The Last Word

  ‘It’s just you,’ she said. ‘She does a hilarious imitation of you flirting.’ Julia was about to repeat it, but thought better of it. ‘She says you’re snobby, middle-class and patronising, and you’re everything she hates about this country. Someone’s going to teach you a lesson one of these days.’

  ‘I am eager to learn, as you know. But I hope to God Scott isn’t my teacher.’

  With Ruth, on one of her ‘nights’, there’d be dancing, and boisterous copulation, followed by fighting, and blood on the floor in the morning. Julia stayed with her friend Lucy when she could; occasionally, when she thought it would be terrible at home, she’d creep into one of the barns and sleep on a sofa, unbeknown to Liana and Mamoon. But mostly she was at home, sleepless behind the bolted door, wondering whether, or when, she should intervene. If the shouts were desperate, and the punches too hard, she dressed, went down and yelled at the maniacs. She smashed the boom-box with a hammer. Another time she called the police. Although Ruth wore glasses and was thin, if not emaciated in the scrawny manner of some alcoholics, the mother fetched Julia a tremendous blow across the ear which seemed to concuss the poor girl, leaving her with a relentless buzzing. Not only that, one of the men seemed to have moved in, taking up residence in a cardboard box under the living-room table. When Julia sat down, a clammy hand would reach out and caress her ankle. ‘It’s like living in a pub,’ she said.

  In her time off, she didn’t go home, but swam in the narrow, cold but fresh, almost concealed river at the bottom of one of the hay fields. She and Harry rode down to the river on the quad bike which Scott had repaired. While Harry strummed his guitar, singing her a slow blues, she considered the lavender sky and the countryside and the future.

  She had begun to walk more vigorously, and soon she wanted to jog lightly, sometimes with Harry. She had dyed strands of her hair red, so the colour seemed to dance when she ran. To relax she’d sit on a kitchen chair at the bottom of the field with her face up to the sun. She said, ‘A lot of my friends have had kids. I know how they suffer. And how they go on suffering, long after the baby is born and the man has gone.’ Many of these kids she’d looked after; she was kind and patient with children. She said that girls like her were called ‘prams’ by the middle-class locals, but the only regular entertainment in the area was copulation.

  One evening after he’d kissed her, she pulled an envelope from her bag and gave it to Harry. Inside were three stained, scuffed reporter’s notebooks full of Mamoon’s almost illegible notes, in faded pencil and biro. She had been keeping them under her bed. Harry thanked her and slipped them into the pockets of his combat trousers; later, when he had time to glance through them quickly, he saw they were gold dust.

  He and Julia avoided eye contact in the house. But convinced there was an ‘eternal’ connection between them, she texted him often, sending him kisses and instructions as to what he should do to her later. One time she came into his room with a bucket and mop while he was working. When he turned, she pushed her hand down the front of her tights, licking her middle finger and rubbing herself while he watched her in the mirror.

  Harry liked the fact Julia was plucky; the flare of her mischievous and dissenting smile always cheered him. He liked her even more when she was schemingly smart enough to recognise that an appeal to her mistress’s paranoia would work a treat.

  This was her vengeful riposte. ‘Liana, you are the chief, organising everything here, thank Jesus in heaven. But there is something I do have more than you.’

  ‘You joke with me, surely. What?’

  ‘Guess.’ After a little giggle, Julia continued in her humble but dogged way, ‘You have less jiggy than me. Less than most people.’

  Liana stopped and stared at Julia as if she’d never seen her before. Julia flinched, wondering whether Liana would sock or sack her.

  ‘Yes, well . . . Do people talk about this?’

  ‘They do.’

  Liana pursed her lips. She didn’t describe herself as a witch, mystic and clairvoyant for nothing. She thought for a bit before saying, ‘My hands still dampen when Mamoon walks into the room.’

  Julia said, ‘Does any part of him dampen?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the question. You’re absolutely spot on and right, I must increase my power over him.’

  ‘You have to, miss.’

  ‘Otherwise he will become bored and very dangerous, as he did with Peggy and Marion. In my country we women are very forceful and recognise there’s only one way to keep a man – and that is to satisfy him. I will leave him with not a drop of juice or scrap of energy even to say hello to another woman.’

