Ghosting Read online

  As often as not, however, Tiger didn't like what I'd done with the column, and this would lead to contentious phone calls often stretching over several hours as I tried to shape it to his satisfaction. And sometimes, even the beloved allusions could go terribly wrong. Once, for example, I began a piece with:

  They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

  They may not mean to, but they do.

  “Are you crazy?” Tiger's phone calls were all mid-stream specimens—he didn't mess around with hello, how are you formalities. “You want to get us sacked?”

  “What's the problem?”

  “Beloved, we can't say fuck! I don't believe you put it! No newspaper will let us say fuck!”

  “Well, we can put three asterisks if you like.”

  “Asterisks? No, I don't like asterisks. We have to find another word.”

  “But it's a quote. From Larkin. It says so in the next line.”

  “So you mean it's not something we say?”

  “No, it's Philip Larkin. It's poetry.”

  “Poetry?”

  A pause. Poetry—this could change things.

  “Yes, it's poetry.”

  He thought for a moment. I held my breath. Would poetry prevail?

  “No, we still can't do it. We have to find another word. Have you got pen and paper? Let's say, ‘they screw you up, your mum and dad.’ There, we've solved it.”

  He was also sensitive to repetition in any shape or form, even if it was intended for stylistic effect, or when it was entirely innocuous as with repeated pronouns or common verbs. The first thing he did when I faxed the finished copy was to hunt down a repeated word and ring me up with his findings. “There is repetition! he would say, triumphantly, loftily. I found three ‘takes.’ We have to throw two of them.” And sometimes—this fascinated me—he would object to a particular word, not a word that was in any way improper or out of place; but a perfectly harmless, unoffending, plain, ordinary, innocent sort of word. For example, he hated the word befell, as in “a tragedy befell the country,” such a word could spoil a whole day, never mind a tabloid text. By the same token, he would never allow quantity, though he couldn't quite say why. “I just don't like it,” he said, pulling a bad-smell sort of face, though when pressed he said that it wasn't poetic. Which was true after all. As well as proscribed words he also had favourites, and I learned to scatter them like seed: wisdom, mystique, serenity, exquisite, perilous, beguiling and, most beloved of all, vicissitudes. “Ah, vicissitudes—such a wonderful word …”

  Once I used the word humility, as in “I felt a deep sense of humility”—to explain how Tiger had felt in the presence of a woman he very much admired and who had borne a heavy cross. I was confident that he would love humility. But he didn't.

  “Isn't it the same like humiliation?” he asked.

  I thought: up to a linguistic point, Lord Copper. But what I said was:

  “I think humility is the right word in this context. It's to do with feeling humble in comparison to her strength and courage.” He wasn't convinced.

  “Humble … humble,” he said, trying it out for size, “no, it's not good for me.”

  And then, with the thoroughness of a lexicographer, he did an eyes-closed sift and search for the right word. When he found it, he said:

  “I've got it! I've got it! Foreboding. Listen—” I felt a deep sense of foreboding. “It's much better. Write it down.”

  This is Lewis Carroll territory, I thought.

  “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more or less.”

  But I held out for humility. Foreboding never moved anyone to tears, I said, whereas humility could pack a powerful punch. Nothing else would do. When the piece appeared he received a letter from the woman's husband, the editor of a broadsheet newspaper, saying how moved he had been and confirming that “we all feel humility in her presence.” Tiger, jubilant, rang me up and read me the letter.

  “Aren't you pleased now we said humility?” he cooed.

  Anyone who has written a weekly column will know that after a while it exerts a kind of tyranny. Although it appears just once a week, the other six days are also affected, each day slightly different from the next depending on its position relative to the deadline. Copy for Tiger's column was required on a Wednesday for publication on a Friday. On the Thursday the newspaper sent a proof to him by fax, and he then faxed it on to me. It is not easy to read—far less to proofread—a fax of a fax of newspaper print. The text is blurred, the punctuation unclear, the precious semi-colons obliterated. I asked Tiger to arrange for the newspaper to fax me the proof directly, but he wouldn't hear of it. Several typos slipped through the net in this way.

  Fridays were the best days for both of us: it was the single day I didn't have to think about the column, and for Tiger the pleasure of it appearing in the newspaper was more than enough. He bought lots of copies: one for keeping in a leather-bound file and the others to give to guests invited to his new Soho palace. I came to love Fridays—their relative quietness and normality. But the other days assumed a pitiless momentum. In a previous existence I used to think that people probably dashed off columns over a cup of coffee. How could I ever have believed that? It could take over your whole life if you weren't careful.

  Because of the column I wasn't allowed to have holidays. “We don't want to lose our slot,” said Tiger, his voice taking on a low, death knell pitch. And because the pieces had to be topical, they couldn't be written in advance and banked. Sometimes I forgot I was a man and wrote something careless. I once described (in the first-person) how Tiger responded to a stressful situation by curling up on a sofa with a hot-water bottle and cucumber patches on his eyes. “But that's ludicrous!” said N-H when he read it in the newspaper. “That's what you do. No man would ever do that!” In desperation I made a decision: I would think about the column only on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. That way there would be four remaining days—more than half the week in fact— in which to sort out my head and restore the balance necessary for A Happy Home Life.

