The Last Word Read online

  Harry told her Lotte was going too fast. How did this encounter happen?

  She said the old man and the girl began spending time together, having intense and honest talks, while the young man, who was in something of a panic about the biography, read diaries and papers in the old man’s house.

  The book was sad, Lotte said, because the old man had fallen in love with the girl. He became angry when she remained in what he saw as a wretched relationship with the young man. This guy had tried to titillate and distract the old man with a pack of lies about women he’d slept with. How the inane kid loved to boast about his potency! Five women in one day, he even claimed. No wonder he was known as Fizzy Pants!

  ‘The writer advises her to break with the horny punk. When she falls pregnant the writer is the only person she wants to tell. For a while she doesn’t even inform the young man, the actual father. The old man takes the pregnancy seriously. They discuss it a lot.’

  ‘Discuss it in what way?’

  ‘He struggles over whether he should advise her to have an abortion. It’s an anguish for him, perhaps because he regrets the child he and his then girlfriend aborted years before.’

  Harry suddenly said, ‘So what? What is going on? Why the hell does he get involved?’

  Lotte shrugged. ‘Inevitably the old man says the girl should reconsider.’

  ‘Jesus! The arrogance of the man! I could slap him!’

  ‘But the old man has to hit the young idiot with a stick.’ She went on, ‘The old man says he has lived a long time, and in his own paternal way he wants to know that the young woman he loves has thought these things through properly.’

  ‘As if anybody ever does.’

  ‘The old man says the young man can only have catastrophic loves, for which he takes no responsibility.’

  Harry said, ‘What a stupid old man. I hope the novel states that clearly.’

  ‘Oddly enough, it doesn’t.’

  ‘She has the kid?’ She nodded. He said, ‘Nice story. I hope that’s it.’ She looked as though it wasn’t. ‘Why doesn’t it stop there? How can there be more? More of what?’

  He went to the window, threw it open, and sat on the ledge, gulping down the night air. Outside, London was humming. They could go back into Soho and drink and dance to jazz music. Why was he bothered about what she said? Why did he have to listen? Couldn’t he climb out and never return?

  Thirty-one

  ‘Although it’s not far down, and you’d probably only break your ankles, you’re making me nervous,’ said Lotte. ‘Come back, darling.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To hear the end.’ Her voice behind him said, ‘You’d think that would be the lot, wouldn’t you? But in his eighth decade, and in what the old man calls his “mid-life crisis” or the “Eros of his old age” – she has had a child, and her boyfriend is deep in his book – he persuades the young woman to begin to meet up with him in London.’

  He turned to her. ‘To do what?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘I’m asking you, Harry—’

  ‘What, Lotte?’

  ‘To please come and sit next to me.’

  He did so; she kissed him on the mouth; she embraced him, and told him that Mamoon had set it up delicately, with his old precision – a lonely couple hurrying to meet in a friend’s almost empty, unheated flat in Victoria. He – the character – was shocked by how relieved and delighted he was to see this woman, his human feeling coming back. How alienated, he says, is the older adult from his desire! He buys her gifts, and loves just to look at her, his new muse. Never out of a tracksuit now, she dresses for him. He likes to see her take her shoes off and she’s happy to oblige.

  Harry said, ‘But why is she happy to oblige?’

  ‘A woman who is really wanted by a man is going to find him difficult to resist. How often in a life are any of us so adored? He says that Count Sascha Kolowrat, when dying, had Marlene Dietrich visit him, and pull up her skirt.’

  ‘This woman does that for the old man?’

  ‘Why not? She lies naked in front of the fire as he looks at her. She poses, like an artist’s model, while he looks on. She shows him herself. Just this, for them, is electric. He longs to express himself, this word-master, without words. To just “be” with another person. Like a contented baby with the mother.’

  ‘What about his wife?’

  ‘He had loved her. It hadn’t occurred to him that after a while they wouldn’t have anything to say. He is done with her, and wants to separate, but he doesn’t know how to do it because it’ll be expensive and will make her mad, suicidal even. She is obliviously contented, shopping in London, while he is having a sort of breakdown.’

