The Last Word Read online

  ‘What is that doing there?’ Harry indicated the flag of St George above the mantelpiece. He noticed, on the mantelpiece itself, three bottles of the champagne Mamoon and Liana drank, and a big chunk of fine cheese next to it. There was also an old, passport-sized photograph of Mamoon leaning against a Toby jug.

  ‘My brother Scott the Skin is with the National Party. We’re British stock. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Julia, haven’t you noticed – I apologise for talking about it too much – but I am writing a book about an Indian.’

  ‘Shut up. The old man’s no trouble,’ she said. ‘By the way, were his parents and brother coloured too?’

  ‘Oh yes. The whole family. Black as night.’

  ‘But he isn’t Somalian and he’s always giving the Muslims a criticism, they say.’

  ‘Yes, I guess.’

  ‘Do you really like Muslims?’

  He said, ‘The world’s full of people with unusual beliefs, Julia. Scientologists, Rastafarians, Catholics, Moonies, Mormons, Baptists, Tories, dentists, captains of industry – every madness has its cheerleader. The asylums and parliament are crammed full of delusionists, and only a madman would want to eliminate them. My father had the right idea. Begin from an assumption of insanity and then laugh, where possible.’

  ‘Scott says they think we’re unclean filth who’ll burn in hell. He says, where’s our country gone? Who took it away?’

  ‘But the country’s much nicer now. Everyone’s broke, but it’s stable, unlike everywhere else in Europe. And there’s less hate around than there used to be.’ He said, ‘Talking of unusual beliefs, when I finished my last book and was waiting for a good idea, I went down to South London and researched a long story on the new skinheads. They’re all huff and puff. A bunch of Widow Twankeys pissing in the wind.’

  She put her finger to her lips. ‘Shhh . . . Jesus, zip it up and put it away. The local town, where I bet you’ve never been, is full of Poles and Muslims. White workers like us no one cares about. There’s a mosque in a house they watch, the lads. The boys set fires to scare the towel-heads and black crows. They follow them and hit them. That’ll teach ’em to try and blow us up.’

  He got up. ‘Thanks, but I’d better go write a book.’

  ‘Please, Harry, I like you so much. I’m not like them. I don’t go round hating. Are you trying to cliché me?’

  ‘Don’t give me reason to.’

  ‘Good, you lover boy. Now, five more minutes.’ She asked, ‘If you like the writer’s work so much, give me one of his stories.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘While I finish my roll.’

  While she held it up and took a tiny nibble, Harry said, ‘Mamoon’s last big work, a novella, Afternoons with the Dictator, was a top piece of comic satire about a raggedy bunch of five overthrown Third World dictators meeting in a cafe on the Edgware Road for tea. It was adapted as an opera at the Barbican and one weekend at the beginning of this job, Mamoon sent me, as a test, I suppose, to see it. It was all stilts, inflated uniforms and industrial music. I liked it, but it would have killed him to see it. According to him, the world needs no exaggeration.’

  ‘What’s in the story?’

  ‘These dictators – men who would roast your dachshund or drink your eyeballs in soup – walk about with their shopping in plastic bags; they play cards; they drink. At first their talk is mostly banal, about how the lifts in their buildings don’t work, or what a nuisance it is to get your army uniform adjusted for a good price, particularly when you’re getting fat sitting on the sofa watching Big Brother. Not only that, they cannot watch Newsnight without anxiety, and they complain about how the money they stole from the populace doesn’t go as far as people think in these straitened, inflationary times.

  ‘Although they’re still pursued and admired, like ageing popstars, by crazies and eccentrics, what they dream of is returning to active dictating and torturing. What good is an unemployed dictator with time on his hands? Once they’ve talked about traitors and spies, and how badly they were let down by their own side, they start to argue with each other. The problem is, if they fall out, they won’t have much company. But they lack self-knowledge, and, one day, it all comes down . . .’

  ‘How?’

  ‘One of them finds he is beginning to fall in love with a young waitress in the cafe they go to.’

  Julia said, ‘Is she beautiful?’

