The Last Word (4 page)

‘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.

Every morning, once upon a time, Harry’s mother got up early to make him a cooked breakfast, before taking him to school. Whenever they were in the kitchen together, she’d talk over her shoulder about films, politics, men, poltergeists, neighbours, feminism, dreams – a surreal stream of hard-to-follow continuous conversation for which, it was understood, he would be the link man.

She kissed him a lot, or would suddenly sob. She had a mad laugh which could be alarming, or would suddenly say, ‘You have no idea how I hate this middle-class shit!’ Sometimes, to illustrate a point, she’d enact a scene, doing the voices. Or she’d sing: pop, folk, opera, with, a good deal of the time, a joint burning in the ashtray. She’d quote Lautréamont so often he remembered the words even now, ‘Silent, foul spiders/spin their webs in the base of our brain.’

Most evenings she went to see friends, or to parties or the theatre or dance. Apparently she hated boredom, as well as the tyranny of possessiveness and control. Harry’s father had once said, with some irony, that she considered sexual opportunity to be the vanguard of political liberation. She also condemned her husband for not believing in the sixties’ idea that madness brought wisdom. For her, it was not the purpose of living to be as sane as possible, and she believed her husband to be ‘a policeman of the soul’, since he considered it his work to make people sane, as others might want to free people from the tyranny of alcohol. But it could only make them duller, she believed. How many people was she? How many people could we be?

Harry didn’t know what he thought about any of this. He did remember, though, that most nights, at the end of her life, she crept into his bedroom, and he slept in her arms, almost like a young lover, until morning. Was that love, or madness? Later, a friend of his mother’s said: Harry, you are very much like her; of high intelligence, you can understand anything. Both of you are bright but brittle – and you’ll go down under the slightest knock, worrying and fearing failure.

When he was twelve, she died. It seemed that after she was gone he was alone for ten years. He had to get up in the dark, feed himself and cycle to school without his mother offering him a pear, cutting the crusts from his sandwiches or running after him with books and football boots. His identical brothers, four years older, were at Latymer, while he was at St Paul’s. Where the other boys had much more of their mother, he was forced, too early, into independence. And the twins had always had one another: they bickered, disputed and had bloody fist fights around the house, but there was barely a moment when they were not in resentful or eager contact with each other, almost, but not quite a closed circle.

Harry cared for himself by reading in his room, while playing his siblings’ records and tapes, and speaking constantly to his mother in his mind. The family had disposed of her other clothes, but when Harry took over her wardrobe for himself, many of her shoes remained at the back of the cupboard. It occurred to him to lie with his ear on the carpet and speak to them. Harry would make films in his mind of her choosing them and putting them on; he would wonder where she had gone in each pair, who she had been with, and what they had talked about.

He saw now that the idea of isolation he had had about himself was only partly true, a myth he’d made. He was motherless, and his father might have been at work, or attending to the house, or dating. But his brothers had never been awkward or shy. At school they were rugby and soccer stars who earned money modelling and later formed a band, the Ha-Ha Fish, playing at the opening of hip shops in Carnaby Street and the sticky back rooms of Camden pubs in front of school friends. They said if he learned bass, he could perform with them, and so he did.

A teenage girl with a mass of dark hair, in a short skirt, T-shirt and black tights, opened a bedroom door to see a little boy, younger than her, sitting on his bed blinking over a book, scratching and twisting with anxiety, a plate of food untouched. Harry’s brothers’ pals, and their numerous girl friends, were in the house constantly, and from the beginning the boy was the object of much pity and attention from young women. There’s nothing like a blond motherless child to bring the girls running with kisses, sweets and more. Who would want to give that up? The twins began to refer to the pretty little pasha’s ‘harem’, the girls who were keen to assist him with his homework, cook for him, select his clothes and cut his hair, and accompany him to the cinema, the shops and other treats at the weekend and during holidays.

