The Ghost Read online

  ‘I hear Adam Lang’s on the island,’ he said.

  I looked at him properly then. He was in his middle-fifties, slim but broad-shouldered. Strong. His iron-grey hair was slicked straight back off his forehead. There was something vaguely military about him, but also unkempt and faded, as if he relied on food parcels from a veterans’ charity. I answered in a neutral tone: ‘Is he?’

  ‘So I hear. You don’t happen to know his whereabouts, do you?’

  ‘No. I’m afraid not. Excuse me again.’

  I started to eat my chowder. I heard him sigh noisily, and then the clink of ice as his glass was set down.

  ‘Cunt,’ he said, as he passed my table.

  Six

  * * *

  I have often been told by subjects that by the end of the research process, they feel as if they have been in therapy.

  Ghostwriting

  * * *

  THERE WAS NO sign of him when I came down to breakfast the next morning. The receptionist told me there was no other guest apart from me in residence. She was equally firm that she hadn’t seen a British man in a blazer. I’d already been awake since four – an improvement on two, but not much – and was groggy enough and hungover enough to wonder if I hadn’t hallucinated the whole encounter. I felt better after some coffee. I crossed the road and walked around the lighthouse a couple of times to clear my head and by the time I returned to the hotel the minivan had arrived to take me to work.

  I’d anticipated that my biggest problem on the first day would be physically getting Adam Lang into a room and keeping him there for long enough to start interviewing him. But the strange thing was that when we reached the house he was already waiting for me. Amelia had decided we should use Rhinehart’s office, and we found the former prime minister, wearing a dark green tracksuit, sprawled in the big chair opposite the desk, one leg draped over the arm. He was flicking through a history of World War II which he’d obviously just taken down from the shelf. A mug of tea stood on the floor beside him. His trainers had sand on their soles: I guessed he must have gone for a run on the beach.

  ‘Hi, man,’ he said, looking up at me. ‘Ready to start?’

  ‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘I just need to sort out a few things first.’

  ‘Sure. Go ahead. Ignore me.’

  He went back to his book while I opened my shoulder bag and carefully unpacked the tools of the ghosting trade: a Sony Walkman digital tape recorder with a stack of MD-R 74 mini-discs and a mains lead (I’ve learned the hard way not to rely solely on batteries); a metallic silver Panasonic Toughbook laptop computer, which is not much larger than a hardcover novel, and considerably lighter; a couple of small black Moleskine notebooks and three brand-new Jetstream rollerball pens, made by the Mitsubishi Pencil Co.; and finally two white plastic adaptors, one a British multipoint plug and one a converter to fit an American socket. It’s a superstition with me always to use the same items, and to lay them out in the proper sequence. I also had a list of questions, culled from the books I’d bought in London and my reading of McAra’s first draft the previous day.

  ‘Did you know,’ said Lang suddenly, ‘that the Germans had jet fighters in 1944? Look at that.’ He held up the page to show the photograph. ‘It’s a wonder we won.’

  ‘We have no floppy disks,’ said Amelia, ‘only these flashdrives. I’ve loaded the manuscript on to this one for you.’ She handed me an object the size of a small plastic cigarette lighter. ‘You’re welcome to copy it on to your own computer, but I’m afraid that if you do, your laptop must stay here, locked up overnight.’

  ‘And apparently Germany declared war on America, not the other way round.’

  ‘Isn’t this all a bit paranoid?’

  ‘The book contains some potentially classified material which has yet to be approved by the Cabinet Office. More to the point, there’s also a very strong risk of some news organisation using unscrupulous methods to try to get hold of it. Any leak would jeopardise our newspaper serialisation deals.’

  Lang said: ‘So you’ve actually got my whole book on that?’

  ‘We could get a hundred books on that, Adam,’ said Amelia, patiently.

