“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 that I actually threw the phone onto 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 toward 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 riverbank, drinking champagne and sharing a spliff 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 behavior 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 tinfoil 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 that hadn’t happened—couldn’thave 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 realized 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 onto 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.
Ghostwritin g
IT LOOKED TO BEabout 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 hadn’t broken yet, the sky was beginning to sag with the weight of it, like a soft gray 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-colored Ford Escape SUV, which took up the other 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 skepticism as he watched me go, wobbling off uncertainly on one of Rhinehart’s expensive mountain bikes. He obviously thought I was mad, and perhaps Iwas 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 toward the undergrowth. But then I somehow steered the machine back into the center of the track, and once I got the hang of the gears (the last bike I’d owned had only 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 some great volcanic catastrophe 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 emphasize the silence than to break it. I pedaled 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 neighborhoods. 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 plastic. 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 plastic, 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 recognized him now, all right. He was the military type from the hotel bar who’d called me a cunt.
I came to an uncertain halt and checked left and right for traffic, conscious all the while of him staring at me from only twenty feet away. And he must have recognized me, because I saw to my horror that he had got to his feet. “Just one moment!” he shouted, in that peculiar clipped voice, but I was so anxious not to become embroiled in his madness that, even though there was a car coming, I teetered out into the road and began pedaling away from him, standing up to try to get up some speed. The car hit its horn. There was a blur of light and noise, and I felt the wind of it as it passed, but when I looked back the protester had given up his pursuit and was standing in the center of the road, staring after me, arms akimbo.
After that, I cycled hard, conscious I would soon start to lose the light. The air in my face was cold and damp, but the pumping of my legs kept me warm enough. I passed the entrance to the airport and followed the perimeter of the state forest, its fire lanes stretching wide and high through the trees like the shadowy aisles of cathedrals. I couldn’t imagine McAra doing this—he didn’t look the cycling type—and I wondered again what I thought I would achieve, apart from getting drenched. I toiled on past the white clapboard houses and the neat New England fields, and it didn’t take much effort to visualize it still peopled by women in stern black bonnets and by men who regarded Sunday as the day to put on a suit rather than take one off.
Just out of West Tisbury I stopped by Scotchman’s Lane to check directions. The sky was really threatening now, and a wind was getting up. I almost lost the map. In fact, I almost turned back. But I’d come so far, it seemed stupid to give up now, so I eased myself back onto the thin, hard saddle and set off again. About two miles later the road forked and I parted from the main highway, turning left toward the sea. The track down to the cove was similar to the approach to the Rhinehart place—scrub oak, ponds, dunes—the only difference being that there were more houses here. Mostly, they were vacation homes, shuttered up for the winter, but a couple of chimneys fluttered thin streamers of brown smoke, and from one house I heard a radio playing classical music. A cello concerto. That was when it started to rain at last—hard, cold pellets of moisture, almost hail, that exploded on my hands and face and carried the smell of the sea in them. One moment they were plopping sporadically in the pond and rattling in the trees around me, and the next it was as if some great aerial dam had broken and the rain started to sweep down in torrents. Now I remembered why I disliked cycling: bicycles don’t have roofs, they don’t have windshields, and they don’t have heaters.
The spindly, leafless scrub oaks offered no hope of shelter, but it was impossible to carry on cycling—I couldn’t see where I was going—so I dismounted and pushed my bike until I came to a low picket fence. I tried to prop the bike against it, but the machine fell over with a clatter, its back wheel spinning. I didn’t bother to pick it up but ran up the cinder path, past a flagpole, to the veranda of the house. Once I was out of the rain, I leaned forward and shook my head vigorously to get the water out of my hair, and immediately a dog started barking and scratching at the door behind me. I’d assumed the house was empty—it certainly looked it—but a hazy white moon of a face appeared at the dusty window blurred by the screen door, and a moment later the door opened and the dog flew out at me.
I dislike dogs almost as much as they dislike me, but I did my best to seem charmed by the hideous, yapping white furball, if only to appease its owner, an old-timer of not far off ninety to judge by the liver spots, the stoop, and the still-handsome skull poking through the papery skin. He was wearing a well-cut sports jacket over a buttoned-up cardigan and had a plaid scarf round his neck. I made a stammering apology for disturbing his privacy, but he soon cut me off.
“You’re British?” he said, squinting at me.
“I am.”
“That’s okay. You can shelter. Sheltering’s free.”
I didn’t know enough about America to be able to tell from his accent where he was from, or what he might have done. But I guessed he was a retired professional and fairly well-off—you had to be, living in a place where a shack with an outside lavatory would cost you half a million dollars.
“British, eh?” he repeated. He studied me through rimless spectacles. “You anything to do with this feller Lang?”
“In a way,” I said.
“Seems intelligent. Why’d he want to get himself mixed up with that damn fool in the White House?”
“That’s what everyone would like to know.”
