The Course of the Heart

by M. John Harrison

  Sturtevant fell under the hooves of the cavalry as they swept across Peterloo to break up the meeting. He survived hideous injuries to his head, only to die of an infection twelve days later. “In his delirium,” Lucas told Pam, “he dreamed of ‘the perfect time which will come to us all’. He was able to describe it: but it was nothing like the life we have now. Six daughters huddled round the deathbed. The youngest, Alice, only seven years old, records:

  “‘Before he died he cried out, “What does it matter that I’m dying, since I am doing what I want?” ’

  “Anything we make of this glimpse depends on the quality of our intuition. Was the Heart waiting for something? (Nothing, surely, that could ever happen in Manchester!) We can only say that we feel it beating again before silence sets in. By the last quarter of the century, its heirs have passed through the Industrial Revolution as if through a fire. They will never retrieve Godscall’s sense of something beyond and yet within herself. They will never prophesy like Sturtevant. They no longer allow themselves rage. They repress their fear, their sex, their dreams. The skills of the affect have been burned away from them. All they can do is seek advancement.

  “They become shopkeepers.”

  Outside in the corridor after each visit, Lucas took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes.

  “I’m tired out,” he told the ward staff.

  “You’re doing her the world of good,” they reassured him. It was, he knew, too simple a diagram of the relationship. One weekday afternoon had turned into two. By then, Rochdale no longer seemed such a labyrinth to him. He would stop off there at “A Maze of Pine & Roses” to buy her a figured silver bracelet from Nepal, or a photograph of someone else’s Victorian ancestors slipped naively into a small art deco frame because, the woman behind the counter said, they looked so nice together.

  Pam responded with physical improvements like shy gifts of her own. She woke early and, with the blue bedjacket round her shoulders, sat up more often during the day. As a result she slept better at night. Though her skin was still very white, it lost the floury look which had so frightened Lucas at the outset of the illness. The pain was still there, of course, but easier to ignore. She entered into the life of the ward around her. Some days this was hardly more ambitious than a discussion of the events at Emmerdale Farm, but even that helped: where previously she had stared clueless and owlish at the TV, allowing the soaps to wash her as smooth as a stone in a stream, she now followed them with a kind of amused greed. The opposite of innocence is not irony but emptiness. Halfway through Love’s Gold Dream she lent it to one of the nurses, who forgot to give it back.

  “What do I look like with my hair like this?” she asked the other women tentatively.

  She put on weight. She put on make-up.

  It is easy to see that Lucas, who would have done or said anything to preserve the delight he saw on her face when he entered the ward, had rediscovered the excitement of being pivotal to someone else’s happiness, a condition which promised to alleviate all his own wounds. But what Pam had rediscovered could only be inferred from her clear intention to get well. The ward staff thought they knew. Mistaking her smile, her intensity, the attentiveness that came back into her face when she looked up at Lucas, they often conspired to leave him there for half an hour after the rest of the afternoon visitors had gone. They knew, anyway, that left to his own devices he would only make his way back to the waiting area and write furiously with a cheap red ballpoint pen until visiting began again at seven o’clock.

  “You’ve just got to look at her,” trainee nurses told one another delightedly, “to see.”

  “I can’t fancy him myself.”

  “Get on!”

  It was too early to talk about remission, and they were careful never to use the word near her. Would Pam have heard them if they had? With Lucas constantly at her side offering the life-jacket, part of her at least was free to abandon Huddersfield General the way you abandon a ship. This she did with relief. At night, lapped in the faint fake radiance of morphine, she could remember herself as a little girl dancing on a low wall (though she couldn’t remember whose hands caught her again and again when she jumped). Falling for ever, always being saved, she heard Lucas say—

  “Alice Sturtevant grew up frail-looking and pretty, but more obstinate than she seemed. A photograph taken in middle life shows her in an amazing black bombazine dress. If her eyes are dark-ringed like all that family’s, it is less from anxiety than determination. In 1835, she had married a milkman named John Duck. His surname amused her; but they wanted the same things, and he promised a life without visions.

