The Course of the Heart

by M. John Harrison

  “After all,” I wrote to Pam and Lucas that evening, “I’m here to get better, just to lie in the sun and get better—”

  The next morning I took a book with me, and by the end of the week I had read Tristes Tropiques, The Gypsy’s Baby, Mr. Beluncle. In the afternoons I would close my eyes against the glare and let the heat press insistently on their lids. Opening them again suddenly, I saw that my feet were white, blue-veined, delicate-looking. I couldn’t remember ever having looked at my feet before.

  There at the end of a long sleeve of land, the quarry held its contents gently, miraculously, like a hand opened wrist upwards to face south-west. The leaning walls of dark Killas slate, low at first, with thick green and white masses of vegetation piled up against them in an arrested wave, rose steadily to a height of eighty or ninety feet where they overhung a shallow pool. Here, towards the back of the workings, the rock was always damp and streaked with lichen. Hybrid willow, purple and white foxglove, contorted dwarf oak grew profusely on the collapsing terraces amid colonies of wild roses. A thin perpetual trickle of water ran down through dripping mats of moss and fern to fill the pool. In the oblique gold evening light that wall dominated the quarry: and even during the day, when I lay among the mysterious knolls and reefs of the quarry floor—where the heather was mottled with the bright green of new bilberry, and children had scratched narrow, aimless, sandy paths up and down the blunt salients of old spoil—I sometimes found myself looking up at it in surprise. Then I would smile, bury my face in the aromatic turf, and listen to the sound of the water dripping down behind the foliage. It had become a voice. A gull screamed overhead. The tide poured out of the zawn below the headland, and back again with a muffled thud. With my eyes closed I felt as if I were hanging unsupported in the air—burned, clarified, renewed by the summer light.

  I knew that if I stayed there long enough I would be let into a secret.

  * * *

  During the week people used the quarry as a car park, especially at lunch time. Most seemed content to roll down the driver’s window and read the Western Morning News with one elbow stuck out into the sunshine; but one or two locked up the car and walked off to look at the sea or wade into the montbretia which, escaping for a hundred years from the village gardens, now roared over the headland like a heath fire. They were gone by one o’clock.

  Every afternoon when the quarry was most likely to be deserted, a handicapped couple arrived.

  They were shy and strange, easily put off. The woman was blind, the man could not walk. I watched them. This is how, together, they made up a kind of organism:

  At three o’clock their little fawn Reliant van, whining in first gear, would bounce down the track from the village; turn into the quarry with exaggerated care; then, chrome winking in the glassy light, roll uncertainly to a stop. The woman expected rain, so she always wore a white raincoat buttoned to the neck. She talked to the driver in a loud, animated voice. He replied in monosyllables. She got out, and a black Labrador guide dog jumped out after her and ran about barking. Every afternoon before allowing it to lead her round the quarry she made it stand still for a few moments.

  “Can’t you behave, you daft old dog?”

  Her left leg was twisted so as to point the foot inwards instead of forwards, which gave her a rolling and limited gait. Nevertheless the dog wasn’t always quick enough for her. It blinked up at her and sneezed. She laughed with delight, turning her round, perspiring face up to the sun. After a circuit or two like this she let the dog off the lead. While it raised its leg among the nettles, she would feel her way along the side of the van to the rear doors and fetch out a folding wheelchair. This had to be assembled by touch, which took several minutes. By then the driver had got his own door open and was waiting for her to help him out. He was impatient, unhelpful, gesticulatory; she laughed and groaned at his weight. The dog watched them indulgently, hanging out its long red tongue. In the end the driver fell into the chair and lay there breathing hard and staring into the sky.

  “Can I help at all?” I asked, the first afternoon I saw them.

  The paraplegic, slumped white-faced in his chair, tried to ignore me. He was still in his twenties, with muscular shoulders, black hair and deep-set angry eyes; he had been a swimmer or a cyclist, perhaps: a runner. Suddenly he pulled his mouth into a sweet, extraordinary, practiced smile and said:

  “We’ll manage, thanks.”

