Ghosting Page 21

  “Writing? Writing? You think it's easy to write?”

  At that point my nerve failed me and I drew back from conveying what was in my heart. Much easier to stick to the familiar pathways. It was to take another four years before the parting of the pathways. In the meantime I played to Tiger's expectations and got on with the job.

  As luck would have it, just as I was hatching small doubts and raising them to be big strapping quandaries, Tiger was feeling particularly cock-a-hoop. In the summer of 1996, just before the second novel appeared, he gave an interview to Adam Nicolson in the Sunday Telegraph in which he said. “I'm so excited. I've got so much to do. I've got four books coming out, I'm so optimistic, I'm looking forward so much to what is going to happen next.” I pretended to share this excitement, albeit a bit toned-down, but the fulfilment I had once experienced in the job seemed to have vanished. It had been there a minute ago, before I blinked and opened my eyes to the possibility of a different world, and though I sometimes searched for it still, or fancied that I felt it anew, it had actually gone.

  No more novels, I had decided. But Tiger had different ideas. In a review of the first novel in the Independent Andrew Biswell had written:

  [the author] has written a book that is big despite its brevity … he proves he is capable of writing an outstanding novel.

  “You see,” said Tiger, “he says we can write.” In my head I heard strange sounds, like circuits shorting. I could tell he had another novel coming upon him.

  And indeed he had. It turned out that his imagination had been fired by the opening story in Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, in which there is an account of Noah's Flood, told from the point of view of a woodworm.

  “It's so clever, don't you think? Don't you agree?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It has given me an idea,” he said.

  Which was to draw on another Old Testament story, namely the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

  “It will be amazing,” he said. “Can you imagine? Everyone will want to read it.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because of Sodom and Gomorrah! Let me explain. With the Flood there's no sex, but with Sodom and Gomorrah we can put all the sex we like! And sex sells! Isn't it?”

  He rose from his chair and launched into the now familiar ardour for a new project—how beautifully we would do it, how simple it would be to write, how the critics would love it, and so on. At these times he reminded me of a Harlem Globetrotter—fast, deft, agile, bouncing his enthusiasm around the room, potting a new shot every minute or two, yet taking the time between goals to impress and bewitch. As always it was a masterful performance. But my own spirits were diving. I had been in this place before and I just couldn't face another novel. Even so, I didn't refuse outright. Instead I said I would have to research the subject and think about it.

  “But we shouldn't think for too long,” he said, “or someone will pinch our idea.”

  Mercifully, a different project soon beckoned: Tiger was to be a columnist on a tabloid newspaper. He was thrilled. The column was to appear once a week and would feature a woman in the news at the time, the particular slant to be left up to him. The fourth estate trusted him now. His massive volume on women had recently been reissued, and this had consolidated his reputation as an authority on the subject. “It's like the Bible,” he told a journalist in an interview. “People look it up when they want to learn something.”

  By this time he was working from new premises, a fine five-storey house in the heart of Soho, with spacious salons, a private bar in the basement and a studio flat at the top. He had poured love and money into its refurbishment, and it was now a source of great joy. The opulence of his new surroundings seemed to reflect his confidence in the future. The main room, which occupied the whole of one floor, was like a Cecil Beaton stage set: extravagant, resplendent and technically perfect. These qualities extended to the props and special effects—crystal chandeliers, elegant bookcases, photographs in silver frames, a sumptuous sofa, and of course the precious tiger skin. The colours of the paint and fabrics were bright and bold, softened only by the soft peach-pink flesh tones of the many female nudes that adorned the walls. The other objets also had a sultry, seductive quality, giving the room the air of an erotic theme park. Visitors felt themselves transported to another time and place—the Moulin Rouge perhaps, or a seraglio at the Ottoman Court. Tiger was in his element. Since he himself was always a blaze of colour with mad rococo touches, he seemed to belong here. He wore a different suit every day, each with its own eye-popping silk lining and matching trimmings. Some days, in certain colours, he could be perfectly camouflaged in the room, like a lizard on a rock; other days, in different colours, he looked conspicuous and splendidly gift-wrapped.

