Ghosting Read online

  There was a piercing hopelessness to all this, like the lost dream of a Chekhov play—the impossibility of getting to Moscow, or the destruction of the cherry orchard. The agony expanded to blot out everything else; it filled the air and it was impossible not to breathe it in and be infected by it. Those of us in the thick of it didn't trust The Greek an inch, and we said so. “You're mad,” said Tiger. “Why would he double-cross me?” We didn't know why, though we still believed he must be a confidence trickster. But if ever one of us suggested that he have The Greek investigated or have his story checked independently, he flew into a temper and did simian leaps around the room, shouting down the doubter. The strain was beginning to show. How would it all end? we asked ourselves. Sometimes, when fatigue set in, he would remove his beautiful shoes and stretch out on the sofa in his room. Once or twice, unaware that he was resting, I went into the room and saw him lying on the sofa, eyes closed, the mobile propped up at his feet like the tag on the toe in a morgue.

  During this time Tiger continued to interview interesting people—Raymond Briggs, Lord Callaghan, Ken Livingstone, Victoria Glendinning, Richard Holloway, Rabbi Lionel Blue, and many others. John Colvin had described him as “the John Aubrey de nos jours,” with the result that those he approached hardly ever turned him down. To some extent the interviews took his mind off things, but his heart wasn't really in them any more. They took him away from the mobile for two hours, which was more than he could comfortably bear. Occasionally the shape of an interview was ruined on account of vital questions not being asked. He was a swimmer tiring in the water, giving up with the shore in sight. Afterwards, when we talked about it, he would say that he had been forced to cut it short because he had been expecting a call from The Greek.

  “But surely he would have rung you back.”

  “I couldn't risk it. Things are at a crucial stage.”

  Things were perpetually at a crucial stage, it seemed. I had never met The Greek, but I greatly resented him and his power to disrupt everything, even the interviews. I was also deeply suspicious of him. Tiger knew this and it was a source of tension between us. This tension came to a head in a most unlikely place: in the beautiful Ettrick valley, just outside Selkirk in the Scottish Borders. Tiger had come to Scotland to interview Sir David Steel, the Presiding Officer of the new Scottish Parliament. I had picked him up at Edinburgh airport and was driving him to Aikwood Tower, David Steel's home, a distance of forty-seven miles from Edinburgh. The journey was tense. “Are the miles longer in Scotland?” Tiger asked in between fraught calls with The Greek on his mobile. “No,” I said, “it just seems that way.”

  On arrival at Aikwood Tower, a magnificent sixteenth-century keep, David Steel came out to meet us and invited me to sit in the kitchen while the interview took place in the drawing-room. “No,” said Tiger, “she's my driver. She must stay in the car.” Most of the time Tiger had beautiful manners, but everything came under threat in the present crisis. In fact I had been instructed to listen out for the mobile while he was hors de combat with the Presiding Officer. Something was going to happen today, he was sure of it. The Greek had said so.

  “But you've told him you're tied up for the next couple of hours. He won't ring you till afterwards.”

  “He might. I can't risk it.”

  Two hours later, Tiger returned to the car.

  “Did he call?”

  “No, he didn't.”

  “You're sure?”

  “I'm sure.”

  I asked him how the interview had gone, but he didn't answer—he was already dialling The Greek's number. Alas, there was no signal. “Oh my God!” he said, in an instant panic. This was the worst disaster ever. To be completely out of touch at such a critical time! How could he have been so stupid as to risk coming to Scotland, where you couldn't even get a fucking mobile to work! At which point it occurred to me to check my mobile phone. I had a signal. When I passed my phone to Tiger, despair turned to joy. “Bravo! Bravo!” he crooned, “you've saved the day!” I wasn't convinced. And sure enough, despair soon returned. The Greek's mobile was off and his home phone was switched to the answering machine. “Damn! Damn! He must be at the Bank still.”

