The Last Word (2 page)

‘Please, no. I’m not qualified.’

‘Even better. Imagine being lost forever in a dark forest of uncompleted first novels that require your total attention.’ He gathered his rags and got up. ‘I see we’ve arrived at the wasteland! Look outside – look at this bog, peopled by tattooed dolts, gargoyles and turnip heads sniffing glue. The horror, the horror! Are you ready for the rest of your life to begin?’

Mamoon’s pretty house, much altered in the last seven years of this marriage, was at the end of a winding potholed track surrounded by flat countryside, a good tranche of which Mamoon had bought up and now rented to local farmers who used the land to make hay. His land was surrounded by an electric fence, to keep deer off. The original house had been purchased in the seventies for Mamoon and his young wife Peggy, by her parents. Peggy had died, a furiously aggrieved alcoholic, twelve years ago, and a couple of years later, Liana, whom Mamoon had been seeing only for a few months, strode through the door bearing her suitcases.

Since then one small outhouse had been restored as Mamoon’s work room. Another run-down barn apparently housed his unused books, copies of his own works in numerous languages, and a disorganised archive, but nobody had been in there for some time. A ‘studio’, where she would write, paint or design, was semi-built for Liana, but remained unfinished, and she used it to dance in. Liana had also been planning, with an architect, a further extension for guests. It was partly this development, along with all the work she’d had done to the house itself, which had busted Mamoon, forcing him to say that if things didn’t improve, he’d have to work for a living.

Mamoon himself, now in his early seventies, stood waiting for them in the yard with Liana and Yin and Yang, their two young, barking springer spaniels. A handsome and seemingly strong man still, with a wide chest, goatee beard and black eyes, Mamoon was diminutive and dressed in tweedy English country clothing, greens and browns. Liana appeared to be dressed almost entirely in fur, the tails of dead animals dripping down her chest.

The couple greeted their guests warmly, but it was clear, as Rob fell out of the taxi and gazed deferentially at Mamoon, that Mamoon wasn’t interested in him: Mamoon, to Harry’s satisfaction, gave Rob one of the scathing grimaces he was famous for.

Rob lurched away to shout at people on the phone. Then, while Liana went off to cook, Rob hurried towards the sofa in the living room, dragging a rug from the floor and plunging under it. ‘The fresh country air always relaxes me. Don’t let it happen to you,’ he said, passing out. ‘And – make sure you impress him.’

While waiting for Mamoon, who had gone to get changed, Harry contemplated Rob, horizontal rather than lateral, and thought how enviably free and individual the editor was, beyond the disappointing pull of reality.

‘Come, please, Harry. Will you?’

Harry did a double take, for Mamoon had appeared at the door head-to-toe in blue Adidas and trainers. Waving at the young man, he said he would show him his land, two ponds, and the river at the bottom of the field.

‘Let’s walk together and talk, since we are both interested in the same thing.’

‘What is that, sir?’

‘Me.’

Harry had heard that with his sarcasm, superiority, scrupulosity and argumentative persistence, Mamoon had made hard men, and, in particular – his forte – numerous good-hearted, well-read women weep. However, as they went out of the house and across the garden, Mamoon said nothing about the biography, and made no jokes or cutting remarks. Harry had been taken to meet Mamoon and Liana three weeks before, at a lunch organised by Rob. The talk then had been gossipy and light; Mamoon had been gentle and charming, and had kissed his wife’s hand. Harry imagined that this meeting in the country would be the serious audition. But he seemed already to have been given the job. Or had he? How could he find out?

They looked at the flowers, vegetables, ponds, and the closed, grubby-looking swimming pool. Then Mamoon looked at Harry and explained that he needed exercise. It turned out that, among other things, Rob had told Mamoon that Harry was an intellectual with a fine singing voice, and also that he’d been a schoolboy tennis champion. Unfortunately, the reprobate now snoring and groaning on the sofa had failed to inform Harry that playing tennis with Mamoon was part of the deal, and that he would be introduced to a pair of Mamoon’s old shorts, while hitting balls for him in the court adjacent to his garden.

