Christ, I thought, he thinks I’m a lunatic.
‘Don’t worry,’ Ruth told him. ‘He isn’t always such a jerk.’
Five
* * *
It is essential for the ghost to make the subject feel completely comfortable in his or her company.
Ghostwriting
* * *
‘BRILLIANT OPENING LINE,’ said Amelia as we drove back to the house. ‘Did they teach you that at ghost school?’
We were sitting together in the back of the minivan. The secretary who’d just flown in from New York – her name was Lucy – and the three protection officers occupied the seats in front of us. Through the windscreen I could see the Jaguar immediately ahead carrying the Langs. It was starting to get dark. Pinned by two sets of headlights, the scrub oaks loomed and writhed.
‘It was particularly tactful,’ she went on, ‘given that you’re replacing a dead man.’
‘All right,’ I groaned. ‘Stop.’
‘But you do have one thing going for you,’ she said, turning her large blue eyes on me, and speaking quietly so that no one else could hear. ‘Almost uniquely among all members of the human race, you seem to be trusted by Ruth Lang. Now why’s that, do you suppose?’
‘There’s no accounting for taste.’
‘True. Perhaps she thinks you’ll do what she tells you.’
‘Perhaps she does. Don’t ask me.’ The last thing I needed was to get stuck in the middle of this cat fight. ‘Listen, Amelia – can I call you Amelia? As far as I’m concerned, I’m helping write a book. I don’t want to get caught up in any palace intrigues.’
‘Of course not. You just want to do your job and get out of here.’
‘Now you’re mocking me again.’
‘You make it so easy.’
After that I shut up for a while. I could see why Ruth didn’t like her. She was a shade too clever and several shades too blonde for comfort, especially from a wife’s point of view. In fact it struck me as I sat there, passively inhaling her Chanel, that she might be having an affair with Lang. That would explain a lot. He’d been noticeably cool towards her at the airport, and isn’t that always the surest sign? In which case, no wonder they were so paranoid about confidentiality. There could be enough material here to keep the tabloids happy for weeks.
We were halfway down the track when Amelia said: ‘You haven’t told me what you thought of the manuscript.’
‘Honestly? I haven’t had so much fun since I read the memoirs of Leonid Brezhnev.’ She didn’t smile. ‘I don’t understand how it happened,’ I went on. ‘You people were running the country not that long ago. Surely one of you had English as a first language?’
‘Mike …’ she began, and then stopped. ‘But I don’t want to speak ill of the dead.’
‘Why make them an exception?’
‘All right then: Mike. The problem was, Adam passed it all over to Mike to deal with right at the beginning, and poor Mike was simply swamped by it. He disappeared to Cambridge to do the research and we barely saw him for a year.’
‘Cambridge?’
‘Cambridge – where the Lang Papers are stored. You’ve really done your homework, haven’t you? Two thousand boxes of documents. Two hundred and fifty metres of shelving. One million separate papers, or thereabouts – nobody’s ever bothered to count.’
‘McAra went through all that?’ I was incredulous. My idea of a rigorous research schedule was a week with a tape recorder sitting opposite my client, fleshed out by whatever tissue of inaccuracies Google had to offer.
‘No,’ she said irritably. ‘He didn’t go through every box, obviously, but enough so that when he finally did emerge, he was completely overwrought and exhausted. I think he simply lost sight of what he was supposed to be doing. That seems to have triggered a clinical depression, though none of us noticed it at the time. He didn’t even sit down with Adam to go over it all until just before Christmas. And of course by then it was far too late.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, twisting in my seat so that I could see her properly. ‘You’re telling me that a man who’s being paid ten million dollars to write his memoirs within two years turns the whole project over to someone who knows nothing about producing books, and who is then allowed to wander off on his own for twelve months?’
Amelia put a finger to her lips, and gestured with her eyes to the front of the car. ‘You’re very loud, for a ghost.’
