The Course of the Heart

by M. John Harrison

  On balance, Pam had found her liveliness contagious. “I think in the end the women did too, although they never joined in.”

  I thought this might cheer Lucas up, but all he said was:

  “Jesus Christ”

  He finished his tea and walked out. I wanted to stay, but in the end followed him wearily.

  * * *

  Outside it was heavy snow. The air was flurried with it, and there was a thin, milky skim upon the setts. Whenever the wind catches falling snow, you seem for a moment to be rushing forward, as if your life has accelerated. Snow has been magical to me since as a child I stayed up late to gaze out of a downstairs back window and watch it fall through the night on to the dark lawn—soft, silent, huge as pennies. (It’s easy to tell yourself: “Memory is the great mythologizer. You were small. It was the first snow you had ever seen. Images like that become magnified out of proportion.” Now I wonder.) Pam Stuyvesant loved snow too. “Yet if it falls for any length of time,” she used to say, “I get the sense I’m watching something in slow motion which shouldn’t be. It’s very unnatural.”

  Trying to find the bus stop, Lucas had become disoriented and was walking across the old Settle square—now a car park—towards some narrow lanes on the north side, where Castlebergh rises steeply, wooded like a Chinese rock, above the town. He seemed intent on something: NGR 842642 perhaps, and the image of Pam drawing him back. Halfway across the square, though, he stopped as if puzzled, a gloomy, stooped figure in the poor light. I could see him moving his head from side to side. He gazed up into the whirling snow. He put his hand out to gather some of it, suddenly dropped what he had caught as if it had scorched him. I stood in the shelter of the café doorway and called—

  “Lucas!”

  He didn’t seem to hear me.

  “Lucas!”

  When I stepped out into the square, I found that it wasn’t snowing at all. White rose petals were falling out of the sky. Their thick, Byzantine perfume filled the air.

  We were folded into the heart of a rose. The heart of a rose! The whole square beat with it. Lucas Medlar stood distraught and lonely, lapped in attar. He shouted my name: and then, “Someone’s here!” Attar! We were in the heart of the rose, and it was already occupied. People say of someone, “She filled the place with her personality,” without a clue of what they might mean. Perfume was like a sea around us. If we could not learn to swim in it we would drown. I was gripped by the panic of irreversible events. “Hello?” I whispered. No one answered, but Lucas called again, more urgently, “Someone’s here! Someone’s here!” Now she walked out of the great soft storm of rose petals, the goddess herself, the green—the grown—woman, the woman made of flowers. Her outline was perfectly sharp, it seemed to have no surfaces, and flowers came and went within it as she turned her head deliberately this way and that. She was like a window opened on to a mass of leafage after rain, branches of blackthorn, aglet and elder interwoven, plaits of grass and fern, all held together with rose briars, over and between which went a constant trickle of water. Her eyes were a pitiless chalky blue, without white or pupil. They were flowers, too. She knew we were there. She stretched her arms, standing with one leg bent and the other stiffened to take her weight.

  “You are never simply yourselves,” she whispered.

  This time she had brought for us a glimpse of her own place, the envelope of her eternal fall, which is perhaps of the Pleroma but not yet the Pleroma itself (thirtieth Aeon beloved of God, she cast herself out and fell into mirrors in Alexandria, Rome, Manchester, Birkenau): roses blooming in a garden. Between the lawns were broad formal beds of Old China Blush—“China’s in the heart, Jack. China’s in the heart!”—with lilies planted between them. Burnet and guelder spilled faint pink and thick cream over old brick walls and paths velvety with bright green moss. White climbing centifolias weighed down the apple trees. Two or three willows streamed, like yellow hair in strong winter sunshine. Beyond this garden spread an intimately folded arrangement of orchards and lanes, of sandy eminences and broad heathland stretching off to hills. There, late afternoon light enameled the leaves of the ilex, briars hung over the grassy banks, clematis put forth great suffocating masses of flowers. Everything was possible in that country beyond. A white leopard couched among the hawthorn; other animals paced cagily along its lanes—baboons, huge birds, a snake turning slowly on itself. I heard a voice not mine or Lucas’s say: “The Rose of Earth is the Lily of Heaven.” The scent of attar was as heavy as a velvet curtain: but through it, from the café behind me like flashes of light through a veil, came piercing human smells—hot fat, brandy sauce, perspiration, beer. I could feel the heat, see the yellow lights. For a moment it might have been possible to go back inside—

  But the green woman!

