The Last Word (13 page)

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.’

Harry guessed there was something wrong with Rob when, the afternoon after his return to London, Rob suggested they meet in the frantic bar of a railway station. It was not the case that Rob was intending to take a journey: he said he only liked ‘anonymous places’ or ‘non-spaces’ now. As soon as they met, Rob commented on the number of anxious bodies rushing around them, saying how the limbs had lost contact with their owners and resembled electrified stumps.

Rob had been drinking and was sweaty and shaking excessively, even for him. He appeared to have shoved most of his clothes in a kit bag that didn’t close, and Harry could see a slew of manuscripts, Bulgarian, Albanian and Tunisian novels, and poetry books. As there was the stench of the grave about the editor, Harry got down from his stool, saying it was awkward, and insisted they sit at a table where Rob was further away.

‘Don’t I look a hundred per cent?’ said Rob. His eyes widened and he glanced around furtively, as if he were about to be attacked. Harry remembered how gentle his father was with paranoiacs, speaking to them quietly, and without intrusive questions, often just repeating what they said in a whisper. He managed this until Rob informed him that he was intending to accompany him to Mamoon’s place in the country.

‘You are? Why?’ asked Harry.

‘Don’t you think it would be a good place to detox? We can talk through the material while strolling about the woods. I can help you organise it.’

‘Rob, I’m not ready for that,’ said Harry. ‘All you need to know is that India was terrific.’

‘And America?’

‘I had to beg for it, but finally it turned out to be good stuff, with Marion. She’s very similar to Liana in her brashness and confidence. Mamoon must know that people go for the same types without seeing it. But she’s more intelligent and shrewder than Liana. She knows him better. However, it turns out she loved the curmudgeonly old cunt non-stop for years, and still does, remarkably enough. She even fetched other women for him.’

‘There’s no accounting for taste. Particularly with literary giants, Harry, you will find that the women fling themselves into the fire head first. We fans are on the wrong side of literature.’

Harry said, ‘She gave him everything he wanted, and plenty of what he didn’t want. There was so much of it, he had to run for his life, even if it meant going back to the moaning lush Peggy who’d swallow anything, except his semen.’

‘No wonder he hid in the shed writing.’

‘He regrets the hiding, I suspect. It did him no good to miss out on the kisses. Still, it cheers me to think what a torment the bastard endured with both of them. It must have been a relief when Liana turned up, his escape from the labour of love. He must have believed everything would get easier.’

‘Did it work out for Mamoon? What’s it really like down there in the country with him? I guess I’ll find out later tonight.’ Harry must have looked surprised. ‘But I’m already packed. And this is juicy stuff, Harry. I can’t wait to hear more!’

‘In due course.’

‘What the fuck?’ said Rob. ‘Aren’t you going to let me sniff the sock?’

‘Rob, you sound a little manic. Your words are too close together. You don’t look at your all-time best.’

He said, ‘Did you get objective confirmation of the Mamoon violations? You can’t just stick any fucking gossip in one of my books: the lawyers will rip it right out.’

‘I understand that.’

Rob said he was rereading Mamoon’s second book, which was improving with age. He saw it all: how Marxism and fundamentalism both require and enjoin silence, and that where there is silence evil is done. Far from fading, the writer had become a more crucial figure. He and Harry should shout out to the world that Mamoon still existed and people should hear him. Rob went on to say that things were not good for him either. ‘The wife’s thrown me out of the house. We had an altercation involving violence – on her side. She says I’m a paranoid alcoholic with a personality disorder.’

‘Who’d have thought it?’

‘I am narcissistic, too, apparently, as is anyone who doesn’t think about her continuously. I’m going to get treatment for depression. If the pills don’t work, I’m going to ask to have electricity put through me to jolt me into full health. Will you hold my hand when I’m plugged into the AC/DC?’

‘Rob, it was you who suggested that things were not good for
me
.’

‘Sorry, I forgot. They are not good for you. They couldn’t be worse, no.’ He leaned towards Harry. ‘Watch out all around – from behind, the side and the front.’

Harry laughed. ‘For what? I’ve just been in New York discussing the book with the American publisher. I’m full of ideas. He was pleased.’

