The Course of the Heart

by M. John Harrison

  “Mum’s teaching her to knit.”

  I knew Lawson was in the house with us. I had passed his BMW in the street, black and shiny among the rubbish skips. I could hear his voice, ba-luddy caw pawking away in the flat upstairs. Somehow this magnified David’s good will and made it all the harder to bear. I wanted to shock him out of it. I wanted him to feel the girl’s danger. Most of all, perhaps, I wanted him to feel guilty. I pushed him into the corner of the landing and said urgently:

  “This is the real daughter.”

  He gave me a puzzled look.

  “Yaxley’s substituting the real daughter,” I said.

  “What?”

  “He’s going to use Lawson’s real daughter for the operation! You must have known that!”

  “Operation? I don’t—”

  “Hasn’t he told you anything?” I shouted. “For Christ’s sake, David!”

  He stared at me.

  “I’m just helping him out,” he said eventually.

  “Shit.”

  The door to the top flat banged open, and down came Lawson. He was in a hurry. He had on a beautifully tailored overcoat in gray wool, which somehow accentuated the breadth of his shoulders, the thickness of his neck, the forward thrust of his head; and he was carrying a bottle of Louis Roederer champagne as shiny and incongruous under the yellow forty-watt light as the car outside at the curb. “I can’t be bothered with that now,” he called back up to Yaxley. “Get someone of yours to do it.” There was no answer. When he reached the landing, he inspected David, as if he had never seen him before.

  “Just as a matter of interest,” he said. “What does your bloody mother cook all day in there?”

  I don’t think he once suspected his daughter was behind the same door, watching Game for a Laugh and Celebrity Squares every evening when he went past.

  David, who had never understood Lawson well enough to defend himself, could only laugh and shrug. Lawson laughed too. “Well, best be off, eh?” he said. I was in his way: he started to shove me aside, then stopped abruptly and, his hand still resting on my arm, eyed me with hatred. Yaxley appeared at the top of the stairs and smiled weakly down on all three of us, his face damp and indescribably vacant in the yellow light. Leaning forward, he looked as if he might launch himself off the top step and float out over us; or else cover us with vomit.

  “I’ll remember you,” Lawson promised me softly, as if he had only now understood something.

  “Oh, I’ll remember you.”

  The infolding took place two or three evenings later, in the main room of the upper flat, at about nine o’clock. I arrived late and, in the end, saw very little of it.

  * * *

  The room was cold. On the wall surrounding the empty fireplace, Yaxley had pinned a dense mass of overlapping Polaroid photographs. From a distance, these tiny, often blurred images seemed to condense into a single sign from some randomly devised but powerful magical alphabet. Above them, like a lock to keep their meanings under control, he had hung the Gethsemane I had found on the Old Kent Road. Its central figure swam out of the cheap frame with motions of despair. In front of the fire had been placed a stripped-pine table with short bulbous legs, which in any other ritual would have taken the part of the altar. Since no actual sacrifice was to occur here, I wondered how Yaxley would use it. For a moment I had a clear vision of Lawson with his trousers down round his ankles, trying to mount his own daughter as she clung pale and goosefleshed to this object, with its cigarette burns and whitish ring-shaped stains. Then I caught a glimpse of the girl, and saw what they had done to her.

  She was sprawled legs apart in a corner, naked but for a pair of white briefs designed for someone twice her age, with lace detail and legs cut very high to accentuate the pubic mound. Her ribcage and immature nipples stood out in the forty-watt light. Shadows pooled in the hollow of her collar-bone. A musing, inturned expression was on her face; but every so often she laughed inappropriately at something Yaxley or her father said. They had got her drunk on some kind of cherry liqueur, which I could smell from where I stood in the doorway at the end of the passage.

  Yaxley and Lawson were occupied burning something in the grate. Yaxley’s wrists were covered in new scabs; Lawson blew on the pale blue flames until his cheeks were red. I could hear them murmuring excitedly, but I couldn’t quite see what they had set on fire—glossy paper, I thought, of the sort used for soft pornography: I could see it, wadded, reluctant to catch, curling at the edges. But its thick, stale odor was of something else entirely, wood, hair, kitchen waste. The fourth person in the room was David. David seemed drunk too. He had propped himself up against the wall near Lawson’s daughter and was staring at her small white shoulders and arms. Every so often his gaze would fix with a kind of wonder on the place between her unformed thighs where the lips of her sex were quite discernible beneath the thin white fabric.

