The Course of the Heart

by M. John Harrison

  She narrowed her eyes, puzzled.

  “You wondered why they had so little common sense.”

  She tried to push the cat off her bed, but it only bent its body in a rubbery way and avoided her hand. She yawned suddenly. “At the same time,” she went on, after a pause, “I could see that some spiders had made their webs between the rocks, just a foot or two above the tideline.” Though they trembled and were sometimes filled with spray like dewdrops so that they glittered in the sun, the webs remained unbroken. She couldn’t describe, she said, the sense of frailty and anxiety with which this filled her. “So close to all that violence. You wondered why they had so little common sense,” she repeated. “The last thing I heard was someone warning me, ‘On your own you really can hear voices in the tide—’”

  She smiled.

  “Will you come in with me?” she said, holding back the top of the continental quilt. “Just for a moment? After all, Lucas can’t mind any more, can he?”

  “Pam, you’re not—”

  “Take your clothes off. Come in and hug me, if nothing else.” She made room. She said, “You’ve stayed young while I got old.”

  And then: “There, touch. Yes.” I held her until she fell asleep. All night the old cat moved about uncomplainingly but restlessly on the continental quilt, as if it could no longer be comfortable anywhere. I smoothed the fur on its bony head. Its huge purr filled the room. Once, Pam seemed to wake up suddenly: finding that I had rolled away from her, she murmured:

  “I’m glad you got something out of it. Lucas and I never did. Roses! It was worth it for that.”

  And, after a moment:

  “Hug me. Come inside me again.”

  I thought of us as we had been twenty years before. I woke quite early in the morning. I didn’t know where I was until I walked in a drugged way to the window and saw the village street full of snow. I fed the cats again. As I left the house Pam was still asleep, with the expression people have on their faces when they can’t believe what they remember about themselves. It was the last time I saw her before her illness took hold.

  “On your own, you really can hear voices in the tide,” she had said. “I started to menstruate the same day. For years I was convinced that’s why my fits had begun: menstruation.”

  * * *

  For a long time after that inconclusive meeting with Yaxley, I had a recurrent dream of him. His hands were clasped tightly across his chest, the left hand holding the wrist of the right, and he was going quickly from room to room of the British Museum. Whenever he came to a corner or a junction of corridors, he stopped abruptly and stared at the wall in front of him for thirty seconds before turning very precisely to face in the right direction before he moved on. He did this with the air of a man who has for some reason taught himself to walk with his eyes closed through a perfectly familiar building; but there was also, in the way he stared at the walls—and particularly in the way he held himself so upright and rigid—a profoundly hierarchical air, an air of premeditation and ritual. His shoes, and the bottoms of his faded corduroy trousers, were soaking wet, just as they had been the morning after the rite, when the four of us had walked back through the damp fields in the bright sunshine. He wore no socks.

  In the dream I was always hurrying to catch up with him. I was stopping every so often to write something in a notebook, hoping he wouldn’t see me. He strode purposefully through the Museum, from cabinet to cabinet of twelfth-century illuminated manuscripts. Suddenly he stopped, looked back at me, and said:

  “There are sperms in this picture. You can see them quite plainly. What are sperms doing in a religious picture?”

  He smiled, opened his eyes very wide.

  Pointing to the side of his own head with one finger, he began to shout and laugh incoherently.

  When he had gone, I saw that he had been examining a New Testament miniature from Queen Melisande’s Psalter, depicting “The Women at the Sepulcher”. In it an angel was drawing Mary Magdalene’s attention to some strange luminous shapes that hovered in the air in front of her. They did, in fact, look something like the spermatozoa which often border the tormented Paris paintings of Edvard Munch.

  I would wake up abruptly from this dream, to find that it was morning and that I had been crying.

  * * *

  “On your own, you really can hear voices in the tide, cries for help or attention.”

  A warm front had moved in from the south-west during the night. The snow had already begun to soften and melt, the Pennine stations looked like leaky downspouts, the moors were locked beneath gray clouds. Two little boys sat opposite me on the train until Stalybridge, holding their Day Rover tickets thoughtfully in their laps. They might have been eight or nine years old. They were dressed in tiny, perfect donkey jackets, tight trousers, Dr Marten’s boots. Close up, their shaven skulls were bluish and vulnerable, perfectly shaped. They looked like acolytes in a Buddhist temple: grave, wide-eyed, compliant. By the time I got to Manchester, a fine rain was falling. The wind blew it the full length of Market Street and through the doors of the Kardomah Café, where I had arranged to meet Lucas Medlar.

  The first thing he said was, “Look at these pies! They aren’t plastic, you know, like a modern pie. These are from the plaster era of café pies, the earthenware era. Terracotta pies, realistically painted, glazed in places to have exactly the cracks and imperfections any real pie would have! Aren’t they wonderful? I’m going to eat one.”

