That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (6 page)

‘
Many things,’ Seaming began. ‘There is considerable discussion–’

The wolf cut him off with an impatient snarl.
‘Art is lust! As a man I collected art and thought myself above the crowd. As a beast, without a man’s talent for self-flattery, I acquired a better understanding. Art is the voluptuous language of the senses. The artist is a pornographer. The connoisseur is a voyeur. Art is a euphemism that permits humans to indulge all their lusts, however base or alarming, while imagining that they are using their highest and holiest faculties. Man can’t decide whether he wants to be an angel or an ape. Art lets him be both.’

‘
I know a man who would agree with you,’ Seaming said, thinking of Stroud. ‘Perhaps he is a more sophisticated man than I.’

‘
We do not need a sophisticate,’ Beauty said. ‘We need a simple idealist. We need a person whose philosophy opposes our own.’

Again t
he wolf loomed forward and breathed the stench of his gullet over Seaming. ‘A beast knows its desires. Only humans do not know what they want. Because I am this much a man, my desires are complex and conflicting. I do not know, now, if I would rather be man or beast.’

‘
And I,’ Beauty said sorrowfully, ‘still condemn him to be neither. Since he has become part man, I cannot help but love that man, too. My desires are as tangled as any human being’s. But you can enable me to untangle them, Mr Seaming. Like you, I do not love ordinary things. I loved one extreme, but perhaps I could love another. Create two images, man and beast, neither having any quality of the other, each an opposite ideal. Then I will know which one I love more. My choice will make my husband a whole creature, one way or the other.’

Seaming admitted that he knew nothing of magic.
‘And I do not want to know,’ he said. ‘But when it comes to painting, I stand on firmer ground.’ He said that he believed he could do as she asked.

‘
Then practice your craft, Mr Seaming,’ the wolf panted. ‘From my perspective there is nothing to be lost, and the peace of my soul to be gained.’

Beauty brought Seaming a bright lamp to work by, while he unpacked his small portable easel. The wolf proved to be an excellent sitter. His nose and ears twitched a little to begin with, but soon he ceased to move at all, other than to breathe. As Seaming sketched he hesitatingly remarked on this to Beauty.

‘He sleeps with his eyes open,’ she explained.

Seaming made several studies in ink and chalk.
When he was satisfied that he had enough material from which to produce the actual canvases, he asked to take his leave.

Beauty escorted him out, leaving the beast asleep, statue
-like.

At the top of the stairs Seaming blurted,
‘Why do you love him?’

Again he had the sense that she was smiling.
‘He was the only creature I ever met who was as beautiful as I. The only being who ever fascinated me. Without him, I would wither from boredom. Human love is selfish, Mr Seaming.’

He wrenched himself away, but not before his eyes had filled with tears of loss. Once out of the house, h
e all but fled the Ravels. When he at last arrived, breathless and exhausted, within sight of Cake Street, he thought the still-carousing nightspots had never looked anywhere near as welcoming and homely; nor had they ever looked as drab.

‘She’s right, of course. A woman after my own heart. What an escapade, old friend!’ Stroud lit a cigarette with a flourish. ‘I must say, I’m rather jealous. I should have liked to meet this beast myself.’

‘
I think you would have got along well,’ Seaming said, though he privately thought that Stroud would have felt uncomfortably upstaged.

They were in Seaming
’s studio. Stroud waved the cigarette at the finished portrait of the wolf. ‘That’s quite spectacular. I wouldn’t have guessed you had it in you to paint such a thing. Outrageous, of course – but hang me if it isn’t handsome, too!’

‘
He looks a lot like that. I didn’t have to alter much.’ Seaming had invented powerful haunches, long flanks and a thick tail, and had scrupulously erased any hint of human sentience from the wolf’s expression. He was fully animal, a fact emphasised by his rearing stance and carefully depicted, outsized canine genitalia.

Stroud went on admiring the portrait.
‘He shows the human race up, doesn’t he? Rather an undistinguished lot we are, compared with that. I don’t mean just the pizzle.’

‘
If taken only as physical objects, perhaps you’re right.’

Seaming felt rather little towards his painting of the beast. It had gone against his grain to execute it; he was the opposite of the dramatist who does great things with his villain and gives his hero nothing interesting to say. Had he written plays, he would have lavished care on the most humane characters and left the brutal and ignoble ones dimensionless. Painting the beast had been, for him, a strictly technical exercise. But either
his genius was more flexible than he had supposed, or else a decade of professional practice had stood him in good stead, for he had captured (without caging it, as Stroud said) the raw fearsomeness of the predator. It would not have done to paint a false gentility into the beast’s features, and he had strenuously refrained from doing so.

On the other hand, Seaming was immodestly proud of his portrayal of the man. Having no actual face to base it on, he had been unable to resist the temptation to use Beauty
’s own, altered to be recognisably masculine. Every time he looked at the canvas, he felt more reluctant to part with it. For this reason he had draped it with a sheet, but Stroud uncovered it.

‘
A bit sterile,’ he offered. ‘Still, it looks like a much more congenial creature for a lady to keep in her boudoir. Which one do you think she’ll choose?’

Seaming was well used to Stroud
’s offhand manner and had long ago stopped letting it bother him.