A girl beginning to move away from her parents and wanting to grow up can be persuaded into appalling acts of love. Once Harry hit thirteen and began to sweat and shower, a relay of fragrant teenagers were kissing, petting and spending the night with him on sleepovers. The motherless boy hated to sleep alone; sometimes he crashed on the floor in one of his brothers’ rooms. Soon he learned that numerous girls were susceptible to his pleas for them to care for him. He needed to replace one woman with a horde of other women. From the age of fourteen he was seducing more of them than those amateurs his brothers. It would cheer his father up, when he came home, to find the house garlanded with girls in flower. ‘St Trinian’s’, he called it, or ‘the Kingdom of Pubescent Girls’. He made sure to warn Harry that he’d be envied – hated, he meant – for his gifts, charm and ease, as he got older, and that he should conceal but not suppress his virtues. Harry didn’t then understand what his father meant.

His father had a superb library: philosophy, psychology, fiction, art. That was that, for Harry; he developed himself there. Not that he didn’t miss his mother; he was still angry with her, to say the least, which was how she remained alive and active in his mind. What he didn’t want was her sitting at the end of his bed when he was alone in the country.

Now he sped through the dark winding lanes, and then ran from the car. Soon he was at the warm bar of a busy pub, and others were turning to him, the stranger, the curiosity that everyone seemed to know about. People gathered round. Apparently the locals – farmers and ageing rock stars who lived in the big houses, and their fans who lived in smaller places – were keen to hear about ‘the writer’.

Was it true Mamoon had no friends? Was he cruel to his wife, violent even? Was he a devil-worshipper? More importantly, was he really broke? And wasn’t it true that he had certainly made the most of the country which had welcomed him, and where his talent had been allowed to flourish? Hadn’t he complained too much? Had he ever been sufficiently grateful?

Nothing can be still while it lives in the minds of others, including, of course, a character and reputation. It didn’t take long, Harry saw, for a personality to enlarge and inflate, as the subject became what others preferred him to be. Like Harry’s mother, Mamoon had travelled beyond and above himself, a process Harry himself was now correcting but also abetting, in his own way. What was a person then, but a self which travelled between private fantasy and public creation?

Hadn’t Mamoon been in that place for Harry when he read and reread Mamoon’s interviews, profiles and essays in
Playboy
,
Rolling Stone
and
Esquire
as a young man? That Mamoon had willingly journeyed into the darkness of the contemporary world itself, and returned with testimony, witness and thought, revealed an intrepid man who was a conquistador, determined to expose and explain the harshest truths. Wasn’t he the first to track, in the dark cities of northern Britain, the change in the Muslim community from socialist anti-racism to a radicalism built around a new worldwide form, a reactionary idea of Islam? His essay ‘The Axe of Ideology’
had been crucial. Didn’t his analysis then go further, as he followed the trajectory of Islam from a form of liberation theology to a death cult demanding sacrifice, built around obedience to the law of the Absolute father?

Where was Harry in this now? Like Mamoon, Harry couldn’t just hold up the mirror; he had to explain why he was there, and what this man meant. His words had to keep the writer alive in the history of literature, however much he might want to kill him personally.

 Glad to be out of the house, and to have alcohol in him, Harry felt more buoyant. The less he said to the locals the more he’d enjoy his evening. He did make the mistake of suggesting, to the irritation of those around him, and at the risk of appearing superior, that a good way to make contact with a writer might be to pass one’s eyes over his sentences. After this faux pas he thought it best to settle himself in a secluded corner of the bar where he could keep a look out for the local interest: the ardent young wife of a farmer bored by dipping sheep in antiseptic, or dragging on the udders of recalcitrant animals; or perhaps the partner of a long-distance lorry driver eternally delayed by a French strike.

Then he looked up; it was dim in the pub, but he saw what he wanted. His instinct had been correct. The skin game was on. He finished his drink. Before fetching another one, he went into the toilet, popped some money into the condom machine and pushed the button for plain rubbers. The girl who had been smiling and flicking her long hair at him appeared to be younger than he’d wanted. He didn’t need a scandal. But she had sent her friends away. Sensibly, she was standing up. She would lead him.

He was keen to follow this siren, even into a crepuscular corridor which led to the pub’s back room, an undecorated and unheated grave fragrant with urine and worse, as if the toilet was parked under a table. The drinkers were here. A hairy man with the face of a pit bull, wearing only boxer shorts and tattoos, played pool under a flickering striplight. A couple of Medusas, pulling on chained dogs, waited, squinted and cursed. Harry was afraid. He went to the girl.