  I sat down next to him.

  “What happened to you last night, Lucas? It was a bloody nightmare.”

  He looked away.

  “How is Pam?” he asked. I could feel him trembling.

  “Fuck off, Lucas.”

  He smiled over at a toddler in an appalling yellow suit. The child stared back vacantly, upset, knowing full well they were from competing species.

  A woman near us said to the two children with her, “I hear you’re going to your grandmother’s for dinner on Sunday. Something special I expect?” Lucas glared at her, as if she had been speaking to him. She added: “If you’re going to buy toys this afternoon, remember to look at them where they are, so that no one can accuse you of stealing. Don’t take them off the shelf.”

  From somewhere near the kitchens came a noise like a tray of crockery falling down a short flight of stairs.

  Lucas seemed to hate this. He shuddered.

  “I feel it as badly as Pam,” he said. He accused me: “You never think of that.” He looked over at the toddler again. “Spend long enough in places like this and your spirit will heave itself inside out.”

  “Come on, Lucas, don’t be spoilt. I thought you liked the pies here.”

  Eventually he admitted:

  “I’m sorry.”

  Even so, I got nothing from him. We left the Kardomah in case his spirit heaved itself inside out; but then all he did was walk urgently about the streets, as if he were on his own. The city center was full of wheelchairs, old women slumped in them with impatient, collapsed faces, partially bald, done up in crisp white raincoats. Lucas had turned up the collar of his gray cashmere jacket against the rain but left the jacket itself hanging open, its sleeves rolled untidily back above his bare wrists. He left me breathless. He was forty years old, but he still had the ravenous face of an adolescent. Halfway through the afternoon the lights went on in the lower floors of the office blocks; neon signs turned and signaled against the sky. Lucas stopped and gazed down at the rain-pocked surface of the old canal, where it appears suddenly from beneath the road near Piccadilly Station. It was dim and oily, scattered with lumps of floating styrofoam like seagulls in the fading light.

  “You often see fires on the bank down there,” he said. “They live a whole life down there, people with nowhere else to go. You can hear them singing and shouting on the towpath.”

  He looked at me wonderingly:

  “We aren’t much different, are we? We never came to anything, either.”

  I couldn�
�t think of what to say.

  “It’s not so much that Yaxley encouraged us to ruin something in ourselves, as that we never got anything in return for it.”

  “Look, Lucas,” I explained, “I don’t see it that way. I’m never doing this again. I was frightened last night.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Lucas, you always are.”

  “It isn’t one of my better days today.”

  “For God’s sake fasten your coat.”

  “I can’t seem to get cold.”

  He gazed dreamily down at the water—it had darkened into a bottomless opal-colored trench between the buildings—perhaps seeing goats, fires, people who had nowhere to go. “‘We worked but we were not paid,’” he quoted. Something forced him to ask shyly:

  “You haven’t heard from Yaxley?”

  I felt sick with patience. I seemed to be filled up with it.

  “I haven’t seen Yaxley for twenty years, Lucas. You know that. I haven’t seen him for twenty years.”

  “I understand. It’s just that I can’t bear to think of Pam on her own in a place like that. I wouldn’t have mentioned it otherwise. We said we’d always stick together, but—”

  “Then why didn’t you?” I said.

  He stared at me.

  “Go home, Lucas. Go home now.”

  He turned away miserably, walked off, and disappeared into that unredeemed maze between Piccadilly and Victoria—alleys full of wet cardboard boxes, failing pornography and pet shops, weed-grown car parks, everything which lies in the shadow of the yellow-tiled hulk of the Arndale Center. I meant to leave him there, but in the end I went after him to apologize. The streets were empty and quiet: by now it was almost dark. Although I couldn’t see him, I could sense Lucas ahead of me. He would be walking very quickly, head thrust forward, hands in pockets. I had almost caught up with him near the Tib Street fruit market when I heard a terrific clattering noise, like an old zinc dustbin rolling about in the middle of the road.

  “Lucas!” I called.

  When I rounded the corner, the street was full of smashed fruit boxes and crates, rotten vegetables were scattered everywhere. A barrow lay as if it had been thrown along the pavement. There was such a sense of violence and disorder and idiocy that I couldn’t express it to myself. But Lucas Medlar wasn’t there; and though I walked about for an hour afterwards, looking down alleys and into doorways, I saw nobody at all.

  * * *

  I had lied to him about Yaxley, of course. For what motives I wasn’t sure, though they had less to do with guilt than a kind of shyness. Even after so many years I had no idea how to proceed. Nothing would have been achieved by telling Pam and Lucas the truth, which was that my dealings with Yaxley began again at their wedding—

  THREE

  “Michael Ashman”

  Pam’s parents insisted on a marquee. They could, they said, afford it.

