“Your poor old garden!” Pam said. She studied the empty windows. “I think I’ll stay here.”
“What a warren!”
It had always been too large and complex for them; perhaps for anyone. The Local Authority had bought the building when they left, converting it into a home for disturbed children, a kind of halfway house for those bemused before they reached the age of consent. Now cutbacks had returned it to the private sector, where according to the builder’s signboard it would become a small exclusive “estate” of five or six houses round a courtyard. Lucas looked in through one of the windows and tried to imagine this. All he saw was an empty room, flowered wallpaper, dusty air across which slanted a bar of light. He mooched round for a bit among the demolished outbuildings, picking up pieces of broken lath, stooping over a pile of brand new yellow drainage pipes, then made his way back to the front garden, where he had left Pam. He found her trying to smile and cry at the same time. To cheer her up he said:
“I loved this view.”
“You didn’t like the house much.”
“It was never very lucky for us,” he admitted. She touched his hand.
“I’m glad they’re doing something with it at last,” she said. “Aren’t you?”
He began to push the wheelchair back to the car.
“Do you know what I miss most, Lucas?”
“What?”
“A cigarette.”
“Wipe your nose now.”
* * *
All along they had known that the one word neither of them must ever pronounce was “metastasis”. But in September, cancer was diagnosed in the remaining breast. From there it seemed to rage across her like a fire. As he said bitterly, there wasn’t much left of her to burn. In case anything could be done, the consultant had her admitted to Christie’s, the Manchester cancer-hospital, where she underwent state-of-the-art scanning, exploratory operations and then a second amputation; radiation treatment followed. It was too late. By November she was very ill indeed, and in December we knew she would die.
Lucas telephoned me a few days before Christmas. “You’d better come up here,” he said.
He sobbed suddenly and put the phone down.
TWELVE
Trasfigurante
My train rolled slowly into Manchester Piccadilly the next morning just before twelve. I had an overnight bag with me, and a copy of Roman Tales. While I was waiting for the train to stop, I pushed the window down and had a look along the platform: there was Lucas, reading the travel posters outside the buffet while he warmed his hands round a styrofoam cup. His gray cashmere jacket hung open over a thin gray cotton T-shirt with the word “Technique” printed on it in fluent red script like lipstick on a mirror. He had wrapped a long black scarf twice round his neck. The way he hunched his shoulders made him seem vulnerable as well as cold. I wondered how long he had been standing there. The train lurched twice and drew to a halt at last. I opened the door and got down, wincing in the raw air. Sleet had begun to fall as we crossed the south Staffordshire plain, only to turn to wet snow at Stockport. Piccadilly smelled of gas turbines, acetylene, diesel.
“Lucas!”
We shook hands. “How are you?” I asked.
“I can’t seem to get warm nowadays,” he said. “Especially in the mornings.” He offered me the cup. “Want some? It’s hot chocolate. No? The cold seems brutal to me. I’m getting old, I suppose.” We were forty that year, I reminded him: if he was old, so was I. He had the grace to laugh. It wasn’t far to the Christie Hospital, he told me: though at this time of day traffic would be heavy. “Let’s go straight there,” he said. “I’ve got the car out the kick.” He touched my upper arm shyly.
“Pam will be so glad to see you!”
“You don’t wear enough,” I said. “That’s why you’re always cold.” As we trudged across the car park through the snow I warned him, “Lucas, I haven’t got long.” It was important he didn’t expect too much. “A week at most. Kit and Katherine want me home at Christmas.”
For a moment I wondered if he understood.
Then he said: “Oh, I see. You mean she’d better get it over with in the next couple of days.”
“It wouldn’t be fair to them, Lucas.”
His face white and miserable, he unlocked the front passenger door of the Renault for me, then went round the other side to get in. “I’m sorry,” he said, as soon as he had the bulk of the car between us. “I shouldn’t have said that. Of course you must go back.” He started the engine, put the heater on. The windscreen misted up. The windscreen wipers batted back and forth, making a soft thudding noise as they piled the melting snow against the glass. “What’s the weather like in London?”
