don’t love me anymore, do you? No matter your decency the victim’s incredulity’s potentially hilarious. You manage not to laugh. But breaking the heart of someone you still love is a rare horror, not funny to anyone, except perhaps Satan, if such a being existed, and even his pleasure would be spoiled by not having had a hand in it, by the dumb, wasteful accident of the thing. The Devil wants meaning just like the rest of us. Once, in the small hours, when I’d thought she was asleep with her back to me, Arabella had said, Put your arms around me, and I had, cupped her breasts and buried my nose in the warm down of her nape—and felt another bit of her faith die because despite my skin against hers something kept us apart. Me. Can’t you come to me? she said, holding tighter. I’m still here. I’m waiting for you.
The simplest tasks required immense concentration: descending a staircase, opening a door, pulling on a riding boot. I had memories not my own. Waist-deep mist dividing around me. Trees rushing past. Moonlight on a mountain tarn. A young girl on a forest floor with her thigh torn open, naked white doll body on a bed of dark green ferns, eyes wide, dead. Jacob, where are you? Arabella wanted to know. Are you seeing something? I certainly was. Harebells crushed under his wrinkled quivering heel. The three moonlit horsemen like a living Uccello. Mucus in his snout had rattled. I fell asleep in my chair with my arm hanging down and woke feeling the stream’s soft cold flow and my shirt warm-heavy with blood. I had to keep getting up and leaving the room, the house, her.
So the two weeks since my return from Wales had passed and every day I’d suffered the torture of torturing the woman I loved, the woman who loved me. At moments of supreme self-pity I’d hated her for it. Last night, woken mouth open, tongue out, body at tearing point over the simmering shape of the wolf, I’d left her asleep and gone out onto the lawn. The moon knew. The moon knew I didn’t know what. The moon was an inscrutable pregnancy, a withheld alleviation, a love more cunning than a mother’s. The moon had a secret to share. But not yet. Not quite yet. I’d wandered the fields, crawled in dew-damp before dawn. For Arabella, waking to find me gone had torn off a further layer of denial.
“This will almost, but not quite, kill me,” she said now, still with the ominous neutrality, as the small-faced parlour maid crossed the doorway carrying a vase of white roses. “That love’s no match for the whispers of English neighbours. Marlowe’s American whore. Do you remember laughing about that? Do you remember calling it quaint?” I did remember. I remembered how that “quaint” had liberated me into superior benevolence, how with that one word the harness constricting the world—Blake’s mind-forged manacles (the erotic revolution had resuscitated dead pictures and poems)—had dropped away. Now she believed I wanted something else. How could she not? I did want something else. More blue- veined, more soft, more sweetly white / Than Venus when she rose / From out her cradle shell. Together we’d celebrated the bliss of the Fallen flesh. Now I knew there was a Fall further, into the bliss of devouring it. (And a fall further than that. Or so the moon told. Or so the moon withheld. Not yet. Not quite yet.)
“Where are you going?” Arabella said. I’d risen from the chair and crossed to the French windows. “Jacob? Will you not look at me? For God’s sake.”
My legs gave. I went down slowly onto my knees, one moist hand slipping from the door handle. She rushed to me—or the creature did; the ether tore a moment and I couldn’t tell which. Then her arms and orange blossom perfume were around me, my face close to her white breasts take her life take her life take her life please God make it stop let me die take her—“Don’t,” she said, as I pushed myself upright. “Don’t try to get up.” But I was on my feet again as if a spirit had hoiked me by the armpits.
“I must go,” I said. I knew how insane that sounded to her. “I’ll go and see Charles.” Her detachment, I now saw, had been an experiment, a toe dipped in the emotional waters she might have to enter. In fact she was still waiting for me to return to her. And still I hadn’t. She stared at me, forced into her eyes suspicion, anger, concern, potential forgiveness; to admit outright incomprehension would be a death. A few drops of sweat showed above her top lip. I thought of the look she gave me when I came inside her: sly welcome that segued into infinite calm relished confirmation. For a man a woman has no greater gift to give. And here I was destroying it. “It’s not you,” I managed to get out. I’d opened the door. The smell and weight of the lawn was a gravity I could flow into. “It’s not you. I love you.”
