Ghosting Read online

  Some progress had been made, however, and the nuts and bolts of the new novel were already in place. The setting, the main characters, and the voice had all been decided, though there was a whiff of compromise about all three. I had started out in the first person, hoping to achieve the immediacy and conviction that can come with a first-person perspective. But it felt too personal, too intimate, and I soon abandoned it for the third person. I had also thought of setting the story in Scotland, but that too would have been too subjective, and besides, Tiger would have hated it. Although he claimed to love Scotland, it was purely an abstract love, for he regarded it as a curious foreign land, quite inscrutable, and much more “abroad” than further-flung places. So instead I chose a sleepy Oxfordshire village in middle-class England. This is not my territory at all, but it allowed me to make one of the characters an academic at Oxford University (my daughter was there at that time and I had come to know it a little), and also to set a dramatic scene in the Ashmolean Museum (where I had first seen paintings by Pasternak). I drew up a list of main characters: the two married couples, their children, the vicar next door and his long-suffering wife. I had also decided that the academic would have an ex-wife—she would be the mother of one of the children and confined in a psychiatric hospital near Oxford.

  Nabokov says somewhere that any writer who claims that his characters are running away from him and assuming their own identity is simply failing to keep them in order. From memory, I think Nabokov was quite bad-tempered about this. He believed that, since characters are the creation of the writer, they should be made to do exactly as they are told. Well, yes and no. In one sense this is obviously the case: characters can be plucked from the air and made to fit any description. They can be given a twitch, a limp, a divorce, thick ankles, a dark secret—anything at all. Lives can be invented that never existed, and never will exist—all this is possible. But in the end, even if the characters are “invented,” they are usually not wholly contrived. They turn out to be strange composites of people you have known, who behave in ways you have observed, saying things you have heard or thought about. And the strange thing—the thing that Nabokov doubted—is that they can start behaving in ways that surprise you. But the real surprise is that they do something you hadn't planned for them, not that they do something completely out of character. In fact what they do is usually absolutely right for them.

  According to the American writer Paul Auster,* it is when the characters in his books are most confined that they seem to be most free, and when they are free to wander, they are most lost and confused. This appears to be a baffling remark, yet it is more or less what I found to be true. For example, the vicar in the story has an obvious part to play in comforting the bereaved parents, but instead of being tied down to the predictable role of bumbling, well-meaning clergyman offering the strength of faith as proof against despair, he is allowed to wander freely and ends up lurching between extremes and having a crisis himself. I suspect he fails to convince, partly because of the Paul Auster paradox: the character seems to be set free from the obvious, but he finishes up trapped in another kind of stereotype—the vicar who has lost his faith. By contrast, I intended the vicar's wife to be “confined,” bound by the limitations of her role. She would be a peripheral character, someone just for decoration, giving tea to distressed parishioners, feeling oppressed, and so on. But out of these initial restrictions, she developed into a much more interesting character than her husband. A dull marriage had altered the balance of her mind, and her life was lived at depths of concealment, marked by shame and guilt and disappointment. She ended up playing a pivotal part in the narrative.

  In the afternoons when the weather was fine we went to the swimming pool. It was a sizeable pool and beautifully maintained by the gardien, who used brushes and a long pole with a large ladle on the end to keep it free of leaves and insects. Sometimes as we drew near he would be scooping out a solitary fly or giving the tiles a final polish. But as soon as he saw us he would scurry off, for he knew that the poolside was designated a place of absolute privacy. The etiquette there was complete nakedness—comme les animaux—as Tiger put it, and it was a requirement—so he said— that applied to all his houseguests, without exception. It was a matter he often raised on the short walk to the pool, and invariably he invoked the health-giving properties of fresh air on bare skin or the freedom bestowed on the spirit once clothes had been discarded—as if the case for what he called “being au naturel” had to be made anew each time. “Skin is amazing,” he would say, sinking into a rhapsody. “There's nothing like skin. It's so soft, it breathes, it is alive. Why on earth do we cover it up?” Why indeed, I would say, for it was easier just to agree, and in any case nakedness was no big deal. At other times he would ask, rhetorically, in the manner of Falstaff's disquisition on honour, “What is the point of clothes? Do the beasts of the jungle wear clothes? Do the birds of the air?” His answer was brisk and decisive: “No, of course they don't. Bloody hell, when you think about it, it's the strangest thing on earth to wear clothes!” Like a Bach fugue his subject could be cut up, inverted, quickened, slowed to half its speed, given a change of key, or several, but it always remained recognisably the same first subject, stated in all its clarity at the beginning.

