The Course of the Heart

by M. John Harrison

  As I let myself back in the smell of the blackcurrant grew acrid and overpowering, and the sense I had of understanding something faded. I knew that if I looked back there would no longer be any blossom on the bush, only drops of water like tears on every stem.

  By then, the conversation on the doorstep seemed distant and confused. At one point, I believed, I had heard her say, “I wanted to die.” (Her eyes had closed, as if she were testing the idea briefly, then opened again.) I thought about this in Pam’s front room while Pam’s cats sat licking themselves companionably on the carpet. Rain blew against the window behind me; I turned up the gas fire and drank my tea. If she had been collecting for charity why had she talked of dying, and let so many silences fall between us?

  I fell asleep in the chair and dreamed about her:

  * * *

  In the dream she came to me as Phoenissa, the muse who has “whored with many”. This enabled me to understand clearly, though it would become meaningless to me once I woke up again, the paradox of the mouth that warmed, the eyes which knew. What I failed to understand then, though it would become plain within weeks and has stayed plainly with me ever since, was the origin—or simplicity—of the message she had brought when she asked me to fetch her some roses.

  “Like those on the graves over there.”

  I looked in the direction indicated and saw instead of graves, as if through the wrong end of a telescope, groups of sad, exhausted boys in a wood, digging wide pits amid the fallen trees and uprooted secondary growth. It was spring. The woodland rides were muddy and poached, filled with lines of emaciated women dragging the dead up from the burned and fallen City by the cartload, and the cold air smelled of rain, raw timber, excrement.

  Phoenissa giggled and whispered:

  “Did you see the way that boy smiled when he saw me? The one with the mark like a rust stain down his cheek? Another girl said to me, ‘He was brave in the fighting around the Basilica, but he has such a disfigurement, running down from the corner of one eye, exactly like the stain on the side of a building under a rusty bolt. As if he had been crying rust!’ But did you see how he smiled at me?”

  She touched my hand affectionately and then pushed me away with a laugh.

  She drew me back. She said: “Later he wrote me a note. Look!”

  * * *

  I woke up confused but still able to remember some of what the boy had written. “Attar, the secret heart of the rose: one ounce of this colorless fluid may be extracted from the petals of two hundred and fifty pounds of Gallica roses by means of a suitable solvent.” It didn’t occur to me to think of this as nonsense—dreams often speak, Yaxley had once been careful to teach me, in the very inappropriateness of their elements. It was two o’clock in the morning and so quiet I could hear a car change gear off towards Huddersfield. I yawned, stretched, switched off the fire and then the kitchen light. Pam Stuyvesant’s cats purred; rain pattered in the garden outside the lavatory window. I went upstairs and opened the door of the bedroom and found Phoenissa waiting for me there.

  She was sitting in the dark on the very edge of the bed, gazing fixedly into the reflector of a cheap electric fire, her hands clasped on her knees and her body curled forward over them. A deep orange light lay across her face, which was turned very slightly away from me, elucidating the line of the jaw, the long tendons of the neck but leaving her eyes in shadow. How long she had been there I couldn’t guess. She hadn’t taken her coat off, and while the air in the room was warm it smelled strongly of scorched dust, as if the single bar of the fire had only recently heated up. She had made some attempt to dry her hair on a towel which now lay like a small animal on the carpet near her feet. It seemed to take her a long time to see me. Eventually she murmured, almost to herself. “Sometimes I think I’ll never get warm again!”

  I stood in the doorway, filled with an extraordinary excitement and tension. I could feel myself rocking a little with every heartbeat, as though I were being tapped politely but repeatedly between the shoulder-blades. The muscles of my arms and upper back were rigid. Phoenissa looked up from the fire, at the same time unclasping her hands so she could draw my attention to it.

  “Isn’t this lovely?” she said, like someone who had never seen one before.

  “Pam and Lucas used to have dozens of them,” I heard myself answer. “They could never get warm, either. Look,” I went on quickly, so as not to give myself time to think, “I don’t understand how you got in here.”

