The Last Word (11 page)

‘I swear, this is the first refreshing night’s sleep I’ve had here,’ Harry said when he and Alice woke up the next day and were making love. She was the only woman he liked to look at first thing in the morning; kissing her then was what he was born to do. ‘Thank God you came, and you’re with me. Didn’t the noise madden you?’

‘What noise?’

‘The animals outside. The screaming foxes trapped by Tories.’

‘That’s just the country, Harry. They are natural sounds. But there is another noise.’

‘What is it? Where?’

‘Why are you so jumpy? Has something disturbed you?’

‘Yes, I’m disturbed all the time here. I think Mum is calling to me through the walls. Dead mothers talk even more than live ones.’

‘What does she say?’

‘She asks me what I’m doing here.’

‘That’s what mothers are supposed to do.’

He said, ‘Keep holding my penis.’

‘Just a minute. Come,’ she called. ‘Oh big, big wow. Wow.’

The door opened and Julia came in bearing a breakfast tray.

‘Good morning, ma’am,’ Julia said, placing the tray on the low table at the end of the bed. Harry shrank under the sheets. It was the only time his penis had contracted in Julia’s presence. ‘And sir. Sorry it’s me – Mum’s not well. She had a fall onto her knee.’

‘Not a push? I’m sorry to hear that, Julia. I hope she recovers soon.’

‘Thank you, sir. Can I pour the tea for you?’

‘That would be perfect, my dear.’

‘There’s toast and eggs downstairs. I’ll run your bath for you, ma’am.’

‘Thank you,’ said Alice. When Julia had gone, she whispered, ‘Is it like P. G. Wodehouse every day?’

‘Oh yes. I haven’t lifted a finger all the time I’ve been here. I’ve found the indolence utterly enervating.’

Alice and Harry went down to join Liana, while Julia and her mother moved slowly around them waving rags and squirting unguents. Although Alice had asked Julia for an ironing board, Julia had somehow found their clothes and elected to do Alice and Harry’s washing and ironing, explaining that not only would she be offended if Alice did the work herself, but she even might lose her job.

‘I beg you, Alice ma’am, it’s my only livelihood,’ she said, ‘since they closed the abattoir.’

The closing of the abattoir had generated many knock-ons in the area, most of them deleterious. Working for Liana and Mamoon at the weekends, Julia had also put in some hours at the abattoir during the week, in order to increase her earnings. Now, since she was aware that Liana was becoming fed up with her, not only did she take care of her and Mamoon, she cleaned and tidied Harry and Alice’s room and bathroom, and organised Harry’s papers, notebooks and stationery. Harry felt slightly oppressed by Julia’s ever-presence, but there was nothing he could do about that, nor about the way her eye watched over him and Alice from a suitable vantage point, usually near the skirting board.

After the long weekend, Alice realised she was owed some annual leave and decided to stay on instead of fleeing back to the city, as she had said she would. She had become almost romantic about the place, despite the fact that, as Harry complained, it took an hour to buy milk and you had to wear wellingtons most of the time, if not rainwear and a vest. Alice said now that she loved Mamoon and Liana, who felt like parents to her, and that spending this intimate time with Harry – witnessing his anguish and hearing him worry, the exposure of his need – was one of the best things to have happened to their relationship.

While Harry worked, Alice helped Mamoon choose his clothes, before taking him on drives and walks, where she was beginning a series of photographs of him in the countryside, leaning against trees, ‘for the book’.

‘I thought he hated being photographed?’

‘Not by me. He listens to a woman,’ Alice said later, when they took a canoe down the balmy little river. Alice sat sedately in the front in nautical stripes and a floppy hat, steering occasionally by dipping her paddle into the water like someone stirring their tea. ‘I feel he wants to understand and help me.’

‘Help you what?’

‘Live more successfully.’

‘What is that?’

‘To have more pleasure.’

