Ridiculous thoughts! He sat up and groped for the bedside light and pulled out from under a magazine the pills he preferred to avoid. He took one and leaned back against the pillows, chewing it slowly. Still massaging his hand, he mothered himself with sensible thoughts. His hand had been in the cold, that was all, and he was overtired. His proper business in life was to work, to finish a symphony by finding its lyrical summit. What had oppressed him an hour before was now his solace, and after ten minutes he put out the light and turned on his side: there was always work. He would walk in the Lake District. The magical names were soothing him: Blea Rigg, High Stile, Pavey Ark, Swirl How. He would walk the Langstrath Valley, cross the stream and climb toward Scafell Pike, and come home by way of Allen Crags. He knew the circuit well. Striding out, high on the ridge, he would be restored, he would see clearly.
He had swallowed his hemlock, and there’d be no more tormenting fantasies now. This thought too was comfort, so that long before the chemicals had reached his brain, he had drawn his knees toward his chest and was released. Hardknott, Ill Bell, Cold Pike, Poor Crag, Poor Molly …
II
i
The thought recurred to Vernon Halliday during an uncharacteristic lull in his morning that he might not exist. For thirty uninterrupted seconds, he had been sitting at his desk gently palpating his head with his fingertips and worrying. Since arriving at the Judge two hours earlier, he had spoken, separately and intensely, to forty people. And not only spoken: in all but two of these exchanges he had decided, prioritized, delegated, chosen, or offered an opinion that was bound to be interpreted as a command. This exercise of authority did not sharpen his sense of self, as it usually did. Instead it seemed to Vernon that he was infinitely diluted; he was simply the sum of all the people who had listened to him, and when he was alone, he was nothing at all. When he reached, in solitude, for a thought, there was no one there to think it. His chair was empty; he was finely dissolved throughout the building, from the city desk on the sixth floor, where he was about to intervene to prevent the sacking of a long-serving subeditor who could not spell, to the basement, where parking allocations had brought senior staff to open war and an assistant editor to the brink of resignation. Vernon’s chair was empty because he was in Jerusalem, the House of Commons, Cape Town, and Manila, globally disseminated like dust; he was on TV and radio, at dinner with some bishops, giving a speech to the oil industry or a seminar to European Union specialists. In the brief moments during the day when he was alone, a light went out. Even the ensuing darkness encompassed or inconvenienced no one in particular. He could not say for sure that the absence was his.
This sense of absence had been growing since Molly’s funeral. It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken beside his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity.
Had Vernon taken a few of his senior staff aside in the canteen and confided about his condition, he might have been alarmed by their lack of surprise. He was widely known as a man without edges, without faults or virtues, as a man who did not fully exist. Within his profession Vernon was revered as a nonentity. It was one of the marvels of newspaper lore, difficult to exaggerate and often recounted in City wine bars, the manner in which he had become editor of the Judge. Years back, he had been the bland and hardworking lieutenant for two gifted editors in succession and had shown an instinctive talent for making neither friends nor allies. When the Washington correspondent fell ill, Vernon was ordered to stand in for him. In his third month, at a dinner for the German ambassador, a congressman mistook Vernon for a writer on the Washington Post and tipped him off about a presidential indiscretion—a radical hair implant procured at taxpayers’ expense. It was generally accepted that “Pategate,” a story that dominated American domestic politics for almost a week, had been broken by Vernon Halliday of the Judge.
Meanwhile, back in London, one gifted editor was falling to another in bloody battles with a meddlesome board of directors. Vernon’s return home coincided with a sudden realignment of proprietorial interests. The stage was littered with the severed limbs and torsos of titans cut down to size. Jack Mobey, the board’s own placeman, had failed to take the venerable broadsheet far enough downmarket. There was no one left but Vernon.
Now he sat at his desk and tentatively massaged his scalp. Lately he had realized he was learning to live with nonexistence. He could not mourn for long the passing of something—himself—that he could no longer quite recall. All this was a worry, but it was a worry that was several days old. There was now a physical symptom. It involved the whole of the right side of his head, both skull and brain somehow, a sensation for which there was simply no word. Or it might have been the sudden interruption of a sensation so constant and familiar that he had not been conscious of it, like a sound one becomes aware of the moment it stops. He knew exactly when it had begun—the night before, as he had stood up from dinner—and it was there when he woke in the morning, continuous and indefinable, not cold, or tight, or airy, though somewhere in between. Perhaps the word was dead. His right hemisphere had died. He knew so many people who had died that in his present state of dissociation he could begin to contemplate his own end as a commonplace—a flurry of burying or cremating, a welt of grief raised, then subsiding as life swept on. Perhaps he had already died. Or again—and he felt this strongly—perhaps all that was needed was a couple of sharp taps to the side of the head with a medium-sized hammer. He opened his desk drawer. There was a metal ruler left by Mobey, fourth editor in succession to fail to reverse the Judge’s declining circulation. Vernon Halliday was trying not to be the fifth.
He had raised the ruler several inches above his right ear when there was a knock on his open door and Jean, his secretary, entered and he was obliged to convert the blow into a pensive scratching.
