She sat on the edge of the bed and put her face in her hands. I didn’t know what to do. It seemed incongruous to remain standing, towering over her, so I sat down next to her. She was shaking from head to toe: it could have been fear, or anger, or maybe it was just the cold.
‘He said to begin with he couldn’t talk,’ she went on, ‘but I said he bloody well had to talk. So he took the phone into the men’s room. When I told him Mike had been in touch with Rycart just before he died, he didn’t even pretend to be surprised.’ She turned to me. She looked stricken. ‘He knew.’
‘He said that?’
‘He didn’t need to. I could tell by his voice. He said we shouldn’t say any more over the telephone. We should talk when he gets back. Dear God help us – what has he got himself mixed up in?’
Something seemed to give way in her and she sagged towards me, her arms outstretched. Her head came to rest against my chest and I thought for a moment she might have fainted, but then I realised she was clinging to me, holding on so fiercely I could feel her bitten fingertips through the thick material of the robe. My hands hovered an inch or two above her, moving back and forth uncertainly, as if she was giving off some kind of magnetic field. Finally, I stroked her hair and tried to murmur words of reassurance I didn’t really believe.
‘I’m afraid,’ she said in a muffled voice. ‘I’ve never been frightened in my life before. But I am now.’
‘Your hair’s wet,’ I said gently. ‘You’re drenched. Let me get you a towel.’
I extricated myself and went into the bathroom. I looked at myself in the mirror. I felt like a skier at the top of an unfamiliar black run. When I returned to the bedroom, she’d taken off her robe and had got into bed, pulling up the sheet to cover her breasts.
‘Do you mind?’ she said.
‘Of course not,’ I said.
I turned off the light and climbed in beside her, and lay on the cold side of the bed. She rolled over and put her hand on my chest and pressed her lips very hard against mine, as if she were trying to give me the kiss of life.
Twelve
* * *
The book is not a platform for the ghost to air their own views on anything at all.
Ghostwriting
* * *
WHEN I WOKE the next morning I expected to find her gone. That’s the usual protocol in these situations, isn’t it? The business of the night transacted, the visiting party retreats to their own quarters, as keen as a vampire to avoid the unforgiving rays of dawn. Not so Ruth Lang. In the dimness I could see her bare shoulder and her crop of black hair, and I could tell by her irregular, almost inaudible breathing that she was as awake as I was, and lying there listening to me.
I reclined on my back, my hands folded across my stomach, as motionless as the stone effigy of a crusader knight on his tomb, shutting my eyes periodically as some fresh aspect of the mess occurred to me. On the Richter scale of bad ideas, this surely had registered a ten. It was a meteor strike of folly. After a while, I let one hand travel crabwise to the bedside table and feel for my watch. I brought it up close to my face. It was seven fifteen.
Cautiously, still pretending I didn’t know that she was pretending, I slipped out of the bed and crept towards the bathroom.
‘You’re awake,’ she said, without moving.
‘I’m sorry if I disturbed you,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d take a shower.’
I locked the door behind me, turned the water up as hot and strong as I could bear, and let it pummel me – back, stomach, legs, scalp. The little room quickly filled with steam. Afterwards, when I shaved, I had to keep rubbing at my reflection in the mirror to stop myself from disappearing.
By the time I returned to the bedroom, she had put on her robe and was sitting at the desk, leafing through the manuscript. The curtains were still closed.
‘You’ve taken out his family history,’ she said. ‘He won’t like that. He’s very proud of the Langs. And why have you underlined my name every time?’
‘I wanted to check how often you were mentioned. I was surprised there wasn’t more about you.’
‘That will be a hangover from the focus groups.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘When we were in Downing Street, Mike used to say that every time I opened my mouth I cost Adam ten thousand votes.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true.’
‘Of course it is. People are always looking for someone to resent. I often think my main usefulness, as far as he was concerned, was to serve as a lightning rod. They could take their anger out on me instead of him.’
‘Even so,’ I said, ‘you ought not to be written out of history.’
