Ghosting Page 14

  You don't know what will happen until you start writing. Only then do you discover things that previously you knew nothing about. There is a level at which you know what you are doing, it is a conscious process: you decide what to put in this chapter, what to leave for the next. But at another level, there seem to be deep forces at work that take you in unexpected directions. How much does the unconscious have to do with writing? Writers have spoken eloquently about this for generations. And in some sense it does seem reasonable to regard a novel as an accident of the unconscious, not in the sense of mishap, but in the sense of various buried strands colliding. The fact that I was writing as someone else—with a mask on, as it were—inevitably added yet another layer of complexity. I did and did not feel responsible for the words on the page, I did and did not feel that they belonged to me; I did and did not feel that I could defend them in my heart.

  For the next week or so, however, I found myself doing a good imitation of a man writing a novel. I tried to free up the flow by telling myself that it was just another job that had to be done, that none of this mattered, that I was free to write anything that came into my head. I decided to call the main character Carlo—I had once known an Italian student named Carlo—and make him a successful advertising executive living in London. The novel would begin with Carlo's return to his native Italy to attend his mother's funeral. The reason for giving him dual nationality was twofold: it fitted very generally with Tiger's own background, and it would act as a metaphor for further conflict and dichotomy. The trip to Italy was surely a stroke of genius: it would allow for our hero's journey in all senses—physical, mental, spiritual and emotional. It would also enable the affair to take place in the hot and steamy Mediterranean climate and, finally, it would conveniently provide the backdrop of Catholicism—Tiger's professed faith—which would in turn introduce the familiar tensions between faith and reason and passion. Carlo could be a latter-day Graham Greene character, tortured by Catholic guilt and spiritual angst. Catholicism provides such rich opportunities for this sort of exploration compared with other religions, even other Christian denominations. Who could imagine being interested in Methodist guilt, for example? I warmed to my theme. So far so good.

  Except that I was kidding myself, whistling in the dark. Within a few pages, a central difficulty emerged and it never completely went away. The difficulty was, loosely speaking, the question of sincerity. While I don't for a moment imagine that all novelists have to write a personal story, or one in which they are intimately involved, I like to believe—even if I am wrong—that the author is sincere, and that the reader can sense if he (or she) is not. Words matter, the novel matters. That has been, and remains, my passionate belief. Writers are judged by the distinctive way in which words and the effect of these words on the reader combine. As a reader you somehow just know when every word is meant, even if the work is not a first-person narrative. Writing a novel is an intuitive thing and, while you can choose to write—or indeed ghostwrite—an academic book or a work of non-fiction by doing the required research, it is probably true to say that in the case of a novel the subject matter invariably chooses you. I think you have to live with the idea for a novel, be obsessed by it even, before you are able to write it. Of course you might have just the vaguest of images as a starting point, or there might be an event that has lodged in the imagination. But unless you are committed, unless there is some element of compulsion attaching to it, the whole business can end up hollow at the centre.

  Predictably, I agonised about the opening line. Again, it is a matter of confidence and belief. When you are searching your mind for that first sentence it is difficult not to be assailed by truths universally acknowledged and the similarity between all happy families. And easy to think that anything less brilliantly epigrammatic is small potatoes. The opening line also marks you. It can imprison you in a style and tone that are not easily shaken off. I pondered the possibilities, weighed and considered, wavered and faltered to the point of paralysis. Eventually, desperately, I wrote the first sentence:

  Carlo surveys the land of his birth and contemplates death.

  There! Done it. But would it do? It surely had a lot going for it—our hero is introduced in the first word, the present tense lends the journey a certain immediacy, and there is the neat juxtaposition of birth and death, a pointer to the weighty themes to come. It would do.

  I tried to think myself into what I imagined Tiger's style might be, but the more I searched for his voice, the more I caught my own breaking through; the more I tried to realise his literary aspirations, the more my own seemed to intrude. The novel did not grow organically; it was force-fed and boosted with steroids. Set pieces and ruminations on the human condition were thrown about like salt. It became a stilted, studied thing. I was consumed by doubt. The characters were not “real,” they were mouthpieces for various ideas, which shoved them around and kicked them to the ground. André Gide wrote something to the effect that the true novelist listens to his characters and watches how they behave, whereas the bad novelist simply constructs them and controls them. Without a doubt, I was constructing and controlling.

  The more I struggled to be free, the more I felt constrained by Tiger's expectations. Muriel Spark believes that writers sin against God because they create characters who cannot bring about their own salvation. How I longed to create such a character, to sample this sinfulness. But our hero, it had become clear, was not quite ready to be the stuff of fiction. I knew even before he was fleshed out that he would have to be saved. It was the only permissible outcome.

  The misgivings multiplied. It just wasn't working. I tried to make the writing light and airy, but the more I tried, the heavier it became. The harder I tried to handle it sensitively, the harder it would bite back. And in a moment of dreadful incaution, I hit on the structure of the novel: there would be fourteen chapters, each one a Station of the Cross, linking Carlo's painful journey with Christ's passion. One reviewer was later to describe this as “an overweening conceit” and she was almost certainly right. With the curse of hindsight I can see it was a ghastly mistake (not least because it turned out that Tiger himself, though a cradle Catholic, was unfamiliar with the Stations of the Cross), but at the time I thought I could show off my knowledge of Catholicism. And in any case, I was desperate.

