Ghosting Read online

  Tiger talked a lot about passion and poetry—the two main elements that would underpin the book. He used the word poetic sweepingly in the way others might say beautiful or fine. To call something poetic was the highest accolade. It could apply to paintings, furniture, faces, conversations, encounters and many other things besides, notably sex. Passion on the other hand was a softening word for just one thing—sex. Over the years we had discussed sex many times, very often in the context of films we had seen, and he gave the impression that he favoured a kind of idealised romantic love with an overlay of crude fucking. I could sense danger ahead.

  There is a great deal of nonsense talked about writing novels. The common assumption is that it is easy: we all have a novel in us, so they say. People talk carelessly about their intention to “write it all down one day.” They encourage others with the same recklessness. They hear a funny/tragic/bizarre story in the pub one day and in no time at all they are saying that it would “make a good novel.” As if the only way to give validity to a chunk of real life is to wrap it up in a novel. As if it were the simplest thing in the world. Where did this illusion spring from? It is a job to write a novel. And now it is my job.

  Two days passed without a single word being written. I gave way to an assortment of displacement activities—sending faxes to my children, rescuing a trapped honey bee, filing my fingernails—together with the modern equivalent of pencil sharpening: setting up the laptop, adjusting the chair, getting the ergonomics right. There was too much glare from the sun so the desk had to be moved. Perhaps an extra cushion would prevent backache? And iced tea would surely help things along nicely. But you can fool yourself only for so long. You can put things off only for so long. As it says in the Stone Garden in Kyoto: You are here. This is now. I stared at my blank computer screen and it stared back blankly.

  How to proceed? Write what you know, they always say. But what did I know? Suddenly I knew nothing. In a bid to avert panic I decided to make a list of things in my favour. The list was not long but it was a start:

  I have written a lot already (just not a novel).

  I have read lots of novels.

  For the first of these to count as an advantage you have to believe that all writing comes from the same place. I'm not sure that I do believe that. Writing prose is not writing fiction. The most I could hope for was that the experience of writing journalism, literary pieces, book reviews, and so on would act as some sort of training ground for writing a novel.

  As for reading a lot, there is, sadly, no causal connection between the fact of having read fiction and the ability to write fiction. I know this at an instinctive level, and I think perhaps I have always known it; but this did not prevent me gathering together dozens of novels and taking them to France in my suitcase. It was an eclectic heap, selected from my shelves of paperbacks at home. I did this partly in the hope of discovering how to write a novel, and partly because I thought the systematic approach might compensate for lack of inspiration. The next two days were spent dipping into books by Penelope Fitzgerald, Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Beryl Bainbridge, Alison Lurie, Anne Fine, Jennifer Johnstone. At the end of the second day I realised that I had been reading only women writers, surely a foolish exercise if I was to learn to write like a man. For the next two days, fighting off a slight feeling of frenzy, I read William Trevor, John Updike, Ian McEwan, Tim Parks, John Banville.

  Spending days on end re-reading my favourite authors would normally be my idea of supreme happiness. But if you approach it as a technical exercise, it can remove most of the pleasure. I selected chapters at random, sometimes reading them several times, unpicking the prose, analysing the method, looking for clues as to how something was done—the way in which suspense, or perhaps interior monologue, was created, how one perspective suddenly turned into another without the seams showing. Gradually I became aware of different techniques and stylistic devices. When you are reading for pleasure and interest (the best way), you are aware of the good quality of the writing without necessarily noticing how it is being achieved. It's enough that it is there, and you are grateful for it. If the writer is skilled, the nuts and bolts don't show. How is the passing of time conveyed, for example? How to get to the flashback, how to jump forward in time? Is it merely to do with verb tenses? Or is there something more ingenious at work?

  What I discovered was that, when time changes are handled well, you scarcely notice them; as a reader, you are perfectly happy to move through days and weeks and years in either direction provided your author has a safe pair of hands. The devices are subtle: the judicious use of a pluperfect tense, for instance, or the foreshortening of a character's history. The same applies to point of view: the narrator—even when the story is told in the first-person—has various tricks up his sleeve to allow the reader to know what the other characters are thinking and feeling. And the handling of dialogue was a revelation. Critics are fond of saying, “the dialogue doesn't work,” but when it works well it is, paradoxically, a kind of dialogue that people believe is spoken, or feel comfortable with; not what actually is spoken, which would not work at all. Often the very best dialogue is not in the least authentic. In real life, dialogue does not follow a logical sequence. People do not always listen to each other, nor do they always answer each other.

  Of course, this systematic approach was doomed from the start. Utterly futile, in fact. In spite of all the unpicking and unpacking, or possibly because of it, it became clear that a novel is much more than the sum of its parts. It is a kind of commitment of oneself— an investment of something very personal. It is the writer's own energy, emotion and thoughts, in spite of the fact that these are conveyed by means of made-up characters. It is not mathematics; it cannot simply be reduced to different elements or separate equations. In all good novels there is something that transcends the constituent parts and resonates with the reader. This something is not quantifiable or discoverable or learnable. At least not in six weeks—Tiger's proposed timetable.

