The Course of the Heart

Other books by M. John Harrison:

Things That Never Happen
Light
Viriconium
(Omnibus Edition)
Travel Arrangements
Signs of Life
The Luck in the Head
Climbers
Viriconium Nights
he Ice Monkey & Other Stories
In Viriconium
(US Title:
The Floating Gods
)
A Storm of Wings
The Machine in Shaft Ten & Other Stories
The Centauri Device
The Pastel City
The Committed Men

The Course of the Heart
© 1992 by M. John Harrison
This edition of
The Course of the Heart
© 2004 by Night Shade Books
Cover illustration © 2004 by David Lloyd
Cover & interior layout and design by Jeremy Lassen

First Edition

ISBN
1-892389-97-5 (Trade Hardcover)
1-892389-98-3 (Limited Edition)

Night Shade Books
http://www.nightshadebooks.com

Was man nicht erfliegen kann, muss man erhinken.

—Ruckert,
Die beiden Gulden

…She hath yielded herself up to everything that
lives, and hath become a partaker in its mystery.
And because she has made herself the servant of each,
therefore she is become the mistress of all…

—Aleister Crowley

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

PART TWO

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

PART THREE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

EPILOGUE

When I was a tiny boy I often sat motionless in the garden, bathed in sunshine, hands flat on the rough brick of the garden path, waiting with a prolonged, almost painful expectation for whatever would happen, whatever event was contained by that moment, whatever revelation lay dormant in it. I was drenched in the rough, dusty, aromatic smells of dock-leaves and marigolds. In the corner of the warm wall, rhubarb blanched under an upturned zinc tub eaten away with rust. I could smell it there.

Some of the first words I heard my mother say were, “A grown woman like that! How could a grown woman act like that?” She was gossiping about someone in the family. I can’t remember who, perhaps one of her younger sisters. It was the first time I had heard the phrase. “A grown woman.” I imagined a woman cultured like a tomato or a potato, for some purpose I would never understand. Had my mother been “grown” like that? It was an image which ramified and expanded long after I had understood the proper meaning of the phrase.

* * *

My mother loved films. She loved the actresses Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson as much as the characters they played. She was a tallish, thin woman herself, but otherwise nothing like them. Against their grave and bony calm, always breaking out into rage or delight, she could set only the tense provincial prettiness shared by nurses and infant teachers. Her name was Barbara, but she had her friends call her “Bobbie”. When I was older I found the effect of this as sad as her neatly tailored trouser-suits and deep suntan. She was frightened the sun would make her haggard but she sat out in it anyway, in the garden or on the beach, turning up her face in a static flight reflex of vanity and despair.

The women she liked Redgrave and Jackson to play were queens, dancers, courtesans, romantic intellectuals determined to better themselves to death like huge rawboned moths inside the Japanese lamps of their own neuroses. Sexuality seemed to be the strongest of their qualities, until, at the crux, they diverted all the sexual momentum of the film into some metaphor of self-expression—an image of dancing or running—and gave the slip to both the filmic lover and the audience. Much more important was to remain at the focus of attention, and for this they were in competition even with themselves. Having captured the center stage they were ready to abandon it immediately, dance away, and still ravenous, demand:

“No. Not her. Me.”

* * *

The year I was twelve, my mother was thirty. I remember her walking up and down on the lawn at the front of the house shouting, “You bloody piece of paper, you bloody piece of paper,” over and over again at a letter she was holding in her right hand. It was from my father, I suppose. But clearly something else was at stake. “You
bloody
piece of paper!” Eventually she varied the emphasis on this accusation until it had illuminated briefly every word. It was as if she was trying for some final, indisputable delivery.

Her sense of drama, the transparency of her emotion, unnerved me. I ran round the garden pulling up flowers, desperate to offer her something in exchange for whatever loss she was suffering. “Have my birthday,” I remember shouting. “I don’t want it.” She looked puzzledly at the broken-stemmed handful of marguerites. “We must put them in a vase,” she said.

My role was the role of Vanessa’s male lead, Vanessa’s audience. I was to follow my mother’s retreat through the diminishing concentric shells of her self. The layers of the onion, peeled away, would reveal only more layers.

“A birthday’s the last thing I want, darling.”

The letter was left out on the lawn all afternoon, where the rain could pulp it. When my father stayed away for good, she took to saving her skin, carefully applying a layer of honey-colored make-up every morning, only to remove it even more carefully at night. Liberated perhaps too late by best-selling feminist novels, she wore wide American spectacles with tinted lenses to protect her eyes and emphasize the fine, slightly gaunt structure of jaw and cheeks.

“I am a sadder but a wiser woman,” she wrote to me from a holiday villa in Santa Ponsa, perhaps overestimating the maturity of a boy seventeen years old. “We never get to know people until it’s too late, do we?”

I was flattered by these sentiments which, unfinished and adult, implied but somehow always evaded their real subject. Long after I had given up trying to puzzle out what she meant, I was still able to feel that she had confided in me.

“But there you are, my dear. As you grow up I expect you’re finding that out.”

