The Last Word

Eighteen

Harry had arranged to visit Marion again the next day, but as he walked around the block before going in, he wondered if it was worth returning. Alice’s enthusiasm for Mamoon was annoying him, and he wanted to take a cab to the airport, fly back to London, shove the old man away and remind her of his, Harry’s, existence. He needed to put more into his relationship with Alice otherwise it would slow down and end. What could Marion add now? He was reluctant to re-enter that tent of grief, regret and despair. But he spoke firmly to himself: although Mamoon had deliberately got rid of him, this was still business. He forced himself to buy flowers for her; he rang again at her door.

She was more lively, flirtatious even, today, in a skirt, plunging top and jewellery. She was brandishing photographs of herself and Mamoon together.

‘Harry, look how he holds my hands. How he needed me! In that house in the country they lived in an atmosphere of fear and anger. Does it seem haunted, that place?’

‘Yes, a bit.’

‘That’s her, Peggy — haunting but not living! His original home life had never been like that. Her wretchedness was corrupting him.’

‘How did you tell him that?’

‘I showed him the possibility of love. And sex. He was, you know, caliente. Steam came off him. But he hadn’t had proper sex for some time. Mamoon thought that needing a woman was like wanting a cigarette. The wish could be great, but you waited until it passed, you could get back to more important things.

‘To give her credit, Peggy was kind, she thought of him only. She led him through society, introducing him to people who might be interested, explaining to them that the world was bigger than Britain. But he was—’

‘What?’

‘Well, underfucked.’

‘I love the way you say that, Marion. The rolling tone.’

‘Darling, she had no sexual hold over him. Sad woman; hysterical. When it came to making copulation she was a plate of cold spaghetti, chattering inanely and forcing poor Mamoon to live as if passion didn’t have a place in the centre of the heart of every being. You have no idea how naïve he was, when it came to some things.’

He asked her what she meant by ‘naïve’.

‘In some ways he was like a teenager. As if he expected the other to take the lead. As you must know, his adolescent adventures were many and multifarious. The adults couldn’t keep their hands off him. He had been such a beautiful youth, with the dark hair and body of a film star, with a long thin cock. He was almost as beautiful as you, darling boy, but altogether more of a nuisance, with a stronger character and, obviously, more talent. I would imagine that you’re only a minor nuisance, though you have a haughty look.’ She’d been watching Teorema the other night. ‘Pasolini would have gone for you. Did an older man ever take you?’

When he said nothing, she went on, ‘Try and imagine this. When I first met him, Mamoon had anticipated being properly married for the rest of his life. He didn’t think he and Peggy would ever separate. But he did take to sex, when he refound it through me. It gave him a new confidence. He liked it. He liked it too much. He’d regained a part of himself, so that he wanted it the whole time. Then he wanted more. More extremity.’ When Harry asked what sort of extremity, she said, ‘If I tell you, and you put it in the book, it will come to be the only thing anyone ever knows about me.’

‘You’ve considered that?’

‘Of course.’

‘At the same time, you want to give your side of the story?’

She said, ‘He will deny me, I know that. He will laugh and shrug and accuse me of being mad, a common strategy of men. Recently, to a journalist, he accused me of being a balloon of unbound fantasies, a magical realist even — stories for children! This from someone who makes up people, and has them speak and then die, for a living! But I will have spoken before I go.’

Harry pushed the recorder closer to her. ‘What are you referring to?’

‘Turn off that damn machine.’ He pushed a button on it. She smiled, grabbed it and tossed it out of the room into the corridor, before asking him to shut the door.

She told him there were a couple of clever, attractive married women she’d known, good friends for years, whom she’d introduced him to. One night he said they were attractive. He was bored with her. ‘I couldn’t make his penis smile. He would go with them, it would put some lead in his pencil.’

He said he had become a utilitarian, providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number. He had also become despondent. His father had died and he was reproaching himself. He’d physically fought with the dad, plucking him from his chair and flinging the old fellow against a wall.

‘Yes, I heard. But what are the details of that?’