“Bad,” I said. “It’s bad all over the country.” I felt emptied out by his distress. “Lucas, why don’t you come down to us, just for Christmas Day?”
He put the car into gear. “Because she’d be alone,” he said.
* * *
Ward Three was long and narrow, with tall sash windows, a dozen beds along either side and a red sign at one end which said ZONE 3 WASHROOM. Later I would remember it as having a ghoulish air of fancy dress, like a concentration camp Christmas. Radiation and chemotherapy implants had slowed the women down. Their hair had fallen out. Despite this, morale was high, and morphine often left them as cheerful and vague as toddlers. White plastic strips fastened to each emaciated wrist—as a precaution against the wrong medication-reduced their responsibilities. Haggard yet childlike, they had a name, an age, an admission number. They needed no more unless it was to vomit: for that they were given a thing that looked like a papier-mâché bowler hat.
Pam’s face was all bones, yellowy-white skin, eyes in deep black hollows not much larger than the eyeballs themselves. She hardly seemed to recognize us. Perhaps as a way of protecting herself from her memories, she had begun to keep the outside world at a distance. If she had to live, she would live inside her condition. Consequently, most of her talk was about the ward or the other patients. “Mrs. Eddy goes home tomorrow,” she told us. We had no idea which one Mrs. Eddy was. “We call her ‘Mary Baker’. Everyone gets a name. That’s her husband just come in.” She added, with a certain professional scorn: “How they expect him to manage her on his own—!” Then something else caught her attention.
“See the old dear over there? No, there. Just going off to Radiology.
“We used to call her ‘Steve Overt’.”
To all intents and purposes cured, but needing exercise to build her up before they could discharge her, this old woman had dutifully pushed a walking frame round the ward for fifteen minutes twice a day, scraping it along the worn polished floor in front of her and telling everyone:
“I’m joining a marathon when I get out.”
“You’ll win!”
Without warning, circulatory complications had made it necessary to amputate her left leg just beneath the knee, and after that, as Pam said, “Steve Ovett” seemed a bit close to the bone. The old people were typically cheerful, “But a thing like that would give anyone a shock.”
“So what do they call her now?”
“‘Long John Silver.’”
We watched as, with some care, two nurses knotted the old woman’s stocking below the stump; helped her put on a dressing gown decorated like a running strip in different shades of blue; and finally maneuvered her into a wheelchair. “I must have a fag before I go!” she shouted. “I must have a smoke.” The nurses tutted her. Amused by the baldness of the irony, the rest of the patients were prompted to call out “Tarra, duck!” as she was wheeled away.
“Tarra!”
Suddenly Pam said:
“There are only two paces in this place, slow and dead stop.” After that she seemed to go to sleep; but then as we were leaving she touched my arm and smiled. “I’m glad you came,” she said—
“Look after Lucas.”
* * *
Stuck in traffic on Oxford Road, Lucas stared out of
the Renault at slushy pavements, hurrying shoppers, the remains of a late December afternoon.
“This will be gone tomorrow,” he said. “It’s not the kind of snow that lasts.”
He lived in a large flat at the top of a Victorian house.
“An entire generation disappeared into places like this,” he had written to me just after the divorce, as if it was inevitable he would finish up in some bedsitter with a shared bath and lino on the stairs. “What have they got now? A bookcase full of outdated sociology texts and some old records. They always wanted to go to Budapest, but somehow it couldn’t be done.” As usual he had seen only what he wanted to see.
It was nearly dark as we made our way up the stairs. A curious thing happened at the top. While Lucas stood on the little landing outside his front door, fumbling with the keys in the cobwebby gray light, I heard a quiet, indistinct noise from inside the flat. “Lucas! There’s someone in there!”
Lucas seemed unnerved for a moment, then he laughed and explained, “You get that every time they run the water next door. These walls might as well be made of plasterboard.” He opened the door. “Let me go first. The light switches are difficult to find.”
