Read Online The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison - Free Book Online
Authors: M. John Harrison
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rain eased off, then sat through the next shower in the doorway of an empty church, eating cheese and watching the clouds cross Augsburg”—the next, stimulated by the miraculous westwork of Aachen chapel, “font of the German Romanesque”, he would be speculating again about the nature of the Heart:
“We must sound the historical topboard, then, like someone testing a musical instrument, if we wish to hear the fading resonances of the Coeur—its convulsion, its fall, its disappearance as a kingdom of the World. Less acute researchers allow themselves to be deafened by a catastrophe which, they reason, goes through the fabric like the explosion of a bomb: but we know that by now it is only a whisper, an event implicit in the way other events are organized; less an event, in fact, than what rhetoricians might call a ‘gap’. We can never be sure we have found the Coeur except by its absence!
“Falling into the gap we may glimpse that great light—which, though it takes a million years to fade, would otherwise remain invisible to us even if we knew where to look—in the shape of a ripple in the sand, the position of an empty cardboard box on a building site, the angle of a woman’s head as she turns joyfully to listen to three notes of music, a playing-card King seen in a sidelong light.”
“How beautiful,” Pam said. She blinked hard; buried her face in the old cat’s fur. “Do you think it could ever really be like that?”
* * *
The point of everything they did was to hide.
Every morning, Lucas drove off into Longdendale. Unnerved by the tight bends and fast local traffic, he would peer anxiously into the sunshine or rain for the spire of Mottram church (known since the fifteenth century as “the Cathedral of East Cheshire”), which signaled that his journey was almost over. At night the moon’s reflection raced him home under the rusty pylons, across the chains of reservoirs. Meanwhile—even if the plans of previous owners had left its walls a confusing patchwork of filled-in doorways, bare stone alcoves, and sections of stripped-pine paneling which didn’t quite come down to the floor; even if the connecting doors almost always opened into some odd corner of a room, behind the oak sideboard—Pam waited for him as if theirs was the only house in the world. She would have her own modifications in hand as soon as the builders could be bothered to arrive.
When did it become clear to her that “Michael Ashman”, as Lucas presented him, did not exist?
We can imagine her coming down one morning late. She stares helplessly at the reference books and concertina-files spilled across the living-room carpet, a standard lamp tipped over with its pink silk shade crushed out of shape, the pictures awry on the walls. Before leaving for work, Lucas—who often types on the Lettera portable they keep in a bulky old roll-top desk opposite the French windows—has crumpled up a lot of typing paper and thrown that around too. She smoothes out a sheet of it and finds the draft version of a paragraph from Beautiful Swimmers , a version without Michael Ashman’s deftness:
“The Expressionists chained to their mirrors—Rilke and Munch, Schiele and Kafka—never able to turn away or look anywhere else. A column of doomed and disintegrating soldiers in the long war against the father and the society he has created. Like the assault rifle or the rocket launcher, the mirror is not a simple burden. It is their only method of defense. It is their only means of attack. In it they are able to reassure themselves of their own continuing existence; their fear is of an identity fragmenting, dissolving, fading to a wisp. The mirror assures them—or seems to—that they are still more than a twist of light at its heart. Those faces ravaged by egotism and insecurity still exist, modified by what is expected of them but not yet quite absorbed or transformed. Rilke and Schiele, glue on to what you can prove!—the bent light,
“We must sound the historical topboard, then, like someone testing a musical instrument, if we wish to hear the fading resonances of the Coeur—its convulsion, its fall, its disappearance as a kingdom of the World. Less acute researchers allow themselves to be deafened by a catastrophe which, they reason, goes through the fabric like the explosion of a bomb: but we know that by now it is only a whisper, an event implicit in the way other events are organized; less an event, in fact, than what rhetoricians might call a ‘gap’. We can never be sure we have found the Coeur except by its absence!
“Falling into the gap we may glimpse that great light—which, though it takes a million years to fade, would otherwise remain invisible to us even if we knew where to look—in the shape of a ripple in the sand, the position of an empty cardboard box on a building site, the angle of a woman’s head as she turns joyfully to listen to three notes of music, a playing-card King seen in a sidelong light.”
“How beautiful,” Pam said. She blinked hard; buried her face in the old cat’s fur. “Do you think it could ever really be like that?”
* * *
The point of everything they did was to hide.
Every morning, Lucas drove off into Longdendale. Unnerved by the tight bends and fast local traffic, he would peer anxiously into the sunshine or rain for the spire of Mottram church (known since the fifteenth century as “the Cathedral of East Cheshire”), which signaled that his journey was almost over. At night the moon’s reflection raced him home under the rusty pylons, across the chains of reservoirs. Meanwhile—even if the plans of previous owners had left its walls a confusing patchwork of filled-in doorways, bare stone alcoves, and sections of stripped-pine paneling which didn’t quite come down to the floor; even if the connecting doors almost always opened into some odd corner of a room, behind the oak sideboard—Pam waited for him as if theirs was the only house in the world. She would have her own modifications in hand as soon as the builders could be bothered to arrive.
When did it become clear to her that “Michael Ashman”, as Lucas presented him, did not exist?
We can imagine her coming down one morning late. She stares helplessly at the reference books and concertina-files spilled across the living-room carpet, a standard lamp tipped over with its pink silk shade crushed out of shape, the pictures awry on the walls. Before leaving for work, Lucas—who often types on the Lettera portable they keep in a bulky old roll-top desk opposite the French windows—has crumpled up a lot of typing paper and thrown that around too. She smoothes out a sheet of it and finds the draft version of a paragraph from Beautiful Swimmers , a version without Michael Ashman’s deftness:
“The Expressionists chained to their mirrors—Rilke and Munch, Schiele and Kafka—never able to turn away or look anywhere else. A column of doomed and disintegrating soldiers in the long war against the father and the society he has created. Like the assault rifle or the rocket launcher, the mirror is not a simple burden. It is their only method of defense. It is their only means of attack. In it they are able to reassure themselves of their own continuing existence; their fear is of an identity fragmenting, dissolving, fading to a wisp. The mirror assures them—or seems to—that they are still more than a twist of light at its heart. Those faces ravaged by egotism and insecurity still exist, modified by what is expected of them but not yet quite absorbed or transformed. Rilke and Schiele, glue on to what you can prove!—the bent light,
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