The Last Word

Thirty-two

Travelling with the kids was a major operation, and such manoeuvres had to be planned in advance. But they intended to turn this trip around in twenty-four hours, as Lotte had suggested to Harry. Alice was known for her list-making, Julia was recognised in the family for her ability to pack things in the car, while Harry would complain, confuse and eat all the sandwiches before they started out. Having been consulted, Rob considered it an excellent idea for them to ‘complete the process’, and by the late afternoon they were gaily bowling down the motorway, the kids vomiting.

Liana heard the car and came out into the yard with the dogs to greet them, standing on the spot where Harry had first seen her when he arrived afraid and excited with Rob, that first Sunday afternoon. Where once Mamoon’s temper and Liana’s will had kept everything alive, the house and gardens were beginning to look as if the original wilderness would return. Mamoon wouldn’t use his writing room again; Scott was growing weed in the greenhouse, and renting the former ‘archive’ barn as a repairs workshop. The yard was scattered with semi-dismantled cars and metal parts. Scott himself stood there dirt-smeared and bare-chested, idly knocking a monkey-wrench against an oil can, with two of his gang beside him.

Julia greeted her brother, and then went to look for Ruth, to console her. A couple of weeks back, one night, a male friend of Ruth’s — perhaps a paramour — had attacked another of her friends in the house, stabbing him with a broken bottle, almost murdering him. There had been blood and despair; there would be a court case and prison. Before his second stroke, Ruth had gone to Mamoon, the patriarch, and begged for help, consolation and wisdom, but he only gave her a look of pity that said, ‘How can anyone live like you?’

Liana had had an operation to remove a growth; her eyes, behind thick glasses, were tired, and she wore no make-up or jewellery, just jeans and a too large sweater. She’d never been so thin or so sad, she said, or so happy to see her friends and the ‘grandchildren’ she adored.

After his strokes and heart failure, as well as weeks in hospital, Mamoon had stubbornly insisted on being at home, and, despite her own weakness, Liana was determined to look after him. She had had Scott bring a bed into the library, where Mamoon, propped up and surrounded by roses, could see out into the garden, watching Liana as she worked.

Ruth and her sister Whynne bathed and changed Mamoon; Scott moved him about, and Liana sat and whispered poetry into him, books from his childhood, Alice in Wonderland, parts of Dickens, stories from the Thousand and One Nights, the sports news and, his favourite, the Song of Songs — ‘I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine; he feeds among the lilies. Thou art beautiful, my love’ — because he said he liked to hear her voice, to know someone was there.

Alice was keen to see Mamoon. She missed the stillness, and sense of distance and space, you got at Prospects House; she missed Liana’s cooking and the energetic talk. All the same, she had been uneasy about going; she had rung Liana often and knew how unwell Mamoon was, yet she was still shocked and upset to see him. She wanted to keep on good terms with Liana, and perhaps work with her in the future. But Liana was too wretched, preoccupied and weepy to think about that. She was delighted to have them there.

Insisting that Mamoon had become very fond of him, Liana asked Harry to sit with him. And Harry did sit there, wondering about the relation between his book and the man, even holding the old man’s hand. Harry missed their combative conversations; nobody had been so tough on him, or made him think so hard. At one point, when Harry wiped saliva from Mamoon’s mouth, and dared to take out his phone and photograph him, Mamoon looked directly at him and said, ‘How long can you stay, Latif? Did you bring your homework? Is the story finished?’

In this house of the almost dead, Ruth, her sister and Liana were delighted to see the babies, which meant that Harry and Alice could walk again in the familiar woods and beside the river, with the dogs.

Alice would get a flat, as would he; Julia would find a room nearby. He and Alice had almost stopped speaking about anything except money and the children, and how their care for them would be divided up. Now Harry said to her, ‘Did you read Mamoon’s new novel?’

She shook her head; he explained that, as far as he knew, it concerned the love of an older man for a younger woman, the partner of a journalist.

‘He did it then, he wrote the fiction he’d been talking about,’ she said. ‘He’d been sitting in that room every day for months, staring at the wall, while you burrowed into his privacy. I said I understood that,’ she said. ‘I have that desolate nature.’

‘You do?’

‘But you have helped me with it, Harry, listening to me. I respect you for that, as well as for you being relatively stable and all.’

He thanked her.

‘I didn’t believe Mamoon, in fact. His bin was full of screwed-up paper. I opened one out, thinking it might make a souvenir for the children. It was covered in doodles. He really did believe he was finished.’ She went on, ‘And you were asking him questions about things he couldn’t, or didn’t want to remember — certainly not in that way — questions which made him feel his life was being retold as farce by an idiot. There was something else.’

‘There was?’

‘He’d reread Anna Karenina. He worshipped Tolstoy for his understanding of marriage, of women, and of children. He’d done his best, but he knew he’d never do anything as true, as sympathetic, as universal.’

‘Why didn’t he talk to Liana about these things?’

‘He was afraid. She was demanding, asking for more love, sex, money. He couldn’t work and he couldn’t satisfy her. What was it with women and him that always went wrong?’ She said, ‘I suggested it must be more than peculiar, disorienting, in fact, having someone write your life, interview you about it as if you were almost dead, while living in your house. At that moment he had the idea of writing about what you were doing and how it made him see himself differently.’

Harry said, ‘He finally flogged the archive and some of his land. He rented the London flat to calm Liana. He was able to see you regularly at a friend’s place.’