  My parents gave me an interest in Roman Catholicism—exactly the opposite of what they intended to do. Religion, like bad grammar, is generally a habit picked up in childhood. But religious intolerance is a volatile substance which can have unexpected results.

  It would be a mistake to imagine that sectarianism is confined to Northern Ireland or the west of Scotland. It is alive and well in the Kingdom of Fife. Nowadays the official line is ecumenical, but during my childhood religious bigotry was a legitimate occupation. Catholics—Papes we called them—were the enemy, and they had to be defeated before they took us over.

  “They breed like rabbits,” my father said.

  “They spread like wildfire,” my mother warned.

  It was one of the few subjects on which they were completely in agreement.

  On my way to school I had to pass St. Patrick's, the primary school for Catholic children. The teachers were mostly nuns who lived in the convent next to the school. The school looked like any other school but the convent was hidden from the world behind a high beech hedge. In the wintertime I sometimes peered through the gaps in the hedge and saw dark figures swishing about in their robes. They looked so much more interesting than our teachers.

  I made a friend called Mary McNamara, on whose mother's face my own mother professed to be able to see the map of Ireland. Though I looked hard, I was never able to find it. My mother said that Mary kicked with the left foot, which meant I wasn't allowed to be friends with her. The ban was strengthened by the fact that she lived in the scheme. But we usually left for school at the same time and would walk as far as St. Patrick's together. We soon discovered that our birthdays were just two da
ys apart—hers was on 4 February, mine on 2 February. Mary told me I was really lucky to have that day as a birthday and she wished she could swap with me. When I asked why, she said that the second of February was Candlemas Day, the Feast of the Purification of Our Lady. They always had time off school that day for a special Mass when they consecrated all the candles that would be needed in the church for the whole year. Consecration was evidently something the priest did with holy water and incense.

  “Who's Our Lady?” I asked my parents when I got home. They looked completely horrified, so I explained, chirpily, that my birthday was apparently on the same day as Our Lady was purified.

  “I'll Our Lady you!” thundered my father. “We'll have no Our Lady in this house!”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “If there's any more Our Lady, you'll find out what sorry is!” he said.

  There were often fights between the Papes and Prods (anyone who was not a Pape was a Prod), but when Mary was with me I was never picked on. Once, when she was off school with chicken-pox, a boy from St. Patrick's grabbed my schoolbag and threw it over the high hedge that surrounded the convent. When I went home without my bag and explained what had happened, my mother reacted with predictable fury. She immediately went to what we called the Special Drawer and took out a new pair of nylon stockings with seams up the back. This could mean only one thing—she was going to see the Mother Superior. As she pulled on her nylons, she nursed her ire. She would show her, give her what's for, put her gas on a peep. By the time she left the house the veins stood proud on her forehead. She wore her Sunday coat and her second-best feathered hat—essential accoutrements for a visit to the convent.

  “I'll Mother Superior her!” was her parting shot.

  My mother and I went to church every Sunday. My father had stopped going to church before I was born. Apparently he had failed to get the contract for rebuilding the manse wall and had vowed never to go back. It was the principle of the thing, he said. I often longed for a principle like my father's so that I could stay at home and help him in the garden. In church we had our own pew with our name displayed in a small brass fitting at the end. Occasionally someone would sit in our pew by mistake. There was plenty of room, but according to my mother that was hardly the point. She would look daggers at the offending party and say in a loud highfalutin voice, “Excuse me, this is a private pew.” She appeared to relish the plosive sounds of private pew. At such times I wanted to die.

  I hated almost everything about having to go to church—my too tight coat with the astrakhan collar, the joyless atmosphere once we got there, the endless drone of the pulpit voice. At the beginning of the sermon my mother would surreptitiously pass me a pandrop which had to last the whole way through—on this point she was emphatic. I didn't ever dare bite the pandrop; in fact I tried not to suck it for fear it would disappear too quickly and upset my mother. Instead I would push it to a place of safety under my tongue and then open my mouth a fraction in the hope that the dry church air would preserve it. This was more difficult than it sounds. Sometimes, even when I concentrated hard, my mouth would fill with warm spit and the pandrop would dissolve before the sermon ended.

  Mary McNamara was to take her First Communion.

  “What's that?” I asked.

  “It's when you get to wear a white dress in church,” she said. “Mine has a lace bodice, puffed sleeves and pearl sequins.”

  It sounded wonderful. I asked if I could see it but we both knew I wasn't allowed to visit her house. Mary said that maybe I could come to the rehearsal after school the next day. She would speak to the priest. I asked her if she was remembering I wasn't a Catholic.

  “No, but you're a Christian, so that's all right.”

  “I'm not a Christian,” I corrected her, “I'm a Protestant.”

