The Last Word

Four

Harry was waiting for a way in. It would happen, he knew. He had to be patient.

Meanwhile, during the following week, he found the routine he needed: reading diaries, letters and papers in the barn until one o’clock, when Liana would announce lunch.

Then, one day, he saw Mamoon in a green velour tracksuit heading for the garden carrying weights. Harry figured that he would be mistaken if he believed for a moment that Mamoon’s vanity, or his competitiveness, had declined with age. In the mid-afternoon, after it had occurred to Harry to invite Mamoon to stretch, run a little, work out a bit, and warm down with him, he learned this would be an opportunity for him to enter the old man’s confidence. Mamoon loved dressing in a variety of sports gear and was keen to kickbox and learn some capoeira moves. ‘If, or rather when, all else fails,’ puffed Mamoon, ‘you could become my personal trainer.’

In the early evening Harry would talk to Liana and help her make supper, before writing up his notes. Later, when he could no longer concentrate, he would become restless. Sometimes he ate alone in a local restaurant, with a book in front of him. If he was lucky, Mamoon would shout out his name, inviting him into the television room. Mamoon was proud of his television, which he called ‘Pakistani’, since it was vastly out of proportion to its surroundings and characteristic, he liked to believe, of deprived immigrants crouching in front of it like primitives contemplating the transit of Venus. Rob had prepared Harry for these whisky sessions, saying that it was in confrontation with the TV that Mamoon came into his own. For most of his adult life, Mamoon had been his own kind of radical, going to some trouble to mock and invert political correctness, rebelling against the fashionable contrarians of his day, hippies, feminists, anti-racists, revolutionaries, anyone decent, kind or on the side of equality or diversity. This was, for a short time, an unusual and even witty idea. Now Mamoon was as bored by this pose as he was by everything else. Occasionally he would try a provocation. ‘Look at that ugly lazy black bastard,’ he’d say, as, instructed by Liana, they drove into town to pick up some local cheese, and having noticed what looked like a shy but enthusiastic African student visiting local churches. ‘Off to rob, rape and mutilate a white woman’s cunt, no doubt.’ But Harry felt Mamoon’s heart wasn’t in it, and that he preferred to ask simple questions about things which genuinely puzzled him. ‘Tell me, Harry, what exactly is Happy Hour? What is lap dancing and the X Factor? What is wiffy?’

‘Wiffy? Oh, wi-fi.’

Mamoon adored Indian and, even, Pakistani cricket. He had loved, on first coming to Britain, to watch English county cricket on provincial grounds. Monday morning in chilly weather and a light rain, a train ride from London, he would sit down on a bench with a Thermos and a cheese sandwich to watch an obscure game. One wall of his library was covered with pictures of post-war players. In pride of place, though, Mamoon kept a framed photograph of the 1963 West Indian cricket team. Rob had told Harry to be sure to tell Mamoon that his uncle had captained Surrey, and had instructed him to prepare Mamoon by never turning up without either gossip or DVDs of his heroes, Rohan Kanhai, Gary Sobers, Wes Hall, and, from a later period, Malcolm Marshall, Gordon Greenidge, Alvin Kallicharran, and Vivian Richards. It didn’t bore Harry to repeatedly watch them with Mamoon, or even to hear him say, ‘Oh good shot, sir,’ like any other English buffer. Sport, which was unpredictable and existential, and where men were truly tested in the moment, was more important than art, which was ‘soft’. Bowling at Lord’s, taking a penalty at Wembley, playing at Wimbledon, that was ‘the definitive’, as Mamoon called it. ‘If one had played a shot like that at Lord’s, one would die happy, don’t you think? I am a poor entertainer compared to it.’

Mamoon was chatty and alert when he watched football, and liked it if Harry sat with him, drinking whisky and discussing the players and managers. ‘Watching the World Cup with Nietzsche,’ Harry called it, having realised he learned more about Mamoon listening to him discuss the future of Manchester City than by interviewing him about his books, or his ideas on colonialism. Harry’s questions were, at the beginning, gentle and general, and Mamoon made no attempt to conceal his boredom. ‘When did you know you were a writer?’ ‘But I don’t, even now.’ ‘Did you love your father?’ ‘Too much. I was a son rather than a man.’ ‘When did you become a man?’ If a question seemed impertinent or irritated him, Mamoon said nothing but stared into the distance, waiting for the fatuity of the enquiry to occur to Harry.