  Liana would make sure that everyone knew that she could use her ‘wiles and guiles’, to turn her husband on – that very night. ‘Then the gossiping village dagger-tongues of those who think my husband doesn’t desire me will be zipped shut forever.’

  ‘Good shot, Julia,’ confirmed Harry. ‘Dangerous, but subtle. I can’t wait to see what sort of wiles and guiles Liana has in mind. She can have no better helper than you. Let’s hope this little plan doesn’t backfire.’

  Now Harry stubbed out his cigarette and poured Mamoon another drink. He said, ‘Liana, with Julia’s kind help, is going to some trouble to please you. It goes without saying that the ideal woman you refer to – a man’s woman – needs to be kept occupied by the man.’

  ‘You will be thrilled to hear that I increased Liana’s allowance last month.’

  ‘What did you allow her?’

  ‘It is true that a man has to catch a woman by the ears, by talking to her and, occasionally, even listening. But this time I got her head. I seem to have bought her a wig.’

  ‘She certainly needs to be walked out, and shown off. Otherwise it is like keeping a Velázquez in a cupboard. Be nice: get her some new titties for Christmas. She’d love the attention.’

  Mamoon laughed. ‘Dear boy, your prick is so hard you can barely walk straight. But I can barely walk at all – you know why. Besides, my blood has cooled at last.’ He went on to say that he had a good friend in Paris, a wonderful poet older than him. ‘Think of two old men sitting in a cafe, watching the world die. He is either weaker or more persistent than me, but he is still playing the game of love. He said the other day that the only thing to be said for ageing is that you don’t come quickly, if at all.’

  Mamoon said that his friend’s eyes would suddenly focus; he would stand up and follow a woman down the street, quoting Stendhal as he went: ‘Beauty is the promise of happiness . . .’ Mamoon’s friend set the women up in apartments, made love to them – at least at the beginning – and paid for them to study to become lawyers. It broke down when the women found someone richer and younger. One day he was apprehended by the police on a balcony, this old man, trying to look in on one of his lovelies who was with another man.

  ‘Then – Harry – he comes crying to me – no better therapist when it comes to comforting the lovelorn.’

  ‘You envy him?’

  ‘My friend might need to learn, as I think you will, when it’s too late, that rather than a big bang, the whimper of a companionate marriage, an agape, a warm conversation, could be the model union, and the target of all love. Kind, nurturing, even-keeled, dispassionate – such a love will make for contented days when one can think freely. Plus: one’s supper will be on the table when one wants it.’

  ‘Parental, or pseudo-sibling, rather than adult?’

  ‘Why say it would not be adult?’

  ‘There’s no sex.’

  Mamoon knocked back his vodka. ‘I have to acknowledge, you might be on to something.’ Harry smiled, pleased to have interested Mamoon at last. ‘You’re almost, but not quite, the fool I like to take you for.’

  Harry leaned forward. ‘You put your penis on the page.’

  Mamoon looked at him quizzically. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Mamoon, you made your women into fictional characters rather than loved them as real people.’

  ‘Thin
k what you’d achieve, Harry,’ said Mamoon sorrowfully, ‘if you didn’t always go too far.’

  ‘It’s only when I go too far that I think I’m getting somewhere,’ said Harry.

  Mamoon had just closed his eyes when there was a cry from elsewhere in the house. ‘I’m alive and ready to boogie! Prepare, people!’

  ‘Boys, she’s coming!’ trilled Julia.

  Mamoon came to, and reached for his stick. ‘It better be worth it.’

  Supported at the elbow by Julia, Liana stepped carefully down the stairs. At some physical cost, Mamoon turned around to see his wife. Harry didn’t know whether it was the style Mamoon’s wife had selected for his birthday, or the fact that she appeared to be wearing all of his money at once, which made Mamoon resemble a man about to have an electric fire dropped into his bath.

  ‘Help me,’ he said to Harry, raising his arms. ‘Please, help me up – my bottom half has gone.’