‘Does it say all that?’

‘Liana didn’t know.’

‘I couldn’t hurt her. She would have misunderstood.’

‘Nor did I know. You deceived me. God knows, I’ve done the same to you in other ways.’

She said suddenly, ‘I’ve had enough of you.’

‘The same. Bored to death.’

‘Why won’t you just fuck off?’

‘Don’t hit me like that,’ he said, taking her arm. ‘Alice, I know Mamoon considered me mediocre—’

She giggled. ‘Yes, impatient and seething with fury. And perhaps with a personality disorder!’ She went on, ‘Does it say in the book that he insisted I give you up for him? He liked to be massaged — otherwise I didn’t have to touch him. I could have lovers. All I had to do was talk to him.’

‘Why?’

‘I guess he was in love.’

‘How nice was that for you?’

‘I was flattered, I liked the attention. You didn’t give me much.’

‘Nor you me.’

‘He was too forceful and demanding, but it was a good experience with him. To be close to a man like that, to have the chance to learn to think, it’s unforgettable.’

He said, ‘What was your reply to his request?’

‘I reminded him of his duty towards Liana. She is a great friend to me.’ She shrugged. ‘I won’t read the book. I know it’s a story. I became his hallucination, all made up and left behind with nothing. Sometimes you can know too much. I feel as if I’ve been shredded. I can’t take any more life right now, if these terrible coils and circles are life. Are they, Harry? Do you know? Won’t you answer me for once?’

He had heard enough. He began to walk back, and she followed him. He said, ‘I wish he could hear about the new and well-paid job I have lined up.’

‘What is it?’

‘It is a gift from Rob, because he pities me after the last job, and wants to give me an easy time. While working on the book about Mum, I will be ghost-writing the autobiography of an international footballer. I will be a centre forward’s horse whisperer. I can safely say we have class, at last, as a family.’

But they were not really a family, and, as she laughed, he recalled his father’s words to him about his mother, which were, roughly: she was your mum, Harry, but to me she was just another girl. Harry wondered if, in twenty years’ time, he’d say such a thing to his sons.

Perhaps Alice was thinking something similar. ‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out between us. But we’re very pleased and grateful, Harry, that you can support us all.’

‘Any time.’ He said, ‘Please hold me, hold me one last time.’

‘Never.’

It was Lotte’s idea that they return to the house and Harry add the account to the end of the book: a few paragraphs about the dying writer. Now, before supper Harry stood at the open door of Scott’s barn, the place where he’d sat for hours with a magnifying glass. Peggy’s diaries were gone, taken to the American archive, as if Peggy herself had finally been taken away. Harry had brought them all back to life, reclaiming her in the book, stressing her contribution to Mamoon’s work, and how he needed her; Ruth also appeared, sending Mamoon forth, and there was enough about Marion, and how she’d led him towards himself at last.

In the kitchen, that night, they all had supper together, and when the children were asleep, chrysalises wrapped tightly in their white blankets, everyone apart from Liana and Harry went to bed early. He watched her poking at the fire in the library, and, at last, had the courage to ask for her view of the biography, and whether anything in it pleased her.

‘I wondered when you’d ask,’ she said, and left the room to return with a piece of paper. ‘I haven’t had much time, I haven’t even read Mamoon’s last book. Did you read it?’

‘I’m going to.’

‘Yes. Now, some of these mistakes angered me very much,’ she said, twirling her pencil and giving him a glorious glare. He was glad to see she had temporarily returned to her old go-getting self. ‘My eyes are not good. My mind won’t stay. But marvellous, in the main. I don’t care so much about this now — it’s you I adore, Harry. You are one of the people I like most. You’ll always have time for me, won’t you? These are my thoughts.’ She put on her glasses. His stomach plunged; he was ready to scribble in his notebook. ‘Didn’t you bother to research thoroughly?’

Her father had been a pharmacist, with a chain of shops in the region. It was true that their name appeared on shampoo. He had founded a country club, with real art on the walls, and built a library. Where did he get the idea she only spoke three languages, rather than four? She had always ridden horses, and for long distances too. And so on. It wouldn’t take him long to make those corrections.

He went out into the yard, where he had spent many evenings worrying, agitated, pacing up and down.

‘I got the gush from Liana,’ he said to Rob on the phone. ‘She called it “splendid, marvellous”. Write that down. Send apologies and money immediately.’

Looking back towards the kitchen, Harry saw that Liana was weeping in the doorway. He dismissed Rob, led her outside into the night air, and asked her what was wrong.

‘At the end, in London, before he became sick, when he fulfilled my wish at last, bless you, because I think you insisted — you were kind, dear boy, kind! — we became close again,’ she said. ‘He wanted to dine with me.’

They strolled in sunny parks; he wanted to buy clothes, and take her advice; something made him talk about his childhood. One afternoon, after coming home, he stroked her hair; he closed his eyes, let her touch him and say her dream about falling over the cliff. He gave his view, his voice was gentle like a blissful kiss. She could have devoured him, her beloved husband, with love. One night, he even took her breast into his mouth.

‘And so, soon, after I have reread his complete works, I will gulp down everything written about him, including you. So thank you for keeping his name in the world. We are grateful, and I love you.

‘But now — now I want him back,’ she said. ‘Where has it gone? I want him back, as he was then! Bring him back to me! Life is too cold without him!’