Earlier that morning he had watched her walking ahead of him, in the sunshine, slow, dreamy, sensual, almost vacant and outside time, a creature in another dimension, and he thought, guiltily, that that, for him, was a woman: always other, and a provocation. Now he handed her a peach from a basket at his feet, and watched her bite into it, the juice running down her chin.

‘What a beautiful pussy you are . . .’

‘Thank you.’

‘I’m surprised to hear you say he listened and was interested,’ said Harry, handing her a napkin. ‘Friends of his I’ve interviewed say he’s self-absorbed. He had a tantrum the other night because a tomato was too cold.’

‘I’d hate it if he had a tantrum. I wouldn’t know what to do. I’d probably just cry. How did Liana deal with it?’

‘“Cold,
habibi
? Oh dear,” she said, picking up the relevant tomato, sticking it up her dress and placing it between her thighs. “A cold tomato. That must be the worst thing in the world. Why don’t I warm it up for you? Is that better?” When she replaced it on the plate he took a bite. “That is indeed better, memsahib,” he said. “You know I need to spare my teeth.”’

Alice, for whom vulgarity and humour were a portal to madness, said, ‘There’s nothing in it for him with the men. With the women he really gives us the gaze. He makes anarchic jokes and hums the songs by Dido I’ve introduced him to.’

‘Dido?’

‘The Stéphane Grappelli was getting me down.’

‘Me too. But he hums Dido? The two of you listen to
White Flag
?’

‘He la-la’s along. It’ll be Tracey Thorn next and then I’ll slowly manoeuvre him all the way to Amy Winehouse. What would you say, Julia? Does he listen to you?’

‘Yes, he does,’ said Julia, who was waiting at the little jetty with an armful of towels. Harry and Alice had learned that you merely had to say her name for her to materialise, like a spirit. ‘He doesn’t treat me like a servant. He never has, since I was little. He sits there and talks to me about what’s in the paper when he reads them in the morning, asking me who the people are.’

‘You see,’ said Alice, moving towards Julia and being helped up the bank. ‘Go to him, Harry, and talk. Take your chance. I wagged my finger and said, “Harry’s getting insomnia and depression. Do not upset my partner, Mr Writer, or you’ll find that things will not go well.”’

‘Did that go down a treat?’

‘He will give more to you now. He seemed to be bubbling over, earlier, and may say you can meet the other woman.’

‘Marion?’

‘Now, go,’ she said. ‘I want to spend some time with Julia.’

‘Why?’

‘We have similar backgrounds. And similar interests. Come on, my dear,’ she said to her. ‘Let’s get together. Let’s talk about men, babies and how fat we were as children. Let’s frighten Harry and then go shopping with Liana this afternoon. I want to buy perfume. And perhaps later we could dance in the barn.’

Harry said, ‘Can’t I come with you?’

‘Of course not. You have important things to do.’

‘Would it be possible for us to chat a little today?’ whispered Harry, pleased to have found Mamoon in the library.

To Harry’s surprise, Mamoon said, ‘Yes, why not, I am keen,’ though he did glance at Harry’s clipboard as if it were his death certificate. ‘Do you have any exciting questions for once?’

‘I wondered if you might feel invigorated after your morning massage?’

‘My skin is singing. And you have put me in the unfortunate position of having to think about you, something I’ve been reluctant to do.’

‘Think about me in what way?’

‘You’re surprised.’

‘Gobsmacked, sir.’

‘Good.’ Mamoon said, ‘Your fascination with the female body isn’t unnatural or unusual. In fact the body of the young woman is the world’s most significant object, admired and desired by homosexuals, of course, as well as by other women, babies, lesbians, children, fashion designers and men. No wonder Muslims hide the woman like a filthy picture, while their fundamentalists remind us that female sexuality is the biggest problem of all. For these people the woman is already a whore. They’re right to be so concerned,’ he went on. ‘The young female body is at the centre of the world, and usually at the centre of most elections – abortion, single mothers, maternity leave, prostitution, incest, abuse, the hijab . . . The woman is where we all come from, and where we all want to go. The woman’s body makes knowledge disappear. It’s amazing that anyone has time to think about philosophy, literature, psychology or history. Women know it too, which is why they hurry on the street. No beautiful woman is a slow walker.’

