Ghosting Read online

  From Bordeaux it starts off innocently enough along the wide estuary with its lush water meadows and rivers edged with poplars. Before long you start to recognise the names from wine labels. First is Saint-Émilion, enclosed by medieval walls, sitting on top of a rounded hill. Beyond it the river twists and turns in the quiet, beautiful valleys. The richness of the landscape is set off by countless châteaux that hang, seemingly precariously, over the magnificent cliffs above the river. They are evidence of the region's turbulent past when the valleys ran with blood rather than wine.

  You cannot travel through the Dordogne without getting a sense of pre-history as well as history. The limestone cliffs rise steeply, sometimes sheer, and you can see the horizontal grooves in the cliffs that formed rock shelters and became the homes of prehistoric man. Some of the overhanging rocks have been worn into fantastic shapes—spectacular mushroom-like growths and swellings. They seem to have been there forever and they look as if they will last forever. Henry Miller, who feared for the future of France during the ravages of the Second World War, thought that the Dordogne alone was imperishable. “France may one day exist no more,” he wrote, “but the Dordogne will live on, just as dreams live on and nourish the souls of men.”

  Happily, there aren't many straight stretches of road, so you don't race along and miss everything the way you do on the M1. The road mostly weaves and winds with the river, altering the perspective with every turn, and checking the speed so that it's possible to notice fine details: enormous pink tomatoes on a market stall at the side of the road, old men standing on corners hitching their trousers, the shine on courgettes growing in the field. The pace was too slow for Tiger, of course, but even he couldn't straighten the bends in the road. Every so often there would be an unexpected hold-up, a farmer moving his cattle, a tractor crossing the road. At these times he would squeeze his temples and exclaim “Mon Dieu! Quest-ce qui se passe?” The gardien would dutifully explain what was plain for all to see.

  The natural colour of the region is limestone, sometimes marble-white, sometimes wheat-yellow, but often dyed pink or amber by the ore in the rock. The countryside changes markedly with the seasons, becoming a kaleidoscope of shifting shapes and colours. In springtime, my favourite time, the hills look like busy weavers’ looms, so quickly are they transformed by the different varieties of flowers. In autumn the colours are darker, purples and browns mainly, warm patchwork quilts covering the hillsides, repudiating the chill yet to come.

  Autobiography is unreliable. A lot of what we remember is designed to shield us from painful truths. As is a lot of what we forget, or choose to forget. Divorce changes every aspect of life—that much I had already discovered. It requires radical adjustments in all the settled corners. You don't know what to keep, what to throw away. And sometimes, when you try to hold onto something to stop it slipping away, it slips away anyway. The substance, the detail—both of which once seemed so important—leak away into the dry sand, leaving just the faintest imprint.

  By 1991, the year of my first visit to the Dordogne, six years had passed since the unhitching of my marriage. It's easy to underestimate the sheer bloody agony of separation and divorce, particularly since they are now so run-of-the-mill. To be married and then, suddenly, to be not married packs a violent punch. You move headlong from one reality to another. Being abandoned is not unlike being bereaved, and the shock can be just as great. Abandonment, however, comes without the fringe benefits of bereavement. There is mostly an absence of compassion and, though it is rare for sympathy to be completely withheld, it is quite usual to pick up in others the feeling that marital breakdown is not a blameless state, as widowhood is judged to be. Those who are left, so it seems, have colluded in their own downfall.

  Widows and widowers are allowed to grieve, encouraged even, but the grief which attends marriage breakdown is often a silent secret thing. When a partner dies, the happy memories are sustaining, even if—perhaps especially if—they are touched up by a falsely bright light. Yet when a marriage falls apart, every happy memory is threatened, and the good times can be blackened overnight. There is nothing that cannot be reinterpreted. Divorce violates the present, but it also slithers backwards on its filthy tentacles and desecrates the past.

