The Last Werewolf

really, against her bigger, her wiser, her more wholly human self. Memories: her mother’s smell of flour and lavender. A red ploughed field under a blue sky. A painted carnival horse. A dead possum in the yard. Her limbs lengthened. The arrival of her breasts filled her with maidenly pride. The shocking little pearl of pleasure down there. Dost thou love me? I know, thou wilt say—Ay; And I will take thy word. Her father had a complete Shakespeare. She learned lines and entered characters. There was some incompletely hammered- out contract between art and God. Male attention went to her. Once or twice something shy and fierce in a man that hinted at what love would be, an index of the body’s maddening insufficiencies. She took her clothes off for painters, sculptors, lovers, learned poker, the rough friendship of rye whisky. Knowing the dangers she pushed forward into experience, suffered, caught on fire, rolled in the dirt to put herself out. She pushed harder and got sick. Pneumonia. Aunt Eliza she hadn’t seen for fifteen years. She emerged from the interrogation by death knowing she’d never be quite as awake as she’d once dreamed. Then Europe, Switzerland, white mountains, me. Love at first sight.

I swallowed it, stole it, the wealth you never count till it’s taken. It went into me, an obscene enrichment, a feast of filthy profit. She fought me, such as she could. She wanted life. Unequivocally she wanted life. She couldn’t scream. I’d gone through her vocal cords in the first bite. Five seconds. Ten. Twenty. Instinct tells you when they’re going. (As a kindred instinct tells you when they’re coming.) I looked at her, gave her my werewolf face dark with her blood, my fangs dressed in her shredded treasures. She was past pain now. Her eyes said she’d gone on from it, was standing at the rail looking back at the dock. Embarkation. I could never have not loved her without becoming someone else. But I had become someone else. She blinked, once, languidly. Her lips moved. One wet gobbet of her own raw meat winked red on her cheek. Dark brown eyes flecked with gold. These eyes said: I’m going. She was past the old language: murder, morality, justice, guilt, punishment, revenge, the words were valueless currency on her voyage. Her eyes said: So, this is it. In the moment before they closed she made the last shift: At the true end of life one doesn’t care how one’s come to death. I wasn’t Jacob, or her husband, or her killer, or a monster; I was just the thing that had unlocked the door. Now she saw through me and the matter of this world into final solving darkness or annihilating light. I was no longer important. Her eyes widened once, then closed.

At some point our struggle must have clipped the bedside table because the lamp had fallen, smashed, spilled, spread a little pool of flame. One bed drape had caught. The fire moved in leisurely consummation up it, across to its neighbour. I only noticed the heat because hers had gone. Once the body’s light’s out the Hunger admits a strand of disgust, a postcoital realism before the act is complete. You eat fast, in a worsening temper, with contempt for God’s creative vulgarity in yoking consciousness to meat. You eat fast because revulsion’s chasing you. When it catches you—seeks you out like the long arm of the law—you’ll have to stop, you won’t be able to go on.

The fire bloomed. In one gesture of flame the whole rug was ablaze. I caught sight of myself for the first time in the cheval glass, hunched over the gored body. It was a hideous composition, a pornographic companion piece to Fuseli’s The Nightmare—or a satire on its excesses. Her left arm hung white, slender, supple, miraculously untouched, the hand half open, fingers arrested as if in mid-evocation of something delicate and elusive. Goodness me, that was nice.

Satiety ambushed me. Too much too soon. A delayed expansion to accommodate the haul. Fed on her flesh my own silted. The stolen life went over my consciousness like hurrying cloud shadows. I found I’d lifted one leg off the floor for balance. It took effort to put it back down. Imbibed blood goes molasses-thick. You lug it for a while, awkwardly. Get out, now, before the fire stops you. Heat beat on my back. Already one curtain was aflame.

I let what remained of her fall from my arms back onto the now burning bed. Let it go. Let it all go. At the window I paused just long enough to feel my right side singed and my left salved in the moonlight, then jumped down, fell, got up and ran.