  ‘Why? What sort?’

  ‘He was vulnerable, since he could not return to his daily routine, the prison which held him together. He asked himself repeatedly, even at this stage of his life, how can we rid ourselves of old, dead selves and make new ones?

  ‘He calls the two of them Prospero and Miranda, and she attends to him like a good daughter. She draws him, they make tea and talk intimately about their lives, their partners, and the future. They have to.’

  ‘What sort of future could this couple have?’

  Lotte said, ‘This blank girl, a piece of fluffy erotic nothing, who seems to absent herself from herself, can help him prepare for his death. He knows she is evasive, silly and insipid, but she is sincere, at least, with a couple of years’ real beauty left. And he believes he has wasted his time infuriating people, and giving them little, for which he is now tearing himself apart. Like a lot of people, he believes, in his imagination, that he is a murderer.

  ‘The old man had been struck by a story he’d heard about Ingmar Bergman, who, when dying, sat through his own films in chronological order. Mamoon admired this, and wanted to say, in a last gasp of integrity, what it was to be old, what it meant to look unflinchingly at one’s life. He was amazed by how labile the past is, and how one rewrites it, and writes over it, continuously.’

  Lotte went on, ‘The girl with the vanilla hair encourages him to talk through his work, and about the people he’d loved. She even helps him write to the people he has regrets about.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘A woman living in America, I think, to whom he owes some kind of explanation or apology. There is going on, in that room, between the older man and the younger woman, a play of reparation and atonement. It’s rather wonderful, Harry. He writes about his own sexuality, and that of his father, with a new curiosity and insight, as if he has found a new subject, even at his age. It’s the warmest, most moving thing he’s done since the early work.’

  ‘I’m sure. Jesus, I’ll go mad.’ He was silent for a time. ‘Can you tell me, please, what’s in it for the young woman?’

  ‘A sort of education, a more complex way of seeing the world. For the first time she gets a sense of the whole of someone’s life. She begins to read. He has started to write again. One person can develop another, you know. There with her in the room, as they sit by the fire together, he dictates some of the book to her.’

  Harry said, ‘They keep this secret?’

  ‘This necessity is private.’ She said, ‘I suspect some of this concerns you.’

  She asked him what he thought. He kissed her and lay back. ‘I don’t know yet.’ He said, ‘Was he keen for me to know what it was about?’

  ‘Oh yes. He suspected you would try not to read the book.’

  ‘Was he eager for you and me to meet again and for you to tell me this?’

  She nodded. He sat up, looked for his bag and told her she’d done her job. ‘Is that why you invited me here? Is that all you want from me? Shall I just fuck off now?’

  ‘I wanted to see you again.’ She took his hands. ‘So no, please don’t cry or fuck off.’

  ‘You want more?’

  She kissed his hair, his forehead, his nose, his mouth. ‘Yes,’ sh
e said. ‘Oh yes. I could look at you, and look at you. Lots.’

  ‘And me at you,’ he sighed. ‘Love is the only damn thing. It catches you when you’re not ready.’

  ‘Rob told me you’re single, but still living in the house.’

  He said, ‘I’m reading a bit, thinking about dead mothers. But I’m always optimistic in Paris; everything looks better from there. Shall we go for a few days?’

  In the morning Harry and Lotte went to a cafe for breakfast. He walked with her to work. When they kissed and parted, she said, ‘I’ve an idea as to what you should do about Mamoon and Liana.’

  Thirty-two

  Travelling with the kids was a major operation, and such manoeuvres had to be planned in advance. But they intended to turn this trip around in twenty-four hours, as Lotte had suggested to Harry. Alice was known for her list-making, Julia was recognised in the family for her ability to pack things in the car, while Harry would complain, confuse and eat all the sandwiches before they started out. Having been consulted, Rob considered it an excellent idea for them to ‘complete the process’, and by the late afternoon they were gaily bowling down the motorway, the kids vomiting.

