The Ghost (12 page)

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 was
stuff
. 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 London
Evening 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.

“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’t
have 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?”

IT LOOKED TO BE
about 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 I
was
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.”

“War crimes!” he said, with a roll of his head, and I caught a glimpse of two flesh-colored hearing aids, one in either ear. “We could all have been charged with those! And maybe we ought to have been. I don’t know. I guess I’ll just have to put my trust in a higher judgment.” He chuckled sadly. “I’ll find out soon enough.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. I was just glad to be standing where it was dry. We leaned on the weathered handrail and stared out together at the rain while the dog skittered dementedly on its claws around the veranda. Through a gap in the trees I could just make out the sea—vast and gray, with the white lines of the incoming waves moving remorselessly down it, like interference on an old black-and-white TV.

“So what brings you to this part of the Vineyard?” asked the old man.

There seemed no point in lying. “Someone I knew was washed up on the beach down there,” I said. “I thought I’d take a look at the spot. To pay my respects,” I added, in case he thought I was a ghoul.

“Now
that
was a funny business,” he said. “You mean the British guy a few weeks ago? No
way
should that current have carried him this far west. Not at this time of year.”

“What?” I turned to look at him. Despite his great age, there was still something youthful about his sharp features and keen manner. His thin white hair was combed straight back off his forehead. He looked like an antique Boy Scout.

“I’ve known this sea most of my life. Hell, a guy tried to throw
me
off that damn ferry when I was still at the World Bank, and I can tell you this: if he’d succeeded, I wouldn’t have floated ashore in Lambert’s Cove!”

I was conscious of a drumming in my ears, but whether it was my blood or the downpour hitting the shingle roof I couldn’t tell.

“Did you mention this to the police?”

“The police? Young man, at my age, I have better things to do with what little time I have left than spend it with the police! Anyway, I told all this to Annabeth. She was the one who was dealing with the police.” He saw my blank expression. “Annabeth Wurmbrand,” he said. “Everybody knows Annabeth—Mars Wurmbrand’s widow. She has the house nearest the ocean.” At my failure to react, he became slightly testy. “She’s the one who told the police about the lights.”

“The lights?”

“The lights on the beach on the night the body was washed up. Nothing happens round here that she doesn’t see. Kay used to say she was always happy leaving Mohu in the fall, knowing she could be sure Annabeth would keep an eye on things all winter.”

“What kind of lights were these?”

“Flashlights, I guess.”

“Why wasn’t this reported in the media?”

“In the media?” He gave another of his grating chuckles. “Annabeth’s never spoken to a reporter in her life! Except maybe an editor from the
World of Interiors.
It took her a decade even to trust Kay, because of the
Post
.”

That started him off talking about Kay’s big old place up on Lambert’s Cove Road that Bill and Hillary used to like so much, and where Princess Diana had stayed, of which only the chimneys now remained, but by then I had stopped listening. It seemed to me the rain had eased somewhat and I was eager to get away. I interrupted.

“Do you think you could point me in the direction of Mrs. Wurmbrand’s house?”

“Sure, but there’s not much point in going there.”

“Why not?”

“She fell downstairs two weeks ago. Been in a coma ever since. Poor Annabeth. Ted says she’s never going to regain consciousness. So that’s another one gone. Hey!” he shouted, but by then I was halfway down the steps from the veranda.

“Thanks for the shelter,” I called over my shoulder, “and the talk. I’ve got to get going.”

He looked so forlorn, standing there alone under his dripping roof, with the Stars and Stripes hanging like a dishrag from its slick pole, that I almost turned back.

“Well, tell your Mr. Lang to keep his spirits up!” He gave me a trembling military salute and turned it into a wave. “You take care now.”

I righted my bike and set off down the track. I wasn’t even noticing the rain anymore. About a quarter of a mile down the slope, in a clearing close to the dunes and the pond, was a big, low house surrounded by a wire fence and discreet signs announcing it was private property. There were no lamps lit, despite the darkness of the storm. That, I surmised, must be the residence of the comatose widow. Could it be true? She had seen
lights
? Well, it was certainly the case that from the upstairs windows one would have a good view of the beach. I leaned the bike against a bush and scrambled up the little path, through sickly, yellowish vegetation and lacy green ferns, and as I came to the crest of the dune the wind seemed to push me away, as if this too were a private domain and I had no business trespassing.

I’d already glimpsed what lay beyond the dunes from the old guy’s house, and as I’d cycled down the track, I’d heard the boom of the surf getting progressively louder. But it was still a shock to clamber up and suddenly be confronted by that vista—that seamless gray hemisphere of scudding clouds and heaving ocean, the waves hurtling in and smashing against the beach in a continuous, furious detonation. The low, sandy coast ran away in a curve to my right for about a mile and ended in the jutting outcrop of Makonikey Head, misty through the spray. I wiped the rain out of my eyes to try to see better, and I thought of McAra alone on this immense shore—facedown, glutted with salt water, his cheap winter clothes stiff with brine and cold. I imagined him emerging out of the bleak dawn, carried in on the tide from Vineyard Sound, scraping the sand with his big feet, being washed out again, and then returning, slowly creeping higher up the beach until at last he grounded. And then I imagined him dumped over the side of a dinghy and dragged ashore by men with flashlights, who’d come back a few days later and thrown a garrulous old witness down her architect-designed stairs.