That afternoon, as Mamoon puffed and thrashed, and Harry helped him with his backhand grip and even sculpted Mamoon’s body into his as they worked on his serve, Harry was terrified that Mamoon would drop dead on the court, murdered prematurely by the man sent to embalm him in words.

The tennis session cheered Mamoon. Clearly seeing that Harry’s presence wouldn’t be all bad, he punched his fist into the palm of his other hand, and said, ‘You have the look of an English gentleman cricketer. Did you play for Cambridge?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re not terrible at tennis. You even tested me. I like that. I need it. While you write me, we can be competitors. It will lift our games. We will improve together, side by side. Okay?’

Mamoon went to shower; Liana took Harry into the garden, sat him down on a bench and patted his knee. Simultaneously, a dark-eyed country girl with tied-back black hair and a tight white blouse began to pad across the infinite lawn with a tray of tea and biscuits. When the girl finally arrived, after what seemed like forty minutes, and began to pour the tea – things in the country appeared to take place in slow motion; the stream petrified between pot and cup – Liana looked Harry over with a mixture of severity and pity, and indicated the surroundings.

‘What is your impression?’

Harry sighed. ‘The peace, the silence, the distance. This place is paradise. Perhaps I’ll get to live like this, when I’m older.’

‘Only if you work very hard. I can reveal the truth now, young one. My husband approves of you. He whispered to me while changing that you seem to be among the few decent and bright Englishmen left on this island. “How did they turn out one so decent?” he said. But, Harry, it is
my
job to ask you what you intend to do with this man I love, admire and worship.’

Harry said, ‘He is one of the greatest writers of our time. Of any time, I mean. His fictions are stand-out, but he got to know, and has written up, some of the most violent and powerful men in the world. I want to give a true account of his fascinating life.’

‘How can you tell it all?’

Rob had warned Harry that you couldn’t go wrong if you mentioned ‘the facts’. No one could have a beef with ‘the facts’ – they were unarguable, like a punch in the face.

‘The facts—’

But Liana interrupted him. ‘I must tell you that it will not be easy, but Mamoon is compassionate and wise. You will write a gentle book, remembering that all he has, apart from me, is his reputation. Anyone who besmirches that will suffer from nightmares and boils forever. By the way, do you take drugs?’ Harry shook his head. ‘Are you promiscuous?’

Harry shook his head again. ‘I am almost engaged,’ he said.

‘To a woman?’

‘Very much so. She is a PA to a clothes designer.’

‘And you don’t have a criminal record?’

‘No.’

‘Dear God, with you we are getting everything at once!’

He was becoming dizzy; Liana stared at him in admiration until he felt uncomfortable and sipped his tea.

‘How is it, your tea, sir?’ said the girl, who was still standing there. ‘You like Earl Grey? Rrrr . . . if it’s your favourite and you’re coming to stay, I’ll get you a hundred tea bags.’

‘Thank you, I do like it.’

‘Digestive?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Jaffa cake?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Shall we go in and eat properly?’ said Liana.

Rob missed lunch, and woke up when the taxi arrived.

‘I can see,’ said Liana, as she and Mamoon stood together in the yard with their arms around one another, waving goodbye to Rob and Harry, ‘that it is going to be a lot of fun to have you here, and we will all get along well as Team Mamoon. You will be so welcome here at Prospects House! I can feel already that you will become like a beloved son to us.’

‘They’re so happy together,’ said Rob, as the taxi drew away. ‘Makes me spit. Harry, don’t go straight home. I’m not quite as married as I used to be. Let’s go out and rip some rectum, yeah?’

‘No, please—’

‘I am adamant, friend.’

That night, since he thought it would be Harry’s last glimpse of civilisation for some months, Rob insisted on taking him and Alice to a smart place in Mayfair frequented by bankers, gangsters and Russian prostitutes. They began with vodka, oysters and tiger prawns, but as with all of Rob’s sprawling meals, it was some time before they even reached the base camp of the first course. Hours later, staggering out into the quiet, grand city, and feeling as if he’d swallowed someone’s head, Harry said, ‘Who would have any idea that the financial system has collapsed?’