‘When did you first get interested in this?’ Harry asked him, adjusting his digital recorder but not pressing ‘record’ yet.

‘I can remember as a young man in Madras reading something by Bertrand Russell, who was famous for knowing everything, and a huge passion of mine then.

‘He wrote somewhere of his emotional life being “irrational”. By God, he disapproved of the “irrational”. Russell’s loves, hates, desires – the entire bodily caboodle, and all the greatest philosopher in the world could say was that it was “irrational”. It made me want to say my say, as if the whole thing still required explaining, to hunt down these irrational people, the ones so powerful in the world, and hear their speech.’

‘What is the cure, sir?’

‘Halt your naughty finger before I crush it. Do not record this: it is between us. You ask for the cure – I presume the cure for excessive appetite?’

‘Yes.’

Mamoon laughed. ‘All religions have concerned themselves with the weaning of individuals from their desire. Who, after all, can live with their own wanting? Let’s think about endurance, as the Stoics would have it. I like to read Seneca, who says it can be borne. Or self-knowledge, as Plato preferred it, which might dissipate it. But appetite is all we have and we cannot or should not be cured of it. I’m no Freudian, yet no one can deny that desire is the motor of our existence, as it is for any child who wants to go on living. As your enthusiasm indicates, it is usually out of control and it is tied to madness, unfortunately, because the object – the woman in mind – can only be elusive, and will evade one. She will, naturally, have other preoccupations, other lives. This will create jealousy, the belief that the other has what we don’t have. Proust made a mint out of this simple idea. Still, more desire, less punishment, I say.’

Harry said, ‘You mention Bertrand Russell and his horror of disorientation.’

‘So?’

Harry glanced at the clipboard, noticed a question and looked up at Mamoon. ‘Isn’t it the case that when you met Marion for the first time you experienced a physical connection you’d never had with anyone? That you experienced, at that time, a large bout of irrationality which de-centred you?’

‘You are creating a history for me, one that is parallel to my life. But why don’t you ask her?’

‘Obviously, I need to do that. Would you approve? Can I say that, sir?’

‘That would be up to Marion. But darling Alice with her massages and photographs – and how lucky you are there – has convinced me to be more co-operative with you.’

‘She puts my case?’

‘She is kind, you know, and has pleaded for you. She has thought about my suffering, too, which will be over quicker if I let you in more. Go to Marion and see. I am so looking forward to her giving you a flea in your ear, as she has done to other snoopers. One begging scribbler she tipped a bottle of ink over.’

‘Why?’

‘You will see – ha – she is chilli hot!’

‘Is that why you didn’t marry her?’

Mamoon laughed and said, ‘It would be true to say there are occasions when certain pleasures can be so strong that you might have to rethink your life entirely, as a way of taking them in – or avoiding them.’

Harry said, ‘Pleasure can knock you right off your feet, it is true. Do you mean that a series of orgasms can be a new beginning?’

Mamoon got up. ‘Whatever Marion says, I will always be the stranger in your book.’

‘Thanks for your blessing, sir,’ said Harry. ‘A final question, one which has just occurred to me, I don’t know why. Do you regret not having children?’

‘Not having children has been the one bright spot in my life so far,’ said Mamoon. ‘Now, pack your bags and fuck off out of my damn sight. I need peace again.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘You will thank me a thousand more times,’ he said, giggling. ‘Particularly when you sneak back here with your soul bleeding. I can’t wait.’

After almost ten days, Alice and Harry went back to London. Lotte, from Rob’s office, had sent Harry airline tickets and a busy itinerary for the next few weeks. Rob also wanted Harry to push on with the book; he needed to see at least a couple of chapters by the end of the month.

Harry was relieved to get out of the claustrophobic atmosphere of Mamoon’s place. In town, he and his father and brothers watched Chelsea and ate; afterwards, their father liked it when they took part, as a family, in the local pub quiz. The prize could have been £10 million, it was taken so seriously by the men. The twins were good at sport and music, and their father had science covered. Harry did literature. They came second and were not happy, Father castigating them as if he’d just received a unpleasant letter from the school head.