  I switched the light on. She jumped to her feet.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You were fast asleep. I just came up here, I suppose.”

  “Did you have a key, then?”

  “It was so wet. I had waited for a long time.”

  “I thought you were collecting for charity,” I explained. I laughed. “You should have said you knew Pam.”

  At Pam’s name a further wave of immobility—this is the only way I can describe an emptiness the warmth of her mouth simply could not redeem—crossed her face. She stared at me. The unkind wash of electric light revealed her large eyes surrounded by smudges of make-up like bruises. She looked as awkward and impermanent as she had done when I first saw her, on the doorstep, in the rain. It was the raincoat, a brisk tailored design meant for a much older woman, which had made me think of Christian Aid. By now it had lost much of its crispness. Her hair hung damp and tangled over its sodden collar. Nevertheless in Pam Stuyvesant’s bedroom under the unforgiving light it only increased her sexual attraction.

  Quite suddenly I imagined her turning away from me, pulling it up over her behind to show underwear made of oyster satin, white skin a little reddened in the creases below the buttocks so that she seemed at once inviting and ordinary (or perhaps I mean real), and made vulnerable as some women are by their own sensuality. I entered her at once and with miraculous ease. She groaned, and I heard myself whisper, “Christ, Christ.” The rain spattered against the window. “I died in Birkenau,” she said. She did not know how she came to be here with me, even in a dream. The electric fire was burning my bare calf—I paid no attention.

  To visualize this took only a moment. I had no control over it. At the same time I was asking her:

  “Would you like another towel? For your hair?” and she was blinking as if a sheet of glass separated us and then saying with a quick smile like someone waking up:

  “Yes.”

  Outside on the landing I shivered convulsively.

  By the time I came back from the bathroom carrying the towel across my arm, she had switched off the ceiling light and arranged the bedside lamp to face the wall. It was hardly brighter than the firelight. She had taken off the raincoat and hung it up. Under it she had been wearing only a shiny gray slip which bared her thin shoulders and clung to the sides of her body, accentuating every rib.

  From the doorway I had a clear view of her.

  She was kneeling over me where I lay naked on Pam Stuyvesant’s bed, talking in a low, persuasive voice while she fanned out in front of my drawn, surprised face a handful of dusty picture postcards she had taken off a shelf at the head of the bed.

  I didn’t see how I could be in the open door with a towel in my hand, and at the same time on the bed, breathing heavily with my clenched fists at my sides and the blood pumping and aching in my sex: but there she was, astride me. The slip had ridden up round her waist. I could see the soles of my own feet, yellow like the soles of the feet in some painting by Munch or Schiele. An instant later I was inside myself there, looking only at her, past the offered cards, seeing only her mouth and eyes while I struggled to drag the satin slip up further, perhaps pull it over her head altogether, and she laughed and urged:

  ‘Pick a card. First pick a card,’ so that in the end I had no option but to take one. While I was looking helplessly at it she reached down between her legs, adjusted herself slightly, then lowered herself deftly on to me. “Oh!” I cried: and came, immediately and despairingly, as you often do in dreams. The res
t of the cards showered down, spilled in an alluvial fan across the black and red motifs of Pam Stuyvesant’s continental quilt and pattered on to the bare lino. Phoenissa’s eyes were open but she could not see me; her lips were parted but she did not speak. I remember her smiling, moving on me for a few minutes in a slow, self-hypnotized parabola, raising herself in a long-drawn-out motion then sliding down with a quick limping flick, a rhythm with a strange lacuna at its heart, like a comet passing close to the sun. Then in complete silence her head seemed to transform itself into the head of a huge red rose, blind and perfect, and I shouted “Phoenissa!” and fainted from pleasure or fear, to wake in the dawn with the bedroom empty and the fire unplugged, my semen drying stiffly on the sheets, and still clutching in one hand the postcard she had made me choose.

  It was a color print, mystified by the faint milky light coming through the window, of a Romanesque cloister or courtyard: perhaps the exact one from which Lucas Medlar had constructed, to pacify the young Pam Stuyvesant, the first myths and anecdotes of the Coeur—though when I sent it to him later he didn’t seem to recognize it and, interested only in its curiosity value, described its architecture in a letter as “less calm than dispassionate, less tranquil than detached”.

