She didn’t want to be put in the position of having to ‘trick’ Mamoon, as she put it. He trusted her; she liked him, and it was awful when Harry became so insistent and domineering.
‘I need your help,’ he said. ‘We’re in financial trouble. Won’t you do this small thing for me?’
Before supper Harry nodded at Alice. She went downstairs to Mamoon and gave him the scarf, cuff links and tie she knew would cheer him up. She offered him her arm, and suggested they take a stroll. She had her phone with her, to use as a recorder. Harry had briefed her about the numerous acts she was to ask Mamoon about. There was quite a number of stories; she’d been shocked to hear them, and didn’t believe Mamoon would do such things. ‘Are you absolutely sure about this?’ she kept saying.
‘Just be certain to remember them all. I’ll be interested to hear what his attitude to this part of his past is.’
They were gone a long time. When Alice returned with Mamoon, she couldn’t look at Harry, but she did hand him her phone which he took upstairs and plugged into his computer. He heard her playfully asking Mamoon if he’d been as macho as she’d heard. Had he ever used his power and position for sexual advancement? Was he as dominant as he appeared? The old man grunted and laughed. She said there were some ‘sexual excitements’ she wanted to try herself, if she could talk Harry into them. Had Mamoon tried, she wondered, any of the following?
Vaguely Mamoon confirmed, or at least didn’t deny, much of what she asked. In truth, he said, Marion had had many strong wishes, and had turned out, to his regret, to be too demanding for him. Female passion was a whirlwind: he couldn’t devote himself to a woman; he needed time to ponder and write. Come to think of it, he preferred art to life. Once he’d met Liana everything had seemed easier. As a defence against unwanted excitement, marriage was a prophylactic he would recommend to anyone.
Alice sat on the bed watching him while Harry listened to the recording, nodding and making notes.
‘Don’t I look pale?’ she said.
He looked at her. ‘Pale is your colour.’
‘Don’t you want to know what happened?’
She asked Harry to go outside. He followed her into the nearest field, walking quickly. She was white and shaking. Her eyes were dilated.
She hit Harry several times and shouted, ‘Why did you make me talk dirty to a stranger? I kept thinking he was enjoying it in some obscene way. And when I’d turned the phone off, guess what, I had a panic attack — violent palpitations, like being hit in the chest with a rock. I had to lie down on the ground.’
‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’
‘You’re never sorry!’
He said, ‘What can I do? This is maddening! You did offer to help me on this project. I never said it would be easy.’
She said, ‘Mamoon stroked my forehead until I felt better. He was worried that the things he was telling me would make me mad and ill.’
‘He was right. You’re sensitive. Are you okay now?’
‘I’m not going to thank you for putting me in that position. Are you sure you actually want to take care of me? Liana wonders if you really do. She has reservations about your character.’
‘And I about hers. I love you, darling. Can I kiss you?’
‘How could you even think about it when I’m in this state?’
She was already walking back to the house. It wouldn’t be a good idea to speak to her for a while. His desire for the truth had made him a criminal. She didn’t want to eat with Liana and Mamoon, she didn’t want to talk at all, but wrapped herself in a duvet on the sofa in the living room and slept there in a woolly hat, sucking her thumb. The next morning he drove her to the station, where she took a train to Cornwall for a photoshoot. Harry kissed and thanked her, and reminded her of his adoration, but there was nothing he could do with her in this mood.
When he returned to the house, he found Mamoon, sitting in the living room, and said, ‘Could I ask you, sir, if I’d be completely wrong to think that your experiences with Marion, your amour fou, informed the character of Ali in your sixth novel?’
There was a silence, before Mamoon said, ‘Harry, you do already know, don’t you, that I like to aid your intellectual development by refusing to allow any banal and simplistic correlations between art and experience.’
‘I know, sir. About that I follow you as a master. Art is a symbolic dream of life which transcends that from which it derives, and, indeed, everything which is said about it. However, there was an unmistakable outburst of desire and love, even of happiness in your work at that time. Before, your male characters were isolated, naïve even, perhaps book-bound. Then, brilliantly, you made another step.’
‘I did?’
‘You said, early on, that if every age has its central philosophical issue, ours will be the revival of religion as politics. And so you began to link radical Islam and its weird sexuality with hatred of the body, the body burned in the sacrificial auto-death. This is a gesture of the profoundest obedience. We know that the West attempted, in the sixties, to remove the father, authoritarian or not. That was how we ended up, as you have often helpfully pointed out, with a culture of single mothers. Take Ruth, for instance.
‘The father — as fathers do — returned, in the form either of a gangster, as in The Godfather or your favourite, The Sopranos, or of religious authority. There is also the father’s attempt to exclude, if not stamp out, sexuality. At least in others. Perhaps the father, according to this myth, wants all the women for himself. The sexuality returns, as it must, as perversion, as a kind of sadism. The fear, if not hatred, of women, of course, is at the centre of many religions.’
Mamoon yawned. ‘I said this, did I? And if I did, so fucking what?’
‘You let a woman in, sir. People say that sexuality is at the centre of the human secret, and that the erotic leads us into new experience, both sacred and profane. What is the connection, in your mind, if any, between the women you’ve been with and the work you’ve done?’
‘I haven’t a clue as to what you could mean.’
‘Think, sir, please: I’m trying to make you look interesting here. I can make you look good in bed, and out of it! Marion has suggested your mind opened to fresh ideas when her legs did, when the two of you embarked on your adventures in America.’
Unlike most people, Mamoon had more or less complete control over his speech; he didn’t like his words to run away from him. But for a moment he looked like someone who had swallowed a large marble.
At last he said, ‘Ecstatic as I am to hear Marion’s views from over the pond, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I wish you weren’t trying to peel me as you would an onion. You know, like the general public, I have a passion for ignorance. I want to work in the dark — the best place for me, for any artist. It just comes out, compacted as in a dream.’ He was silent, before saying, ‘There’s no denying she sparked me into a new creativity. The intellect and the libido have to be linked, otherwise there’s no life in the work. Any artist has to work with their prick or cunt. Any person has to work with their desire, to defeat boredom, to keep everything alive. Anything good has to be a little pornographic, if not perverse.’
Harry said, ‘However, the biographer sees the inevitabilities, the same paradigmatic sexual scenarios enacted repeatedly. When it comes to love and sex, the past writes the future. That would be the story of everyone’s life. Cannibals don’t become foot fetishists.’
‘Harry, you know more about my many selves than I do. You’re in the remembering business while I’m in the forgetting game, and forgetting is the loveliest of the psychic luxuries, a warm scented bath for the soul. I follow Chuang Tzu, the patron saint of dementia, who advised, “Sit down and forget.”’