The Course of the Heart (8 page)

* * *

They were married for a year, then five. During that time Lucas was promoted, but grew no tidier. Pam continued to rise late, take her medication carefully, and stare out of the kitchen window at the trees on the other side of the valley. Lucas replaced his Renault with a more expensive one. The old cat died, and Pam, who had begun to call it “Michael”, buried it quietly in the garden before Lucas came home. Like any childless couple, they seemed a bit aimless, a bit clinging. Neither of them wanted to risk children. “I wouldn’t visit this on anyone,” Pam repeated often, meaning epilepsy. But their real fear was the entrance of some new and uncontrollable factor into a stabilized situation. While the fiction of the Coeur was central to their lives, it wasn’t, to begin with at least, their only relief: Pam kept trying to make something of the house, though its size was always to defeat her; and during Lucas’s school holidays, they often went to see her parents in Silverdale.

There the tide crept in and out unnoticeably behind “Castle Rock”. While Pam’s father stood on his lawn in the moist afternoons, looking out as thoughtfully towards the bay as he had done the morning after her wedding; and her mother sat patiently behind the till of the souvenir shop like a life-size novelty made of leather, fake fur and red paint. They always seemed glad to see Lucas, and were industrious in making him welcome.

Privately, he thought they drank too much in the evenings. Lucas rarely drank anything. When he did, he became a clinical parody of himself, swinging helplessly between elation and depression.

For Pam, this was a warm coast, full of geological faults which cut down obliquely through her life, where the blackthorn flowered early above the little limestone coves. Winter felt like spring. After her first fits she had stayed for a few weeks at a convalescent home above the thick mixed woods that come down to the sea at Arnside. She still loved to walk the coastal path there. “It was so different then,” she promised Lucas repeatedly, as they slithered along tracks of blackish earth trodden aimlessly between caravan parks.

“It all seemed more private: the woods were more mysterious, more like woods.”

Lucas had his doubts. The caravans were old, often without wheels. Towed long ago into stamped-down clearings in the woods and painted green, they had quickly surrounded themselves with plastic gnomes which stared implacably out into the undergrowth from railed-off gardens; while inside at night retired couples from Salford wished, “If only we could have TV.” There were more modern sites at Far Arnside and Gibraltar Farm—great bare strips of dirty grass in the twilight, dogs nosing about the rubbish bins as it got dark. Lucas bought a map—the current OS 1:25000 sheet—only to find parts of the woods marked an empty white. He studied the legend: “‘Information not available in uncolored areas.’ You don’t often see that.”

Pam found him an old snapshot of herself, in the grounds of the home.

“Who took it?”

“One of the other patients I suppose.”

There she sat, squinting into the sun: thin, eyes blackened with convalescence, one leg crossed over the other, smiling out at someone she had never seen since.

“Didn’t I look awful?”

* * *

One summer weekend she arrived alone, by train. Two o’clock in the afternoon: Silverdale was deserted, awash with sunlight so brilliant it made her hood her eyes and look down, as if modestly, at her own arms. Outside the station, birch trees moved uneasily in a baking wind. That morning Lucas had driven her to Manchester Victoria in the Renault, settled her with a styrofoam cup of coffee in the buffet with its luxurious old tiled walls, and then gone back to Dunford to mark third-year essays, promising, “I’ll come up tomorrow if I get finished.” From Preston onwards, she had entertained herself with the fantasy that he would change his mind, race the train north, and be waiting for her when she arrived. When he wasn’t, she began to feel as if she was between lives for a moment—naked to whatever might happen, yet able to have some peace. She shivered with the danger of this, stared out over Leighton Moss, then picked up her suitcase. A crumpled white serviette blew along the up-platform.

Eventually she left the station and walked slowly down the road through the woods towards Jenny Brown Point, where she sat on some rocks in a stupor of delight in the sunshine, looking out over the sea-hardened grass at the distant water of the Kent Channel. Holiday-makers came and went along the shore, laughing and shouting. The tide rose, rearranged the sand and glazed it carefully, and then receded again. All afternoon Pam tried to remember her first fit, the hallucination which had accompanied it, her subsequent appalled dreams of that other seashore, with its rocky platforms shaken by the waves.

