Ghosting Page 20

  As in life, so in books—he preferred the text to be straightforward and unambiguous. I was made intensely aware of this point on the occasion when he took a flight to Edinburgh in order to read Chapter Eight. He had told me of his plan the week before, so there was no question of the chapter not being finished. I picked him up at the airport and drove him to the Caledonian Hotel, where he had booked the finest suite overlooking the castle.

  “Did you bring Chapter Eight?” he asked as soon as he had checked in.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Then give it to me and I will put it somewhere safe. We don't want it to get lost.”

  I had imagined he would want to read it straightaway, but no, he would settle into his suite, make some telephone calls, and at 6:40 precisely we would drink some champagne before having dinner at the Pompadour. Afterwards he would read the chapter— “I will be relaxed then”—and in the morning we would discuss it—“Come to the hotel at 8:20 A.M.”

  Next day I knew the moment I saw him that all was not well. He was perfectly courteous, but at the same time there was a stiffness and formality in his approach that made me feel as if I had been called to the headmaster's study. We sat opposite each other at a desk and he placed the chapter between us. He licked his fingers and turned over the pages one by one, about twenty of them, making the same comment on each, repeated verbatim—“With this page I have no problem, with this page I have no problem”—and so on, until he reached the very last page by which time the tension was almost unbearable. “But with this page, number one hundred and nineteen, I have a big problem. There is something missing. It doesn't make sense.” And as before he read it to me so that I too would see. The chapter in question deals with the deepening friendship between the young people and ends with a description of the two girl cousins asleep in bed together after a stressful day. The final paragraph reads as follows:

  In the confusing no man's land between deep sleep and consciousness Tara was faintly aware of a door opening and a shaft of light cutting through her bedroom. She moved in a kind of reflex action, and she felt the weight and stickiness of Claire's limbs on her own body. The last thing she registered before drifting back into the depths was the click of the door closing.

  By the time he reached the last sentence Tiger had worked himself up into what appeared to be a state of anger, banging out each word on the table. I could not imagine the point he was trying to make. I remained silent and uncomprehending. After a few moments he banged the table again.

  “Who closed the door?” he suddenly demanded to know. “We say there is the click of the door closing, but we don't say who closed the door!”

  “No, we don't,” I agreed.

  “But why don't we say it? We have to say it! Otherwise how can the readers know? I read it so many times—twenty, maybe forty times—and each time I asked myself, ‘Who closed the fucking door?’ I got so irritated.”

  This episode was something of a watershed for me. I suddenly felt weary. The tension between absurdity and normality was becoming too much. If you don't resist the madness, you become part of it. I had not resisted it, and now I was part of it. This was a crystalline moment and marked what I now think of as the beginning of the end. There was absolutely no point in trying to explain to Tiger the nature of dramatic suspense or the need to keep the reader in a state of curiosity. It was best left alone. There was such a thing as dignity, wasn't there?

  I finished the book. It was, in the famous phrase, a learning experience. I travelled to London and handed it over, glad to be free of it. When I arrived back in St. Andrews a few days later, a large package was waiting for me. The covering letter informed me that the author had delivered his typescript and it was now ready for editing. Could I kindly turn it round as quickly as possible?

  Publication of the second novel coincided with the French edition of the first novel, and I persuaded myself that all that liquid romping really did sound better in French. Who would not agree that il glisse sur sa peau humide is more appealing than he slides over her moist skin? Or that des gouttelettes perlent sur sa toison fauve is a vast improvement on droplets of moisture sit on her copper fleece? Robert Frost thought that poetry got lost in translation, but perhaps poetry can also be found.

  The party to launch the book was a bizarre event for me. People asked if I'd read the new novel, and what did I think of it. Sometimes I said, yes, and that it was very good, and sometimes I said, no, but I was looking forward to it. What I said didn't matter, I told myself. But later that same evening it did matter, because Tiger took me by the arm and introduced me to one of the guests, a well-known (but not to me) literary agent.

  “This is my editor,” said Tiger to well-known agent.

  “But she told me five minutes ago she hadn't read your book!” said well-known agent to author.

  “Bloody hell, if she hasn't read it, I'm in trouble!” said Tiger.

  Awkward laughter all round. Our alliance was a curious compound and we were held together by its strange elements.

  The reviews of the new novel were mostly kind, though there was general agreement that the three-way extravaganza was a mistake. The Daily Telegraph reviewer was particularly clear-sighted. Having commended the author's “mild, thoughtful tone” he gave the cousinly capers the thumbs-down:

  … they [the girls] embark on mutual sexual consolation, an unexpected occurrence that reads like an after-thought of which, once considered, the author could not bring himself to let go.

