The Last Word

Nine

‘Come on Boswell, are you a real man or are your stories all made up like mine?’ cried Mamoon, always keen on a little lethal competition after a morning keeping culture alive. ‘My nuts are not even sweating! Make me run! Don’t you want to kill the jumped-up wog who has stolen your white women? Take your chance with murder at last! What risk have you ever taken?’

Harry found it amusing to knock balls around for Mamoon to hit, and Mamoon enjoyed the vigorous sessions; they cheered him up, particularly the bullying part.

Thwack — Harry hit the ball, calling after it, ‘There, Fred Perry, practise your backhand on that, if you can! Go, go, go, grandad!’

When Mamoon did run, he coughed; he hawked, retched and spat, his whole body shuddering. Then he wanted to play again, to push himself.

In the kitchen, as they were leaving, Liana had wagged her bejewelled finger at Harry. ‘Whenever he insists that you kill him, that he would love to be murdered by you, I do not want you to provide him with a heart attack, okay? This may be a labour of hate, and I don’t know the incidence of biographers actually murdering their subjects, but let’s not begin a trend.’

Harry soon wondered if he had indeed begun a trend. He sent across a strong but not-too-strong shot. The old man was lumbering after the ball when he suddenly pulled up as if he’d been shot, yelling out in pain and falling onto his knees.

Harry ran to Mamoon, turned him onto his back and told him to remain still. He would fetch help.

‘I’ve never been still in my life,’ said Mamoon. ‘I will rise up and walk!’

Despite what Harry reckoned to be a pulled muscle, Mamoon began to crawl across the court, insisting they restart the game. Holding onto the fence, he scrambled to his feet, bent to one side, and presented his racket.

‘Serve! I’m ready! Come on, you English public-school bastard!’

Harry gently patted the ball towards him. Mamoon hurried for it and keeled over once more, falling onto his face while clutching his side.

Harry hadn’t brought his phone. He had to get Mamoon to his feet and more or less carry him back to the house. It was quite a hike, and Mamoon was heavy, sweating and cursing. At last Harry asked Mamoon to climb onto his back; after some consideration, it seemed to be the most efficacious position.

As they went, Mamoon breathed into Harry’s ear, ‘I bet you wish you were writing another bad book about Conrad. Tell me, what is that story where a man has to carry a corpse on his back? Or perhaps I have become Kafka’s authoritarian insect?’

Having to conserve his breath, Harry was unable to reply.

Liana glanced out of the window to see the groaning two-headed, two-legged creature staggering towards the house. Out she rushed, demanding to know what Harry had done to her husband. While she ministered to him, Harry waited for Mamoon to explain, but the old man just yelped, cursed and refused to lie down until Liana threatened to spank him. She sent Harry to the woods to make a stick for Mamoon.

Since Liana was preoccupied organising Mamoon’s birthday dinner, for the next few days Harry was deputed to take care of Mamoon physically. He dragged the old man in and out of chairs, got him to the door of his work room — though, like everyone else, he was allowed no further — and helped him return to the house. Liana had strung a mobile phone around her husband’s neck with two numbers in it, those of herself and of Harry. A writer is loved by strangers and hated by his family. As a young man, Harry would have been amazed, thankful and flattered to have Mamoon Azam call him five times a day. Why would such a distinguished man, with whom everybody, surely, would love to converse, want to talk with him? Now, as ‘family’, he was too close, and dreaded hearing that languid voice. ‘Please, Harry, dear boy, if you’re nearby, would you be so kind as to fetch me a book — the one with the green cover, I think it’s green, greenish or perhaps turquoise, but I can’t remember the title or the author — from near the television. . At least I think it’s near the television. Also, I can’t locate my glasses exactly. These are the ones with the blue not the black frames. Do you have any idea. .’

It was unfortunate that Mamoon’s back injury, which rendered him physically incapable, as well as more irascible than usual, coincided with Liana’s desire to impress Harry with their friends. Liana had become particularly engaged with and, indeed, somewhat manic about the dinner — ‘the beginning of always’, as she referred to the evening.

With Julia flying behind her being shouted at, Liana hurried into town on numerous occasions, bearing lists, to organise the menu, drink and seating plan. She was keen to ensure it was the perfect mix of people. Apparently, most of the diners would be local, but friends were coming from London; others would be driving across the country. There would be witty talk and laughter, drink, and good food. It would be useful for Harry too: he would see how a successful man lived and was loved. It would be a rehearsal for the sort of thing Liana anticipated happening regularly in London, once they raised the money to buy a place.

