I looked into the kitchen. An array of butcher’s knives was laid out on a chopping block; there was fresh blood on some of the blades. I called a hesitant “Hello?” and stuck my head round the door of the pantry, but the housekeeper wasn’t there.
I had no idea which was my room, and I therefore had no option but to work my way along the corridor, trying one door after another. The first was locked. The second was open, the room beyond it exuding a rich, sweet odor of heavy aftershave; a tracksuit was thrown across the bed: it was obviously the bedroom used by Special Branch during the night shift. The third door was locked, and I was about to try the fourth when I heard the sound of a woman weeping. I could tell it was Ruth: even her sobs had a combative quality.“There are only six bedrooms in the main house,” Amelia had said.“Adam and Ruth have one each.” What a setup this was, I thought as I crept away: the ex–prime minister and his wife sleeping in separate rooms, with his mistress just along the corridor. It was almost French.
Gingerly, I tried the handle of the next room. This one wasn’t locked, and the aroma of worn clothes and lavender soap, even more than the sight of my old suitcase, established it immediately as McAra’s former berth. I went in and closed the door very softly. The big mirrored closet took up the whole of the wall dividing my room from Ruth’s and when I slid back the glass door a fraction, I could just make out her muffled wailing. The door scraped on its runner, and I guess she must have heard, for all at once the crying stopped, and I imagined her startled, raising her head from her damp pillow and staring at the wall. I drew away. On the bed I noticed that someone had put a box, stuffed so full the top didn’t fit. A yellow Post-it note said, “Good luck! Amelia.” I sat on the counterpane and lifted the lid. “MEMOIRS,” proclaimed the title page,“by Adam Lang.” So she hadn’t forgotten me after all, despite the exquisitely embarrassing circumstances of her departure. You could say what you liked about Mrs. Bly, but the woman was a pro.
I recognized I was now at a decisive point. Either I continued to hang around at the fringes of this floundering project, pathetically hoping that at some point someone would help me. Or—and I felt my spine straightening as I contemplated the alternative—I could seize control of it myself, try to knock these six hundred and twenty-one ineffable pages into some kind of publishable shape, take my two hundred and fifty grand, and head off to lie on a beach somewhere for a month until I had forgotten all about the Langs.
Put in those terms, it wasn’t a choice. I steeled myself to ignore both McAra’s lingering traces in the room and Ruth’s more corporeal presence next door. I took the manuscript from its box and placed it on the table next to the window, opened my shoulder bag, and took out my laptop and the transcripts from yesterday’s interviews. There wasn’t a lot of room to work, but that didn’t bother me. Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin—the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too hot, too cold, too early, too late. I had learned over the years to ignore them all and simply to start. I plugged in my laptop, switched on the lamp, and contemplated the blank screen and its pulsing cursor.
A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and immediately it becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written. But the best must never be allowed to drive out the good. In the absence of genius there is always craftsmanship. One can at least try to write something that will arrest the readers’ attention, that will encourage them, after reading the first paragraph, to take a look at the second, and then the third. I picked up McAra’s manuscript to remind myself of how not to begin a ten-million-dollar autobiography:
CHAPTERONE
Early Years
Langs are Scottish folk originally, and proud of it. Our name is a derivation of “long,” the Old English word for “tall,” and it is from north of the border that my forefathers hail. It was in the sixteenth century that the first of the Langs…
God help us! I ran my pen through it, and then zigzagged a thick blue line through all the succeeding paragraphs of Lang ancestral history. If you want a family tree, go to a garden center—that’s what I advise my clients. Nobody else is interested. Maddox’s instruction was to begin the book with the war crimes allegations, which was fine by me, although it could serve only as a kind of long prologue. At some point, the memoir proper would have to begin, and for this I wanted to find a fresh and original note, something that would make Lang sound like a normal human being. The fact that he wasn’t a normal human being was neither here nor there.
From Ruth Lang’s room came the sound of footsteps, and then her door opened and closed. I thought at first she might be coming to investigate who was moving around next door, but instead I heard her walking away. I put down McAra’s manuscript and turned my attention to the interview transcripts. I knew what I wanted. It was there in our first session:
I remember it was a Sunday afternoon. Raining. I was still in bed. And someone starts knocking on the door…
If I tidied up the grammar, the account of how Ruth had canvassed Lang for the local elections and so drawn him into politics would make a perfect opening. Yet McAra, with his characteristic tone deafness for anything of human interest, had failed even to mention it. I rested my fingers on the keys of my laptop, then started to type:
CHAPTERONE
Early Years
I became a politician out of love. Not love for any particular party or ideology, but love for a woman who came knocking on my door one wet Sunday afternoon…
You may object that this was corny, but don’t forget (A) that corn sells by the ton, (B) that I had only two weeks to rework an entire manuscript, and (C) that it sure as hell was a lot better than starting with the derivation of the name Lang. I was soon rattling away as fast as my two-finger typing would permit me:
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 FORa 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 inyour wardrobe, was there, Mike? He had been a big fellow, I realized, as I felt all those supersize 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 defenses 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 wasstuff . 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 hold of the handle, something slid around inside. Ah, I thought. At last. The secret document.
The case was huge and ugly, made of molded 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 Julia Crawford-Jones, PhD, Director.
One of the photographs I recognized at once: Lang in his chicken outfit, from the Footlights Revue in the early nineteen 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 programs and theater 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 reexamine the package with more care now, beginning with the election stories. At first glance I thought they’d come from the LondonEvening Standard , but I saw 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 his 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 gone into politics only 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 him 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 his 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 hippiedom and punk. Spiritually, they looked far closer to the sixties than the seventies. The girls had long lacy dresses in floral prints, 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 color 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.
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 recognized: 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 ballpoint was a telephone number, prefixed by the international dialing code. No doubt McAra, 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 dialed 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 in, a man answered, cautiously.