They sat close together. When, quite soon, the words ran out, she licked her fingers and extinguished the candles on the table, rubbing hot wax into his hands, and onto his arms. She was plain and lovely, and not too young at all, a dramatically dark-haired busty girl in her mid-twenties or perhaps older, with black eyes, her thick legs packed into a tight, if not straining miniskirt. She introduced herself as Julia. He followed her out, and indicated his car.

They drove for half an hour, until she told him to stop in a wide street of old council houses. It was otherwise quiet in the misty rain, but dogs barked.

‘Follow me,’ she said.

But Harry wondered if he might be getting too old for the dispiriting adventure that seemed to inevitably accompany the need for human contact. Did he want to creep half drunk into a damp-walled council house at midnight in the countryside, particularly since, as the girl hauled him along the dim downstairs corridor, he glimpsed, through an open door, a scene of Hogarthian dissipation.

A late middle-aged woman with her shirt open and arms in the air and three older rough men in clothes they must have slept in for weeks were dancing. They punched their arms in the air, and shouted with drunken violence.

Julia would not let him linger. She jerked him away. Soon he was two floors up in an attic room, perhaps deluded, but certainly crammed into a single bed clinging to a thin pillow and what appeared, now, to be a fat-faced proletarian girl in her early twenties. Still, once she’d finished her cigarette, and – if he hurried – before she lit another one, he’d have her again, this time on her knees on the floor, clearing a space amongst the cups and clothes, while regarding the underwear hanging from the mirror.

Not that anything important could be achieved without inconvenience, if not suffering; and he was happy to see she was more than he’d imagined. As was often the case, he feared he might become afraid and lost in his own mind, and might begin to dwell, once more, on the fact that he and his brothers could have made their mother crazy. His father had said, not long ago, ‘There’s no ambivalence: children make their parents die. The three of you were much too much for her.’ Thinking of this, Harry required a night’s comfort and companionship. A girl is an umbilical cord, a lifeline to reality. His mother wouldn’t have wanted him to be alone.

Despite the thud of music and the occasional shock of abrupt yells from elsewhere in the house, he relaxed. As she stroked him and he kissed her hair, he could consider how things were going with the book. There had at last been progress; Harry believed he’d been asking the right questions. He’d pressed on.

That afternoon, passing the library on his way back from the barn, he’d spotted his foe through the window. The old man was halfway up a ladder searching for a book, and appeared particularly vulnerable. Harry, with a burst of spontaneous confidence, and, by now, a certain amount of desperation, had hurried into the house. ‘There you are, sir,’ he said, and peppered Mamoon with queries until even he became curious about himself.

The writer had, at last, come gingerly down the ladder, made himself comfortable in a chair and said almost mournfully, ‘I must give you more, dear man. You seem upset, and even angry, now.’

Mamoon talked about his father with respect and affection; his mother he hardly mentioned, but when pushed was kind. As for his siblings, again Mamoon talked of how much he liked them, having supported one through college in America. The sister he hadn’t spoken to for thirty years he said nothing about. ‘It’s not an interesting dispute.’ About Peggy he didn’t add much, claiming he’d repressed the details but that it was ‘all in the diaries’.

‘What’s your view of it now?’ Harry asked. ‘Of her. Your lover.’

‘You know, Harry, I loved her for a long time,’ Mamoon said. ‘But, once intelligent and attractive, the poor woman became increasingly distressed. She made herself so very ill with the drinking. She was even unwashed at times. Born for disappointment, she only wanted what I couldn’t give. The drink made her aggressive – mostly with herself.’

Harry said, ‘Would a more ruthless man have removed her?’

‘How could even a more ruthless man have removed her from her own house? I could have moved somewhere else. But there is a lot I love here – the quiet to write. The long story, the novel, is an old-fashioned and, people say, defunct form. Perhaps it resembles oil painting, in that its creation is labour-intensive and enjoins an iron discipline, patience and forbearance. It is all I can do. As for Peggy, you can’t just let people down, dammit. That’s the hell of compassion. But I did think, next time I must marry a real woman.’