‘Why not? Most women usually are. Even the Amelia Blys of this world are written out eventually.’
‘Well then, I shall reinstate you.’ I slid open the door of the closet so hard in my haste it banged. I had to get out of that house. I had to put some distance between myself and their destructive ménage à trois, before I ended up as crazed as they were. ‘I’d like to sit down with you, when you have the time, and do a really long interview. Put in all the important occasions that he’s forgotten.’
‘How very kind of you,’ she said bitterly. ‘Like the boss’s secretary whose job is to remember his wife’s birthdays for him?’
‘Something like that. But then as you say, I can’t claim to be a proper writer.’
I was conscious of her watching me carefully. I put on a pair of boxer shorts, pulling them up under my robe.
‘Ah,’ she said drily, ‘the modesty of the morning after.’
‘A bit late for that,’ I said.
I took off the dressing gown and reached for a shirt, and as the hanger rang its hollow chime, I thought that this was exactly the sort of miserable scene that the discreet nocturnal departure was invented to avoid. How typical of her not to sense what the occasion required. Now our former intimacy lay between us like a shadow. The silence lengthened, and hardened, until I could feel her resentment as an almost solid barrier. I could no more have gone across and kissed her now than I could on the day we met.
‘What are you going to do?’ she said.
‘Leave.’
‘That’s not necessary as far as I’m concerned.’
‘I’m afraid it is as far as I am.’
I pulled on my trousers.
‘Are you going to tell Adam about this?’ she said.
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ I cried. ‘What do you think?’
I laid my suitcase on the bed and unzipped it.
‘Where will you go?’ She looked as if she might be about to cry again. I hoped not; I couldn’t take it.
‘Back to the hotel. I can work much better there.’ I started throwing in my clothes, not bothering to fold them, such was my anxiety to get away. ‘I’m sorry. I should never have stayed in a client’s house. It always ends …’ I hesitated.
‘With you fucking the client’s wife?’
‘No, of course not. It just makes it hard to keep a professional distance. Anyway, it wasn’t entirely my idea, if you recall.’
‘That’s not very gentlemanly of you.’
I didn’t answer. I carried on packing. Her gaze followed my every move.
‘And the things I told you last night?’ she said. ‘What do you propose to do about them?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You can’t simply ignore them.’
‘Ruth,’ I said, stopping at last, ‘I’m his ghostwriter, not an investigative reporter. If he wants to tell the truth about what’s been going on, I’m here to help him. If he doesn’t – fine. I’m morally neutral.’
‘It isn’t morally neutral to conceal the facts if you know something illegal has happened – that’s criminal.’
‘But I don’t know that anything illegal has happened. All I have is a phone number on the back of a photograph and gossip from some old man who may well be senile. If anyone has any evidence, it’s you. That’s the real question, actua
lly: what are you going to do about it?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I’ll write my own memoirs. “Ex-Prime Minister’s Wife Tells All.”’
I resumed packing.
‘Well, if ever you do decide to do that, give me a call.’
She emitted one of her trademark full-throated laughs.
‘Do you really think I need someone like you to enable me to produce a book?’
She stood up then, and undid her belt, and for an instant I thought she was about to undress, but she was only loosening it in order to wrap the robe more closely around herself. She drew the belt very tight and knotted it, and the finality of the gesture somehow restored her superiority over me. My rights of access were hereby revoked. Her resolve was so firm I felt almost wistful, and if she had held out her arms it would have been my turn to fall against her, but instead, she turned and, in the practised manner of a prime minister’s wife, pulled the nylon cord to open the curtains.
‘I declare this day officially open,’ she said. ‘God bless it, and all who have to get through it.’
‘Well,’ I said, looking out at the scene, ‘that really is the morning after the night before.’
The rain had turned to sleet and the lawn was covered with debris from the storm – small branches, twigs, a white cane chair thrown on its side. Here and there, around the edges of the door, where it was sheltered, the sleet had stuck together and frozen into strips, like bits of polystyrene packaging. The only brightness in the murk was the reflection of our bedroom light. It resembled a flying saucer hovering above the dunes. I could see Ruth’s face quite clearly in the glass: watchful, brooding.