  Liana heard the car and came out into the yard with the dogs to greet them, standing on the spot where Harry had first seen her when he arrived afraid and excited with Rob, that first Sunday afternoon. Where once Mamoon’s temper and Liana’s will had kept everything alive, the house and gardens were beginning to look as if the original wilderness would return. Mamoon wouldn’t use his writing room again; Scott was growing weed in the greenhouse, and renting the former ‘archive’ barn as a repairs workshop. The yard was scattered with semi-dismantled cars and metal parts. Scott himself stood there dirt-smeared and bare-chested, idly knocking a monkey-wrench against an oil can, with two of his gang beside him.

  Julia greeted her brother, and then went to look for Ruth, to console her. A couple of weeks back, one night, a male friend of Ruth’s – perhaps a paramour – had attacked another of her friends in the house, stabbing him with a broken bottle, almost murdering him. There had been blood and despair; there would be a court case and prison. Before his second stroke, Ruth had gone to Mamoon, the patriarch, and begged for help, consolation and wisdom, but he only gave her a look of pity that said, ‘How can anyone live like you?’

  Liana had had an operation to remove a growth; her eyes, behind thick glasses, were tired, and she wore no make-up or jewellery, just jeans and a too large sweater. She’d never been so thin or so sad, she said, or so happy to see her friends and the ‘grandchildren’ she adored.

  After his strokes and heart failure, as well as weeks in hospital, Mamoon had stubbornly insisted on being at home, and, despite her own weakness, Liana was determined to look after him. She had had Scott bring a bed into the library, where Mamoon, propped up and surrounded by roses, could see out into the garden, watching Liana as she worked.

  Ruth and her sister Whynne bathed and changed Mamoon; Scott moved him about, and Liana sat and whispered poetry into him, books from his childhood, Alice in Wonderland, parts of Dickens, stories from the Thousand and One Nights, the sports news and, his favourite, the Song of Songs – ‘I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine; he feeds among the lilies. Thou art beautiful, my love’ – because he said he liked to hear her voice, to know someone was there.

  Alice was keen to see Mamoon. She missed the stillness, and sense of distance and space, you got at Prospects House; she missed Liana’s cooking and the energetic talk. All the same, she had been uneasy about going; she had rung Liana often and knew how unwell Mamoon was, yet she was still shocked and upset to see him. She wanted to keep on good terms with Liana, and perhaps work with her in the future. But Liana was too wretched, preoccupied and weepy to think about that. She was delighted to have them there.

  Insisting that Mamoon had become very fond of him, Liana asked Harry to sit with him. And Harry did sit there, wondering about the relation between his book and the man, even holding the old man’s hand. Harry missed their combative conversations; nobody had been so tough on him, or made him think so hard. At one point, when Harry wiped saliva from Mamoon’s mouth, and dared to take out his phone and photograph him, Mamoon looked directly at him and said, ‘How long can you stay, Latif? Did you bring your homework? Is the story finished?’

  In this house of the almost dead, Ruth, her sister and Liana were delighted to see the babies, which meant that Harry and Alice could walk again in the familiar woods and beside the river, with the dogs.

  Alice would get a flat, as would he; Julia would find a room nearby. He and Alice had almost stopped speaking about anything except money and the children, and how their care for them would be divided up. Now Harry said to her, ‘Did you read Mamoon’s new novel?’

  She shook her head; he explained that, as far as he knew, it concerned the love of an older man for a younger woman, the partner of a journalist.

  ‘He did it then, he wrote the fiction he’d been talking about,’ she said. ‘He’d been sitting in that room every day for months, staring at the wall, while you burrowed into his privacy. I said I understood that,’ she said. ‘I have that desolate nature.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘But you have helped me with it, Harry, listening to me. I respect you for that, as well as for you being relatively stable and all.’

  He thanked her.

