The Course of the Heart Read Free Page A

a statue of a dolphin and a girl; they had visited Greenwich. On their last day it had been the zoo in Regent’s Park where, gazing diffidently into the little heated compartments of the reptile house, they were surprised by a Thailand water lizard with a skin, one of them said, “like a canvas bag”.
    She relished this description.
    “Just like an old green canvas bag,” she repeated. “Didn’t it make you feel funny?” she insisted. But her friend seemed bored. “What?”
    “That skin!”
    At this the black man leaned forward and said, “It only makes me feel sad.”
    His voice was low and pleasant. The women ignored him, so he appealed to me, “I couldn’t say why. Except that a lizard’s skin seems so shabby and ill-fitting.”
    “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one,” I said.
    “What if evolution were ideological after all?” he asked us. “With aesthetic goals?”
    The women received this so woodenly that he was forced to look out of the window; and although he smiled at me once or twice in a preparatory way, as if he would have liked to reopen the conversation, he never did.
    Later I went down the carriage to the lavatory, and then on to the buffet. While I was there the train stopped at Stevenage; when I returned to my seat I found that the women had moved to an empty table, and the negro had been replaced by a fat, red-faced man who looked like the older H. G. Wells and who slept painedly most of the way to London with his hands clasped across his stomach. He had littered the table with sandwich wrappers, plastic cups, an empty miniature of whisky, the pages of a newspaper. Just before the train pulled in, he woke up, glared at me suspiciously at this mess, and pushed something across to me.
    “Last bloke in the seat left this for you,” he said. He had a thick northern accent.
    It was a square of folded notepaper, on which had been written in a clear, delightfully even hand, “I couldn’t help noticing how you admired the birch trees. Birchwoods more than any others are meant to be seen by autumn light! It surprises them in a dance, a celebration of something which is, in a tree, akin to the animal. They dance even on cold still days when the air leaves them motionless: limbs like illuminated bone caught moving—or just ceasing to move—in a mauve smoke of twigs.”
    This was unsigned. I turned it over but nothing more was written there.
    I laughed.
    “Was he black?” I asked.
    “Aye, kid,” said the fat man: “He were.” He hauled himself to his feet and began, panting, to wrestle his luggage off the rack. “Black as fuck.”
    As the train crawled the last mile into London, I had seen three sheets of newspaper fluttering round the upper floors of an office block like butterflies courting a flower. The Pleroma demands of us a passion for the world which, however distortedly, reflects it.
    I still remember the intelligent eagerness of the negro’s smile—how he always had to talk about the world—the way his sharp-edged elegant cheekbones seemed, like tribal scars or a silk suit, to be more designed than organic.
    * * *
    Though he hated the British Museum, Yaxley had always lived one way or another in its shadow.
    I met him at the Tivoli Espresso Bar, where I knew he would be every afternoon. The weather that day was damp. He wore a thick, old-fashioned black overcoat; but from the way his wrists stuck out of the sleeves, long and fragile-looking and dirty, covered with sore grazes as though he had been fighting with some small animal, I suspected he had no jacket or shirt on underneath it. He looked older than he was, the top half of his body stooped bronchially, his lower jaw stubbled with gray. I sometimes wonder if this was as much a pretence—although of a different order—as the Church Times he always carried, folded carefully to display part of a headline, which none of us ever saw him open.
    At the Tivoli in those days they always had the radio on. Their coffee was watery