes—to stare into a basement area as if he had forgotten something. It was a strange, illogical tour, which ended suddenly when he dodged into the Pizza Express at the corner of Dean Street and Carlisle Street.

* * *

I caught up with him as he lurched and shoved his way between the crowded tables to a corner by the window. Disturbed by his smell, people looked up suddenly as he passed, only to look away again when they heard him say quietly but distinctly to himself, “Cunt!” or “Who’s this nasty little animal then?” He sat down and emptied the plastic flowers out of the little vase in the center of the table.

The waiters ignored us.

“Yaxley—” I began, but he had lost interest in me again.

All of a sudden rain began to stream down into the street, and with it a kind of sad, silvery, watery light, which splashed off the front of the pub opposite. Within seconds the road was empty. “There’s a parrot up there,” said Yaxley, in an inturned, empty voice. He was right. I could see it clearly through the upper windows of the pub, running up and down inside its cage like a little mechanical toy. There wasn’t much else to look at: another restaurant, the “TRUSNA” with its pink and purple facade, closed: the rain.

“Yaxley?”

“Just fuck off and leave me alone,” he said. He seemed to be waiting for something.

After a moment two men appeared, pushing a car which wouldn’t start. They went round the corner into Dean Street and only one of them came back. He stood in the doorway of the Pizza Express and shook out his umbrella. As he came into the restaurant, his gaze caught mine for a moment. It was absent and empty. I looked away.

Yaxley grinned and leaned over the table. He had torn his paper serviette into several thin strips, one of which he laid across my place mat. Its edges were fibrous and delicate in the washed-out light.

“Look at that!” he said.

I stared at him. I realized that he meant not the torn serviette, but the man who had just come in.

“No, be careful not to let him see you! His name is Lawson.”

* * *

The Pizza Express was full of middle management from the advertising and TV industries, lunching each other on the cheap. “The only reason you go to Germany for two years is to make more money than you do here,” said someone a few tables away. After that I heard only, “BBC.” There was some laughter. Lawson looked no different to the rest of them. He had furled his umbrella and taken off his raincoat, and was now sitting two or three tables away from us, with people he knew. He wore a gold watch, a striped shirt, one of those pale blue ties with the small white spots you see in the shop next to the men’s lavatories at Euston Station. His hair was gray and curly, the curls tiny, tight and wiry: he had on a blue suit.

“Listen to him!” urged Yaxley.

I could see that Lawson was speaking, but in the lunchtime hubbub it was hard to separate his voice from all the others. He talked with his mouth open all the time: the lips moved in a jerky rhythm unrelated to speech, like those of a puppet, so that you imagined left to themselves they would make a constant “wah wah wah” noise, not loud but penetrating. For a moment I thought I could hear this noise. I was wrong. Then suddenly he said, and I heard him clearly even at that distance:

“Ba-luddy woman. Ba-luddy woman! My God!” He moved his mouth down to his fork to eat. Yaxley seemed delighted.

“That man knows four things about the Pleroma,” he said. “Three of them he learned from me.” He shrugged, and as if to justify himself went on, “So what. Everyone knows them. But the fourth is important. He is unaware that he knows the fourth, or that he is keeping it from me.”

“I thought you knew everything,” I said.

Yaxley gazed across the junction at the baskets of flowers above the appalling façade of the “TRUSNA”. The rain had eased off and people were walking past again.

“How are Pam Stuyvesant and Lucas Medlar?” he asked me distantly.

Before I could answer, he went on:

“Let me tell you what Lawson will do this afternoon, when he leaves here. He’ll go down to the Thames at Charing Cross Pier, wait in the Victoria Gardens for a very young woman to get off a pleasure boat, and follow her to a house in West Kilburn. She will go inside and shut the door. Then he’ll stand outside for an hour, willing her to cross an uncurtained window; while she sits on the bed with her hands in her lap, staring at the wall in front of her. After an hour or two, Lawson will turn away and go home.

“He thinks this girl is his daughter, but she is not. She is a daughter of mine.” He laughed. “One of my daughters.”

“I don’t want to know any of this,” I said.

“Yes you do,” said Yaxley. “Because if you help me with Lawson I will help you with Pam and Lucas. Would you like me to help them? Things will get worse for them even if I try.”

“What things, Yaxley? What things will get worse?”

He only shrugged.

“If I don’t try, they haven’t a chance,” he said. “Look—”

He pushed a Polaroid photograph across the table to me. It showed quite a pretty teenage girl in the white blouse, royal blue V-neck and pleated gray skirt of some private school. Failures of the developing chemicals had drained color out of her face, so that it had a blank, unformed look. I couldn’t see any resemblance to Lawson. She was sitting on a garden bench, leaning forward with her clasped hands resting on her lap. Behind her it was possible to make out a neo-Georgian door; some standard rose bushes in gray, loose, heavily weeded earth; a black BMW. Something about the curve of her back, the clasped hands, the way she seemed to be staring straight ahead into the air, reminded me of a painting. I couldn’t think who it was by.

“Lawson wants to fuck his own daughter. Do you understand? He wants to fuck her, but he hasn’t the courage or the determination to do it. She lives in Cheshire with his first wife. He says she is fourteen years old, but I imagine she is younger. He is afraid of himself on her behalf. I’ve explained to him how he can deflect this stroke on to a substitute. I’ve made him an image of her. When I’m ready I’ll allow him to use it in return for what he knows.”

“I won’t be involved, Yaxley.”

“Yes you will,” he said.

I stared at him across the table. He pushed his chair back and stood up. “Keep that,” he said, indicating the Polaroid. “You’ll need it.” He arranged the rest of the torn serviette around my place mat, then as an afterthought added the plastic flowers. “There,” he said.