He didn’t want to tell his father that he still dreamed about a family holiday in Italy, when he went to his mother’s room to find the door ajar. Looking through, he saw her in bed with a man. They were lying still; he was in her arms. Her clothes were on the floor, but her shoes, oddly enough, were together on a chair – either, he wondered, as a sort of exhibit, or for their own safety. Harry pushed the door a little and went into the room. His mother jumped up, pulling a sheet over herself; the man was exposed. She screamed at Harry to get out.
He ran away, and when he saw her a few hours later she was unaffected, and didn’t mention it. He knew then there was another mother within the mother he believed he knew, and after that he wondered often when he would see his real mother again. But which one would it be? Had she deliberately given him erections by lazily rubbing eczema cream into his skin?
He learned from his brothers that he had escaped awareness of the worst of her extremity, though he assisted when their mother searched the house for bugs and closed the curtains against spies. When that didn’t keep them away, she stowed her three boys in the car and drove them singing, a bottle of vodka in one hand – water was poisoned – to Scotland to escape an abuser. When she went to the police station to report him, her children saw her held in handcuffs, taken away to a locked ward where she was drugged, only to be returned to the family months later, in a worse state.
His father said, ‘You should know, she would be proud of you being a literary man. She was fond – often over-fond – of any prick who could wield a pen nicely. The writers always put their art first, as they should. But they are usually available in the afternoon, at which point their minds give way to their genitals. Women are attracted to artists, of course, as they are to doctors, and prisoners on death row. The powerful and the vulnerable. If you want to continue to get laid, particularly as you get older, that’s where to head, boy.’
‘Did her infidelities hurt you?’
He shrugged and said, ‘I can’t quite count the ways in which we hurt one another. It was the means by which we tried to help one another – me, turning her into a patient, her, turning me into a dull authority – which were as bad as, if not worse, than our actual abuses.’
His father then said the harshest thing that Harry thought he had ever heard.
‘The truth is, she was your whole life and she’ll be in your dreams until your dying day; she was your mother, Harry. But to me she was just another woman. You boys are a very happy memento. You know, when you end a relationship and say you fell out of love, you actually mean you were never really in love. The past is a river, not a statue.’
Although Alice had been against the biography, before he had set off to Mamoon’s at the very beginning, she had insisted Harry practise his interview technique. She was worried that with Mamoon’s short-temperedness and indifference alongside Harry’s blithe politeness, Mamoon would run rings around the boy, and the two would exchange only small talk. Alice had therefore insisted that she and Harry draw up a list of demanding and incisive questions for Mamoon, which she had videoed him asking in as mild and neutral a voice as possible. But Mamoon had conducted numerous interviews with some of the world’s most unpleasant characters, asking them about the children they had murdered and the women they had raped – ‘Did strangling the woman to death complete your pleasure or did you consider it a supplement, like brandy at the end of the meal?’ – and he used silence like a knife. The ‘master’ would always be the one who could wait without anxiety; Mamoon could also, as Rob had predicted, become bored and prickly. ‘The sight of you, Harry,’ said Rob, early on, ‘will no doubt remind him of how little time he has left to live truly and authentically.’
Harry had inadvertently discovered that there were some literary subjects which would rile and arouse Mamoon. These provided usefully unguarded moments, which Harry had to utilise sparingly, for fear of alerting his opponent to the baiting. It was more like road rage than literary criticism, and Mamoon would sit up in his chair. ‘The enervated nancy boy of English writing, the slack-arsed lily-livered mother-loving faggot?’
Harry had referred, in passing, and in a low voice, to E. M. Forster. ‘Why, what is your view, sir?’
‘View? I have no views on a man who claimed he wanted to write about homosexual sex, a subject we certainly needed to know about. Since he lacked the balls to do it, he spent thirty years staring out of the window, when he wasn’t mooning over bus conductors and other Pakis. An almost-man who claimed to hate colonialism using the Third World as his brothel because he wouldn’t get arrested there, as he would showing off his penis in a Chiswick toilet. Apparently he preferred his friends to his country! How brave and original! Of course,’ he went on, his eyes flashing, ‘Orwell was even worse. He’s the worst of the Blairs. Do they still take him seriously in this country?’
