“You try her. See what she says.”
What she said was always the same. She was lonely and ill. The Pleroma was aware of us, even after all those years. Lucas Medlar didn’t love her any more. I would hug her—though I got into bed with her only that once—and telephone him. “You should see more of one another,” I would tell them. “We never see enough of you,” they always replied; and I would promise to write more often. Each time, some kind of balance of anxieties would have to reassert itself before I could go home again. Nevertheless it was a relationship which suited us, until I saw the White Couple in the snow outside Pam’s kitchen window on the third anniversary of Yaxley’s death. Even then, something might have been salvaged. I admit that the White Couple frightened me. How could they not, after everything else that had happened? I had hated the look on their faces as they hung in the air in front of Pam’s kitchen window. I was angry with Lucas, and disappointed by his feeble attempt to avoid the issue. But whatever I told him the day after, in the Manchester Kardomah with the rain streaming into the crowded shopping streets outside, I would still have been happy to help (less out of guilt than he assumed, or at any rate, less out of—the guilt he knew about); and things would have gone on in the same way for ever if, in the following spring, Pam’s illness hadn’t flared up suddenly.
No one knew what was wrong. Migraines paralyzed her. Epileptic incidents increased in frequency and scale. She fell asleep, sometimes for a day, two days, at a time; then ranged restlessly about the cottage for a week, reading, smoking and shouting at the cats late into the night, unable to sleep at all. Her weight fluctuated violently over quite short periods. To these metabolic disturbances were added outbreaks of ulcers, ringworm, colitis, abscessed teeth. She became allergic to increasingly exotic forms of penicillin. Finally her skin flared up bright red with erysipelas—St. Anthony’s Fire, often called simply “the Rose”. (Afterwards, it would be easy to see this portfolio of symptoms as a secondary stage; a transition. It was as if the illness was searching for its own best expression. Her original symptoms, you will say, were so clearly hysterical—fits, headaches, a hallucination in a kitchen—that this must be a form of speech, the language of some quite common psychic disorder. I wouldn’t deny that, even now.)
Then, in April, Lucas telephoned me from Manchester. He was panicky and fey, he didn’t know what to do. Pam had been taken into Huddersfield General Hospital.
“She needs a heart bypass,” he said.
“Lucas, a week ago her heart was sounder than mine. It must be a mistake. What are they saying?”
“They don’t know what’s wrong with her!”
“Try and stay calm,” I advised.
“It’s easy for you. She isn’t just breaking to pieces in front of you.”
“I’ll come when I can.”
But spring is a difficult season. We were publishing as many books as we could print. It took time to extricate myself, and by then Pam was already recovering. I found her propped up in bed in the front room of her cottage, wearing a Marks & Spencer’s cotton nightdress and a blue woolen bedjacket with short puffy sleeves. Her hair was longer; she had tied it back with a piece of ribbon. Her face and arms were very white. Around mouth and eyes the skin had a soft, powdery, inflated look; the flesh was yielding, deeply cut with crow’s-feet and lines of strain. She seemed to have gained weight in the hospital rather than lost it; despite this you could feel the presence of the bones beneath.
“How are you?”
“Sore!”
Lucas had manhandled the bed downstairs and arranged it by the window so she could look out at the great bars of sun and shadow chasing each other all day across the moors towards Holme. There was more light in the room than I remembered from my last visit, falling on the lively red and black design of the quilt-cover, where it found scattered an invalid’s things: Kleenex, the Guardian folded tightly to display yesterday’s half-completed crossword puzzle, a spectacle case, two or three paperbacks with predominantly pink-and-lavender covers and titles like Sweet Dawn of Desire.
“You can’t be serious about this,” I complained. Knowing her taste, I had brought her Willa Gather’s A Lost Lady.
“They belong to the woman next door,” she said. “It was very kind of her to think of me. And look at all these flowers! You never know how nice people are until you’re ill.” Everyone had been kinder than she had a right to expect: they fed the cats, they did the housework even though a home help came in twice a week; they went shopping for her. “The old man two doors along offered to lend me his television.” She laughed. “And it’s cleaner in here than I ever managed to get it. So keep your literary pretensions to yourself! Here. Let me hug you. Oh, it’s so nice to see you!”