  What must we have looked like, the pair of us, as we lay side by side on the sunbeds by the pool? I often thought we must have made an absurd picture. Scottish pallor next to Levantine swarth—not to mention my blond mop, his dark walnut whip topknot, and our various assorted dangly bits and bobs. Of course, Tiger was quite unable to lie still. And his nudity was in fact not absolutely total, for he kept on his watches, checking them constantly and counting down the minutes and seconds till the next event, the designated time for launching himself in the pool. “In fifteen minutes I will go in the water … in ten minutes I will go in the water … in eight minutes …” In between he talked about how relaxing it was, how peaceful, how calm. “Don't you feel relaxed?” he asked every few moments. “Aren't you calm?”

  In truth I was far from calm on the days when Éclair, the killer Doberman, was on the prowl. The security system was devised in such a way that the three dogs were shuffled round the various parts of the estate. This meant that there were always two guarding the main house and one guarding the smaller property and pool area. The theory was that, by moving them around, no dog would spend too much time on its own and all of them would enjoy a bit of variety. I dreaded the times when Éclair was on duty and I felt especially vulnerable in the scud. Tiger was aware of my fear and exploited it mercilessly. “I wonder which of my babies is here today,” he would say, starting out innocently enough. And then with a devilish touch. “Maybe it's Éclair. It's funny, you know, I haven't seen him yet. Have you seen him? I wonder where he can be—maybe I should call him.” He would discharge the short stiff laugh of the tormentor before calling out, “Eclair, mon bébel Oil es-tu? Viens id! Joue avec moi!”

  Can dogs smell fear? I have no idea, but it seems likely that they can. After all, we know that our nervous systems respond to stress with certain physiological changes such as increased heart rate and sweat gland activity. So although fear is an emotion, it almost certainly has a smell. As Éclair approached, I would note the quickening of my heart and a dampening on my skin. Sometimes there was cause for even greater alarm; for if dogs can smell fear, they can almost certainly smell a woman who is menstruating, as inevitably I was some of the time (not a subject that could easily be raised with Tiger). I had once heard a radio programme about grizzly bear attacks on women in Canadian national parks. The speculation was that women may be more prone to savage attacks because of odours associated with menstrual periods, and although the evidence was inconclusive the advice to women was not to camp in bear country during their periods. It may be argued that being under canvas in bear country and lying on a sunbed in dog territory are not remotely the same thing. But for me there was no conceptual distinction between being mauled by a grizzly a
nd mauled by a Doberman.

  At these times of greatest dread it was always a relief to get into the pool and swim. I have always been at home in the water. Swimming is sensual and self-renewing. Water washes away pain. It holds you in a gentle embrace and allows you to let go. The rhythms of swimming feel natural; air in, air out, arms forward, arms back, legs together, up and kick, swishing cleanly like a kelpie. I feel I can keep going for hours without tiring. The body movements of swimming are efficient yet graceful, and they are woven into the fabric of the species more than any other form of propulsion. Walking and running are relatively recent activities, but man has known how to swim since before he was fully human. The water supports you and allows you to trust, to breathe deeply, to be confident and carefree. Swimming cultivates the imagination, the fluent motion relaxing the body and allowing the mind to roam free. There is rapture to be had in water.

  Even so, no one who observed Tiger in the pool would ever have believed in an aquatic theory of evolution. Tiger was unable to swim and afraid to learn; yet, determined to do something of the same order, he went through a ritual that was much more elaborate and strenuous than even the most vigorous swimming. As I did lengths up and down the pool, he stood waist-deep at one corner and behaved like a man in the throes of a delirium. He performed a series of hectic exertions of his own devising, counting from one to a hundred for each separate activity, all the while panting and blowing like a birthing mother. The exercises involved desperate movements—slapping the water with the flat of his hands, or doing frantic futile kicks as he clung to the side of the pool—and they continued for a heartbreaking length of time. Because he didn't like getting splashed, he kept his eyes closed and his face screwed up during the entire frenzy. It could have been a form of theatre designed to disturb the spectator, or a morality play concerned with the forces of evil and man's Fall and Redemption.

  When you come to write, things creep out of the back of your mind as well as the front. I suppose we carry our history around with us. The characters in the new novel were beginning to ride my hobby-horses and, though they struck out on their own from time to time, they had a curious way of returning to the familiar pathways of my own preoccupations: Russian literature, the puzzle of memory, the absence of God, the nature of truth. Show your workings, the teacher at school would tell us as we grappled with multiplication and long division. And now I was showing the workings of this novel, with the result that a gap was opening up between the thing begun and the unfolding story. Here is an example of what I mean. It occurs in the passage where the grief-stricken mother wanders through Oxford with no clear sense of purpose:

  She felt it was important to be near people, to observe the details of ordinary living. In time she thought they would make her well again. Sometimes she found herself gazing at people, observing their pleasure secondhand, and feeling detached from it at the same time, like tapping into someone else's memory. Her daughter had asked her once if it was possible to have someone else's memories. No, she said, memory is an individual, subjective thing. Afterwards she had worried about her answer. She knew from her studies that memory can be distorted in various ways, not least by our knowledge and expectation of the world. We can also inherit memories and build our own out of the rubble of other people's.