“The schedule. Twenty minutes.” She peeled off a sheet and gave it to him and left the rest on the conference table as she went out.
He scanned the lists. Under Foreign, Dibben was writing on “Garmony’s Washington triumph.” That would need to be a skeptical piece, or a hostile one. And if it really was a triumph, it could stay off the front page. On the Home list was, at long last, the piece by the science editor on an antigravity machine from a university in Wales. It was an attention-grabber and Vernon had pushed for it, half dreaming of a gizmo you strapped to the bottom of your shoes. In fact the thing turned out to weigh four tons, required nine million volts, and didn’t even work. They were running the piece anyway, at the bottom of the front page. Also under Home was “Piano quartet,” quadruplets born to a concert pianist. His deputy, along with features and the whole home desk, was fighting him over this, all of them hiding their fastidiousness behind a pretense of realism. Four wasn’t enough these days, they were saying, and no one had ever heard of the mother, who wasn’t pretty anyway and didn’t want to talk to the press. Vernon had overruled them. Last month’s circulation average was seven thousand lower than the month before. Time was running out for the Judge. He was still considering whether to run a story about Siamese twins joined at the hip who had secured a job in local government. One of their hearts was weak, so they couldn’t be separated. “If we’re going to save this paper,” Vernon liked to say at the morning editorial conference, “you’re all going to have to get your hands dirty.” Everyone nodded, nobody agreed. As far as the old hands, the “grammarians,” were concerned, the Judge would stand or fall by its intellectual probity. They felt safe in this view because no one on the paper, apart from Vernon’s predecessors, had ever been sacked.
The first of the section editors and deputies were filing in when Jean waved to him from the door to pick up the phone. It had to be important because she was mouthing a name. George Lane, her lips said.
Vernon turned his back on the room and remembered how he had avoided Lane at the funeral. “George. A deeply moving occasion. I was going to drop you a—”
“Yes, yes. Something’s come up.
I think you should see it.”
“What sort of thing?”
“Photographs.”
“Can you bike them round?”
“Absolutely not, Vernon. This is very, very hot. Can’t you come now?”
Not all Vernon’s contempt for George Lane had to do with Molly. Lane owned one and a half percent of the Judge and had put money into the relaunch that marked the fall of Jack Mobey and Vernon’s elevation. George thought that Vernon was in his debt. Also, George knew nothing about newspapers, which was why he thought the editor of a national daily could saunter out of his office to cross the entire width of London to Holland Park at eleven-thirty in the morning.
“I’m rather busy at present,” Vernon said.
“I’m doing you a big favor here. Sort of thing the News of the World would kill for.”
“I could be there sometime after nine this evening.”
“Very well. I’ll see you then,” George said huffily, and rang off.
By now every chair but one at the conference table had been taken, and as Vernon lowered himself into it the conversation subsided. He touched the side of his head. Now that he was in company again, back on the job, his interior absence was no longer an affliction. Yesterday’s paper was spread before him. He said into the near silence, “Who subbed the environment leader?”
“Pat Redpath.”
“On this paper, hopefully is not a sentence adverb, nor will it ever be, especially in a leader, for godsakes. And none …” He trailed away for dramatic effect while pretending to scan the piece. “None usually takes a singular verb. Can we get these two things generally understood?”
Vernon was aware of the approval round the table. This was the kind of thing the grammarians liked to hear. Together they would see the paper into the grave with its syntax pure.
Crowd-pleaser dispensed, he pressed on at speed. One of his few successful innovations, perhaps his only one so far, was to have reduced the daily conference from forty to fifteen minutes by means of a few modestly imposed rules: no more than five minutes on the postmortem—what’s done is done; no joke-telling, and above all, no anecdotes—he didn’t tell them, so no one else could. He turned to the international pages and frowned. “An exhibition of pottery shards in Ankara? A news item? Eight hundred words? I simply don’t get it, Frank.”
Frank Dibben, the deputy foreign editor, explained, perhaps with a trace of mockery. “Well, you see, Vernon, it represents a fundamental shift in our understanding of the influence of the early Persian Empire on—”
“Paradigm shifts in broken pots aren’t news, Frank.”
Grant McDonald, the deputy editor, who was sitting at Vernon’s elbow, cut in gently. “Thing is, Julie failed to file from Rome. They had to fill the—”
“Not again. What is it now?”
“Hepatitis C.”
“So what about AP?”
Dibben spoke up. “This was more interesting.”
“You’re wrong. It’s a complete turnoff. Even the TLS wouldn’t run it.”
They moved on to the day’s schedule. In turn the editors summarized the stories on their lists. When it came to Frank’s turn, he pushed for his Garmony story to lead the front page.
Vernon heard him out, and then: “He’s in Washington when he should be in Brussels. He’s cutting a deal with the Americans behind the Germans’ backs. Short-term gain, long-term disaster. He was a terrible home secretary, he’s even worse at the Foreign Office, and he’ll be the ruin of us if he’s ever prime minister—which is looking more and more likely.”
“Well, yes,” Frank agreed, his softness of tone concealing his fury about the Ankara put-down. “You said all that in your leader, Vernon. Surely the point is not whether we agree with the deal, but whether it’s significant.”
