‘He was right. You’re sensitive. Are you okay now?’
‘I’m not going to thank you for putting me in that position. Are you sure you actually want to take care of me? Liana wonders if you really do. She has reservations about your character.’
‘And I about hers. I love you, darling. Can I kiss you?’
‘How could you even think about it when I’m in this state?’
She was already walking back to the house. It wouldn’t be a good idea to speak to her for a while. His desire for the truth had made him a criminal. She didn’t want to eat with Liana and Mamoon, she didn’t want to talk at all, but wrapped herself in a duvet on the sofa in the living room and slept there in a woolly hat, sucking her thumb. The next morning he drove her to the station, where she took a train to Cornwall for a photoshoot. Harry kissed and thanked her, and reminded her of his adoration, but there was nothing he could do with her in this mood.
When he returned to the house, he found Mamoon, sitting in the living room, and said, ‘Could I ask you, sir, if I’d be completely wrong to think that your experiences with Marion, your amour fou, informed the character of Ali in your sixth novel?’
There was a silence, before Mamoon said, ‘Harry, you do already know, don’t you, that I like to aid your intellectual development by refusing to allow any banal and simplistic correlations between art and experience.’
‘I know, sir. About that I follow you as a master. Art is a symbolic dream of life which transcends that from which it derives, and, indeed, everything which is said about it. However, there was an unmistakable outburst of desire and love, even of happiness in your work at that time. Before, your male characters were isolated, naïve even, perhaps book-bound. Then, brilliantly, you made another step.’
‘I did?’
‘You said, early on, that if every age has its central philosophical issue, ours will be the revival of religion as politics. And so you began to link radical Islam and its weird sexuality with hatred of the body, the body burned in the sacrificial auto-death. This is a gesture of the profoundest obedience. We know that the West attempted, in the sixties, to remove the father, authoritarian or not. That was how we ended up, as you have often helpfully pointed out, with a culture of single mothers. Take Ruth, for instance.
‘The father – as fathers do – returned, in the form either of a gangster, as in The Godfather or your favourite, The Sopranos, or of religious authority. There is also the father’s attempt to exclude, if not stamp out, sexuality. At least in others. Perhaps the father, according to this myth, wants all the women for himself. The sexuality returns, as it must, as perversion, as a kind of sadism. The fear, if not hatred, of women, of course, is at the centre of many religions.’
Mamoon yawned. ‘I said this, did I? And if I did, so fucking what?’
‘You let a woman in, sir. People say that sexuality is at the centre of the human secret, and that the erotic leads us into new experience, both sacred and profane. What is the connection, in your mind, if any, between the women you’ve been with and the work you’ve done?’
‘I haven’t a clue as to what you could mean.’
‘Think, sir, please: I’m trying to make you look interesting here. I can make you look good in bed, and out of it! Marion has suggested your mind opened to fresh ideas when her legs did, when the two of you embarked on your adventures in America.’
Unlike most people, Mamoon had more or less complete control over his speech; he didn’t like his words to run away from him. But for a moment he looked like someone who had swallowed a large marble.
At last he said, ‘Ecstatic as I am to hear Marion’s views from over the pond, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I wish you weren’t trying to peel me as you would an onion. You know, like the general public, I have a passion for ignorance. I want to work in the dark – the best place for me, for any artist. It just comes out, compacted as in a dream.’ He was silent, before saying, ‘There’s no denying she sparked me into a new creativity. The intellect and the libido have to be linked, otherwise there’s no life in the work. Any artist has to work with their prick or cunt. Any person has to work with their desire, to defeat boredom, to keep everything alive. Anything good has to be a little pornographic, if not perverse.’
Harry said, ‘However, the biographer sees the inevitabilities, the same paradigmatic sexual scenarios enacted repeatedly. When it comes to love and sex, the past writes the future. That would be the story of everyone’s life. Cannibals don’t become foot fetishists.’
