The Course of the Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

it on to the floor. “That’s where cats belong. Cats belong on the floor.”
    Some paper flowers were knocked down. Stooping to gather them up she said, “If there is a God, a real one, He gave up long ago. He isn’t so much bitter as apathetic”
    She winced; held her hands up to her eyes. “You don’t mind if I turn the main light off?” And then:
    “He’s filtered away into everything, so that now there’s only this infinitely thin, stretched thing, presenting itself in every atom, so tired it can’t go on, so haggard you can only feel sorry for its mistakes. That’s the real God. What we saw is something that’s taken its place.”
    “What did we see, Pam?”
    She stared at me.
    “You know, I was never sure what Lucas thought he wanted from me,” she said.
    The dull yellow light of a table lamp fell across the side of her face. She was lighting cigarettes almost constantly, stubbing them out half-smoked into the nest of old ends that had accumulated in the saucer of her cup.
    “Can you imagine? In all those years I never knew what he wanted from me.”
    She seemed to consider this for a moment or two. She said puzzledly, “I don’t feel he ever loved me.” She buried her face in her hands.
    I got up, with some idea of comforting her. Without warning, she lurched out of her chair and in a groping, desperately confused manner took a few steps towards me. There in the middle of the room she stumbled into a low fretwork table someone had brought back from a visit to Kashmir twenty years before. Two or three paperback books and a vase of anemones went flying. The anemones were blowsy, past their best. Pam looked down at Love for Lydia and The Death of the Heart , strewn with great blue and red petals like dirty tissue paper; she touched them thoughtfully with her toe. The smell of the fetid flower water made her retch.
    “Oh dear,” she murmured. “Whatever shall we do, Lucas?”
    “I’m not Lucas,” I said gently.
    While I was gathering up the books and wiping their covers, she must have overcome her fear of the kitchen—or, I thought later, simply forgotten it—because I heard her rummaging about for the dustpan and brush she kept under the sink. By now, I imagined, she could hardly see for the migraine. “Let me do that, Pam,” I called impatiently. “Go and sit down.” There was a gasp, a clatter, my name repeated twice.
    * * *
    “Pam, are you all right?”
    No one answered.
    “Hello? Pam?”
    I found her by the sink. She had let go of the brush and pan and was twisting the damp floor cloth so tightly in her hands that the muscles of her short forearms stood out like a carpenter’s. Water had dribbled down her skirt.
    “Pam?”
    She was looking out of the window into the narrow passage where, clearly illuminated by the fluorescent tube in the kitchen, something big and white hung in the air, turning to and fro like a chrysalis in a privet hedge.
    “Christ!” I said.
    It wriggled and was still, as though whatever it contained was tired of the effort to get out. After a moment it curled up from its tapered base, seemed to split, welded itself together again. All at once I saw that these movements were actually those of two organisms, two human figures hanging in the air, unsupported, quite naked, writhing and embracing and parting and writhing together again, never presenting the same angle twice, so that now you viewed the man from the back, now the woman, now both of them from one side or the other. When I first saw them, the woman’s mouth was fastened on the man’s. Her eyes were closed; later she rested her head on his shoulder. Later still, they both turned their attention to Pam. They had very pale skin, with the dusty bloom of white chocolate; but that might have been an effect of the light. Sleet blew between us and them in eddies, but never obscured them.
    “What are they, Pam?”
    “There’s no limit to suffering,” she said. Her voice was slurred and thick. “They