The Course of the Heart (20 page)

“The insoluble conflict between ideal and reality! Richard vanishes from his own story for a year. Where does he go while de Morville is impersonating him in Durnstein? Only the codes embedded in his name enable us to guess.

“Gallica carried the blood of the Lion.”

“Really, Lucas,” Pam interrupted suddenly, “I don’t care what fucking color she bled.”

Soon she was laughing at him again. “‘Ideal and reality’!” she said.

In this way, turn and turn about, losing their confidence one day only to regain it the next, they steered the Course of the Heart. Pam’s compass was hidden, glandular, difficult to read: less romantic than Lucas’s. But she was equally determined; and perhaps in the end she had the truer sense of direction. Her health continued to improve, while Lucas watched in awe and Huddersfield General held its breath. The disease went into remission. Within a month—though she was a little too frail to fend for herself and would still need treatment as an out-patient—they had allowed her to go home.

From then on Lucas spent his free time at the cottage, although he always drove back to Manchester at night. No cook, he bought what he called “middle-class convenience food”—filled pasta and tins of ratatouille—after school at Sainsbury’s; and in the evenings did the housework (rarely to the standard of Pam’s neighbors, who came in and did it again during the day). Pam slept a lot; Lucas sat by the bed and wrote letters to me, in red ball-point on lined paper. “We try and get as much fresh air as we can.” At weekends he carried her out to the Renault and drove to one local beauty spot or another—anywhere she could look out over a reservoir and some woods without having to leave the car—or pushed her round the Huddersfield shopping arcades in a wheelchair. When he picked her up, he told me, she was just a lot of bones and heat that weighed nothing.

One Saturday in late August they drove through Dunford Bridge, past their old house.

“Look, Lucas!”

Lucas parked the car on the grass verge, where the road dipped northward into a valley with beech and dwarf oak. The valley was full of haze, the haze full of sun. A strange bronze light fell on the tangled grass in front of the house. From behind rose a plume of smoke so thick and perfectly detailed that it looked like a solid object.

“Wind your window down,” Lucas said. He studied the house.

“Good God.”

Builders were at work on it again. They had opened one gable end, then sealed it temporarily with heavy-gauge polythene. The front windows were out, the stonework above them jacked into place until the lintels could be replaced. A yellow JCB lay hull-down among the muddy hawthorn stumps it had grubbed out of the gardens at the back, where two men were burning a dozen or so metal chairs. Only the frames remained, tangled together inextricably and outlined with fire.

Lucas wheeled Pam across the road and through the gates. “Let’s have a look round.”

“Your poor old garden!” Pam said. She studied the empty windows. “I think I’ll stay here.”

“What a warren!”

It had always been too large and complex for them; perhaps for anyone. The Local Authority had bought the building when they left, converting it into a home for disturbed children, a kind of halfway house for those bemused before they reached the age of consent. Now cutbacks had returned it to the private sector, where according to the builder’s signboard it would become a small exclusive “estate” of five or six houses round a courtyard. Lucas looked in through one of the windows and tried to imagine this. All he saw was an empty room, flowered wallpaper, dusty air across which slanted a bar of light. He mooched round for a bit among the demolished outbuildings, picking up pieces of broken lath, stooping over a pile of brand new yellow drainage pipes, then made his way back to the front garden, where he had left Pam. He found her trying to smile and cry at the same time. To cheer her up he said:

“I loved this view.”

“You didn’t like the house much.”

“It was never very lucky for us,” he admitted. She touched his hand.

“I’m glad they’re doing something with it at last,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

He began to push the wheelchair back to the car.

“Do you know what I miss most, Lucas?”

“What?”

“A cigarette.”

“Wipe your nose now.”

* * *

All along they had known that the one word neither of them must ever pronounce was “metastasis”. But in September, cancer was diagnosed in the remaining breast. From there it seemed to rage across her like a fire. As he said bitterly, there wasn’t much left of her to burn. In case anything could be done, the consultant had her admitted to Christie’s, the Manchester cancer-hospital, where she underwent state-of-the-art scanning, exploratory operations and then a second amputation; radiation treatment followed. It was too late. By November she was very ill indeed, and in December we knew she would die.

