The phone starts to ring, then stops before she can answer it. She stands indecisively in the hallway, barefoot on the cold quarry-tiled floor. The old cat runs up and rubs its smelly head on her ankles. Having seen their furniture moved in, everyone else in the village believes she and Lucas are antique dealers. A rumor is already growing up that they have another house just like this one, in Ireland, piled up with valuable sofas and Japanese fire screens. Staring first at the paper in her hand and then out of the window at the mist on the other side of the valley, Pam tells herself aloud, “I must make a start.”
* * *
Shyly at first, each of them demarcated areas of interest: established a personality. Lucas was the creative one. From the start, his intention had been magical, calming. Pam was the critic. This enabled her to pretend for a long time that her interest in the Heart was archaeological, practical, cynical; she would, had she ever spoken openly, have claimed to be testing the theories of “Michael Ashman” rather than swallowing them. But they never spoke openly, Pam Stuyvesant and Lucas Medlar. Instead, they sat in that huge front room of theirs, plaiting the quotes on one side of Lucas’s postcards into the pictures on the other, until, by degrees, over the next year, perhaps two, they had extended Ashman’s researches and woven between them, while pretending it was someone else’s, a whole world. By two o’clock each afternoon, whatever time of year, twilight was already in the massive old sideboards and bits of pseudo-medieval art. Her prints of “Ophelia” and “The Scapegoat” glowed from the wall. He often looked across at his shelves of books by Alfred Kubin, Rilke and Alain-Fournier. The old cat sat first on his lap, then, yawning and straightening its arthritic legs, stepped cautiously over to hers.
What they believed separately about the Coeur when they began—to what extent, for instance, Lucas saw it as a useful fiction—I can’t say. But what they came to agree later, by a sort of sign language, seems to have been this: that somehow, and in special circumstances, the Pleroma breaks into ordinary existence, into political, social and religious life, and becomes a country of its own, a country of the heart.
For a time it blesses us all, then fades away again, corrupted or diluted by its contact with the World. Consequently we can detect its presence as a kind of historical ghost.
The myth of the Coeur was centered on its Fall:
FOUR
Dark Rapture
“In the beginning of course,” Lucas used to say, with a smile across the room at Pam, “it must still have been perceptible as a catastrophe, the World and the Coeur a great wreck burning in the fabric of the Pleroma like two lovers in the glorious wreck of desire, a funeral done in Byzantine colors on cloth-of-gold—blazing ships, breached walls, smoke towering over everything! If only one had been close enough to hear that huge cry of love and loss, echoing and re-echoing across Europe through the remainder of the fifteenth century (so that, for instance, even the wars of York and Lancaster must be seen as a response—however characteristically cold and sluggish—an unconsciously constructed metaphor not so much of the politics of the Coeur as of its inmost griefs) and well into the sixteenth. We should know much more!”
“We know nothing,” Pam would remind him shortly, opening another packet of cigarettes.
Lucas tried to teach her to be willing to guess instead, taking the whole of the Middle Ages as his resource and ranging in his analogies from the Field of Blackbirds to Duns Scotus and the pursuit of Nominalism; from Courtly Love to the ecstasies of le roi Tafur, that shadowy European knight who relinquished armor and horse to fight on foot in sackcloth, and led the plebs pauperum to the Holy City (“What do I care if I die, since I am doing what I want to do?”). “On one hand,” he said, “We have the heresy of the Free Spirit, with its emphasis on the singularity and self-possession of the soul, on the other the beautiful staggered apses en echelon of the Romanesque cathedral. Love and order: the very polarity of these visions demands the Coeur as a higher level of appeal, which will reconcile them by containing them as elements of its own structure, just as the Pleroma reconciles the World and the Coeur.”
But this only made Pam laugh.
“What was it like to live there, Lucas? What did they eat? What sort of pottery did they piss in?”
“We don’t know.”
“No.” She smiled. “We don’t, do we?”
* * *
“For two nights and a day the harbor had been in flames. In any case, there is no escape from inside the meaning of things. The Empress Gallica XII Hierodule, mounted and wearing polished plate armor but—in response some thought to a dream she had had as a child at the court of Charles VII of France—carrying no weapons, waited with her captains, Theodore Lascaris and the twenty-three-year-old English adventurer Michael Neville (later ‘Michael of Anjou’), for the last assault on the citadel. The outer walls were already weakened by three weeks of bombardment from landward. The labyrinthine powder magazines were exhausted. Smoke from the besieging cannon drifted here and there in the sunlight, sometimes like strips of rag, sometimes like a thick black fog.
“At ten in the morning a force of Serbs and Albanians, on ladders of their own dead, breached the inner defenses; by noon they were still only halfway across the citadel, fighting grimly uphill street by street.
“Lascaris was killed there early in the afternoon. Neville, trying wildly to come to his aid with the remains of the small English contingent, seems to have been ambushed and awfully wounded, and it is possible the Empress thought both of them dead. She was last seen on foot at four o’clock, near one of the gates. By then, someone said, she was weeping openly and had picked up a sword. Her armor, though spattered with blood, remained so bright that when the smoke cleared you could not bear to look directly at her. Several people saw her fall. Not content with killing her the Serbs trampled her unrecognizable.
“The invading kings—it seems hardly worth our while at this distance to know who they were—allowed their followers three days in the sacred city before they took possession of it. When at last they rode through the great arch they received into their care a city which seemed to have been in ruins for a thousand years. They wept to see that birds were nesting in the fallen basilicas, weeds growing up between the paving stones.” Lucas told this story a number of times. At this point he would always pause and look at Pam before finishing.
“What had happened? The Coeur would no longer let itself be known, though it did not perhaps breathe its final breath in the world until they identified Gallica by her beautiful armor, and displayed the mutilated head.”
There was a silence.
Into it Pam said. “That’s all very well. We read ‘death’ where we should read ‘transformation’. But when will it allow itself to be known by us?” And she lit one Churchman’s from another, looking steadily at Lucas until he lifted his hands, palms upwards, in a gesture of puzzlement as if she had asked the wrong question.
* * *
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 anythin
g 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.
The Course of the Heart Page 6