Free The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison

couple, they seemed a bit aimless, a bit clinging. Neither of them wanted to risk children. “I wouldn’t visit this on anyone,” Pam repeated often, meaning epilepsy. But their real fear was the entrance of some new and uncontrollable factor into a stabilized situation. While the fiction of the Coeur was central to their lives, it wasn’t, to begin with at least, their only relief: Pam kept trying to make something of the house, though its size was always to defeat her; and during Lucas’s school holidays, they often went to see her parents in Silverdale.
    There the tide crept in and out unnoticeably behind “Castle Rock”. While Pam’s father stood on his lawn in the moist afternoons, looking out as thoughtfully towards the bay as he had done the morning after her wedding; and her mother sat patiently behind the till of the souvenir shop like a life-size novelty made of leather, fake fur and red paint. They always seemed glad to see Lucas, and were industrious in making him welcome.
    Privately, he thought they drank too much in the evenings. Lucas rarely drank anything. When he did, he became a clinical parody of himself, swinging helplessly between elation and depression.
    For Pam, this was a warm coast, full of geological faults which cut down obliquely through her life, where the blackthorn flowered early above the little limestone coves. Winter felt like spring. After her first fits she had stayed for a few weeks at a convalescent home above the thick mixed woods that come down to the sea at Arnside. She still loved to walk the coastal path there. “It was so different then,” she promised Lucas repeatedly, as they slithered along tracks of blackish earth trodden aimlessly between caravan parks.
    “It all seemed more private: the woods were more mysterious, more like woods.”
    Lucas had his doubts. The caravans were old, often without wheels. Towed long ago into stamped-down clearings in the woods and painted green, they had quickly surrounded themselves with plastic gnomes which stared implacably out into the undergrowth from railed-off gardens; while inside at night retired couples from Salford wished, “If only we could have TV.” There were more modern sites at Far Arnside and Gibraltar Farm—great bare strips of dirty grass in the twilight, dogs nosing about the rubbish bins as it got dark. Lucas bought a map—the current OS 1:25000 sheet—only to find parts of the woods marked an empty white. He studied the legend: “‘Information not available in uncolored areas.’ You don’t often see that.”
    Pam found him an old snapshot of herself, in the grounds of the home.
    “Who took it?”
    “One of the other patients I suppose.”
    There she sat, squinting into the sun: thin, eyes blackened with convalescence, one leg crossed over the other, smiling out at someone she had never seen since.
    “Didn’t I look awful?”
    * * *
    One summer weekend she arrived alone, by train. Two o’clock in the afternoon: Silverdale was deserted, awash with sunlight so brilliant it made her hood her eyes and look down, as if modestly, at her own arms. Outside the station, birch trees moved uneasily in a baking wind. That morning Lucas had driven her to Manchester Victoria in the Renault, settled her with a styrofoam cup of coffee in the buffet with its luxurious old tiled walls, and then gone back to Dunford to mark third-year essays, promising, “I’ll come up tomorrow if I get finished.” From Preston onwards, she had entertained herself with the fantasy that he would change his mind, race the train north, and be waiting for her when she arrived. When he wasn’t, she began to feel as if she was between lives for a moment—naked to whatever might happen, yet able to have some peace. She shivered with the danger of this, stared out over Leighton Moss, then picked up her suitcase. A crumpled white serviette blew along the up-platform.
    Eventually she left the station and walked slowly down the road through the