Lucas telephoned me a few days before Christmas. “You’d better come up here,” he said.

He sobbed suddenly and put the phone down.

My train rolled slowly into Manchester Piccadilly the next morning just before twelve. I had an overnight bag with me, and a copy of
Roman Tales
. While I was waiting for the train to stop, I pushed the window down and had a look along the platform: there was Lucas, reading the travel posters outside the buffet while he warmed his hands round a styrofoam cup. His gray cashmere jacket hung open over a thin gray cotton T-shirt with the word “Technique” printed on it in fluent red script like lipstick on a mirror. He had wrapped a long black scarf twice round his neck. The way he hunched his shoulders made him seem vulnerable as well as cold. I wondered how long he had been standing there. The train lurched twice and drew to a halt at last. I opened the door and got down, wincing in the raw air. Sleet had begun to fall as we crossed the south Staffordshire plain, only to turn to wet snow at Stockport. Piccadilly smelled of gas turbines, acetylene, diesel.

“Lucas!”

We shook hands. “How are you?” I asked.

“I can’t seem to get warm nowadays,” he said. “Especially in the mornings.” He offered me the cup. “Want some? It’s hot chocolate. No? The cold seems brutal to me. I’m getting old, I suppose.” We were forty that year, I reminded him: if he was old, so was I. He had the grace to laugh. It wasn’t far to the Christie Hospital, he told me: though at this time of day traffic would be heavy. “Let’s go straight there,” he said. “I’ve got the car out the kick.” He touched my upper arm shyly.

“Pam will be so glad to see you!”

“You don’t wear enough,” I said. “That’s why you’re always cold.” As we trudged across the car park through the snow I warned him, “Lucas, I haven’t got long.” It was important he didn’t expect too much. “A week at most. Kit and Katherine want me home at Christmas.”

For a moment I wondered if he understood.

Then he said: “Oh, I see. You mean she’d better get it over with in the next couple of days.”

“It wouldn’t be fair to them, Lucas.”

His face white and miserable, he unlocked the front passenger door of the Renault for me, then went round the other side to get in. “I’m sorry,” he said, as soon as he had the bulk of the car between us. “I shouldn’t have said that. Of course you must go back.” He started the engine, put the heater on. The windscreen misted up. The windscreen wipers batted back and forth, making a soft thudding noise as they piled the melting snow against the glass. “What’s the weather like in London?”

“Bad,” I said. “It’s bad all over the country.” I felt emptied out by his distress. “Lucas, why don’t you come down to us, just for Christmas Day?”

He put the car into gear. “Because she’d be alone,” he said.

* * *

Ward Three was long and narrow, with tall sash windows, a dozen beds along either side and a red sign at one end which said ZONE 3 WASHROOM. Later I would remember it as having a ghoulish air of fancy dress, like a concentration camp Christmas. Radiation and chemotherapy implants had slowed the women down. Their hair had fallen out. Despite this, morale was high, and morphine often left them as cheerful and vague as toddlers. White plastic strips fastened to each emaciated wrist—as a precaution against the wrong medication-reduced their responsibilities. Haggard yet childlike, they had a name, an age, an admission number. They needed no more unless it was to vomit: for that they were given a thing that looked like a papier-mâché bowler hat.

Pam’s face was all bones, yellowy-white skin, eyes in deep black hollows not much larger than the eyeballs themselves. She hardly seemed to recognize us. Perhaps as a way of protecting herself from her memories, she had begun to keep the outside world at a distance. If she had to live, she would live inside her condition. Consequently, most of her talk was about the ward or the other patients. “Mrs. Eddy goes home tomorrow,” she told us. We had no idea which one Mrs. Eddy was. “We call her ‘Mary Baker’. Everyone gets a name. That’s her husband just come in.” She added, with a certain professional scorn: “How they expect him to manage her on his own—!” Then something else caught her attention.

“See the old dear over there? No, there. Just going off to Radiology.

“We used to call her ‘Steve Overt’.”

To all intents and purposes cured, but needing exercise to build her up before they could discharge her, this old woman had dutifully pushed a walking frame round the ward for fifteen minutes twice a day, scraping it along the worn polished floor in front of her and telling everyone:

“I’m joining a marathon when I get out.”