  “He came from Mottram, a village east of Manchester in the gape of the Longdendale Valley, and at the time of their marriage was poised to convert his milk profits into a small shop on the old saltway, close to the Packhorse Inn. There, in the shadow of the fifteenth-century church, ‘the Cathedral of East Cheshire’, Alice helped him sell groceries by weight (a piece of bacon was stuck with its own fat to the base of the scales to ‘adjust’ them); cough mixtures full of opium which went down like warm pitch; and boot laces from a card.

  “Alice had seven children. Of five girls, one died at birth; another, three years old, from diphtheria. The boys survived, which was a blessing. She was happy enough; and if she never liked the dark gape of Longdendale, she could always look back at the Altdorfer sunsets burning away above the chimneys of the city.

  “John Duck, meanwhile, looked eastward. Under construction ten miles up the valley were railway lines, tunnels, a chain of dams and reservoirs intended to water the industries of Manchester. From 1838 until the end of the century, these obsessional works drew a massive labor force to the shanty villages of Rhodeswood, Woodhouse and Dunford Bridge. Conditions were bad. Men, women and children died in subsidences and premature explosions, of privation, overwork, bad housing, puzzlement, or grief; and were often buried on the moor with less ceremony than the victims of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley a hundred years later. Pictures of the time show them grouped outside their ‘homes’ in New Yarmouth—blurred faces in the foreground, bleak oak woods behind, then the high black edge of the moor.

  “John supplied groceries to the survivors. It was a good business, and—apart from the younger son, who seems to have registered as a quarryman at the age of thirteen—all the Duck children went into it.

  “By 1880, the oldest boy William was ready to branch out on his own. John bought him a milk round in Salford, and taught him to keep the product fresh by adding formalin. With the death of his parents within two months of one another in 1900, William brought his sisters to Manchester and liquidated all three enterprises, along with a Salford public house—the Junction—he had acquired in the meantime. This enabled him to buy a share in a modest but successful department store on Victoria Street.

  “He began with three partners. Buying out the last of them twenty years later, he determined to give the store his own name. But by then it was the biggest in Manchester, and his wife—a publican’s daughter from Burnley-persuaded him that ‘Duck’s’ had no ring to it. Looking back through the family history, they chose his mother’s maiden name, modifying it after some thought from Sturtevant to Stuyvesant. Stuyvesant! It was European yet transatlantic; it was American yet aristocratic. William loved it. He changed his name by deed poll.”

  “St. Ives to Sturtevant. Sturtevant to Stuyvesant. Godscall’s descendants have found their way down to us. The Heart has its Heir.”

  * * *

  Thursday afternoon, Primrose Ward.

  Patients and visitors exchange desultory talk.

  “We got toast this morning.”

  “Move, Nina, move and let your grandma sit down. She’s not been very well.”

  “Thanks, flower: ’as your ’eadache gone?”

  “In Ashton they were all dreaming of toast. It was all they ever thought of.”

  “It’s not time yet is it? It’s not time. Do they come and check if the visitors have gon
e?”

  “You had to have an operation to get toast. Or else be in the Maternity Unit—”

  Laughter.

  “Nina, love, it’s not time yet.”

  Only Pam and Lucas are silent. Lucas, having told his story, turns away for a minute or two as if out of shyness. Given this time to herself, Pam regards him thoughtfully. The afternoon, swinging round on its pivot, isolates in a kind of flat light one flower vase after another: tulips, asters, lilies, “like a tart’s boudoir.” On the TV a dog is running through rubbish by some docks, under the stern of a ship. An old woman’s voice sings a few quavering notes. “That’s nice, isn’t it?” And, to a passing nurse: “I’m singing. Ha ha.” Rain scratches at the windows. Eventually Pam says:

  “Somehow that makes it even sadder.”

  “Oh, Pam!”

  Lucas laughs. They hug.

  “Pam, Pam, remember Valentinus: ‘Do not be afraid. In death you shall not die.’ You were in the Pleroma all along without knowing it!”

