The Last Word Read online

  ‘My father did what, Alice?’

  ‘Your voice has gone castrato. Don’t be oversensitive on that subject.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You said you never take women to meet your father.’

  ‘They have to be very special. It was a big thing for me, Alice.’

  ‘I was having palpitations. Surely you remember, after we’d sat down, how he looked around the table, banged it with both hands and said, “Tell me, what are your views of the financial crisis?”’

  ‘What were they?’

  ‘I was so intimidated I had a panic attack, which was why I fled to the loo to splash my face with cold water. It was like suddenly being on television.’

  ‘I know you prefer invisibility.’

  ‘Was it always like that at home?’

  ‘He’s very democratic, Dad, he listens to every idiot. That’s his job. He certainly didn’t find you superficial. He said you’d come far. And I know for sure that Mamoon will hang on your every word. I thought you didn’t like old men.’

  ‘You know how my mind scatters at the sight of a novel, but I’ve started one of Mamoon’s books.’

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Don’t worry, there’s no chance of me becoming an intellectual. Do you prefer me stupid? Do you feel threatened?’

  ‘Darling, writing this book is doing my head in. India was difficult. I’m exhausted.’

  ‘Mamoon has been very sympathetic to you.’

  ‘He has?’

  ‘He’s desperately hoping Marion isn’t misleading you too much.’

  ‘What did he say about her?’

  ‘That not one word she says is true. He hopes, for your sake, that you aren’t taken in.’ She went on, ‘You know, I’m beginning to understand how brave Mamoon has been, attacking those corduroy-wearing Maoists when it was fashionable to be one. He broke the cult of silence. Wasn’t your dad a Maoist?’

  Harry laughed. ‘Did Mamoon say that? I’ll have it out with him.’

  ‘No, please don’t, otherwise I won’t tell you what else he said.’

  ‘Why, what else did he say?’

  ‘He said his friends and acquaintances were as hypnotised by Marxism as some people are by fundamentalism. Everything they did was calculated to “benefit” the working class. And didn’t it turn out that Marxism was hardly a system which sponsored the freedoms they’re suddenly so keen on?’

  ‘Yes, he wrote a lovely essay about it, “The Superstitions of the Secular”.’

  ‘But that was incredibly foresighted of him, wasn’t it?’

  Harry snorted. ‘Mamoon has always thought everything’s a lot of rot, and that anyone who believed anything was a deluded idiot. You can’t go wrong if you start off as a cynic.’

  ‘Are you still a socialist? He said you were.’

  ‘He did? A liberal democrat, Alice, and no more harmful than a glass of sparkling water with a slice of lemon.’

  Alice asked, ‘What does your father think of Mamoon?’

  Harry thought for a moment before saying, ‘Dad considers Britain’s finest post-war achievement, apart from the NHS, to be a multiracial society. Yet Mamoon wanted to be an Englishman, just when they were becoming obsolete, when the mongrels were taking over. Dad considers him deluded for never speaking about the contagion of British racism, particularly in the seventies, when it was at its most virulent. Mamoon liked to pretend it had never happened to him. He was also a risible snob, according to Dad, for identifying himself with a defunct class. At least, later, he criticised the Islamists, those heroes of the seventh century.’

  Alice said, ‘You know, Mamoon said this lovely thing about me – I could become an artist.’

  ‘An artist?’

  ‘Why not? Perhaps one day, when our future child is asleep in his Moses basket, I’ll start to draw seriously. Mamoon says that if I find it difficult to speak, I should express myself more in other ways.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘Mamoon’s wicked, too,’ she went on. ‘I shouldn’t repeat this: apparently a fan asked him how he created, with which pen or computer, and he replied that he liked to insert his finger into his arse in the morning and write directly onto the bathroom wall.’

  Harry said, ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’ve told you a thousand times.’

  Harry asked, ‘How’s Liana?’

  ‘I haven’t seen much of her. She’s been gardening, then she rushed to London for a manicure. She saw her beloved psychic, and met someone else on business.’

