The Course of the Heart Read Free Page B

and, like most espresso, too hot to taste of anything. Yaxley and I sat on stools by the window, resting our elbows on a counter littered with dirty cups and half-eaten sandwiches, and watched the pedestrians in Museum Street. After ten minutes a woman’s voice said clearly from behind us: “The fact is that the children just won’t try.”
    Yaxley jumped and looked round haggardly, as if he expected to have to answer this.
    “It’s the radio,” I reassured him.
    He stared at me the way you would stare at someone who was mad, and it was some time before he went on with what he had been saying:
    “You knew what you were doing. You got what you wanted, and you weren’t tricked in any way.”
    “No,” I admitted.
    My eyes had begun to ache: Yaxley soon tired you out.
    “I can understand that,” I said. “That isn’t at issue. But I’d like to be able to reassure them somehow—”
    Yaxley wasn’t listening.
    It had come on to rain quite hard, driving the tourists—mainly Germans and Americans in Bloomsbury for the Museum—off the street. They all seemed to be wearing brand-new clothes. The Tivoli filled up quickly, and the air was soon heavy with the smell of wet coats. People trying to find seats constantly brushed our backs.
    “Excuse me, please,” they murmured. “Excuse me.” Yaxley became irritated almost immediately.
    “Dog muck,” he said loudly in a matter-of-fact voice. I think their politeness affected him much more than the disturbance itself. “Three generations of rabbits,” he jeered, as a whole family were forced to push past him one by one to get the table in the corner. None of them seemed to take offence, though they must have heard him. A drenched-looking woman in a purple coat came in, looked anxiously for an empty seat, and, when she couldn’t see one, hurried out again.
    “Mad bitch!” Yaxley called after her. “Get yourself reamed out.” He stared challengingly at the other customers.
    “I think it would be better if we talked in private,” I said. “What about your flat?”
    For twenty years he had lived in the same single room above the Atlantis Bookshop. He was reluctant to take me there, I could see, though it was only next door and I had been there before. At first he tried to pretend it would be difficult to get in.
    “The shop’s closed,” he said. “We’d have to use the other door.” Then he admitted:
    “I can’t go back there for an hour or two. I did something last night that means it may not be safe.”
    He grinned.
    “You know the sort of thing I mean,” he said.
    I couldn’t get him to explain further. The cuts on his wrists made me remember how panicky Pam and Lucas had been when I last spoke to them. All at once I was determined to see inside the room.
    “We could always talk in the Museum,” I suggested. Researching in the manuscript collection one afternoon a year before, he had turned a page of Jean de Wavrin’s Chroniques d’Angleterre —that oblique history no complete version of which is known—and come upon a miniature depicting in strange, unreal greens and blues the coronation procession of Richard Coeur de Lion.
    Part of it had moved; which part, he would never say.
    “Why, if it’s a coronation,” he had written almost plaintively to me at the time, “are these four men carrying a coffin? And who is walking there under the awning—with the bishops yet not a bishop?”
    After that he had avoided the building as much as possible, though he could always see its tall iron railings at the end of the street. He had begun, he told me, to doubt the authenticity of some of the items in the medieval collection. In fact he was frightened of them.
    “It would be quieter there,” I insisted.
    He sat hunched over the Church Times , staring into the street with his hands clamped violently together in front of him. I could see him thinking.
    “That fucking pile of shit!” he said eventually. He got to his feet.
    “Come on then. It’s