Lucas thought for a moment.
“It’s not entirely clear what changed this,” he said. He took his spectacles off and rubbed his eyes.
“Don’t tease me,” Pam warned him.
“Early one April morning, Ashman caught a train from Birmingham Central station and made his way first to Bath, then Weston-super-Mare on the Bristol Channel. From there he went ten or fifteen miles inland, to a small village near Burrington, on the northern edge of the Mendip Hills. What he found in the parish church there is important to us, and easy to understand. The rest is more difficult—”
“Lucas!”
Lucas took the point, and read on—
* * *
I left the church quickly.
There were two churchyards, the inner one well-kept and intimate, with trimmed squares of box hedge, little curving lawns and paths. Yew and elm surrounded it; lesser celandines edged each path; daisies and dandelions were already out in the grass. There I sat down for a few minutes, listening to the song of a thrush as it shaped and defended its spring territory among the ornamental shrubs. The church itself was Norman, small but massy: nave, choir and sanctuary quarried block by block, with all the enormous energy of that time, out of a rosy limestone which reminded me of Tintern and the Wye Valley. Faint shadows of the surrounding trees, cast by the light falling across its south flank, were like the shadows traced on a white cliff by a warm winter day. All this filled me with delight. When I got up to go, much of the excitement of my discovery had drained away into the thrush’s song, the pale but warm sunshine on the grass: but it was replaced by an extraordinary happiness.
The outer churchyard was less secluded. In an acre of obscure untended sites among colonies of rhododendrons, masses of bramble, and thickets of sapling trees, it served a less favored clientele. I looked for them as I made my way towards the gate. Some lay completely hidden under the coarse, tangled grass. Headstones were rare. Instead the graves had rusty ornamental chains, and over them a kind of iron cage, as if something were needed to hold in the dead. From the three or four stones I was able to find—all greenish, and with shoulders carved to represent a scroll—I read messages incomplete, ordinary, strange:
“…also his Beloved Wife.”
A little way in from the gates, attempts had been made to clear the vegetation. Here for some reason the graves were simply heaps of earth with unpainted wooden crosses at the head of them: an unaccustomed sight, shocking and yet somehow exciting in that it bared a process usually so well hidden under marble chippings, urns, angels standing on great pillars. Across this raw ground, you had a view into a long bleak sloping field, where not far from the churchyard wall some men were tending a fire, staring at it aimlessly but with a certain satisfaction as one of them turned it over with a rake. Going through the gate and out into the road, I wondered what they could be burning, on a Saturday afternoon in April.
The village smelled of furniture polish. A fat woman with red arms sat in her garden eating an apple. From inside the house behind her came the sound of a vacuum cleaner.
They were used to visitors. Someone had converted the old toll house into a bookshop. In the square, with its chestnut trees and limestone cross, I found three whitewashed cottages knocked together to make a café called the Naked Man, a popular starting place for parish outings to Burrington Combe, where, caught in the rain nearly two hundred years earlier, Augustus Toplady had taken shelter in the famous cave and been inspired to write “Rock of Ages, cleft for me”. That morning a lot of old people had come down from Bristol: frail but lively men in braces, flannel trousers and straw hats with a black ribbon, who trooped in and out of the public lavatories; women with faces like buns, sailing along in their cotton print frocks only to stop and exclaim over a baby as if they had just found it. Now they were waiting for the bus to take them home. It would be another hour. Meanwhile they packed the Naked Man, where under the low ceiling beams and in front of a fireplace decorated with paper flowers and ears of corn dyed transparent green, they examined a sepia photograph entitled “Washday c. 1900” (three or four sullen-looking women outside a stone building) and asked one another:
“Now do you like seafood, because they do a really nice seafood platter here, dear—”
“Seafood platter? Seafood platter?”
“Oh no, not for me, dear!”