Alice, now at work in London, had heard about all this from Harry. She had been in Paris with people from the office, but had promised she would get on the train and join them if she could, depending on how things went in town.

On the evening of the dinner, one month after Harry had arrived at the house, he and Mamoon were sitting at the kitchen table waiting for Julia to finish helping Liana to get dressed. The two women, with Ruth’s assistance, had been at it for some time — since yesterday morning, in fact. Mamoon had compared it to redecorating Chartres. Meanwhile, the men, having taken only a second to get their suits on and jiggle their hair, had already had a number of bracing Martinis.

Harry asked Mamoon if he was okay. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, you have the alarmed look of a man who has just noticed he’s boarded the wrong train.’

‘It’s not the juice making my hands shake, Harry. What could be worse than a dinner in one’s honour, my friend? I’d have preferred to stay in and self-harm. The wife, as you would call her in the faux cockney you must have learned at public school, seems to be having a mad spell, even for her.’

‘This dinner is making you both tense. Liana is wonderfully kind—’

‘I must say, you’re a sparky lad to be erecting one’s effigy and bringing drinks. I’m getting rather fond of you. You might have to do me a slight favour.’

‘I wondered if something along those lines was in the offing—’

Mamoon leaned forward. ‘Keep an eye on Liana tonight — you know how good you are at making conversation about brassieres, ley lines and other female interests.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You’re smart enough to recognise that the subjects of migraines and cats never fail with the women. Lead the old girl towards the mint tea.’

‘Okay.’

‘Mind you, you could do me another favour by fetching that bottle of vodka for me, please. The one in the freezer, where Liana keeps her cashmere sweaters.’ Harry got it, and two crystal shot glasses. Mamoon poured two hits and drank one off, replenishing it immediately. ‘Drink that. It’s better nude. The vermouth was confusing us.’ Harry drank his and Mamoon refilled his glass. Mamoon said, ‘I know you have a lot of experience in this area.’

‘What area, sir?’

‘Women.’

‘You know more, sir. You were with Peggy for years. I’m studying it.’

‘Harry, please do not omit to point out to the eager reading masses that she was a perfectly nice woman, but no one should have had to marry her. One falls in love, and then learns, for the duration, that one is at the mercy of someone else’s childhood. One will realise, for instance, after a time, that one is actually living in one’s wife’s mother’s armpit. I made a mistake. Perfectly understandable.’

‘How?’

‘I believed sex and work could take the place of love. I have to say, when Peggy died, I was relieved and perhaps a little exhilarated. For a while I didn’t know what to do. Really what I needed was what I have now. A girl, who is knotty — very damn knotty, without doubt — but one who is a man’s woman.’

‘What sort of woman is that?’

‘A woman devoted not to herself, to her children, to a cause or to alcohol, but to the man she idealises, and to his pencil and his genius. And that man, where possible,’ Mamoon sighed, ‘should be me.’

‘You are lucky, sir. Soon to get even luckier.’

‘Why?’

‘Wait until you see your wife tonight.’

‘Has she had a facelift?’ Harry shook his head. ‘More expensive? Tell me, please.’

‘One minute.’ Harry stood at the back door and lit a cigarette. ‘I will tell you.’

That morning Julia had come into Harry’s room, shut the door, and almost cried. Not that she was usually the crying type. When Harry asked her what was wrong, she reported that Liana, having become particularly frantic and anxious in the past few days, had vehemently reminded her that she, Liana, was in charge and that as she had everything and Julia nothing, Julia should watch out. Julia was on notice.

‘Girl, you should be more grateful and better behaved,’ Liana added. ‘Then, insh’allah, perhaps Mamoon and I will help you progress in this tough world.’

Harry learned that there had been an accumulation of hurts: Liana had accused Julia, on an earlier occasion, of having greasy hair and of being slovenly. Exasperated by Liana’s high-handedness, impatience and one more threat of a slap, Julia had thought and thought. She had come up with a plan to get back at Liana without being fired. Not that Harry thought Liana would get rid of her anyway; he knew Liana was not paying Julia for all the time she spent at the house and that Liana was trying to make out that the two of them were ‘friends’.

Julia didn’t see money as the essential thing here. She had found some purpose at last, and had been working to insert herself indispensably into Liana’s life. First thing in the morning she prepared her mistress’s wardrobe by laying out her clothes, crystals and accessories for the day. She ensured Liana’s bathroom was as scrubbed as an operating theatre. Then she drove her, shopped with her, brushed and fed the animals, and put out her vanilla ice cream when she became anxious. Julia was turning Liana into the grand lady Liana had always assumed herself to be, while seeing all. From the other side, Harry had heard Liana say, without embarrassment, that working ‘as experience’ for the couple would ‘look good’ on Julia’s CV, at which Julia smirked. ‘Why do you make that face?’ Liana asked, to which Julia replied, ‘But miss, we don’t have careers down here. Sometimes we have jobs. But not often.’