  In the middle and foreground of the shot, neat flowerbeds, in which I could identify only the hyacinths—“Lord, the hyacinths are blooming in the Roman garden”—surrounded a font built of pale rosy marble. Behind them was the low wall of the cloister, topped with serenely curved arches of the same stone as the font. In its dim recesses you could just make out a window, though whether it was glassed and modern was difficult to see. Growing across much of this part of the view were the blossom-laden branches of an old hawthorn tree. It was that type which flowers pink. You could imagine its heavy equivocal scent, half confection half corruption, filling the court; while a tiny jet of water sprang perpetually from the font, falling whitely back on itself in perfect order, so that you saw how passion and clarity need never be divorced again as long as they became aspects of some thing which is neither.

  I got out of bed. I had a wash. I got myself something to eat. I was in love—as Lucas had often complained—with contradictions. The postcard I carried about with me from room to room the way you carry a paperback you are reading, propping it up by the soap dish, the kettle, and finally next to my plate. I stared into it, like someone staring into a shaving mirror, but found there neither myself nor the answer to the riddle which may be loosely stated:

  “The house is empty but two damp towels lie on the bedroom floor.”

  If I looked past the card and out of the window I could see the blackcurrant bush, its branches dark and wet, a few yellowed leaves still clinging to it out of terror at what their new lives might bring. In the north and the midlands, the weathermen were saying, more snow had fallen overnight. Though it was melting, the month would continue cold. Pam’s cats ran in and out making sudden little noises of encouragement to one another: fights broke out between them, raced up and down the stairs like a burning fuse, then fizzled out. I thought I would go home that afternoon. At around eleven o’clock I had a telephone call from Lucas Medlar, who told me without preamble: “Pam’s come back.”

  * * *

  “You’ve seen her?”

  Lucas said something that sounded like, “No, of course not!” (although it might equally have been, “The Course of the Heart!”), adding after a pause a sentence which made no sense whatsoever:

  “None of us ever die,” and then “Scars,” or perhaps it was “Wounds.”

  “Lucas?”

  Unintelligibility was to mark this whole exchange.

  The line was full of rushing noises which built up, saturated then discharged, in steady tidal patterns; distant voices were audible in them, like people calling to one another from boats; and sometimes voices not so distant, so that at rimes I wasn’t even sure I was talking to Lucas. When I was, he was clearly distraught, often unable to finish one sentence before starting another, so that I was never sure if he was telling me about something which had actually happened, or about a dream of his own.

  In an attempt to be sure I repeated again and again, as clearly as I could, the questions, “You’ve seen her?” and “Have you actually seen Pam Stuyvesant?”

  “I can’t hear you!”

  “Did you see her last night?”

  “Thank God for that.”

  “Lucas? I said, did you see Pam last night?”

  I tried to get him to put the phone down and try another line, but he ignored me.

  “Like a lunatic!” he went on. “Early this morning. Wandering about babbling and soaked to the skin on the moors—” I couldn’t tell whether he meant Pam or himself, or someone else altogether. “When I asked her why she said, ‘We talked about my heart.’”

  There was a silence, as if everything had flowed away out of the line, leaving it empty and transparent between us.

  Lucas had time to say:“—taken up into the Coeur.”

  Then the surf of interference rolled back in, and I had a sudden, clear, agonizing memory of Pam describing her first epileptic fit, and the vision she had had along with it—

  “It was very clear. A seashore, steep and with no sand. Men and women lying on the rocks in the sunshine like lizards, smiling at the surf as it exploded up in front of them—huge waves, that might have been on a cinema screen for all the notice anyone took of them! At the same time I could see tiny spiders making webs between the rocks, just a foot or two above the tideline. Though it trembled, and was sometimes filled with spray like dewdrops so that it glittered in the sun, every web remained unbroken. So close to all that violence! I can’t describe the sense of anxiety with which this filled me. You wondered why they had so little common sense.”

