The Course of the Heart

by M. John Harrison

  Other books by M. John Harrison:

  Things That Never Happen

  Light

  Viriconium (Omnibus Edition)

  Travel Arrangements

  Signs of Life

  The Luck in the Head

  Climbers

  Viriconium Nights

  he Ice Monkey & Other Stories

  In Viriconium (US Title: The Floating Gods)

  A Storm of Wings

  The Machine in Shaft Ten & Other Stories

  The Centauri Device

  The Pastel City

  The Committed Men

  The Course of the Heart © 1992 by M. John Harrison

  This edition of The Course of the Heart © 2004 by Night Shade Books

  Cover illustration © 2004 by David Lloyd

  Cover & interior layout and design by Jeremy Lassen

  First Edition

  ISBN

  1-892389-97-5 (Trade Hardcover)

  1-892389-98-3 (Limited Edition)

  Night Shade Books

  http://www.nightshadebooks.com

  Was man nicht erfliegen kann, muss man erhinken.

  —Ruckert, Die beiden Gulden

  …She hath yielded herself up to everything that

  lives, and hath become a partaker in its mystery.

  And because she has made herself the servant of each,

  therefore she is become the mistress of all…

  —Aleister Crowley

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  PART TWO

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  PART THREE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  Pleroma

  When I was a tiny boy I often sat motionless in the garden, bathed in sunshine, hands flat on the rough brick of the garden path, waiting with a prolonged, almost painful expectation for whatever would happen, whatever event was contained by that moment, whatever revelation lay dormant in it. I was drenched in the rough, dusty, aromatic smells of dock-leaves and marigolds. In the corner of the warm wall, rhubarb blanched under an upturned zinc tub eaten away with rust. I could smell it there.

  Some of the first words I heard my mother say were, “A grown woman like that! How could a grown woman act like that?” She was gossiping about someone in the family. I can’t remember who, perhaps one of her younger sisters. It was the first time I had heard the phrase. “A grown woman.” I imagined a woman cultured like a tomato or a potato, for some purpose I would never understand. Had my mother been “grown” like that? It was an image which ramified and expanded long after I had understood the proper meaning of the phrase.

  * * *

  My mother loved films. She loved the actresses Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson as much as the characters they played. She was a tallish, thin woman herself, but otherwise nothing like them. Against their grave and bony calm, always breaking out into rage or delight, she could set only the tense provincial prettiness shared by nurses and infant teachers. Her name was Barbara, but she had her friends call her “Bobbie”. When I was older I found the effect of this as sad as her neatly tailored trouser-suits and deep suntan. She was frightened the sun would make her haggard but she sat out in it anyway, in the garden or on the beach, turning up her face in a static flight reflex of vanity and despair.

  The women she liked Redgrave and Jackson to play were queens, dancers, courtesans, romantic intellectuals determined to better themselves to death like huge rawboned moths inside the Japanese lamps of their own neuroses. Sexuality seemed to be the strongest of their qualities, until, at the crux, they diverted all the sexual momentum of the film into some metaphor of self-expression—an image of dancing or running—and gave the slip to both the filmic lover and the audience. Much more important was to remain at the focus of attention, and for this they were in competition even with themselves. Having captured the center stage they were ready to abandon it immediately, dance away, and still ravenous, demand:

  “No. Not her. Me.”

  * * *

  The year I was twelve, my mother was thirty. I remember her walking up and down on the lawn at the front of the house shouting, “You bloody piece of paper, you bloody piece of paper,” over and over again at a letter she was holding in her right hand. It was from my father, I suppose. But clearly something else was at stake. “You bloody piece of paper!” Eventually she varied the emphasis on this accusation until it had illuminated briefly every word. It was as if she was trying for some final, indisputable delivery.

  Her sense of drama, the transparency of her emotion, unnerved me. I ran round the garden pulling up flowers, desperate to offer her something in exchange for whatever loss she was suffering. “Have my birthday,” I remember shouting. “I don’t want it.” She looked puzzledly at the broken-stemmed handful of marguerites. “We must put them in a vase,” she said.

  My role was the role of Vanessa’s male lead, Vanessa’s audience. I was to follow my mother’s retreat through the diminishing concentric shells of her self. The layers of the onion, peeled away, would reveal only more layers.

  “A birthday’s the last thing I want, darling.”

  The letter was left out on the lawn all afternoon, where the rain could pulp it. When my father stayed away for good, she took to saving her skin, carefully applying a layer of honey-colored make-up every morning, only to remove it even more carefully at night. Liberated perhaps too late by best-selling feminist novels, she wore wide American spectacles with tinted lenses to protect her eyes and emphasize the fine, slightly gaunt structure of jaw and cheeks.

  “I am a sadder but a wiser woman,” she wrote to me from a holiday villa in Santa Ponsa, perhaps overestimating the maturity of a boy seventeen years old. “We never get to know people until it’s too late, do we?”

  I was flattered by these sentiments which, unfinished and adult, implied but somehow always evaded their real subject. Long after I had given up trying to puzzle out what she meant, I was still able to feel that she had confided in me.

