The Ghost Read online

  She was wringing wet from the pouring rain, but she didn’t seem to notice. Instead, she launched into a passionate speech about the local elections. Until that point, I’m ashamed to say, I didn’t even know there were any local elections, but I had the good sense to pretend that I did …

  I looked up. Through the window I could see Ruth marching determinedly across the dunes, into the wind, on yet another of her brooding, solitary walks, with only her trailing bodyguard for company. I watched till she was out of sight, then went back to my work.

  *

  I carried on for a couple of hours, until about one o’clock or so, and then I heard a very light tapping of fingertips on wood. It made me jump.

  ‘Mister?’ came a timid female voice. ‘Sir? You want lunch?’

  I opened the door to find Dep, the Vietnamese housekeeper, in her black silk uniform. She was about fifty, as tiny as a bird. I felt that if I sneezed I would have blown her from one end of the house to the other.

  ‘That would be very nice. Thanks.’

  ‘Here, or in kitchen?’

  ‘The kitchen would be great.’

  After she’d shuffled away on her slippered feet, I turned to face my room. I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer. Treat it like writing, I said to myself: go for it. I unzipped my suitcase and laid it on the bed. Then, taking a deep breath, I slid open the doors to the closet and began removing McAra’s clothes from their hangers, piling them over my arm – cheap shirts, off-the-peg jackets, chain-store trousers, and the sort of ties you buy at the airport: nothing handmade in your wardrobe, was there, Mike? He had been a big fellow, I realised, as I felt all those supersized collars and great hooped waistbands: much larger than I am. And, of course, it was exactly as I’d dreaded: the feel of the unfamiliar fabric, even the clatter of the metal hangers on their chrome-plated rail, was enough to breach the barrier of a quarter of a century’s careful defences and plunge me straight back into my parents’ bedroom, which I’d steeled myself to clear three months after my mother’s funeral.

  It’s the possessions of the dead that always get to me. Is there anything sadder than the clutter they leave behind? Who says that all that’s left of us is love? All that was left of McAra was stuff. I heaped it over the armchair, then reached up to the shelf above the clothes rail to pull down his suitcase. I’d expected it would be empty, but as I took a hold of the handle, something slid around inside. Ah, I thought. At last. The secret document.

  The case was huge and ugly, made of moulded red plastic, too bulky for me to manage easily, and it hit the floor with a thud. It seemed to reverberate through the quiet house. I waited a moment, then gently laid the suitcase flat on the floor, knelt in front of it and pressed the catches. They flew up with a loud and simultaneous snap.

  It was the kind of luggage that hasn’t been made for more than a decade, except perhaps in the less fashionable parts of Albania. Inside it had a hideously patterned shiny plastic lining, from which dangled frilly elastic bands. The contents consisted of a single large padded envelope addressed to M. McAra Esq., care of a post office box number in Vineyard Haven. A label on the back showed that it had come from The Adam Lang Archive Centre in Cambridge, England. I opened it and pulled out a handful of photographs and photocopies, together with a compliments slip from Dr Julia Crawford-Jones, PhD, Director.

  One of the photographs I recognised at once: Lang in his chicken outfit, from the Footlights Revue in the early seventies. There were a dozen other production stills showing the whole cast; a set of photographs of Lang punting, wearing a straw boater and a striped blazer; and three or four of him at a riverside picnic, apparently taken on the same day as the punting. The photocopies were of various Footlights programmes and theatre reviews from Cambridge, plus a lot of local newspaper reports of the Greater London Council elections of May 1977, and Lang’s original party membership card. It was only when I saw the date on the card that I rocked back on my heels. It was from 1975.

  I started to re-examine the package with more care after that, beginning with the election stories. At first glance I thought they’d come from the London Evening Standard, but I saw now they were from the news sheet of a political party – Lang’s party – and that he was actually pictured in a group as an election volunteer. It was hard to make him out in the poorly reproduced photocopy. His hair was long. His clothes were shabby. But that was him, all right, one of a team knocking on doors in a council estate. ‘Canvasser: A. Lang.’

