The Course of the Heart

by M. John Harrison

  I told him I hadn’t.

  “I’m one of the bridegroom’s friends,” I added. “Lucas’s. One of Lucas’s friends.”

  He stared at me for a few seconds.

  “Ah,” he said. “It’s just that someone rather like you came to the house a few years ago. About seven years ago.”

  As far as he was concerned, his probably was the only house in the world. It occurred to me that I must look to him much as Yaxley had looked to me: something forcing its way in from outside, or up from inside, as deranging and unwelcome as his daughter’s epilepsy. In his mild, hospitable way he was trying to tell me so. I had drunk so much by then that I rather admired him.

  “I think my taxi’s here,” I said.

  * * *

  Shortly after the wedding Pam and Lucas moved to West Yorkshire, where they lived in a large square unimaginative place, local stone, with one or two deteriorating outbuildings. Extensive gardens lay behind it, then the moors; at the front, on the other side of a quiet lane, the land dropped abruptly into the narrow valley below the reservoir. The view from its upper windows was gloomy and bare, even in summer when a hot brownish haze spread like a cloudy lacquer over the moors, so that you never knew whether to expect rain, an electric storm, or some property of the atmosphere which had never demonstrated itself before. That winter, though it was so raw and cold, no snow fell, only steady drenching rain. Mist hung above the scrub oaks or clamped down motionless along the sides of the valley. During the school holidays Lucas could be seen at all times of day trying to keep warm by digging over the unproductive garden, clearing undergrowth, lighting rubbish-fires, obsessed with his own thoughts. He was teaching just across the county boundary, in a Thameside comprehensive. He drove there and back along the Woodhead Road in a small Renault he called “the Tub”.

  Pam, though she was uneasy on her own, had soon found how unbearably untidy he could be, and claimed, “I’m glad he’s out all day!”

  It gave her a chance to clear up.

  “Papers thrown everywhere,” she wrote to me. “The place always looks as if a bomb has hit it!”

  The drugs caused her to sleep late and wake exhausted: loaded with propranolol she would come down at eleven in the morning to find that Lucas, up late the previous night, had thrown everything around in a fit of rage. “Even the furniture, even his precious bloody books!”

  Sometimes at weekends, though she had only left the room for a moment or two, she would return to find him shamefacedly putting records back on the shelves, picking up the sofa cushions, righting a chair. She suspected him of a deep frustration (unable to sound it, grew afraid; unable to absorb or assuage it, blamed herself) but never drew it to his attention. And if in his turn Lucas caught Pam fey and scared, staring with a drowsy helplessness out of the kitchen window into the drizzle at the end of the day, he said nothing either: though he may for all I know have offered comfort. They were twenty-two years old. Already their skills were those of avoidance. They let each encounter slide past them. Off it rumbled, at the last moment, top-heavy with its emotional freight like a train swaying away down a tunnel. As a result, Pam’s attacks became more frequent.

  “I can’t help it,” she would tell herself: “I can’t.”

  While Lucas, halfway across the Woodhead Pass in “the Tub” in the morning, banged the palms of his hands on the steering wheel and repeated savagely, “I can’t help her! I can’t!” He hated his heart for lifting when he got out of the house; himself for noticing the way the early sunshine fell across the broad heathery slopes of Longdendale.

  To me he wrote, “It can tire you out, never being allowed to be miserable, or vague, or preoccupied.”

  It was in the face of this, I think, that they began constructing between them the fairy-tale of the Pleroma which was to cheer them up in the years when Yaxley and I seemed to have abandoned them. Going through a shoebox of old postcards one lunchtime in an Oxfam shop in Hyde or Stalybridge, Lucas came across a photograph of the Cuxa Cloister in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. “This cloister contains important architectural elements from Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa,” he read, when he turned it over, “one of the most important Romanesque abbeys of the XII Century.” No one had ever sent it to anyone. Struck by the enormous tranquility of the scene, amused at the idea of sending her a card from only ten miles away, he put a stamp on it and posted it to Pam. Half dressed in the hall the next morning, she stared at it. “Let your heart beat/Over my heart,” he had written on the back. She was so delighted this soon became a habit. He chose only exotic or medieval cards, “The Creation and the Fall” from the British Library’s collection, or Altdorfer’s “Battle on the Issus”; and on the back of them he would always scribble something from one of his favorite writers or painters. “Every discovery is a rediscovery of something latent,” he informed her owlishly one day, only to advise the next: “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.”