  “It’s easier in the end,” the woman agreed quickly in her loud voice. “Really.”

  They had their own way of doing things, habits long-formed. They had their independence.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “If there’s anything—”

  “Thank you anyway,” she said.

  She offered me the ghost of her sight: a faint discoloration of the whites of her eyes. She had buttoned her coat unevenly that morning, so that one side was higher than the other.

  Every afternoon she hobbled round the quarry then wheeled the man in his turn, while he guided her with curt rights and lefts, his head tilted to one side as if it were too heavy for his neck, his body held with the legs stuck stiffly out in front. Every afternoon he made her stop so he could look across the pool at the tangled roses, the cushions of moss, the waterfall, the tottering ribs of Killas slate. He clutched her arm: pointed here and there: followed with his head the sudden zigzag flight of a bird. Every afternoon she wheeled him back to the van and with a lot of grunting and straining forced him back into the driving seat like someone trying to force a snail back into its shell, whereupon he took charge again, revving the engine on its hand-throttle, calling to her to hurry the dog up.

  They were like the parts of the jellyfish, a million years ago, coming together for the sake of convenience and never being able to go back on the arrangement.

  * * *

  At what point do you recover your self?

  I wanted to do things, but not the things I had always done.

  A barely suppressed excitement drove me out, on to the headlands, into the abandoned tin-streamers’ cottages at Nineveh, along sunken lanes, in the mornings before I had time to eat anything.

  By eight the tracks were already warm and airless. Bees wavered past on long curving courses. In the grass grew bird’s-foot trefoil as yellow as the inside of an egg, tangled up with wild violets and cinquefoil. Great spear-thistles commanded the sagging walls and ruined gardens, thrusting up out of patches of fuchsia. The bramble-covered banks were alive with butterflies like new, complicated kinds of petals. Emerging suddenly on the upland lawn above the cliffs at Porthmoina Cove or Cam Clough, I would stare out at the Atlantic framed violet and silver between blunt brown headlands, and, astonished by the landscape, feel my imagination reach out vainly to touch its essence. The sea! A vigorous wind blew between the white boulders; the cliffs fell away; behind me, waves of gorse and bell-heather broke on the gentle slopes. All around was blue and unrelenting air!

  I was elated one minute, tired out again the next.

  I felt as if I was listening for something, but that it would never speak.

  Subsidiary workings opened off the quarry, two or three interconnected troughs full of dust and flies, used by the local farmers as a rubbish dump. Hanks of last year’s fern stuck out of the sandy walls, which nowhere rose higher than ten feet. A dry whirring, the sound of grasshoppers, came and went with the sun.

  Crouched listlessly in one of these pits, knees drawn up to chin, arms hanging at my sides, I fell asleep and dreamed of a green woman who led me a dance over the downs:

  It was the middle of the day.

  All morning a hot enervating wind had scoured the village, bringing with it unidentifiable, tarry smells. Among the quarries it was even hotter. Suddenly there was a movement deep in the shadowy crevice between two walls, and the green woman walked out into the sunlight, relaxed and naked. I watched her carefully, from a distance. While her outline was perfectly sharp, it seemed to have no surfaces, and flowers came and went within it as s
he turned her head deliberately this way and that. She was like a window opened on to a mass of leafage after rain, branches of blackthorn, aglet and elder interwoven, plaits of grass and fern, all held together with rose briars, over and between which went a constant trickle of water. She knew I was there.

  “We are never simply ourselves,” she said.

  She stretched her arms, standing with one leg bent and the other stiffened to take her weight.

