Free The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison Page B

the soft dry sand to stand wonderingly in front of her for some moments before he said in a loud voice:
    “Shoes.”
    Across his bare skin fell sunshine such a thick, sleepy yellow it was almost ochre. Pam opened her arms wide, as if to embrace him, then wider to take in the whole scene behind him: the clear air rippling with heat; the tide, slack and warm; the red setter running in delighted circles over the beach, snapping up at the gulls twenty feet above its head as if they were butterflies.
    “Isn’t it lovely?” she said. She smiled.
    “Why don’t we walk back through the woods?”
    Years of hiding had made them adept at manipulating each other’s silences. Lucas was unable to refuse so direct a request. Too much else would have to be confronted.
    Whatever he expected, the woods turned out to be cool, speckled with sun, smelling of wild garlic. Even the caravan parks seemed transfigured. But when they got home they found that Pam’s mother had choked to death on half a Mars bar, thrashing about like a poisoned chicken behind the counter of the souvenir shop while retired couples from Burnley walked slowly past outside, intent on finding somewhere nice to have lunch, too stupefied by the sunshine to notice anything going on behind the festoons of silk scarves, printed tea towels and decorated leather handbags which cluttered the display window. Lucas Medlar was less appalled by the death than by its circumstances.
    “I can’t get that picture of her out of my mind,” he wrote to me.
    How Pam felt was less clear. “She doesn’t want to talk about it, and I don’t press her. People have their own ways of dealing with things.”
    Her father didn’t want to talk either. He passed his time between the bar and the big bay window at the side of the house, out of which he stared seawards. Or Lucas would find him on the lawn in the mist and rain. Every blade of grass was covered with drops of water, so that it looked as if a hard frost had clamped down in the night. He would be tilting his head as if listening for something. A few days after the funeral they left him to it. He needed help, you could see: but Lucas wouldn’t risk leaving Pam there on her own.
    * * *
    “When we talk about the Fall of the Heart,” Lucas was always careful to point out, “we are actually using a figure of speech. Further, this ‘fall’ has two opposing trajectories: even as we watch the City recoil from the world and back into the Pleroma—a swooning away from us ‘into the mirror to die in root and flower’—we interpret this movement as its precise opposite, as a fall into experience of the world, which we read as the loss of ontological purity, it is this aspect which must interest the historian and the genealogist.
    “For the Empress there was no escape from ‘inside the meaning of things’; and by definition we can know nothing of those who survived within the Coeur as it snapped back along that first trajectory, and who were thus withdrawn from the world along with it. But if Neville escaped the revenge of the Albanians, so must others have done, and it is their subsequent history—not as a series of events so much as the clue to a direction of movement—which allows us to plot that second trajectory.
    “In this sense, the pedigree of the Heirs of the Coeur is, literally, a fall from Grace.”
    The Empress Gallica XII Hierodule, he claimed, had at least three children. Of a shadowy daughter whose name may have been Phoenissa, least is known. “She was beautiful. She may not have escaped the wreck. You can still hear in the Pleroma a faint fading cry of rage and sadness which may have been hers. The older of the two sons was popularly supposed to have been the son also of Theodore Lascaris, but this seems like a late slander. His name was Alexius and he died in Ragusa in 1460, where, ironically, he had a reputation as one of the secret advisers of George Kastriotis, the national hero of Albania.
    “It was his