  In line with the surroundings, the emperor also seemed bolder. This might have had something to do with his momentous decision to have a completely new hairdo. The substantial but delicate upsweep of many years had finally been removed, and he was now a skinhead to be reckoned with. He loved to feel the fresh air on his head, he said, and he took to stroking its new contours. “Anyhow, why should I pretend I have hair when I have no hair?” Why indeed, we all said. “It was a stupid idea!” he said, as if the thatch that had sat so precariously and required harnessing in the wind might have been a lapse of short duration. In fact the new look suited him, and everyone agreed it had been an excellent move.

  Another decision was that there would be no supernumeraries in the new palace. Most of the staff would be in other buildings, but here, close to the throne, there would be only a small, select company of girls who would be chosen for “the lightness of their shadow,” a vital quality that had its origins in an Arab proverb. Someone whose shadow was light would have a certain reticence and, though she would be competent, she would be content to stay quietly in the background. Tiger's language was lit up by inscrutable sayings from the folklore of the Middle East in which the kissing content seemed curiously high: Kiss the dog on the mouth until you get what you need out of him; or Kissing hands is fooling beards. But it was lightness of shadow that he alluded to most. If ever he had to sack one of his lovelies, official grounds would be found for doing so, but the real reason would invariably be because her shadow was not light.

  There were only three people to help run the new premises: a devoted young secretary who answered the telephone and kept Tiger's diary; a beautiful Girl Friday whose jobs included cleaning, polishing the silver, serving lunch, manicuring his nails and putting drops in his ears; and a society chef, a delightfully skittish young woman who prepared and cooked lunch to order each day. The dining-room was just as lavish as Tiger's private room: the walls were lobster-red and there was a huge antique mahogany table with matching chairs, and solid-silver place settings. Different guests arrived for lunch every day and all were given a conducted tour of the palace. No one left without a swag-bag containing signed copies of the latest books and occasionally, if the guest was particularly favoured, a silver heart in a black velvet pouch.

  The arrangement for the weekly newspaper column was that Tiger would choose whichever woman was to be the subject, and we would then discuss the line to be taken. He would write down all his thoughts and fax them to me in Scotland whereupon they would be turned into what he liked to call “beautiful prose.” Beautiful prose was a potent concept for Tiger, amounting to much more than the arrangement of words on a page. Beautiful prose was a transcendent thing, an indication of good character, a mark of decency, a moral register almost. Good and bad writing, like good and bad in the world, was a Manichean struggle between conflicting forces. And actually, though our touchstones were quite different and we weren't always in agreement about how this beauty might be captured, I felt something of the same, and still do.

  The first column was to appear in the middle of January 1997, and so I travelled to London in the first week of the year to discuss the general approach to the new ve
nture. As usual there was a sort of shopping-list of basic ingredients, the eggs and tinned tomatoes of the undertaking.

  “It must be very distinguished,” said Tiger.

  “Of course.”

  “But we must never be boring”—his voice was low in line with the warning—“otherwise they will drop us immediately.”

  “Do you want it to be polemical?”

  “Polemical?”

  “You know, controversial. Something that people will talk about over breakfast.”

  “But of course! It has to be controversial. People expect it of me,” he said. “But we must also be poetic. Very poetic.”

  The newspaper in question was not exactly known for its lyricism, but I judged it wasn't worth putting a damper on things when they seemed to be going so well. For years Tiger had dreamed of having a regular slot in a newspaper and he was thrilled by the idea of a huge readership. I too was keen, mainly because I believed I could manage a column, and yet it would be demanding enough to keep the unthinkable—a third novel—at bay. And because Tiger knew so many famous women that there would be no shortage of material. “We'll have such fun,” he said to me, “and you'll make some money too.” This second point was certainly true: the newspaper would pay £500 for five hundred words, and I was to receive half of the total—a much better rate of pay than for anything else I had done.