  1994 was not confined to being The Year of the Novel. It was a busy year in other respects. On the personal front there were two deaths and a marriage—in that order.

  Love has many elements, but scarcely any forms the basis for marriage. And marriage is precarious—my new partner and I both knew that—so it was never mentioned. Both of us had been left, that is to say that we had not done the leaving, and this single fact seemed to fix the way the light fell on the picture. It made us more wary perhaps, though it also bound us more closely. Three years after we met, however, the subject of marriage came up, like a crocus pushing through snow, when we were talking about Dante's circles of hell—at least that was what I was talking about, in particular the circle which is reserved for those who are wilfully sad. Without warning, he said: would I marry him, please? A long pause. Then, of course I would. Let's not wait, he said. This conversation took place in June 1994, three weeks after the death of his mother.

  Falling in love gets such a bad name among mature adults: it's so twee, so outmoded, so mushily-slushily embarrassing. Women are counselled against it—it makes them dependent, passive, dewy-eyed. And strong men lose control—never a good thing. Yet we still do it. Even if we are suspicious of it, or marked by the pain of having once lost it. Falling in love just will not go away.

  People who are not in love, or who have “got over” love, condescend to those in the grip of love, or those who have just lost it. They say, oh, you'll get over it, or they welcome you, knowingly, back to the real world; but they have forgotten that love gives the illusion of a better world, a more beautiful one, a place where idealism doesn't seem inexorably doomed. Being out of love is the real misfortune. Being in love is perhaps not to be in the real world, but it is ipso facto more agreeable in a hundred different ways.

  How had I managed for so long without it?

  Meanwhile, in an overheated nursing home, my father was waiting for death. Four years before, diminished and demented, he had been booked in for life. A
t first he had to share a room with Mr. Dixon, who sat in a chair with a wooden tray fastened in front. Mr. Dixon stared ahead, unspeaking, apparently quite unaware of my father's presence, or anyone else's. But his presence was strangely unnerving, at least to me, and I felt obliged to talk to him, not to ignore him. Whenever I visited, usually with my children, there was always something loud on television. But my father and Mr. Dixon had fixed expressions, suggesting they neither watched nor listened. Sometimes their chairs were at the wrong angle to the screen, and they both sat gazing past it. “Do you mind if I switch off the television, Mr. Dixon?” I sometimes asked. He never answered, but out of a kind of awkward politeness I pretended that he had, and that he didn't mind. I found it impossible to behave as if he weren't there. “Would you like a chocolate, Mr. Dixon? What's that you said? Oh, you wouldn't? Well, I'll leave it on your table in case you change your mind.” The children would sit wide-eyed during my inept ventriloquism, looking from me to Mr. Dixon, trying not to laugh, so it seemed. And sometimes when they played together at home, this silent, staring presence was a character in their make-believe world. “Shall I pull down your trousers, Mr. Dixon?” I heard them say. “Shall I put ribbons in your hair? It's really nice that you don't mind.”

  One day when we visited the nursing home, Mr. Dixon had gone. His chair was empty and his bed had been stripped. My father seemed indifferent. I told myself it was better this way. Much worse if he had missed him, longed for his company. Mr. Dixon never reappeared, but for many years afterwards he was kept alive by my children who consulted him—an imaginary spirit at our table—on a variety of matters on which they were keen to supply the answers as well as the questions. “What time do I have to go to bed, Mr. Dixon? Oh, ten o'clock. That's good. Thank you very much.”

  In the early months, before his strength seeped away, my father would occasionally escape from the nursing home in St. Andrews. He would wander through the town, stopping to take in the sights—St. Salvator's church, the medieval quadrangles of the university, St. Rule's Tower, still standing after forty generations had lived and died. Not being in a hurry, and looking slightly bemused, he blended well with the tourists. Sometimes it took a whole day to catch him.

  But now he stayed in his room and made no bid for freedom. He seemed sad, vacant, his eyes looking out and in at the same time. Very occasionally his face would light up, and for a moment it could seem as if all was well and there had been some terrible mistake. These moments in their own way were more agonising than the others. But mostly he sat perfectly still in his armchair, staring ahead, doing his best to die. Sitting beside him, I could feel myself growing up. This is part of life, I told myself. This is what happens. Your parents die—they show you how to do it.

  Two weeks before I was due to be married, they telephoned me from the nursing home and told me he was slipping away. I sat by his bedside all day, listening to his breathing. I talked to him, telling him the things that mattered, things I had never been able to tell him when he was not dying. Nurses popped in and out, jauntily, breezily. Did I want a cup of tea? Perhaps I would care to give my father a shave? It would make him look nice, they said— smarten him up, give me something to do. I rubbed in the shaving soap, tenderly, doubtfully, and drew the razor down his cheek. But it felt too awkward, too poignant. I couldn't do it. I said my goodbyes and left.

  Next day they telephoned again and told me he was much better. When I went into his room he was sitting up in bed eating porridge. Evidently it was hard to die. He had come back to life, albeit a poor rendition of life.