  Since the summer she had thought a lot about memory, and how much she had underestimated its importance. It was possible that a person's very existence could be measured in terms of the extent to which he entered the memory of others. It was her memory of Oliver, for example, and nothing else, which made him part of the present and gave him a place in the future. In Doctor Zhivago there is a passage where Yury tries to give comfort to Anna, who believes she is dying. He tells her that throughout her years on earth her identity has been firmly established in the minds and hearts of others:

  You in others are yourself, your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life—your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on it is called your memory? It will still be you.*

  As a student Kate had read these lines again and again, thinking them the most beautiful version of immortality she had come across, although no one close to her had yet died. Or disappeared.

  There is a lot of cross-border trading going on here, between the details of the fiction and the story of a life—the life of the ghost in this case. The passage about memory, for example, can be taken at face value within the fictional context of a mother thinking about her missing child; at another level it was a veiled way of alluding to one of the bizarre aspects of my job—that of inventing episodes in Tiger's life and thereby “giving” him memories that he couldn't possibly have. This was something that troubled me from time to time and applied particularly to his childhood, which I sometimes wrote about in newspaper articles, embellishing and enriching it in ways that pleased (and sometimes moved) him but had only a tenuous connection with biographical truth. Occasionally his childhood was impossibly, even ludicrously, romanticised—water being drawn from the well where the Virgin Mary had drunk, soil being tilled, and a wise old grandmother at whose feet the young boy heard tales of derring-do about the Ottoman empire. Once I had to check an atlas to establish if it really was possible to see the hills of Galilee, as I had described, from the spot of some invented childhood scene. At times it felt deceitful, but that didn't stop me. I'm no longer sure why I did this, although it seemed to be what was wanted at the time, and I think the absurdity of it all appealed to me. I also remember feeling a sense of power and being strangely excited by it.

  And now the same sort ofthing, only in reverse, was happening with the ghosting process. I was raiding my own knowledge and experience of the world rather than the author's. Although the novel is set in and around Oxford, for example, I deliberately used local place names from the East Neuk of Fife where I lived—Lower Kenly, Upper Kenly, Kenly Green. For some reason this was exhilarating. And in creating the character of the academic, I poked fun at my ex-husband who had something of a reputation among his colleagues for self-importance and a sense of his own suffering in the world. This felt even more exhilarating.

  Julian loved himself every bit as much as his self-adulation required. He considered himself the most moral of men, not in any prudishly upright way, but in the manner of a man who has examined his position carefully and separated right from wrong. Like the anti-hero in Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, he believed there were two sets of people: normal people and those like himself of enhanced awareness. This conviction came about through extensive reading and thinking about literature, which he believed contained all the truth of the world. The penalty for his enhanced sensitivity was increased suffering. In his own mind Julian suffered more than most men, far more than Edward, for example. He loved his brother dearly, but… he felt a certain remoteness from him. Those who do not grapple with art, he thought, cannot hope to make sense of life. Nor can they appreciate—except in the most superficial way—the struggle between good and evil, duty and desire, honour and pleasure. They may be spared some of the agony of existence, but they will never truly understand the world.

  Julian's pain was not always obvious to others since so much of it took place beneath the surface. Those who were less finely turned than himself often failed to appreciate it. But he did not mind, for the rewards were commensurate with the suffering itself. These included deeper insights, a profound moral sense, and an understanding of the nature of love. It was in this last area, love, that Julian felt his heightened sensibilities had exposed him to the greatest pain.

  And so on. And so on. Of course I did not tell Tiger that this Julian character was a caricature of my ex. How could I? But also, how could I not? I persuaded myself that what he didn't know couldn't hurt him, but that has ever been a woeful cop-out. In truth I think I had begun to sign away my soul.


  One of the more pressing difficulties with the book was that I did not feel confident about being able to fulfil Tiger's orgasmic stipulation, so to speak. I had hinted to him that there might be complications in the literary execution, but he continued to regard it as a sine qua non of the action. I had been proceeding on the assumption that Tiger's idea was a male sexual fantasy. Men love the idea of having a third person in on the act—or so women think. A little elementary research, however, led me to believe that it was not an absolutely standard male fantasy, yet I still thought it would be best to treat it as fantasy in the novel. I broached this line of reasoning as delicately as possible, but Tiger was having none of it.

  “What nonsense!” he barked.

  “But surely, it's the only way,” I said. “Otherwise it won't be plausible.”

  “How can it be plausible if he doesn't do it? It can only be plausible if he does do it. Why don't you see that? We have to make him do it.”

  There was a lot at stake here. I had to hold my ground.