The Last Word

Seven

‘Harry?’ Mamoon’s gentle tap alarmed Harry, and he dropped the papers he was holding. ‘I need to see you.’

‘You do, sir?’

‘Oh yes. Can we talk later this morning? Will you be available?’

‘Talk? That’s why I’m here, sir, getting under your feet like vermin, as you put it the other day.’

‘See you in the library, my friend, insh’allah. I’m looking forward to it.’

‘You are?’

‘Why not? There’s much to say.’

This was a surprise; Mamoon had never before solicited Harry’s company. He either wanted to put the record straight about something, which was unlikely, or Harry was going to be kicked out.

Distracted, tired and guilty after his exertions with Julia, Harry was also concerned he hadn’t got far with his most recent questions to Mamoon, which were about Mrs Thatcher. Why, Harry had asked, would Mamoon like someone with no discernible culture, and who had driven Britain towards vulgarity and consumerism? Besides, anyone would have thought that a scribbling Indian would be the last thing Thatcher would have liked. Apparently, she enjoyed Mamoon’s company, and he had been asked to visit her late at night, in Downing Street. A few days ago Harry had got Mamoon to say that Thatcher ‘stood up to the mob’ and to ‘pointless demagogues like Scargill’, and that ‘Margaret liked men.’ While a scoop about Mamoon’s private conversations with Thatcher would have helped the book, Mamoon wouldn’t say more.

Now, in an attempt to think about how to approach Mamoon more profitably, Harry took off to the woods with Yin and Yang, who could run all day. He said to Alice on the phone, ‘This is turning bad. Mamoon has given me only titbits. I’ve got a thousand facts and dates, but who wants that? What am I to do, my love? How can I really open him up?’

Harry had known he would have to ask Mamoon questions he wouldn’t have put to his friends or, indeed, to any other man. There were many aspects of his friends, and indeed of his girlfriends, that Harry, with English restraint, didn’t want any knowledge of. Forgetting, along with hypocrisy, were, to him, the necessary arts central to living, just as they clearly were to Mamoon. Why then, he wondered, of all things, had he decided to become a literary biographer — someone who sought the truth of another and wished to remake them in his own words? Was this what he should be doing, or would he have been better off as a coastguard, as one of his brothers had recently suggested?

In London last weekend, strolling with his father in Richmond Park, he had consulted him about making progress with Mamoon. The old man said, ‘Persistence is the key, surely you must have learned that from me? If you want to treat a schizophrenic, for instance, particularly one who is more or less catatonic, the only prescription is time and close attention. And you have to enter the fantasy rather than attempt to refute it. It could take months or years before you get anywhere. Sometimes you get nowhere. Not only that, the patients try to make you crazy. They want to deposit their illness in you. At the same time, the doctors get very annoyed with the patients for not getting better, and often punish them, just as teachers become impatient with their pupils. The truth is, Harry, in these relationships there’s a lot going on even when nothing seems to be going on. The sane have always envied the mad for their freedom and ecstasy. Look at your mother,’ he said, ‘she could be adorable, and was adored. But all our love and attention couldn’t keep her alive.’

‘Can I ask you now — I’ve never said it. Did you love her?’

‘I did, Harry. She loved other men. I don’t happen exactly to believe in the bourgeois marriage settlement, a form designed to limit sexuality, and which obviously demands too high a price. But she made it difficult for me. She was curious about the world, she was a believer: it was her weakness. If she wanted to know someone, she just followed them, any faker or fakir, and damn the consequences. She disappeared; we were mad with worry; but she came back after a week saying she’d hung out with some DJs in Brighton. You know some of this? Did the boys tell you?’

‘Pretty much.’

He didn’t want to tell his father that he still dreamed about a family holiday in Italy, when he went to his mother’s room to find the door ajar. Looking through, he saw her in bed with a man. They were lying still; he was in her arms. Her clothes were on the floor, but her shoes, oddly enough, were together on a chair — either, he wondered, as a sort of exhibit, or for their own safety. Harry pushed the door a little and went into the room. His mother jumped up, pulling a sheet over herself; the man was exposed. She screamed at Harry to get out.

He ran away, and when he saw her a few hours later she was unaffected, and didn’t mention it. He knew then there was another mother within the mother he believed he knew, and after that he wondered often when he would see his real mother again. But which one would it be? Had she deliberately given him erections by lazily rubbing eczema cream into his skin?