  ‘Amazing.’ He shook his head. ‘You know the worst thing about my life?’ He closed the book with a snap and replaced it on the shelf. ‘You get so out of touch. You never go in a shop. Everything’s done for you. You don’t carry any money – if I want some money, even now, I have to ask one of the secretaries or one of the protection boys to get it for me. I couldn’t do it myself anyway, I don’t know my … what’re they called? I don’t even know that.’

  ‘PIN?’

  ‘You see? I just don’t have a clue. I’ll give you another example. The other week, Ruth and I went out to dinner with some people in New York. They’ve always been very generous to us, so I say, “Right, tonight, this is on me.” So I give my credit card to the manager and he comes back a few minutes later, all embarrassed, and he shows me the problem. There’s still a strip where the signature’s supposed to be.’ He threw up his arms and grinned. ‘The card hadn’t been activated.’

  ‘This,’ I said, excitedly, ‘is exactly the sort of detail we need to put in your book. Nobody knows this sort of thing.’

  Lang looked startled. ‘I can’t put that in. People would think I was a complete idiot.’

  ‘But it’s human detail. It shows what it’s like to be you.’ I knew this was my moment. I had to get him to focus on what we needed right from the start. I came round from behind the desk and confronted him. ‘Why don’t we try to make this book unlike any other political memoir that’s ever been written? Why don’t we try to tell the truth?’

  He laughed. ‘Now that would be a first.’

  ‘I mean it. Let’s tell people what it really feels like to be prime minister. Not just the policy stuff – any old bore can write about that.’ I almost cited McAra, but managed to swerve away at the last moment. ‘Let’s stick to what no one except you knows – the day-today experience of actually leading a country. What do you feel like in the mornings? What are the strains? What’s it like to be so cut off from ordinary life? What’s it like to be hated?’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ‘What fascinates people isn’t policy – who cares about policy? What fascinates people is always people – the detail of another person’s life. But because the detail is naturally all so familiar to you, you can’t sort out what it is the reader wants to know. It has to be drawn out of you. That’s why you need me. This shouldn’t be a book for political hacks. This should be a book for everyone.’

  ‘The people’s memoir,’ said Amelia drily, but I ignored her, and so, more importantly, did Lang, who was looking at me quite differently now: it was as if some electric light bulb marked ‘self-interest’ had started to glow behind his eyes.

  ‘Most former leaders couldn’t get away with it,’ I said. ‘They’re too stiff. They’re too awkward. They’re too old. If they take off their jacket and tie and put on a’ – I gestured at his outfit – ‘put on a tracksuit, say, they look phoney. But you’re different. And that’s why you should write a different kind of political memoir, for a different age.’

  Lang was staring at me. ‘What do you think, Amelia?’

  ‘I think you two were made for one another. I’m beginning to feel like a gooseberry.’

  ‘Do you mind,’ I asked, ‘if I start recording? Something useful might come out of this. Don’t worry – the tapes will all be your property.’

  Lang shrugged and gestured towards the Sony Walkman. As I pressed RECORD, Amelia slipped out and closed the door quietly behind her.

  ‘The first thing that strikes me,’ I said, bringing a chair round from behind the desk so that I could sit facing him, ‘is that you aren’t really a politician at all, in the conventional sense, even though you’ve been so amazingly successful.’ This was the sort of tough questioning I specialised in. ‘I mean, when you were growing up, no one would have expected you t
o become a politician, would they?’

  ‘Jesus, no,’ said Lang. ‘Not at all. I had absolutely no interest in politics, either as a child or as a teenager. I thought people who were obsessed by politics were weird. I still do, as a matter of fact. I liked playing foot-ball. I liked theatre and the movies. A bit later on I liked going out with girls. I never dreamed I might become a politician. Most student politicians struck me as complete nerds.’

  Bingo! I thought. We’d only been working two minutes and already we had a potential opening for the book right there:

  When I was growing up I had no interest in politics. In fact I thought people who were obsessed by politics were weird.

  I still do …

  ‘So what changed? What turned you on to politics?’