  By far the most interesting and favourable review came from the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis. In the Literary Review she wrote:

  [the author] has an uncanny awareness of the atmosphere of loss, how it affects the bereaved and those on the periphery… he knows how people gather “in small groups, like vultures sensing the presence of death. They discussed and told what they knew and what they did not know, and felt the particular dismay reserved for other people's misfortunes.” He knows that Kate moves in a “sort of sepia fog” and he knows about the “huge surge of happiness” that overwhelms her when she sees a child in a party of schoolchildren and mistakes him for her son. “For the rest of her life that feeling did not come again, neither in its intensity nor in its immediacy.” This is heartbreaking.

  Tiger was thrilled with this review and read it out to me on the telephone. I too was pleased, but I also felt something else—something akin to shame and compunction. For I knew from a newspaper article that, some twenty years earlier, Alice Thomas Ellis had lost her son, aged nineteen, in a freak accident. Suddenly, this fictional account of loss struck me as a trivial counterfeit. I had believed all my adult life that writing was important, that the novel mattered, that the reader should be able to trust the author. Now I had sullied that belief. Frederic Raphael once said in an interview, “Novel writing is really a matter of coming to terms with your own squalor.” Whatever he meant by that, I agree with him.

  At the end ofher piece Alice Thomas Ellis wrote something intriguing, and if I ever meet her I shall ask her if perhaps she had rumbled the fact that things were not quite what they seemed.

  [the author] has a sensitivity and an insight into human nature unusual in a man, and he writes quite beautifully. This is not the first book he has written in which I find the character of the author, his invisible presence, as interesting as any of the people on the page.

  The author accepted these words at face value and in due course they appeared in bold print on the cover of the paperback edition.

  In the end I decided that this novel for me was not after all a complete sham. Of course it was contrived, but in the contrivance there emerged a certain shape to the world that was quite telling. The way things bubble beneath the surface is deeply mysterious, and if they occasionally boil up and spill over, something is set free. Indeed whenever I managed to loosen the shackles of the ghost, I quite enjoyed writing. There were even the beginnings of a belief that I may always have been a writer in my head. As a child I had
a sense of strangeness, a sense of otherness that has never entirely left me. I was always trying to make sense of everything, in thrall to the power of language and, later, being thrilled with what it could do. But then you grow up, and for a long time you forget who you were.

  What I discovered was that writing has a lot to do with unlocking secrets that are inside you. The familiar maxim “write what you know” implies that you describe something that has happened to you, and in so doing you are examining the past and trying to make sense of it. We know this works, and it can work well. But in fact what I came to understand—and this was a startling revelation—is that in some sense you also write in advance of what you know, and that as you write you create the shapes and patterns that emerge later in your life. “What you know” may in fact be what you know only at a subliminal level, and it might not be “known” in the normal sense for a long time. This is not as arcane as it might sound. After all, the imagination is not some obscure element unrelated to living; indeed we imagine our lives even as we are living them. Imagination is rooted in memory and experience. And often what we imagine is what we are then impelled to live out. Through writing we are not so much creating a new pattern as uncovering one that is already in us. There is an interplay, only dimly understood, between the novels and the life. Writing is always personal. You reveal yourself to yourself. This may not become clear immediately, perhaps not for years afterwards. That second novel—I can see now—was about the letting go of pain. It also contained the genesis of a resolve: to pull out of this bizarre arrangement. To give up the ghost.

  * Martin Amis, Experience, Jonathan Cape, 2000.

  * Interview with Mark Irwin in The Art of Hunger, Penguin Books, 1997.

  * Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, Collins & Harvill, 1958. Translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari.

  I had arrived in a place that felt dangerous. I had begun to think hypothetically, contingently, subjunctively. If only I didn't have to do this. Supposing I were simply to hand in my notice and leave. What if? What then? I wanted to write something different, something more open that didn't betray obvious signs of strain. Language creates us and defines us, but the stuff I was producing was a curious hybrid. I could never really trust it; it was too artificial, too much like a confidence trick. In odd melodramatic moments I thought of myself as a slave, toiling away, belonging to someone else, deprived of freedom.

  Tiger was displaying a luminous sense of purpose and flitting from success to success. He promoted himself on a heroic scale, talking excitedly about all his projects, usually in the context of lavish displays of generosity, such as champagne lunches for journalists and newspaper editors. He loved these occasions and was an excellent host, working the room with his charm, his fine feathers fluttering, his coloured crest sparkling with purpose and poise. Even if the outcome was only a small paragraph in a diary column it was considered a triumph. There was now a steady trickle of commissions from serious newspapers, and the great and the good were queuing up to be interviewed. Amidst the everyday frivolity of life at the imperial court, a new gravitas was emerging.

  Meanwhile I was losing the will to ghost. Outwardly I remained calm and got on with the work in hand, while inside I was building up a quiet fury at every new demand, every fresh enthusiasm. Psychologists call this emotional dissonance, pretending to feel one thing when you experience another—and it is bad for you, so they say. If you hide your negative emotions while displaying positive emotions, you can end up a bit of a wreck. This is one of the reasons why people who work in customer service centres suffer from early burnout—they have to be nice to people who scream and shout at them, and after only a short time they can't take it any more and start biting the carpet. Evidently there are two kinds of emotional dissonance: residual, when feelings from a previous event or conversation are carried over to the next; and anticipatory, when the prospect of the next event or conversation leads to an emotional schism. I'm sure I experienced both kinds.