  I was more irritated than anything. It certainly didn’t strike me as sinister. Everybody tends to heighten their own reality. We start with a private fantasy about our lives and perhaps one day, for fun, we turn it into an anecdote. No harm is done. Over the years, the anecdote is repeated so regularly it becomes accepted as a fact. Quite soon, to contradict this fact would be embarrassing. In time, we probably come to believe it was true all along. And by these slow accretions of myth, like a coral reef, the historical record takes shape. I could see how it would have suited Lang to pretend he’d only gone into politics because he’d fancied a girl. It flattered him, by making him look less ambitious, and it flattered her, by making her look more influential than she probably was. Audiences liked it. Everyone was happy. But now the question arose: what was I supposed to do?

  It’s not an uncommon dilemma in the ghosting business, and the etiquette is simple: you draw the discrepancy to the author’s attention, and leave it up to them to decide how to resolve it. The collaborator’s responsibility is not to insist on the absolute truth: if it were, our end of the publishing industry would collapse under the dead weight of reality. Just as the beautician doesn’t tell her client that she has a face like a sack of toads, so the ghost doesn’t confront the autobiographer with the fact that half their treasured reminiscences are false. Don’t dictate, facilitate: that is our motto. Obviously, McAra had failed to observe this sacred rule. He must have had his suspicions about what he was being told, ordered up a parcel of research from the archives, and then removed the ex-prime minister’s most polished anecdote from his memoirs. What an amateur! I could imagine how well that must have been received. No doubt it helped explain why relations had become so strained.

  I turned my attention back to the Cambridge material. There was a strange kind of innocence about these faded jeunesse dorée, stranded in that lost but happy valley that lay somewhere between the twin cultural peaks of hippydom and punk. Spiritually, they looked far closer to the sixties than the seventies. The girls had long lacy dresses in floral print, with plunging necklines, and big straw hats to keep off the sun. The men’s hair was as long as the women’s. In the only colour picture, Lang was holding a bottle of champagne in one hand and what looked very much like a joint in the other; a girl seemed to be feeding him strawberries, while in the background a bare-chested man gave a thumbs-up sign.

  The biggest of the cast photographs showed eight young people grouped together, under a spotlight, their arms outstretched, as if they had just finished some show-stopping song-and-dance routine in a cabaret. Lang was on the far right-hand side, wearing his striped blazer, a bow tie and a straw boater. There were two girls in leotards, fishnet tights and high heels: one with short blonde hair, the other dark frizzy curls, possibly a redhead (it was impossible to tell from the monochrome photo): both pretty. Two of the men apart from Lang I recognised: one was now a famous comedian, the other an actor. A third man looked older than the others: a postgraduate researcher, perhaps. Everyone was wearing gloves.

  Glued to the back was a typed slip listing the names of the performers, along with their colleges: G. W. Syme (Caius), W. K. Innes (Pembroke), A. Parke (Newnham), P. Emmett (St John’s), A. D. Martin (King’s), E. D. Vaux (Christ’s), H. C. Martineau (Girton), A. P. Lang (Jesus).

  There was a copyright stamp – Cambridge Evening News – in the bottom left-hand corner, and scrawled diagonally next to it in blue biro was a telephone number, prefixed by the British international dialling code. No doubt M
cAra, indefatigable fact-hound that he was, had hunted down one of the cast, and I wondered which of them it was, and if he or she could remember the events depicted in the photographs. Purely on a whim, I took out my mobile and dialled the number.

  Instead of the familiar two-beat British ringing tone, I heard the single sustained note of the American. I let it ring for a long while. Just as I was about to give up, a man answered, cautiously.

  ‘Richard Rycart.’

  The voice, with its slight colonial twang – ‘Richard Roicart’ – was unmistakably that of the former Foreign Secretary. He sounded suspicious. ‘Who is this?’ he asked.

  I hung up at once. In fact, I was so alarmed, I actually threw the phone on to the bed. It lay there for about thirty seconds, and then started to ring. I darted over and grabbed it – the incoming number was listed as ‘withheld’ – and quickly switched it off. For half a minute I was too stunned to move.

  I told myself not to rush to any conclusions. I didn’t know for certain that McAra had written down the number, or even rung it. I checked the package to see when it had been dispatched. It had left the United Kingdom on January the third – nine days before McAra died.