* * *

By then I was already playing truant two or three afternoons each week from the grammar school. I couldn’t have explained why. All I ever did was walk about; or sit hypnotized by the Avon where it ran through the local fields, watching the hot sunlight spilling and foaming off the weir until a kind of excited fatigue came over me and I could no longer separate the look of the water from its sound and weight, its strange, powerful, almost yeasty smell. This I associated somehow with the “grown woman”. She had developed with me. That yeasty smell, that mass, was hers. She didn’t so much haunt as stalk my adolescent summers, which were all rain and sunshine and every minute the most surprising changes of light.

My mother, unaware of this, told people I was young for my age; and indeed during my first term at Cambridge I spent most weekends at home, travelling by rail on Friday evening and early Monday morning. The train often stopped for a few minutes near Derby. I don’t remember the name of the station. Two old wooden platforms surrounded by larch, pine and variegated holly gave it an air at once bijou and mysterious: it was the branch-line halt of middle-class children’s fiction forty years ago. Sitting in the train, you had no idea what sort of landscape lay behind the trees. The wind rushed through them, so that you could think of yourself as being on some sandy eminence away from which spread an intimately folded arrangement of orchards and lanes, of broad heathland stretching off to other hills. Afternoon light enameled the leaves of the holly. Everything was possible in the country—or garden—beyond. Foxes and owls and stolen ponies. Gorse and gypsy caravans in a rough field. Some mystery about a pile of railway sleepers near the tracks, shiny with rain in the green light at the edge of the woods!

I wanted it desperately.

Then the light passed, the wind dropped and the train began to move again. The trees were dusty and birdlimed. All they had hidden was a housing estate, allotments, a light engineering plant. A woman with a hyperactive child came into the carriage and sat down opposite me.

“Just sit down,” she warned the child.

Instead it stared defiantly into her eyes for a moment then wandered off to make noises with the automatic door.

* * *

Early in my second term I bought a stereo. I quickly learned to put on the headset, turn up the volume and listen again and again to the same piece of music, each repetition of a significant phrase causing soft white explosions all over the inside of my skull.

Whether the music was the first movement of Bruckner’s Fifth or only the Bewlay Brothers, the result was the same. The actual cortex, the convoluted outer surface of my brain, was somehow scoured and eroded by these little painless epiphanies. I half-hoped that if I listened long enough or got the volume high enough, it would be worn as smooth as a stone by them, so that I would never be able to think again. My ideal at that time was to remain conscious—perceptive, receptive—while no longer conscious of myself. I never achieved that. The music always lost its effect. The explosions ceased to scour. My brain began to grow itself again. I woke up to myself, staring out of the window at the green light rippling through the trees.

Girls eighteen or nineteen years old swam down towards me through it, their arms and legs moving in lazy, thoughtless strokes. When I thought about them they were red-haired, smiling, sleepy-eyed as a Gustav Klimt. A year later I lay on the floor with one of them.

* * *

It was early June, bright but humid. The air had been like a hammer for days, the streets stunned and dazzled into silence. She lived with some other people, but the house was empty all through the week. Her room, which was at the front and shaded by the great canopy of a horse-chestnut tree, stayed dim and cool for much of the day. For an hour in the morning the shadow of the slatted blinds moved across the sofa with its Indian cushions, on to the fringed maroon and orange rug and then on again, to dwell over her parted legs and scattered underwear. A little after two o’clock a thin, incandescent line of sunshine sliced into the upper part of the room, caught the dusty paper birds of a cheap mobile and flared them briefly into enamel and gold. That was it.

“This room reeks of sex.”

“It reeks of us,” I said.

I had known her for a week and two days. Half awake alone in my own bed I would catch the smell of her, and in a moment of shocked delight, remember her whispering, “Fuck me! Fuck me!” in the middle of the night. Wherever I was I could close my eyes and visualize precisely the curves at the base of her spine where it seemed to hold its breath before it arched out into the smooth, heavy muscles of her behind. I loved her contact lenses. I loved the way she had to stop in the middle of the street to slip one out into the palm of her hand then lick it up into her mouth like a cat to clean it.

“Perhaps we should have a bath.”

At three o’clock, someone manhandled a bicycle up the steps outside and came into the house. We heard footsteps on the cool tiled floor of the hall. By then we were restless, a little tired, sticky to touch. Whoever had come in knocked first hesitantly then determinedly at the door of the room. A voice I knew asked for me.

“Don’t answer,” she mouthed.

“Yaxley’s ready to try,” said the voice at the door. There was a pause. “Are you there? Hello? Yaxley says he’s ready. This weekend.”

“Don’t answer!” she said, quite loudly.

I sat up and looked at her. I had known her for a week and two days, and I loved everything about her.

“Shh!” I said.

She pulled me down again. “Go away!” she shouted.

“Are you in there?” said the voice at the door. “It’s Lucas!”

“Hang on, Lucas—” I answered.

Would anything have changed if I hadn’t, if I’d stayed there quietly with my hand between her legs, trying not to laugh?