Ghosting Read online

  In fact something quite subtle was at work during these conversations. Tiger, while affecting a boyish ingenuousness, was actually endowed with a Machiavellian shrewdness. He could flatter, disparage, coax and intimidate, interchangeably and with consummate artistry. He would do almost anything to get his own way. I had witnessed many performances over the years, sometimes from the wings, at other times from the front stalls, more often than not sharing the stage with him and fluffing my lines. At times it seemed ungenerous not to succumb to his childlike excitement, which came over as a kind of innocent hopefulness endlessly generated and regenerated. However, I knew it was driven by something that was not at all innocent. The more formidable his proposal and the less appealing to me, the more fervently he tried to proselytise. It would be so easy, a joy to do, I would soon be able to see that for myself, and besides we would make pots of money and, best of all, we would have such fun.

  Fun ranked high in Tiger's scheme of things. And during these dialogues he played his part well. He was the enthusiast, the fanatic, the zealot, the mad inventor, the prime mover, the armchair philosopher. I played the killjoy, the doubter, the wet blanket, the party-pooper. I didn't enjoy my part much but, over the years, we had settled into our respective roles, and we stuck to them steadfastly.

  “You don't want to? You don't want to? But darling, why don't you want to?”

  “It's just, well, a second novel will be quite a lot of hard work.”

  “Beloved”—the voice is lowered to impart a confidence—“let me tell you something. Life is hard work. Bloody hell, we all have to work hard. Otherwise we get nowhere. Isn't it?”

  “Yes, that's true, but…”

  “But what? What is this ‘but'? There is no ‘but’ We can do anything we put our minds to. We are amazing together!”

  “All I mean is …”

  “You still have a problem? Tell me your problem, my darling. I will solve your problem. That's what I'm here for.”

  And so on. And so on. The pattern of these exchanges was invariably the same. In no time at all they degenerated into low farce with a diminishing ratio of reason to emotion.

  I set about the second novel with a joyless heart. This only made things worse because Tiger loathed low spirits in others. It was joie de vivre he loved—he often said so—and he could not bear even the slightest lack of enthusiasm for something he favoured. Whenever he detected reluctance on my part he would put on his evangelist hat and set about converting me. Before too long it would usually strike me that the idea I was rejecting was preferable to the process of indoctrination, so I would generally cave in.

  With this new novel he had explained that I could have carte blanche—“You can do whatever you like,” he had said, and he clapped his hands together like a pair of cymbals, sealing his lav-ishness. He then sat back in his chair and smiled benignly. His expression was one of utter benefaction. It was not possible for a man to be more reasonable.

  But it wasn't true. It turned out there was a requirement, though to hear him you might easily have imagined it was nothing at all. He was talking it down so much—“It's just a small idea, that's all, it's not anything big”—and as he continued it got so very small that I imagined it as a tiny dot on an old television screen, disappearing into the void. Alas, this scarcely-a-requirement-at-all, this small thing-let, this little idea-let, slowly began to take on monstrous dimensions. As before, there were to be two women and a man. The man, so Tiger explained, was to be the lover of both women, and each woman would be aware of the other and quite relaxed about the sharing arrangement. So far so good. The women were to be cousins who had been born on the same day— “Under the same star sign, so they're more like sisters,” said Tiger. Sounds quite manageable so far, I thought. There followed a lot of eager talk about how very close sisters can be, how twins can feel each other's pain, how they seem almost to inhabit each other's bodies. “It's like they're one person, not two,” he said.

  “Yes …” I said, beginning to wonder where all this was leading, looking out for the catch. I was not prepared for what came next.

  “So,” he said, clasping and unclasping his large soft hands, working up to the pièce de résistance, “when the one girl gets orgamsi the other gets orgamsi also!”

  “How do you mean exactly?” I asked. I felt sure I had missed something. I took a few moments to consider the possibilities before venturing, “Are we talking about simultaneous orgasm?”