When the food came they shoveled it down themselves vigorously, then chewed with inturned expressions as if they weren’t quite sure what they were eating. Forty-five minutes passed. The sky darkened and a few spots of rain dashed against the windows. At this the men consulted their watches, while their wives smiled indulgently at a toddler. (It ate for them a cream cake, then banged its blue plastic cup repeatedly on the table.) They were less certain about the mother. She was chain-smoking Players Number Six and kept saying, “I’m never satisfied with anything.” To this her companion, a woman of about forty with a deep, measured voice and pulled-back hair which made her face look like a bone on the shore, only replied: “You should wait until you see something you really like, then buy it. You can always throw away something you don’t like as much. You can pass on something you’ve grown tired of.”
She sniffed suddenly and added: “Can you smell that?”
The child stopped banging its cup and stared at them both. Suddenly, everyone was getting up agitatedly.
“That smell!”
“Is it the bus already? It’s the bus!”
“I can’t smell anything.”
“What is it?”
The old men gathered round the war memorial in the square, staring up at a huge plume of dark gray smoke which rose, out of proportion to any possible cause, from behind the houses. Rain streamed down their tilted faces, darkened the shoulders of their jackets. “Oh dear, oh dear, what is it?” called the women anxiously from the café door, their expressions vague, loose, expectant.
We all ran down towards the church. Intense heat met us at the gate. The graveyard had caught fire.
A rake lay abandoned in the empty field next door, and two or three figures were running in and out of the edge of the smoke. I could hear them calling to one another, their voices distant and panicky beneath the roar and crackle of the fire. One of them toppled over; confused, the others took hold of his feet and pulled him inwards, towards the church. “This way!” shouted the old men. They began to take off their coats, but nothing could be done. “Over here!” Too late. However it had started, the blaze seemed to have seated itself everywhere at once, crackling and hissing in the saplings, racing through the grass between the railed and caged graves. (Through the heat mirage they seemed to bob like small boats on a burning sea, their ironwork glowing a dull plum color. They remained unexpectedly afloat.) Tangle by tangle, the brambles quivered like red hot barbed wire and fell into ash. The elms nearest the church went up like bunches of straw: from where I stood, thirty or forty yards away, I could feel the heat on my skin.
The woman with the toddler held it up to see the flames. “Look,” she urged. “Timmy, look!” Her friend, who was occupied lighting a cigarette, said neutrally:
“It’ll be the church next.”
This stopped the old men short. While they were considering it, the wind shifted a point or two and blew the flames towards us. Smoke roiled and eddied, alive with sparks. Eyes watering, I stepped back, expecting the acrid, powdery but reassuring smell you get from a garden bonfire on a wet day. Instead it stank of chlorine and putrefying bodies, then the crematorium chimney; and I heard a voice speaking as if from a great distance, in a middle-European accent so thick I could understand only a phrase or a sentence here and there. “Ice,” it whispered. Then something that might have been, “Our clothes.” And then, quite clear: “They took us from Theresienstadt without warning at night.” I was in Birkenau. It was October. I could hear dogs barking somewhere a long way off across the river Sola, which had frozen early. The huts were dark, filled with the smell of exhausted women. “All killed
. Killed by injection.” Birkenau! How can I explain? History, not smoke, had enveloped me. Racked and nauseated, I stumbled across the road away from the church gate, knelt down, and vomited copiously into the grass verge. By the time I felt like standing up again, the fire in the churchyard had consumed itself. I thought: “You’re nearly fifty years old.”
It was the year of the Prague Spring. Dubcek had yet to be defeated; Jan Palach had yet to make his appallingly confused gesture of hope and desolation in Wenceslas Square.
Were the borders beginning to move again?
The dead remain with us, passed down as the things that concerned them while they were alive. I recalled, suddenly and in succession: the prostitute in her booth above the Danube, light pooling in the hollow of a collar-bone; the orgasm of an eighteen-year-old boy, sad as an exhaled breath; the yellowed photograph of some old statesman who had meant so much to her. Had she died in Birkenau?
“I know you’re here!” I shouted. I knew she wasn’t.
