The Course of the Heart Read Free

children I couldn’t see, chanting one word over and over again. Quite suddenly, above all this, I heard the pure musical note of a thrush and stepped out into the road.
    “You’re sure no one got off the bus behind you?”
    Pam kept me on the doorstep while she looked anxiously up and down the street, but once I was inside she seemed glad to have someone to talk to.
    “You’d better take your coat off. Sit down. I’ll make you some coffee. No, here, just push the cat off the chair. He knows he’s not supposed to be there.”
    It was an old cat, black and white, with dull, dry fur, and when I picked it up it was just a lot of bones and heat that weighed nothing. I set it down carefully on the carpet, but it jumped back on to my knee again immediately and began to dribble on my pullover. Another, younger animal was crouching on the windowsill, shifting its feet uncomfortably among the little intricate baskets of paper flowers as it stared out into the falling sleet, the empty garden.
    “Get down off there!” Pam called as she hung my coat up in the tiny hall.
    Both cats ignored her. She shrugged.
    “They act as if they own the place.” It smelled as if they did. “They were strays. I don’t know why I encouraged them.” Then, as though she were still talking about the cats:
    “How’s Lucas?”
    “He’s surprisingly well,” I said. “You ought to keep in touch with him, you know.”
    “I know.”
    She smiled briefly.
    “And how are you? I never see you.”
    “Not bad. Feeling my age.”
    “You don’t know the half of it yet,” she said. She stood in the kitchen doorway holding a tea towel in one hand and a cup in the other. “None of us do.” It was a familiar complaint. When she saw I was too preoccupied to listen, she went and banged things about in the sink. I heard water rushing into the kettle. While it filled up, she said something she knew I wouldn’t catch: then, turning off the tap:
    “Something’s going on in the Pleroma. Something new. I can feel it.”
    “Pam,” I said, “all that was over and done with twenty years ago.”
    * * *
    The fact is that even at the time I wasn’t at all sure what we had done. This will seem odd to you, I suppose, but all I remember now is a June evening drenched with the half-confectionery, half-corrupt smell of hawthorn blossoms. It was so thick we seemed to swim through it, through that and the hot evening light that poured between the hedgerows like transparent gold. I remember Yaxley because you don’t forget him easily. But what the three of us did under his guidance escapes me, as does its significance. There was, undoubtedly, some sort of loss: whether you described what was lost as “innocence” was very much up to you. Anyway, that was how it appeared to me: to call it “innocence” would be to beg too many questions.
    Lucas and Pam made a lot more of it from the very start. They took it to heart.
    And afterwards—perhaps two or three months afterwards, when it was plain that something had gone wrong, when things first started to pull out of shape—it was Pam and Lucas who convinced me to go and talk to Yaxley, whom we had promised never to contact again. They wanted to see if what we had done might somehow be reversed or annulled, what we’d lost bought back again.
    “I don’t think it works that way,” I warned them, but I could see they weren’t listening.
    “He’ll have to help us,” Lucas said.
    “Why did we ever do it?” Pam asked me.
    * * *
    I went down the next day. The train was crowded. Across the table from me in the other window seat, a tall black man looked round smilingly and cracked his knuckles. He had on an expensive brown silk suit. The seats outside us were occupied by two middle-aged women who were going to London for a week’s holiday. They chattered constantly about a previous visit: they had walked across Tower Bridge in the teeth of a gale, and afterwards eaten baked potatoes on the north bank, admiring