While Harry sat with the great man, he ruminated on the writers he had grown up loving. Forster, tearing colonialism apart, absurdity by absurdity; a serious Orwell; Graham Greene, prowling around, looking for trouble and death; Evelyn Waugh, who saw almost everything, and hated it. Mamoon was one of the last of that sort, and of equal merit, in Harry’s view. And Harry was in his house; he was walking and discussing seriously with him; he would write his life. Their names would be linked for ever; he would have a small share in the old man’s power. But biography had learned a lot from the scandal sheets; it had been sucked towards the dirty stuff, a process of disillusionment. Unmasking was the thing, leaving just bleached bones. You think you like this writer? See how badly he treated his wife, children and mistresses. He even loved men! Hate him, hate his work — whichever way you looked at it, the game was up. The question had become: what can we forgive in others? How far do they have to go before we lose faith in them?

Harry had loved most of the arts long enough to know that artists had to be excused failings which would condemn the general population. The artist was the proxy, the brave one, the one who spoke, was thanked, and who paid the price. Artists were allowed, indeed encouraged, to lead more libidinous lives on behalf of others who had, of necessity, to leave their jouissance at the door while they worked. And as Harry began to read through the material in the barn, he became aware that he was thinking about the matter Rob had specified. What would he do with Mamoon? Who can think of Larkin now without considering his fondness for the buttocks of schoolgirls and paranoid hatred of blacks — ‘I can hear fat Caribbean germs pattering after me in the underground. .’ Or Eric Gill’s copulations with more or less every member of his family, including the dog? Proust had rats tortured, and donated his family furniture to brothels; Dickens walled up his wife and kept her from her children; Lillian Hellman lied. While Sartre lived with his mother, Simone de Beauvoir pimped babes for him; he envied Camus, before trashing him. John Cheever loitered in toilets, nostrils aflare, before returning to his wife. P. G. Wodehouse made broadcasts for the Nazis; Mailer stabbed his second wife. Two of Ted Hughes’s lovers had killed themselves. And as for Styron, Salinger, Saroyan. . Literature was a killing field; no decent person had ever picked up a pen. Jack Nicholson in The Shining had the right approximation of a writer. If Harry showed merely a decent man rather than a mercenary, he wouldn’t be believed. No one wanted that: it didn’t get anywhere near the hate, heat and passion of a real artist.

Harry wanted Mamoon to know that he would ‘respect and honour’ him because he loved his work. Mamoon might have been mean, drunken and dirty at times, as all men and women were, but it was important that prurience didn’t distract him, or his readers, from the increasingly important lesson that great art, the best words and good sentences, mattered — and mattered increasingly in a degraded, censorious world, a world where the passion for ignorance had increased through religion. Words were the bridge to reality; without them there was only chaos. Bad words could poison you and ruin your life, Mamoon had once said; and the right words could refocus reality. The madness of writing was the antidote to true madness. People admired Britain only because of its literature; the pretty little sinking island was a storehouse of genius, where the best words were kept, made and remade.

If Harry felt guilty that he was attempting to look into the intimate life of a considerable man who had invited him to stay in his house, it wasn’t because Mamoon, with his high-mindedness, fastidiousness and dignity — a man formed and active before the Murdoch empire altered for good our ideas of a ‘private life’ — was beyond such trivialities.

But trivialities make a man, and, when he could find them, Harry brought and read to Mamoon bad reviews of books written by Mamoon’s contemporaries, friends or acquaintances, knowing that he would be unable to refrain from chuckling and purring with pleasure. Then Harry learned, during their runs through the lanes with the dogs, that Mamoon loved gossip, particularly if it was demeaning. Harry cursed himself for not noticing, in his reading, that humiliation was the touchstone of Mamoon’s character; it was where he had come from, and where he continued to find his enjoyment. His father had humiliated him continuously, driving him towards excellence and a lifetime of semi-repressed fury, and Mamoon never forsook its awful pleasures. Mamoon didn’t appear to respond to his wife’s kisses or caresses, or even her attempts to take his hand, but he was fascinated when there was prohibited contact between other people. Before he drove down to the country, Harry had to ring around the gossipocracy of agents, publishers and writers, to stock up with as many stories of infidelity, plagiarism, literary feuding and deceit, cross-dressing, backstabbing, homosexuality, and, in particular, lesbianism, as he could. At present Mamoon was fascinated by stories of formerly ‘normal’ women dragged to the ‘other side’ by ‘les Sapphics’, whom, he seemed to believe, had ‘mesmeric’ powers.

‘Anything lesbic to cheer me up?’ he’d say when Harry arrived from London. ‘Have their moustaches been twitching this week? Do they have fresh batteries in their vibrators? Let’s hike across the fields and discuss it fully.’

Harry had begun to feel like a Bloomsbury Scheherazade. But he had learned that Mamoon’s definition of lesbianism was almost non-discriminatory: he referred to all women writers as lesbian, including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Sylvia Plath. ‘I’m going to bed with a lesbian,’ he’d say, tucking an Austen under his arm and going upstairs.