‘I’m not going to give you an interview,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be in his bloody book, being patronised and thanked by him, using your words.’ She turned and brushed past me. At the bedroom door she paused. ‘He’s on his own now. I’ll get a divorce. And then she can do the prison visits.’
I listened to the sound of her own door opening and closing, and shortly afterwards the barely audible sound of a toilet flushing. I had almost finished packing. I folded the clothes she had lent me the previous evening and laid them on the chair, put my laptop into my shoulder bag, and then the only thing left was the manuscript. It sat in a thick pile on the table where she had left it, three sullen inches of it – my millstone, my albatross, my meal ticket. I couldn’t make any progress without it, yet I wasn’t supposed to take it from the house. It occurred to me that perhaps I could argue that the war crimes investigation had changed the circumstances of Lang’s life so completely, the old rules no longer applied. At any rate I could use that as an excuse. I certainly couldn’t face the embarrassment of staying here and running into Ruth every few hours. I put the manuscript into my suitcase, along with the package from the archive, zipped them up, and went out into the corridor.
Barry, the Special Branch man, was sitting with his Harry Potter novel in the chair by the front door. He raised his great slab of a face from the pages and gave me a look of weary disapproval, tinged with a sneer of amused contempt.
‘Morning, sir,’ he said. ‘Finished for the night, have we?’
I thought, He knows. And then I thought: Of course he knows, you bloody fool; it’s his job to know. In a flash I saw his sniggering conversations with his colleagues, the log of his official observations passed to London, a discreet entry in a file somewhere, and I felt a thrust of fury and resentment. Perhaps I should have responded with a wink, or a colluding quip – ‘Well, Officer, you know what they say, there’s many a good tune played on an old fiddle’, or something of the sort – but instead I said, coldly, ‘Why don’t you just fuck off?’
It wasn’t exactly Oscar Wilde, but it got me out of the house. I walked through the door and set off towards the track, only belatedly registering that unfortunately high moral dudgeon offers no protection against stinging squalls of sleet. I trudged on with an effort at dignity for a few more yards, then ducked for cover into the lee of the house. Rainwater was overflowing from the gutter and drilling into the sandy soil. I took off my jacket, and held it over my head, and considered how I was going to reach Edgartown. That was when the idea of borrowing the tan-coloured Ford Escape SUV popped helpfully into my mind.
How different – how very different – the course of my life would have been if I hadn’t immediately gone running towards that garage, dodging the puddles, the tent of my jacket raised over me with one hand, the other dragging my little suitcase. I see myself now as if in a movie, or perhaps, more aptly, in one of those filmed reconstructions on a TV crime show: the victim skipping unknowingly towards his fate, as ominous chords underscore the portentousness of the scene. The door was still unlocked from the previous day and the keys of the Ford were in the ignition – after all, who worries about robbers when you live at the end of a two-mile track, protected by six armed bodyguards? I heaved my case into the front passenger seat, put my jacket back on, and slid behind the steering wheel.
It was as cold as a morgue, that Ford, and as dusty as an old attic. I ran my hands over the unfamiliar controls and my fingertips came away grey. I don’t actually own a car – I’ve never found much need, living alone in London – and on the rare occasions I hire one, it always seems that another layer of gadgets has been added, so that the instrument panel of the average family saloon now looks to me like the cockpit of a jumbo. There was a mystifying screen to the right of the wheel, which came alive when I switched on the engine. Pulsing green arcs were shown radiating upwards from the earth to an orbiting space station. As I watched, the pulse switched direction and the arcs beamed down from the heavens. An instant later, the screen showed a large red arrow, a yellow path, and a great patch of blue.
An American woman’s voice, soft but commanding, said, from somewhere behind me: ‘Join the road as soon as possible.’