‘But surely,’ I whispered, ‘a former prime minister must recognise how important his memoirs are to him.’
‘If you want the honest truth, I don’t think Adam ever had the slightest intention of producing this book within two years. And he thought that that would be fine. So he let Mike take it over as a kind of reward for sticking by him all the way through. But then, when Marty Rhinehart made it clear he was going to hold him to the original contract, and when the publishers actually read what Mike had produced …’ Her voice trailed off.
‘Couldn’t he just have paid the money back, and started all over again?’
‘I think you know the answer to that question better than I do.’
‘He wouldn’t have got nearly such a large advance.’
‘Two years after leaving office? He wouldn’t have got even half.’
‘And nobody saw this coming?’
‘I raised it with Adam every so often. But history doesn’t really interest him – it never has, not even his own. He was much more concerned with getting his foundation established.’
I sat back in my seat. I could see how easily it all must have happened: McAra, the party hack turned Stakhanovite of the archive, blindly riveting together his vast and useless sheets of facts; Lang, always a man for the bigger picture – ‘the future not the past’: wasn’t that one of his slogans? – being feted around the American lecture circuit, preferring to live, not relive, his life; and then the horrible realisation that the great memoir project was in trouble, followed, I assumed, by recriminations, the sundering of old friendships, and suicidal anxiety.
‘It must have been rough on all of you.’
‘It was. Especially after they discovered Mike’s body. I offered to go and do the identification, but Adam felt it was his responsibility. It was an awful thing to go through. Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty. So please, if you don’t mind, no more jokes about ghosts.’
I was on the point of asking her about the rendition stories in the weekend papers when the brake lights of the Jaguar glowed, and we came to a stop.
‘Well, here we are again,’ she said, and for the first time I detected a hint of weariness in her voice. ‘Home.’
It was fairly dark by this time – half past five or thereabouts – and the temperature had dropped with the sun. I stood beside the minivan and watched as Lang ducked out of his car and was swept through the door by the usual swirl of bodyguards and staff. They had him inside so quickly, one might have thought an assassin with a telescopic sight had been spotted in the woods. Immediately, all along the façade of the big house, the windows started lighting up, and it was possible, briefly, to imagine that this was a focus of real power, and not merely some lingering parody of it. I felt very much an outsider, unsure of what I was supposed to do, and still twisting with embarrassment over my gaffe at the airport. So I lingered outside in the cold for a while. To my surprise, the person who realised I was missing and who came out to fetch me was Lang.
‘Hi, man!’ he called from the doorway. ‘What on earth are you doing out here? Isn’t anybody looking after you? Come and have a drink.’
He touched my shoulder as I entered and steered me down the passage towards the room where I’d had coffee that morning. He’d already taken off his jacket and tie and pulled on a thick grey sweater.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to say hello properly at the airport. What would you like?’
‘What are you having?’ Dear God, I prayed, let it be something alcoholic.
‘Iced tea.’
/>
‘Iced tea would be fine.’
‘You’re sure? I’d sooner have something stronger, but Ruth would kill me.’ He called to one of the secretaries: ‘Luce, ask Dep to bring us some tea, would you, sweetheart? So,’ he said, plonking himself down in the centre of the sofa and flinging out his arms to rest along its back, ‘you have to be me for a month, God help you.’ He swiftly crossed his legs, his right ankle resting on his left knee. He drummed his fingers, wiggled his foot and inspected it for a moment, then returned his cloudless gaze to me.
‘I hope it will be a fairly painless procedure, for both of us,’ I said, and hesitated, unsure how to address him.
‘Adam,’ he said. ‘Call me Adam.’
There always comes a moment, I find, in dealing with a very famous person face to face, when you feel as if you’re in a dream, and this was it for me: a genuine out-of-body experience. I beheld myself as if from the ceiling, conversing in an apparently relaxed manner with a world statesman in the home of a media billionaire. He was actually going out of his way to be nice to me. He needed me. What a lark, I thought.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I have to tell you I’ve never met an ex-prime minister before.’