  “Precisely!” he purred in a go-to-the-top-of-the-class way. “Simultaneous orgamsi. You've got it! Bravo!”

  But I knew I hadn't got it. Not really anyway. As far as I was aware, simultaneous orgasm happened—if it happened at all—between the two principal players, as it were. It was not something that could be dispensed at will to a third party, not even a close cousin. Such a phenomenon would in any case have to be called a telekinetic orgasm. Strictly speaking, that is. This was no time to be finicky, however. I had to know more, I had to discover what was in Tiger's head. Besides, my mind was already racing ahead to the alarming business of having to convert this far-fetchery into plausible fiction.

  “And how do you see that working exactly?” I asked, matter-of-factly. We might have been discussing a new business plan or profit-sharing scheme. “Is the man stimulating both of them in such a way that they climax at the same time?”

  Wrong question. Tiger smote his brow with the palm of his hand. It was his God-protect-me-from-imbeciles gesture.

  “Daaarleeeng, you don't understand!” He was right. I didn't. I had led a sheltered life. “The women are not together! They are miles apart!” He was shouting now. He always shouted when stupid people failed to grasp the essential point. At these times there was a huge expenditure of spit. A salvo of saliva.

  “I'm afraid,” I said—and for once perhaps I was a little afraid— “you're going to have to spell it out. I don't quite get it.”

  He rose from his desk and started pacing up and down, his body language a narrative in itself. He enfolded himself in his own arms and rocked slightly from side to side, the way a man might move about a padded cell, trying to control the violent turmoil within. He fixed me with a look that said, how could you be so dim? The explanation when it came was bad-tempered and delivered de haut en bas. The gist of it was that the two women would be so closely harmonised, so much in tune with one another that, even if they were separated physically, even by oceans and by continents, they would be capable of experiencing the heights of pleasure at the same time. As he spoke he became more and more animated, his tiger eyes shining brightly in his head, his whole body in motion, semaphoric, balletic. And since I had been so obtuse, he did not mince matters. The speaking got plainer and plainer. To remove any lingering doubt he spelled it out.

  “Look, it's simple! If one woman is in London, say, and the other is in New York, when he is fucking the one in London, the one in New York feels it in her fanny also!”

  A number of conflicting thoughts went splat in my head.

  “Now do you understand?” he said, regaining his composure.

  “I understand,” I said.

  Spinoza said that he had sought all his life to be able to understand—he had striven not to laugh, not to weep, and not to curse, sed intelligere—but to understand. Understanding is everything.

  Writing is a lonely business; or, rather, it is a business done alone. In this sense writing imitates life. Although we may spend much of our time with other people, essentially we live our lives alone. It may seem as if we are sharing our lives all the time—with commuters on the train, shoppers in supermarkets or, more intimately, with marriage partners, close friends, lovers. But these connections are as nothing compared with the lifelong communion we have with ourselves. What we tell others is only a tiny distillation of what we tell ourselves; and what we know of others is only what they choose to tell us, or what we have gleaned from the surfaces—the look in the eyes, the body posture, the sweat on the brow. Solitude is often se
en as a dismal, cheerless state, yet there is surely great point and purpose in it. Indeed aloneness seems to contain a happy paradox: it is when we are alone that we best understand how we are hitched to the world, how we are connected to others. Our sense of self is manifestly shaped by others: our mothers, to begin with, then our immediate family and friends, also by random encounters and chance bondings. But that sense of self which is linked to our awareness of others resides, curiously, at the heart of being alone. Much of what is important in life takes place inside us.

  Tiger did not share my liking for solitude. I often tried explaining that in order to write I needed to be alone. There is a separate world inside your head, I told him, and that's the place you have to try to occupy when you write. You can leave it behind and do other things, I said, but it is the place you have to return to each time. But he just looked at me as if I were insane. Sometimes when I asked for some time alone, he appeared to regard it as a personal affront. And even when I thought I had managed to get through to him, there would always come a point when he switched and started to view it as a business negotiation. “OK, let's compromise. Go now, and at quarter to three”—he checked all three watches as he spoke—“I shall pass by the studio and we shall go together to the pool.”