  “But there you are, my dear. As you grow up I expect you’re finding that out.”

  * * *

  By then I was already playing truant two or three afternoons each week from the grammar school. I couldn’t have explained why. All I ever did was walk about; or sit hypnotized by the Avon where it ran through the local fields, watching the hot sunlight spilling and foaming off the weir until a kind of excited fatigue came over me and I could no longer separate the look of the water from its sound and weight, its strange, powerful, almost yeasty smell. This I associated somehow with the “grown woman”. She had developed with me. That yeasty smell, that mass, was hers. She didn’t so much haunt as stalk my adolescent summers, which were all rain and sunshine and every minute the most surprising changes of light.

  My mother, unaware of this, told people I was young for my age; and indeed during my first term at Cambridge I spent most weekends at home, travelling by rail on Friday evening and early Monday morning. The train often stopped for a few minutes near Derby. I don’t remember the name of the station. Two old wooden platforms surrounded by larch, pine and variegated holly gave it an air at once bijou and mysterious: it was the branch-line halt of middle-class children’s fiction forty years ago. Sitting in the train, you had no idea what sort of landscape lay behind the trees. The wind rushed through them, so that you could think of yourself as being on some sandy eminence away from w
hich spread an intimately folded arrangement of orchards and lanes, of broad heathland stretching off to other hills. Afternoon light enameled the leaves of the holly. Everything was possible in the country—or garden—beyond. Foxes and owls and stolen ponies. Gorse and gypsy caravans in a rough field. Some mystery about a pile of railway sleepers near the tracks, shiny with rain in the green light at the edge of the woods!

  I wanted it desperately.

  Then the light passed, the wind dropped and the train began to move again. The trees were dusty and birdlimed. All they had hidden was a housing estate, allotments, a light engineering plant. A woman with a hyperactive child came into the carriage and sat down opposite me.

  “Just sit down,” she warned the child.

  Instead it stared defiantly into her eyes for a moment then wandered off to make noises with the automatic door.

  * * *

  Early in my second term I bought a stereo. I quickly learned to put on the headset, turn up the volume and listen again and again to the same piece of music, each repetition of a significant phrase causing soft white explosions all over the inside of my skull.

  Whether the music was the first movement of Bruckner’s Fifth or only the Bewlay Brothers, the result was the same. The actual cortex, the convoluted outer surface of my brain, was somehow scoured and eroded by these little painless epiphanies. I half-hoped that if I listened long enough or got the volume high enough, it would be worn as smooth as a stone by them, so that I would never be able to think again. My ideal at that time was to remain conscious—perceptive, receptive—while no longer conscious of myself. I never achieved that. The music always lost its effect. The explosions ceased to scour. My brain began to grow itself again. I woke up to myself, staring out of the window at the green light rippling through the trees.

  Girls eighteen or nineteen years old swam down towards me through it, their arms and legs moving in lazy, thoughtless strokes. When I thought about them they were red-haired, smiling, sleepy-eyed as a Gustav Klimt. A year later I lay on the floor with one of them.

  * * *

  It was early June, bright but humid. The air had been like a hammer for days, the streets stunned and dazzled into silence. She lived with some other people, but the house was empty all through the week. Her room, which was at the front and shaded by the great canopy of a horse-chestnut tree, stayed dim and cool for much of the day. For an hour in the morning the shadow of the slatted blinds moved across the sofa with its Indian cushions, on to the fringed maroon and orange rug and then on again, to dwell over her parted legs and scattered underwear. A little after two o’clock a thin, incandescent line of sunshine sliced into the upper part of the room, caught the dusty paper birds of a cheap mobile and flared them briefly into enamel and gold. That was it.

  “This room reeks of sex.”

  “It reeks of us,” I said.

  I had known her for a week and two days. Half awake alone in my own bed I would catch the smell of her, and in a moment of shocked delight, remember her whispering, “Fuck me! Fuck me!” in the middle of the night. Wherever I was I could close my eyes and visualize precisely the curves at the base of her spine where it seemed to hold its breath before it arched out into the smooth, heavy muscles of her behind. I loved her contact lenses. I loved the way she had to stop in the middle of the street to slip one out into the palm of her hand then lick it up into her mouth like a cat to clean it.

  “Perhaps we should have a bath.”

  At three o’clock, someone manhandled a bicycle up the steps outside and came into the house. We heard footsteps on the cool tiled floor of the hall. By then we were restless, a little tired, sticky to touch. Whoever had come in knocked first hesitantly then determinedly at the door of the room. A voice I knew asked for me.

  “Don’t answer,” she mouthed.

  “Yaxley’s ready to try,” said the voice at the door. There was a pause. “Are you there? Hello? Yaxley says he’s ready. This weekend.”

  “Don’t answer!” she said, quite loudly.

  I sat up and looked at her. I had known her for a week and two days, and I loved everything about her.

  “Shh!” I said.

  She pulled me down again. “Go away!” she shouted.

  “Are you in there?” said the voice at the door. “It’s Lucas!”