“You’ll win!”

Without warning, circulatory complications had made it necessary to amputate her left leg just beneath the knee, and after that, as Pam said, “Steve Ovett” seemed a bit close to the bone. The old people were typically cheerful, “But a thing like that would give anyone a shock.”

“So what do they call her now?”

“‘Long John Silver.’”

We watched as, with some care, two nurses knotted the old woman’s stocking below the stump; helped her put on a dressing gown decorated like a running strip in different shades of blue; and finally maneuvered her into a wheelchair. “I must have a fag before I go!” she shouted. “I must have a smoke.” The nurses tutted her. Amused by the baldness of the irony, the rest of the patients were prompted to call out “Tarra, duck!” as she was wheeled away.

“Tarra!”

Suddenly Pam said:

“There are only two paces in this place, slow and dead stop.” After that she seemed to go to sleep; but then as we were leaving she touched my arm and smiled. “I’m glad you came,” she said—

“Look after Lucas.”

* * *

Stuck in traffic on Oxford Road, Lucas stared out of the Renault at slushy pavements, hurrying shoppers, the remains of a late December afternoon.

“This will be gone tomorrow,” he said. “It’s not the kind of snow that lasts.”

He lived in a large flat at the top of a Victorian house.

“An entire generation disappeared into places like this,” he had written to me just after the divorce, as if it was inevitable he would finish up in some bedsitter with a shared bath and lino on the stairs. “What have they got now? A bookcase full of outdated sociology texts and some old records. They always wanted to go to Budapest, but somehow it couldn’t be done.” As usual he had seen only what he wanted to see.

It was nearly dark as we made our way up the stairs. A curious thing happened at the top. While Lucas stood on the little landing outside his front door, fumbling with the keys in the cobwebby gray light, I heard a quiet, indistinct noise from inside the flat. “Lucas! There’s someone in there!”

Lucas seemed unnerved for a moment, then he laughed and explained, “You get that every time they run the water next door. These walls might as well be made of plasterboard.” He opened the door. “Let me go first. The light switches are difficult to find.”

The flat was two-bedroomed, with high molded ceilings and central heating. He had furnished its massive living room—which doubled as a study—with a kind of absent-minded energy, buying from junk shops one day and Habitat the next. As a result some gold brocade cushions hobnobbed with a black-and-chrome chair, while the tiny bulb of a very modern angle-poise lamp cast its light on a sofa covered with chintz. The fitted carpets were pale and neutral, the rugs old-fashioned and figured. The shelves bore a characteristic mix of books—Bruno Schultz next to Henry Miller; Cawte’s
Ritual Animal Masks;
works of European history and modern literary criticism. The front windows had once looked out over gardens reminiscent of a London square, of which a few trees and some of the original railings remained. Lucas closed the curtains, switched on the gas fire, rubbed his hands.

“I’m sorry about the mess,” he apologized. “I never get time to tidy up.”

Dark, peaty earth, studded with the remains of an earthenware plant pot, was scattered all over the floor. The plant itself, quite a large streptocarpus, lay in a corner where it had shed its thick white petals like a bag of prawn crackers. “I knocked it off the mantelpiece last night,” Lucas said off-handedly. But I suspected that rage or misery had made him throw it across the room. Either way, the carpet was ruined. “He was always so untidy!” I remembered Pam saying. This pretence—that Lucas was a child—had never entirely relieved her fear that he had some core of anger she could neither understand nor assuage. “So untidy and so easily hurt.”

Lucas had been her life. Now she often forgot him altogether. Freed by her condition to be the center of attention, she would talk for hours then fall asleep in the middle of a sentence; or refuse to talk at all, withholding herself almost as if she were blaming us for the illness. Riding an hourly see-saw of pain and morphine, she revised her memories, acted out her childhood in Cheshire and Silverdale, spoke in tongues: the coy whisper of the little girl, the boom of the father’s laughter, the cooing of the mother. This eerie archaeological theatre was never fully per-formed. She needed help we couldn’t give; asked questions we couldn’t answer; wept distraughtly when we couldn’t supply details she had forgotten.