The Last Word

Twenty

Harry sat close to Alice and confessed how mad and discouraged this part of Mamoon’s story was making him. It was true, you couldn’t just say anyone was a sexual sadist. Mamoon, predictably, was already hostile, and Marion wouldn’t let him quote from the letters — not that they confirmed much. Unless there was more than Marion’s allegations to go on, he would have to drop the material and write a bland book.

‘I will pull out of the project if I can’t do the sort of intimate, psychological portrait we’ve talked about,’ he said. ‘The archaeology of a whole man. He speaks; they all speak. I can’t bear the idea of just being mediocre, Alice. I would rather die than be ordinary.’

‘What can we do?’

‘You could go to him and ask if Marion told the truth.’

She looked horrified. ‘Why would he tell me, Harry?’

‘The old fool flatters himself he can seduce you. Haven’t you been prancing in the woods with him?’

‘Not prancing, no. He can’t walk far. As we go, we discuss the nature of love and art.’

Harry said, ‘Let’s turn it around. If you can persuade the old man to own up, you will help me out, and indeed the family we will have. Our future together could be secured.’

She was biting her nails. ‘Why are you pulling me into this, Harry?’

She didn’t want to be put in the position of having to ‘trick’ Mamoon, as she put it. He trusted her; she liked him, and it was awful when Harry became so insistent and domineering.

‘I need your help,’ he said. ‘We’re in financial trouble. Won’t you do this small thing for me?’

Before supper Harry nodded at Alice. She went downstairs to Mamoon and gave him the scarf, cuff links and tie she knew would cheer him up. She offered him her arm, and suggested they take a stroll. She had her phone with her, to use as a recorder. Harry had briefed her about the numerous acts she was to ask Mamoon about. There was quite a number of stories; she’d been shocked to hear them, and didn’t believe Mamoon would do such things. ‘Are you absolutely sure about this?’ she kept saying.

‘Just be certain to remember them all. I’ll be interested to hear what his attitude to this part of his past is.’

They were gone a long time. When Alice returned with Mamoon, she couldn’t look at Harry, but she did hand him her phone which he took upstairs and plugged into his computer. He heard her playfully asking Mamoon if he’d been as macho as she’d heard. Had he ever used his power and position for sexual advancement? Was he as dominant as he appeared? The old man grunted and laughed. She said there were some ‘sexual excitements’ she wanted to try herself, if she could talk Harry into them. Had Mamoon tried, she wondered, any of the following?

Vaguely Mamoon confirmed, or at least didn’t deny, much of what she asked. In truth, he said, Marion had had many strong wishes, and had turned out, to his regret, to be too demanding for him. Female passion was a whirlwind: he couldn’t devote himself to a woman; he needed time to ponder and write. Come to think of it, he preferred art to life. Once he’d met Liana everything had seemed easier. As a defence against unwanted excitement, marriage was a prophylactic he would recommend to anyone.

Alice sat on the bed watching him while Harry listened to the recording, nodding and making notes.

‘Don’t I look pale?’ she said.

He looked at her. ‘Pale is your colour.’

‘Don’t you want to know what happened?’

She asked Harry to go outside. He followed her into the nearest field, walking quickly. She was white and shaking. Her eyes were dilated.

She hit Harry several times and shouted, ‘Why did you make me talk dirty to a stranger? I kept thinking he was enjoying it in some obscene way. And when I’d turned the phone off, guess what, I had a panic attack — violent palpitations, like being hit in the chest with a rock. I had to lie down on the ground.’

‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’

‘You’re never sorry!’

He said, ‘What can I do? This is maddening! You did offer to help me on this project. I never said it would be easy.’

She said, ‘Mamoon stroked my forehead until I felt better. He was worried that the things he was telling me would make me mad and ill.’

‘He was right. You’re sensitive. Are you okay now?’

‘I’m not going to thank you for putting me in that position. Are you sure you actually want to take care of me? Liana wonders if you really do. She has reservations about your character.’

‘And I about hers. I love you, darling. Can I kiss you?’

‘How could you even think about it when I’m in this state?’

She was already walking back to the house. It wouldn’t be a good idea to speak to her for a while. His desire for the truth had made him a criminal. She didn’t want to eat with Liana and Mamoon, she didn’t want to talk at all, but wrapped herself in a duvet on the sofa in the living room and slept there in a woolly hat, sucking her thumb. The next morning he drove her to the station, where she took a train to Cornwall for a photoshoot. Harry kissed and thanked her, and reminded her of his adoration, but there was nothing he could do with her in this mood.

When he returned to the house, he found Mamoon, sitting in the living room, and said, ‘Could I ask you, sir, if I’d be completely wrong to think that your experiences with Marion, your amour fou, informed the character of Ali in your sixth novel?’

