The Ghost (6 page)

“Are you okay?” she said. “I got your message. You sounded a bit…odd.”

“Did I? Sorry. I’m fine now.” I fought back the impulse to ask her where she’d been when I called.

“So? Have you met him?”

“I have. I’ve just come from him.”

“And?” Before I could answer, she said, “Don’t tell me: charming.”

I briefly held the phone away from my ear and gave it the finger.

“You certainly pick your moments,” she went on. “Did you see yesterday’s papers? You must be the first recorded instance of a rat actually boarding a sinking ship.”

“Yes, of course I saw them,” I said defensively, “and I’m going to ask him about it.”

“When?”

“When the moment arises.”

She made an explosive noise that somehow managed to combine hilarity, fury, contempt, and disbelief. “Well, yes,
do
ask him. Ask him why he illegally kidnaps British citizens in another country and hands them over to be tortured. Ask him if he knows about the techniques the CIA uses to simulate drowning. Ask him what he plans to say to the widow and children of the man who died of a heart attack—”

“Hold on,” I interrupted. “You lost me after drowning.”

“I’m seeing someone else,” she said.

“Good,” I said and hung up.

After that there didn’t seem much else to do except go down to the bar and get drunk.

It was decorated to look like the kind of place Captain Ahab might fancy dropping into after a hard day at the harpoon. The seats and tables were made out of old barrels. There were antique seine nets and lobster traps hanging on the roughly planked walls, along with schooners in bottles and sepia photographs of deep-sea anglers standing proudly beside the suspended corpses of their prey: the fishermen would now all be as dead as their fish, I thought, and such was my mood that the notion pleased me. A big television above the bar was showing an ice hockey game. I ordered a beer and a bowl of clam chowder and sat where I could see the screen. I know nothing about ice hockey, but sport is a great place to lose yourself for a while, and I’ll watch anything available.

“You’re English?” said a man at a table in the corner. He must have heard me ordering. He was the only other customer in the bar.

“And so are you,” I said.

“Indeed I am. Are you here on holiday?”

He had a clipped, hello-old-chap-fancy-a-round-of-golf sort of a voice. That, and the striped shirt with the frayed collar, the double-breasted blazer, the tarnished brass buttons, and the blue silk handkerchief in the top pocket, all flashed bore, bore, bore as clearly as the Edgartown Lighthouse.

“No. Working.” I resumed watching the game.

“So what’s your line?” He had a glass of something clear with ice and a slice of lemon in it. Vodka and tonic? Gin and tonic? I was desperate not to be trapped into conversation with him.

“Just this and that. Excuse me.”

I got up and went to the lavatory and washed my hands. The face in the mirror was that of a man who’d slept six hours out of the past forty. When I returned to the table, my chowder had arrived. I ordered another drink but pointedly didn’t offer to buy one for my compatriot. I could feel him watching me.

“I hear Adam Lang’s on the island,” he said.

I looked at him properly then. He was in his middle fifties, slim but broad shouldered. Strong. His iron-gray hair was slicked straight back off his forehead. There was something vaguely military about him but also unkempt and faded, as if he relied on food parcels from a veterans’ charity. I answered in a neutral tone, “Is he?”

“So I hear. You don’t happen to know his whereabouts, do you?”

“No. I’m afraid not. Excuse me again.”

I started to eat my chowder. I heard him sigh noisily and then the clink of ice as his glass was set down.

“Cunt,” he said as he passed my table.

THERE WAS NO SIGN
of him when I came down to breakfast the next morning. The receptionist told me there was no other guest apart from me in residence. She was equally firm that she hadn’t seen a British man in a blazer. I’d already been awake since four—an improvement on two, but not much—and was groggy enough and hungover enough to wonder if I hadn’t hallucinated the whole encounter. I felt better after some coffee. I crossed the road and walked around the lighthouse a couple of times to clear my head, and by the time I returned to the hotel the minivan had arrived to take me to work.