  Ten

  There was a swish and a sizzle: Harry thought the world would catch fire. Liana was crossing her legs.

  ‘If this doesn’t do it, nothing will,’ she leaned across and whispered to Harry in the car, tugging her skirt down.

  He said, ‘I’m getting a twitch in the trousers myself.’

  ‘I’m looking forward to tonight. I so much want to touch him.’

  ‘May you have many soft orgasms.’

  ‘I will do, later,’ she said. ‘Just between us, I come easily, sometimes two or three times in a row – if I like the man. If I don’t, it’s just the once. Does sex make life worth living? Didn’t you say, the other day, “Our lives are only as good as our orgasms?”’

  He giggled. ‘I hope so.’

  He glanced at Liana again, and complimented her on her short A-line leather skirt, sheer top, and what he recognised as Louboutin pumps with heels. As for her handbag, he had to admit he had always been a fan of leopard print; he wore pyjama bottoms in the same colour.

  ‘Stop and park – it’s here,’ she said to Harry at last. ‘Mamoon,’ she said loudly. ‘Please listen, we’re getting out.’

  ‘Here?’ Mamoon was peering anxiously out of the window. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘It can’t be. Drive on, boy!’

  ‘No, no,’ she said, getting down from the car and going round to let Mamoon out. ‘I’m serious.’

  Harry was surprised, too, that the dinner was to be held in the back room of a standard Indian restaurant with seventies ersatz-colonial decor. It was certainly a shock for Mamoon, who began to quiver like a pensioner about to be left in a care home.

  ‘You said you won’t travel, and it’s our own Pottapatti, where we used to moon over one another for hours, talking about our childhoods, the colour we wanted the library to be, the future and what we would do together. You know you love the food here, habibi darling,’ pleaded Liana, caressing his hands, while trying to prise them from the seat he was holding onto.

  ‘I do?’

  ‘You said the keema was God’s ambrosia. There’s plenty to drink, and look – there are our friends!’

  ‘I hate those bastards—’

  ‘Don’t be silly. They’ve read your books. Let’s be grateful for the royalties.’

  ‘My publisher sent them free copies.’

  Harry and Liana had some trouble hauling Mamoon out of the car and onto the premises, particularly as he had to stop to stare at Liana in disbelief, while she informed him for the first time that it would be particularly kind if he made ‘just a little speech’, later on.

  ‘Speech? Here?’

  ‘Please, darling, just for a moment, a few kind words for your dear friends. You just have to put your Nelson Mandela face on. That comes easily to you.’

  As Mamoon intuited – ‘Oh God, it’s going to be like one of Charcot’s Tuesday lectures’ – a succession of somewhat withered, demented people soon arrived. Mamoon, sitting low in his chair at the table, and uninclined, if not unable to get up, greeted the line of undead with the indifference of a billionaire Indian contemplating his servants. A wealthy American couple from London who’d always admired Mamoon’s work and wanted to meet ‘the great man’ had also been invited by Liana, to provide ‘variety’. Despite the woman’s outpouring of praise over his last book, on Australia, which she described as a stellar classic of the ‘personal journalism’ genre, without the American exhibitionism, Mamoon did not want to speak to them.

  During dinner, when his friends asked Mamoon what he was doing now, and when he had shrugged and said, ‘Nothing, it’s all too late, the work is there, the work is done, I am finished and only eternal darkness awaits,’ Liana made conversation about dual carriageways, bypasses and ‘the green belt’, as they do in the country.

  Having been asked for his views on this matter, Mamoon cleared his throat and said with some decision, ‘I love you all, and I love England – the countryside, the people, even the food, particularly when it is Indian,’ before shutting his eyes.

  Liana tapped her glass to bring people to attention; they all looked reverently at Mamoon, waiting for the old man’s lips to begin moving once more.