  Tiger made a confident start, dashing off page after page in a bold hand with lots of his trademark CAPITAL LETTERS, randomly dispersed to smack the reader in the eye. For the first few weeks, each time he phoned to tell me he had sent his piece by fax, he would say, “It's so easy! You won't believe it, I wrote the whole thing in ten minutes!” In fact, I did believe it. But I also hated when he said something was easy since this usually meant that I would find it especially hard, a point that strained relations over the years. My role in this instance was to sort out the material, keeping as much as possible of the original, type it up and fax it back— straightforward enough in theory, but in practice something of a challenge. As a child I was always slightly in awe of language, and I suppose I have never really got over this feeling. But Tiger had a different starting point: language was there to be used, so what are we waiting for, where is the problem? Wittgenstein believed language has meaning because those who use it have agreed basic rules of syntax and signification, just as in a game of cards the players are agreed about the different suits and what is trump. I sometimes wondered what Wittgenstein would have made of our exchanges. In truth, Tiger had taken shelter in English and lived there for a long time, but it was not his natural home. In spite of this, his language was so powerfully engaged with its purpose that the style had an inimitable, inscrutable verbal genius all of its own. And yet his sentences were a riot of hangings and danglings, while the subject and predicate, being scarcely ever on speaking terms, always put up a fearful fight before being mediated into a suspension of hostilities.

  Tiger also insisted on the requisite dash of philosophical depth or literary allusion. If ever these were absent, there would be a plaintive, melodramatic cry at the other end of the phone—“Dar-leeng, where is the literature? What about the philosophy? You promised!”—as if he might burst into tears. Another required element was psychology, or rather its younger punchier sister, pop-psychology The woman featured in the column was usually put on the couch, her character assessed, her faults or virtues or motives laid bare. “We have to say what makes her tick” was how he put it. Which was interesting, since he, more than anyone I have known, preferred to stay fixed and immovable on the surface of himself. I once asked him what made him tick. “Me? Tick?” he said, as if I'd nabbed the wrong bloke, in immediate denial of the possibility that he ticked at all. He seemed afraid to probe, while still wanting to be thought of as a man who delved deep into his own soul. When it came to contradictions he could spin on a sixpence—his view of himself simply did not cohere. Perhaps this is true of most emperors.

  I did quite a lot of spinning too. In the world in which I moved, there was a feeling that lying, pretending and dissembling were all just part of the repertoire. It was reality that was the danger—always loitering with intent, ready to pounce at any moment. If you weren't careful, if you didn't guard against it, everyone would soon be telling the truth, and then who knows where we'd all end up. No one said this, but you could feel it in the air.

  I also thought a lot about the extent to which I deceived myself about what I was doing and why I was doing it. On the face of it, self-deception is an odd idea. At university my philosophy teachers even argued there was no such thing—according to them it amounted to no more than an interesting paradox. How could you set about misleading yourself, they scoffed. Surely you would know what you were up to, which would undermine the deception. And if you knew what you were doing, how was it possible to trick yourself into believing otherwise? But philosophers have always overestimated the rational side of human behaviour. Self-deception may have a paradoxical look about it, seeming to require that the same person must be both the deceiver and the deceived, but of course we all know what is meant and understood by it. And we're even quite lenient on it, precisely because it is thought to be an unconscious, irrational, minor-moral-flaw sort of transgression.

  People are much tougher on deception—which is also odd, given the sheer ordinariness and ubiquity of it. Deception is part of everyday life—from the polite thank you for something we would much rather not have received, to the calculated lie to maintain a friendship. It is one of the ways we engage with the world, and we seem to have a special aptitude for it. We deceive one another to protect our emotional attachments, but we also cling emotionally to abstract ideas, like fame and power. Certainly, those who lie and deceive don't have any special identifying marks. It's not possible to tell from the outside—they look just like you and me. We all wear masks; it's just that some masks are worn so closely and tightly that they begin to consume the face behind them.