I’d anticipated that my biggest problem on the first day would be physically getting Adam Lang into a room and keeping him there for long enough to start interviewing him. But the strange thing was that when we reached the house,
he
was already waiting for
me
. Amelia had decided we should use Rhinehart’s office, and we found the former prime minister, wearing a dark green tracksuit, sprawled in the big chair opposite the desk, one leg draped over the arm. He was flicking through a history of World War Two that he’d obviously just taken down from the shelf. A mug of tea stood on the floor beside him. His trainers had sand on their soles: I guessed he must have gone for a run on the beach.

“Hi, man,” he said, looking up at me. “Ready to start?”

“Good morning,” I said. “I just need to sort out a few things first.”

“Sure. Go ahead. Ignore me.”

He went back to his book while I opened my shoulder bag and carefully unpacked the tools of the ghosting trade: a Sony Walkman digital tape recorder with a stack of MD-R 74 minidisks and a mains lead (I’ve learned the hard way not to rely solely on my batteries); a metallic silver Panasonic Toughbook laptop computer, which is not much larger than a hardcover novel and considerably lighter; a couple of small black Moleskine notebooks and three brand-new Jetstream rollerball pens, made by the Mitsubishi Pencil Co.; and finally two white plastic adapters, one a British multipoint plug and one a converter to fit an American socket. It’s a superstition with me always to use the same items, and to lay them out in the proper sequence. I also had a list of questions, culled from the books I’d bought in London and my reading of McAra’s first draft the previous day.

“Did you know,” said Lang suddenly, “that the Germans had jet fighters in 1944? Look at that.” He held up the page to show the photograph. “It’s a wonder we won.”

“We have no floppy disks,” said Amelia, “only these flash drives. I’ve loaded the manuscript onto this one for you.” She handed me an object the size of a small plastic cigarette lighter. “You’re welcome to copy it onto your own computer, but I’m afraid that if you do, your laptop must stay here, locked up, overnight.”

“And apparently Germany declared war on America, not the other way round.”

“Isn’t this all a bit paranoid?”

“The book contains some potentially classified material that has yet to be approved by the Cabinet Office. More to the point, there’s also a very strong risk of some news organization using unscrupulous methods to try to get hold of it. Any leak would jeopardize our newspaper serialization deals.”

Lang said, “So you’ve actually got my whole book on that?”

“We could get a hundred books on that, Adam,” said Amelia, patiently.

“Amazing.” He shook his head. “You know the worst thing about my life?” He closed the book with a snap and replaced it on the shelf. “You get so out of touch. You never go in a shop. Everything’s done for you. You don’t carry any money—if I want some money, even now, I have to ask one of the secretaries or one of the protection boys to get it for me. I couldn’t do it myself, anyway, I don’t know my—what’re they called?—I don’t even know that—”

“PIN?”

“You see? I just don’t have a clue. I’ll give you another example. The other week, Ruth and I went out to dinner with some people in New York. They’ve always been very generous to us, so I say, ‘Right, tonight, this is on me.’ So I give my credit card to the manager and he comes back a few minutes later, all embarrassed, and he shows me the problem. There’s still a strip where the signature’s supposed to be.” He threw up his arms and grinned. “The card hadn’t been activated.”

“This,” I said excitedly, “is exactly the sort of detail we need to put in your book. Nobody knows this sort of thing.”

Lang looked startled. “I can’t put that in. People would think I was a complete idiot.”

“But it’s human detail. It shows what it’s like to be you.” I knew this was my moment. I had to get him to focus on what we needed right from the start. I came round from behind the desk and confronted him. “Why don’t we try to make this book unlike any other political memoir that’s ever been written? Why don’t we try to tell the truth?”

He laughed. “Now that would be a first.”

“I mean it. Let’s tell people what it really feels like to be prime minister. Not just the policy stuff—any old bore can write about that.” I almost cited McAra but managed to swerve away at the last moment. “Let’s stick to what no one except you knows—the day-to-day experience of actually leading a country. What do you feel like in the mornings? What are the strains? What’s it like to be so cut off from ordinary life? What’s it like to be hated?”