  I knew it was risking a lot to enter St. Patrick's Church, but it was a place of such out-of-bounds mysteriousness that I judged it worth the risk. Awe and trepidation were mixed together in roughly equal measures. There was a lot to take in—statues everywhere, angels on the ceiling, a huge wooden cross, and the smell of warm wax. I stood at the back waiting for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. The only light came from a few dozen candles flickering at the front. These would be the candles that had been sprinkled on my birthday, I supposed. The priest stood at the altar dressed in a long purple robe with gold round the edges. There were several nuns sitting halfway up the church. One or two of them turned round when they heard me come in and gave me a smile. After a few minutes, Mary and her friends entered by a side door. Just as she'd promised, they all wore pure white dresses complete with veils held on by rings of flowers. I suppose there must have been boys too, but I don't remember them. I had eyes only for Mary and the other girls. They walked towards the priest, a slow procession of miniature brides, their hands pressed together as in prayer. Mary had said it would not be the real thing, only a rehearsal, but I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful in my whole life. They all knew exactly what to do, when to bob up and down, when to kneel, when to make the sign of the cross. There was a lot going on in this church, much more than in our boring private pew.

  I was late getting home. I had prepared a lie, but my mother was no fool. When I confessed, she was truly appalled—much worse than I had feared.

  “Wait till your father gets home,” was all she said.

  That meant only one thing: the belt. The belt was made of thick leather with the end slit in two for maximum effectiveness. It was used in schools throughout Scotland to deal with every classroom crime imaginable. The belt was made in my home town, Lochgelly, in a dark little room at the back of John Dick's ironmongery. I often went with my father to the iron-mongery to have our garden tools sharpened. John Dick didn't look like the sort of person who would spend his life shaping bits of leather to punish children. He was a neat, amiable man in brown overalls, and at weekends he visited his sister Bella who lived near us. She had a touch of facial palsy and a husband called Agnew. John Dick didn't have any children of his own, but in my mind this hardly excused what he did for a living.

  For minor lapses my father belted us on our outstretched hands. If it was a more serious offence we were belted on the backs of our legs. It seemed there was no offence more serious than visiting the chapel—our name for the Catholic Church.

  The days in the Dordogne settled into a rhythm. Every third day or so Tiger paid a visit to the antiquaire in one or other of the surrounding villages. His reputation for spending money had spread throughout the Dordogne valley, and those in the antique trade always looked delighted when they saw the Mercedes draw up outside. Tiger knew what he wanted and invariably went straight to the point.

  “Vous avez des femmes nues?”

  It was more the sort of question that might be asked at the massage parlour, or so I thought the first time I heard it, but it was clear that the shop owners were quite used to this opening bat and more than happy to oblige.

  “Bien sür, monsieur!” All French gestures seem to be a variation of the shrug. Even when Frenchmen are enthusing and affirming, their shoulders go up and down.

  “Complètement nues?” Tiger would ask, for nakedness was not to be compromised.

  “Bien sür, monsieur!” Another expansive, how-could-you-doubt-me shrug.

  “Entièrement nues?”

  “Bien sür, monsieur! Nues comme les nunus!”—naked as nudists. Shoulders, arms and hands would swing and sway at the prospect of a sale. In practice each antiquaire almost always had something extraordinaire to show Tiger—a painting or perhaps a sculpted figure, something special that had been kept “just for him.”

  “Exprès pour vous, monsieur!”

  Once in an antiques shop near Sarlat there was a wonderful happening that I felt privileged to witness. As soon as the antiquaire saw Tiger enter the premises his face lit up. Without waiting for the usual femmes nues enquiry, he took a key and unlocked the top drawer of his desk. He removed a large box which he hand
led with great care, confiding in a whisper to Tiger that what he was about to see was something truly exceptionnel. And it was.

  The box contained a collection of original daguerreotypes—the results of an early photographic technique using silvered plates and mercury vapour—taken in the pleasure houses of Paris in the last years of the nineteenth century.* The women in the photographs, unlike modern pin-ups and models, were well filled-out, and seemingly happily so. They were arranged in a variety of tempting poses and looked distinctly huggable and inviting. Although they seemed perfectly at ease with their bodies, a slight shyness came through in some of the pictures, perhaps because they were not used to being photographed rather than because of any doubts about their profession. Tiger pored over the plates, savouring every one, soughing the occasional formidable and mag-nifique. After a while, he closed the box and said:

  “Combien?”

  He had the look of a man who had searched for, and just found, the centre of human happiness.

  The mornings were mostly taken up with visits to the market to buy the food for lunch. The kitchen was Tiger's domain. He loved cooking and prepared the most wonderful meals—fresh haricot beans in garlic oil and lemon juice, shiitake mushrooms in a herb marinade, salads straight from the garden. And sometimes we ate soft-boiled eggs freshly laid by the hens on the estate. “Did you ever taste anything so beautiful?” he would ask. He didn't only cook, but laid the table and served the wine like an experienced maÎtre d‧. Afterwards he would clear up, washing and wiping till everything sparkled. He never allowed me to help, and he became agitated if ever I offered. As with other areas of his life he was fastidious in his attention to detail. Nothing was left to chance. As we ate, he kept up a running commentary on the food, its preparation, the health benefits it would confer, the character of the wine, the quality of the grape, and so on. At these times Tiger seemed deeply content.