The flat was two-bedroomed, with high molded ceilings and central heating. He had furnished its massive living room—which doubled as a study—with a kind of absent-minded energy, buying from junk shops one day and Habitat the next. As a result some gold brocade cushions hobnobbed with a black-and-chrome chair, while the tiny bulb of a very modern angle-poise lamp cast its light on a sofa covered with chintz. The fitted carpets were pale and neutral, the rugs old-fashioned and figured. The shelves bore a characteristic mix of books—Bruno Schultz next to Henry Miller; Cawte’s Ritual Animal Masks; works of European history and modern literary criticism. The front windows had once looked out over gardens reminiscent of a London square, of which a few trees and some of the original railings remained. Lucas closed the curtains, switched on the gas fire, rubbed his hands.
“I’m sorry about the mess,” he apologized. “I never get time to tidy up.”
Dark, peaty earth, studded with the remains of an earthenware plant pot, was scattered all over the floor. The plant itself, quite a large streptocarpus, lay in a corner where it had shed its thick white petals like a bag of prawn crackers. “I knocked it off the mantelpiece last night,” Lucas said off-handedly. But I suspected that rage or misery had made him throw it across the room. Either way, the carpet was ruined. “He was always so untidy!” I remembered Pam saying. This pretence—that Lucas was a child—had never entirely relieved her fear that he had some core of anger she could neither understand nor assuage. “So untidy and so easily hurt.”
Lucas had been her life. Now she often forgot him altogether. Freed by her condition to be the center of attention, she would talk for hours then fall asleep in the middle of a sentence; or refuse to talk at all, withholding herself almost as if she were blaming us for the illness. Riding an hourly see-saw of pain and morphine, she revised her memories, acted out her childhood in Cheshire and Silverdale, spoke in tongues: the coy whisper of the little girl, the boom of the father’s laughter, the cooing of the mother. This eerie archaeological theatre was never fully per-formed. She needed help we couldn’t give; asked questions we couldn’t answer; wept distraughtly when we couldn’t supply details she had forgotten.
She was three years old, escaping towards the sea with some other child’s toy. It was an inflatable horse. It was blue. But what color of blue was it? Lucas didn’t remember. How could he?
“Go away then!” she told him. “Go away.”
Her other relationships were equally confused.
“They’ve been so wonderful, whatever happens,” she would say suddenly of the doctors or nurses; only to beg a few minutes later, “You’ve got to get me out of here! They won’t tell me anything!”
We shared the visits. Since Lucas could rarely get away until four, I went to see her in the afternoons. Lucas took over when he had finished work. In the evenings I left them together as often as I could. I would go to the cinema, eat at McDonald’s, call Katherine from a vandalized box on Oxford Road—“Hello. I love you.” “Hello?”—then go home and try to tidy up Lucas’s flat. Afternoons were Pam’s best time. On the cusp between one dose and the next, she sometimes salvaged half an hour of the Pam Stuyvesant I remembered. “Aren’t these gladioli beautiful?” she would insist: or, “Have you seen the view from my window? I never get tired of it!” Looking out through the wavy Victorian glass you found the snow had melted to reveal a few trees and tilting board fences touched at that time of year with deep green lichen. Some sunlight, bright but dilute, slanted across the street, making you wish for frost, holly berries, one vigorous figure, one event which might give it the effect of a Christmas card. This didn’t matter to Pam. “It cheers me up, it really does.”
But the recapture of lucidity had dangers of its own. Two or three nights before Christmas Lucas came home early and complained: “The whole time I was there, she just stared at the TV. Celebrity Squares. The whole fucking time! Can you understand that?”
Later, when he had calmed down, he added:
“She looked horrified. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know what she was actually seeing.”
I knew.
* * *
“How are you?”
Three thirty: Christie’s. Two beds along from Pam on the other side of the ward, a fat woman stood up, retrieved her handbag, sat down again abruptly. She wore an angora wool skirt with a matching scarf; pinned to her head was a kind of trilby hat apparently made out of carpet material. She had been trying to leave for half an hour. “Well, goodbye dear,” she said cheerfully each time she got up. “I expect I’ll see you this time tomorrow.” The air in Ward Three was brown and gloomy. Every so often, colored light from the television flickered through it like sunshine through moving branches; discovered Pam’s white face; and pulled the cheekbones this way and that in shifting relief. Her eyes were wide yet uninterested, her voice filled with a faint disgust.
