Mamoon looked away. ‘I’ll never be finished.’
Alice had closed her eyes and was falling asleep. Harry said, ‘I love looking at Alice now she’s pregnant. She’s even more ravishing — her skin, her eyes, her hair just glows.’ Mamoon nodded sullenly. ‘You once said, sir, and under pertinent circumstances, “Rather a book than a child,” didn’t you?’
‘You invented that.’
‘I think I remember reading it in Peggy’s diaries,’ said Harry.
‘Why did you think such a thing?’ Alice said to Mamoon, opening her eyes. ‘Did you never want a child, maestro?’
‘Don’t believe a word you read,’ said Mamoon.
‘My blood’s gone to my feet,’ said Alice. ‘I feel quite faint. I thought I had more puff. The children are already taking my life.’
Harry stroked Alice’s hair. ‘Books are traps: rather a child than a thousand libraries. Stories are merely a substitute.’
‘For what?’ said Mamoon.
He kissed Alice. ‘The real thing. The woman.’ He looked up. ‘Ah, here comes Liana, doesn’t she look beautiful in her bathing costume?’ He stood up, helped Alice to her feet, and led her away with his arm around her. ‘Come on, let’s go inside and lie down together before you turn blue. I think it might rain. And Mamoon wants to be with Liana.’
‘Mamoon,’ called Liana. ‘Take my arm, darling, and help me drown — sorry, I mean down into the water. Where are you, my dear husband?’
‘See you later, we’re leaving you to it,’ shouted Harry.
Twenty-eight
Harry stood in the yard in the rain holding a box. He had the feeling someone was watching him, but what did it matter?
Ruth had come to the house to clear up after lunch, bringing Julia with her to help Harry empty his room. While Julia attempted to sort and order the papers and books Harry had neglected to take the last time they left, Harry carried the stuff out to the car. Lingering there in the yard a moment, something made him go to look over some quotes and take a final peep.
Mamoon had often dismissed and evaded Peggy, particularly around the time of the abortion, not long after they moved into the house. It was then, apparently, that he had said, ‘Rather a book than a baby.’ For Harry, Peggy’s version of Mamoon’s early history was authoritative and believable, and the material at the end, when she begged Mamoon, ‘If only my dear husband would relent and think to bring me some pages to edit, he knows for me this is the most important thing, our only connection now,’ when he had sat at her bedside with his head in his hands in awful silence, was unbearable. The ghost is always the one not admitted. As Harry flicked through the diaries and believed he could hear Peggy crying out to him, he assured her he would tell her story — whatever it was — as well as he could, alongside Mamoon’s.
‘Harry!’ Mamoon was standing at the kitchen door when Harry returned to the house. Mamoon removed the headphones he had now taken to wearing, through which he played music sent by Alice. ‘What are you doing in there? Looking at Peggy again? You’d better be done with that,’ he said. ‘It’s all going to the university this week. I should have stuffed it in the grate. Ted Hughes, whom I knew and loved, had the right idea with Sylvia’s diaries — push them in the oven after the woman’s head. Otherwise those unreadable academics never stop trying to make their careers and a good income out of it, while making the man look like an ogre. They see it as they wish, without imagination. And it is ordinary male sexuality that they hate.’
‘If we’re talking honestly, as you wanted,’ said Harry, ‘would you say there’s some regret there?’
‘Far from being merciless, I was too loyal and dutiful. What do you do with dead desire? I had none for her, and her desire was to suffer. The sensible thing would have been to scarper sharpish.’
‘Is that the rule you recommend, sir? When you no longer desire someone, you leave them? I am thinking of Don Giovanni here. One’s emotional life would be a revolving door.’
‘That is one of your caricatures. You do not grasp the truth or difficulty of the thing.’
‘But what about guilt?’
‘Guilt exists, you damned fool, and has to be negotiated and confronted. But who could it possibly serve to live with the corpse of a dead love? It is hard work, betraying others in order not to betray oneself. Perhaps you would be trying to convince the person that they are still desirable. And meanwhile one turns oneself into Proust’s poor myopic Swann, who degrades himself by opening Odette’s mail, spies on her house and spends every evening at the awful Verdurins’. Jealousy outlives desire, and Swann uses that ghastly vacant woman to stuff excrement into his own mouth.’
Harry said, ‘Can I ask, sir, what makes you so sharp? There’s an energy in your eyes.’
‘You see me. Yes, I am beginning to write well. I want to do something on ageing. Writing’s an uncomplicated pleasure and all I’m good for.’
Mamoon had been unhappy a lot of the time; in fact, he had rarely experienced contentment or been entirely cheerful. The world being what it was, only a fool would whistle all day. He didn’t think it mattered, except when he made it rough ‘for other people’. What Mamoon wanted was to have been creative and to have caused no more harm than necessary, though often harm was necessary, like war and murder.
Harry touched his arm. ‘You’re a lucky man, sir. At the end of your life you found someone who admires and loves you, and who can’t wait to see you each morning.’
‘Really — who?’
Harry cleared his throat. ‘Liana.’
Mamoon began to speak of renewal. He had always written intuitively — one thing developing from another — which was why he found his art difficult to explain. Now he wanted to be more conscious of what he was doing, of how he planned the material. This new approach excited him, which, he believed, guaranteed a thrill in the reader. The short book he had begun writing was, even at his age, a new direction. He had conducted many interviews, but this was different: conversations between generations, an older and a younger person. He hadn’t quite got it into focus yet; an essential element of intimacy was missing.
Not that he knew if the public would be interested. The market had changed; these days there were more writers than readers. Everyone was speaking at once while no one heard, as in an asylum. The only books people read were diet books, cookery books or exercise books. People didn’t want to improve the world, they only wanted better bodies. ‘But I will say my say, and, since it’s not done, it will be published after your book on me. I want to outlive you at least in this sense.’ At this, Harry looked at his watch. ‘But you are restless. Am I keeping you from some other ecstasy?’
‘I want to miss the traffic.’
‘You’re going to London?’
‘I think we’ll leave in the late afternoon.’
‘Why doesn’t anyone tell me anything?’
Mamoon concluded the conversation quickly by dismissing Harry with a wave. He shouted for Julia, telling her to take tea to his study immediately and fetch Alice from the garden. They would, he said, be having ‘discussions’. Julia told Alice what Mamoon required, and then she went off to visit Lucy.
Briefly, the house was silent. Harry saw it was ‘time’, and yet he wasn’t finished. He looked for Ruth and called her name. He found her, at last, on the top corridor carrying towels. ‘Would you talk to me — would you, please?’ he said. She put the towels down. She was afraid, as if this was the moment her sins would be exposed. ‘About everything,’ he went on. ‘Can I take you somewhere close by?’
She was pale and put her shaking hands together in a prayer. But she nodded and hurried out of the house before him as if afraid of being caught. He drove her to a nearby tea shop.