Ghosting Page 6
That scene, repeated many times, is still sharp in my mind—I can see it as if I'm watching a sequence in a film. Yet it may not have been that way at all, and as I write it I am conscious of how differently my parents might have described it. Would there in fact have been anything for them to describe? Were they even aware of what I felt? Did they feel it too? I think not. Memory is not always to be trusted—it can make things so much worse or better than they were. But there is such a lot that is forgotten, so much that doesn't make it past the hippocampus and simply disappears into oblivion; with the result that the parts we do remember cry out to have sense made of them.
What sense do I make now of the confusion surrounding the way we spoke and the words we used? Judging by the rigidity of their rules, and the strictness with which they imposed them, my parents appeared to me to be certain about everything. I now think that I was mistaken. The sheer fluidity of their position on language was surely a sign that they were feeling their way in the dark just as much as the rest of us. Both my parents were fiercely proud of being Scottish: they felt ipso facto supreme in the pecking order of nations. They were fond of reciting the names of Scots inventors—a list to make you proud, they said. Without the Scots and their inventions, so they claimed, the world would be nothing—no trains, no telephone, no roads, no television. And if it hadn't been for James Watt and his steam engine we'd still be getting around on donkeys. In fact, when you think of it, we'd scarcely be alive at all without all that penicillin and anaesthetic, not to mention the antibiotics. It was a subject they returned to again and again, affirming and reaffirming the peerlessness of their country. My country too. They also honoured Scots traditions—haggis on Burns night, black bun at New Year—and spoke with swollen hearts of the unparalleled beauty of the Scottish landscape. When they saw pictures of far-flung countries on television, they would scoff: “Huh! Not a patch on Bonnie Scotland!” It mattered not at all that the place where we lived was mostly unbeautiful, that we were surrounded by bings—our name for slag-heaps—and that the topographical features they praised were wholly absent—no mountains, no glens, no coastline. They were devoted to Scottish-ness, especially what is perceived by the outside world as Scottish-ness—whisky, bagpipes, kilts and Balmorality. We even had a family plaque on our front door displaying our clan tartan and coat of arms.
But when it came to language, that other potent symbol of national identity, my parents’ attitude, particularly that of my mother, was equivocal. With its colourful dialect words and distinctive accent the Scots tongue was—still is—a vigorous, vital and varied thing. And it was something my parents clearly took pleasure in. But in common with parents the world over, they wanted the best for their children. They wanted them to get on. And it can't have escaped them that the status of the Scots language in wider society was low. If you spoke in the way it felt natural to speak, the way you heard spoken all around you, you were marked in the eyes of the world beyond. It was daylight snobbery, but that's the way it was. My mother was fiercely aspiring, and my father, perhaps in the interests of peace, went along with her. English was the thing; hence the elocution lessons and all that pitiful vowel management.
Neurologists tell us that there is part of the brain specific to verbs, another specific to nouns. In my own brain, I have come to believe there must be a part directed towards vowels; and what a muddled, messed-up part it is. Alas, some things learned in childhood are difficult to unlearn, however much you might try. Thus, I have never been, am not now, confident of the way I speak. I hardly ever use the vernacular—“the guid Scots words” that brightened my childhood—except self-consciously or mockingly; everything is slightly adjusted, depending on where I am, and those I am with. This irony is not lost on me. My mother and Miss Ming-is have prevailed.
Like its proprietor, the publishing house was sui generis, and it had a reputation quite disproportionate to its size. It was known to be radical and risk-taking—unafraid of the odd lawsuit, real or threatened. And although commercial viability was rapidly becoming the most important factor in the rest of the publishing world, it was not yet a feature of this independent house. Tiger took chances with books and seemed to act mostly on impulse. He would meet people at a party and sign them up on the spot. Sudden ideas were converted into improbable publishing ventures, and books were invented that ought never to have existed. He acted speedily and never flinched from taking a decision. He loved controversy, courted it indeed, and any whiff of scandal merely strengthened his resolve to publish. “Let them sue! Let them sue!” he would say, rubbing his soft hands together. “But I am a fighter, and I fight to win!” Tiger basked in this image, and we basked in it too. By association, we felt as if we were also fighters, that we too would win, and although at editorial meetings there was hardly ever a discernible rational plan, the atmosphere was highly charged and there was a lot of heady talk about noble ideals. There was, too, a good deal of frivolity, but the frivolity was curiously serious, and much of the time we behaved as if we might be engaged in decisions of supreme importance.
There wasn't an obvious hierarchy, but there seemed to be an appetite for titles and an abundance of directors. There were editorial directors, marketing directors, publicity directors and public relations directors. According to my business card I was a commissioning editor. But whom was I going to commission, and what was I going to edit?
Nothing much was explained, though a lot could be picked up from looking and listening, and from reading trade publications. Much of the time, however, I had a vertiginous sense of bafflement about what I was meant to be doing. And people were suspicious of the New Girl, partly because of the atmosphere of mistrust in the sultan's seraglio, where New Girls might easily elbow out those who were not quite in mint condition. I wanted to tell them that they had nothing to worry about: that I was no threat, that I just wanted a job to stop my brain softening, that I had no need of orchids or perfume, that I didn't want to disturb their domain. Yet I said none of this.
