The Course of the Heart (27 page)

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.

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 think 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.

Sometimes the three of us would go down to Tunbridge in the Volvo after Sunday lunch, to walk on the downs; increasingly, though, Katherine preferred to drive herself, and meet us later. On a sunny Sunday, Coulsdon hemorrhages its BMWs and Jaguars into the surrounding tissues of Redhill, Reigate and Dorking, which flush and bruise suddenly under the strain. She hated to be in queues. One afternoon, following her at a leisurely pace down the M23 just south of Salfords, Kit and I found lines of stationary traffic winking in the sun. All three lanes were jammed solid. A police Land Rover, a small ambulance and a rescue vehicle raced down the hard shoulder. Every so often a kind of peristalsis shuddered through the lines of cars, a ten or twenty-yard gap which opened and closed to give each driver the illusion of movement. A quarter of an hour later we were still inching our way towards the accident. Up ahead we could see a tall black plume of smoke, its base somewhere near Outwood or Wasp Green; and once or twice we got a confused glimpse of flames through a hedge.

“There’s a church near it!” cried Kit, craning her neck out of the open window. “I can’t see anything else!”

“Why would they be burning a church, Kit?”

“They’re a funny lot in Wasp Green.”

But when we finally crawled past the base of the column, we found that a small black car had left the motorway and gone through the hedge into the churchyard, where it had shed its bonnet and one door then fireballed itself among the gravestones. A disgusting smell blew in through the windows and Kit threw up suddenly across the back seat. I stopped the car and shut her in it. She had begun to scream and kick. I walked back up the hard shoulder and said to the first policeman I saw, “Does anyone know what make of car it is?” They weren’t sure, but I was. The goddess gives, the goddess takes away.

A few weeks later, clearing up Katherine’s papers, I came upon some letters, addressed to her from the Chelsea Arts Club, sympathizing with her feelings of being “stifled” by marriage and speaking of “our long sexy afternoons together”. They were about ten years old. I didn’t recognize the man’s name. Kit and I drew apart in the following years. After she left home I couldn’t seem to be bothered with the house, so I sold it. Bereavement numbed my hyperesthesia. Then a year or two ago, for a few minutes one afternoon in May, it returned:

I had been sorting books all day. I still have a lot, some of which I have owned since Cambridge. They look their age now, browned by the tobacco smoke, gas fumes and evaporated cooking oil of the places I have lived in since things fell apart. By the shelf load they have a faint smell of dust. It is a cured odor, as if my way of life had been designed to preserve them by bringing about organic and chemical changes, in one-roomed flats like a chain of smokehouses across London. I was thinking about that, and looking through an old paperback copy of
War in Heaven
, when up from it came a smell like corn flour, or even vanilla, so strong I thought a door had opened and someone I once knew had come in. It was the smell of the individual book—not dust, not decay, but corn flour and vanilla, some transformation of the glues and inks and paper: corn flour, vanilla, then hawthorn blossom like a drug!

I sat there on the floor and burst into tears:

It will soon be fifteen years since Katherine died. Kit has moved to New York, from where she sends me letters I don’t understand, about politics and AIDS. Pam and Lucas walked away from me somehow, that scented, dew-soaked morning in Cambridge. I remember them all with such happiness.