  But this worked only for a short time. As the months passed and the column became established, Tiger was content just to choose the subject and leave the rest to me, provided we went through the normal rituals of reading aloud, repetition checks, and so on at the end. Which would have been fine, except that he became pathologically anxious about the deadline being met. His anxiety levels could be calibrated by the number of phone calls he made to check on progress—“How are we doing? Are we winning? Are we nearly there?”—until the daily tally was scarcely to be borne. He seemed determined that the column should occupy my frontal lobes at all times.

  When I first started working for Tiger he had paid for a dedicated telephone line to be installed in my house. My children called this The Hotline—they knew from an early age never to pick it up—and the name had stuck. Its ring, though distinct, was perfectly ordinary, but it carried such undertones of urgency that the whole family reacted whenever it rang and there would be a chorus of “Quick! It's The Hotline!” If I was speaking on the other phone in the house, I used to hang up immediately whenever The Hotline rang. Tiger didn't like to be kept waiting, and in any case he just kept ringing till I answered. Friends at the other end of the phone sometimes got upset about this—what could possibly be so urgent and why couldn't I ring him back, they asked—and they chided me for being a complete pushover. One even wrote me a stiff letter on the subject, breaking off our friendship, saying my behaviour was offensive, that he and his wife felt badly treated and that they were sure other friends felt the same. But it's my job, I said pathetically, as if that explained everything. When I moved house in 1995 The Hotline came with me, and I had extensions fitted in the kitchen and the sitting room, as well as my work-space in the garden. N-H drew the line at our bedroom. “We are not sleeping with The Hotline,” he said.

  The Hotline was never so hot as during the year
s of the newspaper column. It started ringing at 8:30 A.M. and it continued shrilly throughout the day. One day I counted the calls, drawing a line of a stick man on the gallows each time the phone rang. At the end of the day there was a graveyard of forty-seven lines and five hanged men. Tiger was rhetorically committed to reasonableness—“I don't want to disturb you,” he sometimes said when he rang in the evening or at weekends, but he seemed unable to help himself. In fact, I think he meant well and saw it as his way of helping me. Even on Fridays he was already thinking about the following week's column—we must find someone, who is in the spotlight? Who can we write about? This was all part of the teamwork. Sometimes he got fretful: My God, this is terrible, he would say, we're running out of women. On Saturdays he would scour the newspapers for a suitable subject, and if he failed to find one, he bought the early editions of Sunday newspapers, available in London on Saturday night, and intensified his search, phoning me at frequent intervals to discuss the options, occasionally edging towards hysteria. “Time is running out. We have to find a woman.”

  In the beginning, N-H complained very little, but I knew he was nursing a slow-burning resentment. “It's too much,” he sometimes said, “he's too big in your life.” And so The Hotline became a sort of barometer of domestic harmony. Its ring could stop a marital moment in its tracks, sending a sudden depth-charge through our Shangri-La. I had been so programmed over the years to respond immediately that I found it impossible to ignore and would leap across the room like some mad thing. “Leave it! Just leave it!” N-H sometimes said, but there was no point. Tiger could outring any resolve ofthat sort.

  Things came to a head one Saturday evening. We were hosting a dinner party for some visiting speakers to the university. Dinner parties in St. Andrews can be nerve-racking occasions—getting the academic mix right, being prepared to talk about post-structuralism while serving linguini, making out that a small medieval town in the East Neuk of Fife is at the centre of the intellectual universe, trying to appear competent and nonchalant at the same time. On this occasion, however, things were going well, and we were feeling rather pleased with the shape of the evening. Until The Hotline rang.

  Whereupon N-H, who has a naturally accommodating vision of the world and a serene manner with his fellow man, quite forgot himself and leapt to his feet, shaking his fist, raging at a nameless adversary, and screaming blue murder in my direction: “Kill that fucking phone, will you! Just tell him to fuck off and leave us in peace, for fuck's sake!” As I grabbed the phone and left the room there were concerned looks, which seemed to say: It's just a phone ringing, isn't it? Does he always react like this when the phone rings? Why, only a moment ago, this gentle, quiet man was filling our glasses with Pinot Grigio, and now he is completely deranged. Perhaps the sea air does this to people after a while …

  “This can't go on,” said N-H after everyone had gone home.

  “No, it can't,” I said.

  At some point in 1998 it became clear that money was in short supply. This was quite a shock since there had always seemed to be more than enough. Indeed those of us who had observed Tiger's extravagant lifestyle over many years had supposed that there was wealth without limit. But it appeared we were wrong. There had been times in the past when he had cried hard up, but no one ever believed him because his protestations were always at odds with what we saw—supreme spending and splurging. He was quite open about it and loved talking about his latest acquisitions. “Wait till you see what I bought!” he would say as he showed off the latest painting or Oriental rug. “And look at this piece of lapis—it's the biggest piece ever! It cost a fortune!” And so, although a certain mystery hung over his financial affairs, we assumed that the money would go on for ever. But it turned out that the debts had been growing for some time.