  Now she passed landwards in a stately way, striding between the great rays of light which fell upon Morvah, Rosemergy and the White Downs, to places even beyond that where I stumbled naked after her along the windy edges among the broken stones and earth. Soon she stood in a steep, hidden ashwood, where a stream descended a series of mossy steps and pools. I straddled this and masturbated convulsively, standing up. “Don’t look at her,” I told myself. “Don’t look.” I came again and again until I was exhausted and out of breath. I thought of Pam Stuyvesant, and my wife, and Lawson’s daughter, each sprawled and spread open on to the same pink wet rose, and came again. Then the green woman led me back to the quarry, where I felt no fear of the unknown: here she climbed up behind the mat of vegetation on the back wall. She turned and looked at me directly! Her eyes were a pitiless chalky blue, without white or pupil. They were flowers, too. When I knew I could no longer avoid their gaze I ran about waving my arms and shouting, filled with a mixture of terror and happiness.

  Hundreds of elder flowers, tiny cream stars with five blunt, points, showered down on me in a cold wind. When I woke up it was because clouds had covered the sun and great splatters of rain were falling on my bare arms.

  * * *

  For the rest of that week the weather was bad. Offshore winds packed the clouds down tightly round the cottage, where I sat by myself listening to a length of washing line tap-tapping against its metal pole in the garden, while the foghorn at Pendeen Watch boomed morosely out into the gray Atlantic spaces. The flowerbeds were black with something between mist and rain, and water hung in beads along the power cables. Each evening, just before it got dark, the clouds seemed to lift for a moment: one or two wallflowers, already past their best, glowed in the thin flat light. Inside, a little of this light collected about the spines of the paperbacks; and you could hear a petal fall in the bowl of dog-roses on the bookcase. I had been in the cottage for a month. Neither Pam nor Lucas had answered my letters.

  All the telephone boxes on the coast road were damaged. I began catching the ten o’clock bus into St. Ives every morning. There I watched people driven into the arcades and surf shacks by the rain; picking over heaps of souvenirs at the indoor market, avid, bored and helpless by turns. “Esperdrilles,” advertised the handwritten signs on the stalls: “Plimpsoles.” Plump young couples, their faces as unblemished as their brand new wind-breakers, linked hands by the lifeboat station and looked across at the hundreds of houses of Mount Zion, roofs and walls of all colors tumbling up the hill in stacked planes like an amateur post-Impressionist landscape. The tide was out. The moored boats canted in disorder against their weedy strands of rope, a box of sweets tipped out on wet sand the exact color of the coffee served in the Tudor Rooms; while a hundred yards away the sea lapped like a kitten and the young herring gulls walked awkwardly about trying to eat pieces of paper. I telephoned Pam and Lucas anxiously from a fish and chip café on the front. The phone rang at their end but no one picked it up. All I could hear was the woman behind the counter:

  “Yes, love?”

  “Coffee, please.”

  “Thank you, love. Anything else, love?”

  “No thank you.”

  “Twenty pence then thank you, love, eighty pence change.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Next please, yes, love?”

  Yes, love (I thought): Love.

  I tried the phone again. This time no one could connect me. All the lines were engaged.

  Pressing the receiver as tightly to my ear as someone trying to hear the sea in a shell, I stared at the back wall of the café where a few greasy-looking landscapes hung, “original” but unsold. One or two of them showed the cottages and breakwater of a fishing village in some less well-designed world than ours. There was a sunset of suety ochre bands. The boats with their crude triangular sails, you imagined, would shortly go out and fish for something more amorphous, less evolved, than haddock. Someone there would be looking out of a window, writing in a letter, “We must not judge God by this. It’s just a study that didn’t come off.” This Platonic reversal, the suggestion that ours is not perhaps after all the shadow but the thing—the Pleroma, not its imperfect index—attracted me obscurely. Outside, a black dog ran in circles on the sand in the rain, snapping up at the gulls twenty feet above its head as if they were butterflies.

  “Pam?” I said. “Lucas? Hello?”