  ‘Turned on is about right,’ said Lang, with a laugh. ‘I’d left Cambridge and drifted for a year, really, hoping that a play I’d been involved in might get taken up by a theatre in London. But it didn’t happen and so I ended up working in a bank, living in this grotty basement flat in Lambeth, feeling very sorry for myself, because all my friends from Cambridge were working in the BBC, or getting paid a fortune to do voice-overs on adverts, or what have you. And I remember it was a Sunday afternoon – raining, I was still in bed – and someone starts knocking on the door …’

  It was a story he must have told a thousand times, but you wouldn’t have guessed it, watching him that morning. He was sitting back in his chair, smiling at the memory, going over the same old words, using the same rehearsed gestures – he was miming knocking on a door – and I thought what an old trouper he was: the sort of pro who’d always make an effort to put on a good show, whether he had an audience of one or one million.

  ‘…and this person just wouldn’t go away. Knock knock knock. And, you know, I’d had a bit to drink the night before and what have you, and I’m moaning and groaning. I’ve got the pillow over my head. But it starts up again: knock knock knock. So eventually – and by now I’m swearing quite a bit, I can tell you – I get out of bed, I pull on a dressing gown, and I open the door. And there’s this girl – this gorgeous girl. She’s wringing wet from the rain, but she completely ignores that, and launches into this speech about the local elections. Bizarre. I have to say I didn’t even know there were any local elections, but at least I have the sense to pretend that I’m very interested, and so I invite her in, and make her a cup of tea, and she dries off. And that’s it – I’m in love. And it quickly becomes clear that the best way of getting to see her again is to take one of her leaflets and turn up the next Tuesday evening, or whenever it is, and join the local party. Which I do.’

  ‘And this is Ruth?’

  ‘This is Ruth.’

  ‘And if she’d been a member of a different political party?’

  ‘I’d have gone along and joined it just the same. I wouldn’t have stayed in it,’ he added quickly. ‘I mean obviously this was the start of a long political awakening for me – bringing out values and beliefs that were already present, but were simply dormant at that time. No, I couldn’t have stayed in just any party. But everything would have been different if Ruth hadn’t knocked on that door that afternoon, and kept knocking.’

  ‘And if it hadn’t been raining.’

  ‘If it hadn’t been raining I would have found some other excuse to invite her in,’ said Lang with a grin. ‘I mean, come on, man – I wasn’t completely hopeless.’

  I grinned back, shook my head, and jotted ‘opening??’ in my notebook.

  *

  We worked all morning without a break, except for when a tape was filled. Then I would briefly hurry downstairs to the room Amelia and the secretaries were using as a temporary office, and hand it over to be transcribed. This happened a couple of times, and always on my return I’d find Lang sitting exactly where I’d left him. At first I thought this was a testament to his powers of concentration. Only gradually did I realise it was because he had nothing else to do.

  I took him carefully through his early years, focusing not so much on the facts and dates (McAra had assembled those dutifully enough) as on the impressions and physical objects of his childhood: the semi-detached home on a housing estate in Leicester; the personalities of his father (a builder) and his mother (a teacher); the quiet, apolitical values of the English provinces in the sixties, where the only sounds to be heard on a Sunday were church bells and the chimes of ice cream vans; the muddy Saturday morning games of football at the local park and the long summer afternoons of cricket down by the river; his father’s Austin Atlantic and his own first Raleigh bike; the comics – the Eagle and the Victor – and the radio comedies – I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again and The Navy Lark; the 1966 World Cup Final and Z Cars and Ready, Steady, Go!; The Guns of Navarone and Carry On Doctor at the local ABC; Millie singing ‘My Boy Lollipop’ and Beatles singles played at 45 rpm on his mother’s Dansette Capri.

  Sitting there in Rhinehart’s study, the minutiae of English life nearly half a century earlier seemed as remote as bric-a-brac in a Victorian trompe l’oeil – and, you might have thought, about as relevant. But there was cunning in my method, and Lang, with his genius for empathy, grasped it at once, for this was not just his childhood we were itemising, but mine and that of everyone who was born in England in the fifties and who grew to maturity in the seventies.