Rob embraced Harry and said, ‘My man, never mind that – I see difficulties ahead for you. This project could be a nightmare, but never forget how fortunate you are to have such a great subject to explore. Now your real work begins.’ Dashing at lithe Alice, almost knocking her off her high heels and then holding her unnecessarily tight, Rob said, ‘Do not worry, you divine thing. The love of your life will triumph. By the end you will admire him even more.’

‘You’re a clever man, Rob,’ she said. ‘But you haven’t convinced me.’ She had already emphasised that Harry, though he had passed thirty, was still a little naïve; Mamoon could eat his soul alive, leaving him humiliated and empty. ‘Surely it might cause him permanent damage, psychologically. Didn’t you say that Mamoon’s wife even called Harry her son? What sort of woman would say that to a stranger?’

Rob was giggling and said he’d be sure to oversee everything. He had dedicated his life to problematical writers – they were always the most talented – and Harry only had to phone him. Anyhow, Mamoon was lonely, but couldn’t admit it. He would more than welcome Harry’s company; he loved to discuss literature and ideas. It would be an education for Harry. He would emerge with a new sophistication.

In the taxi Alice put her arm around Harry and kissed him on the side of the head. ‘I know you so well, and you’ll feel guilty, simplifying everything, putting the emphasis here or there according to your interest. Or the interest of Rob, more like, whom you’re bullied by.’

‘Am I?’

‘See how you listen to his every spitting insane word, and even do that doggy nod when he stops talking? Surely you’ll have to write stuff about Mamoon that he won’t like?’

‘I hope so. I’ve said to Rob it’ll be
my
book. He agreed. He called me an artist.’

‘When?’

‘Just before he put his face down on the table.’

‘What if Mamoon and his wife take revenge on you? Rob was telling me at dinner that the old bird’s capable of mad furies. I read that she tossed a computer at a journalist’s head for asking Mamoon if he’d sold out to become a pseudo-gentleman.’

‘The British Empire wasn’t won with that attitude. Alice, why aren’t you backing me? What would you like me to do?’

‘Truly? I wish you would be a teacher in an ordinary school.’

‘With us living in a comfortable semi in suburbia?’

‘Why not?’

‘You wouldn’t last five minutes on that money.’

‘We’d be different people, with fewer shoes.’

He said, ‘My love, you know very well that I’ve got to get my life off the ground. Even my dad said I still resemble a student. In my family, it’s always a good idea to be a man.’

‘What does that really mean, Harry?’

‘To be amusing and articulate company. To play sport, to be successful in the world – top of the heap. This book is my debt to Dad. Besides, Rob will take care of me. He’s recommended cunning and silence, and has some other advice up his sleeve.’

She turned away. ‘You don’t care what I say.’

‘Listen. Something important happened on the train. Rob slammed the contract down in front of me and insisted I sign it.’

‘And you did?’

‘It was my moment of decision. Now I’m excited. Please, will you visit me there in the country? I’m sure they won’t object. They’ll adore you as I do, I’m sure.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Why not?’

‘Too intimidating. I won’t have any idea what to say if he asks me about the long-term effect of the Iranian revolution. I’ll just have to occupy myself in London. I want to learn to draw.’

‘Oh, Alice,’ he said. ‘Please.’

‘Don’t pressure me. Give me space,’ she said, kissing him again. ‘Let’s see how it goes. I have a feeling you’ll come home to me quite soon.’

A week later, Harry moved into a little upstairs room at the front of Mamoon and Liana’s house.

The night of Harry’s last supper in Mayfair, a gurgling Rob in his cups had quoted a sentence from Plum Wodehouse’s
Uncle Dynamite
,
‘The stoutest man will quail at the prospect of having the veil torn from his past, unless that past is one of exceptional purity.’