‘
It was a beast that she fell in love with,’ he replied. ‘But I think my human is inhuman enough that she may be moved to feel something for him.’

‘
My friend, don’t be mistaken into believing that everyone is as intrigued by goodness and purity as you are.’

That evening a
thickly cloaked and muffled figure came to Seaming’s studio in a gig. It dropped his payment into his hands and took the paintings away.

Seaming was depressed. Stroud suggested Cake Street for supper and drinks. Seaming wasn
’t particularly keen to go so near the Ravels, but he never liked to appear timid in front of Stroud, so he pretended enthusiasm.

Over their stewed peaches
and anisettes, Stroud asked him why he had not attempted to persuade Beauty away from her monstrous husband entirely.

There was no need whatsoever, Seaming felt, to say how little chance he would have given himself in that
venture. ‘Because I’m not the kind of fellow who sees a marriage as crockery to be broken. Besides, whatever the difficulties of their relationship, there was love of a sort in it.’

‘
Love is rarely wise.’

‘
Love is rare. It should not be disturbed, lest it be destroyed.’

‘
You love the notion of love too much, Seaming.’

‘
And you wish that you had been in my place, so that Beauty might have fallen out of love with her beast and into love with you.’

Stroud looked uninterested in the theory.

Seaming swirled his drink around in the glass. ‘I hope they found a happy ending.’

‘
Thus speaks the idealist.’

‘
I suppose you’d prefer tragedy?’

‘
A bitter finish suits my palate best,’ Stroud admitted.

‘
Then you can console yourself that though I viewed my heart’s desire, I’ll never see her again, and no longer really have anything to hope for.’

Stroud made a face.
‘I’m afraid that’s a lot closer to melodrama, old sausage.’

In the green-lit room, Beauty lay with the wolf. On the wall before them were the two portraits.

She scratched his bearded chin.
‘I would have given you what you wanted for yourself. If you can remember anything, remember that.’

He nuzzled her hand.
‘I want beauty,’ he growled. ‘I want only beauty.’

‘
I loved a strange beast. I couldn’t love an ordinary man, and that painted saint is remote and abstract. If he were real I think he would love God and the whole world, and love me no more than anything else.’ Beauty dug her fingers into the long rough fur on his head. ‘I always loved you because you were a beast, not despite it. I suppose your mind will change again with your body. Look, you’re getting more beautiful already.’ She shifted as long, strong legs grew under the covers. ‘I’ll have to find someone else to play chess with, won’t I? But I’ll always look after you. I promise you that.’

The wolf whimpered in pain as his bone structure altered. Beauty soothed him with long strokes of her fingers down his neck. She farewelled the human intelligence fading from his features.

‘And what of your heart,’ she said, her voice dropping low, ‘does it still love me?’

The grey tongue licked
her hand. The huge head laid itself in her lap.

‘
If I change my mind, perhaps I can turn you into a man again, eh?’

A cunning, hungry glow came into the yellow eyes.

‘Is that a “no”?’ she murmured. Then she had to quickly get off the bed, for the wolf was rising.

As she let him out to hunt, he turned and gave her a look that she could not fathom. It might have been fierce adoration; it might have been something else entirely. It was the look of a nature alien to her own. He was again an unfathomable creature, again a riddle and a mystery, like all animals. Standing in the doorway, she watched him lope towards the dark forest of the park
.

For him, Beauty mused, if life and love continued to have complexities, they would be complexities beyond her ken.

‘Forever, Beast,’ said Beauty, knowing that he would hear, even though he would not understand.

When she could no longer see him, she beckoned to the old servant, who came forward, and to whom she said,
‘His room should be cleaned and aired. It may as well be done tomorrow.’

A room that was red, heat-stricken, ingrown, low. Scarlet walls, carpet, ceiling – the latter just above my head – and an igneous light, a sourceless, uninterrupted glare, as if the air were mixed with fire.

Call this room the Apartment of the Ape, since the Ape was its caretaker. None other than the Ape of Reason, he squatted on a barrel
– there was no other furniture – harvesting his fur for fleas, slipping a shriek of ‘Parasite lost!’ between the crushing and the eating of each one. He was insufferable, and I ached to get out of there and find you.

I was looking for you because I desired you. I also felt I deserved you. But beyond that I was very vague as to our respective characters. While you remained undisclosed, so did I.

I did not know who you were, only that you were both like and unlike me. You sparkled in a darkness far from this room. You were someone just ahead of me, someone with a front but without a back. If I could touch you, you would turn around and see me. And then? I could not imagine what would happen then; or, rather, I could predict a moment of mutual recognition, of enormous joy, but it was as if a firm barrier to further speculation lay just beyond that. I had only that momentary you ahead of me. But it was enough, like a beautiful scent coming from a distance down some ordinary street on an ordinary day, to make me yearn to go to its source.

I felt that I had once known you, loved you, and had somehow lost you. But I had no memory of your nature, the features of your face, your speech, or of how we had been parted. I felt as though I should have been able to just reach my hand forward, and there you would be. But I had stood and reached out my hand many times, just like that, ignoring the Ape
’s laughter, without touching anything but the stuffy air in the room. I am afraid I even cried, tears that quickly dried in the heat.