  ‘I didn’t believe Mamoon, in fact. His bin was full of screwed-up paper. I opened one out, thinking it might make a souvenir for the children. It was covered in doodles. He really did believe he was finished.’ She went on, ‘And you were asking him questions about things he couldn’t, or didn’t want to remember – certainly not in that way – questions which made him feel his life was being retold as farce by an idiot. There was something else.’

  ‘There was?’

  ‘He’d reread Anna Karenina. He worshipped Tolstoy for his understanding of marriage, of women, and of children. He’d done his best, but he knew he’d never do anything as true, as sympathetic, as universal.’

  ‘Why didn’t he talk to Liana about these things?’

  ‘He was afraid. She was demanding, asking for more love, sex, money. He couldn’t work and he couldn’t satisfy her. What was it with women and him that always went wrong?’ She said, ‘I suggested it must be more than peculiar, disorienting, in fact, having someone write your life, interview you about it as if you were almost dead, while living in your house. At that moment he had the idea of writing about what you were doing and how it made him see himself differently.’

  Harry said, ‘He finally flogged the archive and some of his land. He rented the London flat to calm Liana. He was able to see you regularly at a friend’s place.’

  ‘Does it say all that?’

  ‘Liana didn’t know.’

  ‘I couldn’t hurt her. She would have misunderstood.’

  ‘Nor did I know. You deceived me. God knows, I’ve done the same to you in other ways.’

  She said suddenly, ‘I’ve had enough of you.’

  ‘The same. Bored to death.’

  ‘Why won’t you just fuck off?’

  ‘Don’t hit me like that,’ he said, taking her arm. ‘Alice, I know Mamoon considered me mediocre—’

  She giggled. ‘Yes, impatient and seething with fury. And perhaps with a personality disorder!’ She went on, ‘Does it say in the book that he insisted I give you up for him? He liked to be massaged – otherwise I didn’t have to touch him. I could have lovers. All I had to do was talk to him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I guess he was in love.’

  ‘How nice was that for you?’

  ‘I was flattered, I liked the attention. You didn’t give me much.’

  ‘Nor you me.’

  ‘He was too forceful and demanding, but it was a good experience with him. To be close to a man like that, to have the chance to learn to think, it’s unforgettable.’

  He said, ‘What was your reply
to his request?’

  ‘I reminded him of his duty towards Liana. She is a great friend to me.’ She shrugged. ‘I won’t read the book. I know it’s a story. I became his hallucination, all made up and left behind with nothing. Sometimes you can know too much. I feel as if I’ve been shredded. I can’t take any more life right now, if these terrible coils and circles are life. Are they, Harry? Do you know? Won’t you answer me for once?’

  He had heard enough. He began to walk back, and she followed him. He said, ‘I wish he could hear about the new and well-paid job I have lined up.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It is a gift from Rob, because he pities me after the last job, and wants to give me an easy time. While working on the book about Mum, I will be ghost-writing the autobiography of an international footballer. I will be a centre forward’s horse whisperer. I can safely say we have class, at last, as a family.’

  But they were not really a family, and, as she laughed, he recalled his father’s words to him about his mother, which were, roughly: she was your mum, Harry, but to me she was just another girl. Harry wondered if, in twenty years’ time, he’d say such a thing to his sons.

  Perhaps Alice was thinking something similar. ‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out between us. But we’re very pleased and grateful, Harry, that you can support us all.’

  ‘Any time.’ He said, ‘Please hold me, hold me one last time.’

  ‘Never.’

  It was Lotte’s idea that they return to the house and Harry add the account to the end of the book: a few paragraphs about the dying writer. Now, before supper Harry stood at the open door of Scott’s barn, the place where he’d sat for hours with a magnifying glass. Peggy’s diaries were gone, taken to the American archive, as if Peggy herself had finally been taken away. Harry had brought them all back to life, reclaiming her in the book, stressing her contribution to Mamoon’s work, and how he needed her; Ruth also appeared, sending Mamoon forth, and there was enough about Marion, and how she’d led him towards himself at last.