  ‘And kind and young. Like you.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Listen: he never comes in without bringing her poetry books and little wooden figures, and she is flattered.’

  ‘Any girl would be if a man did that.’

  ‘He seems kind and sensitive, our dictator, though he has three unmentioned wives already.’

  ‘Did he eat them?’

  ‘They would be tasty,’ Harry said. ‘And usually, such a gorgeous girl – the waitress we’re talking about is Spanish, dark; there are no English people for miles—’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You’ll see, Julia. I’ll show you London.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘Well, parts of it.’

  ‘Please, Harry, don’t make a promise if you don’t mean it. I take your meanings for truth.’

  ‘Never a good idea,’ he said. ‘Now, usually, in the dictator’s world such a juicy girl would be raped and her family burned alive, just for starters, to keep them on their toes. But with this particular beauty, one day, while paying the bill, he was unable to resist – he whispers to her, asking her out to the cinema.

  ‘But one of the other dictators notices what’s going on. He is jealous because he likes the lovely waitress more than a bit too. And he knows the waitress will never go out with the first dictator if she finds out who he is. Who would want to go on a date with a mass murderer – a man who has personally tortured some of his victims?’

  ‘Yuck. Not even me.’

  ‘But, in fact, he has been pretending to be a journalist, an artist even . . .’

  ‘She believes him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happens? Does she go with him?’

  ‘They do go out together.’

  ‘Don’t tell me she sleeps with him on the first date?’

  ‘Would you?’

  She shrugged. ‘If I wanted him. You’ve got to find some fun around here.’

  He went on, ‘They have a good night out. He is mature, polite and gentlemanly. He gives her a sweet kiss on the lips. Something stirs. She begins to feel fondly towards him. Meanwhile, the other dictator is plotting to show her a newspaper article about the first dictator—’

  ‘And? Do the two dictators fall out?’

  ‘But another dictator enters the picture . . .’

  At that moment the door opened and a tragic-looking woman with a swollen eye, which was turning blue, hobbled into the room and stared about distractedly, as if she’d never seen it before. Harry looked up and realised he had seen her before – last night, of course. But somewhere else too. What was this house called, Déjà Vu?

  ‘You’re late, Mum,’ said Julia.

  ‘Morning, sir,’ said the woman to Harry, almost curtseying, but also appearing to shiver. ‘Roof.’

  ‘Sorry?’ said Harry, looking upwards. ‘Damp?’

  ‘Ruth,’ said Julia. ‘My mum.’

  Ruth said, ‘Would it be all right, sir, if you gave us a lift to the house? We all overslept due to illness. Mrs Azam can be very harsh and vile.’

  ‘She can?’ said Harry.

  ‘She slapped my Julia.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Kitchen. I had to physically stop my Scott going down there. After all we’ve done, years upon years of all sorts of things, long before she was here, treating us like servants, she reduced our wages and said, “I know you don’t know what’s going on out there beyond the haystack, but these are hard times.” You should see their champagne bill. She an’ Sir get through three bottles a night. What can you do, if you want t
o work?’

  Harry continued to blink at the woman until he could assemble all the information he had and place her. Julia’s mother Ruth worked in the house for Liana and Mamoon; she had served him supper not long ago.

  ‘No problem,’ he said uneasily.

  The mother left and he was finishing his food as quickly as he could when Julia said, ‘They like you, Sir and Her. I hear them talking. They don’t even notice me.’

  ‘What do they say about me?’

  ‘He caught your description.’

  ‘What description?’

  ‘On the phone. When you called him Saddam Hussein and said he had a face like a soiled arse.’

  ‘Ah. Did he comment on it?’

  ‘He repeated it slowly, like he was taking it in. Then he said something like, you’d never be a novelist, and the biographer is the vulture – no, sorry, what was it? – the undertaker, of the literature world.’

  ‘Thanks, Julia.’

  ‘Who was that you spoke to? Was it your girlfriend?’

  ‘Yes. Alice Jane Jackson.’

  Julia said, ‘She’s lovely, isn’t she? Liana has heard she is. Is it true she’s coming to see us?’