There was a silence, before Mamoon said, ‘Harry, you do already know, don’t you, that I like to aid your intellectual development by refusing to allow any banal and simplistic correlations between art and experience.’

‘I know, sir. About that I follow you as a master. Art is a symbolic dream of life which transcends that from which it derives, and, indeed, everything which is said about it. However, there was an unmistakable outburst of desire and love, even of happiness in your work at that time. Before, your male characters were isolated, naïve even, perhaps book-bound. Then, brilliantly, you made another step.’

‘I did?’

‘You said, early on, that if every age has its central philosophical issue, ours will be the revival of religion as politics. And so you began to link radical Islam and its weird sexuality with hatred of the body, the body burned in the sacrificial auto-death. This is a gesture of the profoundest obedience. We know that the West attempted, in the sixties, to remove the father, authoritarian or not. That was how we ended up, as you have often helpfully pointed out, with a culture of single mothers. Take Ruth, for instance.

‘The father — as fathers do — returned, in the form either of a gangster, as in The Godfather or your favourite, The Sopranos, or of religious authority. There is also the father’s attempt to exclude, if not stamp out, sexuality. At least in others. Perhaps the father, according to this myth, wants all the women for himself. The sexuality returns, as it must, as perversion, as a kind of sadism. The fear, if not hatred, of women, of course, is at the centre of many religions.’

Mamoon yawned. ‘I said this, did I? And if I did, so fucking what?’

‘You let a woman in, sir. People say that sexuality is at the centre of the human secret, and that the erotic leads us into new experience, both sacred and profane. What is the connection, in your mind, if any, between the women you’ve been with and the work you’ve done?’

‘I haven’t a clue as to what you could mean.’

‘Think, sir, please: I’m trying to make you look interesting here. I can make you look good in bed, and out of it! Marion has suggested your mind opened to fresh ideas when her legs did, when the two of you embarked on your adventures in America.’

Unlike most people, Mamoon had more or less complete control over his speech; he didn’t like his words to run away from him. But for a moment he looked like someone who had swallowed a large marble.

At last he said, ‘Ecstatic as I am to hear Marion’s views from over the pond, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I wish you weren’t trying to peel me as you would an onion. You know, like the general public, I have a passion for ignorance. I want to work in the dark — the best place for me, for any artist. It just comes out, compacted as in a dream.’ He was silent, before saying, ‘There’s no denying she sparked me into a new creativity. The intellect and the libido have to be linked, otherwise there’s no life in the work. Any artist has to work with their prick or cunt. Any person has to work with their desire, to defeat boredom, to keep everything alive. Anything good has to be a little pornographic, if not perverse.’

Harry said, ‘However, the biographer sees the inevitabilities, the same paradigmatic sexual scenarios enacted repeatedly. When it comes to love and sex, the past writes the future. That would be the story of everyone’s life. Cannibals don’t become foot fetishists.’

‘Harry, you know more about my many selves than I do. You’re in the remembering business while I’m in the forgetting game, and forgetting is the loveliest of the psychic luxuries, a warm scented bath for the soul. I follow Chuang Tzu, the patron saint of dementia, who advised, “Sit down and forget.”’

‘Thanks for telling me.’

‘Perhaps my wife has hired you to do the little remembering I do require. I have to say, I particularly like it when you remember things which never happened. You are now making an imaginary life.’

‘How?’

‘My life, as I lived it, has been a Marx Brothers film, a series of detours, mistakes, misunderstandings, missed opportunities, delays, errors and fuck-ups. I am a man who never found his umbrella. Your life, I expect, is similar. Your ascription of a teleological arrow gives too much meaning and intention. Still, the idea of becoming a fiction does appeal. To my surprise, you might have the makings of an artist.’

Harry said, ‘I doubt I will ever reach your level, sir. I am impressed that you survived extremity and guilt with Marion, and that you came home to see Peggy through her vile death, sitting with her night after night. Then you carried on. You even had something of a family, for a time. Having repudiated the role previously, you seemed to like being a sort of father. What was that like?’

Mamoon nodded. ‘You know one is subject to many distractions and foolishnesses. It has always been my good fortune to have work which has saved me, and to have been able to look at the world through the lens of my ideas. I hope to God that you, one day, achieve that essential stability.’

‘In what way has work saved you?’

‘You strive to make me look lewd, when the truth is, even Philip Larkin had more sex, and I have been committed to the word throughout. I have always wanted to return to my desk to make something which hasn’t existed before. That is my only — meagre — contribution to improving things here on earth.’

Having said this, Mamoon closed his eyes and began to snore gently. He had the ability to nap at will but was most likely to fall asleep when Harry was making an enquiry.