She blinked, blew her nose.
“I cry very easily now. Make us some coffee, eh?”
“I’m not sure I want to be in that kitchen,” I said, trying to make a joke of it. “Remembering the last time.”
There was a silence. To occupy herself, she moved her books about; smoothed the quilt with quick deft movements of her hands.
“Do you still see them, Pam?”
“The cats?”
“The White Couple.”
She lay back on the pillows and turned her head away from me.
“What do you think? What did you expect? That it would all go away like magic once you became involved?”
I couldn’t think of an answer to this.
“Don’t worry,” she reassured me tiredly. “They’re not out there now. I’d know.” Silence drew out again. She asked it, as if I wasn’t there, “Do you remember the Moors Murders? All those dead children buried up behind Saddleworth? They weren’t the only ones.”
“A moor is only a moor,” I said.
She wiped her eyes again—“I know. I know.”—then sat up suddenly and took both my hands in hers. “Go into the kitchen and make some coffee,” she said. “All that’s changed is that we’ve admitted something to ourselves.”
“I hope you’re right.”
In the event, there was a yellow roller-blind to pull down over the window.
“I haven’t seen this before,” I called. “No.”
Pam’s neighbors, Yorkshirewomen with determined views, had scrubbed down the Formica surfaces and pine shelves. They liked order and optimism; they liked to see a place clean. New coffee-mugs, with cheap and cheerful artwork and optimistic slogans, had replaced her old chipped favorites. When I needed a tea towel, I found them all freshly laundered. Even the stainless steel cat-bowls had been polished until they shone. The kitchen was a kitchen. I filled the kettle. Nothing happened to me.
“You see?”
We drank the coffee. We talked about this and that. We tried to finish the crossword. The afternoon darkened towards evening. Eventually I asked her: “Do you see Lucas much?” I meant something like: Does Lucas fulfill his responsibilities to you? Instead of answering directly, she showed me a pendant he had bought her nearly twenty years before. It was a teardrop of Iranian mother-of-pearl, about an inch by one and a half, mounted in a silver filigree of tiny roses and decorated with peacocks and flowers, in blues, oranges and greens which glowed in the darkening room like paint from Byzantium. God knows where Lucas had found it, or what he had paid.
“It’s beautiful, Pam.”
“Isn’t it? He bought me that when he was in London the first time.”
“Lucas?”
“Oh yes. He often went down during those first few years, to see if he could find Yaxley and make him help us. Poor Lucas! He was frightened: he didn’t know where to look. He wandered about, I expect, and then just came home again.”
“I had no idea.”
She smiled drowsily at me. “Lucas does his best.” Then: “It wasn’t that we didn’t trust you. Our own feelings let us down.” I could see that she was tired. I got up to leave.
“Take care of yourself, Pam,” I said. “I’ll come again soon.”
“Do you kno
w what I’d like?”
“What?”
But she was asleep.
* * *
I talked to Lucas a day or two later.
“She’s much better,” we reassured each other: “Isn’t she? So much better.”
Within weeks she was back in Huddersfield General. A nagging discomfort in her left hip had migrated to her chest on that side, where it settled in the ribs previously broken for cardiac surgery. A consultant described this condition as “arthritis”, but kept her on hand anyway, for observation.
Lucas was frantic.
“They aren’t being honest. She knows there’s something else wrong with her.”
Pam drifted, ill in some unacknowledged way, assuaging her anxieties with Love’s Stormy Heights and Dark Music of Delight: suddenly, breast cancer was confirmed, and the mastectomy carried out in early July.
“We’ve caught it in plenty of time,” the consultant assured her. But when Lucas went to see her the day after, all she could do was shake her head and say:
“Something’s still not right.”