I would have turned her off, but I couldn’t see how, and I was conscious that the noise of the engine might soon bring Barry lumbering out of the house to investigate. The thought of his lubricious gaze was enough to get me moving. I quickly put the Ford into reverse and backed out of the garage. Then I adjusted the mirrors, switched on the headlights and the windscreen wipers, engaged drive, and headed for the gate. As I passed the guard post the scene on the little satellite navigation monitor swung pleasingly, as if I were playing on an arcade game, and then the red arrow settled over the centre of the yellow path. I was away.
There was something oddly soothing about driving along and seeing all the little paths and streams, neatly labelled, appear at the top of the screen and then scroll down before disappearing off the bottom. It made me feel as if the world were a safe and tamed place, its every feature tagged and measured, and stored in some celestial control room, where softly spoken angels kept a benign vigil on the travellers below.
‘In two hundred yards,’ instructed the woman, ‘turn right.’
‘In fifty yards, turn right.’
And then:
‘Turn right.’
The solitary demonstrator was huddled in his hut, reading a newspaper. He stood as he saw me at the junction, and came out into the sleet. I noticed he had a car parked nearby, a big old Volkswagen camper van, and I wondered why he didn’t shelter in that. As I swung right, I got a good look at his gaunt grey face. He was immobile and expressionless, taking no more notice of the drenching rain than if he had been a carved wooden figure outside a drugstore. I pressed my foot on the accelerator and headed towards Edgartown, enjoying the slight sense of adventure that always comes from driving in a foreign country. My disembodied guide was silent for the next four miles or so, and I had forgotten all about her until, as I reached the outskirts of the town, she started up again.
‘In two hundred yards, turn left.’
Her voice made me jump.
‘In fifty yards, turn left.’
‘Turn left,’ she repeated, when we reached the junction.
Now she was beginning to get on my n
erves.
‘I’m sorry,’ I muttered, and took a right towards Main Street.
‘Turn around when possible.’
‘This is getting ridiculous,’ I said out loud, and pulled over. I pressed various buttons on the navigator’s console, with the aim of shutting it down. The screen changed and offered me a menu. I can’t remember all the options. One was ‘ENTER A NEW DESTINATION’. I think another was ‘RETURN TO HOME ADDRESS’. And a third – the one highlighted – was ‘REMEMBER PREVIOUS DESTINATION’.
I stared at it for a while, as the potential implications slowly filtered into my brain. Cautiously, I pressed ‘SELECT’.
The screen went blank. The device was obviously malfunctioning.
I turned off the engine and hunted around for the instructions. I even braved the sleet and opened up the back of the Ford to see if they’d been left there. I returned empty-handed and turned on the ignition. Once again the navigation system lit up. As it went through its start-up routine, communicating with its mother ship, I put the car into gear and headed down the hill.
‘Turn around when possible.’
I tapped the steering wheel with my forefingers. For the first time in my life I was confronted with the true meaning of the word predestination. I had just passed the Victorian whaling church. Before me the hill dipped towards the harbour. A few white masts were faintly visible through the dirty lace curtain of rain. I was not far from my old hotel – from the girl in the white mob cap, and the sailing prints, and old Captain John Coffin staring sternly from the wall. It was not yet eight o’clock. There was no traffic on the road. The sidewalks were deserted. I carried on down the slope, past all the empty shops with their cheery ‘closed-for-the-winter-see-you-next-year!!’ notices.
‘Turn around when possible.’
Wearily, I surrendered to fate. I flicked the indicator and turned into a little street of houses – Summer Street, I think it was called, inappropriately enough – and braked. The rain pounded on the roof of the Ford; the windscreen wiper thudded back and forth. A small black and white terrier was defecating in the gutter, with an expression of intense concentration on its ancient, wise face. Its owner, too thickly swaddled against the wet and cold for me to tell either age or sex, turned clumsily to look at me, like a spaceman manoeuvring himself on a lunar walk. In one hand was a pooper scooper, in the other a white plastic scrotum of dog’s crap. I quickly reversed back out into Main Street, swinging the wheel so hard I briefly mounted the kerb. With a thrilling screech of tyres, I set off back up the hill. The arrow swung wildly, before settling contentedly over the yellow route.