“Thanks a lot.”

“What fascinates people isn’t policy—who cares about policy? What fascinates people is always people—the detail of another person’s life. But because the detail is naturally all so familiar to you, you can’t sort out what it is the reader wants to know. It has to be drawn out of you. That’s why you need me. This shouldn’t be a book for political hacks. This should be a book for everyone.”

“The people’s memoir,” said Amelia dryly, but I ignored her, and so, more important, did Lang, who was looking at me quite differently now: it was as if some electric lightbulb marked “self-interest” had started to glow behind his eyes.

“Most former leaders couldn’t get away with it,” I said. “They’re too stiff. They’re too awkward. They’re too
old
. If they take off their jacket and tie and put on a”—I gestured at his outfit—“put on a tracksuit, say, they look phony. But you’re different. And that’s why you should write a different kind of political memoir, for a different age.”

Lang was staring at me. “What do you think, Amelia?”

“I think you two were made for each other. I’m beginning to feel like a gooseberry.”

“Do you mind,” I asked, “if I start recording? Something useful might come out of this. Don’t worry—the tapes will all be your property.”

Lang shrugged and gestured toward the Sony Walkman. As I pressed Record, Amelia slipped out and closed the door quietly behind her.

“The first thing that strikes me,” I said, bringing a chair round from behind the desk so that I could sit facing him, “is that you aren’t really a politician at all, in the conventional sense, even though you’ve been so amazingly successful.” This was the sort of tough questioning I specialized in. “I mean, when you were growing up, no one would have expected you to become a politician, would they?”

“Jesus, no,” said Lang. “Not at all. I had absolutely no interest in politics, either as a child or as a teenager. I thought people who were obsessed by politics were weird. I still do, as a matter of fact. I liked playing football. I liked theater and the movies. A bit later on I liked going out with girls. I never dreamed I might become a politician. Most student politicians struck me as complete nerds.”

Bingo! I thought. We’d been working only two minutes and already we had a potential opening of the book right there:

“So what changed? What turned you on to politics?”

“Turned on is about right,” said Lang with a laugh. “I’d left Cambridge and drifted for a year, hoping that a play I’d been involved in might get taken up by a theater in London. But it didn’t happen and so I ended up working in a bank, living in this grotty basement flat in Lambeth, feeling very sorry for myself, because all my friends from Cambridge were working in the BBC, or getting paid a fortune to do voice-overs on adverts, or what have you. And I remember it was a Sunday afternoon—raining, I was still in bed—and someone starts knocking on the door…”

It was a story he must have told a thousand times, but you wouldn’t have guessed it, watching him that morning. He was sitting back in his chair, smiling at the memory, going over the same old words, using the same rehearsed gestures—he was miming knocking on a door—and I thought what an old trouper he was: the sort of pro who’d always make an effort to put on a good show, whether he had an audience of one or one million.

“…and this person just wouldn’t go away. Knock knock knock. And, you know, I’d had a bit to drink the night before and what have you, and I’m moaning and groaning. I’ve got the pillow over my head. But it starts up again: knock knock knock. So eventually—and by now I’m swearing quite a bit, I can tell you—I get out of bed, I pull on a dressing gown, and I open the door. And there’s this girl, this gorgeous girl. She’s wringing wet from the rain, but she completely ignores that and launches into this speech about the local elections. Bizarre. I have to say I didn’t even know there
were
any local elections, but at least I have the sense to pretend that I’m very interested, and so I invite her in, and make her a cup of tea, and she dries off. And that’s it—I’m in love. And it quickly becomes clear that the best way of getting to see her again is to take one of her leaflets and turn up the next Tuesday evening, or whenever it is, and join the local party. Which I do.”

“And this is Ruth?”

“This is Ruth.”

“And if she’d been a member of a different political party?”

“I’d have gone along and joined it just the same. I wouldn’t have
stayed
in it,” he added quickly. “I mean obviously this was the start of a long political awakening for me—bringing out values and beliefs that were already present but were simply dormant at that time. No, I couldn’t have stayed in just
any
party. But everything would have been different if Ruth hadn’t knocked on that door that afternoon, and kept knocking.”