He was at the hospital as often as his work allowed, which was perhaps more often than he could cope with. I still have his letters of the time, addressed less to me than to himself, crammed foolscap pages typed out furiously at night on the old Lettera portable he had brought to his marriage like a statement of intent. Yellow with age, they break apart at the folds when you try to open them; but there inside are Pam and Lucas, as easily visible—and just as distant—as figures in a glass paperweight. He wavers between the appalled and the self-pitying. She is a woman already deeply ill, bemused by morphine (though as yet in quite light doses), uncertain of the future. Every time he sees her, she has grown thinner. The visiting hour breaks into her isolation; his appearance is always a relief. She clutches his hand so hard it hurts, but woe betide him if he should give her the wrong drink from the bedside table! Or if her back-rest needs adjusting, and Lucas, shy of seeing the amputation scar when she leans forward, makes a muddle of it—
“For God’s sake leave me alone, Lucas. You were always so useless!”
She has become more demanding, he tells himself, “only as a way of saying ‘We don’t have time for this any more.’ Not just because she’s in pain, but because these things are now the measure of our love for one another, our humanity.”
If he infuriates her, the doctors infuriate him.
“None of them will admit how ill she is,” he writes, after one of the endless courses of chemotherapy has come to nothing: “It’s always, ‘try this, try that’. With these people there’s always ‘hope’ and never any progress!”
No one will tell Pam anything. No one will tell him anything. “Worse,” he alleges, “she isn’t even given proper care. This morning she had a fall trying to use the lavatory on her own. At visiting time all she said to me was, ‘My knee’s gone red. The doctor’s going to come and paint it.’ Sometimes she has no idea what she’s saying. But this time she was wide awake. She wouldn’t let go of my hand. ‘Don’t go yet, Lucas. Don’t go.’ Those bastards had really allowed her to fall down and hurt herself!
“Why are they letting this happen?” he asks, and concludes wildly:
“Doctors need disease. It’s the source of their power.”
The hospital was a maze, with every exit marked “Oncology”. They were both trapped there. As a result they found themselves closer together than they had ever been. Whatever its source, Pam’s distress upset Lucas too. Her pain hurt him. The letters go on, shocked, bitter, uncertain, more and more underscored for emphasis. But what they don’t explain is how Lucas was trying to staunch the wound. Every evening after work in Manchester, he started up the Renault and edged it carefully into the dense eastbound traffic of the M62, leaning forward anxiously over the steering wheel to peer through the streaming rain for Junction 23: Outlane. An hour later Pam’s hands would be held tightly between his, and he would be reminding her, in a low, persuasive voice—
“Always remember: what we mean when we talk about the Heart is that it is a real place.”
He knew he mustn’t stop.
It was harder to catch her attention than it had been in Dun-ford Bridge, with the light going slowly out of the heavy old furniture and the brindled cat weaving about the woodblock floor. There he had only ever to ask “What would you like tonight?” to be answered: “Beautiful Swimmers!” Here, nervous and agitated, unable to concentrate, she would look away from him restlessly at first, up at the clock or the other visitors trooping in and out, or the ward television where Emmerdale Farm or All Creatures Great and Small unwound episodically and in silence the stories of shrewd but likeable locals, faces skewed by poor color-balance to a purplish red. Eventually, struck by a phrase—“disillusioned with the actual”; “bound in wood and velvet”—she would stare at Lucas as if he had only just begun to speak. From that moment the haunted look would gradually leave her face; and by the time the ward sister called cheerfully, “Come on now. Nine o’clock. Throwing-out time,” she would be smiling drowsily and ready to sleep on the complex promises he had begun to make her—
“At the end of his life, Michael Ashman seems to have lost his way. It’s hard to understand why. His own best explanation leaves us frustrated, wondering if he has quite deliberately left something out: ‘As a child I had often spent Christmas with my grandmother, who lived near Catesby in a biggish Victorian house of warm orange brick, to which fake Queen Anne chimneys and an overgrown garden lent an air of history I loved—’”
* * *
In that part of Northamptonshire (Lucas read on) the winter copses seem to hang for ever in the moment of darkening against a pale blue sky—as if it will take for ever for night to fall—in a gesture so perfect there will never need to be another day. Medieval strip-fields, Tudor gateposts; narrow lanes and banks choked with ivy awash in horizontal light; yew berries, waxy and tubular, somehow lit up from within so that they look like fairy lights in the gathering dusk: even without snow this is a landscape continually composing itself as a Christmas card. Even now, a chance configuration of cottages and bare elm trees will remind me how I trudged home across the cold ploughed fields at the close of an afternoon in late December: a boy thirteen or fourteen, composed only of the things he wanted at that moment—the warmth of a front room with its Christmas lights and strings of tinsel, the smell of toast.