“About the same.”
She seemed to be about to add something, but in the end only gestured tiredly at the screen. “That about sums it up today.”
“What’s the program?”
“What do you think?” she said.
It was hard to say. Faces and limbs in some sort of crisis, filmed at odd angles by hand-held camera and lost in interference, had been intercut with pictures of sheep and goats running to and fro in an empty stone building. Gradually these images were allowed to leak into one another until there emerged something like a damp watercolor landscape—mud and rocks in umber colors: indistinct animals: another face staring anxiously out. This in its turn flared and darkened into soft ungeometric shapes which pulsed gently like the organs of the body. After a moment or two the color faded entirely, as though the set had gone out of adjustment. Patches of whiteness began to merge and separate rhythmically against a uniform gray background. “There!” said Pam. The picture had resolved again. I caught a single glimpse of white limbs intertwined, and looked away as quickly as I could. At the same time the soundtrack came up. “In the afternoons.” I heard a faint dull voice say, “it was too hot to sit still. She lay on her back on the sofa with her skirt pulled up and her hand between her legs. Her knickers were always damp. At night she would crouch down over him, push his cock into her, and move strongly up and down on it grunting and panting until she came.”
“Christ!”
“Ask everyone else what they’re watching,” said Pam. “It won’t be this.”
“…this,” echoed the sound-track: “His cock detumesced and fell out. Mixed sperm and juices ran out to cool and dry between his pubic hair and hers.”
Poor Pam! She was shaking. When I tried to put my arm round her shoulders, she moved away.
“No. No.”
* * *
“It’s the morphine, Lucas.”
“I suppose so,” he conceded, “I s
uppose it is.”
Morphine, heart’s ease, hinge of truth. He had hauntings of his own, for which he had hardly begun to find comfort. It would only have distressed him further to know that she could see right through Celebrity Squares or Take the High Road to where the white couple hung just inside every TV set, smiling out at her while they clasped and pushed and panted and turned to and fro like a chrysalis in a hedge. To divert him I asked:
“What shall I do with this?”
We had decided we would clean the kitchen. A baking tray, earthenware casseroles of different sizes, the scorched oven glove shaped like a fish: Lucas had a way of handling each object as if he hoped to recognize something he had mislaid when he moved house years before. He took hours to cook anything and longer to wash up.
“I don’t know.”
That evening it started snowing again. Wintery weather was moving across the north-west on a broad front. Falls would be quite heavy, the television predicted; winds light. I went to bed early, and woke surprised not long after. Midnight. Laughter amplified by the cold air. Couples were still floundering past outside with linked arms, feet turned out, heads wrapped up dark and globular against the cold. People love snow. I lay there listening to them for a moment or two, wondering what had woken me. Then I heard a thud and a low cry from Lucas’s room, followed immediately by an extraordinary outbreak of banging and crashing, as if someone was breaking up the front-room chairs and then throwing pieces of them about. “Lucas!” I called. “Are you all right?” Never a good sleeper, he was up and down all night, disturbed by his nightmares or making his way to the lavatory to pee noisily into the silence. Despite this, he would never switch on the lights. I assumed he had fallen over something at last. “Lucas?” He said something indistinct but reassuring, then cried out suddenly in such an appalled voice I got straight out of bed and went to the door. Nothing sounds worse than a raised voice in someone else’s house at night. Bad dreams, illness, self-pity in the small hours: you have no idea how to respond. Both bedrooms opened on to a short narrow passage painted white, an uncurtained window at one end of which admitted snow-light reflected up from the street. In this cold but buoyant illumination I could easily make out the pictures on the walls either side of Lucas’s door, clip-framed photographs of a visit to some exotic country, Turkey perhaps, or Afghanistan, where very bright sunshine flooded through a deeply recessed window on to broad-striped orange and ochre rugs. I stood there in my underpants, shivering, and knocked. The noise redoubled. Something was flung heavily against the door itself, which flexed under the impact. I pushed. It resisted. Everything went quiet again.
The Course of the Heart Page 16