  Apart from the girl they were all fully dressed.

  I watched for a minute or two in silence. Lawson was the first to notice me standing there.

  “I told you he’d turn up in the end,” he said to Yaxley; and then to me: “Traffic bad, was it?”

  His daughter laughed.

  “See any dead cats?” she asked me.

  “Christ, Yaxley!” I appealed.

  He turned away from whatever he was doing. His eyes were yellow and empty, his face gray. He looked like a cancer patient. “I’m not going to be involved in this,” I told him.

  “Yes you are,” he said.

  David laughed suddenly.

  “Fucking hell,” he said. “Eh?”

  “Yes you are,” Yaxley repeated.

  “Come here, lovey,” Lawson said absently to the girl.

  She pulled herself to her feet, then clutched at herself with both hands.

  “Daddy, I’ve wet my knickers.”

  I took a pace into the room, said, “Lawson, this is your daughter,” then when I saw the expression on his face, turned round and walked straight out down the stairs and into the street. Rain was falling through the sodium light, pattering on the leaves of the sycamore trees. It would have been easy enough to walk into Peckham and catch a train into London Bridge. I meant to go home to St. Mark’s Crescent and tell Katherine everything. I knew she would help me. Instead I crossed the road, positioned myself in a doorway with the collar of my coat turned up, and stared numbly at the lighted upper windows of 17, Hill Park.

  At about a quarter past ten, the glass blew out of them and tumbled into the basement area beneath. Smoke poured into the air, gray at first then thick black then back to gray again. Shortly afterwards, amid cries of fear and pain, the front door slammed open; Lawson, David and the girl appeared at the top of the steps. Lawson and his daughter were naked, but David still had on his Union Jack underpants. The girl ran off immediately, zigzagging away into the uncertain light of the sodium lamps like some quite new city animal, a vulnerable slip of flesh with a face pale and streamlined to featurelessness—frightened yet touched with all the triumph of the victim. I expected Lawson to follow.

  Instead he stared after her; said something incoherent; then, suddenly aware that he was being watched, stormed across the road towards me. The whole left side of his body was scorched and reddened, so that he looked as if he had been dyed. His genitals hung shriveled and vestigial-looking beneath a belly larded with middle age. He thrust his face very close to mine. Expecting him to hit me, I stepped back into the doorway: but all he did in the end was shake the keys of his car under my nose and shout:

  “I’ve still got these, you bastard!”

  And then:

  “I remembered you. Don’t think I didn’t!”

  He ripped open the driver’s door of the BMW, made one or two hasty attempts to start it, then drove away at high speed.

  This left only David, running helplessly about in the street in front of me, trying to say one word over and over again, as if it might describe what had happened in the upper room. “Ungestal
ten, Ungestalten, Ungestalten—”

  Ungestalten: the shapeless. The pain of being without shape. Some days before, prowling restlessly round the High Street Smith’s in search of—as he put it to the assistant—“Anything about concentration camps,” he had bought the newest Primo Levi. At home, sitting with a can of Harp in the television half-light, he had foundered immediately on this reference to Nietzsche and the suffering of the underclass. It was a strange idea to have encountered between biographies of Myra Hindley and David Niven. I had tried to explain to him the “price that must be paid for the advent of the reign of the elect”. From the beginning, though, David had understood it all literally and personally. The pain of being without shape. It was not the idea that frightened him, so much as the question of who—or what—might suffer this pain.

  “Ungestalten, Ungestalten—”

  As Lawson turned the BMW out on to the main road at the bottom of Rye Hill, the fire brigade was turning in. They crowded into the narrow street in front of Number 17, the back of one appliance lit up silver by the headlights of the next. The heavy grinding sound of pump engines filled the night. David seemed not to notice them. He ran up and down between the engines, repeating “Ungestalten, Ungestalten,” in a kind of formless whine; then fell over suddenly. When he got up again, his mouth was slack. Blood and mucus ran out of his nose. Eventually one of the firemen captured him and he was put into an ambulance. His mother was still inside the house.

