He grinned and nodded and advised me:
“Have you ever seen Joan of Arc get down to pray in the ticket office at St. Pancras? And then a small boy comes in leading something that looks like a goat, and it gets on her there and then and fucks her in a ray of sunlight?
“Come back when you know what you want. Get rid of Lucas Medlar, he’s an amateur. Bring the girl if you must.”
“Fuck off, Yaxley.”
He let me find my own way back down to the street.
That night I had to tell Lucas, “We aren’t going to be hearing from Yaxley again.”
“Christ,” he said, and for a second I thought he was going to cry. “Pam feels so ill,” he whispered. “What did he say?”
“Forget him. He could never have helped us.”
“Pam and I are getting married,” Lucas said in a rush.
TWO
N’Aimez Que Moi
What could I have said? I knew as well as they did that they were only doing it out of a need for comfort. Nothing would be gained by making them admit it. Besides, I was so tired by then I could hardly stand. Yaxley had exhausted me. Some kind of visual fault, a neon zigzag like a bright little flight of stairs, kept showing up in my left eye. So I congratulated Lucas and, as soon as I could, began thinking about something else.
“Yaxley’s terrified by the British Museum,” I said. “In a way I sympathize with him.”
As a child, I had hated it too.
Every conversation, every echo of a voice or a footstep or a rustle of clothes, was gathered up into its high ceilings in a kind of undifferentiated rumble and sigh—the blurred and melted remains of meaning—which made you feel as if your parents had abandoned you in a derelict swimming bath. Later, when I was a teenager, it was the vast shapeless heads in Room 25 that frightened me, the vagueness of the inscriptions. I saw clearly what was there—“Red sandstone head of a king…” “Red granite head from a colossal figure of a king…”—but what was I looking at? A description is not an explanation. The faceless wooden figure of Rameses emerged perpetually from an alcove near the lavatory door, a Rameses who had to support himself with a stick: split, syphilitic, worm-eaten by his passage through the world, but still condemned to struggle helplessly on.
“We want to go and live up north,” Lucas said. “Away from all this.”
* * *
As the afternoon wore on, Pam became steadily more disturbed. “Listen,” she would ask me, “is that someone in the passage? You can always tell me the truth.”
After she had promised several times in a vague way, “I can’t send you out without anything to eat. I’ll cook us something in a minute, if you’ll make some more coffee,” I realized she was frightened to go back into the kitchen. She would change the subject immediately, explaining, “No matter how much coffee I drink, my throat is always dry. It’s all that smoking;” or: “I hate the dark afternoons.”
She returned often to the theme of age. She had always hated to feel old.
“You comb your hair in the mornings and it’s just another ten years gone, every loose hair, every bit of dandruff, like a lot of old snapshots showering down. We moved around such a lot,” she went on, as if the connection would be clear to me: “after university. It wasn’t that I couldn’t settle, more that I had to leave something behind every so often, as a sort of sacrifice.
“If I liked a job I was in, I would always give it up. Poor old Lucas!”
She laughed.
“Do you ever feel like that?”
She made a face.
“I don’t suppose you ever do,” she said. “I remember that first house we lived in, over near Dunford Bridge. It was so huge, and falling apart inside! And always on the market until Lucas and I bought it. Everyone who had it tried some new way of dividing it to make it livable. People would put in a new staircase or knock two rooms together. They’d abandon parts of it because they couldn’t afford to heat it all. Then they’d bugger off before anything was finished and leave it to the next lot—”
She broke off suddenly.
“I could never keep it tidy,” she said.
“Lucas always loved it.”
“Does he say that? You don’t want to pay too much attention to him,” she warned me. “The garden was so full of builders’ rubbish we could never grow anything. And the winters!” She shivered. “Well, you know what it’s like out there. The rooms reeked of calor gas. Before we’d been there a week Lucas had every kind of portable heater you could think of. I hated the cold, but never as much as he did.” With an amused tenderness she chided him—“Lucas, Lucas, Lucas”—as if he were in the room there with us. “How you hated it and how untidy you were!”
By now it was dark outside, but the younger cat was still staring out into the grayish, sleety well of the garden, beyond which you could just make out—as a swelling line of shadow with low clouds racing over it—the edge of the moor. Pam kept asking the cat what it could see. “Nothing but old crimes out there,” she told it. “Children buried all over the moor.”
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, turnin
g 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.”
The Course of the Heart Page 3