  “Hang on, Lucas—” I answered.

  Would anything have changed if I hadn’t, if I’d stayed there quietly with my hand between her legs, trying not to laugh?

  “—I’m coming.”

  PART ONE

  In the Wake of the Goddess

  ONE

  Misprision of Dreams

  Pam Stuyvesant took drugs to manage her epilepsy. They often made her depressed and difficult to deal with; and Lucas, who was nervous himself, never knew what to do. After their divorce he relied increasingly on me as a go-between.

  “I don’t like the sound of her voice,” he would tell me. “You try her.”

  The drugs gave her a screaming, false-sounding laugh that went on and on. Though he had remained sympathetic over the years, Lucas was always embarrassed and upset by it. I think it frightened him.

  “See if you can get any sense out of her.”

  It was guilt, I think, that encouraged him to see me as a steadying influence: not his own guilt so much as the guilt he felt all three of us shared.

  “See what she says.”

  * * *

  On this occasion what she said was:

  “Look, if you bring on one of my turns, bloody Lucas Medlar will regret it. What business is it of his how I feel, anyway?”

  “It was just that you wouldn’t talk to him. He was worried that something was happening. Is there something wrong, Pam?” She didn’t answer, but I had hardly expected her to.

  “If you don’t want to see me,” I suggested carefully, “couldn’t you tell me now?”

  I thought she was going to hang up, but in the end there was only a kind of paroxysm of silence. I was phoning her from a call box in the middle of Huddersfield. The shopping precinct outside was full of pale bright sunshine, but windy and cold. Sleet was forecast for later in the day. Two or three teenagers went past, talking and laughing. (One of them said, “What acid rain’s got to do with my career I don’t know. That’s what they asked me. ‘What do you know about acid rain?’”) When they had gone I could hear Pam breathing raggedly.

  “Hello?” I said.

  She shouted, “Are you mad? I’m not talking on the phone. Before you know it, the whole thing’s public property!” Sometimes she was more dependent on medication than usual; you knew when because she tended to use that phrase over and over again: “Before you know it—”

  One of the first things I ever heard her say was, “It looks so easy, doesn’t it? But before you know it, the bloody thing’s just slipped straight out of your hands,” as she bent down nervously to pick up the bits of a broken glass. How old were we then? Twenty? Lucas believed she was reflecting in language some experience of either the drugs or the disease itself, but I’m not sure he was right. Another thing she often said was, “I mean, you have to be careful, don’t you?” drawing out both care and don’t in such a way that you saw immediately it was a mannerism learned in adolescence.

  “You must be mad if you think I’ll say anything on the phone.”

  “I’ll come over this evening then.”

  “No!”

  “Pam, I—” She gave in abruptly.

  “Come now and get it over with. I don’t feel well.”

  Epilepsy since the age of twelve or thirteen, as regular as clockwork; and then, later, a classic migraine to fill the gaps: a complication which, rightly or wrongly, she had always associated with what Yaxley helped the three of us do when we were students. She must never get angry or excited. “I reserve my adrenaline,” she would explain. It was a physical, not a psychological thing: it was glandular. “I can’t let it go at the time.” Afterwards though the reservoir would burst, and it would
all be released at once by some minor stimulus—a lost shoe, a missed bus, rain—to cause her hallucinations, vomiting, loss of bowel control. “Oh, and then euphoria. It’s wonderfully relaxing. Just like sex,” she would say bitterly.

  “OK, Pam. I’ll be there soon. Don’t worry.”

  “Piss off,” she said. She was dependent on reassurance, but it made her angry. “Things are coming to bits here. I can already see the little floating lights.”

  As soon as she put the receiver down I telephoned Lucas. “I’m not doing this again,” I said.

  Silence.

  “Lucas? She isn’t well. I thought she was going to have an attack there and then.”

  “She’ll see you, though? The thing is, she just kept putting the phone down on me. You’ve no idea how tiring that can be. She’ll see you today?”

  “You knew she would.”

  “Good.”

  I hung up.

  “Lucas, you’re a bastard,” I told the shopping precinct.

  * * *

  February. Valentine’s Day. Snow and sleet all over the country. For thirty minutes or so, the bus from Huddersfield wound its way through exhausted mill villages given over to hairdressing, dog breeding and an under-capitalized tourist trade. I got off it at three o’clock in the afternoon, but it seemed much later. The face of the church clock was already lit, and a mysterious yellow light was slanting across the window of the nave, as if someone was doing something in there with only a forty-watt bulb for illumination. Cars went past endlessly as I waited to cross the road, their exhausts steaming in the dark air. For a village it was quite noisy: tires hissing on the wet road, the bang and clink of soft-drink bottles being unloaded from a lorry outside the post office, some children I couldn’t see, chanting one word over and over again. Quite suddenly, above all this, I heard the pure musical note of a thrush and stepped out into the road.

  “You’re sure no one got off the bus behind you?”

  Pam kept me on the doorstep while she looked anxiously up and down the street, but once I was inside she seemed glad to have someone to talk to.