‘Liana wouldn’t dare say that, beta,’ said Mamoon.
‘She’s shouting in our house, Mamoon,’ said Liana. ‘Hear her!’
‘It’s all right,’ he said.
‘Don’t stand for it!’
‘I’m not,’ he said, calmly.
Julia sat down beside him and said, ‘It must be an amazing thing, sir, to have the skill to tell a story like that. You must wake up proud.’
‘Thank you, dear girl, I am proud now,’ he said. ‘I wake up sweating in the night with relief. I got away with it. To have once been a writer is something.’
‘Once?’
‘You mock yourself, sir, surely,’ said Harry.
‘Why?’
‘A friend of my father’s, a film-maker of your generation, has increased his output as he’s aged. He sees the necessity of getting on with things, of honouring the talent he has been blessed with.’
‘What the damn fuck for?’
‘Why should a man’s desire for potency and work diminish? After all, what other dignity is there? There is certainly none in feigned helplessness. “A man must follow his path even in the midst of ruin,” says Sophocles in Antigone. Titian did his best work after seventy. Goethe, at the age of seventy-four, asked for the hand — at least the hand — of a nineteen-year-old.’
‘It is uplifting to hear there are forms of satisfaction available to someone like me. I like — I really like — being a writer. But is work enough?’
Liana had been staring at Julia, before banging the table hard. ‘How dare you! Why are you sitting still like that? Have you forgotten you work here?’
‘Would you like me to continue clearing out your shoes?’
‘Yes, and don’t take anything without asking. I can’t run into you in town again wearing my purple Marc Jacobs. I asked you to wear them in for me, not wear them out.’
‘Sorry, miss. It won’t happen again,’ Julia said.
‘And do not fail to place orange peel in them overnight,’ called Liana. Then, when the girl had hardly gone, she said, ‘A skivvy who thinks she’s in the Bloomsbury Group — what attention-seeking rubbish that girl talks. It’s about time we replaced her with someone ignorant. Suppose she joins a trade union, Mamoon?’
‘I should have discussed it with Mrs Thatcher,’ he said.
When Julia had run out and Liana had gone into the garden to find the dogs, Mamoon, clutching the arms of the chair and groaning, attempted to get to his feet.
‘If only you knew, Alice, how an artist grunts and strains to keep the language full of beans, and how much my back hurts since the tennis incident, making me stiff in all the wrong places. I could be semi-crippled for good now, with your boyfriend steering my wheelchair.’
‘Maestro, why didn’t you say before? I can help you.’
‘How?’
‘Didn’t Harry tell you that I trained briefly as a masseuse?’
‘You did? No one has ever spoken sweeter words to me,’ he said. ‘Your darling Harry is no use at all, but only asks stupid questions about things that happened forty years ago!’
‘That would make an athlete ache.’
He wriggled. ‘Dear girl, are you sure you can bear to touch me?’
‘As a teenager, I worked as a geriatric nurse.’
‘Perfect.’
‘Let me find some almond oil.’
‘Try Liana’s bathroom. Hurry: we can retire to my barn for privacy. While Harry redrafts my history, you can realign my spine — if Harry gives permission.’
Harry said there would be nothing he would like more. He took Alice out into the hall, and they hugged and kissed, falling against the wall. He whispered, ‘You goddess, how did you do it — taking him on like that?’
‘I don’t know, Harry. He was like you said, tough, and he was at me and I was cornered. It was so quick and I couldn’t breathe. But I knew I had to fight or I’d be done for. It came out like that.’
‘You tiger, if you massage him, he’ll calm down, and we might get somewhere.’
She kissed him. ‘I’ll do it, and leave the rest to you.’
When Harry returned to the kitchen, Mamoon murmured, ‘Thank you for your dream interpretation.’
‘A pleasure.’
‘Clearly.’ Mamoon said, ‘The lovable, country child, Julia. The one who dreams she is naked and once, I believe, within my hearing, while you were playing pool in the afternoon, called you Fizzy Pants. While others talk, you look at her with some interest and amusement.’
‘I do?’
‘Why would that be?’
‘I guess in London you never see white people working.’
‘I agree it is a wonderful sight, and not something you see down here much either. I’ve long said it’s over for the white races, an obvious truth which caused much agitation amongst the journalists. The rich will rule as usual; they come in all colours, particularly yellow.’ He said, ‘But I admit it is good to watch people work.’
‘You feel superior?’
‘Not at all. It reminds me of my humble duty to contribute, which is what I want to get back to, once I’m free of this pain.’
‘Why have you been unable to work?’
Mamoon said, ‘I can listen to Bach, just about, and Schubert I can bear, because I am melancholic. Everything else depresses me — Beethoven, and particularly over-cheerful Mozart, chirruping away. The other day, when I pretended to dismiss Forster and Orwell, your little face looked upset. You still like to be impressed. In my teens and twenties, and even in my thirties, I loved to read, and could get absorbed in a particular writer for weeks, reading all their work, everything. Now I’ve forgotten it, and, besides, it’s all gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Consider them, Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Anthony Powell, Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Henry Green, Graham Greene—’
‘No, not that Greene. No — never.’
‘Good, plucky of you. But otherwise — unread, unreadable, discarded, departed, a mountain of words washed into the sea and not coming back. Popeye the Sailor Man has more cultural longevity. Only women and poofs read or write now. Otherwise, these days, no sooner has someone been sodomised by a close relative than they think they can write a memoir. The game’s up.’
Harry said, ‘Some of your books will remain.’
‘They will?’
‘Probably about four—’
‘Four?’
‘No, three big pieces. The first novel and a couple of long stories, which are top-drawer lasters. And, probably, the early essay on Ibsen’s and Strindberg’s women.’
‘So much?’ Mamoon said. ‘It’s done, and it’s too late. I shouldn’t complain. What is there left for me? How many older artists have made significant works?’
‘But sir, that was the true meaning of your dream: the desire to fail.’
‘Why?’
‘To infuriate your father, who never let you go with his expectations.’
‘Go on.’
Harry said, ‘To renounce work and women’s love for a pointless equilibrium or retirement is a destructive self-betrayal. The way you describe yourself is a far more limited narrative than anything I might say about you in my book. And look what happens to Lear. He allows others, indeed encourages them, to humiliate him. Surely a man can remain vital and alive if he feels strong.’
‘How does he do that?’
‘I have to say, sir, that while I’ve been here, I’ve learned something. You taught me that it’s frustration which makes creativity possible. You wrestle with the material, and become inventive, even visionary.’
Mamoon was holding his head. ‘You give me vertigo as well as lumbago. All I think is that I must continue, making words which will then be forgotten. I want that; I can do that. At the same time, it’s not enough. There must be something else.’