He learned from his brothers that he had escaped awareness of the worst of her extremity, though he assisted when their mother searched the house for bugs and closed the curtains against spies. When that didn’t keep them away, she stowed her three boys in the car and drove them singing, a bottle of vodka in one hand — water was poisoned — to Scotland to escape an abuser. When she went to the police station to report him, her children saw her held in handcuffs, taken away to a locked ward where she was drugged, only to be returned to the family months later, in a worse state.

His father said, ‘You should know, she would be proud of you being a literary man. She was fond — often over-fond — of any prick who could wield a pen nicely. The writers always put their art first, as they should. But they are usually available in the afternoon, at which point their minds give way to their genitals. Women are attracted to artists, of course, as they are to doctors, and prisoners on death row. The powerful and the vulnerable. If you want to continue to get laid, particularly as you get older, that’s where to head, boy.’

‘Did her infidelities hurt you?’

He shrugged and said, ‘I can’t quite count the ways in which we hurt one another. It was the means by which we tried to help one another — me, turning her into a patient, her, turning me into a dull authority — which were as bad as, if not worse, than our actual abuses.’

His father then said the harshest thing that Harry thought he had ever heard.

‘The truth is, she was your whole life and she’ll be in your dreams until your dying day; she was your mother, Harry. But to me she was just another woman. You boys are a very happy memento. You know, when you end a relationship and say you fell out of love, you actually mean you were never really in love. The past is a river, not a statue.’

Although Alice had been against the biography, before he had set off to Mamoon’s at the very beginning, she had insisted Harry practise his interview technique. She was worried that with Mamoon’s short-temperedness and indifference alongside Harry’s blithe politeness, Mamoon would run rings around the boy, and the two would exchange only small talk. Alice had therefore insisted that she and Harry draw up a list of demanding and incisive questions for Mamoon, which she had videoed him asking in as mild and neutral a voice as possible. But Mamoon had conducted numerous interviews with some of the world’s most unpleasant characters, asking them about the children they had murdered and the women they had raped — ‘Did strangling the woman to death complete your pleasure or did you consider it a supplement, like brandy at the end of the meal?’ — and he used silence like a knife. The ‘master’ would always be the one who could wait without anxiety; Mamoon could also, as Rob had predicted, become bored and prickly. ‘The sight of you, Harry,’ said Rob, early on, ‘will no doubt remind him of how little time he has left to live truly and authentically.’

Harry had inadvertently discovered that there were some literary subjects which would rile and arouse Mamoon. These provided usefully unguarded moments, which Harry had to utilise sparingly, for fear of alerting his opponent to the baiting. It was more like road rage than literary criticism, and Mamoon would sit up in his chair. ‘The enervated nancy boy of English writing, the slack-arsed lily-livered mother-loving faggot?’

Harry had referred, in passing, and in a low voice, to E. M. Forster. ‘Why, what is your view, sir?’

‘View? I have no views on a man who claimed he wanted to write about homosexual sex, a subject we certainly needed to know about. Since he lacked the balls to do it, he spent thirty years staring out of the window, when he wasn’t mooning over bus conductors and other Pakis. An almost-man who claimed to hate colonialism using the Third World as his brothel because he wouldn’t get arrested there, as he would showing off his penis in a Chiswick toilet. Apparently he preferred his friends to his country! How brave and original! Of course,’ he went on, his eyes flashing, ‘Orwell was even worse. He’s the worst of the Blairs. Do they still take him seriously in this country?’

‘Mostly as an essayist.’

‘He wrote books for children, or, rather, for children who have the misfortune to be studying him. All that ABC writing, the plain style, the bare, empty mind with a strong undertow of sadism, the sentimental socialism and Big Brother and the pigs, and nothing about love — intolerable. No adult apart from a teacher would bother with one of his novels. If I think of hell, it is being alone forever in room 101 with nothing to read but one of his books.’

‘Didn’t you once say that the mystery of human cruelty is the only subject there is?’

‘That sounds like me, though I repudiate that view. There is love. Neither of these writers, the poof and the puritan, has described a beautiful woman. What sort of writer cannot do that?’

He shuddered; then, having appeared to climax after this jihadic uprush of hatred, he would sink back in his chair, his mouth open, murmuring, ‘I much prefer little Willie Maugham or randy H. G. Wells. Yet the only one I still love to read is the Goddess.’

‘Which one?’

‘She who reminds me of my lonely mongrel alcoholic wandering in London and in Paris, when I first arrived — Jean Rhys. She’s the only female writer in English you’d want to sleep with. Otherwise it’s just Brontës, Eliot, Woolf, Murdoch! Can you imagine cunnilingus with any of them? As Jean said, the world is simple: it’s just a matter of cafes where they like you, and cafes where they don’t.’

Harry knocked softly.