The Last Werewolf
Page 21
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.
“I’ll give you the documents myself,” he said. “I don’t want any fuck-ups.”
“That’s a stupid risk for you.”
“I won’t rest until I’ve put them into your hands personally. Do this my way, Marlowe, please.”
Which was his concession. If you’re going to die then I want to see you one more time. One last handshake before the end.
“Anything more on Cloquet?” I asked him. It was the first time I’d thought of the young man with the Magnum since leaving London, but now that I had I felt uneasy again.
“We let him go,” Harley said. “He’s got nothing. We bugged and watched him for a day or two after his release. He bowled around a bit, nursing his hand, which by the way we treated for him, then eventually he made a penitent call to Jacqueline Delon herself. She was furious with him for going after you. He was told to stay put in his hotel until one of her lot came and escorted him back to Paris. Twenty-four hours later two guys—Delon’s—showed up and did just that. Case closed.”
“You know why they invented the phrase ‘case closed’?”
“What?”
“So that the audience would know it wasn’t.”
“Have it your way, Jacob. You’re chasing shadows. You should be worrying about Ellis.”
“Not Grainer?”
“Grainer’s patient. He’ll wait for the full moon. But Ellis down there watching you with fuck-all else to do … There are a couple of trigger-happy juveniles with him, too.”
“They beheaded my foxes.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Just be careful, that’s all I’m saying.”
The cloak-and-dagger arrangements, superfluous though we both know they are, are in place. Graham Greene had a semiparodic relationship with the genres his novels exploited, a wry tolerance of their exigencies and tropes. Unavoidably I have the same relationship to my life. False IDs, code words, assignations, surveillance, night flights. Espionage flimflam. And that’s before we even begin on the Horror Story trappings. If it were a novel I’d reject it along with all other genre output that by definition short-changes reality. Unfortunately for me it is reality.
There is the elephant in the room: I killed and ate my wife and unborn child. I killed and ate love . Which left two alternatives: expand or die. Kill yourself or live with it. Give it up or suck it up, in the modern idiom. Well, here I am.
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.
“I’ll give you the documents myself,” he said. “I don’t want any fuck-ups.”
“That’s a stupid risk for you.”
“I won’t rest until I’ve put them into your hands personally. Do this my way, Marlowe, please.”
Which was his concession. If you’re going to die then I want to see you one more time. One last handshake before the end.
“Anything more on Cloquet?” I asked him. It was the first time I’d thought of the young man with the Magnum since leaving London, but now that I had I felt uneasy again.
“We let him go,” Harley said. “He’s got nothing. We bugged and watched him for a day or two after his release. He bowled around a bit, nursing his hand, which by the way we treated for him, then eventually he made a penitent call to Jacqueline Delon herself. She was furious with him for going after you. He was told to stay put in his hotel until one of her lot came and escorted him back to Paris. Twenty-four hours later two guys—Delon’s—showed up and did just that. Case closed.”
“You know why they invented the phrase ‘case closed’?”
“What?”
“So that the audience would know it wasn’t.”
“Have it your way, Jacob. You’re chasing shadows. You should be worrying about Ellis.”
“Not Grainer?”
“Grainer’s patient. He’ll wait for the full moon. But Ellis down there watching you with fuck-all else to do … There are a couple of trigger-happy juveniles with him, too.”
“They beheaded my foxes.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Just be careful, that’s all I’m saying.”
The cloak-and-dagger arrangements, superfluous though we both know they are, are in place. Graham Greene had a semiparodic relationship with the genres his novels exploited, a wry tolerance of their exigencies and tropes. Unavoidably I have the same relationship to my life. False IDs, code words, assignations, surveillance, night flights. Espionage flimflam. And that’s before we even begin on the Horror Story trappings. If it were a novel I’d reject it along with all other genre output that by definition short-changes reality. Unfortunately for me it is reality.
There is the elephant in the room: I killed and ate my wife and unborn child. I killed and ate love . Which left two alternatives: expand or die. Kill yourself or live with it. Give it up or suck it up, in the modern idiom. Well, here I am.