‘Well,’ he smiled, ‘I’ve never met a ghost, so we’re even. Sid Kroll says you’re the man for the job. Ruth agrees. So how exactly are we supposed to go about this?’
‘I’ll interview you. I’ll turn your answers into prose. Where necessary, I might have to add linking passages, trying to imitate your voice. I should say, incidentally, that anything I write you’ll be able to correct afterwards. I don’t want you to think I’ll be putting words in your mouth that you wouldn’t actually want to use.’
‘And how long will this take?’
‘For a big book, I’d normally do fifty or sixty hours of interviews. That would give me about four hundred thousand words, which I’d then edit down to a hundred thousand.’
‘But we’ve already got a manuscript.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but frankly, it’s not really publishable. It’s research notes, it’s not a book. It doesn’t have any kind of voice.’ Lang pulled a face. He clearly didn’t see the problem. ‘Having said that,’ I added quickly, ‘the work won’t be entirely wasted. We can ransack it for facts and quotations, and I don’t mind the structure, actually – the sixteen chapters – although I’d like to open differently, find something more intimate.’
The Vietnamese housekeeper brought in our tea. She was dressed entirely in black – black silk trousers and a collarless black shirt. I wanted to introduce myself but when she handed me my glass, she avoided meeting my gaze.
‘You heard about Mike?’ asked Lang.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
Lang glanced away, towards the darkened window. ‘We should put something nice about him in the book. His mother would like it.’
‘That should be easy enough.’
‘He was with me a long time. Since before I became prime minister. He came up through the party. I inherited him from my predecessor. You think you know someone pretty well, and then …’ He shrugged and stared into the night.
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. It’s in the nature of my work to act as something of a confessor figure, and I have learnt over the years to behave like a shrink – to sit in silence and give the client time. I wondered what he was seeing out there. After about half a minute he appeared to remember I was still in the room.
‘Right. How long do you need from me?’
‘Full time?’ I sipped my drink and tried not to wince at the sweet taste. ‘If we work really hard we should be able to break the back of it in a week.’
‘A week?’ Lang performed a little facial mime of alarm.
I resisted the temptation to point out that ten million dollars for a week’s work wasn’t exactly the national minimum wage. ‘I may need to come back to you to plug any holes, but if you can give me till Friday, I’ll have enough to rewrite most of this draft. The important thing is that we start tomorrow, and get the early years out of the way.’
‘Fine. The sooner we get it done the better.’ Suddenly Lang was leaning forwards, a study in frank intimacy, his elbows on his knees, his glass between his hands. ‘Ruth’s going stir crazy out here. I keep telling her to go back to London while I finish the book, see the kids, but she won’t leave me. I love your work, I have to say.’
I almost choked on my tea. ‘You’ve read some of it?’ I tried to imagine what footballer, or rock star, or magician, or reality game show contestant might have come to the attention of a prime minister.
‘Sure,’ he said, without a flicker of doubt. ‘There was some fellow we were on holiday with …’
‘Christy Costello?’
‘Christy Costello! Brilliant. If you can make sense out of his life, you might even be able to make sense out of mine.’ He jumped up and shook my hand. ‘It’s good to meet you, man. We’ll make a start first thing tomorrow. I’ll get Amelia to fix you a car to take you back to your hotel.’ And then he suddenly started singing:
Once in a lifetime
You get to have it all
But you never knew you had it
Till you go and lose it all.
He pointed at me. ‘Christy Costello, “Once in a Lifetime”, nineteen seventy’ – he wobbled his hand speculatively, his head cocked, his eyes half closed in concentration – ‘seven?’
‘Eight.’
‘Nineteen seventy-eight! Those were the days! I can feel it all coming back.’
‘Save it for tomorrow,’ I said.
*
‘How did it go?’ enquired Amelia as she showed me to the door.