  The dishonesty was also beginning to weigh more heavily. My mouth was filled with half-lies and half-truths. At dinner parties people asked me, and what do you do? I'm an editor, I said, or sometimes, I'm a researcher. But this seldom put an end to the questions. (And what do you research? What sort of editor?) Eventually I began to take a perverse delight in saying that I was a housewife, even though by the mid-nineties this risked pity or scorn by the bucketful. There's no harm in dissembling, I told myself. But there is. If you can't say what you do, if you can't talk about your daily life, there is a penalty to pay. Curiously, despite all the lies I told, or perhaps because of them, a truth was uncovered: that you can't go on living that way without suffering a loss. Over time I became a martyr to social events where I might have to give an account of myself. I avoided questions, even from close friends, and was deliberately vague about my work. Secrets and lies are corrosive, I discovered, and when they begin to take over it is hard to get back to yourself. At times I felt I was living someone else's life, occupying someone else's head. And losing the way in my own.

  Up till now I had tried to look upon the day-to-day pressures as living intensely, surely preferable to any number of dull existences. And the situation had contained enough weirdness to have a kind of wacky appeal. Tiger could be unconsciously hilarious, and mostly I had been able to see things through a comic prism, and if not comic, then ironic. Irony and absurdity, these two leaning towers, had exerted an enormous pull on me, though it was striking that they counted for nothing with Tiger. What had kept me interested was so very different from what kept him going. But all of that seemed to be changing. The absurdity was beginning to pall, and I was finding it hard to keep everything afloat—the pretence, the masquerade, the constant magnifying of an ego. It was sometimes exhausting. And having embarked on the writing of fiction with Tiger, it seemed that fiction now permeated everything. He could easily deny what was in front of his nose, and reality—whatever we mean by that—was cloaked in a layer that was not reality. Even something that had just occurred, something I had witnessed with my own eyes, could be transmogrified in an instant. The speed at which this could happen was truly remarkable. Innocent remarks were construed as vicious attacks, a glaring defeat presented as another dazzling success. One thing quickly became another, and it would be hard and then impossible to separate the new thing from the old.

  Although I was gradually convincing myself that it was time to make a move, I was deeply alarmed at the thought of living without a salary. My children were beginning to be expensive—two were already at university and my youngest would be starting at art college the following year. In addition to my mortgage I was also still paying off the company loan that had helped me secure the family house. Part of me was appalled by my own pusillanimity and mixture of motives. At least Tiger was openly ambitious, unashamedly self-publicising. He believed in his own story enough to act on it, and ambition insulated him from the world. He had an absolute commitment to whatever was happening in his life at that moment, a complete confidence in what he was saying or doing. But my own position was more complex and ignoble: the ghost was actually getting above herself. I wanted to give up, but I didn't want to be without money; I felt aggrieved at being exploited but I think I also enjoyed a sense of having become the power behind the throne; I had imagined myself immune from delusions of grandeur, but no—a feeling of importance, the proximity to celebrity, my vital role in the construction of a rising scribbler— these things gave me a vicarious kick. A megalomaniac ghost— what a weird idea. Shades of Lady Muck in the Roller once again.

  A job is just a job, declared my Now-Husband (N-H). He had taken to wearing odd socks in flashy colours, just like Tiger's. No, no! I protested. It's much more than a job—why, it's almost a vocation. It certainly wasn't a normal job that could be left in the normal way, I said. And what about references? I could hardly expect Tiger to write me one. Then write one yourself, said N-H, you write everything else, don't you? In any case I had probably unfit
ted myself for other employment. This, and much more besides, was what I rehearsed to myself and to the man at home. Tiger and I had become so much a tandem act, I told him, that it was now hard to imagine us functioning independently of each other. We were like two trapeze artists performing dangerous stunts in midair—he the flyer and I the catcher. How could I possibly give up? It would mean unmaking that which I had helped bring about, strangling the thing I had breathed life into.

  And so I did nothing. Or rather, I continued to do what was expected of me, pretending to Tiger that I shared his enthusiasm, while complaining on the pillow at night about each new assignment. “Give it up,” said the man on the other pillow. He was very patient, but even a patient man can feel he's had enough. Talking it over at home also helped me to see how weird the situation had become and convinced me that I had to take the necessary steps. More than once I resolved to say something to Tiger, but our exchanges were becoming ever more circumscribed. Only once did I raise the possibility that one day I might leave.

  “But why?” he asked, sounding hurt. “Don't you like it here? And what would you do? What on earth would you do?”

  “Well,” I wavered, “I thought I might try my hand at writing.”