She told him that the headmaster of Mamoon’s school, and also the headmaster’s wife, had been dear, lifelong friends of the father. And the man — ‘who, incidentally, had only one leg’ — had been kind and let Mamoon attend the place at a cheap rate. It turned out that Mamoon, at fifteen, had been screwing the headmaster’s wife, the school nurse, in the medical room, most days. She had also loaned him books and read his early stories, editing them for him, encouraging him, telling him that he had it, that thing that everyone wants and most people don’t have: talent. He saw that as soon as he wrote he was loved and admired. Literature was the leg-opener. A good paragraph was better than a few glasses of wine.

She said, ‘The headmaster didn’t find out about any of this until Mamoon was in his mid-twenties. The headmaster then hopped across to see the father, after the woman died, to say his wife’s infidelity had besmirched the last years of his life. The woman had said she’d loved Mamoon. The headmaster was shamed.’ Marion put on a paternalistic Indian accent. ‘The father said to Mamoon, “You dirty bastard, you shamed us all by fiddling with the very woman — a family friend — on the actual school premises while we were getting a generous discount! What other deceptions are you capable of?”

‘“She was very enthusiastic and grateful at the time,” replied Mamoon. “Why is it exercising you? Are you jealous? She said she was lonely. I was the ‘second leg’. I had a body to die for, and she opened my fly with her teeth. Your friend bored her to death. You should have sent me a telegram of congratulation for cheering her up.”’ Marion went on, ‘As you can imagine, it was here that the father, becoming more and more incensed, struck Mamoon across the face. And Mamoon, being quite strong then, having taken up weight-lifting, picked him up and tossed him across the room, towards the litter bin, like a basketball.

‘In his later life Mamoon was ashamed and regretful, and worried over the father a lot. I’d brought up the subject of whether his father was gay.’

Harry almost choked. ‘How exactly did that go down?’

Mamoon had taken it seriously. The pieces were falling into place. Mamoon’s father had had an arranged marriage, fought with his wife continuously, gambled most nights, and drank ferociously. But he never went with women and repeatedly told his son never to marry. Mamoon began to wonder if his weird adolescent sexuality was a picture of his father’s confusions.

Marion said, ‘Mamoon, as you might have found out, was something of a Nietzsche jukebox, with a quote for every occasion. And he particularly liked this: “That which is silent in the father speaks in the son.” We discussed it very intensely. At detumescence, after all, there is conversation, that is where love begins. Over a bottle of wine or three, we spent entire evenings talking, working everything out. We were very close, and living together, because he had been teaching in America.’

He asked her what that was like.

She laughed. ‘It was wonderful to spend time with him. But it was not unconflictual. Nothing with Mamoon was unconflictual. There had been the inevitable run-ins with the authorities, culminating in the accusation of misogyny and so on.’

Harry said he’d heard something about that and was going to look into it. He asked her what the details were.

‘I’d been living with him outside the university for a couple of months,’ she said. Mamoon made sure he was too maverick for the institution. But he knew how to interest people in ideas. ‘Then, unfortunately, there was the incident with the black feminist lecturer to whom he said, at a cocktail party, “Surely, being black isn’t an entire career these days, is it?”’

‘What happened?’

‘Big flatulent row. That, along with his remark that there was a high incidence of psychosis in the Afro-Caribbean community because of the fathers’ absence, did for him. It turned nasty. We had to pack up and get out of there fast. It was like being run out of town.’

‘Did it bother him?’

‘Of course he said he didn’t want to be deprived of the jouissance of racism just because he had brown skin and had suffered it himself. Clearly, he said, it must be one of the great pleasures to hate others for more or less random, arbitrary reasons.’

It meant he was never able to teach again. It cost him money. He was more bothered than he could own up to, because he had important things to say about the craft he had devoted his life to. Somehow he got himself tangled up in these fatuous debacles. He couldn’t understand it and needed ‘comfort’, he claimed.

‘Female comfort?’

‘I told him that as I had sacrificed so much to be with him, I couldn’t have him taking off with my best friends in front of me. He called me a bore, and sulked. He had the temerity to say I was no good at sucking cock.’