Harry was reminded who he was. His brothers weren’t impressed or intimidated by Mamoon. There was a cold severity in Mamoon’s work, and, because he had never written a book the title of which everyone could recognise, and he rarely appeared on television, they didn’t give a damn who he was. What they didn’t like was their little brother being run ragged by a manic egotist who wanted a flattering portrait of his big head. Harry saw that, in the shadow of Mamoon’s personality, he had allowed his identity to be attacked; Liana and Mamoon seemed to be able to do or say anything they liked to him. And his father had said, ‘So far you’ve been the mirror he needs, Harry, and why wouldn’t he be happy?’

‘He’s benign.’

‘Are you sure? Why don’t you mess with his mind a little, twist his penis, confront him, and see what happens? Sometimes a little disorder can be creative.’

Harry and Alice went to Paris for the flim-flam of the fashion shows, before taking the overnight train to Venice – Harry’s mother’s favourite city – where Alice had never been. When he and Alice woke up in the morning, in the bunks of the sleeper, it was a hop, skip and jump to the Grand Canal. They were barely off the vaporetto, exploring. Harry was keen to see Alice seeing things, to watch her as the world unfolded. One evening she took his hand. She had taken a pregnancy test. It was positive. They hadn’t exactly planned things, but they had discussed them a little, and she was pleased; was he?

Yes, yes, and maybe. They were joined for good now. He was shocked, and confused and afraid. Suddenly the future had a shape and an inevitability. There would be duties. He would become a different sort of person, and they would know one another in a new way. ‘Christ,’ he said to his father. ‘I’m done for.’

‘About time. Welcome to the world,’ Father said. ‘Do you know how to think about it?’

‘No . . . Not yet.’

‘Does she?’

‘She has her friends. They are gossiping and planning already. I feel alone.’

‘It will join you to the world, Harry. You can’t run all your life. I love being a father, and I suspect you will too. You’re a better man than you believe you are.’

After a few days, Alice went back to work, and Harry, with this new knowledge growing in him, flew to India to look at the places Mamoon had lived as a child.

For two and a half weeks he met family members and acquaintances of the old man, along with those Mamoon had supposedly snubbed, insulted, exploited, or fucked. He discovered what a good scholarship boy Mamoon had been, as well as the fact he’d been aloof and appeared to consider himself superior to those around him. ‘The cut and strut of him in his blazer with shining buttons!’ Harry was told. ‘The looking down of it!’ He heard from several older people that Mamoon had not been a ‘real’ Indian, and was as alienated on the subcontinent as he would be in Britain. He spoke English at home, except with the servants, read only English and French literature, knew little about Islam or Hinduism, both of which he considered to be the opium of the masses, and had rarely visited the countryside.

Mamoon’s mother was religious, and stayed in her room praying, leaving only to consult experts on the Qur’an. The father had sponsored the boy’s ambition, Harry believed, but not his pleasure, which he opposed. He had had no intention of producing a womanising, hard-drinking, cosmopolitan playboy, sitting in the cafes of European capital cities in worn shoes, borrowing money, stewing in self-pity and debt while discussing Bernard Shaw and Trotsky.

But the father hadn’t entirely succeeded. Harry heard, from a decent source, something stranger and more intriguing, and began to see what the father had been up against. Mamoon had been a seductive teenager, apparently pulling both older men and women – the mothers of school friends; the school nurse; a policeman’s wife, and, it was said, the policeman himself – into his sphere.