Rob leaned towards him. ‘There’s a young gun, just out of college, more businesslike, less drippy and dreamy than you. When you left the country Liana hopped off to London to meet with him secretly. She told him how difficult you are, with your unusual hard-on for the truth, and she gave him encouragement.’

‘She did that to me?’

‘The young gun was guaranteeing he could turn the biography around in a year, and give Mamoon a lovely fresh gloss – the last of the post-war literary geniuses, there being only blogs, trolls and amateurs from now on. I could hear Liana’s vagina clapping with enthusiasm.’

‘You’re joking, Rob. I signed a contract.’

‘If Liana gives the word, you’re gone like a used condom. Me and Lotte, my super-soft sidekick, are making a superhuman effort to hold you in place.’

‘How?’

‘We’re using threats – among other things. Liana has to trust me: I said the young gun doesn’t have half your brain or ability. It sounds as if you’ve been doing good work. I bought you more time. You must press on, friend. Without my protection it will get dirty. I wouldn’t want to see
you
on antidepressants. What’s up? Your coat is going on. You’re looking away. You’re dashing off tonight – but, please, not without me.’

‘Sorry, Rob, I don’t want to be rude, but I need to see Alice properly.’

When Rob said he did too, Harry got up, paid the bill and started to walk away. Rob followed him, still talking. ‘I say – let’s meet soon, with the material in front of us. Perhaps on site. I could feel purified down there amongst the goats, fish and dung.’ He went on, ‘And if I can’t confirm the material’s decent, it’s curtains and creative writing for you, dude. You get me?’

Harry got away from Rob, and hid a bit. At last Alice, who’d been shopping for two days, came to the station with the car stacked with gifts. After tea, they drove to Mamoon’s.

‘You’re in a good mood,’ said Alice. ‘I haven’t heard about the trip in detail. Did you get what you wanted?’

‘I might have a story. Let me talk it through. There’s some kind of centre to the book. Similar events to the ones Marion described occur in two of Mamoon’s later novels. One of his guilt-filled terrorists likes the same stuff, degrading the woman with other men and so on. Mamoon describes him as “moral filth”, which confirms it for me.’

She asked if that was enough, and he told her that ‘the Marion time’ had been a crucial period for Mamoon. After temporising over the matter for weeks, Mamoon deserted Marion in America to return to Peggy and help her die. She had begged him; she had no one else, apart from Ruth, who’d supervised the house for years and was her only friend nearby. A nurse came in every day, and Julia, a girl then, not yet a teenager, ran errands. But it was lonely.

Peggy had also made it clear, at Ruth’s urging, that a Mamoon no-show would ensure that he forfeited the property, which was in her name. His belongings would be dumped in the yard and the house would go to her sister. Mamoon owned nothing. He’d never had to think where he should live, or what he should have for supper. Peggy was maternal, at least. She’d enabled him to become an artist. What was marriage but sex plus property – property being
the
thing here.

So, corpse-tied, Mamoon slunk back. It was toxic; a fateful, blackmailing wrench for him and an interrruption of the new life he was exploring. He had promised Marion he would go back to her. He thought and thought about her, but he didn’t return, and he didn’t ask her to join him. He let it go – for a bit. And then for longer . . .

Peggy’s diaries were sparse here, unsurprisingly, but she noted how kind Mamoon was, when pushed. She had been alone too much, and now couldn’t bear it. The moment he walked back in through the door her heart leapt. He had come home, her prince. She praised and thanked him, her husband, a thousand times. He put down his bag. She had him where she wanted him.

While she rested and slept, he sat with her and wrote at the desk across the room – and he kept on writing: fiction, diaries, and notes on his life. Harry told Alice he’d discovered several of Mamoon’s scruffy notebooks among Peggy’s things in the barn, which he was going through. These notes, given to him, in fact, by Julia, were a fascinating insight into his method, as Mamoon served her: the description of a body shrinking into death, her hands, her mouth, how he washed her, and her suffering and humiliation. Also – his memories of India, political and philosophical ideas, characters, ideas for essays, and so on. For a time he became a zombie, to survive. He had stopped loving her a long time ago, and she knew it.