“Then why—”
“Please, Arabella, as you love me believe me there’s nothing … I must be …” I stepped out onto the terrace —and vomited suddenly in one hot gush and splatter. The sound was a gash on the still afternoon.
“Jacob, for pity’s sake come in. You’re sick.” Some relief, naturally, at the recurrence of a physical symptom: Better my guts than my soul, than me.
“I’m all right,” I said, straightening, searching for my handkerchief. “That helped. Disgusting. Forgive me. Please, just let me be awhile. Let me walk over to Charles’s. I’ll stay there tonight and tomorrow everything will be different, I promise. Just give me this one night to clear my head.” I could hear the precise degree by which my voice didn’t sound right. My body laboured under invisible soft weights. With a superhuman effort I hauled the version of myself she needed to the surface, turned to her, saw hope ignite in her eyes, took her hands in mine. “Don’t think what you’ve been thinking,” I said. “You wrong both of us in thinking it. Something is troubling me, something … On my life, Arabella, I can’t stay here tonight. You must let me go. Tomorrow everything—I swear everything will be different. Please. Let me go.”
For days I’d been unable to meet her eye. Now I did and saw she was still warm and open to me. Her look was of steady entreaty, to return to collusion, to renew the silent vows, to recognise her. Summer had brought out a sprinkle of freckles under her dark lower lashes. In Lausanne we’d lain stunned on the bed after first lovemaking. She’d said, Goodness me, that was nice. “Whatever it is, Jake,” she said, “you know I’m equal to it. I’m not asking you this, I’m telling you something you already know.”
For a moment I felt completely normal. It was her. It was me. We shared an outrageous exemption. The distance between us burned away. These last days had been an absurd inversion.
“I know,” I said—but the blood rushed hardening up from the soles of my feet and I saw the girl’s thigh like a disgorged treasure of rubies and felt already though it was barely three in the afternoon the moon’s slow-ascending joy. I turned and walked away across the lawn.
11
THEY’VE KILLED THE foxes.
I heard something outside and went to look. The severed heads had been left on the back porch facing the door, two with eyes closed, one—the youngest, ears too big for his head, like a bat—with eyes open. A single set of footprints in the snow from the tree line twenty feet away. We can come all the way up to the house without you hearing. I stood in the doorway and looked out into the woods. Nothing visible, but the darkness full of consciousness. I assumed Ellis. To stave off boredom and impress the juniors. To refer to Wolfgang. To advertise the product. I’m supposed to be the leering villain, he’d said back at the Zetter. If this was his work it would’ve been done with affectless efficiency. The man’s centre of self is remote. I imagine Grainer watching his protege in action and conceding with a sad fracture inside that the torch has passed to a strange new bearer.
I’ll bury the heads in the morning. It’s too cold now, and it won’t make any difference to the foxes.•
It was six miles cross-country to Charles’s, and I stopped—doubled-up, glazed, queasy, for periods bereft of any kind of will—many times en route. When I lay down on it the land was a continuation of my skin, full of frantic whispering life. The WEREWULF engraving shivered from the grass, from the boles of trees, from the air’s buzzing atoms. In a wood on the edge of Charles’s estate I got down on all fours and cooled my hot face in a shallow stream of water-polished pebbles. The wolf’s shoulders flirted with mine, his haunches, the scroll of his tongue. For all this there were interludes of sanity. Enough religion remained so that I went into and out of the belief that this was a punishment, superficially for carnal excess but really for living in a love that rendered God negligible, optional, obsolete. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Yahweh’s First Commandment and one he wasn’t shy of fleshing out—Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: For I the LORD thy God am a jealous God … He had every right to be jealous of Arabella. It wasn’t the fucking, the licking, the sucking, but that with her these acts livened the soul instead of deadening it, elevated being instead of degrading it. Lest ye become as gods yourselves. The serpent’s reading of the Edenic proscription was correct. We were our own divine images, not graven but flesh and blood, and God shrank in the light of our divinity. Christ was born of a virgin and died one himself. What did he know? The truths of the body were ours, not his. Human
