Ghosting (13 page)

The
Women
book, as Tiger had predicted, did take my mind off things. And the £8500 bonus I received had helped to ease my financial
situation. The immense workload, however, combined with lack of sleep, had taken its toll on my health. The months after publication were marked by one illness after another, and in the early summer of 1988 I was laid low for two weeks with a streptococcal infection.

At around the same time, my mother had fallen and broken her arm—not an obvious cause for alarm. But when I visited her with the children there was an uncharacteristic vagueness about her. In response to quite simple questions she looked vacant and uncomprehending, and she seemed scarcely to recognise her grandchildren. “How long has she been like this?” I asked my father outside in the garden. But he was evasive, also defensive. “There's nothing the matter with her,” he said. “She's just tired.” When I got home I rang my mother's GP and told her the story. She hadn't noticed anything but promised to make a house call. Within twenty-four hours my mother was admitted to hospital. Tests showed that she had an abnormal parathyroid function, which in turn had released too much calcium into the blood and led to her confused state. By the time I visited her in hospital a day or two later she was completely deranged, hallucinating wildly and terribly distressed.

“No one must know about this,” said my father. “We can't say to anyone.”

“But she's ill,” I said. “It's not her fault.”

“I'm telling you—no one must know, and that's the end of the matter.”

The consultant said that it would be possible to operate, but only when she was well enough to cope with the operation—perhaps in a few weeks. She was put on an intravenous drip and her confusion gradually lessened, but not enough for my father to allow visitors from outside the family. Meanwhile, though I had recovered
from the strep throat, a strange rash had begun to appear on my body—just arms and legs at first but definitely spreading. Since there was such a lot to think about—children, job, mother in hospital miles away—I more or less ignored it. There was also a new worry: the bank was threatening to repossess our house. Although I had kept up the mortgage payments, my ex-husband had borrowed against the house and it now looked as if the debt might be called in.

Before long, my whole body was inflamed and itching and pustulous. My GP arranged a speedy appointment with a skin specialist at the local hospital and, since the school holidays had started, the children came with me. When my name was called, I left them playing with Lego in the waiting room. As soon as the doctor saw me he asked if I had recently had streptococcal pharyngitis. It turned out that my rash was a textbook case of something called “guttate psoriasis,” a form of psoriasis that can be triggered by this virulent infection.

“Can you fix it?” I asked.

“Yes, but you'll have to stay in hospital for three to four weeks.”

I told him this was impossible—my mother was ill, the schools were out, and besides, I had a job.

“If you wait till the end of the school holidays the condition will only get worse, and then it will mean six to eight weeks in hospital.”

He said he would reserve a bed in his dermatology unit straightaway and suggested I let my husband make the necessary practical arrangements. To spare any embarrassment, I didn't enlighten him.

As soon as I came out of the consulting room, Emily asked me what was wrong. I had told the children there was no need to
worry, but she didn't believe me and was on the lookout for anything ominous. I explained what the doctor had told me.

“You should go straightaway,” said Emily. “I can look after the others.” She was all of eleven years old.

At home I phoned round friends but no one could take all three children, certainly not for several weeks. And the children wanted to stay together. In desperation I contacted my sister-in-law in Orkney and she heroically got on the next boat with her own two children and made the long journey to Fife to look after mine. I promised them they could come to Dundee every day to see me in hospital; there was already a rota of volunteer drivers. I then visited my mother—her hospital was miles away in the opposite direction—and told her it was perhaps best if I didn't see her for a while since I thought I had a cold coming on. Lastly I phoned Tiger to tell him the news—he wished me well and thanked God that it hadn't happened during the
Women
book. “Can you IMAGINE?” he said. “It would have been a TOTAL DISASTER!” I also told him about the threat of repossession.

“How much do you need?”

“Enough to buy out my husband and secure the house.”

“Don't worry—we will arrange a company loan. It's perfectly legal and it's interest free. You can pay it back out of your salary each month. Just concentrate on getting well.”

This was only one of several staggering acts of kindness during that time.

In hospital, treatment started immediately and I was plastered from head to toe in a thick gunge, like the wretched Marlow in Dennis Potter's
Singing Detective.
My fellow inmates fell into two groups: scaly and scabby or, like me, red and suppurating. I passed the time gawping ghoulishly at the festering bodies of other
women—mercifully this was before the days of mixed wards—and comparing them with my own. But mostly I lay on my greasy bed, feeling unclean and remembering Sunday School readings about biblical plagues.

One evening, after I had been there for about a week, I was sitting with the other patients watching horrific pictures on the television news. An oil rig was ablaze in the North Sea—the
Piper Alpha
—and nearly two hundred lives had been lost. As we sat in silence, transfixed by the horror of it all, a nurse appeared and told me there was a telephone call for me. It was from the hospital in Kirkcaldy My mother was dead.

The book on women marked the beginning of my time as amanuensis. It was a move sideways from translation and seemed to me to be on the same activity spectrum—catching the voice of the author and being a conduit for his creation. From the ranks in the imperial court I had risen unexpectedly to become Minister of the Pen. Tiger and I collaborated well together and it suited my circumstances perfectly to be able to carry out my duties from home. I felt lucky to have the job and didn't mind burning the midnight oil occasionally to meet deadlines.