  I thought about the handicapped couple, who were often to be seen in St. Ives, separately and together. They were ill-adapted to it. They were without routine to help them. The blind woman waited at the High Street curb in the rain, her hair plastered to her scalp, her head directed madly at the traffic. She could not cross; I saw her reach down deliberately and slap the dog. Down by the lifeboat station, the paraplegic lay back blasted in his wheelchair under an afternoon sky so dark it might have been November, ignoring everything that was said to him, his mouth open in boredom or pain. Forced into the same troglodytic existence, I was sympathetic: I stood under a butcher’s awning as they blundered along the pavement, their faces showing no animation, thinking, “How much happier they’d be in the quarry!” I followed them up the steep streets to the car park and watched them drive away.

  Eventually the bad weather blew itself out in three spectacular storms. Chocolate brown water raced down the hillsides above the coast road and whirled along the village street. The women ran squealing into one another’s houses to borrow buckets. I left the flood to subside and went for long walks across the sodden moorland. I thought I would stay another week, perhaps two. On Cam Down the sun was already boiling the moisture out of the peat. From Boswens Common I went down to the sea. Over everything inland hung a warm haze like watered milk. I could walk all day without tiring myself, along the steep, narrow valleys where streams ran in beds of roseate granite like formal paving; as long as I avoided the White Downs, I could sleep when it got dark. I was well again.

  * * *

  At night, the quarry’s pillars and terraces had something of the same soapy, veiled quality as my dreams when I had first arrived at the cottage. Lovers used it then. You would hear them moan or laugh from their car, or see it rock gently on its springs. The waterfall made an uneven spattering sound, like a tap left running all night in a concrete yard. One night I found a car parked in front of it, silent, with the filtered moonlight reflected from its windscreen. I decided it was empty. Just as I got close enough to see inside, its engine started up. The headlights came on full in my face. I flung up my hand. With a roar and a scrape of gears it raced past me. I had the impression of two excited faces staring out: music from a radio. Its rear lights bumped hurriedly up the track. Later a light breeze moved the vegetation on the back wall.

  I gave up trying to telephone Pam and Lucas. “People change,” I told them in a letter. “You build up opinions like layers of sediment in the bottom of a jam jar. Suddenly someone tips over the jar by accident. Or you get bored and shake it up to see what will happen. Or perhaps you just throw it all away and start again with clean water.” Was I making myself ridiculous? “You should never assume you’re talking to the person you knew five years ago,” I ended lamely. “All the best.” I looked at the envelope for a moment or two before I put it in the post.

  If anyone had come to visit, they would have found me dressed for most of the day in an old pair of shorts. Reading had begun to bore me. Instead I ran about in the lanes below the village, or took the bus to Sennen Cove, where I scrambled down the cliffs to stand grinning on the wave-washed rock platform in the glitte
ring spray, dazzled by the sun and rendered speechless by the salt smell and roaring edge of the sea. When I looked in the mirror, I thought of myself as a castaway, with the thin, sunburnt, muscular look by which all castaways can be recognized.

  * * *

  The quarry stood bleached and empty in the sun. Heat clanged soundlessly from its walls until the air began to shiver and dance. I slept with my hands behind my head in a hollow between some boulders, dreaming vaguely. People parked their cars without ever knowing I was there, and went away again without my ever knowing they had been.

  One afternoon I woke with a sense of confusion I couldn’t attribute directly, to a change in the light, for instance, or the sound from the baling machine which had been chugging to and fro all day in the fields above the headland, leaving a brown stain of exhaust smoke in the clear air. I lifted myself on one elbow and saw the blind woman hobbling round the quarry with her dog; or standing still, rather—as if something had caught her attention in the middle of her walk—and staring up at the spongy green pillows of moss, her head tilted to one side. A light wind animated the willow branches and rustled stealthily along the rose terraces; it stirred the dust round the woman’s feet in their square ungainly shoes. She smiled. The man in the car called out to her. Still smiling, she went back to get him into his wheelchair. I watched them for a few minutes then dozed off again, closing my eyes on an image of the wheelchair parked by the pool beneath the wall, so that drops from the waterfall spattered man, woman and dog as they looked up.