  “Ungestalten.”

  Unable to act, I remained in the doorway for some time after he had been taken away. Yaxley’s will was like glue: it was all round me still. Brought steadily under control, the fire began to smell like burning rubbish in the distance on a clear day; a human, domestic smell, rather more frightening because of that. They had illuminated the front of Number 17 with a powerful floodlamp, but its white glare revealed nothing. How Yaxley had escaped, I don’t know. I hoped at the time he was dead, but I knew it was unlikely. Everyone who lived in the street came out on the pavement to watch the firemen at work—there were frail but cheerful old men and women from the flats, families with children not much younger than Lawson’s daughter, a woman who brought her baby with her as if to accustom it early to tragedies and occasions. Someone said:

  “They’ve burnt the dinner again, then.”

  Firemen were in and out of the house now. Much of their activity seemed aimless. Blue lights flickered down the hallway, reflected from the pictures on the walls. (“There!” they said in the street: “Look there!”) The smoke abated briefly, the beam of a torch struck out through it: a fireman was in the upper room! Flashes, as the torch moved about. I wondered what he could possibly be seeing, there in that exhausted, sticky zone of Yaxley’s will. Finally, a figure in a yellow helmet leaned out of the window and, framed against faint gray smoke, looked down, shrugged. Two hours from the first appearance of the engines, it was all over. People went back to their own houses, a little subdued, whispering, “Doesn’t a woman with kids live there? Ain’t that a family with kids?”

  “I don’t think anyone was in there.”

  “There must have been someone.”

  I was left in the rain, soaked to the skin, still looking upwards.

  * * *

  What happened that night? It would be naive to think that Lawson’s sexual satisfaction was at issue. A facsimile would have done for that. Yaxley had planned all along that real incest should be committed in the upper room at 17, Hill Park. He had planned all along to reveal this to Lawson as soon as it was too late to withdraw. But though he enjoyed these layers of deception for themselves—it was the mark of his increasing impotence—he must also have had a clear magical purpose, some assumption upon which was predicated the whole ritual of “infolding”. What this purpose was never really became clear. Neither was any help forthcoming for Pam Stuyvesant or Lucas Medlar. I don’t think he had ever meant to keep his word on that. Along with the two Asian women, David’s mother died of smoke inhalation. I’m not clear why David had to lose so much.

  EIGHT

  On the White Downs

  After the fire nothing seemed to lift me. I was unable to convince myself I had lost nothing by being involved with Yaxley. Each attempt to get him to help Pam and Lucas had only intricated my motives fatally with his. Every night I dreamed of a Pleroma screaming and convulsed by his attempts simultaneously to penetrate it and escape it; meanwhile, Lawson telephoned daily to harangue me, or offer me his daughter, or abuse me incoherently for having taken her already thus reducing her value in any further operation. He didn’t seem to understand that Yaxley had abandoned us all again. At first he promised scandal, public exposure, legal action: but he knew quite well the extent of his own involvement. Even now I’m not clear what he thought he wanted, unless it was to retain somehow his links with the magician; to express somehow that dim sense he had of the Pleroma as a power—an immanence, a closeness—he had failed to share.

  By then I was bone-tired from morning until night. I wept easily at Japanese films.

  At the office I found myself unable to work, staring puzzledly instead at the shelves of paperbacks while my assistant fetched me cups of lukewarm instant coffee the surface of which was always covered with undissolved powder. February came and went. The winter dragged into March and then early April, driving a fine cold penetrative rain across the junctions of Tottenham Court Road. Eventually I caught myself staring at my own deformed reflection in the window of a tube train between Goodge Street, where I worked, and Camden Town, repeating, “Was that all? Was that all?” Perhaps the agony of the Pleroma was fading. Soon after that Lawson seemed to become less of a nuisance. His threats were replaced increasingly by bursts of uncontrollable weeping, until the calls ceased altogether.

