‘Mrs Bly wonders if Mr Lang didn’t actually recognise his assassin and deliberately head towards him, knowing that something like this might happen …’
‘Yes,’ I said to Rick. ‘Yes, I did like him.’
‘Well, there you go. You owe it to him. And besides, there’s another consideration.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Sid Kroll says that if you don’t fulfil your contractual obligations and finish the book, they’ll sue your ass off.’
*
And so I returned to London, and for the next six weeks I barely emerged from my flat, except once, early on, to go out for dinner with Kate. We met in a restaurant in Notting Hill Gate, midway between our homes – territory as neutral as Switzerland, and about as expensive. The manner of Adam Lang’s death seemed to have silenced even her hostility, and I suppose a kind of glamour attached to me as an eyewitness. I had turned down a score of requests to give interviews, so that she was the first person, apart from the FBI and MI5, to whom I described what had happened. I desperately wanted to tell her about my final conversation with Lang. I would have done, too. But in the way of these things, just as I was about to broach it, the waiter came over to discuss dessert, and when he left she announced she had something she wanted to tell me, first.
She was engaged to be married.
I confess it was a shock. I didn’t like the other man. You’d know him if I mentioned his name: craggy, handsome, soulful. He specialises in flying briefly into the world’s worst trouble spots and flying out again with moving descriptions of human suffering, usually his own.
‘Congratulations,’ I said.
We skipped dessert. Our affair, our relationship – our thing, whatever it was – ended ten minutes later with a peck on the cheek on the pavement outside the restaurant.
‘You were going to tell me something,’ she said, just before she got into her taxi. ‘I’m sorry I cut you off. Only I didn’t want you to say anything, you know, too personal, without telling you first about how things were with me and—’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said.
‘Are you sure you’re all right? You seem – different.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘If you ever need me, I’ll always be there for you.’
‘There?’ I said. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m here. Where’s there?’
I held open the door of her cab for her. I couldn’t help overhearing that the address she gave the driver wasn’t hers.
After that, I withdrew from the world. I spent my every waking hour with Lang, and now that he was dead, I found I suddenly had his voice. It was more a Ouija board than a keyboard that I sat down to every morning. If my fingers typed out a sentence that sounded wrong, I could almost physically feel them being drawn to the DELETE key. I was like a screenwriter producing lines with a particularly demanding star in mind: I knew he might say this, but not that; might do this scene, never that.
The basic structure of the story remained McAra’s sixteen chapters, and my method was to work always with his manuscript on my left: to retype it completely, and in the process of passing it through my brain and fingers and on to my computer, to strain it of my predecessor’s lumpy clichés. I made no mention of Emmett, of course, cutting even the anodyne quote of his which had opened the final chapter. The image of Adam Lang which I presented to the world was very much the character he’d always chosen to play: the regular guy who fell into politics almost by accident, and who rose to power because he was neither tribal nor ideological. I reconciled this with the chronology by taking up Ruth’s suggestion that Lang had turned to politics as solace for his depression when he first arrived in London. I didn’t really need to play up the misery here. Lang was dead, after all, his whole memoir suffused by the reader’s knowledge of what was to come – that ought to be sufficient, I reckoned, to keep the ghouls happy. But it was still useful to have a page or two of heroic struggle against inner demons, etc, etc.
In the superficially tedious business of politics I found solace for my hurt. I found activity, companionship, an outlet for my love of meeting new people. I found a cause that was bigger than myself. Most of all, I found Ruth …
In my telling of his story, Lang’s political involvement only really got going when Ruth came knocking at his door two years later. It sounded plausible. Who knows? It might even have been true.
I started writing Memoirs by Adam Lang on February the tenth, and promised Maddox I’d have the whole thing done, all 160,000 words, by the end of March. That meant I had to produce 3,400 words a day, every day. I had a chart on the wall, and marked it up each morning. I was like Captain Scott returning from the South Pole: I had to make those daily distances, or I’d fall irrevocably behind and perish in a white wilderness of blank pages. It was a hard slog, especially as almost no lines of McAra’s were salvageable, except, curiously, the very last one in the manuscript, which had made me groan aloud when I read it on Martha’s Vineyard: ‘Ruth and I look forward to the future, whatever it may hold.’ Read that, you bastards, I thought, as I typed it in on the evening of the thirtieth of March: read that, and close this book without a catch in your throat.
I added ‘THE END’ and then, I guess, I had a kind of nervous breakdown.
*
I dispatched one copy of the manuscript to New York, and another to the office of the Adam Lang Foundation in London, for the personal attention of Mrs Ruth Lang – or, as I should more properly have styled her by then, Baroness Lang of Calderthorpe, the government having just given her a seat in the House of Lords as a mark of the nation’s respect.