  It suddenly seemed vitally important for me to get every remaining trace of my predecessor out of that room. Hurriedly, I stripped the last of his clothes from the closet, upending the drawers of socks and underpants into his suitcase (I remember he wore thick knee-length socks and baggy white Y-fronts: this boy was old-fashioned all the way through). There were no personal papers that I could find – no diary or address book, letters or even books – and I presumed they must have been taken away by the police immediately after his death. From the bathroom I removed his blue plastic disposable razor, toothbrush, comb and the rest of it, and then the job was done: all tangible effects of Michael McAra, former aide to the Right Honourable Adam Lang, were crammed into a suitcase and ready to be dumped. I dragged it out into the corridor and around to the solarium. It could stay there until the summer, for all I cared: just as long as I didn’t have to see it again. It took me a moment to recover my breath.

  And yet, even as I headed back towards his – my – our – room, I could sense his presence, loping along clumsily at my heels. ‘Fuck off, McAra,’ I muttered to myself. ‘Just fuck off and leave me alone to finish this book and get out of here.’ I stuffed the photographs and photocopies back into their original envelope and looked around for somewhere to hide it, then I stopped and asked myself why I should want to conceal it. It wasn’t exactly top secret. It had nothing to do with war crimes. It was just a young man, a student actor, more than thirty years earlier, on a sunlit river bank, drinking champagne with his friends. There could be any number of reasons why Rycart’s number was on the back of that photo. But still, somehow, it demanded to be hidden, and in the absence of any other bright idea, I’m ashamed to say I resorted to the cliché of lifting the mattress and stuffing it underneath.

  ‘Lunch, sir,’ called Dep softly from the corridor. I wheeled round. I wasn’t sure if she’d seen me, but then I wasn’t sure it mattered: compared to what else she must have witnessed in the house over the past few weeks, my own strange behaviour would surely have seemed small beer.

  I followed her into the kitchen. ‘Is Mrs Lang around?’ I said.

  ‘No, sir. She go Vineyard Haven. Shopping.’

  She had fixed me a club sandwich. I sat on a tall stool at the breakfast bar and compelled myself to eat it, while she wrapped things in tin foil and put them back in one of Rhinehart’s array of six stainless-steel fridges. I considered what I should do. Normally I would have forced myself back to my desk and continued writing all afternoon. But for just about the first time in my career as a ghost, I was blocked. I’d wasted half the morning composing a charmingly intimate reminiscence of an event which hadn’t happened – couldn’t have happened, because Ruth Lang hadn’t arrived to start her career in London until 1976, by which time her future husband had already been a party member for a year.

  Even the thought of tackling the Cambridge section, which once I’d regarded as words in the bank, now led me to confront a blank wall. Who was he, this happy-go-lucky, girl-chasing, politically allergic would-be actor? What suddenly turned him into a party activist, trailing around council estates, if it wasn’t meeting Ruth? It made no sense to me. That was when I realised I had a fundamental problem with our former prime minister. He was not a psychologically credible character. In the flesh, or on the screen, playing the part of a statesman, he seemed to have a strong personality. But somehow, when one sat down to think about him, he vanished. This made it almost impossible for me to do my job: unlike any number of show-business and sporting weirdos I had worked with in the past, when it came to Lang, I simply couldn’t make him up.

  I took out my cell phone and considered calling Rycart. But the more I reflected on how the conversation might go, the more reluctant I became to initiate it. What exactly was I supposed to say? ‘Oh, hello, you don’t know me, but I’ve replaced Mike McAra as Adam Lang’s ghost. I believe he may have spoken to you a day or two before he was washed up dead on a beach.’ I put the phone back in my pocket, and suddenly I couldn’t rid my mind of the image of McAra’s heavy body rolling back and forth in the surf. Did he hit rocks, or was he run straight up on to soft sand? What was the name of the place where he’d been found? Rick had mentioned it when we had lunch at his club in London. Lambert something-or-other.

  ‘Excuse me, Dep,’ I said to the housekeeper.

  She straightened from the fridge. She had such a sweetly sympathetic face.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Do you happen to know if there’s a map of the island I could borrow?’

  Ten

  * * *

  It is perfectly possible to write a book for someone, having done nothing but listen to their words; but extra research often helps to provide more material and descriptive ideas.