Like many Indian patriarchs, Mamoon’s father, in his pride and hope, was determined from the start to send his son to the hated mother country to be educated. The son remained the father’s dream, though, and the father had only a little idea of how wrenching the move would be for Mamoon, and what snobbery, contempt and difficulty he would face. The father couldn’t think of his despairing son wandering the London streets evening after evening, nearly mad with loneliness and anxiety, relieved occasionally by a beer and a whore. Even if it was a bit tough, it wouldn’t be for long, since the boy would return home a better man, and continue to be his lonely father’s prop, his mirror, his
chamcha
. ‘Remember me,’ reminds the father, endlessly, colonising the son’s mind. And not only that, ‘live with me.’ Mamoon refused. In his suffering, Mamoon wanted to join ‘the larger or complete civilisation’, as he put it later. He dismissed his dad and never lived at home again. The father ensured his own death through grief because of it.

It might appear now that Mamoon always knew what he was doing, that his progress was almost inevitable. Harry learned what determination and strength Mamoon showed, not only in remaining in inhospitable Britain to earn money by his pen, but to make himself into an original writer, one not seen before, speaking from the position of a colonial subject or subaltern, but one without hatred, and with fascination if not identification with the colonisers’ culture. Eschewing contemporary causes and attitudes, Mamoon fashioned himself into a considerable and successful artist from a background which had enabled few before. For a time he did an essential thing, bringing the new into culture, speaking from where no one had spoken. He was rewarded too, and not only that. Any fool would recognise that a successful ‘bolter’ would always inspire recrimination and the radiation of envy. But, at home in India, Mamoon’s rise and achievement was accompanied by a level of resentment, scrutiny and criticism which could have bewildered if not destroyed a lesser man.

Some of it was self-engineered: Mamoon’s insolence, arrogance and the insanity of some of his statements were no secret. But much of this envy was born of bitterness towards the white man. His former friends and allies believed that Mamoon had become ‘white’. For them any betterment was betrayal. Those he left behind said he had made a pact with the devil and violated his forebears and family. ‘I hope that turns out to be true,’ Mamoon remarked to a friend, waving goodbye. ‘Particularly the violation.’

Harry had learned much about all this in India, and had also had time to study the notebooks Julia had given him. With renewed enthusiasm for his subject –
how do you write such complication? –
he flew with some relief to New York. After three days he went to see Mamoon’s former lover Marion, who lived in a small flat in Portland.

Characteristically, Rob hadn’t exactly ‘organised things’. For the last few weeks Marion had been making it difficult for Harry, cancelling proposed meetings, phoning to ask him more questions, and generally acting like a coquette. All the while she ensured that he was aware she had something valuable to give him, and that there would be a price, though he hadn’t been told what it was. She also insisted on various agents and publishers vouching for his good intentions and honesty. It wasn’t until Mamoon had spoken to Rob, and Rob to her, that Marion gave him a firm appointment. At last he could go to her flat.

The door opened.

With long white hair halfway down her back, and moving slowly and unsteadily on sticks, Marion led Harry into the small, overheated apartment. Relieved to meet her, Harry had tried to take her hand but she insisted on pushing her face towards his, and he kissed her cheeks. She gripped his hand as if she’d touched no one for some time.

She told Harry that as she had cataracts she was unable to read much, watch TV, or clean. What she wanted was conversation, but her family had long deserted her, and she had few visitors now, apart from some nosy students and a secretary who helped her with her writing by taking dictation. There were few creatures on the earth of less interest than a woman in her mid-seventies, but some people were interested in Mamoon Azam. He was the one card she had left.

‘Please, before you interrogate
me
,’ she said, bringing Harry tea and biscuits before sitting down with a blanket over her knees, ‘would you be good enough to answer
my
queries?’

‘Of course.’

‘Do you have anything of his I can touch?’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘A tie. A book he gave you.’

He gestured helplessly. ‘No, sorry, I didn’t think.’

‘He didn’t send anything?’

‘Only me.’

She said he was never particularly thoughtful. ‘But I have his reading glasses here, which I polish every Sunday, while recalling the smell and touch of his skin, remembering his smoky voice – gravelly, harsh sometimes, but caressing – and his careful timing when he made me laugh.’

