The Last Word Read Online Free PDF Page B

was cool, never judgemental but morally firm. He understood the need for dictators, prophets and kings, and our love for them. ‘And anyway, Liana,’ Harry went on, ‘while we’re talking about my family, my long dead mother ran a bookshop for a time.’
    ‘Oh you poor thing. Do you miss her?’
    ‘Every day.’
    ‘Do you speak to her?’
    ‘Yes. How do you know that?’
    She shrugged. ‘The hills are a radio. There are voices everywhere. This house is an ear. Did you hear Mamoon speaking at night?’
    ‘Not yet, no.’
    ‘I think you will.’
    ‘That would be better than nothing,’ he said.

Four
    Harry was waiting for a way in. It would happen, he knew. He had to be patient.
    Meanwhile, during the following week, he found the routine he needed: reading diaries, letters and papers in the barn until one o’clock, when Liana would announce lunch.
    Then, one day, he saw Mamoon in a green velour tracksuit heading for the garden carrying weights. Harry figured that he would be mistaken if he believed for a moment that Mamoon’s vanity, or his competitiveness, had declined with age. In the mid-afternoon, after it had occurred to Harry to invite Mamoon to stretch, run a little, work out a bit, and warm down with him, he learned this would be an opportunity for him to enter the old man’s confidence. Mamoon loved dressing in a variety of sports gear and was keen to kickbox and learn some capoeira moves. ‘If, or rather when, all else fails,’ puffed Mamoon, ‘you could become my personal trainer.’
    In the early evening Harry would talk to Liana and help her make supper, before writing up his notes. Later, when he could no longer concentrate, he would become restless. Sometimes he ate alone in a local restaurant, with a book in front of him. If he was lucky, Mamoon would shout out his name, inviting him into the television room. Mamoon was proud of his television, which he called ‘Pakistani’, since it was vastly out of proportion to its surroundings and characteristic, he liked to believe, of deprived immigrants crouching in front of it like primitives contemplating the transit of Venus. Rob had prepared Harry for these whisky sessions, saying that it was in confrontation with the TV that Mamoon came into his own. For most of his adult life, Mamoon had been his own kind of radical, going to some trouble to mock and invert political correctness, rebelling against the fashionable contrarians of his day, hippies, feminists, anti-racists, revolutionaries, anyone decent, kind or on the side of equality or diversity. This was, for a short time, an unusual and even witty idea. Now Mamoon was as bored by this pose as he was by everything else. Occasionally he would try a provocation. ‘Look at that ugly lazy black bastard,’ he’d say, as, instructed by Liana, they drove into town to pick up some local cheese, and having noticed what looked like a shy but enthusiastic African student visiting local churches. ‘Off to rob, rape and mutilate a white woman’s cunt, no doubt.’ But Harry felt Mamoon’s heart wasn’t in it, and that he preferred to ask simple questions about things which genuinely puzzled him. ‘Tell me, Harry, what exactly is Happy Hour?What is lap dancing and the X Factor ? What is wiffy?’
    ‘Wiffy? Oh, wi-fi.’
    Mamoon adored Indian and, even, Pakistani cricket. He had loved, on first coming to Britain, to watch English county cricket on provincial grounds. Monday morning in chilly weather and a light rain, a train ride from London, he would sit down on a bench with a Thermos and a cheese sandwich to watch an obscure game. One wall of his library was covered with pictures of post-war players. In pride of place, though, Mamoon kept a framed photograph of the 1963 West Indian cricket team. Rob had told Harry to be sure to tell Mamoon that his uncle had captained Surrey, and had instructed him to prepare Mamoon by never turning up without either gossip or DVDs of his heroes, Rohan Kanhai, Gary