I wiped my mouth, raised my eyes, and found the toddler staring at me in bewilderment from his mother’s arms. The rain poured down on us both.
* * *
Lucas closed his briefcase. The ward was quiet.
“What happened to Ashman that afternoon? He can only answer: ‘I’m not sure.’ It’s almost as if he wants us to decide for him—”
Pam touched Lucas’s arm tiredly.
“Lucas, what had he found in the church?”
“A cup, a map, a mirror. A rose. The real heritage of the Empress. The real clue to the Heart.”
“Lucas…”
“He had found the record of a marriage.”
“Will you come and see me in the afternoons?”
“I’ll try.”
ELEVEN
The Slave of God
However Pam had described Lucas to herself, however she had thought of him during their life together—as a demanding but perfect child; as the mirror of her own supernatural guilt; as the author “Michael Ashman”—he had always been able to comfort and convince her. What he now achieved in this direction was as extraordinary as his original success with the Coeur. Folding her pain across itself repeatedly until it was so small she had no sensation of it, he placed it exactly at the heart of the Heart (that Romanesque cloister, he said, where whatever our anxiety we are always able to listen to the fountain playing in silence). There, though she could feel it once more, it was very distant; perhaps even a blessing.
“The first great echoes had died away,” he began. “Yet visions and revelations were still possible. Put your ear to the cavity of history and you can still detect them—sighs, confused harmonies, ripples of ripples intersecting across the whole surface of a lake after some great significant object has submerged!
“1683:
“William Perm was founding Philadelphia. In Britain, Christopher Wren had abandoned astronomy for urban renewal. A bracing pragmatism seemed to rule. But while the modern world had its back turned, the Ottoman Empire besieged Vienna with scimitars, polished brass culverins, horsetail banners in gorgeous reds and yellows, and camels whose tulipwood saddles glowed in the sun less like earthly wood than some perfect Platonic material. And in the Low Countries, Christian Huygens was intuiting his way towards a wave theory of light! As an approach to the day-by-day meaning of the world, the dream might have fallen into disfavor; but that great European bestseller The Judgement of Dreams had entered its fifteenth edition since 1518. Nicholas Coleman of Norwich experienced visions of ‘an army of men’ whose beggar’s rags disguised finery beneath, ‘burning the market towns of England at night’. A tailor from Stamford was encouraged by dreams to try ‘the miraculous healing of the deaf and blind’. And then, suddenly hallucinating a rose which opened ‘not in but somewhere behind’ her sleep, a Bristol woman, christened in the year of the Great Fire with the extraordinary name Godscall St. Ives, renounced her faith to marry a gardener named Joseph Winthrop.
“Winthrop was a man of his time. Commercial and scientific botany delighted him equally. He had corresponded with the younger Tradescant, and worked with Philip Miller on what they hoped would be a new centifolia rose. His Dutch connections balanced a distant relationship to the governor of Massachusetts: he was able to exploit both.
“Three of their children chose the New World. We know nothing of them. The fourth, Liselotte, prone to chlorosis, melancholy from an early age, married a Leiden pump-engineer called Boerhaave. At this, saddened perhaps by the whole charade of Enlightenment, Godscall fell prey quite suddenly to a quartan ague—of which Winthrop, plant-collecting in the Netherlands, learned only on his return—and died. ‘Something burns within me,’ she had written in her diary in 1695, ‘but I am never consumed.’”
Pam loved this.
Lucas was delighted by her delight. It would be oversimplifying, whatever my opinion, to claim he had been disappointed by his life since the divorce. Nevertheless, an unfamiliar excitement now filled him whenever he thought about her. At first, surprised to find himself daydreaming in the school staff-room after lunch, he would shake his head and go back to marking books. Soon, though, the work itself began to bore him. The children seemed willfully slow and uncooperative, the things he was trying to teach them rang with meaninglessness. Clearly, he was approaching the crux of things. He and Pam had been telling themselves the story of the Coeur for twenty years: its worth as an invention—never mind as solace—now depended as much on his ability to convince as on her desire to be convinced. This was the moment of greatest danger. Despite that, he wanted to be at the hospital as often as possible. He wanted to be next to her. Stuck in the classroom, he yawned; heard himself tell some twelve-year-old boy, “For God’s sake go, then. But don’t ask me again this afternoon;” and stared out of the window.