  Finally Mamoon opened his eyes to say, ‘We live in a country which has only a past, but no future. If I am a conservative, it’s because I want to preserve what I consider to be the character of that past, of England and the English people. I am an immigrant, but England is my home. I’ve spent more time in this wilderness of monkeys, this democracy of dunces, than anywhere else, and I prefer its village atmosphere of freedom and fair play to that of anywhere else. I have, too, followed its tragedy and comedy with much interest. When I was a child, Britain was the most powerful country on earth, its representatives both feared and admired. I adore the cynicism it developed in the sixties, the way political figures, far from being idealised, as they too often are elsewhere, are mocked and ridiculed without fear.

  ‘Apparently, now, though, we writers and artists are not allowed to give offence. We must not question, criticise or insult the other, for fear of being hounded and murdered. These days a writer without bodyguards can hardly be considered serious. A bad review is the least of our problems. Every idiot believing any insanity has to be humoured: it is their human right. The right to speech is always stolen, always provisional. I fear the game is almost up for truth. People don’t want it; it doesn’t help them get rich.

  ‘We are staying, to adapt György Lukács, in the Grand Abyss Hotel, which has every service and facility: it is beautiful, well lit, comfortable, with keen staff. There is an incredible view, because it is perched on the edge of a cliff. And with its inhabitants burrowing beneath it, looking for oil, it could collapse at any moment. We are surviving, in this pleasant liberal enclave where people read and speak freely, on borrowed time. But for those not inside – the dispossessed of the world, the poor, the refugees and those forced into exile – existence is a wasteland.

  ‘This increasing separation is deadly. We in the Hotel are the lucky ones, and we must not forget that. Even I appreciate it. I will never go home. It is here that I will die.’

  ‘Not in this restaurant, I hope,’ said Liana.

  Mamoon went on, ‘The news I bring is to say that, man being the only animal who hates himself, the likely fate of the world is total self-destruction.’ He raised his glass. ‘All the best then, my friends. Here’s to a happy apocalypse.’

  ‘Happy apocalypse,’ murmured the other guests, obediently, raising their glasses.

  ‘Total self-destruction,’ said Mamoon.

  ‘Total self-destruction,’ repeated his friends.

  ‘And death,’ added Mamoon.

  ‘Death.’

  ‘Death.’

  They sang ‘Happy Birthday’. Then, before the kulfi, one of Mamoon’s acolytes, a young Indian who sometimes did research for him, stood and made a speech praising, as would anyone, Mamoon’s talent, humanity, compassion and understanding. The scholar also referred to Mamoon as a revolutionary, and c
ompared him to Derrida, Fanon, Orwell, Gogol and Edward Said. Fortunately Mamoon had become incapable of facial expression; only bemusement and bafflement remained as the words washed over him.

  Harry, realising it might be a good idea to feature this scene of summing up and farewell in his introduction, had been making notes all the while. Once the speeches were over, he went outside for some fresh air and, sitting on a wall, added some information and colour about the guests. He wouldn’t present only the ‘facts’; he wanted a more novelistic, personal tone, presenting the writer in his later years, puffed with success and honours. Coming back in, Harry was pleased to see the guests were being served coffee, though most of them were hopelessly drunk by now. He hurried to a corner of the restaurant and checked his phone. Had she called?

  He missed Alice but he didn’t believe she missed him, or anyone. Being low-temperature, she wasn’t like that. Without parents who had time for her, at an early age she had made herself self-sufficient. But since Harry had been at the house for almost five weeks, and was beginning to think he was losing his nerve and becoming depressed over the slow speed of things, he had insisted, and even given a cast-iron guarantee, that if she joined him in the country, no one would say anything pretentious, incomprehensible or even intelligent, while near her. On this basis, Alice had finally agreed to visit. But Harry had received a text message, which he opened now to find that Alice wasn’t sure she’d make it tonight. She wouldn’t know the other guests and, anyway, she was busy. She kept him, as always, ‘on hold’.

  ‘Darling, help me.’ He felt a hand on his shoulder and an arm around his waist. Liana whispered, ‘We must get out of here. I’ve had enough. Look.’

  Harry saw that Mamoon, who after his paean to England had appeared to withdraw into himself, had now dropped from his chair and was sitting on the floor like a bewildered child. Some of the other guests tottered towards him, and helped him up to his seat. Meanwhile Liana was informing their friends that she thought Mamoon had had enough.