The Last Word

Twelve

‘They’re not for me.’

‘Of course not.’

‘They really are not.’

‘I know what you think, and I’ve said already they’re not for most people, Alice. These pompous, authoritarian old men are more than an acquired taste — a perversion, perhaps.’

But it amused Alice to insist that he must be in love with Mamoon. It was ‘obvious’. He asked her where she got that idea from.

‘The other day, when you called me in one of your miserable states, I had to endure a description of his lips and eyes.’ She repeated Harry’s fruity and ironical upper-class drawl. ‘“His eyes, dear Alice, will appear to be dark and impenetrable, but they contain the heat of chestnuts boiled for a hundred years—”’

‘Yes, that was for your information only. You will be thanked for coming here.’

He reiterated that credit would be racked up; a bonfire of money burned in Bond Street for her. And so, after much argument, evasion, as well as the promise of a trip to Venice, a great event had occurred: Alice had not only consented to visit, but he had found her waiting impatiently on the platform at the little station earlier that morning, tapping at her phone.

Now the couple were driving through the maze of the narrow lanes to the destination where all local roads met: Prospects House. Her fine head on its long neck turned, and, at the perfect moment, the hedges parted: cows grazed, birds sang, deer stood. While she drank in the restful beauty of the landscape, as he knew she would, he said he had to apologise for not exactly inviting her to the department of sangfroid.

‘But my body is uncoiling,’ she said. ‘This is almost a yoga mat moment. Why didn’t you say it was wonderful?’

‘Glance across. Tell me, how do I look to you?’

‘Did you shower? That T-shirt is gone. If I were you, I’d wax your hair now to make it look fuller. Did you enjoy last night’s dinner? Tell me all.’

Harry told her that before Mamoon passed out, he had introduced him to his friends as his darbari — meaning courtier, or catamite. Then Liana asked him for drugs and insisted he strip Mamoon. She hinted Harry might want to strip her too. Soon, he’d be qualified to work at the Old Vic as an actor’s dresser.

Alice said, ‘Have you been flirting? Oh God, Harry, I begged you to behave normally down here. Are you buggering everyone about?’

‘I assure you it’s her. Even her pasta is black. She smells my blood, my fear and weakness, and she’s at me, over-intimate, nosy, sneering at my background. When she calls me mediocre and uncreative, as she does most days, I shake with fury and cry alone.’

‘Does she whisper a truth?’

‘I have to smile and smile.’

‘Because Rob insists on it?’

‘I’m here to progress spiritually and materially.’ When Alice asked him how the interviews were going, he said, ‘As you advised so wisely, when standing outside Mamoon’s library, I count back from ten, before I can go in. But then, fearing my subject will insert the head of a spiky fish into my anus, I start to shake and have to get to the toilet before he begins to talk.’ Alice questioned his masculinity, as she often liked to do, to which he said, ‘If you read Mamoon’s essays, which you won’t, you would learn that he has eaten human flesh.’

‘Please—’

‘Not a large amount. Not an arm or throat. But at least, as they say about children, he tried it — fried, with salt and pepper. I do scare him a bit, Alice. When he spies me approaching with my notebook he looks perturbed, like a shellfish about to take a shake of lemon juice on the nose.’ He went on, ‘A lot depends on whether I can meet the former lover, Marion. Rob said I have to get Mamoon’s permission because if I make the old man any more hostile, he’ll throw me out.’

‘What scares you?’

‘His disapproval. His temper. You will see it all, and grasp the gravity here.’

‘Will I?’

‘I can’t help provoking him to consider me a worthless person.’

She wrapped her arms around herself. ‘Is he going to think that of me?’

‘Not at first. He will charm you. Later, he will rip your face off and feed it to the pigs.’

‘Oh for God’s sake, Harry, please take me back to the station. Why on earth did you invite me to this shit?’

‘My blackness is spreading, Alice. I’ve been seeing and hearing things that can’t be there or anywhere. At night, when I’m not hallucinating mad women, I can feel depression starting to burn me around the edges. If I sink into it, I’ll have to give this thing up and write a novel.’

‘Then we will be poor.’

‘Worse. Despised by my family. Indeed by all families.’

‘I hate to say I warned you.’

‘But you will see me come through the fire with most of my hair and at least one intact testicle.’

They passed the garage, the church and the pub, and turned into the lane. Soon they were bumping down the track towards the gingerbread house.

She leaned across, kissed him and told him he was sadistic. ‘I sense you looking forward to this. You won’t make a fuss when I disappear, will you? You know I like to run away.’

Pulling the numerous cases she’d arrived with from the back of the car, and carrying them to the house, he informed her the locals called the place the Overlook Hotel, and that the exits were padlocked. She would not disappear.

Just then there was a shout: Liana bustled out to greet, look over and embrace Alice. Alice loved the dogs in particular, and Liana was immediately keen to give Alice the tour.

