The Last Word by Hanif Kureishi
‘Well, well,’ said Harry to Liana. ‘Thank God Mamoon is using the pool at last.’ Liana asked what he thought they talked about. ‘Many artists have had a muse,’ he said, ‘and with Alice he’s found sensuality, inspiration and a pin-up. He hears her dreams and talks about them in relation to her history. She tells him what trousers suit him.’
‘He listens to her dreams, you say?’
‘Doesn’t he listen to yours? In his spare time he’s become something of an oneiromancer now. He learned that a dream can make or break a day.’
‘He shoos me away.’
Harry pointed towards them. ‘He’s not shooing her away. It looks like Mamoon’s ready for the Olympics, the way he dashes to fetch that towel, a frenzied old man hurrying to catch the last bus. “Forever panting”, as Keats puts it.’ Harry went on, ‘But I don’t actually believe he’ll seduce Alice. He’s too nervous. He just wants to pore over her.’
‘But why, why?’
When Alice emerged from the water, she appeared to be naked. Mamoon stood completely still, with a towel over his arm.
Harry said, ‘Mamoon did say to me, wisely, I believe – and this is advice I’ve taken to heart – that a man would be a fool to think he had to make love to any woman he fancied.’
Harry went to Alice, shivering on a lounger, wrapped in a towel, and kissed her on the side of the head. He took her hand and sat down next to her. He patted her stomach and addressed his children inside her, ‘Hi kids, how you doing? Was it too cold for you in that water? When are you coming to see us? We want you!’
Liana sat with Mamoon and grasped his hand. ‘What a wonderful job you have done. The pool must be cold, but it looks tempting, my dear. I will swim. Won’t you join me? It would be lovely if we went in together, side by side, and I could see how strong you are. Mamoon, can you hear me, are you fine?’ He shook his head vaguely. ‘In that case, will you watch me and make sure I don’t drown, my love?’
While Liana changed in the nearby hut, Harry said to Mamoon, ‘I’m shocked not to see you in your study at this time of the day, sir. Have you finished what you’re doing?’
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.
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.
Harry prepared his recorder and notes, invited her to talk about Mamoon, and then, when she said nothing, passed over £50.
‘Nobody asked me anything before,’ she said. ‘I was thinking, how clever is this Harry, that he doesn’t go to the most obvious person – the one who saw everything.’
‘From day one, please,’ he said. ‘How you met.’
The talking went on until she emerged, skinned. She had nursed Peggy; she had cared for Mamoon in his despair. He had slept with her twice, after she had got into his bed and he hadn’t turned her away. ‘He couldn’t love me,’ she said, ‘but I had been celibate in terms of pleasure and feeling. But you don’t know anything about failure or having nothing.’
Later, the new bride, Liana, landed in the yard. Ruth knew that if she wanted to keep her job she had to seal her mouth and unpack Liana’s bags. Ruth knew that women now had careers ‘and all that’, but she had never been able to rise above her station. She was where she was before, if not worse, and certainly older; the blacks had more opportunities, the Somalis better housing: they were sitting on golden cushions eating caviar with platinum spoons. Nothing had improved for her and her class, and she liked a drink, that was all.
As Harry packed up his notes, she said, ‘Will I definitely be in the book?’
‘Of course.’
She clapped her hands. ‘And you’ll put in that he loved me all along?’
‘The two of you didn’t get anywhere as lovers, Ruth. He left for Europe.’
‘Exactly – because I’d been telling him that Peggy might be the sweetest person to talk to, but she had been a vampire for years, drinking his life-blood and giving him complaints and guilt. And some mornings, after she’d died, he had become so dark, I was worried he would go and hang himself in the barn. I believed I’d find him dead. So he went away. And then Liana infiltrated him, and forced him away from us for ever.’ She leaned towards Harry and hissed in his ear. ‘He regrets it. For me it was, at first, the best time. Those memories are my highlight. He knows he could have been happy with just us, the family who adored him. I know he still loves and wants us. Perhaps Liana should have an accident.’ Ruth took his hands across the table. ‘Will there be pictures? If I find one, of Mamoon and all of us together in the garden, so happy, will you promise to put it in? Will Liana try to stop it?’
‘Let me see it,’ he said.
Alice texted to suggest that she and Harry might stay one more night, since she didn’t want to drive back in the storm which had been predicted. Harry wasn’t keen, but didn’t think it would be a problem as long as he could begin to write up the Ruth material. He drove Ruth home; she was weeping and he helped her inside, to Scott. ‘You’ve emptied me,’ she cried. ‘I lost my battles with life, didn’t I? Who will look after me in my old age?’