‘Oh dear. You have to take care with your teeth,’ said Harry. ‘I guess you know that. Perhaps you could have practised.’

‘Believe me, baby, I could suck your brain out through your ass and blow it down the can.’

He asked, ‘How was he at cunnilingus?’

‘Enthusiastic, at times. But inaccurate. And then—’

‘Then?’

She said, ‘When a man doesn’t want to eat you out, he’s done with you.’

‘That must be one of life’s hardest lessons.’

She went on, ‘Mamoon could really freeze you out, until I couldn’t bear the anxiety. Threesomes weren’t my thing, I had tried them. Men think they like them, but their eyes are bigger than their dicks. It’s rare for a man to satisfy one woman, let alone two. Still, I decided these women could join us, if they wanted to — one at a time. Why not? Hadn’t we had the sixties? Why be conventional, why say no to everything? And they were free women. We did it a few times. He said it was the most exciting thing he’d done.’

‘Why did the women do it?’

‘It was the first time, I guess, that he’d seen that he could use his power, position and charisma to seduce and use. As he said, being famous, witty and good-looking made him catnip to the menopausal. He was so interested in some things that the world seemed to vibrate around him. And these women were curious. But they had husbands, children and lives, and weren’t always available when he wanted. He had the bright idea of inviting professionals to join us.’

‘How many times?’

‘Almost every night, for a few weeks. We were so overtaken by it, we blew a big hole in his income, not that he cared. Why would he? I guess a lot of it was Peggy’s and he believed she owed him.’

‘Were you drinking and using drugs? Were there other men involved?’

‘He was very keen.’

‘How do I know this is true?’

‘There are letters.’

‘If we’re to skewer him, I have to see them.’

‘You do?’

‘Otherwise he can say you’re only a mad fantasist.’

She hesitated for a moment before getting up and leading him out of the room. In the corridor, she pushed open her bedroom door.

Ahead of him, framed on the wall, was a large print of Richard Avedon’s photograph of Mamoon, which Harry had only seen previously, the size of a postage stamp, on a book jacket. In a suit and tie, and wreathed in cigarette smoke, Mamoon must have been in his mid-forties, dark-haired, black-eyed, anguished, a man with the strength to endure, with a poet’s soul, an Asian Camus. In time, Mamoon, the radical transgressor — for whom accurate language was always revolutionary — would argue and fall out with fellow writers; he would be banned from various countries for political or religious opinions, pick up a clutch of fatwas, and numerous prizes and awards, at which he would chuckle; and he would write good books.

‘You see?’ said Marion.

With her behind him, Harry continued to stare: if he had forgotten why, as a young man, he’d loved Mamoon — the tough-guy, hard-living artist who looked into the dark without flinching, and spoke what he saw, putting truth and authenticity before safety — this picture of pride, self-knowledge and glamour should remind him.

It had to be true, as Rob liked to reiterate, that the writer, indeed every real artist, was the devil, rivalling God in creativity, trying even to surpass him. God was surely man’s most fatal creation, the devil’s kitsch bitch. It was God, with his insistence on being worshipped and admired, who made the argument of art necessary, keeping the fire of dissent alive in men and women. This dissident was the artist, who spanned with his imagination reason and unreason, the under and the over, the dream and the world, men and women.

Plato, along with the latest pope, recognised how dangerous it is to have an artist around making mischief, stirring things up with the spoon of truth and intoxicant of fantasy and magic. And so, for crossing the line, and for stealing God’s fire, artists were banned, imprisoned, condemned, silenced, killed — they always would be, these sometime Christs of the page.

It must have been the Faustian idea of Mamoon as hero and holy transgressor, as the one who took on God and the righteous, that Harry had fallen in love with, an image which had brought him to this room today, followed by this woman who had slept every night for years beneath the picture. It was, also, a picture of the man Harry had, at one time, wanted to become. Yet now he was only the illustrator, not the subject. In what way, he wondered, could he become more like the image? How brave or daring had he ever been?

Marion kissed her fingers and pressed them against the photograph.