14

THE FIRE CLAIMED half the house and killed nine of the seventeen staff. Also, as subliminally intended, overwrote the true story of how Arabella died.

Poor Charles suffered, not just the loss of my wife (whom he was at least inordinately fond of and at most guiltily in love with) but of my friendship. In the days immediately following the blaze I was as he saw it understandably remote. But remoteness became estrangement, then absence. I put my estate manager in charge of reconstruction and left for Scotland within a fortnight. I had no plan, merely a reflex to get as far away from people as possible.

I took with me a single souvenir.

The little ground-floor room overlooking the western end of the garden had been Arabella’s study. There wasn’t much in it: a bookcase; a walnut bureau; one of the tattiest of the Indian carpets and an enormous armchair in which my late wife was wont to curl up with her journal and scribble away for entire afternoons. The journal was kept in the bureau in a queer little iron lockbox with a handful of talismanic trinkets from her risky life, and though the desk had gone in the conflagration the casket—and diary—had survived. It’s in the safe-deposit box in Manhattan now, along with my own chronicles, but in the weeks and months that followed the fire I came to know much of it by heart. Only a few lines are necessary here.His behaviour grows daily more disturbed. Others would condemn me for keeping my secret, but he is so erratic I fear the effect of a mistimed disclosure. So many moments this last week I’ve been on the verge of telling him. The words are gold under my heart, honey under my tongue: Jacob, I’m carrying your child.

15

LAST NIGHT, NOT long after I’d laid down my pen (quad scripsi, scripsi) it started raining. It rained all night and it’s still raining now, late in the afternoon. The very last of the daylight shows a low sky of soft dark cloud passed under occasionally by lighter white shreds (“pannus” to meteorologists, “messengers” to fishermen; two hundred years, idle moments, books). The sea looks like marbled meat. Against it the gulls’ white has detergent ad purity. The rain’s destroying the snow, obviously. There’s still plenty out here in the valley, in the woods, but in Zennor pavements are reemerging. By the time I get back to London tomorrow the magic will be almost gone. The city will be brisk and miserable, derisory of its lapse, its little dream of things being different.

“Have you done what you needed to do?” Harley asked on the phone an hour ago.

“There was a gap in the record,” I said. “I filled it. Shall I send it to the PO box or the club?”

He understood: This journal would be the last. No more record because no more me. A bad way to start the conversation. I pictured him closing his eyes and jamming his jaws together before letting himself start again.

“Everything’s set up,” he said. “But I can’t get you out of the country till the seventeenth. Cutting it close, I know, but there’s no choice. You’ve got three car-changes between the city and Heathrow. You’re booked on the afternoon Virgin flight to New York with the Tom Carlyle ID. That’s the interference. You’ll actually be flying private charter to Exeter as Matt Arnold. These are brand-new ID packages. Passports, driving licences, NI numbers, the whole fucking caboodle. From Exeter—”

“I’m going to Wales, Harley.”

“What?”

“You heard. Snowdonia.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Go out where I came in. Full circle.”

He paused again. Laboriously lit a cigarette. “From Exeter,” he went on, quietly, “you’ve got options. You can fly to Palma and on to Barcelona or Madrid, or, if you’re not absolutely convinced you’ve shaken them, I’ve set up another two car changes between there and Plymouth. Reggie’ll wait for you until midnight of the seventeenth. He’ll get you over the Channel, then you’re on your own.”

“You’ve done the work, Harls,” I said. “You’re a rock star.”

“Yeah, well, don’t give me this Wales bollocks then.”

I let it go. He knew. I knew he knew. He knew I knew he knew. Standing at the Pines lounge bay window looking down through the rain to the cove I felt the familiar fondness for him being gnawed at by impatience. The longer I hung on the worse it would get. You can’t live solely for someone else without sooner or later hating them. I started to ask about a drop for the new fake IDs, but he stopped me.