  He obviously regarded solitude as an unnatural state, quite menacing in its way. He regularly talked about how he hated to be alone, either in the office or at home or during normal leisure activities like watching television. He often mentioned that he was incapable of eating alone, something I knew from experience to be completely true. I have never been able to face food early in the day—my constitution seems to pucker at the mere sight unless I have been up and about for a couple of hours—but each morning in France, very much against my own inclination, I did battle with breakfast so that Tiger would not have to eat alone. Put like that, it seems quite mad, and indeed it was. The idea that a rational grown woman could allow herself to be coerced into eating a meal for which she had no appetite is patently absurd. But such was my anxiety surrounding breakfast that I sometimes set my alarm clock a full two hours beforehand in the hope that I would be in a state of increased readiness for food. This was preferable to the slow burn of ill humour that would have resulted from my opting out. A bad miff could last indefinitely.

  Tiger was ravenous in the morning. The first meal of the day was a serious business and he was unfailingly eager to get on with it. If I happened to arrive at the table even a minute or two late, he would glower at me as if I had been off murdering children. I preferred to shower and dress beforehand, but for Tiger eating took precedence over his toilet. He would appear in a voluminous sleeping garment, a staggering creation in silk and blinding brocade that gave him the appearance of an opulent sheikh. It was always unwise to say anything beyond the normal courtesies before he had taken a certain quantity of food inside him. The first stages of breakfast appeared to be something he had to get through rather than enjoy, but he got through with a trencherman's appetite and seized the food as if plundering and pillaging. He would then relax a little and declare, each day in fresh astonishment, “I am so hungry this morning! I don't know why I am so hungry.” Otherwise it was mostly a silent affair punctuated only by his exhortations to do what my mind and gut recoiled from.

  “Eat! Eat! Beloved, why don't you eat?”

  It was not enough simply to be there, and to supply companionship. Eating was the thing. Mercifully breakfast was not remotely a Full English, not even a Part English, but consisted of copious amounts of fromage frais drizzled with olive oil into which we dipped pain de seigle, delicious French rye bread. There were also olives and figs and various specialities of the region. Tiger pressed food on me constantly—his own amour-propre appeared to depend on it—and I became practised in the art of accepting as little as possible without seeming to lean too much in the direction of declining; than which there was nothing more likely to cause offence.

  Though Tiger's conduct in this regard was challenging, it sometimes helped me to see it as an aspect of his sweeping generosity, albeit one that could drive the recipient quite mad. Generosity is one of the six transcending virtues of Buddhism, and it is through generosity that the true dialectics of compassion are revealed. I had recently learned this from the man in my life—in his youth he had spent some months in a Buddhist monastery in Japan. According to Buddhist teaching, so he said, it does not count as generosity if there is any expectation of return, or if something is given out of guilt, or shame, or pride. By these criteria Tiger passed the Buddhist test with honours. Moreover, the so-called Perfection of Giving is evidently best expressed without there being any conscious concept of giving; it should resemble a natural reflex—this according to the founder of Western Buddhism, a man who took the name of Sangharakshita, though he had been born plain old Dennis Lingwood in South London. Again, Tiger could scarcely be faulted in this respect. His giving did seem to be something of a reflex action, involuntary, compulsory even. Perhaps, so I reflected, Tiger was on the path to Buddhahood, and I was in the presence of a transcendent spirit? This theory went so far and no further, however, because another Buddhist condition is that the giver should be joyful when he gives; whereas Tiger was petulant and thrusting, at least over breakfast.