The evening was warm, night came: before she knew it the lights of Morecambe hung in the air to the south. She fell asleep, to be woken freezing at 5 a.m. by the astonishing racket of the seabirds on the sand. By then Lucas had arrived and was combing the shore for her; the police were out. “I didn’t remember anything after all,” she told Lucas. “I only got a very strong sense that I might.” She touched his arm and smiled tiredly up at him. “I’m sorry.” She seemed happy but dazed for the rest of that day, and kept asking her mother, “Do you remember someone taking a picture of me, at the convalescent home? What was he like?”, to which the old woman could only reply:

“He was a black man. Very interesting to talk to, very educated. You didn’t get that much in those days.”

“I knew everyone would be worried about me,” Pam admitted. “But I felt so lazy.” She laughed. “Fancy falling asleep on the beach!” Then, in a panic: “My suitcase! Did anyone get my suitcase?”

* * *

Pam was certain the woods and sands were benign. But the very nebulosity of the incident had frightened Lucas. Thereafter, he always tried to be at “Castle Rock” with her.

“Better the devil you know,” he wrote to me: meaning perhaps epilepsy.

Remembering Yaxley’s demented face thrust under the edge of the wedding marquee in the mud, I had my own doubts. But as far as Pam and Lucas were concerned, Yaxley had vanished. They seemed to have healed the old wound, and I wasn’t anxious to reopen it. Besides, by then I had a life of my own. So I said nothing and, motives aside, this turned out to be a good decision.

As a way of diverting her attention from Park Point and Jack Scout Cove, Lucas organized trips to local towns. There, inevitably, Pam became bad-tempered. Morecambe had good fish and chips, but it was too crowded; Carnforth (though for obvious reasons they were drawn repeatedly to its vast secondhand bookshop) bored her; she was driven to distraction, she complained, by Lancaster’s university-town smugness. All of them were needlessly expensive. Oddly enough she liked Grange-over-Sands: she had been there often as a child. It was middle-class, but it seemed to be in the grip of an endless bank holiday, which a real seaside town should be. She was quite happy to sit in the sunshine at the foot of the sea wall with her sandals off, eat ginger biscuits, drink 7-Up and gaze dreamily across the Kent Channel. Lucas was relieved until in September that year he realized she had been staring all summer at the hill above Arnside, where the convalescent home was situated. He shaded his eyes, consulted the now dog-eared OS map. Arnside Knott, 159m. From this distance the woods, wrapped in dusty gold afternoon light and showing no signs of habitation, seemed even more threatening and enigmatic. If he closed his eyes, black, aimless, muddy paths ran back into his memory. (All he could see were plastic gnomes, and then he was finding Pam again, newly awake and shivering on the shore at Jenny Brown Point, her mouth shocked and her soul as visible as a bruise.) When he opened them again and looked sidelong at her, her head was tilted back and she was laughing. Dazzled by her white cotton dress, which he had glimpsed suddenly from the water’s edge, a little boy perhaps two years old had screwed up his eyes against the glare, abandoned his parents to the water, and trudged all the way up through the soft dry sand to stand wonderingly in front of her for some moments before he said in a loud voice:

“Shoes.”

Across his bare skin fell sunshine such a thick, sleepy yellow it was almost ochre. Pam opened her arms wide, as if to embrace him, then wider to take in the whole scene behind him: the clear air rippling with heat; the tide, slack and warm; the red setter running in delighted circles over the beach, snapping up at the gulls twenty feet above its head as if they were butterflies.

“Isn’t it lovely?” she said. She smiled.

“Why don’t we walk back through the woods?”

Years of hiding had made them adept at manipulating each other’s silences. Lucas was unable to refuse so direct a request. Too much else would have to be confronted.

Whatever he expected, the woods turned out to be cool, speckled with sun, smelling of wild garlic. Even the caravan parks seemed transfigured. But when they got home they found that Pam’s mother had choked to death on half a Mars bar, thrashing about like a poisoned chicken behind the counter of the souvenir shop while retired couples from Burnley walked slowly past outside, intent on finding somewhere nice to have lunch, too stupefied by the sunshine to notice anything going on behind the festoons of silk scarves, printed tea towels and decorated leather handbags which cluttered the display window. Lucas Medlar was less appalled by the death than by its circumstances.

