The Last Word Read online

  Harry wanted Mamoon to know that he would ‘respect and honour’ him because he loved his work. Mamoon might have been mean, drunken and dirty at times, as all men and women were, but it was important that prurience didn’t distract him, or his readers, from the increasingly important lesson that great art, the best words and good sentences, mattered – and mattered increasingly in a degraded, censorious world, a world where the passion for ignorance had increased through religion. Words were the bridge to reality; without them there was only chaos. Bad words could poison you and ruin your life, Mamoon had once said; and the right words could refocus reality. The madness of writing was the antidote to true madness. People admired Britain only because of its literature; the pretty little sinking island was a storehouse of genius, where the best words were kept, made and remade.

  If Harry felt guilty that he was attempting to look into the intimate life of a considerable man who had invited him to stay in his house, it wasn’t because Mamoon, with his high-mindedness, fastidiousness and dignity – a man formed and active before the Murdoch empire altered for good our ideas of a ‘private life’ – was beyond such trivialities.

  But trivialities make a man, and, when he could find them, Harry brought and read to Mamoon bad reviews of books written by Mamoon’s contemporaries, friends or acquaintances, knowing that he would be unable to refrain from chuckling and purring with pleasure. Then Harry learned, during their runs through the lanes with the dogs, that Mamoon loved gossip, particularly if it was demeaning. Harry cursed himself for not noticing, in his reading, that humiliation was the touchstone of Mamoon’s character; it was where he had come from, and where he continued to find his enjoyment. His father had humiliated him continuously, driving him towards excellence and a lifetime of semi-repressed fury, and Mamoon never forsook its awful pleasures. Mamoon didn’t appear to respond to his wife’s kisses or caresses, or even her attempts to take his hand, but he was fascinated when there was prohibited contact between other people. Before he drove down to the country, Harry had to ring around the gossipocracy of agents, publishers and writers, to stock up with as many stories of infidelity, plagiarism, literary feuding and deceit, cross-dressing, backstabbing, homosexuality, and, in particular, lesbianism, as he could. At present Mamoon was fascinated by stories of formerly ‘normal’ women dragged to the ‘other side’ by ‘les Sapphics’, whom, he seemed to believe, had ‘mesmeric’ powers.

  ‘Anything lesbic to cheer me up?’ he’d say when Harry arrived from London. ‘Have their moustaches been twitching this week? Do they have fresh batteries in their vibrators? Let’s hike across the fields and discuss it fully.’

  Harry had begun to feel like a Bloomsbury Scheherazade. But he had learned that Mamoon’s definition of lesbianism was almost non-discriminatory: he referred to all women writers as lesbian, including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Sylvia Plath. ‘I’m going to bed with a lesbian,’ he’d say, tucking an Austen under his arm and going upstairs.

  ‘At least you’re going to be having a good time,’ mumbled Harry.

  ‘I’m sorry to be trivial,’ said Mamoon. ‘I told Rob I’m just a hollow man. The novelist is the same – a trickster, deceiver, conman: whatever. But mostly he is a seducer.’

  ‘Aren’t you fascinated by seduction?’

  ‘Isn’t that all art is?’ said Mamoon. ‘Turn over, show us what you have, that is what you readers want.’

  Even if Harry did have gossip, Mamoon rarely stayed up beyond nine in the evening, and it was soon after that hour when the revenge predicted by Alice – you could call it truth’s price – began to occur.

  Harry was having peculiar experiences when alone in his bedroom.

  The staff hadn’t been allocated time to clean his room. Perhaps Mamoon hadn’t encouraged them; he didn’t like guests, and few came. In Harry’s room there were dead flies and dust; the television didn’t work – all Harry could do was play FIFA and Grand Theft Auto on it, before watching movies on his computer until he fell asleep. He’d been driving back to London to see Alice and their friends whenever he could. Perhaps the close proximity to his subject, and to the countryside, was getting him down.

  Harry had been brought up with his twin sporty, clever brothers in West London, one of them now a philosophy lecturer and the other a restaurateur. Unlike many of his friends, his parents hadn’t owned a country place, preferring to spend the weekends at galleries, exhibitions and the theatre, having picnics at Chiswick House, or throwing parties in the garden for those whom the boys sneeringly referred to as ‘intellectuals’, who talked about feminism, politics, and Lacan. These people’s idea of a good night out was to catch a double bill of Jean-Luc Godard at the ICA. Harry’s father, who never wanted to stop thinking about and, unfortunately, discussing the psyche – being much exercised by the philosophical problems of psychiatry and ‘notions of normality’ – believed there was no one to talk to in the countryside, and that the people living there were as bovine as the animals they reared.

  But it wasn’t only this inherited aversion to the countryside which was making Harry discontented. After ten days, at about three in the morning, he was woken up by a terrifying male howling and yelling, as though something was being slaughtered. At breakfast Liana said, ‘Are you exhausted?’

  ‘But yes.’

  She took Harry some eggs, and then began to dig her fingers into his shoulders as if she’d mislaid some loose change in his muscles. ‘Were you awake? The murderous yelling has begun again. It happened the last three nights but you didn’t hear. Your questions are condemning him to a terrible wakefulness.’

  ‘I’ve hardly started with the enquiries. If I ask him if he wants milk in his tea, he runs for the hills.’

  ‘Mamoon is a worldly man, with childish fears. He won’t tell me what these dreams are, but when he wakes up, soon after he sleeps, he cries like a baby. Sometimes he barks like a dog. Even the animals have insomnia then, and become suicidal. Please, swear to me, you won’t mention it in the book and embarrass us in London, Bombay and Rome.’

  Harry said he couldn’t cram in every wink, burp and gesticulation. He took her hand as he turned to face her. ‘But Liana, surely you know indiscretion is the essence of biography? Who would read a portrait of a saintly saint?’

  ‘I don’t believe you are a filthy merchant only, Harry. What people want is upliftment, to learn the path to greatness so they can follow down it. Thank God I am here to educate you. And when the book is finished, you will bring it to me and I will strike out anything remiss with my sharpened pencil.’

  He laughed. ‘You won’t be doing that, Liana.’

  ‘Rob has agreed. Mamoon would cut his balls otherwise. Who do you think you are – Joan Crawford’s daughter?’

  ‘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.

  Five

  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.