  ‘How long was she there?’

  ‘Just three nights, I think.’

  Harry immediately rang Julia, who claimed to have been tracking things. It was all eating and talk between Mamoon and Alice, she said. They sat up for hours in the late evening, by candlelight; next door Julia was reading Mamoon on the divan, his voice in one room, his words in another. She drifted off contentedly, dreaming of him. In the morning she was under a blanket. She couldn’t recall everything Mamoon and Alice had said; how important could a few murmurs be?

  Harry said, ‘It wasn’t important! Just talk, you say! Talking is the most dangerous form of intercourse!’

  ‘Liana is okay with it, so I think it’s probably harmless. Otherwise, she’d kill him and then Alice.’

  ‘He got me out of the way, though. At least tell me if Mamoon has said anything notable.’

  ‘Only, “Anyone who gardens is lost to humanity.”’

  Harry asked, ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘More and more. I so look forward to seeing you. I’m wearing your T-shirt.’

  ‘You are? Where did you find it?’

  ‘In your room. I put my face in your clothes.’ She said, ‘Do you love me?’

  He was morosely silent, listening to the sea between them. ‘Whoever you are, Julia, I’m yours.’

  ‘Did you read the notebooks I gave you?’

  ‘Yes, I’m going through them again now.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Eighteen

  Harry had arranged to visit Marion again the next day, but as he walked around the block before going in, he wondered if it was worth returning. Alice’s enthusiasm for Mamoon was annoying him, and he wanted to take a cab to the airport, fly back to London, shove the old man away and remind her of his, Harry’s, existence. He needed to put more into his relationship with Alice otherwise it would slow down and end. What could Marion add now? He was reluctant to re-enter that tent of grief, regret and despair. But he spoke firmly to himself: although Mamoon had deliberately got rid of him, this was still business. He forced himself to buy flowers for her; he rang again at her door.

  She was more lively, flirtatious even, today, in a skirt, plunging top and jewellery. She was brandishing photographs of herself and Mamoon together.

  ‘Harry, look how he holds my hands. How he needed me! In that house in the country they lived in an atmosphere of fear and anger. Does it seem haunted, that place?’

  ‘Yes, a bit.’

  ‘That’s her, Peggy – haunting but not living! His original home life had never been like that. Her wretchedness was corrupting him.’

  ‘How did you tell him that?’

  ‘I showed him the possibility of love. And sex. He was, you know, caliente. Steam came off him. But he hadn’t had proper sex for some time. Mamoon thought that needing a woman was like wanting a cigarette. The wish could be great, but you waited until it passed, you could get back to more important things.

  ‘To give her credit, Peggy was kind, she thought of him only. She led him through society, introducing him to people who might be interested, explaining to them that the world was bigger than Britain. But he was—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, underfucked.’

  ‘I love the way you say that, Marion. The rolling tone.’

  ‘Darling, she had no sexual hold over him. Sad woman; hysterical. When it came to making copulation she was a p
late of cold spaghetti, chattering inanely and forcing poor Mamoon to live as if passion didn’t have a place in the centre of the heart of every being. You have no idea how naïve he was, when it came to some things.’

  He asked her what she meant by ‘naïve’.

  ‘In some ways he was like a teenager. As if he expected the other to take the lead. As you must know, his adolescent adventures were many and multifarious. The adults couldn’t keep their hands off him. He had been such a beautiful youth, with the dark hair and body of a film star, with a long thin cock. He was almost as beautiful as you, darling boy, but altogether more of a nuisance, with a stronger character and, obviously, more talent. I would imagine that you’re only a minor nuisance, though you have a haughty look.’ She’d been watching Teorema the other night. ‘Pasolini would have gone for you. Did an older man ever take you?’

  When he said nothing, she went on, ‘Try and imagine this. When I first met him, Mamoon had anticipated being properly married for the rest of his life. He didn’t think he and Peggy would ever separate. But he did take to sex, when he refound it through me. It gave him a new confidence. He liked it. He liked it too much. He’d regained a part of himself, so that he wanted it the whole time. Then he wanted more. More extremity.’ When Harry asked what sort of extremity, she said, ‘If I tell you, and you put it in the book, it will come to be the only thing anyone ever knows about me.’