When Harry got out of the car in the yard, he stood still for a moment. He heard a raised voice: Liana’s. Mamoon’s reply followed, and there was fury in his harsh tone. Harry became sure a number of things were being smashed. He hurried across and found that, unusually, Mamoon’s door was open, and Alice seemed to have backed out into the rain with her hand over her mouth.
Inside, Liana was standing at Mamoon’s desk. She had already swept from it soiled wine glasses, cups full of pens, CDs and newspapers, while strongly informing Mamoon that he was a bastard and a son of a bitch.
Mamoon said, ‘You’re killing me with this destructiveness!’
‘You seem strong enough to entertain a girl in there!’
‘Entertainment? We are talking about important matters for my work, and for her life.’
Liana picked up the stick with the rabbit head and approached him with it. ‘Why don’t I take your stick and tap out some nice words on your forehead? I could hear you from the kitchen laughing together – while I make your favourite spicy parsnip soup! You disappear to be an artist, and leave me alone all day! You absolutely forbid me to enter the room. Then you let her in.’
‘She is like a daughter to me – to both of us! You know that perfectly well.’
‘You filthy man, what’s wrong with me, why can’t I be your daughter? And then you condemn me for talking to Harry!’
‘I do?’
‘You accuse me of flirting like a fishwife and plumping up my breasts pneumatically! And then, finally, you deliberately and cruelly deny me the thing I want most in the world!’
‘What, Liana, please, you know I’ll do anything for you!’
‘A place in Chelsea! You’re too mean to spend the money.’
‘Don’t raise my blood pressure or I’ll slap your fat face, you ignorant bitch, and knock your aura right into the gutter.’
‘You’re not man enough.’
‘Get out!’
‘What did you say?’
‘No, no, Liana, sorry, you know that though I find you irritating, I love you,’ he said, putting out his arms and stretching across the desk towards her.
‘If you love me,’ she said, moving away from him, ‘you will agree to the following. I was dancing with Alice to Abba in the barn a few weeks ago. Julia was the DJ. We were in something of a stupor. I had a flash of inspiration. I’m going to write a self-help book.’
Mamoon looked startled, but, in the circumstances, could only continue to listen.
She said, ‘It’ll be about me, my story.’
‘What exactly is your story?’
‘Don’t you know?’ When he shook his head, she leaned across the desk. ‘An attractive, feisty woman captures the heart of an artistic powerhouse, revives his career while dealing with his impossible ego, and helps turn him into a monument while running a country estate.’
He said, ‘The story you describe is a miracle, and its heroine clearly a parasite. Where is the self-help in that?’
‘It will include good advice on how to seduce a man and get him to marry you.’
‘It’s true, you have mainly used me for money,’ he said.
‘I wish I had,’ she said. ‘It was what people advised me to do.’ Liana turned to Harry. ‘Didn’t you say the book was a brilliant start, Harry, when I s
‘Well, yes, but I only glanced through it, Liana—’ Harry began.
Mamoon said, ‘Is it true that your filthy stain extends even this far?’
Liana said, ‘You depress me, Mamoon. What really is the point of you?’ She was looking at his desk, as was Harry, who noticed a journal held open by a couple of beach stones. Next to it were some white pages with Mamoon’s scrawl across them. ‘Give me that diary to read,’ she said. ‘We’ll go through it together. We don’t have secrets, do we?’
He snorted with laughter. But not for long. Liana picked up a full cup of the tea which Julia brought Mamoon continuously throughout the day, and tipped some of it over the journal, and the rest over the other writing. They watched the writer’s words suddenly dissolve and disappear into a puddle on the desk, dripping onto the floor.
Liana leaned her hip against his desk, and tried to shove it to one side. ‘I am not your fan, and I don’t want to be just a sucking and shopping spouse! I am moving in here, beside you. You can advise me on the finest words.’
Mamoon said, ‘It’s laughable, us side by side like school children. I will never come in here again.’
‘Wherever you are, I will be next to you.’
‘Then I will kill myself.’
She laughed wildly. ‘You lack the courage.’
‘To get away from you, I will do it.’
She picked up a rock he used as a paperweight. ‘Why don’t I insert this into the middle of your face?’
She even threw it, and not limply; he put up his hand and it bounced away. If he hadn’t laughed, she wouldn’t have taken a step forward and struck him across the face. One of her rings must have caught him, because suddenly there was a line of blood and his cry, when he realised he’d been slashed.
She had done it and gone, running out of the barn towards the house. Mamoon hobbled out behind her, his handkerchief at his face, with Alice and Harry behind him.
Inside, Liana flew upstairs, shouting, ‘Leave me alone, you deceivers! If any of you follow me I will kill myself!’