‘Pretty well, I think. It was all very friendly. He kept calling me “man”.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he always does that when he can’t remember someone’s name.’
‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘I’ll need a private room where I can do the interviewing. I’ll need a secretary to transcribe his answers as we go along – every time we break I’ll bring the fresh tapes out to her. I’ll need my own copy of the existing manuscript on disk – yes, I know,’ I said, holding up my hand to cut off her objections, ‘I won’t take it out of the building. But I’m going to have to cut and paste it into the new material, and also try to rewrite it so that it sounds vaguely like it was produced by a human being.’
She was writing all this down in her black and red book. ‘Anything else?’
‘How about dinner?’
‘Good night,’ she said firmly, and closed the door.
One of the policemen gave me a ride back to Edgartown. He was as morose as his colleague on the gate. ‘I hope you get this book done soon,’ he said. ‘Me and the lads are getting pretty brassed off stuck out here.’
He dropped me at the hotel and said he’d pick me up again in the morning. I had just opened the door to my room when my cell phone rang. It was Kate.
‘Are you okay?’ she said. ‘I got your message. You sounded a bit – odd.’
‘Did I? Sorry. I’m fine now.’ I fought back the impulse to ask her where she’d been when I called.
‘So? Have you met him?’
‘I have. I’ve just come from him.’
‘And?’ Before I could answer, she said: ‘Don’t tell me: charming.’
I briefly held the phone away from my ear and gave it the finger.
‘You certainly pick your moments,’ she went on. ‘Did you see yesterday’s papers? You must be the first recorded instance of a rat actually boarding a sinking ship.’
‘Yes, of course I saw them,’ I said defensively, ‘and I’m going to ask him about it.’
‘When?’
‘When the moment arises.’
She made an explosive noise which somehow managed to combine hilarity, fury, contempt and disbelief. ‘Well, yes, do ask him. Ask him why he illegally kidnaps British citizens in another country and hands them over to be tortured. Ask him if he kno
ws about the techniques the CIA uses to simulate drowning. Ask him what he plans to say to the widow and children of the man who died of a heart attack—’
‘Hold on,’ I interrupted, ‘you lost me after drowning.’
‘I’m seeing someone else,’ she said.
‘Good,’ I said, and hung up.
After that there didn’t seem much else to do except go down to the bar and get drunk.
It was decorated to look like the kind of place Captain Ahab might fancy dropping into after a hard day at the harpoon. The seats and tables were made out of old barrels. There were antique seine nets and lobster traps hanging on the roughly planked walls, along with schooners in bottles and sepia photographs of deep-sea anglers standing proudly beside the suspended corpses of their prey: the fishermen would now all be as dead as their fish, I thought, and such was my mood the notion pleased me. A big television above the bar was showing an ice hockey game. I ordered a beer and a bowl of clam chowder and sat where I could see the screen. I know nothing about ice hockey, but sport is a great place to lose yourself for a while, and I’ll watch anything available.
‘You’re English?’ said a man at a table in the corner. He must have heard me ordering. He was the only other customer in the bar.
‘And so are you,’ I said.
‘Indeed I am. Are you here on holiday?’
He had a clipped, hello-old-chap-fancy-a-round-of-golf sort of a voice. That, and the striped shirt with the frayed plain collar, the double-breasted blazer, the tarnished brass buttons, and the blue silk handkerchief in the top pocket, all flashed bore, bore, bore as clearly as the Edgartown lighthouse.
‘No. Working.’ I resumed watching the game.
‘So what’s your line?’ He had a glass of something clear with ice and a slice of lemon in it. Vodka and tonic? Gin and tonic? I was desperate not to be trapped into conversation with him.
‘Just this and that. Excuse me.’
I got up and went to the lavatory and washed my hands. The face in the mirror was that of a man who’d slept six hours out of the past forty. When I returned to the table my chowder had arrived. I ordered another drink, but pointedly didn’t offer to buy one for my compatriot. I could feel him watching me.