Vernon was wondering whether he might just bring himself to let Frank go. What was he doing wearing an earring?
“Quite right, Frank,” Vernon said cordially. “We’re in Europe. The Americans want us in Europe. The special relationship is history. The deal has no significance. The coverage stays on the inside pages. Meanwhile, we’ll continue to give Garmony a hard time.”
They listened to the sports editor, whose pages Vernon had recently doubled at the expense of arts and books. Then it was the turn of Lettice O’Hara, the features editor.
“I need to know if we can go ahead with the Welsh children’s home.”
Vernon said, “I’ve seen the guest list. A lot of big cheeses. We can’t afford the legal costs if it goes wrong.”
Lettice looked relieved, and began to describe an investigative piece she had commissioned on a medical scandal in Holland.
“Apparently, doctors are exploiting the euthanasia laws to—”
Vernon interrupted her. “I want to run the Siamese twins story in Friday’s paper.”
There were groans. But who was going to object first?
Lettice. “We don’t even have a picture.”
“So send someone to Middlesborough this afternoon.” There was sullen silence, so Vernon continued. “Look, they work in a section of the local hygiene department called Forward Planning. It’s a sub’s dream.”
The home editor, Jeremy Ball, said, “We spoke last week and it was okay. Then he phoned yesterday. I mean, it was the other half. The other head. Doesn’t want to talk. Doesn’t want a picture.”
“Oh God!” Vernon cried. “Don’t you see? That’s all part of the story. They’ve fallen out. First thing anyone would want to know—how do they settle disputes?”
Lettice was looking gloomy. She said, “Apparently there are bite marks. On both faces.”
“Brilliant!” Vernon exclaimed. “No one else is onto this yet. Friday, please. Now, moving on. Lettice. This eight-page chess supplement. Frankly, I’m not convinced.”
ii
Another three hours passed before Vernon found himself alone again. He was in the washroom, looking in the mirror while rinsing his hands. The image was there, but he wasn’t entirely convinced. The sensation, or the nonsensation, still occupied the right side of his head like a tight-fitting cap. When he trailed his finger across his scalp, he could identify the border, the demarcation line where feeling on the left side became not quite its opposite but its shadow, or its ghost.
His hands were under the drier when Frank Dibben came in. Vernon sensed that the younger man had followed him in to talk, for a lifetime’s experience had taught him that a male journalist did not urinate easily, or by preference, in the presence of his editor.
“Look, Vernon,” Frank said from where he stood at the urinal. “I’m sorry about this morning. You’re absolutely right about Garmony. I was completely out of order.”
Rather than look around from the drier and be obliged to watch the deputy foreign editor at his business, Vernon gave himself another turn with the hot air. Dibben was in fact relieving himself copiously, thunderously even. Yes, if Vernon ever sacked anyone, it would be Frank, who was shaking himself vigorously, for just a second too long, and pressing on with his apology.
“I mean, you’re absolutely right about not giving him too much space.”
Cassius is hungry, Vernon thought. He’ll head his department, then he’ll want my job.
Dibben turned to the washbasin. Vernon put his hand lightly on his shoulder, the forgiving touch.
“It’s all right, Frank. I’d rather hear opposing views at conference. That’s the whole point of it.”
“It’s kind of you to say that, Vernon. I just wouldn’t want you to think I was going soft on Garmony.”
This festival of first-naming marked the end of the exchange. Vernon gave a little reassuring laugh and stepped out into the corridor. Waiting for him right by the door was Jean, with a bundle of correspondence for him to sign. Behind her was Jeremy Ball, and behind him was Tony Montano, the managing director. Someone whom Vernon could not see was just joining the back of the queue. The editor began to move toward his office, signing the letters as
he went and listening to Jean’s rundown of his week’s appointments. Everyone moved with him. Ball was saying, “This Middlesborough photo. I’d like to avoid the trouble we got into over the wheelchair Olympics. I thought we’d go for something pretty straightforward …”
“I want an exciting picture, Jeremy. I can’t see them in the same week, Jean. It wouldn’t look right. Tell him Thursday.”
“I had in mind an upright Victorian sort of thing. A dignified portrait.”
“He’s leaving for Angola. The idea was he’d go straight out to Heathrow as soon as he’d seen you.”
“Mr. Halliday?”
“I don’t want dignified portraits, even in obits. Get them to show us how they gave each other the bite marks. Okay, I’ll see him before he leaves. Tony, is this about the parking?”
“I’m afraid I’ve seen a draft of his resignation letter.”
“Surely there’s one little space we can find.”
“We’ve tried all that. Head of maintenance is offering to sell his for three thousand pounds.”
“Don’t we run the risk of sensationalism?”
“Sign it in two places, and initial where I’ve marked.”
“It’s not a risk, Jeremy. It’s a promise. But Tony, head of maintenance doesn’t even have a car.”
“Mr. Halliday?”
“The space is his by right.”
“Offer him five hundred. Is that the lot, Jean?”
“I’m not prepared to do that.”
“The letter of thanks to the bishops is just being typed.”