  Then the strangest thing happened. A few moments later, as I was driving down the private track leading to the main road, my mobile rang. I didn't recognise the voice, but the voice was angry and demanded to know who I was and how I had got hold of his number. I thought at first it was a crank and hung up. But it rang again straightaway, and it was the same angry man asking why I had telephoned him. His accent was hard to place. But of course! It must be The Greek. I handed Tiger the phone. Things were very nearly resolved, he told Tiger. In fact he was extremely hopeful— he had just stepped out of the bank in the City for a moment to make the call, and now he was going back inside.

  Which was a lie. He wasn't at the bank at all. For according to the display on my mobile he had telephoned from his home number, which meant that he was at home, not at the bank as he claimed. He must have checked the number of the incoming call, not recognised it—hence his call to me a few moments later. “This proves he's lying,” I said to Tiger. But he didn't want to know. “Why are you attacking me?” he said, as he always did when someone put a different view. I told him it wasn't an attack—I just couldn't bear to watch him go through this and I wanted him to look at the evidence and think carefully about what was happening. But it made no difference. “There must be some other explanation,” he said, “you don't know what you're talking about.” He had reached that point where the victim colludes with his tormentor, filling in the unexplained gaps, making up stories to fit the picture; and when inspiration runs out, repairing to the last refuge of the wishful thinker. When I continued to press the point, he lost his temper. “Enough!” he screamed. After that he didn't talk to me for nearly two months and would communicate only through a member of the Old Guard. We had begun to move against one another. The finely balanced symbiosis was under siege.

  Question: At what point does something stop being the thing you think it is? Answer: Not before you are ready to admit it to yourself. When does a chair stop being a chair? When the back breaks off? When the legs give way? But look, there's no problem, why do we need legs?—the seat is still intact, and anyway we can sit on the floor. At what point do you accept that someone is dying? When the diagnosis of terminal illness is given? When the medication loses effect? When the vital organs start failing? When the eyes close, the breathing stops? You probably know at each stage, yet it is possible to go on denying, in contradiction of the evidence, right till the end and even beyond.

  And so it was with the money. By this stage Tiger was such a hapless puppet that The Greek did not even have to be very good at his game. In retrospect it was clear almost from the start that there was no deal, that there never would be a deal, that there was in fact no money. But the clearer it became that The Greek was a fabulist, the more fervently did Tiger believe in him.

  “It's all true.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he said so.”

  “But how do you know he's telling the truth?”

  “He has no reason to lie.”

  Tiger had to talk to me again when he was invited to contribute to a new erotic magazine. It styled itself as a literary magazine for sensualists and libertines, and according to the Financial Times it favoured “a literary approach to libido.” I saw it more as a nonpareil of thinking man's smut. But there was clearly a certain cachet to appearing in this publication, and for a short time Tiger's spirits soared.

  “This is amazing,” he said, “all the literati write for it. It's a real honour.”

  The first article was on knickers, not a subject that excites many women, but I made an attempt at a vicarious thrill. If you are a woman, writing as a man in a dirty magazine is a risky business, full of pitfalls. But after a paragraph or two on the etymological history of knickers, with small detours by way of drawers, bloomers and comb
inations, I settled down to the thesis that the reason knickers give rise to erotic fantasies is because of the mystery that attaches to them.

  At one level, the introduction of the gusset between the legs might seem to have closed off an erotic dimension. But it only seems that way to those without the capacity to dream. The imagination is far more easily flamed by ambiguity than precision, by the understated than by the loudly declared, by the half-dark and candlelight, rather than the full glare of electric beams. Knickers are about concealment and contradiction; they are the last barrier, and also the gateway to paradise.

  Churning out this stuff made me feel slightly queasy, dressed in the wrong skin. “But it's erotic!” said Tiger, as if I had missed the point entirely. It struck me that a woman writing as a woman on the subject of knickers would have taken quite a different approach, perhaps offering a thoughtful analysis of the sort of knickers that men tend to give as presents, the kind that are often scratchy and apt to pinch in the wrong places. But a woman writing the thoughts of a man—to wit a man inflamed by knickers—is restricted by a number of factors, not least imagination. This was no time to quibble, however: anything that relieved the gloom was probably a good thing.

