At the house, it was a familiar difficulty for Harry getting Mamoon out of the car, into the kitchen, upstairs and onto his bed.
Liana had gone ahead of them and, in the bedroom, she turned off the lights and lit candles. Then she collapsed into her favourite yellow armchair, decorated with exotic birds, let her hair down and removed her shoes.
‘You should know,’ she said, when he forced and stumbled Mamoon through the impasse of the door and onto the bed, ‘that the arch of the foot in this shoe is the shape a woman’s foot makes in orgasm.’ She reached into her bra, took out her crystal and caressed it impatiently. ‘Wake him up.’
Harry said softly, ‘Mamoon. . Mamoon. .’
There was no response. She said, ‘You’re the Muscle Mary — slap him. He’ll thank you later. We both will.’
Harry tapped Mamoon on the cheek. ‘Come on, old fella.’
She told him to do it harder. ‘Start his engine. Splash him with water.’
Harry gave the old man a light backhander and tipped a little water over his forehead. Mamoon raised his head, opened his eyes and stared straight at Harry for a moment. Then he fell back, and closed his eyes.
Liana snorted and gestured at Mamoon’s silk pyjamas. ‘The bastard’s gone for the night. We’ll have to make our own fun. At least try and get him into those.’
‘Why am I doing this, Liana?’
‘You wanted to know him, and aren’t I dead on my feet! Don’t you think my ankles are looking puffy?’ She said, ‘To be serious for a moment, you’ve given me hope. Do you really think I can win Mamoon back in the way we’ve discussed?’
After several outraged snorts and gasps, Mamoon had returned to a deep sleep even as Harry embarked on the considerable process of getting the old man out of his trousers and into the pyjamas. Meanwhile, Harry glanced towards the window. Outside all was dark; thin rain fell. Harry went to the window: he believed he’d seen the light from a mobile phone in the distance.
He said to Liana, ‘You’ll have to be determined and use all your tricks of seduction.’
She was caressing the arm of the chair with the crystal. ‘You’re right. I’ve been too inactive.’ Elaborately, she crossed her legs. ‘I see you looking at me. He used to look at me. He loved my legs, though I think he was a bit surprised, on that wonderful day in Venice, that he had to marry the rest of me too. Harry—’
‘Yes?’
‘You’ve been very inspiring tonight. . Are you going to go where you go at night? Suppose I become frightened? What if I must cry?’
‘Don’t cry.’ At last Mamoon was done. Harry went to the door and saluted her. He thanked her for the evening and told her to sleep well. He retired to his room and locked the door. A few minutes later she came and tried it, crying out, ‘Don’t reject me like everyone else!’
He didn’t believe her heart was in it, and she soon gave up. He went to the window, climbed out and jumped down.
Julia was waiting for him in the yard, holding her raincoat over her head in the midnight rain.
Twelve
‘They’re not for me.’
‘Of course not.’
‘They really are not.’
‘I know what you think, and I’ve said already they’re not for most people, Alice. These pompous, authoritarian old men are more than an acquired taste — a perversion, perhaps.’
But it amused Alice to insist that he must be in love with Mamoon. It was ‘obvious’. He asked her where she got that idea from.
‘The other day, when you called me in one of your miserable states, I had to endure a description of his lips and eyes.’ She repeated Harry’s fruity and ironical upper-class drawl. ‘“His eyes, dear Alice, will appear to be dark and impenetrable, but they contain the heat of chestnuts boiled for a hundred years—”’
‘Yes, that was for your information only. You will be thanked for coming here.’
He reiterated that credit would be racked up; a bonfire of money burned in Bond Street for her. And so, after much argument, evasion, as well as the promise of a trip to Venice, a great event had occurred: Alice had not only consented to visit, but he had found her waiting impatiently on the platform at the little station earlier that morning, tapping at her phone.
Now the couple were driving through the maze of the narrow lanes to the destination where all local roads met: Prospects House. Her fine head on its long neck turned, and, at the perfect moment, the hedges parted: cows grazed, birds sang, deer stood. While she drank in the restful beauty of the landscape, as he knew she would, he said he had to apologise for not exactly inviting her to the department of sangfroid.
‘But my body is uncoiling,’ she said. ‘This is almost a yoga mat moment. Why didn’t you say it was wonderful?’
‘Glance across. Tell me, how do I look to you?’
‘Did you shower? That T-shirt is gone. If I were you, I’d wax your hair now to make it look fuller. Did you enjoy last night’s dinner? Tell me all.’
Harry told her that before Mamoon passed out, he had introduced him to his friends as his darbari — meaning courtier, or catamite. Then Liana asked him for drugs and insisted he strip Mamoon. She hinted Harry might want to strip her too. Soon, he’d be qualified to work at the Old Vic as an actor’s dresser.
Alice said, ‘Have you been flirting? Oh God, Harry, I begged you to behave normally down here. Are you buggering everyone about?’
‘I assure you it’s her. Even her pasta is black. She smells my blood, my fear and weakness, and she’s at me, over-intimate, nosy, sneering at my background. When she calls me mediocre and uncreative, as she does most days, I shake with fury and cry alone.’
‘Does she whisper a truth?’
‘I have to smile and smile.’
‘Because Rob insists on it?’
‘I’m here to progress spiritually and materially.’ When Alice asked him how the interviews were going, he said, ‘As you advised so wisely, when standing outside Mamoon’s library, I count back from ten, before I can go in. But then, fearing my subject will insert the head of a spiky fish into my anus, I start to shake and have to get to the toilet before he begins to talk.’ Alice questioned his masculinity, as she often liked to do, to which he said, ‘If you read Mamoon’s essays, which you won’t, you would learn that he has eaten human flesh.’
‘Please—’
‘Not a large amount. Not an arm or throat. But at least, as they say about children, he tried it — fried, with salt and pepper. I do scare him a bit, Alice. When he spies me approaching with my notebook he looks perturbed, like a shellfish about to take a shake of lemon juice on the nose.’ He went on, ‘A lot depends on whether I can meet the former lover, Marion. Rob said I have to get Mamoon’s permission because if I make the old man any more hostile, he’ll throw me out.’
‘What scares you?’
‘His disapproval. His temper. You will see it all, and grasp the gravity here.’
‘Will I?’
‘I can’t help provoking him to consider me a worthless person.’
She wrapped her arms around herself. ‘Is he going to think that of me?’
‘Not at first. He will charm you. Later, he will rip your face off and feed it to the pigs.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Harry, please take me back to the station. Why on earth did you invite me to this shit?’
‘My blackness is spreading, Alice. I’ve been seeing and hearing things that can’t be there or anywhere. At night, when I’m not hallucinating mad women, I can feel depression starting to burn me around the edges. If I sink into it, I’ll have to give this thing up and write a novel.’
‘Then we will be poor.’
‘Worse. Despised by my family. Indeed by all families.’