“And if it hadn’t been raining.”

“If it hadn’t been raining I would have found some other excuse to invite her in,” said Lang with a grin. “I mean, come on, man—I wasn’t
completely
hopeless.”

I grinned back, shook my head, and jotted “opening??” in my notebook.

WE WORKED ALL MORNING
without a break, except for when a tape was filled. Then I would briefly hurry downstairs to the room that Amelia and the secretaries were using as a temporary office and hand it over to be transcribed. This happened a couple of times, and always on my return I’d find Lang sitting exactly where I’d left him. At first I thought this was a testament to his powers of concentration. Only gradually did I realize it was because he had nothing else to do.

I took him carefully through his early years, focusing not so much on the facts and dates (McAra had assembled those dutifully enough) as on the impressions and physical objects of his childhood: the semidetached home on a housing estate in Leicester; the personalities of his father (a builder) and his mother (a teacher); the quiet, apolitical values of the English provinces in the sixties, where the only sounds to be heard on a Sunday were church bells and the chimes of ice cream vans; the muddy Saturday morning games of football at the local park and the long summer afternoons of cricket down by the river; his father’s Austin Atlantic and his own first Raleigh bike; the comics—the
Eagle
and the
Victor
—and the radio comedies—
I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again
and
The Navy Lark
; the 1966 World Cup Final and
Z Cars
and
Ready, Steady, Go!; The Guns of Navarone
and
Carry On, Doctor
at the local movie theater; Millie singing “My Boy Lollipop” and Beatles singles played at forty-five RPM on his mother’s Dansette Capri record player.

Sitting there in Rhinehart’s study, the minutiae of English life nearly half a century earlier seemed as remote as bric-a-brac in a Victorian trompe l’oeil—and, you might have thought, about as relevant. But there was cunning in my method, and Lang, with his genius for empathy, grasped it at once, for this was not just his childhood we were itemizing but mine and that of every boy who was born in England in the nineteen fifties and who grew to maturity in the seventies.

“What we need to do,” I told him, “is to persuade the reader to identify emotionally with Adam Lang. To see beyond the remote figure in the bombproof car. To recognize in him the same things they recognize in themselves. Because if I know nothing else about this business, I know this: once you have the readers’ sympathy, they’ll follow you anywhere.”

“I get it,” he said, nodding emphatically. “I think that’s brilliant.”

And so we swapped memories for hour after hour, and I will not say we began to
concoct
a childhood for Lang, exactly—I was always careful not to depart from the known historical record—but we certainly pooled our experiences to such an extent that a few of my memories inevitably became blended into his. You may find this shocking. I was shocked myself, the first time I heard one of my clients on television weepily describing a poignant moment from his past that was actually from
my
past. But there it is. People who succeed in life are rarely reflective. Their gaze is always on the future: that’s why they succeed. It’s not in their nature to remember what they were feeling, or wearing, or who was with them, or the scent of freshly cut grass in the churchyard on the day they were married, or the tightness with which their first baby squeezed their finger. That’s why they need ghosts—to flesh them out, as it were.

As it transpired, I collaborated with Lang for only a short while, but I can honestly say I never had a more responsive client. We decided that his first memory would be when he tried to run away from home at the age of three and he heard the sound of his father’s footsteps coming up behind him and felt the hardness of his muscled arms as he scooped him back to the house. We remembered his mother ironing, and the smell of wet clothes on a wooden frame drying in front of a coal fire, and how he liked to pretend that the clotheshorse was a house. His father wore a vest at table and ate pork dripping and kippers; his mother liked the occasional sweet sherry and had a book called
A Thing of Beauty
with a red-and-gold cover. Young Adam would look at the pictures for hours; that was what first gave him his interest in the theater. We remembered Christmas pantomimes he had been to (I made a note to look up exactly what was playing in Leicester when he was growing up) and his stage debut in the school nativity play.