The Ghost

  *

  All good books are different but all bad books are exactly the same. I know this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot of bad books – books so bad they aren’t even published, which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published.

  And what they all have in common, these bad books, be they novels or memoirs, is this: they don’t ring true. I’m not saying that a good book is true necessarily, just that it feels true for the time you’re reading it. A publishing friend of mine calls it the Seaplane Test, after a movie he once saw about people in the City of London that opened with the hero arriving for work in a seaplane he landed on the Thames. From then on, my friend said, there was no point in watching.

  Adam Lang’s memoir failed the Seaplane Test.

  It wasn’t that the facts in it were wrong necessarily – I wasn’t in a position to judge at that stage – it was rather that the whole book somehow felt false, as if there was a hollow at its centre. It consisted of sixteen chapters, arranged chronologically: ‘Early Years’, ‘Into Politics’, ‘Challenge for the Leadership’, ‘Changing the Party’, ‘Victory at the Polls’, ‘Reforming Government’, ‘Northern Ireland’, ‘Europe’, ‘The Special Relationship’, ‘Second Term’, ‘The Challenge of Terror’, ‘The War on Terror’, ‘Sticking the Course’, ‘Never Surrender’, ‘Time to Go’ and ‘A Future of Hope’. Each chapter was between ten and twenty thousand words long and hadn’t been written so much as bolted together from speeches, official minutes, communiqués, memoranda, interview transcripts, office diaries, party manifestos and newspaper articles. Occasionally, Lang permitted himself a private emotion (‘I was overjoyed when our third child was born’) or a personal observation (‘the American president was much taller than I had expected’) or a sharp remark (‘as Foreign Secretary, Richard Rycart often seemed to prefer presenting the foreigners’ case to Britain rather than the other way round’) but not very often, and not to any great effect. And where was his wife? She was barely mentioned.

  A crock of shit, Rick had called it. But actually this was worse. Shit, to quote Gore Vidal, has its own integrity. This was a crock of nothing. It was strictly accurate and yet overall it was a lie – it had to be, I thought. No human being could pass through life and feel so little. Especially Adam Lang, whose political stock-in-trade was emotional empathy. I skipped ahead to the chapter called ‘The War on Terror’. If there was going to be anything to interest American readers it must surely be here. I skimmed it, searching for words like ‘rendition’, ‘torture’, ‘CIA’. I found nothing, and certainly no mention of Operation Tempest. What about the war in the Middle East? Surely some mild criticism here of the US president, or the Defense Secretary, or the Secretary of State; some hint of betrayal or let-down; some behind-the-scenes scoop or previously classified document? No. Nowhere. Nothing. I took a gulp, literally and metaphorically, and began reading again from the top.

  At some point the secretary, Alice, must have brought me in a tuna sandwich and a bottle of mineral water, because later in the afternoon I noticed them at the end of the desk. But I was too busy to stop, and besides I wasn’t hungry. In fact I was beginning to feel nauseous, as I shuffled those sixteen chapters, scanning the sheer white cliff-face of featureless prose for any tiny handhold of interest I could cling to. No wonder McAra had thrown himself off the Martha’s Vineyard ferry. No wonder Maddox and Kroll had flown to London to try to rescue the project. No wonder they were paying me fifty thousand dollars a week. All these seemingly bizarre events were rendered entirely logical by the direness of the manuscript. And now it would be my reputation which would come spiralling down, strapped into the back seat of Adam Lang’s kamikaze seaplane. I would be the one pointed out at publishing parties – assuming I was ever invited to another publishing party – as the ghost who had collaborated on the biggest flop in literary history. In a sudden shaft of paranoid insight I fancied I saw my real role in the operation: that of designated fall guy.

  I finished the last of the six hundred and twenty-one pages in mid-afternoon (‘Ruth and I look forward to the future, whatever it may hold’) and when I laid down the manuscript I pressed my hands to my cheeks and opened my mouth and eyes wide, in a reasonable imitation of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

  That was when I heard a cough in the doorway and looked up to see Ruth Lang watching me. To this day I don’t know how long she’d been there. She raised a thin black eyebrow.

  ‘As bad as that?’ she said.