It was no secret to Harry that Julia prefered Prospects House to her own home. She had first come to the house as a child, when her mother was employed by Peggy. Julia’s brother Scott, who tended to take care of her, was away often, and in the past few months her mother’s carousing had been accelerating in intensity and frequency. Barely a night passed when Ruth didn’t go to the pub and bring several men back to the house for a further session. ‘I deserve a bit of company at this time of my life,’ Ruth insisted, dragging in a crate of lager. ‘I might have been unlucky in love, but it’s never too late to live! Look at you for instance,’ she went on. ‘You bring that posh boy back here and do I say nothing?’

‘But why should you say something?’ asked Julia. She said to Harry, ‘So, Mum has started to hate you.’

Harry said, ‘The other morning as I scoffed my scrambled egg I noticed her turning the evil eye on me. But have I been anything but polite to her?’

‘It’s just you,’ she said. ‘She does a hilarious imitation of you flirting.’ Julia was about to repeat it, but thought better of it. ‘She says you’re snobby, middle-class and patronising, and you’re everything she hates about this country. Someone’s going to teach you a lesson one of these days.’

‘I am eager to learn, as you know. But I hope to God Scott isn’t my teacher.’

With Ruth, on one of her ‘nights’, there’d be dancing, and boisterous copulation, followed by fighting, and blood on the floor in the morning. Julia stayed with her friend Lucy when she could; occasionally, when she thought it would be terrible at home, she’d creep into one of the barns and sleep on a sofa, unbeknown to Liana and Mamoon. But mostly she was at home, sleepless behind the bolted door, wondering whether, or when, she should intervene. If the shouts were desperate, and the punches too hard, she dressed, went down and yelled at the maniacs. She smashed the boom-box with a hammer. Another time she called the police. Although Ruth wore glasses and was thin, if not emaciated in the scrawny manner of some alcoholics, the mother fetched Julia a tremendous blow across the ear which seemed to concuss the poor girl, leaving her with a relentless buzzing. Not only that, one of the men seemed to have moved in, taking up residence in a cardboard box under the living-room table. When Julia sat down, a clammy hand would reach out and caress her ankle. ‘It’s like living in a pub,’ she said.

In her time off, she didn’t go home, but swam in the narrow, cold but fresh, almost concealed river at the bottom of one of the hay fields. She and Harry rode down to the river on the quad bike which Scott had repaired. While Harry strummed his guitar, singing her a slow blues, she considered the lavender sky and the countryside and the future.

She had begun to walk more vigorously, and soon she wanted to jog lightly, sometimes with Harry. She had dyed strands of her hair red, so the colour seemed to dance when she ran. To relax she’d sit on a kitchen chair at the bottom of the field with her face up to the sun. She said, ‘A lot of my friends have had kids. I know how they suffer. And how they go on suffering, long after the baby is born and the man has gone.’ Many of these kids she’d looked after; she was kind and patient with children. She said that girls like her were called ‘prams’ by the middle-class locals, but the only regular entertainment in the area was copulation.

One evening after he’d kissed her, she pulled an envelope from her bag and gave it to Harry. Inside were three stained, scuffed reporter’s notebooks full of Mamoon’s almost illegible notes, in faded pencil and biro. She had been keeping them under her bed. Harry thanked her and slipped them into the pockets of his combat trousers; later, when he had time to glance through them quickly, he saw they were gold dust.

He and Julia avoided eye contact in the house. But convinced there was an ‘eternal’ connection between them, she texted him often, sending him kisses and instructions as to what he should do to her later. One time she came into his room with a bucket and mop while he was working. When he turned, she pushed her hand down the front of her tights, licking her middle finger and rubbing herself while he watched her in the mirror.

Harry liked the fact Julia was plucky; the flare of her mischievous and dissenting smile always cheered him. He liked her even more when she was schemingly smart enough to recognise that an appeal to her mistress’s paranoia would work a treat.

This was her vengeful riposte. ‘Liana, you are the chief, organising everything here, thank Jesus in heaven. But there is something I do have more than you.’

‘You joke with me, surely. What?’

‘Guess.’ After a little giggle, Julia continued in her humble but dogged way, ‘You have less jiggy than me. Less than most people.’

Liana stopped and stared at Julia as if she’d never seen her before. Julia flinched, wondering whether Liana would sock or sack her.