‘At least you’re going to be having a good time,’ mumbled Harry.

‘I’m sorry to be trivial,’ said Mamoon. ‘I told Rob I’m just a hollow man. The novelist is the same — a trickster, deceiver, conman: whatever. But mostly he is a seducer.’

‘Aren’t you fascinated by seduction?’

‘Isn’t that all art is?’ said Mamoon. ‘Turn over, show us what you have, that is what you readers want.’

Even if Harry did have gossip, Mamoon rarely stayed up beyond nine in the evening, and it was soon after that hour when the revenge predicted by Alice — you could call it truth’s price — began to occur.

Harry was having peculiar experiences when alone in his bedroom.

The staff hadn’t been allocated time to clean his room. Perhaps Mamoon hadn’t encouraged them; he didn’t like guests, and few came. In Harry’s room there were dead flies and dust; the television didn’t work — all Harry could do was play FIFA and Grand Theft Auto on it, before watching movies on his computer until he fell asleep. He’d been driving back to London to see Alice and their friends whenever he could. Perhaps the close proximity to his subject, and to the countryside, was getting him down.

Harry had been brought up with his twin sporty, clever brothers in West London, one of them now a philosophy lecturer and the other a restaurateur. Unlike many of his friends, his parents hadn’t owned a country place, preferring to spend the weekends at galleries, exhibitions and the theatre, having picnics at Chiswick House, or throwing parties in the garden for those whom the boys sneeringly referred to as ‘intellectuals’, who talked about feminism, politics, and Lacan. These people’s idea of a good night out was to catch a double bill of Jean-Luc Godard at the ICA. Harry’s father, who never wanted to stop thinking about and, unfortunately, discussing the psyche — being much exercised by the philosophical problems of psychiatry and ‘notions of normality’ — believed there was no one to talk to in the countryside, and that the people living there were as bovine as the animals they reared.

But it wasn’t only this inherited aversion to the countryside which was making Harry discontented. After ten days, at about three in the morning, he was woken up by a terrifying male howling and yelling, as though something was being slaughtered. At breakfast Liana said, ‘Are you exhausted?’

‘But yes.’

She took Harry some eggs, and then began to dig her fingers into his shoulders as if she’d mislaid some loose change in his muscles. ‘Were you awake? The murderous yelling has begun again. It happened the last three nights but you didn’t hear. Your questions are condemning him to a terrible wakefulness.’

‘I’ve hardly started with the enquiries. If I ask him if he wants milk in his tea, he runs for the hills.’

‘Mamoon is a worldly man, with childish fears. He won’t tell me what these dreams are, but when he wakes up, soon after he sleeps, he cries like a baby. Sometimes he barks like a dog. Even the animals have insomnia then, and become suicidal. Please, swear to me, you won’t mention it in the book and embarrass us in London, Bombay and Rome.’

Harry said he couldn’t cram in every wink, burp and gesticulation. He took her hand as he turned to face her. ‘But Liana, surely you know indiscretion is the essence of biography? Who would read a portrait of a saintly saint?’

‘I don’t believe you are a filthy merchant only, Harry. What people want is upliftment, to learn the path to greatness so they can follow down it. Thank God I am here to educate you. And when the book is finished, you will bring it to me and I will strike out anything remiss with my sharpened pencil.’

He laughed. ‘You won’t be doing that, Liana.’

‘Rob has agreed. Mamoon would cut his balls otherwise. Who do you think you are — Joan Crawford’s daughter?’

‘I had no idea that Rob had made some sort of deal with you.’

‘What does it have to do with you?’

‘Sorry?’

‘When you hire a decorator to make the walls green, you don’t invite him to say he doesn’t like green. You invite him to put the green up and shut up.’

‘I’m only the decorator here?’

‘You do the paperwork. We do the rest. Coffee?’

He was compromised already. What else might she swear him to omit? Would he have to defy her? And if he knew he would have to do that, why couldn’t he say so now and make everything clear to her?

That was the least of it. Harry rang Rob to tell him how it was going, and how inhibited he felt already, as well as to complain about the other noises which prevented him from sleeping — the wildlife.

Rob yelled, ‘Get a gun and fire off a few rounds from the window. When the goats get the idea you mean business they’ll retreat to their stables.’

‘They’re not goats.’

‘Horses?’

‘They’re birds, I think. It’s cold in the room, the light doesn’t work, the window doesn’t shut and at about four o’clock in the morning these animals — what are they, bats, geese, ducks, fish, pigs; anyway most of Noah’s ark — start up this atrocious animal disco. I’m trapped in a rectum here!’