Mamoon confessed that Peggy’s whole being made him ill. Her voice turned his stomach; the way she pulled at him made him cringe. The terror was that she wouldn’t die. The combination of hate and duty did him in: he was out of control, passionately unhappy, half mad, drinking, wondering why he was so loyal to her. Shouldn’t he have stayed with Marion and let Peggy down?

Peggy did die. He went into his room, eating and weeping at his desk, crying for Marion too, with whom he had also broken – at least in his mind. So: he was done with her, too. But what did it mean to be ‘done’ with so many people? Who, or what, was left?

He wrote about the hell within him with a new honesty and seriousness. This was when he became an ‘authentic’ artist. He was no longer standing to one side of himself, but said everything straight out. Harry said that no one described death as well as him, and how the mourning, isolation and deprivation made him mad.

Harry said, ‘Mamoon saw no one for eighteen months.’

‘No, no—’

‘Except – except what he describes as “his new family”. And he writes a lot about them in the journal I have.’

‘What? Who do you mean when you say family?’

With Peggy gone, Harry explained, it was the local woman, Ruth, attending to him. Because Mamoon couldn’t cope, and Peggy had insisted on it, Ruth moved into the house with her children, Julia and Scott, who was a teenager. He’d known the kids for years, of course. Peggy had always been aware how cruel Ruth was as a mother. So, when she was a child, Julia lived there for weeks on end during the holidays, hanging out with Peggy, making cakes, taking care of the animals, seeing the place as her home.

But now Mamoon became fond of them in a more adult, responsible way. He had never wanted crying babies or whinging toddlers. But now, to his surprise, he found he liked being a paternal figure. He enjoyed having authority and being relied on. The children taught him that the inside of his head wasn’t the only interesting thing in the world.

He discovered that he could be good fun, joking around as his parents did with him. But he was solicitous too; he saw what the kids needed as they got older. They ate together and watched sport and movies. The kids were used to seeing him sitting on the sofa scribbling in the notebooks. Ruth asked him if he wanted some peace. But no, he found he liked the everyday noises and the voices.

He even had a swimming pool dug for them and their friends, the locals, who came over to splash around. He drove Julia to school. She was moany, sullen, excitable, but perhaps he pitied her, or even liked her. He talked to her as he thought – his usual free association, about politics, his childhood, reading and writing – and she listened. He wrote a story and read it to her. He and Scott boxed together in the garden. Scott built bikes, and played with engines. When Scott was in big trouble with some of the locals, Mamoon went round and faced them down. Ruth kissed his feet.

Julia was the one Mamoon adored more and more. Appalled by her ignorance growing up in the country, he paid for her to have piano lessons, and to attend dance and art classes. He started to teach her Greek, and – quite mad this – made her read Homer and the Bible. He bought her classical records and sat with her while she listened to Mahler, and he was pleased when she wept, since it showed ‘sensitivity’. He promised he’d send her to college, but it didn’t happen. ‘I guess because he was with Liana by then,’ said Harry. ‘But I suspect he never stopped paying for her.’

‘Why would he do this?’ Alice said abruptly, ‘Oh no, he wasn’t going with Ruth, was he?’

‘He might have been. I don’t know yet. Though she wasn’t as far gone as she is now, she was drinking, and capable of violent despair.

Ruth was not entirely awful, or a halfwit, then. She was mightily enthusiastic at that point. She wanted everything, of course: love, the house, a future . . . She thought she might get it if she served Mamoon. Then she made a mistake: she was not entirely self-serving. Maybe she understood what he really needed. Perhaps she cared for him. Harry said he thought she did. Maybe even now.

‘What happened?’ Alice asked.

Ruth had told Mamoon that enough was enough. There was no money coming in. He had to clean himself up and get on with his career. ‘My mother’, said Harry, ‘gave herself to her demons. They devoured her.’ But Mamoon resisted: he got up, he shaved off his long beard. Ruth cut his hair and kissed him. Instead of continuing to lay out his clothes for him every day, she packed his suitcase, and shoved him off to London to see his agent and his publisher. Meanwhile, he gave the family money, allowing them all to stay in the house while he was away. They loved it there: the space, the quiet, the isolation, and Julia regularly began to sit in that lovely library, leafing through books on art.

That was where the notebooks finished.