Tiger had developed a taste for interviewing. He decided the next book would be a collection of in-depth interviews with prominent men—Harold Acton, Edmund White, Raymond Carr, Yehudi Menuhin, John Updike, Derek Hill, André Deutsch and about twenty others. “Of course, it's
women
I love, but I want to show I can do men also.” In some ways men proved to be more troublesome than women. Lord Goodman had agreed to be interviewed,
but only after vetting Tiger over a sumptuous breakfast and hearing about other distinguished celebrities who would be appearing in the anthology. Just before the book went to the printers, however, he wrote to Tiger withdrawing his permission for publication on the grounds that Richard Ingrams was to be in the same volume. “It is inexcusable to have lured me with a number of respectable names, such as Lord Alexander and Lord Rees-Mogg,” he wrote, “only to withhold the fact that Mr. Ingrams was to be included in the book.” Evidently he had not forgiven the former editor of
Private Eye
for an alleged libel of him in the magazine. A placatory letter was sent to Lord Goodman reminding him of his avowed opposition to censorship and questioning the wisdom of bowing out in a pique. It worked, but his reply was designed to put Tiger in his place. “In view of your pathetic plea, I am prepared, albeit reluctantly, to allow the interview to appear.” As an example of staggering pomposity, Goodman's letter is on a par with Mr. Collins’ epistle to Elizabeth Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice,
about which Elizabeth asks her father, “Can he be a sensible man, sir?” He answers, “No, my dear, I think not…”

Read no history, said Disraeli, nothing but biography, and that's what I did to prepare for the interviews. Most of the interviewees had written autobiographies and I gorged on them. I loved formulating the questions, whether based on the research material or simply my own curiosity. We always prepared for an interview by going over the questions beforehand. I told Tiger what I had discovered about the person's life, explaining the reasoning behind some of the questions, and pointing out any sensitive or no-go areas. I always wanted more discussion time, but he was impatient to get it over with. These briefings became a form of jousting in
which we both jabbed away, trying to get the edge on our opponent. “Let me just
explain
,” I would say, but would be cut back immediately with a side wound. “No, no! It's not necessary. I
understand.
You don't need to tell me.” Another lunge. “But it's important—there's something you really should know.” Then the counter-lunge: “It's OK. I know
everything
now. I'm very quick, you see.” And so it went on. I always had butterflies when I knew the interview was taking place, the sort of feeling you get when your children are sitting exams. I wanted him to do well and hoped he wouldn't fluff his lines. But I needn't have worried—he was always supremely confident. He gave the impression of having done his homework, and most people, flattered by his knowledge and interest, opened up to an astonishing degree.

Over time we both got better at it. “We really are a fantastic team!” said Tiger. In the
Telegraph,
Bill Deedes compared his technique to that of a safebreaker, calling him “a dab hand with the skeleton keys” and “the smartest burglar in the business.” Tiger was ecstatic. “He called me a
burglar!”
he trilled. Certainly he had the knack of inspiring trust, and the results were often remarkable. On the technical side, as it were, I learned how to shape and pace the interview, and also to insert into Tiger's text certain typographical aids to help things along. He had difficulty with words ending in
ism
or
asm
—they came out as
imsi
and
amsi
—so I was careful to avoid any socialism or idealism or spasms or fanaticism. Inevitably the questions sounded “scripted,” too scrupulously prepared, but the formula seemed to work. Once the question had been asked, Tiger was content to sit back and listen, something the subjects seemed to like and readers found refreshing.

Occasionally he fell on his face, usually when he bungled one of
the questions, but generally he didn't know that he had and was therefore unaffected. It was I who cringed when I heard the tape. Once, in an interview with Julian Critchley, he misread “John Buchan” and asked a question based on the writings of a certain John Buchanan. “Buchanan?” said Critchley, taken aback. “Buchanan,” repeated Tiger in a fancy-not-knowing-who-Buchanan-is tone. Another time, as I listened to the interview with Lord Amery, I remember curling up into foetal position and rocking back and forth. At an exquisitely moving point, Tiger is speaking about Lord Amery's brother who had been hanged for treason in 1945. He quotes the words of the famous hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, who said that, of all the people he had executed, John Amery had been the bravest by far.

“Did that make the pain all the harder to bear?” asks Tiger.

A long pause.

“No, I think it was appropriate. He was an Amery.”

“He was a
what?”

Another pause.

“He was an Amery.”

“What
did you say he was?”

But the rough spots didn't greatly matter. What mattered was that Tiger had the talent for getting people to talk, and newspapers and magazines were keen to buy. There seemed to be no end to the number of people willing to put themselves through the Tiger treatment, and no one ever asked to censor the material or objected to anything that was published. Which was surprising in view of some of the eye-wateringly frank confessions.

The more interviews I edited, the more I noticed that even when the subjects didn't know the answer to the question being
asked—had clearly never even considered it—they invariably felt obliged to give an account of themselves, and perhaps a more definite account than they genuinely felt. Someone who might have had no particular position on marriage and fidelity, for example, could actually sound as if his mind was made up. Tom Stoppard says somewhere that interviews should come marked with a warning:
This profile falls in the middle truth range.
By which he probably meant that the whole truth, the nothing-but that we swear to tell in the witness box, is a rare sort of beast. In interviews, perhaps even in most of our day-to-day dealings, we put forward versions of ourselves that are short of the whole truth.