Hour of the Wolf Read Online Free PDF Page B

suppose so,’ he said. ‘Yes, you’re right. I’m ravenous.’
    During the rest of the evening he hadn’t repeated his offer of marriage – but nor had he retracted it. He liked the idea of it hanging in the air, as it were, without their needing to address it or comment on it. It was a sort of string between them that didn’t need to be plucked, but which was there nevertheless, binding them together. He also had the impression that Vera had nothing against it. That she felt more or less the same.
    A sort of secret. A link.
    And when they had sex later, it was as if they had drunk from the well of love.
    Incredible. In a way, it was incredible.
    How could life take off in entirely different directions without warning? Directions which turned all the habits one had acquired, all one’s powers of reason and all one’s worldly wisdom upside down? How was it possible?
    And to cap it all, in just a few weeks. First that horrific Thursday evening, then Vera Miller and true love. He couldn’t understand it. Was it possible to understand it?
    He spent most of the rest of that Sunday evening lying on the sofa with just one candle lit, thinking about how he seemed to be being hurled from one extreme to the other. Between feelings of doubtful, confusing, inadequate conceptions of reality on the one hand, and a very calm and rational interpretation of his existence on the other. Reason and emotions, but without connections, without synapses.
    He eventually decided that despite appearances to the contrary, there was only one reality and that applied constantly: his feelings regarding it and his attempts to control it might vary, but it was only the point of view that varied. The perspective.
    Two sides of the same coin, he thought. Like a toggle-switch. The mundane and the incomprehensible. Life and death? The thin band that separated them.
    Remarkable.
    After the eleven o’clock news on the radio he took out the letter again. Read it one more time before sitting down at his desk again. Sat there for a good while in the darkness, giving free rein to his thoughts, and soon – very soon – he began to discern another way of approaching things when he had previously comprehended only two.
    A third way. It appealed to him. He sat there for a long time, trying to weigh up its advantages and disadvantages.
    But it was still too soon to choose. Much too soon. Until he had received more detailed instructions from ‘A friend’, all he could do was wait.
    Wait for the next day’s postal delivery.

5
    He was twenty minutes early. While he waited behind the wheel of his car in the almost empty car park, he read the instructions one more time. Not that it was necessary – he’d been rereading them all day: but it was a way of passing the time.
    The money : banknotes in bundles of fifties and one hundreds packed in double plastic bags and placed inside a carrier bag from the Boodwick department store.
    Place : Trattoria Commedia at the golf course out at Dikken.
    Time : Tuesday, six p.m. exactly.
    Instructions : Sit down in the bar. Order a beer, take a few swigs, go to the gents after about five minutes. Take the carrier bag containing the money with you, leave it well camouflaged by paper towels in the rubbish bin. If there are others in the gents, wait until they have gone. Then leave the toilets, go straight out to your parked car and drive away.
    That was all.
    The same sort of paper as last time. The same handwriting, presumably the same pen.
    The same signature: A friend .
    No threats. No comments about his weakness.
    Nothing but the necessary instructions. It couldn’t be any simpler.
    At two minutes to six he opened the side window and got out of the car. He had parked as far away from the restaurant as possible, next to the exit. Without seeming to hurry, he walked quickly the fifty or so metres over the windswept gravel to the restaurant. It was low and L-shaped, its façade plastered with dark pebble-dash. Gaudi windows