I took all sixteen chapter openings and laid them out across the desk in sequence.
“The key to everything is in Lang’s autobiography—it’s all there at the beginning.”
Thebeginning or thebeginnings ?
I was never any good at puzzles. But when I went through the pages and circled the first word of each chapter, even I couldn’t help but see it—the sentence that McAra, fearful for his safety, had embedded in the manuscript, like a message from the grave: “Langs Wife Ruth Studying In Seventy-six Was Recruited As A CIA Agent In America By Professor Paul Emmett of Harvard University.”
SEVENTEEN
A ghost must expect no glory.
Ghostwritin g
I LEFT MY FLATthat night, never to return. Since then a month has passed. As far as know, I haven’t been missed. There were times, especially in the first week, sitting alone in my scruffy hotel room—I’ve stayed in four by now—when I was sure I had gone mad. I ought to ring Rick, I told myself, and get the name of his shrink. I was suffering from delusions. But then, about three weeks ago, after a hard day’s writing, just as I was falling asleep, I heard on the midnight news that the former foreign secretary Richard Rycart had been killed in a car accident in New York City, along with his driver. It was the fourth headline, I’m afraid. There’s nothing more ex than an ex-politician. Rycart would not have been pleased.
I knew after that there was no going back.
Although I’ve done nothing but write and think about what happened, I still can’t tell you precisely how McAra uncovered the truth. I presume it must have started back in the archives, when he came across Operation Tempest. He was already disillusioned with Lang’s years in power, unable to understand why something that had started with such high promise had ended in such a bloody mess. When, in his dogged way, researching the Cambridge years, he stumbled on those photographs, it must have seemed like the key to the mystery. Certainly, if Rycart had heard rumors of Emmett’s CIA links, it’s reasonable to assume that McAra must have done so, too.
But McAra knew other things as well. He would have known that Ruth was a Fulbright scholar at Harvard, and it wouldn’t have taken him more than ten minutes on the internet to discover that Emmett was teaching her specialist subject on the campus in the midseventies. He also knew better than anyone that Lang rarely made a decision without consulting his wife. Adam was the brilliant political salesman, Ruth the strategist. If you had to pick which of them would have had the brains, the nerve, and the ruthlessness to be an ideological recruit, there could only be one choice. McAra can’t have known for sure, but I believe he’d put together enough of the picture to blurt out his suspicions to Lang during that heated argument on the night before he went off to confront Emmett.
I try to imagine what Lang must have felt when he heard the accusation. Dismissive, I’m sure; furious also. But a day or two afterward, when a body was washed up, and he went to the morgue to identify McAra—what did he think then?
Most days I have listened to the tape of my final conversation with Lang. The key to everything is there, I’m sure, but always the whole story remains just tantalizingly out of reach. Our voices are thin but recognizable. In the background is the rumble of the jet’s engines.
ME: Is it true you had a serious row with him? Just before he died?
LANG: Mike made certain wild accusations. I could hardly ignore them.
ME: May I ask what kind of accusations?
LANG: I’d prefer not to repeat them.
ME: Were they to do with the CIA?
LANG: But surely you already know, if you’ve been to see Paul Emmett? [A pause, lasting seventy-five seconds]
LANG: I want you to understand that everything I did, both as party leader and as prime minister—everything—I did out of conviction, because I believed it was right.
ME: [Inaudible]
LANG: Emmett claims you showed him some photographs. Is that true? May I see?
And then there is nothing for a while but engine sound, as he studies them, and I spool forward to the part where he lingers over the girls at the picnic on the riverbank. He sounds inexpressibly sad.
“I remember her. And her. She wrote to me once, when I was prime minister. Ruth was not pleased. Oh,
God, Ruth—”
“Oh, God, Ruth—”
“Oh, God, Ruth—”
I play it over and over again. It’s obvious from his voice, now that I’ve listened to it often enough, that at that moment, when he remembers his wife, his concern is entirely for her. I guess she must have called him late that afternoon in a panic to report I’d been to see Emmett and shown him some photographs. She would have needed to talk to him face-to-face as soon as possible—the whole story was threatening to unravel—hence the scramble to find a plane. God knows if she was aware of what might be waiting for her husband on the tarmac. Surely not, is my opinion, although the questions about the lapses in security that allowed it to happen have never been fully answered. But it’s Lang’s failure to complete the sentence that I find moving.What have you done? is surely what he means to add.“Oh, God, Ruth—what have you done?” This, I think, is the instant when the days of suspicion abruptly crystallize in his mind, when he realizes that McAra’s “wild accusations” must have been true after all, and his wife of thirty years is not the woman he thought she was.
No wonder I was the one she suggested should complete the book. She had plenty to hide, and she must have been confident that the author of Christy Costello’s hazy memoir would be just about the least likely person on the planet to discover it.
I would like to write more, but, looking at the clock, I fear that this will have to do, at least for the present. As you can appreciate, I don’t care to linger in one place too long. Already I sense that strangers are starting to take too close an interest in me. My plan is to parcel up a copy of this manuscript and give it to Kate. I shall put it through her door in about an hour’s time, before anyone is awake, with a letter asking her not to open it but to look after it. Only if she doesn’t hear from me within a month, or if she discovers that something has happened to me, is she to read it and decide how best to get it published. She will think I’m being melodramatic, which I am. But I trust her. She will do it. If anyone is stubborn enough and bloody-minded enough to get this thing into print, it is Kate.
I wonder where I’ll go next? I can’t decide. I certainly know what I’d like to do. It may surprise you. I’d like to go back to Martha’s Vineyard. It’s summer there now, and I have a peculiar desire to see those wretched scrub oaks actually in leaf and to watch the yachts go skimming out full-sailed from Edgartown across Nantucket Sound. I’d like to return to that beach at Lambert’s Cove and feel the hot sand beneath my bare feet, and watch the families playing in the surf, and stretch my limbs in the warmth of the clear New England sun.
This puts me in something of a dilemma, as you may appreciate, now that we reach the final paragraph. Am I supposed to be pleased that you are reading this, or not? Pleased, of course, to speak at last in my own voice. Disappointed, obviously, that it probably means I’m dead. But then, as my mother used to say, I’m afraid in this life you just can’t have everything.
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