  He died a few days later, barely a week before my new marriage was to take place. The funeral was squeezed in a day or two ahead of the wedding. It was the right way round, we told ourselves.

  Back in France I needed a beginning, a middle and an end. I needed them badly. I also needed at least two characters in order for the story to function at even a basic level—the main character, who was to be “our hero,” and the woman with whom he was to fall in love. The man, according to Tiger, was married, so perhaps his wife would also play a part in the story? Which made a total of three. Three characters don't sound terribly daunting—not as daunting as, say, four—but three characters can be quite daunting enough, especially when none has yet taken shape.

  From one or two remarks Tiger had made I had a hunch that he already identified with the main character in the book. This was an interesting existential association given that not a word had yet been written. Confirmation came from an unexpected source, an interview with Tiger that appeared in the Scotsman newspaper around that time.

  … His whole demeanour suggests passion constrained. He cannot sit still for long. He talks quickly, almost imploringly, and the words tumble over each other. “You have to keep pushing at the boundaries in life,” he declares, “or you don't exist anymore.” So, just as one tried to pin him down about his interviews and why he has done so many, he announces they are already in the past. From now on he is going to be a novelist. This is what is fresh. This is what is now. “It is not going to be a beeg novel… It will be more a philosophical and a literary book. It's about my love of women and what would happen—what the consequences would be of such a love if… well, anyway, it's about a man who loves two women.”

  “My love of women.” There, I knew it. A dead give-away. If it was a slip, it was surely a telling slip. There was now little doubt in my mind that Tiger saw himself as the protagonist. In some ways this simplified things—at least there was an abundance of source material to work from. But I soon realised that the fictional version of Tiger would have to be based on his own self-image. He could not be, like the most interesting characters in fiction, seriously flawed. No, our hero would have to be sensitive, compassionate, successful in business, of strong moral fibre, devout, impassioned and wise. He would probably also be something of a self-styled philosopher and he would have to have a great capacity for love.

  And so, to work. I sketched out a plan in which the main character would be a wealthy businessman whose ordered life would be turned upside down by an extra-marital affair. This would arrive like a bolt from the blue and would coincide with a crisis in his life—the death of his beloved mother. I tried this out on Tiger. He pulled a face. Something wasn't right. It wasn't immediately clear what it was.

  “Darleeng, PLEEEase, do we have to have the death?” He spoke imploringly, drawing out each word.

  “You don't like the death?”

  “I don't like the death.”

  “Well,” I said, caught a little off-guard, “I do think we need to have some sort of crisis, and a funeral is always quite a good focal point in a novel.” Then, gaining in confidence, “Also, the emotional upheaval associated with bereavement would be a neat way of allowing the affair to take place. It would make it more understandable in a way.” Now the coup de grâce. “I mean, we don't want to make him an uncaring bastard who cheats on his wife, do we?”

  The mention of an uncaring bastard would surely be enough to win him round, but instead he pulled another face. I wasn't sure what was bothering him. He stroked his lower jaw and made a prolonged moaning noise, the sort you might make when someone is sticking a needle in your arm. Eventually he said:

  “It's no good. We have to find another crisis. You see, my mother is still alive and, well, I don't want to upset her.”

  This was endearing in its way, but not endearing enough to jettison the planned death. By now I had convinced myself I needed this death. Bereavement was something I thought I could “do;” it was part of recent experience and I wasn't going to give it up that easily. We seemed to be nearing the edge of the unsayable, but I decided to say it anyway.

  Gently but firmly, I suggested that it was important that the life of the main character was not matched in every single aspect with his own, indeed, it was essential that it wasn't; that the proposed book should be, in essence, a work of imagination; that it would be a pity if the critics dismissed it simply as a replica of hi
s own life rather than a serious literary endeavour; and that it could quite properly reflect his own concerns while at the same time retaining its own artistic integrity. After which, he generously agreed—albeit somewhat ungraciously—to the death of his mother.

  We had many conversations just like this one and we became used to our respective roles. Mine was to persuade; his—so I decided—was to be persuaded. I shamelessly used whatever devious means I could to coax and convince—anything to make the task ahead more workable in my own terms. I was cruel, and over the next month or two he endured a great deal. The main objective for me was not to win the argument but to gain enough concessions to be able to deliver the book. Although it would nominally be his book, and to that extent he would have to be happy with it, it was impossible to lose sight of the fact that the actual writing would be done by me.

  Despite all the difficulties, we seemed, surprisingly, to have a mutuality of purpose. Tiger wanted the book to be done well, and I wanted to do it well. Ever since childhood I had been a watcher and a listener, taking it all in but not sharing with anyone, at least not in a structured way. Up till now I had thought that all the watching and listening had perhaps been wasted. Now I found I was putting it to use, making it work for its living. My reservations about the feasibility of writing someone else's novel never entirely disappeared, but in the weeks that followed I tried hard to set them aside. There is a brilliant observation in Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe to the effect that, if you have the duty of washing the dishes, renounce the duty—this leaves you existentially free to wash the dishes.