Hanif Kureishi - The Last Word

His father said, ‘You should know, she would be proud of you being a literary man. She was fond — often over-fond — of any prick who could wield a pen nicely. The writers always put their art first, as they should. But they are usually available in the afternoon, at which point their minds give way to their genitals. Women are attracted to artists, of course, as they are to doctors, and prisoners on death row. The powerful and the vulnerable. If you want to continue to get laid, particularly as you get older, that’s where to head, boy.’

‘Did her infidelities hurt you?’

He shrugged and said, ‘I can’t quite count the ways in which we hurt one another. It was the means by which we tried to help one another — me, turning her into a patient, her, turning me into a dull authority — which were as bad as, if not worse, than our actual abuses.’

His father then said the harshest thing that Harry thought he had ever heard.

‘The truth is, she was your whole life and she’ll be in your dreams until your dying day; she was your mother, Harry. But to me she was just another woman. You boys are a very happy memento. You know, when you end a relationship and say you fell out of love, you actually mean you were never really in love. The past is a river, not a statue.’

Although Alice had been against the biography, before he had set off to Mamoon’s at the very beginning, she had insisted Harry practise his interview technique. She was worried that with Mamoon’s short-temperedness and indifference alongside Harry’s blithe politeness, Mamoon would run rings around the boy, and the two would exchange only small talk. Alice had therefore insisted that she and Harry draw up a list of demanding and incisive questions for Mamoon, which she had videoed him asking in as mild and neutral a voice as possible. But Mamoon had conducted numerous interviews with some of the world’s most unpleasant characters, asking them about the children they had murdered and the women they had raped — ‘Did strangling the woman to death complete your pleasure or did you consider it a supplement, like brandy at the end of the meal?’ — and he used silence like a knife. The ‘master’ would always be the one who could wait without anxiety; Mamoon could also, as Rob had predicted, become bored and prickly. ‘The sight of you, Harry,’ said Rob, early on, ‘will no doubt remind him of how little time he has left to live truly and authentically.’

Harry had inadvertently discovered that there were some literary subjects which would rile and arouse Mamoon. These provided usefully unguarded moments, which Harry had to utilise sparingly, for fear of alerting his opponent to the baiting. It was more like road rage than literary criticism, and Mamoon would sit up in his chair. ‘The enervated nancy boy of English writing, the slack-arsed lily-livered mother-loving faggot?’

Harry had referred, in passing, and in a low voice, to E. M. Forster. ‘Why, what is your view, sir?’

‘View? I have no views on a man who claimed he wanted to write about homosexual sex, a subject we certainly needed to know about. Since he lacked the balls to do it, he spent thirty years staring out of the window, when he wasn’t mooning over bus conductors and other Pakis. An almost-man who claimed to hate colonialism using the Third World as his brothel because he wouldn’t get arrested there, as he would showing off his penis in a Chiswick toilet. Apparently he preferred his friends to his country! How brave and original! Of course,’ he went on, his eyes flashing, ‘Orwell was even worse. He’s the worst of the Blairs. Do they still take him seriously in this country?’

‘Mostly as an essayist.’

‘He wrote books for children, or, rather, for children who have the misfortune to be studying him. All that ABC writing, the plain style, the bare, empty mind with a strong undertow of sadism, the sentimental socialism and Big Brother and the pigs, and nothing about love — intolerable. No adult apart from a teacher would bother with one of his novels. If I think of hell, it is being alone forever in room 101 with nothing to read but one of his books.’

‘Didn’t you once say that the mystery of human cruelty is the only subject there is?’

‘That sounds like me, though I repudiate that view. There is love. Neither of these writers, the poof and the puritan, has described a beautiful woman. What sort of writer cannot do that?’

He shuddered; then, having appeared to climax after this jihadic uprush of hatred, he would sink back in his chair, his mouth open, murmuring, ‘I much prefer little Willie Maugham or randy H. G. Wells. Yet the only one I still love to read is the Goddess.’

‘Which one?’

‘She who reminds me of my lonely mongrel alcoholic wandering in London and in Paris, when I first arrived — Jean Rhys. She’s the only female writer in English you’d want to sleep with. Otherwise it’s just Brontës, Eliot, Woolf, Murdoch! Can you imagine cunnilingus with any of them? As Jean said, the world is simple: it’s just a matter of cafes where they like you, and cafes where they don’t.’

Harry knocked softly.

He was standing at the door of the library. Since he couldn’t remember the mantra Alice had insisted would calm him, he repeated to himself, ‘Doom, doom, doom. .’

‘Come.’

The book-lined room was quiet and cool, the heavy curtains keeping out the light. The desks, piled with the world’s most obscure and difficult books, were antique. Busts, sculpture, paintings and tapestries, some exquisite, some vulgar, had been shipped from Liana’s parents’ house near Bologna. Harry took off his shoes, stepping onto a long Venetian carpet selected by Mamoon when shopping with Liana. It was like walking across a Mantegna towards a hanging judge.

Mamoon had changed out of his usual roomy tracksuit, and was dressed in grey flannel trousers, Italian loafers with grey woollen socks, and a white shirt with the sleeves unbuttoned. The ginger tom on his lap closed his eyes as Mamoon stroked his head.

Harry sat down opposite and placed his notebook and pen, as well as his tape recorder, on the low table.

Mamoon said, ‘Harry, please, dear boy, before you ignite that dreadful recording box, can’t it be my turn to bore you with a question?’

Harry nodded. If he didn’t fall asleep, Mamoon would, occasionally, ask Harry a question which would be direct and difficult to answer, a question which, nonetheless, Harry believed he should answer in order to illustrate that silence was no use.

‘Harry, do you believe in monogamy and fidelity?’ Harry started. ‘Do you?’

‘Yes. Yes I do, yes, in theory.’

‘In theory?’

‘Ah-ha.’

‘You are a theoretician, you say?’

‘In a way.’

‘In what way are you in fact a theoretician?’

Harry said, ‘People say fidelity is the best solution, that everything is simpler inside the prison of love. Fewer people go crazy. The various alternatives make for more unhappiness, don’t they?’

‘How would I know?’ said Mamoon. ‘I have lived this long and still cannot answer the unanswerable questions. People come and ask me for universal truths, but this is the wrong address. You’ll only get universal questions here, the ones that make literature.’

‘How can you expect me to answer them?’

‘I’ve seen the way you look at women. We researched you, and heard rumours which shocked us. Luckily Rob vouched for you, otherwise we wouldn’t have considered taking you on. Perhaps, though, you’re not ready to withdraw from the game yet.’

Harry said, ‘My mother died. I needed female attention. There were aunts, Dad’s female friends, and my brothers’ girlfriends. It was a sumptuous pleasure, running into the arms of the women at that age, with many of them being more than nice to me. Perhaps it became something of an obsession, to try and satisfy a woman after being in her debt.’