  ‘You’ve considered that?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘At the same time, you want to give your side of the story?’

  She said, ‘He will deny me, I know that. He will laugh and shrug and accuse me of being mad, a common strategy of men. Recently, to a journalist, he accused me of being a balloon of unbound fantasies, a magical realist even – stories for children! This from someone who makes up people, and has them speak and then die, for a living! But I will have spoken before I go.’

  Harry pushed the recorder closer to her. ‘What are you referring to?’

  ‘Turn off that damn machine.’ He pushed a button on it. She smiled, grabbed it and tossed it out of the room into the corridor, before asking him to shut the door.

  She told him there were a couple of clever, attractive married women she’d known, good friends for years, whom she’d introduced him to. One night he said they were attractive. He was bored with her. ‘I couldn’t make his penis smile. He would go with them, it would put some lead in his pencil.’

  He said he had become a utilitarian, providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number. He had also become despondent. His father had died and he was reproaching himself. He’d physically fought with the dad, plucking him from his chair and flinging the old fellow against a wall.

  ‘Yes, I heard. But what are the details of that?’

  She told him that the headmaster of Mamoon’s school, and also the headmaster’s wife, had been dear, lifelong friends of the father. And the man – ‘who, incidentally, had only one leg’ – had been kind and let Mamoon attend the place at a cheap rate. It turned out that Mamoon, at fifteen, had been screwing the headmaster’s wife, the school nurse, in the medical room, most days. She had also loaned him books and read his early stories, editing them for him, encouraging him, telling him that he had it, that thing that everyone wants and most people don’t have: talent. He saw that as soon as he wrote he was loved and admired. Literature was the leg-opener. A good paragraph was better than a few glasses of wine.

  She said, ‘The headmaster didn’t find out about any of this until Mamoon was in his mid-twenties. The headmaster then hopped across to see the father, after the woman died, to say his wife’s infidelity had besmirched the last years of his life. The woman had said she’d loved Mamoon. The headmaster was shamed.’ Marion put on a paternalistic Indian accent. ‘The father said to Mamoon, “You dirty bastard, you shamed us all by fiddling with the very woman – a family friend – on the actual school premises while we were getting a generous discount! What other deceptions are you capable of?”

  ‘“She was very enthusiastic and grateful at the time,” replied Mamoon. “Why is it exercising you? Are you jealous? She said she was lonely. I was the ‘second leg’. I had a body to die for, and she opened my fly with her teeth. Your friend bored her to death. You should have sent me a telegram of congratulation for cheering her up.”’ Marion went on, ‘As you can imagine, it was here that the father, becoming more and more incensed, struck Mamoon across the face. And Mamoon, being quite strong then, having taken up weight-lifting, picked him up and tossed him across the room, towards the litter bin, like a basketball.

  ‘In his later life Mamoon was ashamed and regretful, and worried over the father a lot. I’d brought up the subject of whether his father was gay.’

  Harry almost choked. ‘How exactly did that go down?’

  Mamoon had taken it seriously. The pieces were falling into place. Mamoon’s father had had an arranged marriage, fought with his wife continuously, gambled most nights, and drank ferociously. But he never went with women and repeatedly told his son never to marry. Mamoon began to wonder if his weird adolescent sexuality was a picture of his father’s confusions.

  Marion said, ‘Mamoon, as you might have found out, was something of a Nietzsche jukebox, with a quote for every occasion. And he particularly liked this: “That which is silent in the father speaks in the son.” We discussed it very intensely. At detumescence, after all, there is conversation, that is where love begins. Over a bottle of wine or three, we spent entire evenings talking, working everything out. We were very close, and living together, because he had been teaching in America.’

  He asked her what that was like.

  She laughed. ‘It was wonderful to spend time with him. But it was not unconflictual. Nothing with Mamoon was unconflictual. There had been the inevitable run-ins with the authorities, culminating in the accusation of misogyny and so on.’