‘You fucking wuss, complain to your agent, not to me. Thank God I didn’t put you forward for the Freya Stark gig, redoing her African walks or wherever it was the old girl traipsed around.’

Harry said, ‘Is it true you’ve given Liana creative control of my book?’

Rob put the phone down.

Before retreating to his room, Harry began to go out into the yard and smoke a joint to help him sleep. Then he lay in bed thinking about Peggy, with a notebook and pen beside him. This was how he often had ideas. But sentences from the ‘miseries’, as he called the diaries, began to circulate in his head. One night, after he’d been there for ten days, these whispers appeared to have their own agency, or to be coming from another source, a hubbub he couldn’t turn off.

Harry got up, stumbled across the room, and put on the dim light. There she suddenly was: Peggy perched on the foot of the bed, perilously thin, exhausted but fiercely energetic, and glowing.

‘What will you say about me, Harry?’ she said. ‘Will I be defined by my bitter end? Isn’t there more to me than that? And who are you to judge?’

Peggy had been a quiet, articulate, academic girl with well-off alcoholic parents who had taught French at private schools. After university she’d worked for a small literary magazine and been introduced to Mamoon by the editor in one of the Bloomsbury pubs he frequented. In Harry’s view Mamoon, whose school-teacher father had trained him hard to win scholarships, was traumatised by being sent to an English public school and then to Oxford. There wasn’t a moment when he didn’t feel awkward and out of place amongst the English toffs his father was so keen for him to join, though the father also claimed, at the same time, to hate the British. On his first date with Peggy he had embarrassed himself by getting into the front of a black taxi next to the driver, and shuffling about trying to find the seat, until the outraged driver threw him out.

In cold, sooty London, a city full of people who believed Indians to be backward and inferior, while the sexy white kids were dressing like Syd Barrett, Peggy helped Mamoon negotiate the master race of Belgravia for whom he was a failed white man barely acquainted with cutlery, and persuaded him to meet her friends in the literary world. Half the people he charmed: he was sympathetic, and was considered to have class and quiet wit. The other half he offended with his arrogance. But his father wanted him back, and wrote all the time begging him to return. He would have gone; he couldn’t see a way forward. It was Peggy who persuaded him to stay in London and make a career as a writer, one of the most difficult choices a man like him could have made. It was she, when he wasn’t getting enough work done in London, who pleaded with her parents to loan them the money to buy the cottage in Somerset.

As couples are at the start, they were together all the time, exploring their new neighbourhood, and driving around the rest of the country, visiting second-hand bookshops. Mamoon then took her to India for a few months. Meanwhile, intellectually, she never let him off the hook; she even accused him of having a lazy, ‘playboy’ mind, which stung him into arguing and debating back. He started to really think.

It was here, in the late sixties, in the library she began to create in the house — the one which he was still developing — that he began to read ferociously, to ‘catch up’. She was a European, an internationalist, who loved Miles Davis and Ionesco; they learned about wine and listened to Boulez while smoking Gauloises. Like a lot of English intellectuals, she was exhausted and frustrated by English isolationism. She worshipped D. H. Lawrence, but otherwise the established view of writing was dry and scholastic: pointless talk of ‘lit crit’, ‘the canon’ and Leavis, and then, later, of Marxism. Harry was learning that Peggy formed Mamoon as much as his parents had, and his scorn for totalitarian — mostly Marxist — political and religious systems, inherited from her sixties libertarianism, had remained unchanged. Eventually he drained her, it was thought, and wanted to be gone; she wanted to settle. After, for years, they just stayed ‘suspended’.

And so, addressing the ghost, Harry said, ‘I will be fair and compassionate. No blame or excuses. Just the facts and a warm voice. You spoke for yourself, in the diaries. You were clear. You can go now, Peggy, please. You don’t have to worry, I’m not from the newspapers.’

‘But Harry, I’ve been waiting to see you for a long time,’ she said. ‘Don’t you know me?’

‘Aren’t you Peggy?’

‘Look at me closely, if you can bear to.’

It was when he recognised his mother and heard her say, ‘Oh Harry, it’s so good to see you. I want to hear every detail of your life after I left. Was it awful? Have you been okay? Can we talk now?’ that he jumped out of bed, fled soundlessly along the corridor past the rooms where Liana and Mamoon retired, and out of the house and into the cooling night air.

In the yard he sat helplessly in the family 4 × 4, pulling his eldest brother’s scarf from the glove compartment, putting it around his neck and hugging it to himself. His brothers, at his father’s insistent urging, had made him sell his motorbikes, which he had only done when they promised to replace his wheels with the loan of this vehicle.

It was turning out to be useful. It was twenty minutes’ drive to the village pub, where he’d never before been. He had no idea how he’d be received. But he needed to see people who weren’t yet ghosts.