  “And we’ve a big enough lawn, after all!”

  Mr. Stuyvesant’s family, four generations in the Longdendale Valley, had owned Manchester’s favorite department store. Finding themselves, late in middle age, in sole charge of this lumber room—scrolled iron lift gates, revolving doors “and all”—he and his wife had sold it. Convinced they’d never settle out of England, they bit the tax bullet; and instead of retreating to Marbella let themselves be guided by Mrs. Stuyvesant’s lively childhood memories to one of the old stone houses in the woods behind Jenny Brown Point, jewel of Morecambe Bay’s retirement coast. This they bought. They were a surprise to Silverdale village, with its view of Humphrey Head across the bay, its pretty coves and little limestone cliffs, its gardens full of tranquil yellow laburnum. Restless only a month after she arrived, Mrs. Stuyvesant renamed the house “Castle Rock”. She bought a souvenir shop from which she sold Indian silk scarves. At sixty she still wore an orange leather suit. Pam, her late child, reaching maturity then Cambridge from within a stone’s throw of the sea, flowering only to books and epilepsy despite red hair and a Pre-Raphaelite calm, had always puzzled her. “We’re that relieved to have her wed at all,” joked Mr. Stuyvesant. Nothing could dispirit him, not even Lucas Medlar, a novice English teacher with a poor degree planning to live near Manchester, refusing first to be married in church at all, then—after Pam had persuaded him it wouldn’t matter—coming to the ceremony thin and hostile in a rented morning suit.

  My train was late. By the time I arrived, Mr. Stuyvesant was on his feet. He wanted to say a few words.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, as father of the bride—”

  Sitting next to him, Pam was dwarfed by the flounced white satin shoulders of her own dress. She smiled and waved when she saw me, but events seemed to have piled up against her even here, where they were of her own instigation.

  The marquee was warm enough, but its floor tilted sharply to the left, so that everyone sitting at that side felt as if they were sliding out of it. The supporting poles, dressed with yellow and white ribbon, creaked uneasily in an offshore wind which that evening had brought mist and rain in from the bay. The air smelt of salt; the canvas bulged and slackened rhythmically; the electric chandeliers swayed. Halfway through the meal, the tennis court had begun to squeeze itself up through the coconut matting. Apart from Lucas and Pam, I didn’t know anyone there. I sat on my own with my back against the tent, drank some champagne and stared up into the roof where, far above the central tables on which the ruins of the buffet lay scattered among yellow bows and sprigs of artificial flowers, a bright red helium balloon was trapped. Four or five children were staring up at it too, heads tilted back at an identical angle. Events seemed to have piled up against all of us.

  “And so it is that we all wish you well,” Pam’s father was repeating. “To share a life with a young one is a tremendous blessing. Most of all we wish you lasting love.” He pronounced this in such a way as to sound like “lust and love”, sat down suddenly looking surprised, and felt for his handkerchief.

  Everyone cheered. The cake was cut. Toasts followed, running into one another:

  “Moments like this—”

  “—the Reverend, with whom I had the pleasure of sitting a moment ago—”

  “It is usual to say a few words—”

  “—like to thank my great friends Alec and Katie, the sort of hospitality we’ve come to expect from them—”

  “Brother Simon, for one, had jetted in from Australia ‘for a couple of days’ or so he says, so things aren’t very parochial at all!”

  Throughout these inane or incompetent speeches—which gave me feelings of nightmare, disorder, the certain failure of everything the ceremony was supposed to represent—the children laughed at every pause, as if they were trying to understand less what to laugh at than when, so that in later life they could measure their responses as accurately by the rhythms of an occasion as by its content.

  “I can only say,” someone finished, “that if I had a pound for every time I’ve found this beautiful girl literally with her head buried in a book… Well, Lucas, I hope you know what you’ve taken on!”

  At this Lucas, whose own speech had been inaudible, tentative, full of failed allusions, stared miserably ahead and tried to smile. Pam leaned across to touch his hand. By now the fabric of the marquee was in constant motion, an enormous muscle rippling and tensing over their heads. Pam’s father, who lay like a log of wood in his chair between them, stirred. “Now then!” shouted the young man who had got up to present a cellophane-wrapped bouquet to the bride’s mother and aunt—in case, perhaps, they felt left out—“None of that!” The plumbing, he had to inform us, “on a more serious note”, was broken. “Could everyone go downstairs until gravity has caused the upstairs to flush.” While they were laughing at this I heard a voice close to me say quietly and very distinctly:

  “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 do
wn 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.