Not that Harry could be put off. He had prepared for the veil-tearing task ahead by rereading Mamoon, going to the gym to work out with an orange-toned trainer, and keenly seeking the advice of his father, a psychiatrist, about the mind contest ahead. At the top of his list of imperatives was the one from Rob which informed Harry that he was to approach silkily from the side, charming and working Liana, the gatekeeper, until she knelt before him with the key to Mamoon on a velvet pillow.

‘Turn it on, dude, as previously stated. The full beam, innit – as you did so fruitfully with my weepy assistant Lotte, now in three-times-a-week therapy, poor thing.’ Rob went on, ‘She’ll seem deranged to you, the wife, but she worked hard to find the right person to frame the husband, hassling every agent and publisher in London. I guided her to you.’

‘What clinched it?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I guess my potential and writing style. Possibly, my intellect.’

Rob said, ‘Her first two choices dropped out after meeting Mamoon. One of them he called an “amateur”.’

‘And the other?’

‘“Excrement”. You were the cheapest of the decent, available ones, and, from her point of view, probably the most naïve. She thinks she can intimidate you into a hagiography.’

‘Ah.’

‘We’ll let her believe that, pal, before taking them down – all the way to Chinatown. It’ll be a long game of intrigue and deception. Remember, his vanity will be quite a force. Let it be your lever and use it against him.’

For the first few days, after breakfast, and when Mamoon had walked with his eyes down to his work room across the yard, Harry sat at the kitchen table with Liana and made sure, while adopting his therapist’s face, to enquire about her hatred of her sister, her spiritual beliefs, why men had always adored her, why she preferred tea to coffee in the afternoon, the temperaments of her numerous dogs and cats as well as that of her parapsychologist, and wondering, with her, whether she should ditch yoga and take up Pilates. But their main concern was whether it would be possible for her to lose five pounds from her ass. In London, she said, all the women were anorexic and in the country they were all obese.

He learned that Liana’s mother had been an English teacher, and an expert on Ariosto and Tasso; her grandmother had written for De Sica and Visconti. But when she brought over a box and began to offer him photographs of herself as a child – ‘that little child is still in me, Harry, wanting to be loved’ – he saw his empathic face had worked too well. Somehow he had convinced Liana that as well as researching a book about her husband, which would include a lot of material about her, he was also an odd-job man. ‘Please, darling, such a tall strong blond boy, with – oh, wow – thick legs and fine arms, would you accompany me to the supermarket, if you don’t mind, just five minutes, otherwise we won’t eat or drink a thing tonight.’

He was to carry the stuff to the car, and then into the house. His work had also come to involve hauling boxes of books around the place, fetching firewood from the barn, putting down poison for rats, making the fire in the library, and removing half-eaten mice from the front step, as well as numerous other domestic chores that the two women from the village, who came in five mornings a week – sometimes accompanied by the slow-moving daughter of one of them – didn’t have the time or strength to do. As he wasn’t staying in a hotel, Harry knew, encouraged by Alice, that he just had to muck in and ‘embed’ himself.

His therapeutic charm offensive, and the fact she had little company, had made Liana indecently adhesive. The wisest thing for him to do, he figured after a few days – while he surveyed the material he might begin to look at – was to have breakfast at six thirty. After, he’d scoot off to do ‘research’ before experiencing the couple in their dressing gowns and hearing Mamoon complain about his eggs, the temperature of the toast, the fatal burden of being a writer with nothing left to say, and only blindness, incontinence, impotence, bad reviews, death and obscurity ahead of him.

After breakfast Liana would be busy instructing and harrying the staff, including two people who came to work in the garden, which gave Harry the opportunity to escape to the barn to which she had handed him the key, saying, ‘There,
tesoro
, now go – find him.’

He found, as he barged open the creaky door, that the place hadn’t been opened for some time, and was semi-derelict. Scattered around were unwanted books, discarded coats, busted furniture, mouse and bird mess, a pool table, boxes full of drafts of novels, and, most valuably, Mamoon’s first wife Peggy’s diaries in a wooden crate. Carefully, he lifted them out and wiped them with a cloth. Then he scrubbed down a table, found an unbroken chair, fixed up a light, and plunged in.