  “I saw her in a dream,” Lucas said reasonably. “Taken up into the Coeur. We’re to meet her tomorrow, perhaps for the last time.” A sound like frying drowned everything but the words “clear instructions”. Then I heard the rhythmic clicking that signals a crossed line, and a woman’s voice said:

  “Is that you, Alex?”

  “Can you hear me?” Lucas shouted suddenly. “You must be mad if you think I’m saying any more on the phone!”

  “Lucas?”

  “Alex?”

  The other voices on the line went on calling to one another, remote as voices at the small end of a telescope; but Lucas said nothing more, so I rang off, picked up the postcard again and turned it over in my hands.

  FIFTEEN

  Every Web Remained Unbroken

  Carnforth is less a town than a kind of late efflorescence of the old A6 as it hinges away from Morecambe Bay, where you can sometimes hear the seabirds calling sadly in the morning. We met in a bookshop which claimed to have on its shelves a hundred thousand secondhand volumes. Lucas and Pam had visited it regularly over the years in search of texts which would enable them to develop their myth of the Coeur. By the time I got there, it was late on a raw morning, and Lucas—looking along row after row of books with his head on one side like someone who has noticed something missing, though he can’t say what—was already puzzled and disappointed.

  “Why did we come here?” he asked himself. “We might as well have met at the railway station.”

  “Because you’re a romantic, Lucas.” He shrugged.

  “You’d know,” he said. I laughed.

  Lucas looked around him with a kind of amused helplessness. “This isn’t going to be one of my better days.” He offered me a copy of Bruno Bettelheim’s The Informed Heart. “Look at that,” he said in disgust. “He’s a saint.”

  “Lucas?”

  “He’s a saint,” Lucas explained impatiently, “and they want two pounds fifty for him, second hand.” He looked at his watch. “We’ve got hours before the train,” he complained.

  Over the years the bookshop had been knocked haphazardly into dozens of finicky little rooms: section connected to section—however contiguous—by annex,
passageway, steps up and down, often with bewildering changes of direction as each new builder strove to avoid knocking out structural members, so that you always seemed to end up back where you started. “Two pounds fifty for that?” Lucas would say in a high pitying voice every time he saw the Bettelheim, and glance back over his shoulder, trying to decide what other turning we should have taken. “It’s absurd.”

  Two women stood irresolutely on a top-floor landing.

  “Oh Christine!” one of them was saying as we passed. “And it was one of Daddy’s favorite plays!”

  “Don’t touch my arm.”

  Lucas glared at them. From somewhere below came a noise like a damp cardboard box full of books bursting as it fell down the stairs.

  “Let’s get out of here!” he said suddenly. He looked savage and ill. “This old junk. I—Well, it isn’t funny any more.” He wrinkled his nose. He could smell the stifled front rooms, vicarage studies, failed private schools all over the north-west, which had given up all these cramped, affectless, unread collections of Men and Books, Books and Characters, Adjectives and Other Words. Eventually we found the main door of the shop and were able to leave.

  “If you spent too long in there your spirit would heave itself inside out!”

  Lucas stood looking up and down the pavement.

  “Let’s meet Pam early!” he suggested. “If we get a bus to Lancaster and then on, we could leave here now, without waiting for the train—”

  “We were supposed to wait for this train.”

  “Does that matter to you?” he appealed.

  “You said it was part of the instructions.”

  “Let’s go now. Pam won’t know!”

  I thought about the dreams I had had the night before. I said tiredly, “Of course she won’t. Lucas, Pam’s dead. She’s dead.” But he knew I would give him anything when he was in this mood, if only to prevent him damaging himself.

  * * *

  Even so, we didn’t get away by bus. For some reason he could only explain by saying, “I don’t like to carry a lot of things around with me,” his briefcase and most of his money were locked in the left-luggage office at the railway station. When he discovered there would be no attendant to unlock it for him until the arrival of the next train down from Silverdale at two o’clock, he could only murmur softly and miserably, “Fuck it, I always wondered what it would be like to be in Carnforth for more than an hour or two.”