The Course of the Heart

by M. John Harrison

  “Lucas?”

  Nothing.

  “Lucas!”

  I was about to turn away when the door jerked open and Lucas stuck his head out so suddenly that I backed into the wall of the passage. It was hard to see what was wrong with him—the bedside lamp in the room behind him was flickering like a damaged fluorescent tube—but his face seemed both white and dirty, and there was blood running down one side of it from a cut above his eye.

  “What do you want?” he said irritably, as if it was me who had called for help in the middle of the night.

  “Lucas—”

  “There’s no need to come in,” he said. “I had a bit of an accident. Go back to sleep now.” He closed the door until all I could see was his left eye and the cut above it, swollen, blue with bruised tissue. He was trembling. “Go back to sleep,” he repeated. “It’s all right.”

  “Lucas—”

  The door closed suddenly.

  “Lucas!”

  Silence.

  I went back to the spare room and stood at the window for some time with the duvet wrapped round my shoulders, staring down into the street. The snow directly beneath each sodium lamp was orange: a little further away it became a fragile tremulous pink, a color on the edge of tenure, unassuming, shy, threatened. Though Pam was still alive, Lucas already felt bereaved. The bereft, we say, are less dismayed than in a rage; and I was afraid Lucas’s rage would damage him. How can you protect someone from a grief which causes him to throw his furniture about in the middle of the night? This may have been the wrong question to ask. By now the street was empty. Parked for the night, the cars had grown strange and shapeless. In the morning, I knew, they would look as if they had been molded from styrofoam—blind, blunt models in some early, uninteresting stage of design.

  * * *

  The next day Pam was moved into a small side-ward. Her bouts of pain and delirium had been upsetting other patients, the ward sister told us; it would be easier to manage her there.

  “Easier to manage her death,” Lucas said bitterly.

  Pam put a brave face on it. “How nice to have a room of your own.” In the end though I think she would have preferred to stay where she was. “They were real characters in Ward Three,” she said to me, as if I had been there to: “Weren’t they?”

  She laughed.

  “Oh, Lucas, aren’t people funny?”

  “I’m not Lucas,” I said.

  She took my hand.

  “I know that, really. Tell him I love him.”

  That was one of the last lucid things she said to me.

  * * *

  When I got back to Lucas’s flat late that afternoon, I found that he had been in at lunchtime and wrecked it. All the internal doors were propped open. The plates had been taken out of the kitchen and smashed in the bath; fragments of the bedside table from the spare room were scattered round the kitchen. Though he had chosen the hall outside his bedroom as the best place in which to wrench the house plants out of their pots, the earth they had been potted in now formed a thin careful layer over every carpet in the house. The bathroom wash-basin was cracked where it had been hit repeatedly with a ball-peen hammer. Some of the kitchen cupboards had been emptied and their contents thrown around under the intense bleak light of the fluorescent strip—packets of dried soup, pasta, and tortilla chips, Marks & Spencer’s coffee beans, bottles of vegetable oil and Hungarian red wine, in a congealing slick on the tiled floor. But the front room was the preferred site of destruction. The shades were off the lamps. The chairs were on their backs. Awed, I gazed round at Lucas’s pictures, broken in half as if they had been snapped across someone’s knee; the bookcases which lay on their faces in the center of the room, volumes spilling out from under them like talus; the shattered plastic molding and sheaf of colored threadlike wires which was all that remained of the telephone. Lucas’s grief had led him to tear up his own shirts. Finally, he had pulled all the papers out of the filing cabinet in his bedroom and thrown them in on top of the pile. It looked as if he had planned to make a bonfire in his lounge.

  I stood there trying to take in the scale of it. The flat was so quiet you could almost hear him dragging the bulkier items from room to room, panting with effort, sobbing perhaps, repeating over and over again, “Easier to manage her death. Easier to manage her death.”

  “Lucas, for Christ’s sake.”