  I did not recover quickly. It can take a long time to get the burning molten stuff out of the way. There ought to be a word for it— what people go through at this time. For the first few months I spent the days wishing for the nights to come, so that I could take off my brave face; and for many nights the misery of weeping and wakefulness made me long for daybreak and the release it would give. Lying in my great salt lake, I marvelled at the efficiency of tear-ducts. It is an exhausting business, just getting through, facing down unhappiness, trying to outwit it.

  Meanwhile the children poured love all over me. And also over each other, some days seeming to fill all the available space with it. We kept busy—going down the track to the beach, gathering driftwood for fires, roasting potatoes in the embers, reading stories, making music together, hugging a lot, trying to come through. A lot of this time felt good and precious. In between editing and translating I tamed the garden, sawed fallen trees, chopped logs. The energy of grief is awesome. Weekends consisted in non-stop activity, or the simulation of it. This stage had its own value, its own rhythm. I existed only for the children—that was my sense of it. But of course, children are never truly an “only”: they are the best reason for existence, and being with them is the finest model we have of what it is to love. Every day, in large ways and small, they show us what it means.

  You can't hurry grief. Even when the rawness heals, there is still something heavy waiting in the wings, ready to engulf you if you let it. But slowly, gradually, something that could be called normal tiptoed back. And with it the faintest notion, once inadmissible, that something good would stagger out of the wreckage.

  Men often assume that women who live on their own are desperate for sex. Women tend to get irritated by this assumption, and when the assumption is correct, as it usually is, they get even more irritated. And sex can look like love if you are confused about what love looks like. Men appeared from nowhere, like door-to-door salesmen, expecting rebuff but eager to display their wares anyway. Some were eager to the point of idiocy, and most bore the livery of solitary, unhappy lives. But evidently I had become hard to please. I knew—if I had not known before—it would take a long time before I was able to relax again, learn to let go again. I pencilled it in for some date in the distant future.

  By the time the years had passed, however, an unlooked-for contentment had crept in and taken up residence. Being on my own no longer felt incomplete or wanting. I had adapted well. Life was good.

  And then of course, just as I dropped my guard, it happened— bang! The oceanic moment, then the whelming and the vividness of—of what? Simply this: of coming to love again, and being loved in return. Put like that, this new love might be thought to be the same sort of thing I had known before. All I can say is that it did not feel the same, and it never has. Perhaps the intervening years had blocked the once familiar pathways, but there is no real way of telling. At any rate the world suddenly altered in the early part of 1991, and some months later, after the first madness had subsided, I sat in the back of a car travelling through the valley of the Dor-dogne and, looking up towards the distant peaks of the Massif Central, I thought of this new love back in Scotland and the mountains behind the mountains behind the mountains.

  During the early nineties Tiger and I made several trips to the Dordogne together. Each visit lasted about two weeks. Tiger described them as working holidays, to himself and to others, but in fact the work proportion was often negligible. Sometimes there were proofs to correct or a book review to write, but it seemed that my chief raison d'etre was to provide some company. He hated to be by himself. A routine was established during my first stay and adhered to rigidly on every subsequent trip. The routine governed eating, shopping at the market, watch
ing cable television, afternoon swims, walks round the estate and feeding the dogs.

  The last of these filled me with terror. Every second day, just before midday, the dogs were fed on raw meat. This was a high point for Tiger. The procedure was greatly ritualised, carried out with sacramental solemnity. First the three dogs would be shut in their kennels by the gardien, a preliminary to the feeding exercise. The kennels were situated about two hundred metres from the main house. They were the size of potting sheds and beautifully appointed with everything an haut monde dog could desire. The dogs knew the routine and would immediately work themselves up into a frenzy, throwing themselves against the kennel doors and barking their overbred heads off. The gardien would then fetch a basin of bloody meat from the back of his van, walk over to the paved patio where Tiger was waiting, and there he would ceremoniously hand over the basin as if it were the blessed Eucharist itself. Next, the dogs were put on stout leads, more like harnesses, and brought down from their kennels. I found it a terrifying sight: the gardien pulling one way, the dogs another, four sets of teeth being bared—the gar-diens as a result of straining every sinew to keep control, the dogs’ collective choppers getting ready for the fresh meat on offer. But Tiger found it exhilarating. While the gardien kept a tight grip on the leash, Tiger would throw chunks of meat at each dog in turn, issuing commands in French—“Asseyez-vous! Restez tranquilles!”— making them wait their turn, showing them who was boss. He loved this feeding ceremony and he wanted me to love it too.