‘Harry, you know more about my many selves than I do. You’re in the remembering business while I’m in the forgetting game, and forgetting is the loveliest of the psychic luxuries, a warm scented bath for the soul. I follow Chuang Tzu, the patron saint of dementia, who advised, “Sit down and forget.”’
‘Thanks for telling me.’
‘Perhaps my wife has hired you to do the little remembering I do require. I have to say, I particularly like it when you remember things which never happened. You are now making an imaginary life.’
‘How?’
‘My life, as I lived it, has been a Marx Brothers film, a series of detours, mistakes, misunderstandings, missed opportunities, delays, errors and fuck-ups. I am a man who never found his umbrella. Your life, I expect, is similar. Your ascription of a teleological arrow gives too much meaning and intention. Still, the idea of becoming a fiction does appeal. To my surprise, you might have the makings of an artist.’
Harry said, ‘I doubt I will ever reach your level, sir. I am impressed that you survived extremity and guilt with Marion, and that you came home to see Peggy through her vile death, sitting with her night after night. Then you carried on. You even had something of a family, for a time. Having repudiated the role previously, you seemed to like being a sort of father. What was that like?’
Mamoon nodded. ‘You know one is subject to many distractions and foolishnesses. It has always been my good fortune to have work which has saved me, and to have been able to look at the world through the lens of my ideas. I hope to God that you, one day, achieve that essential stability.’
‘In what way has work saved you?’
‘You strive to make me look lewd, when the truth is, even Philip Larkin had more sex, and I have been committed to the word throughout. I have always wanted to return to my desk to make something which hasn’t existed before. That is my only – meagre – contribution to improving things here on earth.’
Having said this, Mamoon closed his eyes and began to snore gently. He had the ability to nap at will but was most likely to fall asleep when Harry was making an enquiry.
Harry went into the garden in shorts and trainers to do some stretching and weights. He hung a long bag from a tree and kicked and punched it. This was his routine and his release after things got sticky with Mamoon, when he knew he’d have to return to him with more impossible queries.
He wondered how long he’d have.
A few minutes later Liana, in fishnets and wellingtons, came out of the kitchen and settled herself on the bench outside the door with a popular biography of a grand lady, a cup of tea and her reading glasses. ‘Bravo!’ she called. Feeling more like a member of the Chippendales than a literary biographer, Harry took a breather and Liana poured him some tea.
‘Poor man, you must be exhausted. I know I am. Here, I bought you this energising moisturiser,’ she said, handing him a little pot. ‘You’ll like it, you’ll see.’
‘How kind, Liana. Why did you do that?’
‘I heard you complaining about your uneven skin tone. Mamoon said that for you it’s more serious than the collapse of the economy.’
‘Much more. It’s the result of childhood eczema. For years I scratched myself almost to death. I’m worried the anxiety here will make it return.’
‘What anxiety? That cream has amazing healing qualities, and you seem agitated.’
‘I am.’
‘I think you know more about my husband
than I do now.’
‘That’s the problem.’
‘Was Marion kind about my darling Himself? Or was she bitter like the other one?’
‘There was some bitterness, not entirely unwarranted. She turned out to be rather splendid.’
‘Are you sure? You must have flirted all over the place.’
He rubbed the moisturiser onto his arms. ‘She had plenty to say about many things. I haven’t written it up yet, but I can feel that the book has really progressed.’
‘Progressed where, my dear? You are alarming me, Harry.’
‘I am?’
‘I don’t want you to get carried away and inflame my skin too. Let’s keep everything gentle in your account, shall we?’
Alice had warned him to be careful; to endure being patronised and even insulted, and not to allow himself to give anything away, sucking rather than puffing, though that attitude had yet to get him very far. Still what he and Rob admired about Mamoon, they both agreed, was his talent as a provocateur, his ability to create anarchy and fury and then sit back to gaze out over the ruins. On occasion Mamoon was more Johnny Rotten than Joseph Conrad. Harry had begun to think that, as his father had suggested, he had been too passive. His fears had kept him too safe. He’d make some mayhem; it was time to go gonzo, and up the stakes.