  At other times too his urge to share could feel like an assault on one's independence and free will, almost an act of aggression, and yet this was obviously so far from his intention that it would have been brutal to suggest it. But his generosity was emphatically not like other people's; it had an existential significance and seemed to answer an urgent need in him, extending far beyond the normal human desire to share. It came over as an extreme thing, wild and unfettered, capable of sprouting extra body parts and strange accretions till it became a gargantuan creature, both wonderful and terrible, and in danger of toppling over.

  Women sometimes collided with this creature and felt oppressed by it. Yet occasionally I was moved by it. Over breakfast, for example, he even shared with me his own special supply of vitamins and other pills, counting them out into two equal rows, his tongue held tight in his teeth as he concentrated, being let loose only when he cited the essential constituents of each item, their respective efficacy and cost. He doled out tablets for the smooth working of joints (“so you can walk better”), vitamins for oral health (“they cost a fortune but they stop your gums bleeding”), zinc to maintain a healthy skin (“this is amazing—it will prevent the pimples”), and a mud brown pill of truly alarming dimensions—“a secret concoction” available only from Harley Street. The one he saved for last was “the best that money can buy.” It was a long capsule containing powder the colour of tapioca and intended specifically for what Tiger called his “prostrate,” a factor that did nothing to lessen his largesse. “You can have one too,” he said. I was touched by this.

  Shopping at the market was another opportunity for unbounded lavishness. He strolled up and down the food stalls, hands behind his back, like a king inspecting the troops, stopping occasionally to sample an olive or a morsel of cheese. He loved the abundance of produce, the freshness of the fruit and vegetables, the way the stalls were set out so colourfully. But he was a sentimental man, and if ever he saw rabbits hanging by their ears, with tears of blood stuck to their mouths, he would say, “It's awful what they do. Les pauvres! It shouldn't be allowed.” The gardienne, Monique, who always drove us to the market, stayed a couple of paces behind him, ready to receive whatever he bought into her basket. He asked for two kilos of everything, one for la grande mai-son and one for Monique and her family. This he did without expectation of gratitude or reciprocation, though it probably had the effect of securing her devotedness. On the day before our departure from France there was always a very grand spree. During the preceding week or two Tiger had earmarked certain items— mould-ripened cheese, jars of ash-covered chèvre suspended in oil, Périgord honey, truffle vinegar and other delicacies—for purchase on the last market day. On these days the gardienne brou
ght with her a large shopping trolley for the great splurge.

  Back at the house it took the whole afternoon to wrap everything and get it packed for the flight home. There was sometimes so much stuff that an extra suitcase had to be bought to contain it all. The Wrapping was an extended ritual and I was required to be in attendance throughout, though only as a spectator. In the manner of solemn preparation for a sacred act, Tiger began by setting out everything on the large kitchen table—scissors, adhesive tape, tissue paper, bubble wrap, newspaper, tin foil and string. Then, as if he might be engaged in the salvation of his own soul, he proceeded to package and parcel, swathe and swaddle. Jars of olives and harissa were mummified in newspaper and brown tape, while rounds of cheese were encased first in wax paper, then in foil, and finally in newspaper and plastic bags. During this lengthy process he seemed to be in the grip of some mysterious energy that had arrived from nowhere and taken charge of his mind and body. He had a look of intense concentration and he sucked in air noisily. As he worked away, he provided a detailed commentary on the proceedings, describing each and every stage—first we do this, now we do that, then we take the newspaper, now we need the Sell-otape—and so on. Things had to be done in a particular way and in a precise order. The commentary seemed to be for his own benefit, and it took the form of a set piece, something learned by heart and recited by rote. He was completely absorbed, and yet he looked up frequently to check that I was watching and paying attention. If ever I tried to move away or do something else to relieve the tedium, he would shriek, “No! No! Sit! Don't move!”

  I sat alone in the studio wondering what to do, how to begin. It was a blow to be required to write another novel, especially so soon after the first. If I was going to be able to deliver, by which I mean produce not just a satisfactory number of words, but a book which would sustain my own interest, one I could finish as well as start, I felt I had to change tack.