  “Come, beloved! They are your friends! They love you! Give them some meat!”

  But I never did. The very idea made my bowels turn over. I am enough of an Aristotelian to know that virtue resides in the middle way. A choice has to be made between absolute recklessness and absolute cowardice. The happy medium in this case was to stand in the relative safety of the doorway, half-paralysed with fear.

  Tiger and I disagreed comprehensively on the subject of the guard dogs. As far as Tiger was concerned, his Dobermanns were noble, blue-blooded animals, standing out from less thorough breeds as aristocrats, dogs that could fittingly and effortlessly guard the House of Rothschild. They were not aggressive, merely powerful; they were not hostile, merely energetic; not threatening, just playful. Linguisticians call this “semantic bleaching.” He also anthropomorphised like nobody's business: the dogs were sad or jealous or excited or upset, they wanted to play, they wanted to rest, they were missing their mother, they loved their master. He worshipped their bodies: their strong muzzles and wedge-shaped heads, their clearly articulated stifles, the unequivocal lines of their frames. When he looked at them he saw Olympian athletes— sprinters, hurdlers, long-jumpers. What I saw were tightly packed homicidal frames waiting to tear me limb from limb.

  Normally I don't frighten easily. But for me these Dobermanns were in the same category as piranhas and great white sharks. It's easy to avoid piranhas and great white sharks. These serial killers, however, were living in our midst. They were the psychopaths next door, and they meant business. Tiger loved their qualities of strength and power; indeed he identified with them. But I identified with the dead goat that I watched being buried by the gardien on my first visit. I couldn't help noticing then that it was roughly my size. Tiger, who was still upset about the goat, could not bear to watch the interment. But Éclair, the killer, got off lightly. Tiger could not stay angry with him for long.

  “Tu es méchant!” he said, wagging his finger at the impenitent.

  It is 1994 and we are off to France once again. This time we are going there to write a novel. The publication of several non-fiction books has brought Tiger a sense of fulfilment, but there has been no lasting contentment. As the ancients knew and understood, pleasure is transient: it comes, it is savoured, and it goes. Descartes thought that the secret of happiness was to be satisfied with what you know you can have, and not to hanker after something you can't have. But Tiger differs from both the ancients and Descartes in his belief that almost anything is attainable provided you pay for it, and that by setting the sights high the chances of pleasure being permanent are correspondingly high.

  And so, from one moment to the next, anything can happen. A moment ago a sixth volume of interviews was published, attended by a good deal of media interest, favourable reviews, and another round of newspaper profiles. In the Daily Telegraph Allan Massie described Tiger as “masterly and sympathetic, the most self-effacing of interviewers and yet able to speak as an equal.” Robert Kee called him “a magician interviewer of the highest order.” William Trevor wrote: “Making real people real at second hand isn't as easy as it seems … it's the subtlety of interrogation that ensures these portraits emerge.” Tiger purred with pleasure. Everything was well in the world. The next moment we are writing a novel and the landscape has changed. Sic transit gloria mundi.

  Tiger is convinced that the way ahead “for us” lies in a different sort of publication. Interviews, newspaper articles, book reviews are all very well, but the real test is the novel. He lowers his voice at this point, enunciating each word slowly, a sure sign of scarcely being able to contain his excitement, elongating the word real to a disturbing length. He is captivated by the idea. This is not a whim. I know the difference between a whim and a serious proposition. This is a serious proposition. He will not be dissuaded. The tiger is not for turning. I feel the familiar panic pitching its tent somewhere in my lower abdomen.