I loved the holly that grew by my grandmother’s door. Every spring, among its new leaves, you found clusters of small flowers as complicated as ciphers, four petals and four white stamens arranged to make up a sort of eight-pointed star. The petals had an almost hallucinatory touch of purple near the tips. Male and female holly flowers grow on separate trees; only the females bear berries. In winter, my grandmother’s holly bore “a berry as bright as any wound”.
The holly and the ivy! Every time you hear that carol, whatever its provenance, you take the full weight of the medieval experience, which was itself just like a childhood. To them, words seemed mysterious and valuable in their own right; the berries so bright against the dark foliage of the tree! But rowan and yew berries are just as bright. So are hawthorn berries, especially when they are new. Hips and haws are as bright. All are instrumental and have their magical and symbolic associations, but none as dark and childlike as this myth of conscious sacrifice, organized, performed, expressed, as the matrix of a culture!
When I came back to that house to live, I was forty-five years old. “You can’t understand the Middle Ages,” I had just written to a friend, “until you begin to feel death treading on your own heels.” As for that “elasticity of boundaries” I had once recognized as the necessary prelude to the return of the Coeur: it had quickly exhausted itself. Kennedy was in Berlin. Europe was frozen into the postures of the Cold War. “Ich bin ein Berliner”! I told myself that I had been born into a world which, despite its horrors, had always promised more than this.
* * *
“That poor man!”
Caught up despite herself, Pam began to look forward to Lucas’s visits.
“Can’t you come in the afternoons too?” she asked him.
He didn’t see how he could.
“Because I get so bored here.”
Correctly reading “middle age” for “Middle Ages”, she had identified in Ashman’s despair the footprint of her own condition. But where Pam saw melancholia, fear, bewilderment (in some archaic sense of that word which implied lost bearings, night, tangled woods), Lucas saw only a failure of imagination.
“By this time Ashman could read the fifteenth century out of a damp cardboard box on a building site. He had built one of the most powerful metaphysical instruments in the history of European thought but he didn’t know what to do with it next.”
“Read me some more anyway,” said Pam. “Listen, then—”
The ward staff, a rich mixture of SENs, trainees, and unqualified “helpers” in green overalls—heavy women with big feet and grown-up families, who came in by bus from as far away as Bradford and for whom lifting and carrying had been a life’s work—were soon intrigued. Seven o’clock in the evening: Lucas would enter the ward carrying a plastic briefcase and a Salisbury’s carrier bag; sit on the side of the bed; and take out the round, steel-rimmed reading glasses he now affected. These made him seem vulnerable; or, as one of the women put it, “too young for his age”. They liked him anyway. Pam wasn’t much more now than a lot of bones and heat: they were impressed by the care with which he embraced her. And they grew used to his low, even reading voice. “You two and your stories!” they would call. “Whenever we come through here, you’re telling her some story! Has it got any rude bits?”
Lucas could only give a shy smile. “I’m afraid not.”
“Shame!”
He stared after them. Then he said:
“Ashman continued the research with a kind of wan intensity. After all, it represented the years of his life since that formative European journey; and sometimes brought back to him—with a shiver of delight now only the memory of a memory—images of a dancing bear, the frozen floodwater of the Danube, the legs of the Czechoslovakian girls as they spread their tiered skirts like a fan of Tarot cards. But he had begun to believe that the historical past of the Coeur was only a kind of involution of his own life, a way of twisting or folding the outside of his experience to imply an inside, a meaning.”
The Course of the Heart Page 13
