She told Harry that as she had cataracts she was unable to read much, watch TV, or clean. What she wanted was conversation, but her family had long deserted her, and she had few visitors now, apart from some nosy students and a secretary who helped her with her writing by taking dictation. There were few creatures on the earth of less interest than a woman in her mid-seventies, but some people were interested in Mamoon Azam. He was the one card she had left.
‘Please, before you interrogate me,’ she said, bringing Harry tea and biscuits before sitting down with a blanket over her knees, ‘would you be good enough to answer my queries?’
‘Of course.’
‘Do you have anything of his I can touch?’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘A tie. A book he gave you.’
He gestured helplessly. ‘No, sorry, I didn’t think.’
‘He didn’t send anything?’
‘Only me.’
She said he was never particularly thoughtful. ‘But I have his reading glasses here, which I polish every Sunday, while recalling the smell and touch of his skin, remembering his smoky voice — gravelly, harsh sometimes, but caressing — and his careful timing when he made me laugh.’
She could imitate Mamoon well, and appeared to enjoy conversations with him, playing both parts. She asked about Liana without agitation, wanting to know how tall and wide she was and whether she was able to deal with Mamoon’s moods and tantrums, how her cooking was, whether she liked to shop, if she had indigestion, how well she slept, and whether she could cope with his nightmares and whether she made him laugh.
She wanted to hear what Mamoon was working on, whether he dyed his hair now and how his health was, particularly his back, and his stomach and bowels too, as well as his teeth. She needed to know if he still did this or that with his head when you asked him a difficult question. She wanted also to know about the house and its land — the place she’d only seen photographs of, but where she had believed, at one time, she’d spend the rest of her life with the man she loved.
And then she laughed shrilly, before, inevitably, weeping. He wept too, as it seemed participatory and kind, and they called one another soppy. He looked for tissues, and she went to the bathroom to wash her face.
When she was ready, he turned on the tape.
A Colombian with an English Jewish mother, Marion told him how she met Mamoon at a reading, and how they fell in love. Over a period of five years he had visited her often, and they travelled together in India, the United States and Australia. She had left her dull husband soon after meeting Mamoon, and had taken a little place in New York’s West Village, because Mamoon was thinking of setting a novel there. ‘Don’t forget,’ she said. ‘He was a Muslim man, and basically thought of women as servants. I advanced him, but there’s only so far you can go.’
They had always had plenty to say to one another and, like the most attractive men, Mamoon was amusing and sharp — about literature and politics, about others, and primarily, about himself. He was self-absorbed, but too anxious and insecure to be self-admiring. He worried all the time, she said, and could become absolutely frenzied about his work, which kept him sane, just about. He would show her drafts of what he was doing, and she would help him, sitting across the table with a pencil. He listened to her opinions and replied seriously. He made her feel valued and creative, and she knew how those famous books were made.
‘Some of the interviews in Evenings with the Killer were fabricated, of course. That must be well known.’
‘No one else has said that. Didn’t he tape them?’
‘Yes, and they were transcribed, sometimes by Peggy, sometimes by me or a secretary. When he sat down to write up the material, considerable work was done. He was never at that famous execution. He admitted to me that he was only “almost” there.’
‘He’s a creative artist who made—’
‘Or made up,’ she said. ‘He omitted material, altered other things, fudged and even rewrote quotes, to suit the piece. He wrote about places he’d never been, and things he’d never seen.’
Harry shrugged. ‘That’s novelists for you. Bastards.’
She said, ‘No doubt you’ll find yourself doing the same.’ She was looking at him. ‘It’s occurring to you that that would be a good idea.’
‘“Stolen-telling,” Joyce calls it. And Mamoon did say, rather wisely, “I hope you’re not going to be one of those fool writers who thinks the facts are sufficient.” He thinks that originality is the art of stealing the right things. He’s an entertainer. .’
‘How cheap and nasty you are. I suspect you might be something of an argumentative nuisance. Is there really any point in us going on with this? If I could stand up, I’d stand up right now,’ she said, and turned away.
Today would be difficult. Would he get anywhere? Should he walk out? He waited in silence, as his father would have suggested.
‘You gave up a lot for Mamoon,’ he said at last.
‘Yes, yes, everything.’
‘How could it not be difficult for you to speak about it?’
‘Exactly.’
There was more silence; then he sighed in relief as she went on. Her husband was no loss, but her beloved children had been furious that she’d traded her family for what her ex-husband called ‘personal excitement’. But Mamoon, like Omar Sharif, whom she believed he resembled, was a man a woman could give things up for. Marion loved him, he was her destiny; she thought that love was the only game in town. Although he came to America less often because of Peggy’s incapacity, she had taken it for granted he would look after her for life. He had said he would.
Marion had had no reason not to believe Mamoon. Their love life had been more fulfilling and stronger than anything she had encountered before, and they had been together properly. Apart from her, there had only been Peggy, and, at the end, she found they were both waiting for poor Peggy to die. She had nothing against Peggy — though she did refer to her as a ‘bed-blocker’ — and she admired Mamoon for sticking by her. He had fulfilled his ‘futile’ duty.
‘Futile, you say. Why?’ Harry asked.
‘As far as I could see,’ she said, ‘because the two of them had lived in such a closed circle, with very little outside influence, she had hypnotised him into believing that not only was he the cause of her suffering, but that he was the only cure. I freed him from this false belief.’
Not that she’d been thanked. At the end, Marion hadn’t seen Mamoon for more than a year. The day came when she learned that Peggy had died, and she’d readied herself for Mamoon’s call. At last she would leave New York and move to England to be with him in his house. She had already been thinking of how she’d furnish it. The windows would be opened, Peggy’s things put away immediately, and everything rearranged. She didn’t want to live with a dead woman.
She rang Mamoon. The woman who picked up the phone — Harry guessed it had been Ruth — said she would take a message. This happened a number of times; Ruth had passed on the message, she said. Days passed and Marion heard nothing. She guessed Mamoon was busy with the funeral arrangements and other mourning matters. More time passed.
When she didn’t hear from him, she went to Bogotá, and travelled in Colombia, suffering and seeing him everywhere. It wasn’t for some months that she learned from a magazine that he’d married Liana, whom, she also learned, he’d met about eighteen months previously, promoting his work in Italy. Apparently, Mamoon had returned to see Liana several times and they had rented a flat in Paris together. He’d eventually taken her to Venice, where he proposed. Marion examined photographs of them together, and everything she’d tried to forget returned.