‘Mostly as an essayist.’
‘He wrote books for children, or, rather, for children who have the misfortune to be studying him. All that ABC writing, the plain style, the bare, empty mind with a strong undertow of sadism, the sentimental socialism and Big Brother and the pigs, and nothing about love – intolerable. No adult apart from a teacher would bother with one of his novels. If I think of hell, it is being alone forever in room 101 with nothing to read but one of his books.’
‘Didn’t you once say that the mystery of human cruelty is the only subject there is?’
‘That sounds like me, though I repudiate that view. There is love. Neither of these writers, the poof and the puritan, has described a beautiful woman. What sort of writer cannot do that?’
He shuddered; then, having appeared to climax after this jihadic uprush of hatred, he would sink back in his chair, his mouth open, murmuring, ‘I much prefer little Willie Maugham or randy H. G. Wells. Yet the only one I still love to read is the Goddess.’
‘Which one?’
‘She who reminds me of my lonely mongrel alcoholic wandering in London and in Paris, when I first arrived – Jean Rhys. She’s the only female writer in English you’d want to sleep with. Otherwise it’s just Brontës, Eliot, Woolf, Murdoch! Can you imagine cunnilingus with any of them? As Jean said, the world is simple: it’s just a matter of cafes where they like you, and cafes where they don’t.’
Harry knocked softly.
Eight
He was standing at the door of the library. Since he couldn’t remember the mantra Alice had insisted would calm him, he repeated to himself, ‘Doom, doom, doom . . .’
‘Come.’
The book-lined room was quiet and cool, the heavy curtains keeping out the light. The desks, piled with the world’s most obscure and difficult books, were antique. Busts, sculpture, paintings and tapestries, some exquisite, some vulgar, had been shipped from Liana’s parents’ house near Bologna. Harry took off his shoes, stepping onto a long Venetian carpet selected by Mamoon when shopping with Liana. It was like walking across a Mantegna towards a hanging judge.
Mamoon had changed out of his usual roomy tracksuit, and was dressed in grey flannel trousers, Italian loafers with grey woollen socks, and a white shirt with the sleeves unbuttoned. The ginger tom on his lap closed his eyes as Mamoon stroked his head.
Harry sat down opposite and placed his notebook and pen, as well as his tape recorder, on the low table.
Mamoon said, ‘Harry, please, dear boy, before you ignite that dreadful recording box, can’t it be my turn to bore you with a question?’
Harry nodded. If he didn’t fall asleep, Mamoon would, occasionally, ask Harry a question which would be direct and difficult to answer, a question which, nonetheless, Harry believed he should answer in order to illustrate that silence was no use.
‘Harry, do you believe in monogamy and fidelity?’ Harry started. ‘Do you?’
‘Yes. Yes I do, yes, in theory.’
‘In theory?’
‘Ah-ha.’
‘You are a theoretician, you say?’
‘In a way.’
‘
In what way are you in fact a theoretician?’
Harry said, ‘People say fidelity is the best solution, that everything is simpler inside the prison of love. Fewer people go crazy. The various alternatives make for more unhappiness, don’t they?’
‘How would I know?’ said Mamoon. ‘I have lived this long and still cannot answer the unanswerable questions. People come and ask me for universal truths, but this is the wrong address. You’ll only get universal questions here, the ones that make literature.’
‘How can you expect me to answer them?’
‘I’ve seen the way you look at women. We researched you, and heard rumours which shocked us. Luckily Rob vouched for you, otherwise we wouldn’t have considered taking you on. Perhaps, though, you’re not ready to withdraw from the game yet.’
Harry said, ‘My mother died. I needed female attention. There were aunts, Dad’s female friends, and my brothers’ girlfriends. It was a sumptuous pleasure, running into the arms of the women at that age, with many of them being more than nice to me. Perhaps it became something of an obsession, to try and satisfy a woman after being in her debt.’