  *

  She was wearing a man’s thick, shapeless white sweater, so long in the sleeves that only her chewed fingernails were visible, and once we got downstairs she pulled on top of this a pale blue cagoule, disappearing for a while as she tugged it over her head, her pale face emerging at last with a frown. Her short dark hair stuck up in Medusa’s spikes.

  It was she who had proposed a walk. She said I looked as though I needed one, which was true enough. She found me her husband’s windproof jacket, which fitted perfectly, and a pair of waterproof boots belonging to the house, and together we stepped out into the blustery Atlantic air. We followed the path around the edge of the lawn and climbed up on to the dunes. To our right was the lake, with a jetty, and next to that a rowing boat which had been hauled above the reed beds and laid upside down. To our left was the grey ocean. Ahead of us, bare white sand stretched for a couple of miles, and when I looked behind, the picture was the same, except that a policeman in an overcoat was following about fifty yards distant.

  ‘You must get sick of this,’ I said, nodding to our escort.

  ‘It’s been going on so long I’ve stopped noticing.’

  We pressed on into the wind. Close up, the beach didn’t look so idyllic. Strange pieces of broken plastic, lumps of tar, a dark blue canvas shoe stiff with salt, a wooden cable drum, dead birds, skeletons and bits of bone – it was like walking along the side of a six-lane highway. The big waves came in with a roar and receded like passing trucks.

  ‘So,’ said Ruth, ‘how bad is it?’

  ‘You haven’t read it?’

  ‘Not all of it.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, politely, ‘it needs some work.’

  ‘How much?’

  The word Hiroshima floated briefly into my mind. ‘It’s fixable,’ I said, which I suppose it was: even Hiroshima was fixed eventually. ‘It’s the deadline that’s the trouble. We absolutely have to do it in four weeks, and that’s less than two days for each chapter.’

  ‘Four weeks!’ She had a deep, rather dirty laugh. ‘You’ll never get him to sit still for as long as that!’

  ‘He doesn’t have to write it, as such. That’s what I’m being paid for. He just has to talk to me.’

  She had pulled up her hood. I couldn’t really see her face. Only the sharp white tip of her nose was visible. Everyone said she was smarter than her husband, and that she’d loved their life at the top even more than he had. If there was an official visit to some foreign country, she usually went with him: she refused to be left at home. You only had to watch them on TV together to see how she bathed in his success. Adam and Ruth Lang: The Power and the Glory. Now she stopped and turned to face the ocean, her hands thrust deep in her pockets. Along the beach, as if playing Grandma’s footsteps, the policeman also stopped.

  ‘You were my idea,’ she said.

  I swayed in the wind. I almost fell over. ‘I was?’

  ‘Yes. You were the one who wrote Christy’s book for him.’

  It took me a moment to work out who she meant. Christy Costello. I hadn’t thought of him in a long while. He was my first bestseller. The intimate memoirs of a seventies rock star. Drink, drugs, girls, a near-fatal car crash, surgery, and finally rehab and redemp in the arms of a good woman. It had everything. You could give it at Christmas to your grungy teenager or your church-going granny, and each would be equally happy. It sold three hundred thousand copies in hardcover in the UK alone.

  ‘You know Christy?’ It seemed so unlikel
y.

  ‘We stayed at his house on Mustique last winter. I read his memoirs. They were by the bed.’

  ‘Now I’m embarrassed.’

  ‘No? Why? They were brilliant, in a horrible kind of a way. Listening to his scrambled stories over dinner and then seeing how you’d turned them into something resembling a life – I said to Adam then: “This is the man you need to write your book.”’

  I laughed. I couldn’t stop myself. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I hope your husband’s recollections aren’t quite as hazy as Christy’s.’

  ‘Don’t count on it,’ she said. She pulled back her hood and took a deep breath. She was better-looking in the flesh than she was on television. The camera hated her almost as much as it loved her husband. It didn’t catch her amused alertness, the animation of her face. ‘God, I miss home,’ she said. ‘Even though the kids are away at university. I keep telling him – it’s like being married to Napoleon on St Helena.’

  ‘Then why don’t you go back to London?’