  He often read to her when she felt ill. A few days after he had sent the Cuxa postcard, he read her some chapters from the autobiography of Michael Ashman, a minor travel writer who had walked across Europe in the late Thirties, which began: “Concrete only yields more concrete. Since the war the cities of the Danube all look like Birmingham.” Ashman, who—as the professional successor of Freya Stark rather than, say, Robert Byron or Christopher Isherwood—had travelled culturally rather than morally, and on behalf of his audience rather than himself, now found he was able to write a more truthful or at any rate a more intimate history of his formative trip—

  * * *

  When I was a boy (he went on) you could still see how they had once been the dark core of Europe. If you travelled south and east, the new Austria went behind you like a Secession cake-stand full of the same old stale Viennese Whirls, and you were lost in the steep cobbled streets which smelt of charcoal smoke and paprika, fresh leather from the saddler’s. The children were throwing buttons against the walls as you passed, staring intently at them where they lay, as if trying to read the future from a stone. You could hear Magyar and Slovak spoken not just as languages but as incitements. There in the toe of Austria, at that three-way confluence of borders, you could see a dancing bear; and though the dance was rarely more than a kind of sore lumbering, with the feet turned in, to a few slaps on a tambourine, it was still impressive to see one of these big bemused animals appear among the gypsy girls on the pavement. They would take turns to dance in front of it; stare comically into its small eyes to make it notice them; then pirouette away. As performers themselves, they regarded it with grave affection and delight.

  I loved sights like this and sought them out. I had some money. Being English gave me a sense of having escaped. I was free to watch, and conceive there and then the Search for the Heart.

  By day the girls often told fortunes with cards, favoring a discredited but popular Etteilla. (I don’t know how old it was. Among its major arcana it included a symbol I have never seen in any traditional pack, but its langue was that of post-Napoleonic France: “Within a year your case will come up and you will acquire money”; “You will suffer an illness which will cost considerable money without efficacy. Finally a faith-healer will restore your health with a cheap remedy”; “Upside down, this card signifies payment of a debt you thought completely lost”; and so on. It was like having bits of Balzac, or Balzac’s letters, read out to you.) They would stand curiously immobile in the street, with its seventy-odd unwieldy cards displayed in a beautiful fan. While the crowds whirled round them head down into the cold wind of early spring. By night many of them were prostitutes. This other duty encouraged them to exchange their earrings and astonishing tiered skirts for an overcoat and a poor satin slip, but they were in no way diminished by it.

  To me, anyway, the services seemed complementary, and I saw in the needs they filled a symmetry the excitement of which, though it escapes me now, I could hardly contain. Huts and caravans amid the rubbish at the edge of a town or under the arches of some huge bleak railw
ay viaduct, fires which made the night ambiguous, musical instruments which hardly belonged in Europe at all: increasingly I was drawn to the gypsy encampments, as stations of the Search. It was in one of them I first heard the word “Coeur”.

  Was I more than eighteen years old? It seems unlikely. Nevertheless I could tell, by the way the dim light pooled in the hollow of her collar-bones, that the girl was less. She raised one arm in a quick ungainly motion to slide the curtain shut across the doorway; the satin lifted across her ribby sides. I thought her eyes vague, short-sighted. When she discovered I was English she showed me a newspaper clipping, a photograph of Thomas Maszaryk, pinned to the wall above the bed. “Good,” she said sadly. She shook her head then nodded it immediately, as if she wasn’t sure which gesture was appropriate. We laughed. It was February: you could hear the dogs barking in the night forty miles up and down the river, where the floodwater was frozen in mile-wide lakes. She lay down and opened her legs and they made the same shape as a fan of cards when it first begins to spread in the hand. I shivered and looked away.

  “Tell our fortunes first.”

  When I drew the heterodox card, she placed the tip of her right index finger on its picture of a deserted Romanesque cloister and whispered, “Ici le Coeur.”

  Her accent was so thick I thought she had said “Court”. Maszaryk had died not long before; the war was rehearsing itself with increasing confidence. Like many European gypsies, I suppose, she ended up in some camp or oven. Birkenau was in the room with us even then. A burial commando drunk on petrol and formalin was already waiting rowdily outside like the relatives at the door of the bridal suite, as she dosed the curtain, spread the cards, then knelt over me thoughtfully to bring me off in the glum light with a quick, limping flick of the pelvis. However often I traced the line of her breastbone with my fingers, however much she smiled, the death camp was in there with us. Any child we might have had would have lived out its time not in Theresienstadt, the family camp, but in Mengele’s block. Its number would have been prefaced with a Z.

  The Heart!

  The war ended. The cold war began. It was clear that Europe would continue to settle elastically for some time, shedding the energy of its new political shapes as they jostled against one another. Then, not long after the Communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia, Thomas Maszaryk’s son Jan, Czech foreign minister, was found dead in the courtyard beneath an open window in the ministry. I remembered the young prostitute, and the faith she had placed in his father. We don’t so much impose our concerns on others as bequeath them, like small heirlooms. They lose one significance then, rediscovered in a drawer years after, suddenly gain another. I saw that the Search grounds itself—that perhaps the Heart itself speaks to us!—in such short-circuits of history. I spent the days in a fever of suppressed excitement: correspondence with European, Mediterranean and near-Eastern exiles had convinced me that their search and mine were the same. Many of us, remembering how the restless, apparently aimless overlapping of boundaries during the early and high Middle Ages had occasionally exposed the Coeur—wavering, equivocal, interstitial, but never less than a kingdom in its own right—felt that in these conditions it might surface again. It never did. And though I may have hoped for this myself in the bitter winters of the late forties and early fifties, by then I knew as well as anyone how final had been its downfall: a Czechoslovakian prostitute had shown me how to listen for it along the sounding board of history.

  * * *

  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 d
id 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.)”