‘To pay her back for her kindness?’
‘You should know, sir, that at the moment I am very seriously detoxing as far as that side of things goes. I learned I could have a very powerful effect on women. When they wanted to be desired, their passions could be huge. But I’m trying to stop, or at least quieten down, after certain somewhat hazardous escapades and scrapes.’
‘Recently?’
‘Oh God, I should have learned my lesson by now.’
‘What are you saying? I must have an example.’
‘I’m not sure we should get distracted, Mamoon, sir.’
Mamoon leaned forward. He was becoming impatient. ‘The point is, Harry, if I’m not to find you abhorrent, there will have to be more reciprocity all round. Particularly from your side.’ Mamoon tickled the stirring cat under its chin. ‘Do you follow me?’
Harry said, ‘Sir, I’d been on a bit of a binge with the women. I’d asked for too much. My debts were being called in. I picked up a woman on the tube.’
‘Which line?’
‘Central.’
‘Ah yes. Marble Arch. Bond Street.’
‘She was a woman I adored and then pitied – but perhaps led on – an isolated person, an overseas mature student, who eventually wouldn’t leave me alone, and then deliberately became pregnant by me. Or so she said. Apparently it was her last chance, at her age. She wanted nothing else from me – but a child! I was worrying. I remembered that she wrote everything down.’
‘Ah-ha. Everything is recorded. Go on.’
‘At some peril, I climbed up the side of her building and broke into her place, to read her diary and find out the facts about her pregnancy. The door opened while I was consulting the evidence. I thought I would die of a heart attack. It was her flatmate, who had a knife. She was so terrified I thought she might accidentally kill me.
‘I said I would explain everything. We put away some whisky. I slept with her. Then I refused to do it again. So this woman confessed everything to her friend, who got in her car and hunted me down. It turned out that for three days she waited for me in various places, before trying to run me over while I was cycling. My back wheel was crushed. When I looked up and saw her eyes, I threw the bike down and ran for my life. Meanwhile, I had to keep all this from my girlfriend, with whom I’d begun living.’
‘Alice – is that her name?’
‘Yes, she’s gentle and hopeless, and sort of flounders about. But she’s good to look at, and I’m mad about her. Before, if I could, I liked to have three girls a day.’
‘Three? You could manage that?’
‘Four is my record. No, five. What is yours, sir?’ When Mamoon said nothing, Harry said, ‘Now I am determined to put the devil behind me and go straight. But at that time there were others I hadn’t quite finished with – left over from an earlier period, you might say. One had an abortion. Another attempted suicide – in front of me. One of my brothers said I should never have to resort to touching my own penis, though it would have saved me some trouble.’
‘You seem to specialise, if that is the word, in making others crazy. Can it be deliberate?’
‘It’s been a bad run, Mamoon, sir. But at times it seemed worth it.’
‘In what way?’
‘The women were spectacular.’
‘How?’
‘One of them had big eyes,’ he said. ‘Every time she opened them wide, it was as though all the clothes were peeling from her body. She was a violinist who’d play Bach, and sing to me.’
‘Ah.’
‘So you see, they required the sacrifice. I knew I’d be a fool to follow them, but more of a fool not to.’
‘Good. A man who hasn’t left behind him a string of broken women has hardly been alive. And if anyone manages to get their sexuality and their love lined up together, they are indeed lucky. It is as rare as a fine spring day in the country.’
Harry said, ‘I am glad, I have to say, to be here in the countryside, where it’s quieter. I can be more monstrous than I would like to believe – in my passions, and in the way they suddenly end, as if the relationships never happened. I’m one of those people who needs to know where their next meal is coming from – just in case it doesn’t come at all. Not that women like to be so used, of course.’
‘Why behave in such a way?’
‘I have thought about this, Mamoon, sir, you’ll be surprised to hear.’
‘And?’
