Hanif Kureishi - The Last Word

Rob embraced Harry and said, ‘My man, never mind that — I see difficulties ahead for you. This project could be a nightmare, but never forget how fortunate you are to have such a great subject to explore. Now your real work begins.’ Dashing at lithe Alice, almost knocking her off her high heels and then holding her unnecessarily tight, Rob said, ‘Do not worry, you divine thing. The love of your life will triumph. By the end you will admire him even more.’

‘You’re a clever man, Rob,’ she said. ‘But you haven’t convinced me.’ She had already emphasised that Harry, though he had passed thirty, was still a little naïve; Mamoon could eat his soul alive, leaving him humiliated and empty. ‘Surely it might cause him permanent damage, psychologically. Didn’t you say that Mamoon’s wife even called Harry her son? What sort of woman would say that to a stranger?’

Rob was giggling and said he’d be sure to oversee everything. He had dedicated his life to problematical writers — they were always the most talented — and Harry only had to phone him. Anyhow, Mamoon was lonely, but couldn’t admit it. He would more than welcome Harry’s company; he loved to discuss literature and ideas. It would be an education for Harry. He would emerge with a new sophistication.

In the taxi Alice put her arm around Harry and kissed him on the side of the head. ‘I know you so well, and you’ll feel guilty, simplifying everything, putting the emphasis here or there according to your interest. Or the interest of Rob, more like, whom you’re bullied by.’

‘Am I?’

‘See how you listen to his every spitting insane word, and even do that doggy nod when he stops talking? Surely you’ll have to write stuff about Mamoon that he won’t like?’

‘I hope so. I’ve said to Rob it’ll be my book. He agreed. He called me an artist.’

‘When?’

‘Just before he put his face down on the table.’

‘What if Mamoon and his wife take revenge on you? Rob was telling me at dinner that the old bird’s capable of mad furies. I read that she tossed a computer at a journalist’s head for asking Mamoon if he’d sold out to become a pseudo-gentleman.’

‘The British Empire wasn’t won with that attitude. Alice, why aren’t you backing me? What would you like me to do?’

‘Truly? I wish you would be a teacher in an ordinary school.’

‘With us living in a comfortable semi in suburbia?’

‘Why not?’

‘You wouldn’t last five minutes on that money.’

‘We’d be different people, with fewer shoes.’

He said, ‘My love, you know very well that I’ve got to get my life off the ground. Even my dad said I still resemble a student. In my family, it’s always a good idea to be a man.’

‘What does that really mean, Harry?’

‘To be amusing and articulate company. To play sport, to be successful in the world — top of the heap. This book is my debt to Dad. Besides, Rob will take care of me. He’s recommended cunning and silence, and has some other advice up his sleeve.’

She turned away. ‘You don’t care what I say.’

‘Listen. Something important happened on the train. Rob slammed the contract down in front of me and insisted I sign it.’

‘And you did?’

‘It was my moment of decision. Now I’m excited. Please, will you visit me there in the country? I’m sure they won’t object. They’ll adore you as I do, I’m sure.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Why not?’

‘Too intimidating. I won’t have any idea what to say if he asks me about the long-term effect of the Iranian revolution. I’ll just have to occupy myself in London. I want to learn to draw.’

‘Oh, Alice,’ he said. ‘Please.’

‘Don’t pressure me. Give me space,’ she said, kissing him again. ‘Let’s see how it goes. I have a feeling you’ll come home to me quite soon.’

A week later, Harry moved into a little upstairs room at the front of Mamoon and Liana’s house.

The night of Harry’s last supper in Mayfair, a gurgling Rob in his cups had quoted a sentence from Plum Wodehouse’s Uncle Dynamite , ‘The stoutest man will quail at the prospect of having the veil torn from his past, unless that past is one of exceptional purity.’

Not that Harry could be put off. He had prepared for the veil-tearing task ahead by rereading Mamoon, going to the gym to work out with an orange-toned trainer, and keenly seeking the advice of his father, a psychiatrist, about the mind contest ahead. At the top of his list of imperatives was the one from Rob which informed Harry that he was to approach silkily from the side, charming and working Liana, the gatekeeper, until she knelt before him with the key to Mamoon on a velvet pillow.

‘Turn it on, dude, as previously stated. The full beam, innit — as you did so fruitfully with my weepy assistant Lotte, now in three-times-a-week therapy, poor thing.’ Rob went on, ‘She’ll seem deranged to you, the wife, but she worked hard to find the right person to frame the husband, hassling every agent and publisher in London. I guided her to you.’

‘What clinched it?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I guess my potential and writing style. Possibly, my intellect.’

Rob said, ‘Her first two choices dropped out after meeting Mamoon. One of them he called an “amateur”.’

‘And the other?’

‘“Excrement”. You were the cheapest of the decent, available ones, and, from her point of view, probably the most naïve. She thinks she can intimidate you into a hagiography.’

‘Ah.’

‘We’ll let her believe that, pal, before taking them down — all the way to Chinatown. It’ll be a long game of intrigue and deception. Remember, his vanity will be quite a force. Let it be your lever and use it against him.’

For the first few days, after breakfast, and when Mamoon had walked with his eyes down to his work room across the yard, Harry sat at the kitchen table with Liana and made sure, while adopting his therapist’s face, to enquire about her hatred of her sister, her spiritual beliefs, why men had always adored her, why she preferred tea to coffee in the afternoon, the temperaments of her numerous dogs and cats as well as that of her parapsychologist, and wondering, with her, whether she should ditch yoga and take up Pilates. But their main concern was whether it would be possible for her to lose five pounds from her ass. In London, she said, all the women were anorexic and in the country they were all obese.

He learned that Liana’s mother had been an English teacher, and an expert on Ariosto and Tasso; her grandmother had written for De Sica and Visconti. But when she brought over a box and began to offer him photographs of herself as a child — ‘that little child is still in me, Harry, wanting to be loved’ — he saw his empathic face had worked too well. Somehow he had convinced Liana that as well as researching a book about her husband, which would include a lot of material about her, he was also an odd-job man. ‘Please, darling, such a tall strong blond boy, with — oh, wow — thick legs and fine arms, would you accompany me to the supermarket, if you don’t mind, just five minutes, otherwise we won’t eat or drink a thing tonight.’

He was to carry the stuff to the car, and then into the house. His work had also come to involve hauling boxes of books around the place, fetching firewood from the barn, putting down poison for rats, making the fire in the library, and removing half-eaten mice from the front step, as well as numerous other domestic chores that the two women from the village, who came in five mornings a week — sometimes accompanied by the slow-moving daughter of one of them — didn’t have the time or strength to do. As he wasn’t staying in a hotel, Harry knew, encouraged by Alice, that he just had to muck in and ‘embed’ himself.