I hadn’t heard anything from Ruth since the assassination. I’d written to her while I was still in hospital: one of more than a hundred thousand correspondents who were reported to have sent their condolences, so I wasn’t surprised that all I got back was a standard printed reply. But a week after she received the manuscript, a handwritten message arrived on the red-embossed notepaper of the House of Lords:
You have done all that I ever hoped you wd do – and more! You have caught his tone beautifully & brought him back to life – all his wonderful humour & compassion & energy. Pls. come & see me here in the HoL when you have a spare moment. It wd be great to catch up. Martha’s V. seems a v. long time ago, & a long way away! Bless you again for yr talent. And it is a proper book!!
Much love,
R.
Maddox was equally effusive, but without the love. The first printing was to be four hundred thousand copies. The publication date was the end of May.
So that was that. The job was done.
It didn’t take me long to realise I was in a bad state. I’d been kept going, I suppose, by Lang’s ‘wonderful humour & compassion & energy’, but once he was written out of me, I collapsed like an empty suit of clothes. For years I had survived by inhabiting one life after another. But Rick had insisted we wait until the Lang memoirs were published – my ‘breakthrough book’, he called it – before negotiating new and better contracts, with the result that, for the first time I could remember, I had no work to go to. I was afflicted by a horrible combination of lethargy and panic. I could barely summon the energy to get out of bed before noon, and when I did I moped on the sofa in my dressing gown, watching daytime television. I didn’t eat much. I stopped opening my letters, or answering the phone. I didn’t shave. I only left the flat for any length of time on Mondays and Thursdays, to avoid seeing my cleaner – I wanted to fire her, but I didn’t have the nerve – and then I either sat in a park, if it was fine, or in a nearby greasy café, if it wasn’t; and, this being England, it mostly wasn’t.
And yet, paradoxically, at the same time as being sunk in a stupor I was also permanently agitated. Nothing was in proportion. I fretted absurdly about trivialities – where I’d put a pair of shoes, for instance, or if it was wise to keep all my money with the same bank. This nerviness made me feel physically shaky, often breathless, and it was in this spirit, late one nig
ht, about two months after I finished the book, that I made what to me, in my condition, was a calamitous discovery.
I’d run out of whisky and knew I had about ten minutes to get to the little supermarket on Ladbroke Grove before it closed. It was towards the end of May, dark and raining. I grabbed the nearest jacket and was halfway down the stairs when I realised it was the one I’d been wearing when Lang was killed. It was torn at the front and stained with blood. In one pocket was the recording of my final interview with Adam, and in the other the keys to the Ford Escape SUV.
The car! I had forgotten all about it. It was still parked at Logan Airport! It was costing eighteen dollars a day! I must owe thousands!
To you, no doubt – and indeed to me, now – my panic seems ridiculous. But I raced back up those stairs with my pulse drumming. It was after six in New York and Rhinehart Inc. had closed for the day. There was no reply from the Martha’s Vineyard house, either. In despair, I called Rick at home and, without preliminaries, began gabbling out the details of the crisis. He listened for about thirty seconds, then told me roughly to shut up.
‘This was all sorted out weeks ago. The guys at the car park got suspicious and called the cops, and they called Rhinehart’s office. Maddox paid the bill. I didn’t bother you with it because I knew you were busy. Now listen to me, my friend. It seems to me you’ve got a nasty case of delayed shock. You need help. I know a shrink—’
I hung up.
When I finally fell asleep on the sofa, I had my usual recurrent dream about McAra – the one in which he floated fully clothed in the sea beside me, and told me he wasn’t going to make it: You go on without me. But this time, instead of ending with my waking up, the dream lasted longer. A wave took McAra away, in his heavy raincoat and rubber-soled boots, until he became only a dark shape in the distance, face down in the shallow foam, sliding back and forth at the edge of the beach. I waded towards him and managed to get my hands around his bulky body and, with a supreme effort, to roll him over, and then suddenly he was staring up naked from a white slab, with Adam Lang bending over him.
The next morning I left the flat early and walked down the hill to the tube station. It really wouldn’t take much to kill myself, I thought. One swift leap out in front of the approaching train, and then oblivion. Much better than drowning. But it was only the briefest of impulses, not least because I couldn’t bear the idea of someone having to clean up afterwards. (‘They found his head on the terminal roof …’) Instead I boarded the train and travelled to the end of the line at Hammersmith, then crossed the road to the other platform. Motion, that’s the cure for depression, I decided. You have to keep moving. At Embankment I changed again for Morden, which always sounds to me like the end of the world. We passed through Balham and I got off two stops later.
It didn’t take me long to find the grave. I remembered Ruth had said the funeral was at Streatham Cemetery. I looked up his name and a groundsman pointed the way towards the plot. I passed stone angels with vulture’s wings, and mossy cherubs with lichened curls, Victorian sarcophagi the size of garden sheds, and crosses garlanded with marble roses. But McAra’s contribution to the necropolis was characteristically plain. No flowery mottos – no ‘Say not the struggle naught availeth’ or ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant’ for our Mike. Merely a slab of limestone with his name and dates.