“I can’t get that picture of her out of my mind,” he wrote to me.

How Pam felt was less clear. “She doesn’t want to talk about it, and I don’t press her. People have their own ways of dealing with things.”

Her father didn’t want to talk either. He passed his time between the bar and the big bay window at the side of the house, out of which he stared seawards. Or Lucas would find him on the lawn in the mist and rain. Every blade of grass was covered with drops of water, so that it looked as if a hard frost had clamped down in the night. He would be tilting his head as if listening for something. A few days after the funeral they left him to it. He needed help, you could see: but Lucas wouldn’t risk leaving Pam there on her own.

* * *

“When we talk about the Fall of the Heart,” Lucas was always careful to point out, “we are actually using a figure of speech. Further, this ‘fall’ has two opposing trajectories: even as we watch the City recoil from the world and back into the Pleroma—a swooning away from us ‘into the mirror to die in root and flower’—we interpret this movement as its precise opposite, as a fall into experience of the world, which we read as the loss of ontological purity, it is this aspect which must interest the historian and the genealogist.

“For the Empress there was no escape from ‘inside the meaning of things’; and by definition we can know nothing of those who survived within the Coeur as it snapped back along that first trajectory, and who were thus withdrawn from the world along with it. But if Neville escaped the revenge of the Albanians, so must others have done, and it is their subsequent history—not as a series of events so much as the clue to a direction of movement—which allows us to plot that second trajectory.

“In this sense, the pedigree of the Heirs of the Coeur is, literally, a fall from Grace.”

The Empress Gallica XII Hierodule, he claimed, had at least three children. Of a shadowy daughter whose name may have been Phoenissa, least is known. “She was beautiful. 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 older of the two sons was popularly supposed to have been the son also of Theodore Lascaris, but this seems like a late slander. His name was Alexius and he died in Ragusa in 1460, where, ironically, he had a reputation as one of the secret advisers of George Kastriotis, the national hero of Albania.

“It was his brother, John, who fled to Rome after the Fall, and took with him something described as a ‘precious relic’.”

What this might have been, Lucas was forced to confess, was a matter of speculation. It had been variously referred to as “the head of Saint Andrew”, which when stuffed with chemicals would speak; a rose, perhaps the centifolia brought back to England from the Low Countries over a century later by John Tradescant the Elder, gardener to the first Earl of Salisbury; “a magic book of which certain pages open only when a great variety of conditions are fulfilled” (this Lucas saw as a parable of over-determination); and “a mirror”.

“One description,” Lucas said, “has it all or most of these things at once. Whether it was head, mirror or cup, book or flower, it continually ‘extended its own boundaries through the medium of rays’. It was known as the Plan, and was thought also to contain within itself an explanation of the ontological relationships between the Coeur, the World and the Pleroma which continuously gives birth to them both. Whatever it was, it was enough to secure a pension from Pope Pius II; and John remained in Rome until his death, fathering three sons. Yaxley, who believes the Plan is still in the world, would dearly love to get a sight of it, but he’s barking up the wrong tree—you could learn more from a pair of little girl’s shoes left in a ditch.

“It was stolen some years after John sold it to the Church, in the reign of Clement VII; reappeared briefly in the possession of ‘an Englishman’ during the Sacco di Roma in 1527; and has not been seen since.”

By now the age of religious discord was beginning, and with it the Decline of the Heart. Of John’s three sons, two died without issue. Mathaeus married a Roman prostitute whose name he changed to the imperial Eudoxia. He made a secret journey in the late 1470s to try to sell succession rights in the Coeur to Vladimir of Bohemia. (Vladimir is said to have asked, “Where?”; but clearly he knew.) Nothing is known about Stephen except that he was a follower of Contarini, who in the teeth of the historical wind tried to reconcile the old and new faiths of Europe. Did Stephen see in this conflict of simple minds a parody of the Pleroma’s dialectic of love and order?

* * *

“We can’t know,” Lucas would admit with a smile, while Pam looked away at something in the garden, shaking her head and blowing cigarette smoke out of her mouth.