  An hour later I had righted the bookcases, vacuumed the carpets and cleaned the kitchen floor, thrown the pictures in the dustbin. Most of the books were undamaged, but it took another hour to pack them back on to the shelves. By eight o’clock I had gathered all his papers into a pile, made myself a cup of coffee, and come back to start sorting them out. I was pushing crumpled sheets of A4 into an old blue concertina file, when my eye caught the first sentence of the following paragraph:

  “For two nights and a day the harbor had been in flames. In any case, there is no escape from inside the meaning of things. The Empress Gallica XII Hierodule, mounted and wearing polished plate armor but—in response some thought to a dream she had had as a child at the court of Charles VII of France—carrying no weapons, waited with her captains, Theodore Lascaris and the twenty-three-year-old English adventurer Michael Neville (later ‘Michael of Anjou’), for the last assault on the citadel. The outer walls were already weakened by three weeks of bombardment from landward. The labyrinthine powder magazines were exhausted. Smoke from the besieging cannon drifted here and there in the sunlight, sometimes like strips of rag, sometimes like a thick black fog.”

  I looked for the title at the top of the page. Beautiful Swimmers.

  “What are you up to Lucas?”

  I was fascinated. I put the sheets in order, made another cup of coffee, and began at the beginning—

  “Concrete only yields more concrete. Since the war the cities of the Danube all look like Birmingham. When I was a boy you could still see how they had once been the dark core of Europe. If you travelled south and east, the new Austria went behind you—like a Secession cakestand full of the same old Austro-Hungarian cakes—and you were lost in the steep cobbled streets which smelt of charcoal smoke and paprika, fresh leather from the saddler’s.”

  The manuscript, though it amounted to sixty or seventy thousand words, was incomplete: the life of “Michael Ashman” between 1947 and 1968 being sketched in with annotated cuttings from the News Chronicle and other newspapers of the time, a faded snapshot or two labeled “Ashman in the Garden at Catesby” or “Ashman’s aunt”, and a few thousand words of notes. Ashman’s creative revision of history was documented at length, along with the conclusions he had drawn from it, in footnotes which referred to writers as far apart as Gilbert Murray (Five Stages of Greek Religion, 1933) and Norman Cohn (The Pursuit of the Millennium, 1957). One or two elements were preserved on the original postcards Lucas had sent to Pam in the early years of their marriage. Most of the text was typed, single-spaced and with very small margins, on the old Olivetti; much, though, had been handwritten at high speed in ball-point pen on the kind of ruled, punched paper students use. After the events at Burrington Combe, all pretence of an autobiography or memoir was abandoned. Instead, Ashman embarked on a dense, disconnected meditation around the theme of self-sacrifice (which he had originally described as “the narcissism at the center of Christianity”). He was trying to convince himself of something, though it was difficult to see what. “Every sacrifice is a ‘sending on before’, an attempt to prophesy or bring about the conditions of prophecy. All art, all religion, all ‘history’, is only this pained clue dispatched to the future.”

  Beautiful Swimmers took two hours to read, perhaps a little more. The final chapter began with such a barely coherent out-pouring of delight I could hardly tell whether Ashman was describing “the Coeur”, or the world we already know—

  “A rainbow like fire pouring down from heaven. Bare trees glimpsed through the violet end of the rainbow, transfigured, delicate, fragile and complex as a sea-crea
ture in a bowl of water. Gold light on everything. Every object or event in this moment has idealized itself, every hawthorn hedge or gate in the twilight, every fold of a hill, every peach and silver line of cloud above an orange sun, every conifer in a suburban garden black against the house with its strings of fairy lights round each yellow window.”

  Later, though, he passed into doubt and anger—“We were all mad people, who heard voices and misinterpreted dreams”—to end with this strange and bitter cry:

  “Willows bending over the roads, their leaves silver in the wind: comprehend the Heart, and you will never experience it.”

  * * *

  The flat was chilly, and I had eaten nothing since two o’clock that afternoon. Nevertheless, I sat for a long time with the manuscript on my knee, amused and thoughtful.

