Harry got away from Rob, and hid a bit. At last Alice, who’d been shopping for two days, came to the station with the car stacked with gifts. After tea, they drove to Mamoon’s.
‘You’re in a good mood,’ said Alice. ‘I haven’t heard about the trip in detail. Did you get what you wanted?’
‘I might have a story. Let me talk it through. There’s some kind of centre to the book. Similar events to the ones Marion described occur in two of Mamoon’s later novels. One of his guilt-filled terrorists likes the same stuff, degrading the woman with other men and so on. Mamoon describes him as “moral filth”, which confirms it for me.’
She asked if that was enough, and he told her that ‘the Marion time’ had been a crucial period for Mamoon. After temporising over the matter for weeks, Mamoon deserted Marion in America to return to Peggy and help her die. She had begged him; she had no one else, apart from Ruth, who’d supervised the house for years and was her only friend nearby. A nurse came in every day, and Julia, a girl then, not yet a teenager, ran errands. But it was lonely.
Peggy had also made it clear, at Ruth’s urging, that a Mamoon no-show would ensure that he forfeited the property, which was in her name. His belongings would be dumped in the yard and the house would go to her sister. Mamoon owned nothing. He’d never had to think where he should live, or what he should have for supper. Peggy was maternal, at least. She’d enabled him to become an artist. What was marriage but sex plus property — property being the thing here.
So, corpse-tied, Mamoon slunk back. It was toxic; a fateful, blackmailing wrench for him and an interrruption of the new life he was exploring. He had promised Marion he would go back to her. He thought and thought about her, but he didn’t return, and he didn’t ask her to join him. He let it go — for a bit. And then for longer. .
Peggy’s diaries were sparse here, unsurprisingly, but she noted how kind Mamoon was, when pushed. She had been alone too much, and now couldn’t bear it. The moment he walked back in through the door her heart leapt. He had come home, her prince. She praised and thanked him, her husband, a thousand times. He put down his bag. She had him where she wanted him.
While she rested and slept, he sat with her and wrote at the desk across the room — and he kept on writing: fiction, diaries, and notes on his life. Harry told Alice he’d discovered several of Mamoon’s scruffy notebooks among Peggy’s things in the barn, which he was going through. These notes, given to him, in fact, by Julia, were a fascinating insight into his method, as Mamoon served her: the description of a body shrinking into death, her hands, her mouth, how he washed her, and her suffering and humiliation. Also — his memories of India, political and philosophical ideas, characters, ideas for essays, and so on. For a time he became a zombie, to survive. He had stopped loving her a long time ago, and she knew it.
Mamoon confessed that Peggy’s whole being made him ill. Her voice turned his stomach; the way she pulled at him made him cringe. The terror was that she wouldn’t die. The combination of hate and duty did him in: he was out of control, passionately unhappy, half mad, drinking, wondering why he was so loyal to her. Shouldn’t he have stayed with Marion and let Peggy down?
Peggy did die. He went into his room, eating and weeping at his desk, crying for Marion too, with whom he had also broken — at least in his mind. So: he was done with her, too. But what did it mean to be ‘done’ with so many people? Who, or what, was left?
He wrote about the hell within him with a new honesty and seriousness. This was when he became an ‘authentic’ artist. He was no longer standing to one side of himself, but said everything straight out. Harry said that no one described death as well as him, and how the mourning, isolation and deprivation made him mad.
Harry said, ‘Mamoon saw no one for eighteen months.’
‘No, no—’
‘Except — except what he describes as “his new family”. And he writes a lot about them in the journal I have.’
‘What? Who do you mean when you say family?’
With Peggy gone, Harry explained, it was the local woman, Ruth, attending to him. Because Mamoon couldn’t cope, and Peggy had insisted on it, Ruth moved into the house with her children, Julia and Scott, who was a teenager. He’d known the kids for years, of course. Peggy had always been aware how cruel Ruth was as a mother. So, when she was a child, Julia lived there for weeks on end during the holidays, hanging out with Peggy, making cakes, taking care of the animals, seeing the place as her home.
But now Mamoon became fond of them in a more adult, responsible way. He had never wanted crying babies or whinging toddlers. But now, to his surprise, he found he liked being a paternal figure. He enjoyed having authority and being relied on. The children taught him that the inside of his head wasn’t the only interesting thing in the world.
He discovered that he could be good fun, joking around as his parents did with him. But he was solicitous too; he saw what the kids needed as they got older. They ate together and watched sport and movies. The kids were used to seeing him sitting on the sofa scribbling in the notebooks. Ruth asked him if he wanted some peace. But no, he found he liked the everyday noises and the voices.
He even had a swimming pool dug for them and their friends, the locals, who came over to splash around. He drove Julia to school. She was moany, sullen, excitable, but perhaps he pitied her, or even liked her. He talked to her as he thought — his usual free association, about politics, his childhood, reading and writing — and she listened. He wrote a story and read it to her. He and Scott boxed together in the garden. Scott built bikes, and played with engines. When Scott was in big trouble with some of the locals, Mamoon went round and faced them down. Ruth kissed his feet.
Julia was the one Mamoon adored more and more. Appalled by her ignorance growing up in the country, he paid for her to have piano lessons, and to attend dance and art classes. He started to teach her Greek, and — quite mad this — made her read Homer and the Bible. He bought her classical records and sat with her while she listened to Mahler, and he was pleased when she wept, since it showed ‘sensitivity’. He promised he’d send her to college, but it didn’t happen. ‘I guess because he was with Liana by then,’ said Harry. ‘But I suspect he never stopped paying for her.’
‘Why would he do this?’ Alice said abruptly, ‘Oh no, he wasn’t going with Ruth, was he?’
‘He might have been. I don’t know yet. Though she wasn’t as far gone as she is now, she was drinking, and capable of violent despair.
Ruth was not entirely awful, or a halfwit, then. She was mightily enthusiastic at that point. She wanted everything, of course: love, the house, a future. . She thought she might get it if she served Mamoon. Then she made a mistake: she was not entirely self-serving. Maybe she understood what he really needed. Perhaps she cared for him. Harry said he thought she did. Maybe even now.
‘What happened?’ Alice asked.
Ruth had told Mamoon that enough was enough. There was no money coming in. He had to clean himself up and get on with his career. ‘My mother’, said Harry, ‘gave herself to her demons. They devoured her.’ But Mamoon resisted: he got up, he shaved off his long beard. Ruth cut his hair and kissed him. Instead of continuing to lay out his clothes for him every day, she packed his suitcase, and shoved him off to London to see his agent and his publisher. Meanwhile, he gave the family money, allowing them all to stay in the house while he was away. They loved it there: the space, the quiet, the isolation, and Julia regularly began to sit in that lovely library, leafing through books on art.