Mamoon had lived a long time, and written a lot: plays and adaptations of classics set in the Third World, essays, novels, some poetry. Harry’s work would be immense, and his most significant resource was Mamoon himself. Harry was intending to conduct detailed and serious interviews with him. He would hear it from the horse’s mouth; Mamoon’s view would be the coup. However, when Harry approached his subject and opened his mouth to ask him if he might spare a moment to answer a few questions, far from being co-operative, Mamoon hurried on, as if past a tabloid reporter. The fourth morning, after breakfast, when Harry had worked out that Mamoon would be crossing the yard to his study fifty metres away, he made sure to be lurking behind a tree, smoking. Spotting his prey, Harry suddenly dashed out. ‘Sir, sir—’ he began.

Mamoon put his head down and thrust his arms out, and beetled on.

Liana shot out of the kitchen. ‘What do you think you are doing? Never approach Mamoon when he is in the zone!’

‘When will he speak to me?’

‘He is deeply committed to you.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I have to work on him. He has to be softened.’

‘Will you do that?’

‘Believe in me, darling boy. I will take you there. We will reach his marrow.’

While he waited to approach Mamoon’s marrow, Harry was at least pleased to see that the most accurate source of information about Mamoon’s early years as a writer were the journals which Peggy had kept from the beginning of their relationship. There were eleven volumes piled before him, in such tiny writing that Harry had to squint over them with a magnifying glass and ruler. They were also beautiful: Peggy had used numerous different coloured inks, writing at various angles across the page. Between the pages there were flowers, notes from Mamoon, an outline of his hand, cuttings from newspapers, Polaroids of her cats, lists, and postcards from friends. Since he had agreed not to remove or copy the diaries, which would soon be sent to America, Harry had to hurry through them, making notes as he went.

He had already begun to think of the young couple’s relationship in terms of chapters: the callow scholarship-winning Indian, down from Cambridge and living in London; the budding author also working as a journalist; the writer begins to make his name with an amusing and well observed novel about his father and the old man’s scoundrel poker-playing friends; he and Peggy marry and travel; he and Peggy settle down in the house, where Mamoon begins to write the long family novels set in colonial India that he would be remembered for, as well as sharp essays about power and empire, along with extensive profiles and interviews with dictators and the Third-World crazies created at the collapse of colonialism.

In the late morning Liana would bring Harry his coffee, along with half a baguette and some sardines. A woman of Rome, who had spent time in India with Mamoon, Liana wore bright shawls, vibrating bangles and heavy rings, along with wellington boots in various colours for tramping through the mud and rain, which was, Harry was learning, what people who lived in the country appeared to do a good deal of the time. Her overcoats – often in fur, and fashionably spattered with mud, creating a Jackson Pollock effect – looked expensive.

‘How’s darling misery-guts Peggy?’ Liana asked Harry, patting the pile of diaries and sitting right next to him. ‘Is she drunk again?’

Harry, from an academic family, had always been capable of hard work, of bearing a large load of necessary boredom. However, he was finding the diaries both alarming and monotonous, particularly the later pages where Peggy enjoyed describing her numerous symptoms: brain-splitting migraines, stomach aches, her fear of cancer, and her regret. There had been an abortion; she had allowed Mamoon to mistreat her. She had turned away; she hadn’t insisted sufficiently; she had been weak with a strong man. She had been masochistic, even. Her OCD, her desire to slit her wrists and so on, would be interleaved with, ‘I love my solitude, but fear I’ll go mad. I love to read but it’s not enough. Here, in the country in the winter, when it is dark at three, things can get very dark with me. I drink, and fall over and wake up on the floor in my own vomit. If Mamoon saw me, he would be appalled. But he disappeared on a book tour, where he meets only sycophants and pussy, as he puts it. Now he is sleeping with one of the women – Marion – on another continent. Kindly, he informed me she is the first woman who truly knows how to satisfy his renewed appetite. I never quite achieved that, apparently. He loves her soft body, her mouth on his cock, and the way, since the word “no” doesn’t agree with him, she is ready for him whenever he wants her.’

