Thus the obscenity remained draped. For now.

“That’s good then,” she said. “It means we don’t have the entire species to worry about.” She was wearing a grey woollen sweater dress, black nylons and knee-length black leather boots. So you got the soft of the dress and the hard of the boots. Like the soft of the thigh and the hard of the hip. Not sartorial archness, just a sound instinct for sexual accents. We were more than halfway through the lunation and her scent was yielding darker notes. Under the bittersweet glamour of Chanel No. 19 her quickening She exuded a high, tight-packed smell of predatory knowledge. Heat throbbed around her. The Hunger was a second heartbeat still a long way beneath her own. The next dozen days and nights would be the story of its rising. In both of us. Synchronised.

“Yes,” I said. “But the danger is this twerp blabs. He looked as if I was his first lycanthropic run-in. An experience to discuss with his peers. If other vampires who are in the know are here in the city there’s no reason they wouldn’t hook up. He tells his after-dinner werewolf cherry story and they’re onto us. No. We should go.”

“Now? Tonight?”

“Can you stand it?”

She got up out of the chair, crossed to where I stood by the escritoire, slipped her arms around me, kissed me.

“We shouldn’t travel together,” I said, without much conviction.

“Don’t be insane.”

“They don’t have you yet. If they get to you through—”

“Those days are over. It’s you and me, now. That’s all.”

However ridiculous this sounds I already know there will never be a time when putting my hands on her won’t palliate the certainty of death. The feel of her waist between my palms is of the deep geometry that takes you back or forward past the incarnate incidentals to the elemental realm, the realm of soul, one wants to say, knowing one’s going soft in the head. Holding her is a Keatsian beauty-truth. I don’t know what to do with it. I know there’s nothing to do with it. Just live in it and let it bring what it brings.

“We could wait half an hour,” I said, moving my hands to the firm flare of her bum.

“Is it always going to be this bad?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hurry up,” she said. “Hard and fast. Please.”

We quit New York that night (cab to Penn Station, Amtrak sleeper to Chicago) with very little discussion. She knew I’d put arrangements in place, but to talk them through would have been, according to the intuited werewolf proprieties, vulgar. Instead we moved around it, our giant ugliness, our unforgivable end point, dirtily enriched, like molested children, by knowing all and saying nothing. I saw in her abstracted moments that she remained disgusted in spite of the months of violent self-baptism. She’d hardened herself in blood but not all the tender remnants were dead. She was a monster, yes, but all she’d lost could still ambush her, turn her gaze back to her childhood and force her to look. You Can’t Go Home Again. ( Thomas Wolfe, Jesus how much more?) This hurt, very much. She’d been darling to so many, little black-eyed Lula with the high forehead and the beauty spot. Becoming a werewolf ought to have cut her off from all that but it hadn’t. Continuity of identity persisted. It was like being tortured by an innocent child.

“How do you get around the fact that you should have died several times already?” she asked. To any but new lovers the Amtrak sleeper’s three and a half foot bed width would have been a trial. The little window’s curtains were open, revealing a rolling night sky of curdy backlit grey and gun-blue cloud just beginning, in patches, to break. The train smelled of filter coffee and air-con. “You were born in 1808—which is not a sentence I ever imagined saying—and here we are two hundred years later. There must have been questions to answer.”

We could discuss these past practicalities. Past practicalities.

“It got easier,” I said. “It’s easier than ever now, if you’ve got money. It’s always money. The principle doesn’t change: You’re paying specialists in the manipulation of identity technology. Used to be old guys in basements with loupes and inks and plates and presses, now it’s young guys in lofts with computers. This is the primary level, the simple business of purchasing a fake birth certificate, passport, driving licence, social security number. You’ll be surprised how far you can go with just those: bank accounts, credit cards, mortgages, loans, investment portfolios. Over a regular lifespan it’s more than enough. Several lifetimes, it gets trickier. I can’t believe what I did the first time. I can’t believe I thought I’d be able to go on doing it.”

“What did you do?”

“I became my own son.”

“Holy moley.”

“Jacob Marlowe ‘Senior,’ as it were, became a recluse at forty-two, in the year 1850. I couldn’t put it off any longer: people were starting to notice I didn’t seem to be aging at all. ”

She shivered next to me.

“What?”

“You. 1850. I think I’m used to it and then it gets me again.”

“To tell you the truth I can’t remember much about 1850. Dickens published David Copperfield . Wordsworth died. I’ll have to think.”

“It’s not the big events, it’s the ordinary stuff. A butler warming his hands. Those big damp houses. A bonnet on a chair.” She was trying to picture the time when the present would be as distant to her as 1850 is to me. She was feeling the backdraft or slipstream of the far future: a cold flow. She shuddered, turned towards me, slid her right leg over my hip. “Anyway, go on. Jacob Marlowe Senior.”

“Jacob Marlowe Senior went into reclusion—is there such a word? You think I’d know by now.”

“No one cares, honey. Go on.”

“Marlowe Senior went into reclusion if there was such a word in 1850. Not in England, but at a secret location known only to my lawyers. In fact I was rarely there. Couldn’t afford to be.” Because as you know we can’t let the victims pile up in one place . She felt us duck to avoid this present practicality, a motion like a kite dipping in the wind. “All his business decisions were enacted through authorised proxies and lawyers, who received their instructions from him—I had codes, passwords, ciphers, the whole fucking caboodle—in writing. A rickety arrangement. Near misses of catastrophic losses when messages didn’t travel fast enough. Telegraphy was a great relief when it came in. The telephone—well, you can imagine. Not long after leaving England I was ‘married’ and less than a year after that I had ‘a son,’ Jacob Junior. All fictional. A new will was drawn up—Jacob Junior would inherit everything—and that was that. All I had to do then was stay away from anyone who knew me.”