  “Less of that, you two,” orders the ward sister, coming in briskly to fuss with an empty bed. “Throwing-out time now. Come on, it’s four o’clock, you’ve had a good innings.”

  * * *

  Over the years Lucas too had wrung from the myth what comfort he could. By allowing him to experience the Coeur as if it came from outside himself, “Michael Ashman” had relieved him of responsibility and salved his intellectual guilts. More importantly, “Ashman” hid—or at least disguised—Lucas’s own intuition, of which he had an almost comical fear. Pam understood much of this. It was, after all, a shared dream. But while she could accept Lucas’s needs, they had always chafed her. As soon as he confirmed what she had somehow sensed all along—that the whole of this history aimed itself through her—she lost interest. Her sense of urgency prevailed. She laid the Search aside like a crossword puzzle faintly penciled in with guesses and instead focused her attention on the dream itself.

  Increasingly, it centered on the Empress’s shadowy daughter Phoenissa, of whom Lucas had said, “She may not have escaped the wreck. You can still hear in the Pleroma a faint fading cry of rage and sadness which may have been hers.”

  The crux, Pam claimed, the absolute meaning of Phoenissa’s “death into the world”, lay in its counter-trajectory to the Empress’s.

  “From the start Phoenissa was fucking her mother’s general, Lascaris; he only had to be near her to drive her into a kind of delighted paralysis—she could feel herself tremble and moisten if he walked past fifty yards away not even looking in her direction.

  “Things had begun to slide long before the siege began. Everyone knew that. The court was split, the Empress already fatally inattentive. Weeds sprang up between the stones. The wells faltered. In the afternoons the City baked silently in the heat. Lascaris and Phoenissa met in the little deserted courtyards beneath the inner walls. At first he was brutal with her. He would bend her over a dry fountain, enter her, come suddenly with a groan. The sunlight illuminated them mercilessly in this moment: both helpless, half out of their fine clothes, weak with sex. Towards the end, when smoke from the besieging cannon hung above the City like strips of black rag, he seemed to relax. In some cool empty room with broken earthenware scattered over the tiled floor, he would cup the back of her head in his hands, and whisper ‘Don’t be afraid,’ a kindness which disappointed her inexplicably.

  “Then suddenly it was all over. For two nights and a day the harbor had been in flames. The outer walls, weakened by twenty days of bombardment from landward, went down. Lascaris was killed early in the afternoon, the Empress two hours later near one of the gates. She was weeping openly, they say, and had picked up a sword: but they never say why. No one could bear to look directly at her.

  “In the moment of her mother’s agony, as the Coeur snapped back away from the world and into the Pleroma, Phoenissa was given a choice. Alone all day in a deserted cloister, she had watched the air suffuse with a dusty glow the color of rose petals. The sounds of battle faded. She could hear the nearby fountain; and behind that a thread of music, one phrase repeated over and over again on some stringed instrument. Eventually Lascaris, dressed in his beautiful armor, walked slowly across the courtyard in front of her. ‘Theodore!’ she wept. The air smelled of attar, called the heart of the rose. ‘Theodore!’ He turned back to face her and she saw his wound; she remembered the wounds he had given her. He was, of course, already dead. She had mistaken the tawdry glitter of the world for the light of the Pleroma! She fled towards it: her very desire for fullness led her to choose the world.”

  Pam laughed.

  “She’s been whoring through it ever since, under the impression that it’s Heaven.”

  Lucas was rather shocked. “We can’t know that,” he said.

  “The Empress knew. Oh, Lucas, Lucas! It’s easy to talk about the World and the Coeur as ‘burning in the fabric of the Pleroma like two lovers in the glorious wreck of desire’. But we can mean only one thing by that. All those years ago, you talked about ‘a huge cry of love and loss, echoing and re-echoing across Europe.’”

  “But who lost the most?”

  “If the Coeur would no longer let itself be known, we mustn’t blame the invading kings and their conspiracies. It had breathed its final breath long before they identified Gallica by her beautiful armor, and displayed the mutilated head.”

  There was a silence.

