She asked him what he was doing, and he told her he was making notes to start work on another book, about psychosis and his mother. His father had said Harry’s mother was liable to fall for mouth-merchants of all varieties. He’d given Harry letters from one of the writers he’d referred to. Harry had pictured some local Vargas Llosa, but this character was living in a dingy flat in a council block.
‘Surrounded by piles of mouldering paper, he was a conman full of swanky talk and a mile of continuous bullshit. He said Mum was an enthusiastic and flexible lover, but she talked too much and couldn’t listen. One time she grabbed him by the hair and smacked his face against her knee. She wouldn’t let him alone, until he had to cover the windows. He was surprised I turned out so reasonable, and tried to touch me for a few quid. I should have learned, shouldn’t I, that biography is a process of disillusionment.’
‘What will you do?’
‘There have been too many fathers and old men. It is the time for mad mothers. I want to get into women’s minds, rather than their bodies. Except for you.’
They drank some more, before she patted a slim manuscript perched on a pile of books. ‘This is what we’ve been talking about. Mamoon’s latest.’
She put it in his hand. He looked at it and noted the title, A Last Passion, and then handed it back. He was tired of Mamoon. He asked her to whisper him the story, briefly.
‘Are you sure?’
He said, ‘He kept saying I was nothing. He wanted me to feel like nothing. He mocked and almost destroyed me. There were times when I thought I’d lose my mind. Then I had two babies, and I couldn’t get out of bed for weeks. I thought something was going to fall on me, and I had a stomach and bowel infection. My mother and Peggy as ghosts wouldn’t stop talking. I could have murdered the world. Our help Julia was kindness itself. Dad fixed me up with a therapist.’
‘Where was Alice?’
‘She just drifted away, leaving the kids with Julia so she could visit friends. Otherwise she’d go to bed early with a headache and shut the door behind her. She had better things to think about than me. Since I’m a kid who brought himself up, I did the same again. I forced myself to get out of bed, and wrote Mamoon out of me. Pass the brandy: I’m free of him, Lotte. Cheers!’
‘I wouldn’t go that far.’ She was looking at him. ‘The new book is unusual for Mamoon. It concerns a young admirer who comes to stay with an older man, a writer, and begins to write a book about him. So, the old writer secretly writes about the younger man as the younger one writes about him. Unusually for Mamoon, it’s pretty funny. It’s a love story.’
‘What does the old guy say about the young guy?’
‘Harry, it mostly concerns the older man’s love for a younger woman, the hot but cold, vanilla-haired wife of the acolyte, whom he describes as having the stillness of a Modigliani. Displaying at least five of the eight fatal symptoms of love, he adores and mythologises her, as one does.’
Harry told her Lotte was going too fast. How did this encounter happen?
She said the old man and the girl began spending time together, having intense and honest talks, while the young man, who was in something of a panic about the biography, read diaries and papers in the old man’s house.
The book was sad, Lotte said, because the old man had fallen in love with the girl. He became angry when she remained in what he saw as a wretched relationship with the young man. This guy had tried to titillate and distract the old man with a pack of lies about women he’d slept with. How the inane kid loved to boast about his potency! Five women in one day, he even claimed. No wonder he was known as Fizzy Pants!
‘The writer advises her to break with the horny punk. When she falls pregnant the writer is the only person she wants to tell. For a while she doesn’t even inform the young man, the actual father. The old man takes the pregnancy seriously. They discuss it a lot.’
‘Discuss it in what way?’
‘He struggles over whether he should advise her to have an abortion. It’s an anguish for him, perhaps because he regrets the child he and his then girlfriend aborted years before.’
Harry suddenly said, ‘So what? What is going on? Why the hell does he get involved?’
Lotte shrugged. ‘Inevitably the old man says the girl should reconsider.’
‘Jesus! The arrogance of the man! I could slap him!’
‘But the old man has to hit the young idiot with a stick.’ She went on, ‘The old man says he has lived a long time, and in his own paternal way he wants to know that the young woman he loves has thought these things through properly.’
‘As if anybody ever does.’
‘The old man says the young man can only have catastrophic loves, for which he takes no responsibility.’
Harry said, ‘What a stupid old man. I hope the novel states that clearly.’
‘Oddly enough, it doesn’t.’
‘She has the kid?’ She nodded. He said, ‘Nice story. I hope that’s it.’ She looked as though it wasn’t. ‘Why doesn’t it stop there? How can there be more? More of what?’
He went to the window, threw it open, and sat on the ledge, gulping down the night air. Outside, London was humming. They could go back into Soho and drink and dance to jazz music. Why was he bothered about what she said? Why did he have to listen? Couldn’t he climb out and never return?
Thirty-one
‘Although it’s not far down, and you’d probably only break your ankles, you’re making me nervous,’ said Lotte. ‘Come back, darling.’
‘Why?’
‘To hear the end.’ Her voice behind him said, ‘You’d think that would be the lot, wouldn’t you? But in his eighth decade, and in what the old man calls his “mid-life crisis” or the “Eros of his old age” — she has had a child, and her boyfriend is deep in his book — he persuades the young woman to begin to meet up with him in London.’
He turned to her. ‘To do what?’
‘What do you think?’
‘How would I know?’
‘I’m asking you, Harry—’
‘What, Lotte?’
‘To please come and sit next to me.’
He did so; she kissed him on the mouth; she embraced him, and told him that Mamoon had set it up delicately, with his old precision — a lonely couple hurrying to meet in a friend’s almost empty, unheated flat in Victoria. He — the character — was shocked by how relieved and delighted he was to see this woman, his human feeling coming back. How alienated, he says, is the older adult from his desire! He buys her gifts, and loves just to look at her, his new muse. Never out of a tracksuit now, she dresses for him. He likes to see her take her shoes off and she’s happy to oblige.
Harry said, ‘But why is she happy to oblige?’
‘A woman who is really wanted by a man is going to find him difficult to resist. How often in a life are any of us so adored? He says that Count Sascha Kolowrat, when dying, had Marlene Dietrich visit him, and pull up her skirt.’
‘This woman does that for the old man?’
‘Why not? She lies naked in front of the fire as he looks at her. She poses, like an artist’s model, while he looks on. She shows him herself. Just this, for them, is electric. He longs to express himself, this word-master, without words. To just “be” with another person. Like a contented baby with the mother.’
‘What about his wife?’
‘He had loved her. It hadn’t occurred to him that after a while they wouldn’t have anything to say. He is done with her, and wants to separate, but he doesn’t know how to do it because it’ll be expensive and will make her mad, suicidal even. She is obliviously contented, shopping in London, while he is having a sort of breakdown.’