  I was certainly not prepared for the postbag that followed. From all over England men wrote letters in response to the article, one fondly reminiscing about drawers sans entre-jambes, another pointing out that many men, like himself, preferred to wear ladies’ knickers rather than what he called men's undies. Worst of all, a man from Surrey wrote to say that Tiger had been talking “nonsense” when he claimed that the mothers of men now middle-aged had their undergarments open at the crotch. He gave the impression of being quite overwrought:

  At no time that I can remember did our mothers join in the disgusting activity of allowing air to waft around their private parts.

  This man's views were obviously sincerely held, and he cannot have known the repercussions that would follow his charge of “nonsense.”

  “This is very serious,” Tiger said to me, very seriously. “We mustn't make mistakes. We have to do our research properly.”

  “Yes, but I'm not sure we did make a mistake.”

  “Can we prove him wrong?”

  “Well, yes, I think so.”

  “And me right?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Then do it. We must defend ourselves, otherwise we will be a laughing-stock. I will ring the editor.”

  After a quick trip to the V & A, and consultation with aged friends prepared to talk to me about their underwear of yesteryear, the following letter was written:

  Apropos your correspondent's comments—in brief, what happened was this: in the old days there were no knickers at all. This should not occasion shock and horror, since modesty was adequately served by layers of petticoats. But natural functions were possible only because access was relatively unimpeded (aside from the underskirts). By the end of the nineteenth century, women were becoming more emancipated in their habits and dress. All the same, long skirts (hobbled or bustled) persisted, and “open drawers” were a matter of practical convenience. No doubt they were sometimes taken advantage of by young men in a hurry, but that is another matter.

  The drawers, later known as knickers, consisted of two full leg sections and were fastened at the front waist. There are examples in the V & A Museum's collection which include a pair in black satin with lots of lace and frills to trim the legs and, by contrast, a rather more prosaic pair of drawers (dating from 1909) in yellow flannel, buttoned at the back and open—very open indeed—at the crotch. In some parts of the country crotchless knickers were known as “free traders.”

  The first directoire knickers, often referred to as “passion killers,” began to appear around 1910 but they did not replace the crotchless variety until they became necessary because of the rapid abbreviation of the skirt, from mid-calf in 1939 to knee-length in 1941.

  Yours faithfully

  The next article, at my suggestion, was on female ejaculation. I was up to my old tricks, trying to sabotage the assignment by the squelch of bodily fluids again. Tiger was doubtful, but not doubtful enough to abandon writing for the erotic magazine.

  “You mean women can squirt the same like men?”

  “Oh yes, sometimes they can even out-squirt them.”

  And I told him of one American study in which a woman had managed a huge projectile gush, ten feet out. He decided it was best to leave it to me.

  “Just make sure of our facts this time.”

  At least I was on more familiar territory, I thought, though I tried hard to slant the article from the point of view of a man feeling threatened, even emasculated, by the thought that women now seemed capable of almost everything. Alas, the readers’ response was even more alarming than with the knickers. It transpired that men up and down the land—though curiously concentrated on the coast, notably in Southampton and Clacton-on-Sea—were being swept away by hot tidal waves from their women.

  “Amazing,” said Tiger, “who would have believed it?”

  The agony with The Greek lasted more than a year. As the Bank stepped up the pressure, disaster seemed inevitable. The days in the palace had become a living hell for everyone, and with Tiger in extremis it seemed even more impossible to make a run for it. The secretary, unable to stand it any longer, had already fled, and though her shadow had once been light, she was nonetheless denounced as a she-devil and a traitor. Those of us who remained spoke in hushed voices among ourselves and continued with our allotted tasks. The cook produced splendid lunches to delight Tiger's palate, Girl Friday massaged his head and pushed back his cuticles, and I got on with writing the next line.