  Harry said he’d heard something about that and was going to look into it. He asked her what the details were.

  ‘I’d been living with him outside the university for a couple of months,’ she said. Mamoon made sure he was too maverick for the institution. But he knew how to interest people in ideas. ‘Then, unfortunately, there was the incident with the black feminist lecturer to whom he said, at a cocktail party, “Surely, being black isn’t an entire career these days, is it?”’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Big flatulent row. That, along with his remark that there was a high incidence of psychosis in the Afro-Caribbean community because of the fathers’ absence, did for him. It turned nasty. We had to pack up and get out of there fast. It was like being run out of town.’

  ‘Did it bother him?’

  ‘Of course he said he didn’t want to be deprived of the jouissance of racism just because he had brown skin and had suffered it himself. Clearly, he said, it must be one of the great pleasures to hate others for more or less random, arbitrary reasons.’

  It meant he was never able to teach again. It cost him money. He was more bothered than he could own up to, because he had important things to say about the craft he had devoted his life to. Somehow he got himself tangled up in these fatuous debacles. He couldn’t understand it and needed ‘comfort’, he claimed.

  ‘Female comfort?’

  ‘I told him that as I had sacrificed so much to be with him, I couldn’t have him taking off with my best friends in front of me. He called me a bore, and sulked. He had the temerity to say I was no good at sucking cock.’

  ‘Oh dear. You have to take care with your teeth,’ said Harry. ‘I guess you know that. Perhaps you could have practised.’

  ‘Believe me, baby, I could suck your brain out through your ass and blow it down the can.’

  He asked, ‘How was he at cunnilingus?’

  ‘Enthusiastic, at times. But inaccurate. And then—’

  ‘Then?’

  She said, ‘When a man doesn’t want to eat you out, he’s done with you.’

&nbs
p; ‘That must be one of life’s hardest lessons.’

  She went on, ‘Mamoon could really freeze you out, until I couldn’t bear the anxiety. Threesomes weren’t my thing, I had tried them. Men think they like them, but their eyes are bigger than their dicks. It’s rare for a man to satisfy one woman, let alone two. Still, I decided these women could join us, if they wanted to – one at a time. Why not? Hadn’t we had the sixties? Why be conventional, why say no to everything? And they were free women. We did it a few times. He said it was the most exciting thing he’d done.’

  ‘Why did the women do it?’

  ‘It was the first time, I guess, that he’d seen that he could use his power, position and charisma to seduce and use. As he said, being famous, witty and good-looking made him catnip to the menopausal. He was so interested in some things that the world seemed to vibrate around him. And these women were curious. But they had husbands, children and lives, and weren’t always available when he wanted. He had the bright idea of inviting professionals to join us.’

  ‘How many times?’

  ‘Almost every night, for a few weeks. We were so overtaken by it, we blew a big hole in his income, not that he cared. Why would he? I guess a lot of it was Peggy’s and he believed she owed him.’

  ‘Were you drinking and using drugs? Were there other men involved?’

  ‘He was very keen.’

  ‘How do I know this is true?’

  ‘There are letters.’

  ‘If we’re to skewer him, I have to see them.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Otherwise he can say you’re only a mad fantasist.’

  She hesitated for a moment before getting up and leading him out of the room. In the corridor, she pushed open her bedroom door.

  Ahead of him, framed on the wall, was a large print of Richard Avedon’s photograph of Mamoon, which Harry had only seen previously, the size of a postage stamp, on a book jacket. In a suit and tie, and wreathed in cigarette smoke, Mamoon must have been in his mid-forties, dark-haired, black-eyed, anguished, a man with the strength to endure, with a poet’s soul, an Asian Camus. In time, Mamoon, the radical transgressor – for whom accurate language was always revolutionary – would argue and fall out with fellow writers; he would be banned from various countries for political or religious opinions, pick up a clutch of fatwas, and numerous prizes and awards, at which he would chuckle; and he would write good books.