  “We need to evolve,” he says.

  I do not demur.

  How to write a novel? How to write someone else's novel? These two questions seem absolutely central. I wonder how I have arrived at this point without actually meaning to.

  “What sort of novel are we thinking about?” I ask.

  We are in the British Airways Executive Lounge at London Gatwick airport en route to France. The writing will be done in France. According to Tiger, France is the best place in the world to create a work of literature. Evidently we will have everything we need: the best food, the finest wine, a high-tech music system, a studio to work in, the fresh Dordogne air.

  “We are thinking about a beautiful novel, very beautiful,” he says, and he looks somewhere into the middle distance, smiling rapturously, already transported by the sheer imagined beauty of it. “And it will have a beautiful cover. We will make sure of that.” He taps out the last six words on the table.

  “But what genre are we talking about? Are we thinking of a romantic novel? A thriller?” (These conversations are always conducted in the first person plural. The idiosyncratic use of pronouns is part of the charade and has become second nature.)

  “It will be thrilling, oh yes. And also romantic. Very romantic. Oh, yes.”

  “So, a love story then?”

  “But of course! It has to be a love story. People associate me with love. I am famous for love. Isn't it?”

  In certain circumstances, the plural pronoun would switch abruptly to the singular, from we to I, from us to me. There is always a compelling reason for the shift. In this instance, the snag is that people do not associate me with love. Unlike Tiger, I am not famous for love.

  There is a long pause. The matter might have ended there, but for my need to establish the broad nature of the project. I have to ask some more. Tiger is almost certainly concentrating on the finished product, beautifully bound and wrapped in a seductive dust-jacket. My concern is how the finished product will be arrived at.

  “What sort of love story do we have in mind?” I ask, as if we are discussing wallpaper or home furnishings and he has to pick one from a limited range. “Is the love requited or unrequited?”

  “Definitely requited. Oh yes, very requited.”

  “And who are the characters?”

  Even by our standards this is becoming an odd exchange.

  “Sweetie,” he says, the tone long-suffering, humouring an imbecile. He takes hold of my hand in a kindness-to-dumb-animals sort of way. “It has to be the love between a man and a woman. Do you think I cou
ld write about poofters? No, it has to be a man and a woman—a beautiful woman and very sexy. There will be lots of sex, but very distinguished. We will do the sex beautifully. Isn't it?”

  “Long? Short?” I'm feeling desperate now.

  He strokes his chin, weighing up the possibilities.

  “Not too long, not too short.”

  “And do we have a story line? Do we have any idea of what it is about?”

  “Of course, beloved! I have thought of everything He squeals the last word in a spasm of exuberance. “Let me tell you the idea. It is very simple. There is a man … he is like me somewhat… he is married … he falls in love with a woman … there is a huge passion … and then … well, we will see what happens after that, isn't it?”

  There is another pause while I weigh things up. Then:

  “Does he tell his wife? About the huge passion, I mean.”

  “Darling, are you mad?” Tiger points a finger to his temple and screws it from side to side. “Why would he tell her? Why would he hurt her?”

  We had several more discussions just like that one. None went beyond the man/woman/huge passion rudiments. At first I was filled with a sense of the impossibility of proceeding on the basis of such vague guidelines. But before long I realised that vagueness is a blessing in its way. While “Married man falls in love with beautiful woman” is not exactly an original story line or a detailed synopsis, it could easily be worse. For example, it could be: “Married woman falls in love with young army captain in Moscow, has huge passion, cannot live with the consequences, throws herself under a train.” Or perhaps: “Colonial police officer in West Africa, married to a Roman Catholic, falls in love with young widow, has huge passion, compounds adultery with sacrilege, commits suicide.” You have to look on the bright side. Much better to be given just the bare bones to flesh out in any way that seems possible and plausible. Less is more.