  Into it Lucas said, “We can’t know that, either.”

  Pam smiled.

  “We can’t, can we?” she said.

  And looking steadily at him she lifted her hands, palms upwards, in a gesture of weighing: as if he had asked the wrong question. But if he remained a bit unnerved by the energy and sensuality of her vision, Lucas was always willing to contribute what he could. There were days, too, when she seemed to falter. “I’m tired, Lucas,” she would whisper, blinking back tears and staring at the bed opposite hers: “I can’t remember things which happened so long ago.”

  To help, he told her a story of Richard Coeur de Lion which went like this:

  “Traditionally, of course, Richard, returning to England incognito from the Third Crusade, is captured by Leopold of Austria who imprisons him at Durnstein. He is found and freed by the troubadour Blondel, who sings the first verse of a popular ballad outside every keep in Europe until Richard replies with the second. In fact by 1193 Richard’s place had already been taken by a hostage called Hugh de Morville. Hugh, who had helped murder Thomas à Becket on behalf of Richard’s father, is supposed to have died of guilt on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. But a poet called Ulrich von Zatzikhoven saw and talked to him, there in the Durnstein keep. So there was no Richard. Was there ever a Blondel? Who knows. But there was certainly an exchange of songs. Hugh de Morville gave von Zatzikhoven a copy of the Anglo-Norman The Legend of Lancelot, Zatzikhoven’s translation of which—though authorities regard it as both banal and dilute—must be seen as one of the late flowers of German chivalric poetry.

  “The insoluble conflict between ideal and reality! Richard vanishes from his own story for a year. Where does he go while de Morville is impersonating him in Durnstein? Only the codes embedded in his name enable us to guess.

  “Gallica carried the blood of the Lion.”

  “Really, Lucas,” Pam interrupted suddenly, “I don’t care what fucking color she bled.”

  Soon she was laughing at him again. “‘Ideal and reality’!” she said.

  In this way, turn and turn about, losing their confidence one day only to regain it the next, they steered the Course of the Heart. Pam’s compass was hidden, glandular, difficult to read: less romantic than Lucas’s. But she was equally determined; and perhaps in the end she had the truer sense of direction. Her health continued to improve, while Lucas watched in awe and Huddersfield General held its breath. The disease went into remission. Within a month—though she was a little too frail to fend for herself and would still need treatment as an out-patient—they had allowed he
r to go home.

  From then on Lucas spent his free time at the cottage, although he always drove back to Manchester at night. No cook, he bought what he called “middle-class convenience food”—filled pasta and tins of ratatouille—after school at Sainsbury’s; and in the evenings did the housework (rarely to the standard of Pam’s neighbors, who came in and did it again during the day). Pam slept a lot; Lucas sat by the bed and wrote letters to me, in red ball-point on lined paper. “We try and get as much fresh air as we can.” At weekends he carried her out to the Renault and drove to one local beauty spot or another—anywhere she could look out over a reservoir and some woods without having to leave the car—or pushed her round the Huddersfield shopping arcades in a wheelchair. When he picked her up, he told me, she was just a lot of bones and heat that weighed nothing.

  One Saturday in late August they drove through Dunford Bridge, past their old house.

  “Look, Lucas!”

  Lucas parked the car on the grass verge, where the road dipped northward into a valley with beech and dwarf oak. The valley was full of haze, the haze full of sun. A strange bronze light fell on the tangled grass in front of the house. From behind rose a plume of smoke so thick and perfectly detailed that it looked like a solid object.

  “Wind your window down,” Lucas said. He studied the house.

  “Good God.”

  Builders were at work on it again. They had opened one gable end, then sealed it temporarily with heavy-gauge polythene. The front windows were out, the stonework above them jacked into place until the lintels could be replaced. A yellow JCB lay hull-down among the muddy hawthorn stumps it had grubbed out of the gardens at the back, where two men were burning a dozen or so metal chairs. Only the frames remained, tangled together inextricably and outlined with fire.

  Lucas wheeled Pam across the road and through the gates. “Let’s have a look round.”