  She stared down at Lucas Medlar in his loneliness and offered him the whole garden.

  To have it he must first accept her attendants. These creatures, denizens perhaps of the Fullness itself, have power over all transitional states, all redrawing of borders, all human change. They are always with her:

  Around her feet runs the dwarf which haunted Lucas for so long, poisoning the central experience of his life. In the air beside her, naked and joined, hover the white couple. I saw now that under the Manchester street lights I had been mistaken. The dwarf was only a child, a toddler full of delight and charm one moment, full of rage and frustration the next, trying to eat up the world but hampered by some old coat of Lucas Medlar’s he forced it to wear. It was only Lucas’s own unruly future, made futile by too much longing. As for the white couple: they are five million years old. Sustained by their Tao on the perpetual edge between desire and release, they never sleep. Their faces are transitory, yet do not change. They are Harry’s stump and the waitress’s Monsoon frock; the unfastened buttons of the blind woman in the quarry, the sudden sweet smile on the face of her crippled boy. For a brief moment as I watched, they were Katherine and myself: “Touch me here, then.” For an even briefer one, like a promise of some admission not yet ready to be made, they presented themselves as Lucas Medlar and Pam Stuyvesant. In such moments, perhaps, out of delight and disorder, the Coeur—if there was ever any such place—is finally brought forth.

  As if in earnest of this, the green woman seemed to melt and shift and grow huge, until she towered above the town and Lucas Medlar found himself hardly a speck beneath her. Slowly, and with vast grace, she knelt before him and sat back upon her heels, the palms of her hands flat on her vast open thighs. Lucas fell down before the rosy door, then recovered, pulling himself slowly to his feet again. In response, wavering above him like water, the green woman became his Empress, Gallica XII Hierodule, her plate armor shining through the smoke at the gates of the Coeur: “When the smoke cleared you could not bear to look directly at her. There is no escape from inside the meaning of things.” Immediately, she became the Empress’s daughter Phoenissa, running through the cool rooms of morning to meet Theodore Lascaris by a fountain. “Fuck me Theo oh fuck me now.” Now that the goddess is in the World, she is searching too. She sways on her heels above Lucas Medlar’s silent figure. Is it here? No. Panicked, she becomes the Roman prostitute Eudoxia, wife of Mathaeus; then Godscall St. Ives, then Godscall’s sickly daughter Liselotte, then Alice Sturtevant, caught in a moment of yearning she can never express. “Something burns within me,” Alice once imagined shouting as she stood looking in at her father who lay ill, “but I am never consumed!” She felt a terrible emptiness, and ran to John Duck. Now the goddess has fallen into the world, where is it? Michael Ashman’s gypsy prostitute offers Lucas the cards, brings herself off in the air above him with a quick limping flick of the pelvis. Is it here? (Floodwater was frozen in lakes, forty miles up and down the river.) For a terrified moment, the goddess finds herself as Lawson’s twelve-year-old daughter, lying across Yaxley’s table beneath Yaxley’s pictures and her father’s eyes. Then, with bewildering suddenness, she was Katherine; and Kit; and at last, leaping into stabil
ity and focus, Pam Stuyvesant as I had seen her that summer afternoon in her rooms at Cambridge, twenty years before, laughing up at me from the floor and whispering, “This room reeks of sex.” Is it here? “Don’t let him in!” It is never anywhere. It is everywhere at once. The goddess is all those women and none of them, we seek her, she seeks us, less mater than matrix—the bitter world we know, the Pleroma we desire, the Coeur which intercedes. We are wrapped in the heart of the rose. Pam’s face, now clear and specific, ages before us in the sky, after the divorce she is dyeing her hair, smoking fifty cigarettes a day, staring out into her garden. She has forgiven the world for not being ideal, and now bequeaths it to Lucas. The grown woman throws back her head in joy. A great open pink blossom fades like fireworks in the night.