  Ghostwriting

  * * *

  IT LOOKED TO be about ten miles away, on the northwestern shore of the Vineyard. Lambert’s Cove: that was it.

  There was something beguiling about the names of the locations all around it: Blackwater Brook, Uncle Seth’s Pond, Indian Hill, Old Herring Creek Road. It was like a map from a children’s adventure story, and in a strange way that was how I conceived of my plan: as a kind of amusing excursion. Dep suggested I borrow a bicycle – oh yes, Mr Rhinehart, he keep many, many bicycles, for use of guests – and something about the idea of that appealed to me as well, even though I hadn’t ridden a bike for years, and even though I knew, at some deeper level, no good would come of it. More than three weeks had passed since the corpse had been recovered. What would there be to see? But curiosity is a powerful human impulse – some distance below sex and greed, I grant you, but far ahead of altruism – and I was simply curious.

  The biggest deterrent was the weather. The receptionist at the hotel in Edgartown had warned me that the forecast was for a storm, and although it still hadn’t broken yet, the sky was beginning to sag with the weight of it, like a soft grey sack waiting to split apart. But the appeal of getting out of the house for a while was overpowering and I couldn’t face going back to McAra’s old room and sitting in front of my computer. I took Lang’s windproof jacket from its peg in the cloakroom, and followed Duc the gardener along the front of the house to the weathered wooden cubes that served as staff accommodation and outbuildings.

  ‘You must have to work hard here,’ I said, ‘to keep it looking so good.’

  Duc kept his eyes on the ground.

  ‘Soil bad. Wind bad. Rain bad. Salt bad. Shit.’

  After that, there didn’t seem much else to say on the horticultural front, so I kept quiet. We passed the first two cubes. He stopped in front of the third and unlocked the big double doors. He dragged back one of them and we went inside. There must have been a dozen bicycles parked in two racks, but my gaze went straight to the tan-coloured Ford Escape SUV which took up the o
ther half of the garage. I had heard so much about it, and had imagined it so often when I was coming over on the ferry, that it was quite a shock to encounter it unexpectedly.

  Duc saw me looking at it. ‘You want to borrow?’ he asked.

  ‘No, no,’ I said quickly. First the dead man’s job, then his bed, then a ride in his car – who could tell where it might end? ‘A bike will be fine. It will do me good.’

  The gardener wore an expression of deep scepticism as he watched me go, wobbling off uncertainly on one of Rhinehart’s expensive mountain bikes. He obviously thought I was mad, and perhaps I was mad – island madness, don’t they call it? I raised my hand to the Special Branch man in his little wooden sentry’s hut, half hidden in the trees, and that was very nearly a painful mistake, as it made me swerve towards the undergrowth. But then I somehow steered the machine back into the centre of the track, and once I got the hang of the gears (the last bike I’d owned only had three, and two of those didn’t work) I found I was moving fairly rapidly over the hard, compacted sand.

  It was eerily quiet in that forest, as if there had been some great volcanic catastrophe that had bleached the vegetation white and brittle and poisoned the wild animals. Occasionally, in the distance, a wood pigeon emitted one of its hollow, klaxon cries, but that served more to emphasise the silence than to break it. I pedalled on up the slight gradient until I reached the T-junction where the track joined the highway.

  The anti-Lang demonstration had dwindled to just one man on the opposite side of the road. He had obviously been busy over the past few hours, erecting some kind of installation – low wooden boards on which had been mounted hundreds of terrible images, torn from magazines and newspapers, of burned children, tortured corpses, beheaded hostages and bomb-flattened neighbourhoods. Interspersed among this collage of death were long lists of names, some handwritten poems and letters. It was all protected against the elements by sheets of polythene. A banner ran across the top, as over a stall at a church jumble sale: ‘FOR AS IN ADAM ALL DIE, EVEN SO IN CHRIST SHALL ALL BE MADE ALIVE’. Beneath it was a flimsy shelter made of wooden struts and more polythene, containing what looked like a card table and a folding chair. Sitting patiently at the table was the man whom I’d briefly glimpsed that morning and couldn’t remember. But I recognised him now all right. He was the military type from the hotel bar who’d called me a cunt.