  ‘Yes. No. Perhaps. She looks at magazines and chews her hair. She’s not keen on literary people and their talky talk, their going on about reviews and prizes and stuff. She doesn’t think I should have taken on the book. Negative, eh, but at least she’s protective.’

  ‘Harry, trust me, I can help you more than you know. I can keep you informed.’

  ‘You can?’

  ‘I catch onto a lot of things, going about.’ Here she hesitated. ‘I think I might have something, and could find it. Some writing of Mamoon’s I got hold of. Notebooks. They would be useful.’

  ‘How did you get them?’

  ‘It was a couple of years ago. I found them in the barn when Mamoon asked me to tidy up.’

  ‘There’s a lot of damp stuff in there, packed away, rotting. Apart from me, no one’s looked at it. Why did you take and read private material?’

  She tapped her nose and grinned. ‘I wanted to learn something.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Flicking through, I saw my name in one of them. And my mum and Scott.’

  ‘I see. Why?’ She said nothing. He said, ‘Can I look at them?’

  ‘I think so. Sure.’

  ‘You’re so cute.’ He kissed her head and said, ‘Please keep me up to date when necessary.’

  She kissed him on the lips. ‘Keep me satisfied.’

  ‘Will do. I’m your man.’

  ‘Are you, Harry? I’m so pleased. I can’t believe it.’

  ‘It’s just a saying, Julia, not a contract.’

  Julia’s mother climbed up into the front of Harry’s 4 × 4 with her bag on her lap. Julia got in the back and put her headphones on. Ruth said, ‘Is it all right, please sir, if we pick up Whynne, me sister? She’s helping us out today.’

  ‘Of course, Ruth,’ he said. ‘The more the merrier on this fine warm day in the country with the sun coming out and it not raining yet.’

  ‘Thank you ever so much for coming to our house. You like Julia, my daughter, sir?’

  ‘She’s kind and affectionate. You’ve done a good job there.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. I take that as a high compliment, coming from you. A man so high, a doctor even. You do prescriptions?’

  ‘Only philosophical ones.’

  ‘I have a son too.’

  ‘You are twice blessed. What does he do?’

  ‘He frightens people.’

  ‘Professionally?’

  She gurgled. ‘Scares the frigging daylights out of them.’

  ‘In what capacity?’

  ‘Security. Don’t they have that in London?’

  ‘Yes, we have so much of it we’re frightened all the time.’

  ‘Good job you’re down here. He’s lucky, my son.’

  ‘In what way?’

  She said, ‘To have work which suits him.’

  ‘You can’t say fairer than that, Ruth. Clearly a fulfilled life lies ahead of him despite these hard times.’

  ‘Have you met him?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve had that privilege.’

  ‘You will.’ She went on, ‘Do you think he could work up in London one day?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Would you help him, if you could? You must know people who need security.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘I’d be ever so grateful. These children had no proper father. The men down here are no good.’

  ‘Apparently men everywhere are no good, Ruth. But ambition in a young man is a wonderful thing.’

  Far from living, as Harry had imagined, in flower-strewn Aga-heated cottages in the verdant enchanted English countryside, the part of the town Julia’s mother directed him to was composed of run-down ugly council houses – many of them boarded up, seemingly abandoned – and shabby graffitied streets. The people looked pasty-faced, slow-moving, ill-kempt, both dozy and violent. Clearly the fathers had scarpered, or been driven out by unemployment, or by the women. Harry seemed to have discovered an island run by teenagers: a semi-violent English poverty and hopelessness unrelieved by years of government investment. You wouldn’t leave your car here, let alone your family.

  When the sister emerged, she also sat in silence, her lunch in a plastic box on her knee. To avoid any unnecessary enquiries, Harry dropped off the women halfway up the track. Looking up, as he handed Ruth the £20 loan she had solicited for ‘expenses’, he had the impression, though he couldn’t be sure from such a distance, that Mamoon was standing at his bedroom window, adjusting his collar, his hooded eyes seeming to lift and sparkle with mischievous interest.