He could see Pam, sitting up in bed reading a book!
Four in the afternoon. Time to be off. It was a momentary relief to throw his stuff into the back of the Renault, slam the door, start the engine: but predicating his whole day on this gesture solved nothing. An hour later he was as impatient as ever.
He loathed the drive out through Rochdale, with its debilitated public buildings and small businesses. “The Pine Brunch Bar & Coffee Lounge” replaced “Carol’s Wools”, to be replaced in its turn by “A Maze of Pine & Roses”. These fantasias of transformation and escape—pursued with increasing anguish as they approached the depressed outskirts—chafed him into misreading familiar traffic signs, so that he missed a turning he always took. Or he would brake suddenly for an imaginary dog or child. Further east there was only moorland, successive arcs of waterlogged peat, elegant concrete bridges connecting nothing to nothing across the motorway. It was dark even in the afternoon, and the traffic was always bad. The aggression of the other drivers as they jostled nose to tail at eighty or ninety miles an hour through this desolate landscape made him nervous and contemptuous at once.
“They look so stupidly greedy,” he wrote to me, “you wonder how they ever managed to learn to drive at all. I suppose none of us do more than the minimum necessary to get what we want.”
He would arrive at Huddersfield General in a mood impossible, he said, to describe; though he tried hard enough, and in fact it wasn’t hard to recognize—“Impatience, anger, elation, all at once: sometimes so intense I can feel myself draining away out of my own body, like water.” It made him look through the nurses as though they weren’t there; and advise the hospital florist, always slow to calculate change from a five-pound note, “Keep it!” The lifts had been full so often he no longer bothered with them but took the stairs instead, three at a time. Every evening there seemed to be more people in his way. New patients with sheafs of documents en route for Hematology, new visitors on timid quests for husbands in Cardiac or daughters in Maternity, they were easily snared in the web of primary-colored lines painted on the corridor floors, which is where Lucas came upon them. “Excuse me. We’re looking for…”
He stared at them a
s if they were deranged.
“…X-rays.”
“I can’t help. Sorry.”
He pushed open the door of Primrose Ward at last. “Lucas,” Pam called: “Here.” They had moved her bed again! For a moment he stood confused in the middle of the polished floor; then she waved and suddenly he could relax. She took the flowers from him. His heart was pounding. He had been walking so quickly, he found, that he was out of breath.
“Lucas, they’re beautiful!”
“Listen,” he said—
“‘Something burns within me, but I am never consumed!’” But whatever it was, it clearly failed to kindle in Godscall’s daughter. Boerhaave settled in East Anglia, where—encouraged by the success of the Haddenham Level project in 1727—he planned to drain and farm. But his capital proved insufficient, Liselotte soon died of smallpox, and, its income fallen radically, its only issue daughters, the family followed her into oblivion.
“We have only glimpses of them after that.”
Liselotte’s children, Lucas maintained, were to marry into the hand-looming industry which had grown up around Norwich. As for their descendants:
“For nearly a hundred years, they drift north. Norwich to Nottingham and then Manchester; flying shuttle to spinning jenny; figured cloth to stockings and lace. Their names have not survived the famines, wage cuts and migrations, the long slow tragedy of the eighteenth-century cottage industries. When they re-emerge, it is with the invention of the power loom, and the death of Paul Sturtevant, a middle-aged artisan from Horrocks’ Stockport factory who walked all the way to Manchester one day in August 1819, because he wanted to hear the radical Henry Hunt speak in St. Peter’s Fields.”
The Course of the Heart Page 14