‘Didn’t you read them?’ Harry asked as Liana looked at a photograph of Mamoon he had found.

‘I wish I could have known him then,’ she said. ‘I could have saved him. But
grazie a Dio
, why would I read them?’

Liana sounded like Mamoon, but he didn’t sound like her. With her Indian-inflected English in an Italian accent, Liana had a loud abrupt voice, like the wind tearing at your hair, particularly when offended, and there was usually something offending her. Even her emails were loud.

‘Curiosity?’ he said.

‘I am living the damn dream here.’

Before Mamoon she’d had two miscarriages, a fierce marriage and a divorce. Alone in a small flat in Rome, near the Tiber, ten minutes from the Piazza del Popolo, she went to discos, loved to drink, made love when she could—

‘With whom?’ he said, making a note.

She held his arm and whisperingly told him that she worshipped all forms of sexual expression. But dressing up and dancing could make her light up the city with erotic love. At that time she liked younger men.

‘Of which age?’

‘Late twenties,
tesoro
. They are still playful then, and their bodies are lovely, and still firm. Their minds are almost grown up.’

At night she sat at her window reading Turgenev and thought she was done with serious passion. Then, by chance, one day the maestro was generous enough to stroll into the little English bookshop she managed. She recognised him right away and was ecstatic. His books were her truth, and he was her
kismet
. Though she was shy, and had hair like a witch’s web, she could do nothing but beg for his signature, for him to touch her book with his actual hands – the ones that held the pen of genius. He wrote down his number.

She informed him, the second time she saw him, as they strolled in the sunshine in his favourite place, the Villa Borghese, that she had fallen in love with his primal creative power. He was relieved. He was parched. He took her to dinner. She wore her blue lace skirt. She had never had a dark man. They made love with their eyes. He played the man part well, and invited her to his bed. Though he was a little older than she was used to, what could she do but open herself to him? She was pleased that he was not just a talker like some clever men. In her experience intellectuals were not sufficiently devoted to sex, with weak erections and watery, even frothy semen. But Mamoon undressed her slowly, he knew how to look at her body and let her show herself to him; he knew what to say about a woman. He kissed and caressed her feet, and had her at least three times.

In the morning he kissed her coffee mouth. He said he loved that taste on her, of bitter black coffee. She had happily stayed in his arms ever since.

‘God didn’t grant me children, Harry, but He granted me Mamoon when I thought it might be too late! For a time, I could come just by thinking of him. Can’t we throw Peggy and her diaries away and live the life of the living? I am Tolstoy’s wife: it is like running an estate, this place!’

‘Did Mamoon read the diaries?’

‘Why, are they so shocking?’ She said, ‘He wasted his life attending to that poor woman who killed herself just to spite him. Why would he want to fritter away another moment on such a spoilt and sullen creature?’

‘He acknowledges in interviews that the two of them worked together on his manuscripts. She was the only person who wasn’t afraid to edit him.’

‘See how kind he is, praising her when we know the truth – that it was obviously all his work!’

Harry said, ‘Perhaps she was like the Beatles with George Martin – impossible to subtract from the work.’

‘Please, stop these stupid distractions. You know we are in need of a career boost up. I can tell you, to help the finances even more, I am going to write my own book. If I let you see some of it, you can offer advice.’

‘I’d love to. But Liana, I must speak to Mamoon if I’m to make a picture of him alive, here and now. Otherwise I think I will pack right up and go home at the weekend.’

‘
Acha
,
tonight then,’ she said.

They would have a proper supper and Harry would join them.

At seven thirty a bell was rung downstairs. Harry left his work. He learned that Liana liked the round supper table by the window to be properly laid with crisp napkins, shining cutlery, candles, and the best champagne and wine. She was in jeans and a V-neck jumper, and Mamoon wore a fresh shirt. When Harry entered, Liana glared disapprovingly at his raggedy T-shirt, which he would be sure never to wear again, or would perhaps incinerate. Their housekeeper, Ruth, who had veined arms and a grey, bitter mouth, and was wearing black with a white apron, served them silently. Her sister was cooking.