  Remember, I knew nothing about this. In all those letters, miserable or elated, written to me over the years since their marriage, Pam and Lucas had been careful never to give anything away. I had never seen the word “Coeur” written on paper, or heard it spoken down a telephone line. I was a publisher. It was easy for me to assume that Lucas—that dark horse!—had almost completed rather a clever novel. So I was quite unprepared for what happened next.

  He got back from Manchester just after midnight and parked the Renault exhaustedly, sawing it up and down for several minutes in the snow. Then he came slowly up the stairs and stood in the center of the room the way you stand in someone else’s house waiting for them to make you feel comfortable. Last night’s cut, inflamed and sore, embedded in its yellowing bruise, made his face look paler than it was. He had arrived at Christie’s just after I left, he told me. He had been there ever since. “That ward’s bloody noisy in the evenings,” he said. “You can’t hear yourself think.” Then: “She’s not good today.” To make things worse, there was fresh snow on that side of town. “I had a lousy drive back.” He blinked and rubbed the inside corners of his eyes with the tips of his fingers. I caught him staring in a vague way at the faded patches on the wall. Perhaps he was trying to remember where the pictures had gone.

  “Lousy,” he repeated.

  He took his coat off and sat down.

  “Turn the fire on if you’re cold,” I said, “and I’ll make you some coffee.”

  I held out the manuscript of Beautiful Swimmers. “What have you been hiding from me here?”

  He took it, stared down at it in a shocked way, then up at me. Tears began to run down his face.

  “Lucas! What’s wrong?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What for? Lucas, it was a joke!”

  “After Cambridge,” Lucas said, “we couldn’t believe that was the end.”

  I stood over him. I touched his shoulder.

  “Come on, Lucas. I only meant I didn’t know you’d written a book.”

  He didn’t seem to hear.

  “We’d done everything Yaxley suggested and nothing had come of it. Nothing could come of it. Pam was ill. Yaxley had vanished. You had lost interest in us.”

  “All that was over years ago, Lucas.”

  “Listen!” he said. He had to turn his head up at an odd angle to look at me. “Just listen, for once!—

  “The Pleroma isn’t what the Gnostics thought it was. It’s terrifying. Impossible to understand. Without something like the Coeur to buffer it, Heaven is harder to bear than—” he made a helpless gesture “—all this. The world. Do you see? We had nowhere to turn. We had to believe something.”

  I let him sob.

  “What have you promised her, Lucas?”

  “At least try to understand. It isn’t just a book. She’s the Heir. She’s the Empress.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “She is the Coeur. She won’t die. I’ve told her she won’t die.”

  THIRTEEN

  Fatalité Intérieure

  I hadn’t slept properly all week. Tomorrow I would have to get up early, catch the train home, buy Christmas presents, put an ordinary face on it for Kit and Katherine. And now this again. I went over to the window. If I looked into the street I wouldn’t have to look at Lucas. There was a clear moon through the trees. A few clouds high up redistributed its light, which had lent them the color of a fish’s skin. “Lucas…” I began, but I couldn’t think of anything I hadn’t said a hundred times before, and I got no further. Lucas wasn’t listening anyway. He had turned the gas fire up full and huddled close to it, his face lax and tear streaked.

  “You’re always waking up at the exact moment your life goes away from you,” he said.

  He added:

  “That’s what Pam thought.”

  Hot and tired and a bit nauseated, I stood as close to the window as I could and gently touched my forehead to it. My breath bloomed on the glass, but I could still see moonlight glittering in the long thin discolored icicles hanging from the sash windows on each side of the street, where condensation had run down the inside of the window panes to seep out yellow with tobacco smoke and cooking fumes.

  “Life’s aware of itself,” Lucas proceeded, “even as you piss it down the drain. You’re forever catching its last signal: the urge to laugh or fuck or give your money away which you’ve just ignored.”

  “Lucas, we’re free to change our minds.”

  “Too late. As soon as you stop acting spontaneously, your life becomes a fiction.”

  I could only laugh.

  “That’s a simple philosophy,” I pointed out, “for a couple who invented their own Middle Europe.”