  Something I learned as a ghost was that there is an interesting connection between deception and self-deception: lying to others plays a vital role in lying to yourself. Which is to say, you can more easily fool yourself if others are fooled too. On the other hand, it is not at all easy to lie to yourself while telling the truth to others. Especially to a new man in your life. Once N-H entered the picture, a definite limit was placed on my scope for self-deception.

  After a month or two the columns settled down into a series of set pieces, almost formulaic in manner and matter. Judging the length became second nature—I could estimate 500 words standing on my head. Typically they were controversial and opinionated, packing a bit of a punch, and often containing elements of Tiger's own history and experience, such as details of an encounter with the woman in question. I paid attention to the form as well as the content, but the style was at times orotund, the tone defined by a kind of moral seriousness often expressed in a range of truisms. John Updike has spoken slightingly of “the undercooked quality of prose written to order,” but mine was generally overcooked, and sometimes it came out burnt and carbonised. I also inserted a semi-colon at every opportunity because it was Tiger's favourite punctuation—“The semi-colon, such a beautiful thing. I love it!” And though absolutes were starting to look suspect in the country at large, absolutes nonetheless abounded. The pieces were larded with ominous phrases such as the forces of darkness, the redemption of man, the sanctity of life, and the human condition, and they tackled the much beloved big themes: love, God, betrayal, sex, innocence, art, humanity, and so on.

  All of this was arrived at painfully, by trial and error, by learning what pleased Tiger most and upset him least. For me the aim was twofold: to try to achieve good presentable copy and to avoid incurring Tiger's displeasure. It took a while to get the hang of it, and the hang hung precariously between the two. If he liked what he saw, if he thought I had done a good job, I would immediately feel a surge of relief, something close to happiness in fact, now and then extending u
nbounded to a sense of cosmic joy. This visceral response, the extent to which my own emotional state depended on his, surprised me and worried me in equal measure. Why did I care so much? Why was his approval so important? Why did it matter? Why did I try so hard?

  Occasionally, as soon as I picked up the phone, I knew I had got it right, for his reaction would be touchingly appreciative. “I love it!” he would say. “It is the best ever!” This often had to do with poignancy, the lacrymae rerum rating. If the finished piece brought a lump to the throat he was delighted. As usual he would read the text back to me—“Are you listening? I will read it to you …”—and with the “good” pieces, he would start back at the beginning again as soon as he reached the end. There was more to this than liking the sound of it; the act of reading it aloud turned it into his own creation.

  Real happiness, however, was an allusion—usually given a thorough working over since it was unwise to assume any degree of conversance. Once, for example, in a piece on Elizabeth Taylor, I wrote about the phoenix building itself a funeral pyre, flapping its wings to fan the flames and burning itself to death, then rising from the ashes to start all over again. Each stage in the life cycle was carefully spelled out.

  “Is it true?” Tiger asked as soon as he had received the fax.

  “Is what true?”

  “About the phoenix. I was so moved I nearly wept. But is it true?”

  “Well, mythologically speaking, it's true.”

  “It's amazing! I love it!”

  There was something endearing about this, in much the same way as when children ask after a bedtime story: Did they really? Is it true? And something that provoked similar feelings of fond pro-tectiveness. Indeed Tiger could be heart-movingly open to new knowledge—the history of ideas, natural laws, classical references, biblical quotations, and so on. Provided there was no trace of condescension, and Occam's razor was applied to every explanation, he would embrace well-known facts as marvellous new discoveries, greeting them with a radiant, childlike wonder. Or occasionally, if my attempt to explain something didn't quite come off, he would listen politely in a state of baffled incomprehension, but with eyes displaying a kind of clever-buggers-these-Chinese look. I liked this side of him. It was guileless and open-hearted. But every so often I sneered inwardly at his ignorance of something or other. How could he not know that!—I gasped, looking down on him from my cruel smug perch on Mount Parnassus. I hate myself for that now. Tiger knew many things I didn't know. Besides, Orwell was probably right: ignorance is strength.