  At first he was bullish. What were they so worried about? They'd get their money. There had been financial crises before, hadn't there? Just leave it to him—he would sort it. But somehow we knew this was more serious. The details were never fully disclosed; just vague references to cash flow problems and the need to recapitalise the company. To this end a financial backer was sought. This was the obvious way forward, Tiger said. He was in any case fed up with being a one-man band—what he needed was a financial partner, a kindred spirit. And so, letters, dozens of them, were sent off to potential investors, and though they read like investment opportunities I thought of them as just fancy begging letters. Perhaps Tiger knew this too, but nothing was ever said. As each envelope was sealed he said he had a good feeling about it—this one surely would bring a positive response, he just knew it. I felt sorry for him, but if ever I said so, he bridled. “Never underestimate me,” he began, the grim warning before the tirade. “People have made that mistake before and have lived to regret it. I enjoy a fight. I will not be beaten. If they think they can destroy me—just let them try. No one is a match for …” and at this point he would begin to talk about himself in the third person, as if he were sending another man into battle, hailing the man's reputation for fearlessness, praising his defiance, extolling his name—his own name—again and again. Arthur Scargill used to do this during the miners’ strike. (“As long as Arthur Scargill's in charge, the miners will secure a victory. Make no mistake, Arthur Scargill's a fighter. There will be no defeat under Arthur Scargill….”)

  I was spending much more time in London now. N-H's work took him there for quite long stretches and I wanted to be with him as much as possible. Tiger seemed pleased that I was able to be in London more, and he made the magnificent library in the new palace available for me as an office. A lot of letters had to be written and he liked having me on hand to do them. When I wasn't writing letters or doing research for the interviews I worked on the column and other journalistic bits and pieces. Because of his other worries Tiger said it was important for him to keep busy on the creative front. He accepted everything that was offered—the New Statesman diary, commissions from the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph, the Jewish Chronicle, the Tablet and so on. There were also regular approaches from the tabloids for “rapid reaction” pieces: three hundred and fifty words by midday on some topical crisis, sensational divorce settlement or tragic event. And sometimes I did book reviews, though I wasn't allowed to write what I really thought. The thrust of the piece was determined by Tiger's connection with the author—

  “We have to say we like it. We cant not say it's good.”

  “What, even if it's not good?”

  “Even if it's not good. Why make enemies?”

  Perhaps this is not very different from the way a lot of reviewing works. And since there was often a thank you card from a grateful author, this was vindication enough.

  “You see how she loved it? I told you, it's much better to write a nice review.”

  Reading over the different articles now, I am able to recall my particular state of mind as the deadlines approached. Just from a single phrase it is possible to tell whether I felt confident or discouraged, rebellious or simply desperate. I can even detect the odd personal crisis. I can as good as hear the thud of my own heart.

  The small spaces between the newspaper articles were filled with wild thoughts, all of them variations on the theme of breaking free. But how best to go about it? And could I afford it? I considered my mental state, my bank balance, my home life, my blood pressure—this last, bafflingly, being the lowest you could have without being in a semi-permanent faint. At home I judged it was best not to complain too much, and so I began to pretend that everything was fine, that things had improved. But they hadn't, and I had shamefully embarked on yet another level of pretence, this time with the man I loved. In fact, the largest area of my consciousness was still occupied by Tiger, and it included, ironically, the Tiger of my own invention, a protean chameleon-like creature who rhapsodised over the stuff he believed he had created, a man upon whom I had ghosted beliefs and opinions he didn't hold, feelings that he didn't feel. And it was the keenest irony that we were both en
snared by the same myth.

  Some assignments were completely weird. At the beginning of 1998 Tiger gave lunch to an agent who represented a high-profile society girl. He worked his magic on her and by the end of lunch there was a deal on the table: Tiger would publish the society girl's story. When he told me about it, he was hardly able to contain his excitement and immediately plunged into his Harlem Globetrotter routine: this would be the biggest coup ever, she was such a babe, she was hip, she was cool, she was right at the heart of the British social scene, rubbing shoulders with aristocrats and rock stars alike. Bounce, bounce, bounce, and now—wait for it—the goal! This book was a once-in-a-lifetime chance: it would attract more publicity than all the other books put together, it was a surefire winner.

  “And who will write it?” I asked as the ball dropped through the net.

  “We will!” he said. “It's so easy—let me tell you how we will do it. I am going to interview her; I have arranged to do three sessions of two hours. And there are thousands of newspaper cuttings. So with the tapes and the cuttings we have all we need to write the book. There's no problem!”

  But there was a big problem. I didn't want to do it, and this time I told him so. I could not bring myself to be interested in this girl, I said—she represented everything that was trivial in the world, she was no more than a glamour girl flitting from party to party, a sugar mouse, a modeller of designer frocks, a freeloading lightweight, famous just for being famous, irredeemably superficial. Why was such a person exalted? And why did we have to add to the glorification?