  But he was already too confused to notice this. “I won’t live a lie—” he said.

  An old Bengali woman came out of the house across the road and stood looking up and down the street. In the lighted passage behind her I could see a child’s bicycle, a pair of stepladders. She wore cheap Wellington boots, and over her traditional dress a council worker’s coat. To her, snow was an alien, Sisyphean substance. Every day since the first fall she had been busy trying to clear her front steps, using a small red plastic dustpan. Morning, afternoon, quite late at night, you could see her shuffling to and fro across the pavement, the dustpan held stiffly out in front of her. It was too small for the job. Much of its contents remained compacted inside each time she emptied it. She had an air of inexpendable patience. As I watched, the wind got up and blew a cloud of spindrift round her. She bent down. I heard the distinct scrape of the dustpan.

  Live a lie: it was one of Pam’s phrases. You’re living a lie. They’re living a lie. I won’t live a lie. Like all the others, it had signaled only a need for medication.

  “—and Pam never would, either.”

  “That was her trouble, Lucas,” I said bitterly.

  The Bengali woman stopped work for a moment and went inside. When she reappeared, she had wound a colored woolen scarf round her slack brown neck. Her breath puffed out white in the freezing air.

  “Look, Lucas: the world’s ours. We make it, minute to minute. Pam would never admit that. It frightened her to have responsibility for her own needs. She wanted the universe personalized. A father who would look out for her. Happy accidents. Gifts. Things that came demonstrably from outside, so she felt special. That’s the biggest lie of all.”

  “Why are you talking as if she’s already dead?” he shouted.

  “Grow up, Lucas.”

  I waited for a moment then added deliberately:

  “Kicking this place apart every day isn’t going to help you, either.”

  There was a brief awful silence.

  “You don’t know anything!” he said. “What do you fucking know?”

  “Lucas. Don’t. I’m sorry. I—”

  He got up with such violence his chair fell over, and ran out of the room. “Lucas!” I heard his footsteps all the way down the stairs and into the hall. The front door slammed. From the window I could see him floundering across the square, trying to run against the resistance offered by the snow. The Bengali woman watched him too. She remained there for a moment, her b
reath visible in the sharp air, then emptied her dustpan for the last time, drew her clothes tightly round her and went up the steps into her house.

  “Lucas,” I said. My head felt like an empty cinema.

  * * *

  He was back some time in the small hours. He had forgotten his keys. He stood there on the doorstep, frail, tense, resigned, incapable of organizing his own resources. It was his favorite act, and just for once I wanted to tell him so: all that came out was, “You look utterly buggered.” Inside, he crouched down over the gas fire, coughing and rubbing his hands together.

  “Look,” he said. “You should go home tomorrow. Come back when you can. I really don’t mind.”

  He did: but he was losing ground against himself.

  “You do mind, Lucas.”

  He nodded. He narrowed his eyes. I could feel him measuring something. It turned out to be me. “I do,” he admitted. “And so do you. You know you do.”

  “You’re a bastard, Lucas.”

  “You love her as much as I do.”

  I made him have a bath while I got him something to eat. Then I went to bed and left him to it, and in the morning caught an InterCity 125 to Euston so I could spend Christmas at home with my family. If they found me miserable and withdrawn they didn’t say so, for which I was grateful. “How are things up there?” Katherine asked me on Boxing Day. “Not good,” I answered. She put her arms round me. “It will soon be over.” Kit had given me some marker pens and a new shirt. “I wrapped them myself!” After some thought she had also given me her favorite postcard, featuring a Botticelli Venus with whom at that time she strongly identified. Lucas didn’t telephone. I returned to Manchester, as I had promised, on the morning of the 27th. From the train, everything looked astonishingly beautiful: factory chimneys dissolving in a blaze of sunshine you couldn’t bear to look at, smoke wreathing in the clear blue sky. Some children were playing with a tire in a snowy field, enveloped in transparent, bitter air. The sun reflected pink and gold on the icy surface between them.