It was a late spring morning, drowsy with pollen and petrol fumes. In the distance, the traffic rolled up Garratt Lane towards central London. I squatted on my haunches and pressed my palms to the dewy grass. As I’ve said before, I’m not the superstitious type, but at that moment I did feel a current of relief pass through me, as if I’d closed a circle, or fulfilled a task. I sensed he had wanted me to come here.
That was when I noticed, resting against the stone, half obscured by the overgrown grass, a small bunch of shrivelled flowers. There was a card attached, written in an elegant hand, just legible after successive London downpours: ‘In memory of a good friend and loyal colleague. Rest in peace, dear Mike. Amelia.’
*
When I got back to my flat, I called her on her mobile number. She didn’t seem surprised to hear from me.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I was just thinking about you.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘I’m reading your book – Adam’s book.’
‘And?’
‘It’s good. No, actually, it’s better than good. It’s like having him back. There’s only one element missing, I think.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you if I see you. Perhaps we’ll get the opportunity to talk at the reception tonight.’
‘What reception?’
She laughed.
‘Your reception, you idiot. The launch of your book. Don’t tell me you haven’t been invited.’
I hadn’t spoken to anyone for a long time. It took me a second or two to reply.
‘I don’t know whether I have or not. To be honest, I haven’t checked my post in a while.’
‘You must have been invited.’
‘Don’t you believe it. Authors tend to be funny about having their ghosts staring at them over the canapés.’
‘Well, the author isn’t going to be there, is he?’ she said. She wanted to sound brisk, but she came across as desperately hollow and strained. ‘You should go, whether you’ve been invited or not. In fact, if you really haven’t been invited, you can come as my guest. My invitation has “Amelia Bly plus one” written on it.’
The prospect of returning to society made my heartbeat start to race again.
‘But don’t you want to take someone else? What about your husband?’
‘Oh, him. That didn’t work out, I’m afraid. I hadn’t realised quite how bored he was with being my “plus one”.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Liar,’ she said. ‘I’ll meet you at the end of Downing Street at seven o’clock. The party’s just across Whitehall. I’ll only wait five minutes, so if you decide you do want to come, don’t be late.’
*
After I finished speaking to Amelia, I went though my weeks of accumulated mail carefully. There was no invitation to the party. Bearing in mind the circumstances of my last encounter with Ruth, I wasn’t too surprised. There was, however, a copy of the finished book. It was nicely produced. The cover, with an eye to the American market, was a photograph of Lang, looking debonair, addressing a joint session of the US Congress. The photographs inside did not include any of the ones from Cambridge that McAra had discovered: I hadn’t passed them on to the picture researcher. I flicked through to the acknowledgements, which I had written in Lang’s voice:
This book would not exist without the dedication, support, wisdom and friendship of the late Michael McAra, who collaborated with me on its composition from the first page to the last. Thank you, Mike – for everything.
My name wasn’t mentioned. Much to Rick’s annoyance, I’d forgone my collaborator credit. I didn’t tell him why, which was that I thought it was safer that way. The expurgated contents and my anonymity would, I hoped, serve as a message to whoever might be paying attention out there that there would be no further trouble from me.
I soaked in the bath for an hour that afternoon and contemplated whether or not to go to the reception. As usual, I was able to spin out my procrastination for hours. I told myself I still hadn’t necessarily made up my mind as I shaved off my beard, and as I dressed in a decent dark suit and white shirt, and as I went out into the street and hailed a taxi, and even as I stood on the corner of Downing Street at five minutes to seven: it still wasn’t too late to turn back. Across the broad, ceremonial boulevard of Whitehall, I could see the cars and taxis pulling up outside the Banqueting House, where I guessed the party must be taking place. Photographers’ flashlights winked in the evening sunshine, a pale reminder of Lang’s old glory days.
I kept looking for Amelia, up the street towards the mounte
d sentry outside Horse Guards, and down it again, past the Foreign Office, to the Victorian Gothic madhouse of the Palace of Westminster. A sign on the opposite side of the entrance to Downing Street pointed to the Cabinet War Rooms, with a drawing of Churchill, complete with V-sign and cigar. Whitehall always reminds me of the Blitz. I can picture it from the images I was brought up on as a child: the sandbags, the white tape across the windows, the searchlights blindly fingering the darkness, the drone of the bombers, the crump of high explosive, the red glow from the fires in the East End. Thirty thousand dead in London alone. Now that, as my father would have said, is what you call a war – not this drip, drip, drip of inconvenience and anxiety and folly. Yet Churchill used to stroll to parliament through St James’s Park, raising his hat to passers-by, with just a solitary detective walking ten feet behind him.
I was still thinking about it when Big Ben finished chiming the hour. I peered left and right again, but there was still no sign of Amelia, which surprised me as I had her down as the punctual type. But then I felt a touch on my sleeve, and turned to find her standing behind me. She had emerged from the sunless canyon of Downing Street in her dark blue suit, carrying a briefcase. She looked older, faded, and just for a moment I glimpsed her future: a tiny flat, a smart address, a cat. We exchanged polite hellos.