‘I love the razor’s edge. I want to be cut open. My terror is of a bourgeois, ordinary life. I can’t bear the everyday constraint. I believe that ordinariness would put out my spark, such as it is.’
Mamoon said, ‘I have said this: we must bow down in gratitude to the fundamentalist, who reminds us how dangerous books and sex are. All sex, and indeed all pleasure, must include a poisonous drop of perversion, of devilish transgression – of evil, even – for it to be worth getting into bed for. It’s become banal, now that it is ubiquitous. As a keen student of the scandal sheets, I have learned that adultery – pleasure plus betrayal – is the only fun left to us. Marriage domesticates sex but frees love. It is unsuitable as a solution to human need, but as with capitalism, the alternatives are much worse.
‘But all this,’ Mamoon continued, waving at the room, ‘that which you refer to as the everyday, the bourgeois and the dull? I want it. I need it. I love it.’
‘You do?’ Harry leaned forward to turn on the recorder.
‘Do not touch that,’ said Mamoon. ‘I’ve come home, Harry. I did, the other day, have to lower a knife into the toaster and it was more danger than I can bear. I’m sure it will happen to you – the desire for comfort and contentment. The desire not to be special. But I had heard from someone, perhaps Rob – aren’t you intending to get married?’
‘I hope so. Yes, that’s what I want to do. Definitely. I see marriage as a kind of defence, a levee against the turbulence of desire. Do you think it might work like that?’
‘Why would you think that?’
Harry picked up the tape recorder and showed it to Mamoon. ‘I’m supposed to ask you the questions.’
‘Your life is more interesting than mine.’
‘You won’t write about me, will you?’
‘I’d like you more as a fictional character, and you should be flattered to appear in one of my works, even without your trousers. However, Harry, my clock has stopped. The embalmer is rolling up his sleeves. Even as we speak, seventy-two virgins are slipping into schoolgirl uniforms for me. You must live, and I confirm: always put your penis first. Harry, you know I consider you to be an ass and a twerp, but it doesn’t follow you haven’t taught me a lot.’
‘Thank you for that. It cheers me. But what did I teach you, sir?’
‘My backhand was all over the place, you know that. I’d been making that wrong swing for years. It was too high.??
? Mamoon went on, ‘You’re far more sophisticated, thoughtful and well read than I was at your age. But in other ways you’re very crude and self-deceiving.’
‘I am?’
‘I’m sorry if I just laughed at you.’
‘Did you laugh at me?’
‘Didn’t you hear my noise?’
‘I did, sir, and became alarmed that you were unwell. Why did you make your noise?’
‘The juxtapositions you described are laughable.’ Mamoon said, ‘On the one hand there is the banal bourgeois existence, and on the other a fantasy of what could be called limitless enjoyment – as though those were the only alternatives.’
‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘It seems royally stupid now you put it like that.’
‘I’m sorry if I was abrupt. But the way you picture it is misleading. The frame, one might say, is in the wrong place. You haven’t applied your considerable intelligence to this matter and I want to know why. It’s almost a fundamentalist separation you have going.’ He stared at the ceiling. ‘The novel is contamination. The novel sees the complication.’ He went on, ‘You’d be advised to attend to something Joseph Conrad once said, not that he’s a writer I can care much for now – very little gives me pleasure, as you know, since I am almost dead.’
‘What did Conrad say?’
‘“The discovery of new values is a chaotic experience. This is a momentary feeling of darkness. I let my spirit float supine on that chaos.”’
‘Floating supine on that chaos,’ repeated Harry. ‘That’s what I need.’
‘It’s the values bit I would attend to, if I were you.’
Harry noticed that Mamoon was looking at him with some amusement. Harry said, ‘Am I a weak young man, do you think? Or someone who has more pleasure than they deserve?’
‘Pleasure?’ Mamoon laughed. ‘Most people don’t know how to maximise their pleasure, Harry, they sexualise their pain. Surely you’ve noticed that most people live without love, spending their lives trying to find people they’re not turned on by.’
‘Why?’