  ‘What we need to do,’ I told him, ‘is to persuade the reader to identify emotionally with Adam Lang. To see beyond the remote figure in the bomb-proof car. To recognise in him the same things they recognise in themselves. Because if I know nothing else about this business, I know this: once you have the reader’s sympathy, they’ll follow you anywhere.’

  ‘I get it,’ he said, nodding emphatically. ‘I think that’s brilliant.’

  And so we swapped memories for hour after hour, and I will not say we began to concoct a childhood for Lang exactly – I was always careful not to depart from the known historical record – but we certainly pooled our experiences, to such an extent that a few of my memories inevitably became blended into his. You may find this shocking. I was shocked myself, the first time I heard one of my clients on television weepily describing a poignant moment from his past which was actually from my past. But there it is. People who succeed in life are rarely reflective. Their gaze is always on the future: that’s why they succeed. It’s not in their nature to remember what they were feeling, or wearing, or who was with them, or the scent of freshly cut grass in the churchyard on the day they were married, or the tightness with which their first baby squeezed their finger. That’s why they need ghosts – to flesh them out, as it were.

  As it transpired, I only collaborated with Lang for a short while, but I can honestly say I never had a more responsive client. We decided that his first memory would be when he tried to run away from home at the age of three and he heard the sound of his father’s footsteps coming up behind him and the hardness of his muscled arms as he scooped him back to the house. We remembered his mother ironing, and the smell of wet clothes on a wooden frame drying in front of a coal fire, and how he liked to pretend that the clotheshorse was a house. His father wore a vest at table and ate pork dripping and kippers; his mother liked the occasional sweet sherry and had a book called A Thing of Beauty with a red and gold cover. Young Adam would look at the pictures for hours; that was what first gave him his interest in the theatre. We remembered Christmas pantomimes he had been to (I made a note to look up exactly what was playing in Leicester when he was growing up) and his stage debut in the school nativity play.

  ‘Was I a wise man?’

  ‘That sounds a little smug.’

  ‘A sheep?’

  ‘Not smug enough.’

  ‘A guiding star?’

  ‘Perfect!’

  By the time we broke for lunch, we had reached the age of seventeen, when his performance in the title role of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus had confirmed him in his desire to become an actor. McAra, with typical thoroughne
ss, had already dug out the review in the Leicester Mercury, December 1971, describing how Lang had ‘held the audience spellbound’ with his final speech, as he glimpsed eternal damnation.

  While Lang went off to play tennis with one of his bodyguards I dropped by the downstairs office to check on the transcription. An hour’s interviewing generally yields between seven and eight thousand words, and Lang and I had been at it from nine till nearly one. Amelia had set both secretaries on the task. Each was wearing headphones. Their fingers skimmed the keyboards, filling the room with a soothing rattle of plastic. With a bit of luck I would have about a hundred double-spaced pages of material to show for that morning’s work alone. For the first time since arriving on the island, I felt the warm breath of optimism.

  ‘This is all new to me,’ said Amelia, who was bent over Lucy’s shoulder, reading Lang’s words as they unfurled across the screen. ‘I’ve never heard him mention any of this before.’

  ‘The human memory is a treasure house, Amelia,’ I said, deadpan. ‘It’s merely a matter of finding the right key.’

  I left her peering at the screen and went into the kitchen. It was about as large as my London flat, with enough polished granite to furnish a family mausoleum. A tray of sandwiches had been laid out. I put one on a plate, and wandered around the back of the house until I came to a solarium – I suppose that’s what you would call it – with a big sliding glass door leading to an outside swimming pool. The pool was covered with a grey tarpaulin, depressed by rainwater, on which floated a brown scum of rotting leaves. There were two silvered wooden cube-shaped buildings at the far end, and beyond those the scrub oak and the white sky. A small, dark figure – so bundled up against the cold he was almost spherical – was raking leaves and piling them into a wheelbarrow. I presumed he must be the Vietnamese gardener, Duc. I really must try to see this place in summer, I thought.