  She didn’t say anything for a while, just stared at the ocean, biting her lip. Then she looked at me, sizing me up. ‘You did sign that confidentiality agreement?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Check with Sid Kroll’s office.’

  ‘Because I don’t want to read about this in some gossip column next week, or in some cheap little kiss-and-tell book of your own a year from now.’

  ‘Whoa,’ I said, taken aback by her venom. ‘I thought you just said I was your idea. I didn’t ask to come here. And I haven’t kissed anyone.’

  She nodded. ‘All right. Then I’ll tell you why I can’t go home, between you and me. Because there’s something not quite right with him at the moment, and I’m a bit afraid to leave him.’

  Boy, I thought. This just gets better and better.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied diplomatically. ‘Amelia told me he was very upset by Mike’s death.’

  ‘Oh she did, did she? Quite when Mrs Bly became such an expert about my husband’s emotional state I’m not sure.’ If she had hissed and sprung claws she couldn’t have made her feelings plainer. ‘Losing Mike certainly made it worse, but it isn’t just that. It’s losing power – that’s the real trouble. Losing power, and now having to sit down and relive everything, year by year. While all the time the press are going on and on about what he did and didn’t do. He can’t get free of the past, you see. He can’t move on.’ She gestured helplessly at the sea, the sand, the dunes. ‘He’s stuck. We’re both stuck.’

  As we walked back to the house, she put her arm through mine. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘You must be starting to wonder what you’ve let yourself in for.’

  *

  There was a lot more activity in the compound when we got back. A dark green Jaguar limousine with a Washington licence plate was parked at the entrance, and a black minivan with darkened windows was drawn up behind it. As the front door opened I could hear several telephones ringing at once. A genial grey-haired man in a cheap brown suit was sitting just inside, drinking a cup of tea, talking to one of the police guards. He jumped up smartly when he saw Ruth Lang. They were all quite scared of her, I noticed.

  ‘Afternoon, ma’am.’

  ‘Hello, Jeff. How was New York?’

  ‘Bloody chaos, as usual. Like Piccadilly Circus in the rush hour.’ He had a crafty London accent. ‘Thought for a while I wouldn’t get back in time.’

  Ruth turned to me. ‘They like to have the car ready in position when Adam lands.’ She began the long process of wriggling out of her cagoule just as Amelia Bly came round the corner, a cell phone wedged between her elegant shoulder and her sculpted chin, her nimble fingers zipping up an attaché case.

  ‘That’s fine, that’s fine. I’ll tell him.’ She nodded to Ruth and carried on speaking – ‘On Thursday he’s in Chicago’ – then looked at Jeff and tapped her wristwatch.

  ‘Actually, I think I’ll go to the airport,’ said Ruth, suddenly pulling her cagoule back down. ‘Amelia can stay here and polish her nails or something. Why don’t you come?’ she added to me. ‘He’s keen to meet you.’

  Score one to the wife, I thought. But no: in the finest traditions of the British civil service, Amelia bounced off the ropes and came back punching. ‘Then I’ll travel in the back-up car,’ she said, snapping her cell phone shut and smiling sweetly. ‘I can do my nails in there.’

  Jeff opened one of the Jaguar’s rear doors for Ruth, while I went round and nearly broke my arm tugging at the other. I slid into the leather seat and the door closed behind me with a gaseous thump.

  ‘She’s armoured, sir,’ said Jeff into the rear-view mirror as we pulled away. ‘Weighs two and a half tons. Yet she’ll still do a hundred with all four tyres shot out.’

  ‘Oh do shut up, Jeff,’ said Ruth, good-humouredly. ‘He doesn’t want to hear all that.’

  ‘The windows are an inch thick and don’t open, in case you were thinking of trying. She’s air-tight against chemical and biological attack, with oxygen for an hour. Makes you think, doesn’t it? At this precise moment, sir, you’re probably safer than you’ve ever been in your life, or ever will be again.’

  Ruth laughed again and made a face. ‘Boys with their toys!’

  The outside world seemed muffled, distant. The forest track ran smooth and quiet as rubber. Perhaps this is what it feels like being carried in the womb, I thought: this wonderful feeling of complete security. We ran over the dead skunk and the big car didn’t register the slightest tremor.