‘Yes, well. . Do people talk about this?’

‘They do.’

Liana pursed her lips. She didn’t describe herself as a witch, mystic and clairvoyant for nothing. She thought for a bit before saying, ‘My hands still dampen when Mamoon walks into the room.’

Julia said, ‘Does any part of him dampen?’

‘Yes, that’s the question. You’re absolutely spot on and right, I must increase my power over him.’

‘You have to, miss.’

‘Otherwise he will become bored and very dangerous, as he did with Peggy and Marion. In my country we women are very forceful and recognise there’s only one way to keep a man — and that is to satisfy him. I will leave him with not a drop of juice or scrap of energy even to say hello to another woman.’

Liana would make sure that everyone knew that she could use her ‘wiles and guiles’, to turn her husband on — that very night. ‘Then the gossiping village dagger-tongues of those who think my husband doesn’t desire me will be zipped shut forever.’

‘Good shot, Julia,’ confirmed Harry. ‘Dangerous, but subtle. I can’t wait to see what sort of wiles and guiles Liana has in mind. She can have no better helper than you. Let’s hope this little plan doesn’t backfire.’

Now Harry stubbed out his cigarette and poured Mamoon another drink. He said, ‘Liana, with Julia’s kind help, is going to some trouble to please you. It goes without saying that the ideal woman you refer to — a man’s woman — needs to be kept occupied by the man.’

‘You will be thrilled to hear that I increased Liana’s allowance last month.’

‘What did you allow her?’

‘It is true that a man has to catch a woman by the ears, by talking to her and, occasionally, even listening. But this time I got her head. I seem to have bought her a wig.’

‘She certainly needs to be walked out, and shown off. Otherwise it is like keeping a Velázquez in a cupboard. Be nice: get her some new titties for Christmas. She’d love the attention.’

Mamoon laughed. ‘Dear boy, your prick is so hard you can barely walk straight. But I can barely walk at all — you know why. Besides, my blood has cooled at last.’ He went on to say that he had a good friend in Paris, a wonderful poet older than him. ‘Think of two old men sitting in a cafe, watching the world die. He is either weaker or more persistent than me, but he is still playing the game of love. He said the other day that the only thing to be said for ageing is that you don’t come quickly, if at all.’

Mamoon said that his friend’s eyes would suddenly focus; he would stand up and follow a woman down the street, quoting Stendhal as he went: ‘Beauty is the promise of happiness. .’ Mamoon’s friend set the women up in apartments, made love to them — at least at the beginning — and paid for them to study to become lawyers. It broke down when the women found someone richer and younger. One day he was apprehended by the police on a balcony, this old man, trying to look in on one of his lovelies who was with another man.

‘Then — Harry — he comes crying to me — no better therapist when it comes to comforting the lovelorn.’

‘You envy him?’

‘My friend might need to learn, as I think you will, when it’s too late, that rather than a big bang, the whimper of a companionate marriage, an agape, a warm conversation, could be the model union, and the target of all love. Kind, nurturing, even-keeled, dispassionate — such a love will make for contented days when one can think freely. Plus: one’s supper will be on the table when one wants it.’

‘Parental, or pseudo-sibling, rather than adult?’

‘Why say it would not be adult?’

‘There’s no sex.’

Mamoon knocked back his vodka. ‘I have to acknowledge, you might be on to something.’ Harry smiled, pleased to have interested Mamoon at last. ‘You’re almost, but not quite, the fool I like to take you for.’

Harry leaned forward. ‘You put your penis on the page.’

Mamoon looked at him quizzically. ‘Sorry?’

‘Mamoon, you made your women into fictional characters rather than loved them as real people.’

‘Think what you’d achieve, Harry,’ said Mamoon sorrowfully, ‘if you didn’t always go too far.’

‘It’s only when I go too far that I think I’m getting somewhere,’ said Harry.

Mamoon had just closed his eyes when there was a cry from elsewhere in the house. ‘I’m alive and ready to boogie! Prepare, people!’

‘Boys, she’s coming!’ trilled Julia.

Mamoon came to, and reached for his stick. ‘It better be worth it.’

Supported at the elbow by Julia, Liana stepped carefully down the stairs. At some physical cost, Mamoon turned around to see his wife. Harry didn’t know whether it was the style Mamoon’s wife had selected for his birthday, or the fact that she appeared to be wearing all of his money at once, which made Mamoon resemble a man about to have an electric fire dropped into his bath.

‘Help me,’ he said to Harry, raising his arms. ‘Please, help me up — my bottom half has gone.’