Harry went into the garden in shorts and trainers to do some stretching and weights. He hung a long bag from a tree and kicked and punched it. This was his routine and his release after things got sticky with Mamoon, when he knew he’d have to return to him with more impossible queries.

He wondered how long he’d have.

A few minutes later Liana, in fishnets and wellingtons, came out of the kitchen and settled herself on the bench outside the door with a popular biography of a grand lady, a cup of tea and her reading glasses. ‘Bravo!’ she called. Feeling more like a member of the Chippendales than a literary biographer, Harry took a breather and Liana poured him some tea.

‘Poor man, you must be exhausted. I know I am. Here, I bought you this energising moisturiser,’ she said, handing him a little pot. ‘You’ll like it, you’ll see.’

‘How kind, Liana. Why did you do that?’

‘I heard you complaining about your uneven skin tone. Mamoon said that for you it’s more serious than the collapse of the economy.’

‘Much more. It’s the result of childhood eczema. For years I scratched myself almost to death. I’m worried the anxiety here will make it return.’

‘What anxiety? That cream has amazing healing qualities, and you seem agitated.’

‘I am.’

‘I think you know more about my husband than I do now.’

‘That’s the problem.’

‘Was Marion kind about my darling Himself? Or was she bitter like the other one?’

‘There was some bitterness, not entirely unwarranted. She turned out to be rather splendid.’

‘Are you sure? You must have flirted all over the place.’

He rubbed the moisturiser onto his arms. ‘She had plenty to say about many things. I haven’t written it up yet, but I can feel that the book has really progressed.’

‘Progressed where, my dear? You are alarming me, Harry.’

‘I am?’

‘I don’t want you to get carried away and inflame my skin too. Let’s keep everything gentle in your account, shall we?’

Alice had warned him to be careful; to endure being patronised and even insulted, and not to allow himself to give anything away, sucking rather than puffing, though that attitude had yet to get him very far. Still what he and Rob admired about Mamoon, they both agreed, was his talent as a provocateur, his ability to create anarchy and fury and then sit back to gaze out over the ruins. On occasion Mamoon was more Johnny Rotten than Joseph Conrad. Harry had begun to think that, as his father had suggested, he had been too passive. His fears had kept him too safe. He’d make some mayhem; it was time to go gonzo, and up the stakes.

He said, ‘Liana, I guess you already know all about it.’

‘About what?’

‘The background to the Marion story. How Mamoon humiliated and insulted a young woman at an American university, calling her “a career Negro”. He had to get out and quite soon after became violently bitter.’

‘Might this be in the book?’

‘When I’ve done the research. It was after this that Mamoon decided to give up on, or pull away from Peggy, while continuing to live with her. He and Marion began something of a perverse relationship, which made me wonder whether such a thing had been a feature of his life.’ Liana was silent. ‘Or whether it was just a one-off, as it were.’

‘Perverse?’

Harry said that some might call it that.

‘Do you know for sure?’

‘He confirmed it. When this material comes out, people will think about both of you differently. The hacks and papers simplify things. They might call it sadomasochism.’

She thought for a moment and said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t put this in, but I wondered why, at the beginning, he asked if he could watch me urinate. Being a lady, I said no. Why would anyone want such a thing?’

‘To experience a particular form of intimacy.’

She said, ‘Listen, Harry, what the bloody fuck are you hinting at? Can’t you actually be precise? I don’t want to live in the dark like an idiot! As a mature woman —’ she pressed her face close to his, ‘and don’t you like to remind me all the time that I am? — I need to know every detail of the Marion part.’

‘Why?’

‘How awful it would be if you knew things about him that I didn’t.’

He pulled on a tracksuit top and sat with her. It wasn’t long before she’d turned red, and was waving furiously at her face with her book as if trying to put out a fire but succeeding only in fanning the flames. To her credit she heard him out before saying, ‘And you say you’re going to put this filth in the book we commissioned?’

‘If it is relevant to the work, which around that time turns very dark and sometimes brutal.’

She began to cry, and covered her face. ‘Poor Marion. I think of her often and how she was rejected. That will happen to me!’

‘Why would it?’

‘She couldn’t do enough to keep him interested. He regrets leaving her.’

‘He does?’

‘She inspired him, she was intelligent. They loved to talk about Shakespeare. She was learning Arabic and he said she was cleverer than him. He read her letters with a dictionary. I had an intelligent father, so I know men love women who are useful to them, like assistants.’

He asked her if she’d be okay.

She said, ‘You did promise, Harry dear, that you’d help me earn his love and kisses. Now you come to me with this merda. He will blame me for stirring it up. What have you done!’ She got up and walked quickly away, into the woods, stopping only to turn and say, ‘I’ve cursed you. I thought of unleashing the bees on you only I’m too well bred. But a very bad thing is going to happen to you — tonight.’