  I waited for a long time, just outside the café door. The winter air was dark. After a while the falling roses turned to snow again, the scent of attar faded, and Lucas Medlar was left standing in the middle of the car park with his head bowed.

  “Lucas?”

  “Someone was here.”

  “Lucas?”

  “I’ll come back in.”

  * * *

  Pam’s funeral took place a week later.

  “A scent of roses,” I remember her saying once. “How lucky you were!”

  “It was a wonderful summer for roses anyway,” I answered. “I never knew a year like it. All June the hedgerows were full of dog-roses, with that fragile elusive scent they have; I hadn’t seen them since I was a boy. As for the gardens, they were bursting with Hybrid Teas and variegated Gallicas, great powerful blowsy things which gave off a drugged smell into the evening air. It was like a tart’s boudoir. How can we ever say that Yaxley had anything to do with that, Pam? It would have been a good year for roses without his interference!”

  But I sent some to her funeral anyway, though I didn’t go myself.

  EPILOGUE

  Kenoma

  What did we do, Pam, Lucas and I, in the fields of June, such a long time ago? I wish I could remember.

  I don’t think it was “wrong” or “evil”. Why should it have been? I think now it was one of those things that life offers you, from which you take the value you expect, or have been encouraged to expect, rather than some intrinsic goodness or badness. This is what Yaxley, in his corrupt way, might have been trying to tell us. If so, he forgot, and, though he sneered at Pam and Lucas for their lack of self-confidence, came away in the end with less than either of them.

  “It is easy to misinterpret the Great Goddess,” writes de Vries in his Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery:

  “If She represents the long slow panic in us which never quite surfaces, if She signifies our perception of the animal, the uncontrollable, She must also stand for that direct sensual perception of the world we have lost by ageing—perhaps even by becoming human in the first place.”

  Lucas and I continued to correspond, although we never met each other again.

  Shortly after Pam’s death, he claimed he had remembered what it was we did to bring all this on ourselves. Indeed, it was Pam’s death, he thought, which had somehow freed him to remember. He thought that in this sense her death was a redemption. The dwarf no longer haunted him. He had begun to write a book. He would not talk about what had happened to him in the snowy square in Settle. He did not remember a green woman, or a scent of roses. What he did remember, he believed, was his own affair. I agreed, although—from the hints he dropped, the obsessions he still had—I thought I could guess what it was. The search for the heart occupied him until his disappearance a year or two later. His letters are full of it. They glow like stained glass.

  “The Coeur negotiates between the World and the Pleroma. It controls the dialectic between them. When it is in the Pleroma it cannot be in the World. When it is in the World it cannot be in the Pleroma. But it is never for long in one at the expense of the other. The fact that it has withdrawn from the World is the surest indication that it will return. Its presence in the World is the clear sign that it must Fall. It is less a country, or even a state of mind, than a counter which the World and the Pleroma must constantly exchange between them to maintain some balance we cannot understand.”

  After he gave up teaching and went to Europe, I heard from him less regularly. He would spend a couple of weeks here, a couple of weeks there, moving erratically from Spain to Norway, then back down to the Adriatic. He stopped off at Aries to see the Romanesque cathedral there, perhaps because he remembered what Van Gogh had written. “We must not judge God by this world. It’s just a study that didn’t come off.” Or perhaps simply because its cloister reminded him of the one at Cuxa, and the postcard which had begun it all. He wrote twice in a week from Amsterdam; after that not for a year. In the east, governments were going over like tired middleweights—saggy, puzzled, almost apologetic. At first he was unimpressed. Watching TV pictures of East Berliners pouring into West Berlin, he had the sudden impression—from their cheap, dated clothes, their pinched rather unhealthy faces, the way they tilted a bottle of wine greedily to their mouths—that it was in fact people from the back streets of Bolton or Tyne and Wear who were being given their liberty.