  “Why don’t you go down to Cornwall for a month?” Katherine suggested. She owned a cottage there, between the road and the sea perhaps two miles north of St. Just. Originally she had intended to use it in the winter, rent it out between April and October. “Have a holiday!”

  “I think I might. Everyone in publishing suddenly looks like Anthony Blunt.”

  “Have a holiday,” she repeated. “Recover yourself.”

  “I wish I could find a self to recover.”

  She stared at me.

  “I don’t suppose you’d like to come?” I said.

  * * *

  The cottage was one of a neat terrace, built in Penwith granite. While she was waiting for the conversions grants to come through Katherine had filled it with old furniture: a good suite of her mother’s with one chair missing, divan beds, one-bar electric fires with perished rubber flexes fitted in 1958, all that detritus which accumulates in houses whose use the middle class have temporarily failed to define, or which they have furnished for the use of others. But you could smell the sea—though you couldn’t see it—and hear it, and even at night feel that vast emptying-away of the sky to the west where the headlands fall into the Atlantic like folds in a velour cardigan.

  I arrived late and went straight to bed.

  There, unused to the silence, I slept fitfully and dreamed I was walking down the coast road towards Zennor Head in the dark: The air had veiled, brown qualities, draining the color from the stands of gorse which sometimes appeared at the landward side of the road. Every so often the white finger of an old signpost came into view—not the yellowish white of bone or ivory, but the hard chemical white of typewriter correction fluid: Penzance 5 miles. The figures of Yaxley and Lawson jumped out at me from the gorse, their faces drawn and self-concerned. Lawson’s daughter in her white knickers opened her legs—Yaxley mopped his forehead, breathing stertorously. “Sperms!” he cried. “Sperms in this picture!”—while Pam and Lucas looked on in sorrow. Something was wrong, clearly, and it seemed important to do what they wanted. But I couldn’t make out more than a word or two of what it was. In the dream I was worn out but I couldn’t go to sleep: I knew I was too tired to move my limbs, even though I was walking.


  This prostration of the will seemed to flow smoothly out of the dream and into the days that followed.

  Each morning I would walk into St. Just, buy bread at Warren’s, milk or groceries from the Co-op in the square, then make my way back exhaustedly to the cottage, where I sprawled in a chair—head thrown back, legs stuck out in front of me—like an old man, so worn out I felt as if I was being pushed firmly down into a hole. There was no telephone.

  I began a letter to Pam and Lucas. “Katherine Mansfield lived along this coast,” I wrote. Then: “When I look forward I can only see it getting worse: middle age, apathy, death.” I couldn’t post that to them of course. I let it stay on the table while I stood helplessly in the middle of the room wondering what on earth I could say. “Arthur Symons lived here too.” The next day a cat lay like a splatter of black ink on the concrete path under the window; when I spoke to it, it looked up deliberately, stretched, and walked away. I laughed. I was released. I would probably feel fragile for some time: but the crisis, I believed, had passed. Suddenly I screwed the letter up into a ball, which I squeezed until it was packed and hard.

  * * *

  The downs with their granite outcrops and hut-circles overshadow everything. They squeeze everything seawards, into narrow bands: the coast road, the linear villages, a little grazing. Long bracken-covered salients fling themselves down between the pasture and the sea, the boggy reentrants that separate them full of low-lying elder pruned by the wind into a dense, tangled scrub. Old cinder lanes wind over them, linking the abandoned mine workings and empty hamlets from Kenidjack and Pendeen up to Gurnard’s Head. Kittiwakes wheel above them in the blustery air and sunshine.

  I was grateful for this abrupt falling-away of the coast, the luxurious feeling of light and distance it gave. Half a mile below the cottage, I discovered one morning an unworked quarry, warm and sheltered, from which I could look out at the sea. I sat down and unbuttoned my shirt. Shortly afterwards I took it off altogether. I feel asleep, and woke with a start of surprise in a burning blue space. The curve of the workings drew the skyline away out of my field of vision: above that, nothing but sky, alive and glittering as if it somehow reflected the sea beneath, yet heavy and reverberant with heat. I went back to the house and found a faded woolen blanket; a cold drink.