Instead I studied Judith Butcher's Copy-Editing and stumbled upon a fascinating new world full of rules and regulations, all set out with biblical authority: where to put the spaces when showing degrees of temperature, how to convert footnotes to endnotes, what to do with trade names, and which typeface to use for classical Greek. It amazed me that someone had made decisions about all of these things and had set a clear standard. Copy-editing, so I discovered, is a complicated business—an intricate system of textual symbols and marginal marks contained within a rigid structure of spelling, grammar and punctuation. It seems to be part science, part art, and it even has a strange and wonderful language of its own: widows and wrap-rounds, bleeds and blocks and blurbs, serifs and slugs and stets. It is oddly alluring.
After a few months I had managed to learn quite a lot from the Butcher bible, and in due course typescripts began to arrive on my desk with a note asking me to “cast an eye” over them, as if they might be part of a window display. But the work was detailed and precise and it could not be rushed. Copy-editing felt like leaving the world for a while, and the exactness of it was strangely restful. It was also obsessive. I would scour each page for split infinitives and hanging participles; or pounce on a widow and gleefully rearrange the spacing to remove all trace of it. Before long I began to see inordinate beauty in marginal squiggles or the hieroglyphs of textual marks, and though neatness and orderliness had never been my strengths, I soon found that I was keeping my pencil, ruler and eraser in a little wooden box on my desk and guarding them fiercely from casual thievery. I straightened and patted the pages of each typescript into even blocks, and if ever anyone asked to borrow my pencil-sharpener I had to stop myself from screaming. During the working day I was neurotically perfectionist about everything, and at night I dreamed of tiny wooden compartments containing my children's milk teeth, toenail clippings and chicken-pox scabs.
Further estrangement from normal life was averted by a visit to the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 1981.I
had been in touch with agents representing writers from the Soviet Union (as it then was), and we had arranged to meet at Frankfurt and talk about English language rights. I began to see the possibility of setting up an interesting list of Russian books in translation. I was determined to seize this opportunity—if only to justify my existence at work.
The journey to Frankfurt gave me my first taste of travelling with Tiger. We met outside his house in Mayfair where the chauffeur was waiting, this time in a shiny black Bentley, to drive us to Heathrow. Tiger was wearing a long overcoat of wild mink, which he removed before getting into the car. “Do you like it?” he asked, stroking himself with both hands. “It's by Fabienne of Mayfair— my wife gave it to me as a Christmas present.” Underneath he wore a Hermès jacket in red and blue suede, and shoes made from red lizard skin. “For Frankfurt I always like to dress casual,” he explained.
Like fine wine, and cats in baskets, he did not travel well. Every stage of the journey—driving to Heathrow, queuing up at the check-in desk, boarding the plane—was attended by a high degree of angst. Would the traffic make us late? Would the plane leave on time? Would there be a screaming infant in the row behind? On the way to the airport he made countless calls from his car phone, announcing his imminent departure and giving out contact details, apparently to anyone he could think of. In the 1980s the advertisers of the first generation of mobile phones targeted the business traveller, promising that effective use could be made of time spent travelling—“dead time,” they called it. Working his way through the list of numbers in his Filofax, Tiger made this dead time zing. “I shall be in the air for just over one hour. My plane lands in Frankfurt at 14:45 local time, but you can reach me …,” he boomed down the phone again and again. I doubted whether any of this was strictly necessary, but it had the desired effect of aggrandising the trip and creating a sense of urgency.
In the business of communication Tiger was ahead of his time. He acquired one of the earliest versions of the mobile phone, upgrading it as soon as a new model came on the market, and he seemed to understand before anyone else that it was an index of the future. “Look at it!” he would say, cradling it fondly in his hands. “Isn't it amazing? Isn't it beautiful? Can you believe how neat it is?” He drooled over the design and knew instinctively that the size, the fascia, the foldability—all these things would come to be very important. In fact, he was also one of the earliest examples of the useless but self-validating I'm on the train culture. As we trundled down the motorway, he yelled into the mouthpiece a running commentary on weather conditions, traffic congestion, exact location, proximity to Terminal One, and so on. And in the back seat I experienced the first stirrings of those feelings now common among travellers whose basic entitlement to peace and quiet is being violated. I had no idea then that within twenty years a billion people would be jabbering into mobiles.
