‘Thanks for telling me.’
‘Perhaps my wife has hired you to do the little remembering I do require. I have to say, I particularly like it when you remember things which never happened. You are now making an imaginary life.’
‘How?’
‘My life, as I lived it, has been a Marx Brothers film, a series of detours, mistakes, misunderstandings, missed opportunities, delays, errors and fuck-ups. I am a man who never found his umbrella. Your life, I expect, is similar. Your ascription of a teleological arrow gives too much meaning and intention. Still, the idea of becoming a fiction does appeal. To my surprise, you might have the makings of an artist.’
Harry said, ‘I doubt I will ever reach your level, sir. I am impressed that you survived extremity and guilt with Marion, and that you came home to see Peggy through her vile death, sitting with her night after night. Then you carried on. You even had something of a family, for a time. Having repudiated the role previously, you seemed to like being a sort of father. What was that like?’
Mamoon nodded. ‘You know one is subject to many distractions and foolishnesses. It has always been my good fortune to have work which has saved me, and to have been able to look at the world through the lens of my ideas. I hope to God that you, one day, achieve that essential stability.’
‘In what way has work saved you?’
‘You strive to make me look lewd, when the truth is, even Philip Larkin had more sex, and I have been committed to the word throughout. I have always wanted to return to my desk to make something which hasn’t existed before. That is my only — meagre — contribution to improving things here on earth.’
Having said this, Mamoon closed his eyes and began to snore gently. He had the ability to nap at will but was most likely to fall asleep when Harry was making an enquiry.
Harry went into the garden in shorts and trainers to do some stretching and weights. He hung a long bag from a tree and kicked and punched it. This was his routine and his release after things got sticky with Mamoon, when he knew he’d have to return to him with more impossible queries.
He wondered how long he’d have.
A few minutes later Liana, in fishnets and wellingtons, came out of the kitchen and settled herself on the bench outside the door with a popular biography of a grand lady, a cup of tea and her reading glasses. ‘Bravo!’ she called. Feeling more like a member of the Chippendales than a literary biographer, Harry took a breather and Liana poured him some tea.
‘Poor man, you must be exhausted. I know I am. Here, I bought you this energising moisturiser,’ she said, handing him a little pot. ‘You’ll like it, you’ll see.’
‘How kind, Liana. Why did you do that?’
‘I heard you complaining about your uneven skin tone. Mamoon said that for you it’s more serious than the collapse of the economy.’
‘Much more. It’s the result of childhood eczema. For years I scratched myself almost to death. I’m worried the anxiety here will make it return.’
‘What anxiety? That cream has amazing healing qualities, and you seem agitated.’
‘I am.’
‘I think you know more about my husband than I do now.’
‘That’s the problem.’
‘Was Marion kind about my darling Himself? Or was she bitter like the other one?’
‘There was some bitterness, not entirely unwarranted. She turned out to be rather splendid.’
‘Are you sure? You must have flirted all over the place.’
He rubbed the moisturiser onto his arms. ‘She had plenty to say about many things. I haven’t written it up yet, but I can feel that the book has really progressed.’
‘Progressed where, my dear? You are alarming me, Harry.’
‘I am?’
‘I don’t want you to get carried away and inflame my skin too. Let’s keep everything gentle in your account, shall we?’
Alice had warned him to be careful; to endure being patronised and even insulted, and not to allow himself to give anything away, sucking rather than puffing, though that attitude had yet to get him very far. Still what he and Rob admired about Mamoon, they both agreed, was his talent as a provocateur, his ability to create anarchy and fury and then sit back to gaze out over the ruins. On occasion Mamoon was more Johnny Rotten than Joseph Conrad. Harry had begun to think that, as his father had suggested, he had been too passive. His fears had kept him too safe. He’d make some mayhem; it was time to go gonzo, and up the stakes.
He said, ‘Liana, I guess you already know all about it.’
‘About what?’
‘The background to the Marion story. How Mamoon humiliated and insulted a young woman at an American university, calling her “a career Negro”. He had to get out and quite soon after became violently bitter.’
‘Might this be in the book?’
‘When I’ve done the research. It was after this that Mamoon decided to give up on, or pull away from Peggy, while continuing to live with her. He and Marion began something of a perverse relationship, which made me wonder whether such a thing had been a feature of his life.’ Liana was silent. ‘Or whether it was just a one-off, as it were.’
‘Perverse?’
Harry said that some might call it that.
‘Do you know for sure?’
‘He confirmed it. When this material comes out, people will think about both of you differently. The hacks and papers simplify things. They might call it sadomasochism.’
She thought for a moment and said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t put this in, but I wondered why, at the beginning, he asked if he could watch me urinate. Being a lady, I said no. Why would anyone want such a thing?’
‘To experience a particular form of intimacy.’
She said, ‘Listen, Harry, what the bloody fuck are you hinting at? Can’t you actually be precise? I don’t want to live in the dark like an idiot! As a mature woman —’ she pressed her face close to his, ‘and don’t you like to remind me all the time that I am? — I need to know every detail of the Marion part.’
‘Why?’
‘How awful it would be if you knew things about him that I didn’t.’
He pulled on a tracksuit top and sat with her. It wasn’t long before she’d turned red, and was waving furiously at her face with her book as if trying to put out a fire but succeeding only in fanning the flames. To her credit she heard him out before saying, ‘And you say you’re going to put this filth in the book we commissioned?’
‘If it is relevant to the work, which around that time turns very dark and sometimes brutal.’
She began to cry, and covered her face. ‘Poor Marion. I think of her often and how she was rejected. That will happen to me!’
‘Why would it?’
‘She couldn’t do enough to keep him interested. He regrets leaving her.’
‘He does?’
‘She inspired him, she was intelligent. They loved to talk about Shakespeare. She was learning Arabic and he said she was cleverer than him. He read her letters with a dictionary. I had an intelligent father, so I know men love women who are useful to them, like assistants.’
He asked her if she’d be okay.
She said, ‘You did promise, Harry dear, that you’d help me earn his love and kisses. Now you come to me with this merda. He will blame me for stirring it up. What have you done!’ She got up and walked quickly away, into the woods, stopping only to turn and say, ‘I’ve cursed you. I thought of unleashing the bees on you only I’m too well bred. But a very bad thing is going to happen to you — tonight.’
Twenty-one
That evening, while changing in his room, Harry could hear the two of them hollering, their voices overlapping as they interrogated one another. He had had, he guessed, something of an effect on their marriage. Too bad; he had a book to write. Writing was the devil. Writing was what he was employed to do.