Harry noticed there was nowhere else to sit except beside her on the narrow single bed. On the undusted shelf there were photographs of her children when young. He told her they were lovely kids.

‘Women must not bolt,’ she said. ‘The children punished me. When I went, one of them attempted suicide, and is still mad in an asylum. The youngest refuses to let me meet my grandchildren.’

She asked Harry to pull a shoe box from under the bed. Out of this she extracted the letters, of which there were about fifty. She opened two of them, and let him see the date and the ‘Darling Marion’ and ‘all my love, Mamoon’, in his familiar minuscule writing.

She said, ‘During this period he kept saying I bored him, and he didn’t feel alive any more. If I didn’t think of new things for us to do, he’d go mad. He was fascinated by styles of love-making, by how different women respond, move, kiss, and how he was new each time. It was almost forensic for him.

‘I suggested we could ask men to join us, and he could watch, if he wanted to. He did watch; he wanted to take part. He seemed to join forces with the other men. There were too many of them. He started to make me do things I couldn’t bear to do to please him. Scenes so depraved it makes me sick to think of them. Tiger burning. . burning. .

‘He wanted an accelerated ecstasy, as he nominated it, what Poe calls an “infinity of mental excitement. .” He claimed, oddly for him, that this extremity, this repeated transgression and sacrilege, was the closest thing to a religious experience he’d had. Here, he said, he could fruitfully lose himself entirely, and betray his father over and over again. He understood the point of the crowd, and how it could pull you away from yourself. And this from no keener follower of individualism.

‘I made love to people I wouldn’t otherwise have touched. This was dangerous at that time, but I would have done anything to keep him. Anything.’

‘Did he hurt you?’

‘Now, looking back, I feel abused. I was used. I was a fool to think he would love me always, that he would marry me.’ She said, ‘He was strong then. He grabbed my face and forced it into a man’s crotch and I remember thinking “You’ve hurt me for your pleasure. It matters more to you than I do.” There’s a lot of degradation in sex, isn’t there?’

‘When it’s done right. Are you saying he was a pervert?’

‘Are you a serious writer, or are you working for the National Enquirer?’

‘The Enquirer.’

‘I learned that real sex is mad, mad, mad,’ she said, ‘It can overrun everything else, particularly sense and intelligence. And you must remember, he loved me so much, even as he hated me. I had captivated him, sexually, and he was mine. Fortunately, he was travelling a lot at the same time and wrote to me with various “requests” I should fulfil when he came home.’

‘He did?’

‘In the end, Peggy, who was not well in mind or body, requested him to return. He hesitated for days. Suppose he just walked out now. What would he lose, what would he gain? What about her? Duty or love? I’d never seen him so anguished. I was foolish: I said I’d stand by him whichever way he went. He kissed me goodbye. I believed he would marry me. I didn’t think for a moment I’d never see him again.’ She went on, ‘I suspect he went back to see another woman — not Liana. It wasn’t her turn yet.’

‘Another woman? Do you know which woman?’

She shrugged. ‘Do you? Yes, obviously. You do know.’ When he said nothing she continued. ‘I learned later, from reading him, that the experiences we’d had together had traumatised him. He could only process all that raw experience by sitting in a room for months. I even think he still believed he could turn his back on his sexuality and sublimate it entirely.

‘Peggy kept going for eighteen months. She created the environment he needed, where he wrote that horrible text, one of the ugliest books I’ve read, with a sadism which I believe is quite unconscious, since he actually loves women. He was the most conscious of artists, but he knew there were some things you had to leave alone when they occurred to you, which were the essence of something true.’

Harry said, ‘I need to ask you something. Are you sure I can’t see his letters to you? Could I copy them? I could photograph them with my phone. I could help you arrange for them to be purchased by an American university. It goes without saying that you could do well out of them.’

She laughed. ‘I’m aware of that and I need the money badly for health care. I’m not so stupid, Harry. This material will make a chapter in your account. I’m hanging onto it for now because for me it will be an entire book. Mine will be far more spicy, passionate and vulgar than yours. I know the other women involved and they will back me up with their recollections, while remaining anonymous. And I have started my book. Are you and I racing?’