  Then came the fireworks at the Brandenburg Gate. The fall of Ceausescu brought lyrical footage of Moldavia: “Ox-carts, bright peasant clothes and broken shoes, a near medieval society coming out from under the snow!” All this was accompanied by a terrible sense of risk, perhaps of guilt: “At any moment it might go down like a card-house and take us all with it.” Aided more than hampered by a growing sense of his own inadequacy, he determined to re-enact the pre-war journey of his own invention, the travel writer “Michael Ashman”; and after six months more in Western Europe crossed the border into Czechoslovakia, then Hungary. “Things are quite different here now,” he wrote to me from a room overlooking Wenceslas Square. “You can feel a real excitement, an extraordinary sense of something to be rediscovered.”

  Budapest was less impressive. He had always wanted to see the tomb of Gul Baba, a Turk who was supposed to have introduced roses to Central Europe some time in the sixteenth century—

  “I wandered about in the old Turkish Quarter. On Frankel Leo all that remained was a ruined mosque with a rusty dome, and, almost opposite, a flower shop. Eventually I found him, quite low down on the Hill of Roses, on a bleak hummock of earth and railed concrete. A few children were playing football on the worn-down grass round the shrine itself, which is a neat sunken garden laid out in squares, with a path of stones leading to the little domed turbe. The roses were tall and sad, covered in huge pale hips. The garden looked as if it would never flower again. But suddenly a thrush sang, the declining sun shed a gold light across the litter and broken-down houses on the hill above, and you could see how it might look in summer, if summer came again. Two or three other Western tourists were grouped about the railings. I heard one woman say clearly:

  “‘They don’t seem to be any better at growing things than they were at socialism.’

  “It was an unfair comparison to make in February in Budapest. Nevertheless the only flowers I have seen are in the windows of shops, where they look as if they have been injected with wax.

  “‘Who would want to be Father of this?’

  “At the Palace hotel the night before, a flautist had been practicing in the room next door to mine, repeating each phrase of a quite complex piece slowly three or four times, then running them all together in an amazing fluid gesture, as if his failures and infelicities had never happened. You would never get that in a British hotel. Somehow I had expected to hear the same music on the Hill itself.”

  A few days later he wrote, “I’m having difficulty with the frontiers.” But he was determinedly pushing on down the Danube into East Croatia. Things were difficult there, he said. The West was still trying to broker a truce between factions. He would be in touch again as soon as things stabilized. I should take care of myself.

  And then:

  “Sometimes I t
hink I understand it all so clearly!”

  I never heard from him again.

  * * *

  As to my own search:

  Shortly after Pam’s funeral, I experienced a sudden, inexplicable resurgence of my sense of smell. Common smells became so distinct and detailed I felt like a child again, every new impression astonishing and clear, my conscious self not yet the sore lump encysted in my own skull—as clenched and useless as a fist, impossible to modify or evict—as it was later to become. This was not quite what you could call memory. All I recollected in the smell of orange peel or ground coffee or rowan blossom was that I had once been able to experience things so profoundly. It was as if, before I could recover one particular impression, I had to rediscover the language of all impressions.

  But nothing further happened. I was left with an embarrassment, a ghost, a hyperesthesia of middle age. It was cruel and undependable; it made me feel like a fool.

  Katherine had learned to drive quite late in life, and like most people who discover a new skill in their forties, took to it with enthusiasm. Her first car was a little black Peugeot 205 GTi, with engaging plastic “sports” trim and wheels so wide it looked exactly like a roller skate. By then we had moved out of London proper, and were living in Coulsdon, in a pleasant detached house on the northern edge of Sussex. She was soon whipping along the narrow Wealden lanes like a racing driver, redlining the rev-counter and tapping the clutch at just the right moment to slip from third to fourth gear without any loss of power. “I love it!” she would say, laughing at herself. “I love it!” Kit and I were less certain. Kit liked to sit in the back of my Volvo and look graciously out at the woods and flint-faced garden walls; she liked me to slow down for horses.