He said, ‘Liana, I guess you already know all about it.’
‘About what?’
‘The background to the Marion story. How Mamoon humiliated and insulted a young woman at an American university, calling her “a career Negro”. He had to get out and quite soon after became violently bitter.’
‘Might this be in the book?’
‘When I’ve done the research. It was after this that Mamoon decided to give up on, or pull away from Peggy, while continuing to live with her. He and Marion began something of a perverse relationship, which made me wonder whether such a thing had been a feature of his life.’ Liana was silent. ‘Or whether it was just a one-off, as it were.’
‘Perverse?’
Harry said that some might call it that.
‘Do you know for sure?’
‘He confirmed it. When this material comes out, people will think about both of you differently. The hacks and papers simplify things. They might call it sadomasochism.’
She thought for a moment and said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t put this in, but I wondered why, at the beginning, he asked if he could watch me urinate. Being a lady, I said no. Why would anyone want such a thing?’
‘To experience a particular form of intimacy.’
She said, ‘Listen, Harry, what the bloody fuck are you hinting at? Can’t you actually be precise? I don’t want to live in the dark like an idiot! As a mature woman –’ she pressed her face close to his, ‘and don’t you like to remind me all the time that I am? – I need to know every detail of the Marion part.’
‘Why?’
‘How awful it would be if you knew things about him that I didn’t.’
He pulled on a tracksuit top and sat with her. It wasn’t long before she’d turned red, and was waving furiously at her face with her book as if trying to put out a fire but succeeding only in fanning the flames. To her credit she heard him out before saying, ‘And you say you’re going to put this filth in the book we commissioned?’
‘If it is relevant to the work, which around that time turns very dark and sometimes brutal.’
She began to cry, and covered her face. ‘Poor Marion. I think of her often and how she was rejected. That will happen to me!’
‘Why would it?’
‘She couldn’t do enough to keep him interested. He regrets leaving her.’
‘He does?’
‘She inspired him, she was intelligent. They loved to talk about Shakespeare. She was learning Arabic and he said she was cleverer than him. He read her letters with a dictionary. I had an intelligent father, so I know men love women who are useful to them, like assistants.’
He asked her if she’d be okay.
She said, ‘You did promise, Harry dear, that you’d help me earn his love and kisses. Now you come to me with this merda. He will blame me for stirring it up. What have you done!’ She got up and walked quickly away, into the woods, stopping only to turn and say, ‘I’ve cursed you. I thought of unleashing the bees on you only I’m too well bred. But a very bad thing is going to happen to you – tonight.’
Twenty-one
That evening, while changing in his room, Harry could hear the two of them hollering, their voices overlapping as they interrogated one another. He had had, he guessed, something of an effect on their marriage. Too bad; he had a book to write. Writing was the devil. Writing was what he was employed to do.
He played music through his headphones and waited until it was nearly dark, although the kitchen light was on, when he crept out of the back door. He was smoking in the yard and about to get in the car when he heard a shout, or perhaps it was a shriek. Mamoon was coming out of the kitchen and heading towards the man chosen to make his portrait.
Mamoon was not leaning on his stick, as he always did now, the very stick Harry had cut for him, carving the head into the rough approximation of a rabbit. Mamoon was bearing it above his head with the genuine intention, Harry guessed, of bringing it into contact with the young writer’s cognitive equipment.
Harry turned and jogged across the yard towards the track. To Harry’s surprise, Mamoon was behind him, running and tripping, as if trying to throw away his limbs.
‘Mamoon, please, sir—’ tried Harry.
Harry ran some more, and so did Mamoon. He could hear Mamoon breathing heavily, and thought he must be tiring already. Harry was also keen to use reason and discuss literary matters. He’d had an expensive education and, even now, didn’t want to waste it.
