Hanif Kureishi - The Last Word

‘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.

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.’