She could imitate Mamoon well, and appeared to enjoy conversations with him, playing both parts. She asked about Liana without agitation, wanting to know how tall and wide she was and whether she was able to deal with Mamoon’s moods and tantrums, how her cooking was, whether she liked to shop, if she had indigestion, how well she slept, and whether she could cope with his nightmares and whether she made him laugh.

She wanted to hear what Mamoon was working on, whether he dyed his hair now and how his health was, particularly his back, and his stomach and bowels too, as well as his teeth. She needed to know if he still did this or that with his head when you asked him a difficult question. She wanted also to know about the house and its land – the place she’d only seen photographs of, but where she had believed, at one time, she’d spend the rest of her life with the man she loved.

And then she laughed shrilly, before, inevitably, weeping. He wept too, as it seemed participatory and kind, and they called one another soppy. He looked for tissues, and she went to the bathroom to wash her face.

When she was ready, he turned on the tape.

A Colombian with an English Jewish mother, Marion told him how she met Mamoon at a reading, and how they fell in love. Over a period of five years he had visited her often, and they travelled together in India, the United States and Australia. She had left her dull husband soon after meeting Mamoon, and had taken a little place in New York’s West Village, because Mamoon was thinking of setting a novel there. ‘Don’t forget,’ she said. ‘He was a Muslim man, and basically thought of women as servants. I advanced him, but there’s only so far you can go.’

They had always had plenty to say to one another and, like the most attractive men, Mamoon was amusing and sharp – about literature and politics, about others, and primarily, about himself. He was self-absorbed, but too anxious and insecure to be self-admiring. He worried all the time, she said, and could become absolutely frenzied about his work, which kept him sane, just about. He would show her drafts of what he was doing, and she would help him, sitting across the table with a pencil. He listened to her opinions and replied seriously. He made her feel valued and creative, and she knew how those famous books were made.

‘Some of the interviews in
Evenings with the Killer
were fabricated, of course. That must be well known.’

‘No one else has said that. Didn’t he tape them?’

‘Yes, and they were transcribed, sometimes by Peggy, sometimes by me or a secretary. When he sat down to write up the material, considerable work was done. He was never at that famous execution. He admitted to me that he was only “almost” there.’

‘He’s a creative artist who made—’

‘Or made up,’ she said. ‘He omitted material, altered other things, fudged and even rewrote quotes, to suit the piece. He wrote about places he’d never been, and things he’d never seen.’

Harry shrugged. ‘That’s novelists for you. Bastards.’

She said, ‘No doubt you’ll find yourself doing the same.’ She was looking at him. ‘It’s occurring to you that that would be a good idea.’

‘“Stolen-telling,” Joyce calls it. And Mamoon did say, rather wisely, “I hope you’re not going to be one of those fool writers who thinks the facts are sufficient.” He thinks that originality is the art of stealing the right things. He’s an entertainer . . .’

‘How cheap and nasty you are. I suspect you might be something of an argumentative nuisance. Is there really any point in us going on with this? If I could stand up, I’d stand up right now,’ she said, and turned away.

Today would be difficult. Would he get anywhere? Should he walk out? He waited in silence, as his father would have suggested.

‘You gave up a lot for Mamoon,’ he said at last.

‘Yes, yes, everything.’

‘How could it not be difficult for you to speak about it?’

‘Exactly.’

There was more silence; then he sighed in relief as she went on. Her husband was no loss, but her beloved children had been furious that she’d traded her family for what her ex-husband called ‘personal excitement’. But Mamoon, like Omar Sharif, whom she believed he resembled, was a man a woman could give things up for. Marion loved him, he was her destiny; she thought that love was the only game in town. Although he came to America less often because of Peggy’s incapacity, she had taken it for granted he would look after her for life. He had said he would.

Marion had had no reason not to believe Mamoon. Their love life had been more fulfilling and stronger than anything she had encountered before, and they had been together properly. Apart from her, there had only been Peggy, and, at the end, she found they were both waiting for poor Peggy to die. She had nothing against Peggy – though she did refer to her as a ‘bed-blocker’ – and she admired Mamoon for sticking by her. He had fulfilled his ‘futile’ duty.