  Harry hurried into the kitchen to make coffee. Liana looked at him, but said nothing. Soon after, Ruth, her sister, and Julia arrived and began pulling up the carpets and plunging their arms into the toilets. Harry would go to the barn and continue work, for another day, on Peggy’s letters and diaries.

  But he went to his room first, to change. While he was doing so, he heard a knock on the door.

  Seven

  ‘Harry?’ Mamoon’s gentle tap alarmed Harry, and he dropped the papers he was holding. ‘I need to see you.’

  ‘You do, sir?’

  ‘Oh yes. Can we talk later this morning? Will you be available?’

  ‘Talk? That’s why I’m here, sir, getting under your feet like vermin, as you put it the other day.’

  ‘See you in the library, my friend, insh’allah. I’m looking forward to it.’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Why not? There’s much to say.’

  This was a surprise; Mamoon had never before solicited Harry’s company. He either wanted to put the record straight about something, which was unlikely, or Harry was going to be kicked out.

  Distracted, tired and guilty after his exertions with Julia, Harry was also concerned he hadn’t got far with his most recent questions to Mamoon, which were about Mrs Thatcher. Why, Harry had asked, would Mamoon like someone with no discernible culture, and who had driven Britain towards vulgarity and consumerism? Besides, anyone would have thought that a scribbling Indian would be the last thing Thatcher would have liked. Apparently, she enjoyed Mamoon’s company, and he had been asked to visit her late at night, in Downing Street. A few days ago Harry had got Mamoon to say that Thatcher ‘stood up to the mob’ and to ‘pointless demagogues like Scargill’, and that ‘Margaret liked men.’ While a scoop about Mamoon’s private conversations with Thatcher would have helped the book, Mamoon wouldn’t say more.

  Now, in an attempt to think about how to approach Mamoon more profitably, Harry took off to the woods with Yin and Yang, who could run all day. He said to Alice on the phone, ‘This is turning bad. Mamoon has given me only titbits. I’ve got a thousand facts and dates, but who wants that? What am I to do, my love? How can I really open him up?’

  Harry had known he would ha
ve to ask Mamoon questions he wouldn’t have put to his friends or, indeed, to any other man. There were many aspects of his friends, and indeed of his girlfriends, that Harry, with English restraint, didn’t want any knowledge of. Forgetting, along with hypocrisy, were, to him, the necessary arts central to living, just as they clearly were to Mamoon. Why then, he wondered, of all things, had he decided to become a literary biographer – someone who sought the truth of another and wished to remake them in his own words? Was this what he should be doing, or would he have been better off as a coastguard, as one of his brothers had recently suggested?

  In London last weekend, strolling with his father in Richmond Park, he had consulted him about making progress with Mamoon. The old man said, ‘Persistence is the key, surely you must have learned that from me? If you want to treat a schizophrenic, for instance, particularly one who is more or less catatonic, the only prescription is time and close attention. And you have to enter the fantasy rather than attempt to refute it. It could take months or years before you get anywhere. Sometimes you get nowhere. Not only that, the patients try to make you crazy. They want to deposit their illness in you. At the same time, the doctors get very annoyed with the patients for not getting better, and often punish them, just as teachers become impatient with their pupils. The truth is, Harry, in these relationships there’s a lot going on even when nothing seems to be going on. The sane have always envied the mad for their freedom and ecstasy. Look at your mother,’ he said, ‘she could be adorable, and was adored. But all our love and attention couldn’t keep her alive.’

  ‘Can I ask you now – I’ve never said it. Did you love her?’

  ‘I did, Harry. She loved other men. I don’t happen exactly to believe in the bourgeois marriage settlement, a form designed to limit sexuality, and which obviously demands too high a price. But she made it difficult for me. She was curious about the world, she was a believer: it was her weakness. If she wanted to know someone, she just followed them, any faker or fakir, and damn the consequences. She disappeared; we were mad with worry; but she came back after a week saying she’d hung out with some DJs in Brighton. You know some of this? Did the boys tell you?’

  ‘Pretty much.’