  The journey to Frankfurt in 1999 was unusually grim. Right up to the last moment the trip was in doubt—“How can I go when I have this crisis?” he kept saying, though the situation had gone on for too long to be called a crisis. Only the requirement to be seen at the Book Fair made it happen. “We have to be seen, otherwise we're dead.” He was wearing a burgundy shahtoosh—a delicate wool scarf made from the hair of the wild Tibetan antelope, a critically endangered species. “Feel it! It's much softer than pashmina. The antelope hair is so much nicer than the goat hair, so much nicer. A whole shahtoosh can fit through the ring on your finger!” At the airport I handed over my passport meekly and followed him through the boarding-gate and down the tunnel to the aeroplane. Sometimes you don't need to see a man's face to know how he is feeling. You can tell from the way he walks, you can even tell from the back of his head.

  Everything proceeded smoothly from bad to worse. The atmosphere was baleful. To survive the journey, I tried to concentrate on lines of poetry and pieces of music, hoping to drive out malign forces in the shape of mobiles and Greeks and banks. Once we landed in Germany, I absorbed the language around me, listening in on conversations, reading newspapers over people's shoulders. German was much safer than English.

  We arrived at the hotel in the late afternoon, the same luxury hotel in Kaiser Friedrich Platz. “We must continue to live well,” said Tiger, heading for the presidential suite. “We must never compromise our standards.” He told me to be ready to go down for dinner in one hour and fifty minutes. I lay on the bed and let my head empty. Blissful to be alone.

  Five minutes early, in good time for dinner, I knock at the room of the presidential suite and wait for the usual “Come!” Nothing happens. Perhaps he is in his bathroom, I think, so I wait outside for a decent interval, long enough to allow for a chain-pull and hand-washing. But as I wait I hear a terrible sound—not the sound of a flushing loo or hands being washed, but the sound of a man sobbing. Slowly, tentatively, I open the door and see him sitting at the leather-topped desk, head in hands. I approach the desk hesitantly, saying his name so that I don't startle him, but because of the sobbing he doesn't hear me, so I say it louder, and he looks up, his vision blurred by his sad salt tears. There are few images from art or from life that can still evoke universal pity and
compassion: one is that of a man weeping. Especially a man like Tiger who is not given to weeping, or who is afraid to weep, or perhaps has forgotten how to weep. I go round to his side of the desk and put my arm on his shoulder. He is making quiet, choking noises. I ask what's happened, what's the matter, what's wrong, the way helpless people do when they want to help but know they can't. And in any case, there's no need to ask, for I know what's wrong. The Bank—that's what's wrong. There is no other possibility. They have pulled the plug. It's all over. Tiger hands me a sheet of shiny fax paper—confirmation from the Bank. Liquidation. Ruination. End of Empire.

  But it's not from the Bank. It's from the gardien in the Dor-dogne and this is what he has written:

  J'ai de mauvaises nouvelles. Éclair est mort. Je l'ai amené au vétérinaire, mais y avait plus d'espoir. J'espère que ça vous fera du bien de savoir qu'il na pas souffert longtemps. Il s'est endormi bien vite, et pour la dernière fois, dans mes bras.

  Cordialement

  Michel

  This moment lives with me still. The tight mask had slipped and I felt I had glimpsed another man hidden inside the man I had known all these years. A vulnerable man, broken by the death of a dog.

  Once it was over, however, it was as if it had never happened. This place, the place where he had wept, was at such depths of concealment that he could not remain there for long.

  There is no normal perspective in this story. It is not a rounded picture. For me, it is a way of gaining a little purchase on some things that happened long ago and not so long ago. If it were a painting, we would think the composition lopsided, asymmetrical, in some way foreshortened. The size, the relative positions, and the point where the earth meets the sky—all these would be distorted. In a sense, it is more like a child's drawing where the most important part, the clue to the workings of the child's mind, is out of proportion to the rest of the picture.