In the Wolf's Mouth Read Online Free PDF Page B

their heads just a little towards its glow and chiselled voices, their eyes vaguely involved in the carpet or what their hands were doing, his mother sewing, the needle rising and sinking, thread pulled tight with little tugs. The dogs slouched around the room, lay down and got up again. Will called Teddy to him and patted his smooth, hard head. The wireless made Will crave action and involvement with a physical feeling akin to hunger, an emptiness and readiness in his tightened nerves. He was very alert. He’d had years of this now: battle reports, a burning, piecemeal geography of the war, and war leaders and chaos, victoriesand defeats. And propaganda, of course. You couldn’t really know what was going on, but Will with his intelligence, deep reading and cynicism made shrewd guesses. The reports on the wireless were so charged with possibility and vibrant with what was never said or admitted about the battles, the terror and exaltation. The mere cheering of victories didn’t come close to what Will supposed the reality must be. The war was large and endlessly turbulent. There was room in it for someone like Will, for his kind of independent mastery. He could make elegant and decisive shapes out of the shapelessness. He wanted in. By it and with it and on it and in it .
    When the news reports gave way to dance band music, Will got up to go into his father’s study.
    The room had its own stillness. The book spines. The vertical pleats of the heavy blue curtains. The solidity of the desk with its paperweight, mother-of-pearl-handled paper knife, the blotter and wooden trays. Behind Will, the sofa on which his father had died.
    Somewhere in a drawer in this room was the medal his father never took out. The room’s composed silence was like Will’s father. He had always raised a hand halfway to his mouth and coughed quietly before he spoke, preparing himself to do so. Sometimes Will felt as though the empty study might do the same, clear its throat delicately and say something neat and short, something devastating. A terrifying rupture of his reserve had presaged Will’s father’s death. He’d come back from the hunt after being unhorsed. He’d landed badly, apparently, and sat down to dinner looking palewith a deep red scratch trenching his cheek just beside his nose. There was a small notch taken out of his forehead also. Ed asked what had happened.
    ‘What do you bloody well think happened?’
    ‘Darling …’
    ‘What are you leaping into the breach for? Damnfool question. And I have a pounding headache. Christ.’
    He leaned over and vomited onto the carpet right there at his feet. They all sat there waiting through the noise, the wrenching up out of his body. Teddy ambled over afterwards and sniffed at it.
    Father sat up straight and gulped water. ‘Don’t all gawk at me like that. I’m obviously ill. I’m going to lie down.’
    He stood up, swayed, and stalked out to his study. Half an hour later, Will’s mother found him dead on the study sofa. Dead and gone having hardly ever said anything at all to his sons. There was much to cherish, of course, in Will’s memories but he was gone, a man who had always known more than he said.
    Will read along a shelf. Something fine and sharply enhancing of his intellect. Lucretius on the nature of the universe? Why not? It had that fine brilliance and fearlessness as a description of the world, bright bodies in space. Distinctive also. Let the other fellows always be quoting Cicero and Virgil. And reading Latin would keep his mind active. Will would have this and his Arabic poetry. The Lucretius was a squarish, green-covered volume. Inside he saw his father’s pasted ex libris , signed with his fastidious, vertical pen strokes. Henry Walker, 1921 .
    He began reading it that night under the low, slopingceiling of his boyhood bedroom, intending to remember and look up the words he didn’t know.
    In the morning he drew the curtains. A neutral day, the light white