He said, ‘Coming from me, this will sound a bit rich, but why would you want to expose this private material?’

‘Suppose Flaubert’s lover had written a book about him? Or Kafka’s fiancée? What would it be like to be a writer’s companion? After my story of my life with him, he and I will be side by side forever.’ She added, ‘He loved and exploited me. Now I can do the same to him!’

‘Very tabloid.’

‘Isn’t it usually the women’s voices which are suppressed? You envy him, and will never know what it is like to love him. I will give the view from the bedroom, the intimate picture. If you want to know a man, see how he is in love. Isn’t that where the truth lies?’

‘Yes, the truth always lies. It might be in the complexity of the work.’

‘That’s the cover story.’

He said, ‘And if he wanted you back?’

‘I’d be there like a shot, even now. Will you say that to him? He was cruel, handsome and brilliant, everything a man should be. Harry, will you say my name in front of him and watch his face? He knows very well that he is still mine, that he will not escape me.’

At the door she put her face up to his. He kissed her cheek, and saw she wanted to give him her mouth. Perhaps it would be her last kiss. For a short time he gave her his mouth. Why not? She tried to pull him towards her, but he removed her hands from his body.

‘I still have physical feeling,’ she said. ‘If you help me, I’ll show you the letters.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m tired. Come back tomorrow? Would you — for one more day? I will have something important.’

The next day he learned that he could read some of the letters on her bed, where she would lie next to him. He would wear a T-shirt and trousers, and she would be permitted to touch his upper body only: chest, shoulders, head and hair. He didn’t object to her caresses; he believed he was glad to be of use, and he was, anyway, tense for a number of good reasons.

As her hands worked on him, Harry took in the material: they were love letters, with requests for assignations disguised as wishes for others to accompany them ‘on walks’. Despite her promises, and sentences about how much ‘the other evening’ had meant to him at his time of life, and how ‘revived’ and ‘interested’ he was, once more, in what he referred to as ‘the human scene’, there was nothing substantial to count as confirmation.

All Harry could do was thank Marion, kiss her, and say goodbye. He would write to her if he needed anything else.

‘Please come back again — whenever you like,’ she said, taking his hands. He wondered if she’d ever let him go. ‘Please, I’ll try to find other pictures and notes. Tell me, do you pity me, an old woman alone, with nothing except a few memories of a writer?’

‘I admire you, Marion.’

‘For what?’

‘For being a fundamentalist, for giving up everything for one idea — love. And you still live it.’

‘Would you have sacrificed so much?’

‘For me the world’s full of women. Many of them — too many — are nice.’

‘The serial loves keep you safe, and that’s the most dangerous thing of all. You never miss anyone, and if there’s no sacrifice, there’s no love.’

He asked her how she read her love now, as devotion, or the siren call of masochism?

‘Until you said it, I thought it was the first. Now you tell me.’

Self-sacrifice would be the hardest addiction to shift. He said, ‘Mamoon felt uneasy, with all that relentless love and possessiveness coming at him.’

‘That’s what you would feel. I know some puny men are afraid of women. But why would you say that about him?’

‘He fled.’

‘So he’s the victim here, after all.’

He said, ‘I guess it’s wonderful to fall in love, but falling out of it, losing the illusion — now there’s a necessary art, which might profitably be learned.’

‘I suppose that is what you will write. I must do my book then.’ She sighed. ‘I seem to have ruined my life, and you appear to have saved yours.’

‘Not so fast,’ he said. ‘My girlfriend and I did a test back in London, and she’s having a child. We talked about children, but never agreed on anything definite. Myself, I still feel I’m an adolescent.’

‘You’re mis-recognising yourself,’ she said. ‘That is very dangerous.’

‘How to see straight?’

‘That is the thing.’

‘How, how?’

‘It’s been done already, the straight seeing,’ she said. ‘You’ve seen. Now you cover it up. You hide yourself from yourself.’ She kissed him. ‘Don’t forget, conventionally, you actually have what most people want. Send me a picture of the little one.’