‘Liana is okay with it, so I think it’s probably harmless. Otherwise, she’d kill him and then Alice.’
‘He got me out of the way, though. At least tell me if Mamoon has said anything notable.’
‘Only, “Anyone who gardens is lost to humanity.”’
Harry asked, ‘Do you love me?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘More and more. I so look forward to seeing you. I’m wearing your T-shirt.’
‘You are? Where did you find it?’
‘In your room. I put my face in your clothes.’ She said, ‘Do you love me?’
He was morosely silent, listening to the sea between them. ‘Whoever you are, Julia, I’m yours.’
‘Did you read the notebooks I gave you?’
‘Yes, I’m going through them again now.’
‘What do you think?’
Eighteen
Harry had arranged to visit Marion again the next day, but as he walked around the block before going in, he wondered if it was worth returning. Alice’s enthusiasm for Mamoon was annoying him, and he wanted to take a cab to the airport, fly back to London, shove the old man away and remind her of his, Harry’s, existence. He needed to put more into his relationship with Alice otherwise it would slow down and end. What could Marion add now? He was reluctant to re-enter that tent of grief, regret and despair. But he spoke firmly to himself: although Mamoon had deliberately got rid of him, this was still business. He forced himself to buy flowers for her; he rang again at her door.
She was more lively, flirtatious even, today, in a skirt, plunging top and jewellery. She was brandishing photographs of herself and Mamoon together.
‘Harry, look how he holds my hands. How he needed me! In that house in the country they lived in an atmosphere of fear and anger. Does it seem haunted, that place?’
‘Yes, a bit.’
‘That’s her, Peggy — haunting but not living! His original home life had never been like that. Her wretchedness was corrupting him.’
‘How did you tell him that?’
‘I showed him the possibility of love. And sex. He was, you know, caliente. Steam came off him. But he hadn’t had proper sex for some time. Mamoon thought that needing a woman was like wanting a cigarette. The wish could be great, but you waited until it passed, you could get back to more important things.
‘To give her credit, Peggy was kind, she thought of him only. She led him through society, introducing him to people who might be interested, explaining to them that the world was bigger than Britain. But he was—’
‘What?’
‘Well, underfucked.’
‘I love the way you say that, Marion. The rolling tone.’
‘Darling, she had no sexual hold over him. Sad woman; hysterical. When it came to making copulation she was a plate of cold spaghetti, chattering inanely and forcing poor Mamoon to live as if passion didn’t have a place in the centre of the heart of every being. You have no idea how naïve he was, when it came to some things.’
He asked her what she meant by ‘naïve’.
‘In some ways he was like a teenager. As if he expected the other to take the lead. As you must know, his adolescent adventures were many and multifarious. The adults couldn’t keep their hands off him. He had been such a beautiful youth, with the dark hair and body of a film star, with a long thin cock. He was almost as beautiful as you, darling boy, but altogether more of a nuisance, with a stronger character and, obviously, more talent. I would imagine that you’re only a minor nuisance, though you have a haughty look.’ She’d been watching Teorema the other night. ‘Pasolini would have gone for you. Did an older man ever take you?’
When he said nothing, she went on, ‘Try and imagine this. When I first met him, Mamoon had anticipated being properly married for the rest of his life. He didn’t think he and Peggy would ever separate. But he did take to sex, when he refound it through me. It gave him a new confidence. He liked it. He liked it too much. He’d regained a part of himself, so that he wanted it the whole time. Then he wanted more. More extremity.’ When Harry asked what sort of extremity, she said, ‘If I tell you, and you put it in the book, it will come to be the only thing anyone ever knows about me.’
‘You’ve considered that?’
‘Of course.’
‘At the same time, you want to give your side of the story?’
She said, ‘He will deny me, I know that. He will laugh and shrug and accuse me of being mad, a common strategy of men. Recently, to a journalist, he accused me of being a balloon of unbound fantasies, a magical realist even — stories for children! This from someone who makes up people, and has them speak and then die, for a living! But I will have spoken before I go.’
Harry pushed the recorder closer to her. ‘What are you referring to?’
‘Turn off that damn machine.’ He pushed a button on it. She smiled, grabbed it and tossed it out of the room into the corridor, before asking him to shut the door.
She told him there were a couple of clever, attractive married women she’d known, good friends for years, whom she’d introduced him to. One night he said they were attractive. He was bored with her. ‘I couldn’t make his penis smile. He would go with them, it would put some lead in his pencil.’
He said he had become a utilitarian, providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number. He had also become despondent. His father had died and he was reproaching himself. He’d physically fought with the dad, plucking him from his chair and flinging the old fellow against a wall.
‘Yes, I heard. But what are the details of that?’
She told him that the headmaster of Mamoon’s school, and also the headmaster’s wife, had been dear, lifelong friends of the father. And the man — ‘who, incidentally, had only one leg’ — had been kind and let Mamoon attend the place at a cheap rate. It turned out that Mamoon, at fifteen, had been screwing the headmaster’s wife, the school nurse, in the medical room, most days. She had also loaned him books and read his early stories, editing them for him, encouraging him, telling him that he had it, that thing that everyone wants and most people don’t have: talent. He saw that as soon as he wrote he was loved and admired. Literature was the leg-opener. A good paragraph was better than a few glasses of wine.
She said, ‘The headmaster didn’t find out about any of this until Mamoon was in his mid-twenties. The headmaster then hopped across to see the father, after the woman died, to say his wife’s infidelity had besmirched the last years of his life. The woman had said she’d loved Mamoon. The headmaster was shamed.’ Marion put on a paternalistic Indian accent. ‘The father said to Mamoon, “You dirty bastard, you shamed us all by fiddling with the very woman — a family friend — on the actual school premises while we were getting a generous discount! What other deceptions are you capable of?”
‘“She was very enthusiastic and grateful at the time,” replied Mamoon. “Why is it exercising you? Are you jealous? She said she was lonely. I was the ‘second leg’. I had a body to die for, and she opened my fly with her teeth. Your friend bored her to death. You should have sent me a telegram of congratulation for cheering her up.”’ Marion went on, ‘As you can imagine, it was here that the father, becoming more and more incensed, struck Mamoon across the face. And Mamoon, being quite strong then, having taken up weight-lifting, picked him up and tossed him across the room, towards the litter bin, like a basketball.
‘In his later life Mamoon was ashamed and regretful, and worried over the father a lot. I’d brought up the subject of whether his father was gay.’
Harry almost choked. ‘How exactly did that go down?’