Once we were on the aeroplane Tiger's anxiety levels increased, though it was striking that he didn't have the concerns people traditionally have before take-off: will the plane actually get off the ground? Does the captain know what he's doing? Should I have written a letter to my children? Instead he fretted about whether there was enough bread on board so that he could have extra with his lunch, and whether his state-of-the-art mobile phone would work in Germany. In between he kept checking his three watches, certain that we were going to be late in leaving, all the while scowling at his fellow passengers as if they had no right to be there. He worried dreadfully about the possibility of contagion, and he listed the ghastly diseases he could catch, fearing it might already be too late. He hated it when people coughed or blew their noses into handkerchiefs. He was also acutely sensitive to smell, and the moment everyone was seated he puckered his nostrils and probed the air for anything malodorous. “Oh, my God, the smell!” he said to me, screwing up his face and glaring at the man across the aisle. “It's appalling! Can't you smell him?” He pushed the call-button to summon the stewardess. I felt sure he was going to complain about body odours, but instead he asked for a glass of water. “I have to keep drinking,” he explained. “My wee-wee is yellow.” Moments later, he pressed the call-button again and said to the same stewardess: “Excuse me, I am a London publisher. I need to see the Financial Times for reasons of business. Would you be so kind as to bring it to me?”—a sentence that seemed to have been plucked from a phrase book for travellers abroad: “Can you help me, please? I am an English tourist. My car has run out of petrol. Would you be so good as to direct me to the nearest petrol station?”
Matters improved when the in-flight meal arrived, and there were squeals of joy and relief each time the stewardess appeared with a basket of bread rolls. I marvelled at the constant expenditure of emotion—how could he keep it up? When we arrived at Frankfurt airport, however, things took a turn for the worse. Ignoring the familiar injunction to passengers to remain seated “until the plane comes to a complete halt,” Tiger leapt to his feet, collected his bag from the overheard locker and perched himself on the arm of his seat, straining forward like a horse at the starting-gate. “Quick! We have to get ready!” he whispered. “Otherwise we will get caught.”
The next trial took place at the baggage carousel. Tiger pushed his way through the crowd so that we could stand right by the mouth of the machine where the bags are disgorged. His expression was dark, his mouth set hard against the unfairness of life. Happily, his case was among the first to come through, but mine took longer. After a minute or two, he asked me what colour it was. “Black,” I said, full of regret, since all the cases tumbling out looked black, or blackish, or nearly-black, or semi-black, and Tiger asked me unremittingly about every one of them, “Is it this one? Is it this one?,” his agitation increasing each time it wasn't. “Then it must be lost,” he said, “or stolen—they steal them, you know, these bloody crooks on the lorry, sons-of-bitches, it's always happening, you'll never see it again.” By the time my bag turned up, quite safe, I was exhausted by all the emotion.
Nothing can prepare you for the sheer scale of the Frankfurt Book Fair: a row of huge hangars connected by bus lanes, escalators and moving walkways, and inside each hangar a whole city constructed of books. Each city is divided into American-style blocks, with numbers and letters for the interlocking streets. The effect is spectacularly commercial, and the imperative, as in any cattle market, is to sell. “Frankfurt is a must,” Tiger had told me. “If we don't go to Frankfurt, people think we are either dead or bankrupt. We have to be seen.”
I walked through the urban grid reading off the names of distinguished publishing houses that up till then I had read only on the spines of books. This was 1981, before the major mergers and takeovers, when independent companies were still much in evidence: Hamish Hamilton, Jonathan Cape, Michael Joseph, Chatto & Windus, The Bodley Head—names glorious in the pre-conglomerate age. The stands were colonised by diverse species— men in cream suits with spotted bow-ties and long hair, ageing aesthetes alongside city slicker types, women dressed like out-of-work actors, or else wearing sensible skirts and stout shoes. Was it really possible that all these people were here to stave off rumours of death or bankruptcy?
People spoke of “Frankfurt fever,” and evidently with good reason. For in this vast place, filled with neon and noise, rumours abounded: secret deals, manuscripts being read under secure guard, big books, big bucks, big buzz. There were life-sized cardboard effigies advertising popular characters from children's books, and high above, floating in the rafters, there were huge coloured balloons. Gossip was spread like dung on fields, and the dung-beetles—in the form of publishers, agents, scouts—wallowed in their element, hatching, feeding, regurgitating. In the bars that were dotted around the halls, people talked over beer and sausages of The Next Hot Thing. Figures were plucked from the air and were doubled, even trebled, before they had a chance to be written down.
As I wandered along the aisles between the bodice rippers and the diet manuals, the art books and the Bibles, the foreign lan
guage texts and city guides, there was no doubting that publishing had become big business. This was unquestionably a massive trading centre. It was hard to imagine that writers themselves had changed much—theirs would always be a solitary activity undertaken away from the big lights—but those in the publishing business had learned how to sell the writers, how to package their books, make them pop up, change colour, talk, smell and grab the reader in every way possible. In Hall Five I saw a middle-aged woman sitting in a large cardboard carton with the words POET IN A BOX inscribed round the top. She was writing verses in ink with a tulip-shaped pen—a silent protest against the hypermarket.
The days at the Book Fair were tiring and headache-inducing. There was the constant hubbub of large numbers of people talking and moving around, and the air in the huge halls was heavy and smoke-filled. By contrast, the evenings were spent in the cool air of Wiesbaden, a beautiful spa town about twenty miles west of Frankfurt with over two dozen natural hot springs. The first impression on entering the town from the autobahn was one of opulence combined with gracious living. It is one of the oldest towns along the Rhine and, unlike the rest of Germany, most of its buildings came through the Second World War unscathed, including a Russian Byzantine chapel with five golden domes and a splendid theatre built in neo-baroque style for Emperor Wilhelm II.