‘Listen,’ he began, and stopped. The writer was on him. Harry dodged the coming stick by ducking and turning away. ‘I say, sir—’
Mamoon struck him across the back with the stick, as hard as he could. Harry fell down, and Mamoon followed up with two more blows. ‘See, Judas – I’ve still got the forehand!’
‘Stop that – Jesus! It hurts! What are you doing?’
‘You want the cross-court smash with top spin?’ said Mamoon, raising the stick again. He was ready to strike Harry across the face with it. ‘The horse whip is coming – ha!’
‘No, it’s not!’
Harry crawled away as quickly as he could, got up, manhandled the stick away from Mamoon, and took it across the yard, placing it on the top of his car. The old fool, full of adrenaline, stumbled after it, and soon learned, after attempting to jump up, that his days as a sportsman were done. He tripped and fell face down, grovelling in the gravel.
‘Don’t touch me. You blabbed about what Marion alleged,’ puffed Mamoon, as Harry hauled him to his feet and brushed the dirt off him.
‘You agreed, sir, that nowadays not a moment of existence goes unrecorded.’
‘How would you like it if you had everyone you’d ever fucked dragging behind you forever? Perhaps they will, a ghostly crowd of dead souls, howling hostile curses. Then I’ll laugh.’
‘You’ve always been dissident, nonconformist, anarchic. Aren’t most good books about sexual weakness?’ Spying an opening for the intertextual discussion he’d long anticipated, Harry said, ‘You adore Strindberg, adapted his work for the stage and wrote an essay on him. Kafka’s agonised hysterical letters to Felice have long fascinated you. Let’s think about how male writers have characterised the force of female sexuality—’
‘Shut it, bastard! Liana’s killing me, screaming and raving. She can’t believe I’ve had a good time with anyone but her. She dismissed me from the bedroom into the room next to yours. Now she insists I tell her every detail of my life with Marion. How can I do that? How will I get her back?’
‘Do you want her?’
‘If I have a terrible dream or become ill in the night will you give me the kiss of life?’
‘My kisses are soft and deep, sir. But to be honest, this material was going to come out anyway, by Marion’s hand or mine. What else am I doing but teasing out the truth, knot by knot – like Goole in An Inspector Calls?’
‘You’re a ghoul trying to play God with me. It was bloody well private.’
‘You forfeited that right when you invited me here to tell the story of your life. Why worry, when you know that sexuality makes fools of everyone?’
Mamoon told Harry that he could not confirm his material, but Harry explained that Marion had shown him the letters. When Mamoon asked why Marion would do that, Harry replied, ‘The life and the writing make one continuous book. It’s the same for all writers.’
‘Marion – I mean Liana – said you’re the sort to want to appear on television! You’re trying to make a career out of me, young man!’
‘We’re strapped together, sir. We sink or swim as one beast.’
‘Yours is a work of envy, and you are a third-rate semi-failure of a parasite who has got by on meretricious charm and fading looks. Did you ever read a biographer who could write as well as his subject?’
As if this wasn’t enough, Mamoon grabbed Harry by the lapels and tried to throw him against the car.
‘You’re fired, Harry. You’re never going to finish this work of tittle-tattle and when I come in from work tomorrow lunchtime I want to know this ridiculous misadventure is over! We’ve got another writer lined up to take over. He wears a tie!’ He put his face close to Harry’s. ‘Remember this, little boy. You know nothing. You are nothing. You will always be nothing.’
Mamoon seemed to have exhausted himself and began to cough. Harry led him back into the kitchen and sat him down with a glass of whisky.
‘You want me to call Liana?’ He guessed she was upstairs somewhere, tearing at something or listening to Leonard Cohen.
Mamoon shook his head and said, as Harry went to the door, ‘Do I look particularly ancient and infirm to you? Have I suddenly aged? Don’t leave me – I don’t think I have long.’