But first Harry and Alice went to their room, and he lay down on the bed. Half asleep, he watched her look through her clothes. Alice changed at least three times a day, and spent most of her money, and a good deal of his, on clothes. She obtained a lot of them cheaply from friends in the business, and looked good. Her favourite items were the ones she’d never worn — those which were waiting for the ‘right occasion’ — of which there were a great many. Clothes and accessories were a person’s creativity; how someone looked was always a free decision, like a brushstroke on a painting. He would enjoy women more, she had informed him, if he understood their clothes.

When she moved in, the parade of dressing and undressing was frequent and regular. They both liked women’s shoes, and could fill many an evening with her feet. His tiny study had become a cave of her dresses and coats. Her clothes covered his books. That was the least of it. ‘I’m in debt, Harry. I can’t stop spending. A tea set, an espresso machine, jewellery, Milan — all those little necessary things have done for me.’ She wanted to borrow money from him, but unless Rob advanced him a bit more, Harry had nothing himself. If they were to buy a house and start a family, they had to be prudent, like everyone else in Europe.

He knew no one who was not mad, and he recognised Alice was not different from anyone else at the moment: there was no shame attached to debt; in fact, the debtless and thrifty were considered foolish losers. However, he had to urge her to cut down, as one would with any dependency. But she called shopping her ‘outlet’, and was worried that if she did cut back, she’d require another means of assuaging her anxiety.

Today, once she’d settled in, Harry thought it a good idea for Alice to spend time with Liana. With her ferocious but enthusiastic mind focused on food, furniture and the mood of her man, Liana would set a good example to the young woman.

‘Liana, darling, tell me, what do you think of my girl?’ whispered Harry, when, later that morning for a moment, he was alone with the older woman. ‘Should I send her packing?’

‘Seeing her bright face has cheered me up. She is a little haughty, as you said, but fresh and delicate. I loved her from the moment she showed taste. She said a wonderful thing. “Liana, this is definitely a feminine house.” She so reminds me of myself before I had hangovers and met Mamoon that she could be my daughter. Is she a model?’

‘People used to stop her on the street and tell her to go do it. So she was, briefly. But she’s too quiet to show her ass for money.’

‘She’s so skinny I can practically see through her. And her hair, what an extraordinary colour.’

‘It’s natural.’

‘Did I say it wasn’t? Platinum blonde, I suppose you’d call it. It’s almost white.’

‘Please, Liana, don’t give her any clothes. Why are you giving them away?’

‘What point is there to them, down here? Women only wear beautiful clothes so that men will want to remove them.’

Harry said, ‘Poor Alice, she was almost shaking this morning, Liana, in terror of you.’

She clutched his arm. ‘Of me? Never say that! I only want to scare Mamoon — and you, of course. Why?’

‘She’s afraid. Your depth of experience and sophistication was intimidating.’

‘The darling child, I must help and guide her. She lights this house up.’

Alice appeared. Liana shouted and waved, the dogs rushed to the car, and Liana whisked Alice into town to shop for lunch. Afterwards, Liana showed her the kitchen, and cooked with her, the two of them drinking a bottle of wine, while Liana talked continuously. Soon Liana was calling Alice her ‘pretty long-lost daughter’, and dragging her off with the dogs for a tour of the house, barns and grounds, and then of her clothes and shoes; these things, being of an Italian vintage, interested Alice.

When an older woman met a younger one and liked her, she gave her clothes. This cemented something between them, a hierarchy perhaps, as well as understanding. Liana also gave Alice Indian and Italian jewellery, so much so that when Harry next ran into Alice in the kitchen, he did a double take because Alice — who at the station had been wearing a simple orange jacket, denim shorts and strappy shoes — now resembled, as she jingle-jangled about the house, an actress from a Bollywood film. On closer examination Harry saw that Liana had in fact fashioned Alice into a younger version of herself.

Liana said, ‘What a creative girl your Alice is. She took one look at this dying place and threw out a dozen good ideas about how to buck it up. I will speak to my agent. We could set a TV series here. I see how you look at me as if I were a vulgarian. But we are conspiring together to get the house earning its living. We will fill it with young artists.’

‘How young?’

‘Do not risk your life by telling Mamoon this. He is already scorching in his room because lunch is delayed. But, thanks to Alice, there is asparagus, figs, red snapper, ice cream and the best mozzarella in the world — burrata — sent by my sister. Oh, but I am tearing my hair out with fear that he might be rude to her. Lately he’s been wild, because of you.’

When Harry asked her if she’d prepared Mamoon, as promised, for Alice, she was unconvincing. ‘Well, I did some ground work.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I insisted that although she’d never heard of Mamoon the writer, she would come to think highly of him, as she did of the great designers.’

He shivered. ‘You compared them?’

‘It was the context.’

‘What if he says something mad to her?’

‘I’ve warned him not to start talking about his dream. Hurry now, bring the minotaur before he blows up in rage.’