  ‘Nervous?’ asked Ruth.

  ‘No. Why? Should I be?’

  ‘Not at all. He’s the most charming man you’ll ever meet. My own Prince Charming!’ And she gave her deep-throated, mannish laugh again. ‘God,’ she said, staring out of the window, ‘will I be glad to see the back of these trees. It’s like living in an enchanted wood.’

  I glanced over my shoulder at the unmarked minivan following close behind. I could see how this was addictive. I was getting used to it already. Being forced to give it up after it had become a habit would be like letting go of Mummy. But thanks to terrorism, Lang would never have to give it up – never have to stand in line for public transport; never even drive himself. He was as pampered and cocooned as a Romanov before the revolution.

  We came out of the forest on to the main road, turned left, and almost immediately swung right through the airport perimeter. I stared out of the window in surprise at the big runway.

  ‘We’re here already?’

  ‘In summer Marty likes to leave his office in Manhattan at four,’ said Ruth, ‘and be on the beach by six.’

  ‘I suppose he has a private jet,’ I said, in an attempt at knowingness.

  ‘Of course he has a private jet.’

  She gave me a look which made me feel like a hick who’d just used his fish knife to butter his roll. Of course he has a private jet. You don’t own a thirty-million-dollar house and travel to it by bus. The man must have a carbon footprint the size of a yeti’s. I realised then that just about everybody the Langs knew these days had a private jet. Indeed, here came Lang himself, in a corporate Gulfstream, dropping out of the darkening sky and skimming in low over the gloomy pines. Jeff put his foot down and a minute later we pulled up outside the little terminal. There was a self-important cannonade of slamming doors as we piled inside – me, Ruth, Amelia, Jeff and one of the protection officers. Inside, a patrolman from the Edgartown police force was already waiting. Behind him on the wall I could see a faded photograph of Bill and Hillary Clinton being greeted on the tarmac at the start of some scandal-shrouded presidential vacation.

  The private jet taxied in from the runway. It was painted dark blue and had HALLINGTON written in gold letters by the door. It looked bigger than the usual CEO’s phallic symbol, with a high tail and six windows either side, and when it came to a stop and the engines were cut the silence over the deserted airfield was unexpectedly profound.

  The door opened, t
he steps were lowered, and out came a couple of Special Branch men. One headed straight for the terminal building. The other waited at the foot of the steps, going through the motions of checking the empty tarmac, glancing up and around and behind him. Lang himself seemed in no hurry to disembark. I could just about make him out in the shadows of the interior, shaking hands with the pilot and a male steward, then finally – almost reluctantly, it seemed to me – he came out and paused at the top of the steps. He was holding his own briefcase, which was not something he had done when he was prime minister. The wind lifted the back of his jacket and plucked at his tie. He smoothed down his hair. He glanced around as if he was trying to remember what he was supposed to do. It was on the edge of becoming embarrassing when suddenly he caught sight of us watching him through the big glass window. He pointed and waved and grinned, in exactly the way that he had in his heyday, and the moment – whatever it was – had passed. He came striding eagerly across the concourse, transferring his briefcase from one hand to the other, trailed by a third Special Branch man and a young woman pulling a suitcase on wheels.

  We left the window just in time to meet him as he came in through the arrivals gate.

  ‘Hi, darling,’ he said, and stooped to kiss his wife. His skin had a slightly orange tint. I realised he was wearing make-up.

  She stroked his arm. ‘How was New York?’

  ‘Great. They gave me the Gulfstream Four – you know, the transatlantic one, with the beds and the shower. Hi, Amelia. Hi, Jeff.’ He noticed me. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m your ghost,’ I said.

  I regretted it the instant I said it. I’d conceived it as a witty, self-deprecatory, break-the-ice kind of a line. I’d even practised my delivery in the mirror before I left London. But somehow out there, in that deserted airport, amid the greyness and the quietness, it hit precisely the wrong note. He flinched.

  ‘Right,’ he said doubtfully, and although he shook my hand, he also drew his head back slightly, as if to inspect me from a safer distance.