Ghosting (20 page)

What to do? What to
do
? Then, a sudden flash of brilliance: I
knew
what to do. Tiger had an abhorrence of bodily fluids—a mark of his Levantine origins, or so people believed. Whatever the
reason, the abhorrence was comprehensive. His loathing of people who coughed or sniffed or spluttered was legendary—he once threatened to sack someone for blowing her nose, describing her conduct as “totally unacceptable.” On the streets of London he walked in constant fear of being exposed to hawking and spitting. He did not like it when the office staff used the toilet facilities. And he could not cope with menstruation, not even with the general concept. A frantic look came over him if ever women mentioned their monthly cycles. Perhaps—and this was the stroke of genius— bodily fluids might come to the rescue in this situation. Provided that the sex scenes could be made sufficiently liquid, Tiger might decide to abandon them altogether.
Nil desperandum.
Bodily fluids would be my deliverance. I set about my purpose with a devil-may-care recklessness.

Of course, one thing led to another, and it was hard not to get carried away. Tiger, far from feeling squeamish, seemed relieved that at last the lovers had got down to the business. I pressed on, telling myself it was a means to an end. He would soon change his mind.

Oh, Jesus. Every new splash or splosh was a fresh hell. But still Tiger held out. There was no capitulation. In fact he was exultant. He opened a bottle of Château Margaux and we drank to sex. “Bravo!” he said, his highest accolade. This wasn't working out as planned. I would try one more act of sabotage. I had to make certain this time. Go for broke.

At least four things happened as a result of all this incontinence. Tiger was overjoyed; he raised my salary; the
Sunday Times
described the novel as “a strong contender” for the
Literary Review's
Bad Sex Prize; and my teenaged children were mortified.

The novel was launched in the spring of 1995. It was a glittering occasion with all the usual suspects, beautiful creatures plucked from London's fashionable set. Tiger had a well-deserved reputation for throwing the best parties in town. Lots of glamour and glitz and permanent tans. People asked if I knew Tiger and if I had read his novel. Afterwards I returned to Scotland and waited for the patter of tiny reviews. On the whole, the critics were kind; there was scarcely any venom, and derision was reserved for the sex scenes. According to the
TLS
reviewer, “It is only in these scenes that the author comes close to losing control of his spare, precise prose.” The
Sunday Telegraph
reviewer wrote, “I prefer to forget those brief, explicit embarrassments,” while another review was entitled simply:
“Less Sex Please.”

By and large, people see what they expect to see. The reviewer in the
Telegraph
decided:

The reviewer from the
Oldie
agreed:

And this was the editor of the
Catholic Herald:

The reviewer in question cannot have known the trouble she would cause by writing that phrase “the rather less interesting
Carlo.” Tiger was in a huff for days. He had a soft spot for her— she was on his party list and he believed they both occupied the same Catholic intellectual plane—but he was hurt and offended that she had found Petra more interesting.

“How could she write such rubbish!” he said. “Petra is
nothing
compared to Carlo!”

Relieved that he didn't seem to suspect sleight of hand on my part, I said what I could by way of comfort: that he shouldn't take any notice, that reviewers had to work to deadlines and were sometimes hasty or careless in their judgements, and that in any case she had intended her remark as a compliment, a tribute to his sensitive portrayal of the female character.

“So she is not attacking me?” he asked, looking for reassurance.

“No, not at all,” I said, happy to give it.

“But we should write to her, tell her she got it wrong, isn't it?”

“No,” I said, “I think that would be a mistake.”

In truth I was puzzled by her review. Petra had been cobbled together in a great hurry. She was never “real,” not even to me. She is an academic, a woman of prodigious sexual appetite, and hardly the sort of person you would bump into in church—which is where Carlo meets her. In the novel's religious setting she is a subversive force, created largely out of a sense of mischief and cussed-ness, an agent for my own irreverent views. She is certainly not good
Catholic Herald
material. For example:

The next excerpt discharges yet more bodily fluids and strikes me now as an act of delinquency, an experiment to see how far I could go and still get it past the censor.

And so on. And so on. Looking back now, these passages seem to be the outpourings of a smarty-pants, an act of defiance, mischievous in their purpose. They really had no place in Tiger's novel. I was wholly aware of his irrational dread of what is delicately referred to as “the time of the month.” He surrounded himself with young, beautiful well-connected women, but he simply could not cope if any of them complained of period pains or mentioned pre-menstrual tension. He regarded even the most oblique reference to anything ofthat sort as an outrage, a personal affront. “Please! Please!” he would cry out, if ever the conversation seemed to be going in the direction of monthly discharges, and the “please” was always expelled with a great whoosh—PAH-LEEZE—like a whale spouting. Once, to his extreme horror, he discovered a tampon floating in the lavatory bowl of his own
private emperor's bathroom. The premises were protected, inside and out, by closed circuit cameras. Over several days, and with the patience and thoroughness of a forensic scientist, he examined each frame of the security videotape, looking for the culprit. While he searched, he told me earnestly that, until the offender was found, everyone was under suspicion.

“What, the men too?” I said, hoping to lighten what had turned into a very sombre investigation. But he just glowered. In these matters there was no room for levity.

I was therefore completely alive to the possible repercussions of linking Catholicism with emissions of one kind or another. But at the time it brightened up the task in hand, reflecting at the same time my own weariness with the fiddle-faddle of institutionalised religion.

In the summer of 1995, just a few months after the publication of Tiger's first novel, we were back in France once again. By now the routine was quite familiar—going to markets, feeding the dogs, swimming in the pool, dining out at the best restaurants, visiting the
antiquaire
to acquire ever more splendid
objets
for the house and yet more paintings of an explicit nature.

And writing.

This time there was a particular sense of
déjà vu
because we were there to begin another novel. It was difficult to feel cheerful about the prospect. Indeed I could scarcely bear the idea of going through the whole process again. But Tiger had other ideas. We had had one of those “repetitive strain” conversations in which Tiger did a lot of repetition and I took the strain.

“If we do just one, nobody will bloody believe us,” he said.

“What do you mean exactly?” (I often asked this.)

“What do I
mean
?”

“Well, what is it that nobody will believe?”

“What
is
it that nobody will believe?”

“Yes, what
is
it?”

“What
is
it? I'll tell you
exactly
what it is. I'll tell you
exactly
what nobody will believe. Nobody will ever believe we can
do
another one. Isn't it?”

“Well, is that really so important?”

“Is it important? Is it
important
? Darling, what's the matter with you? What's got into you?”

“Well,
is
it important? What people think, I mean.”

“I don't believe I'm hearing this! Of course it's important. They won't take us seriously! Don't you see? They will think the first one was a fluke!”

One difficulty for me during these exchanges was in determining how much to cavil. Was it worth saying that no novel—not even a ghosted one—was a “fluke”? Probably not. Experience had taught me that if I went too far in raising objections, it could rebound very badly, good sense notwithstanding. It could mean huffs and pique, or even a spell in the wilderness. But the danger of not voicing misgivings was just as great.

In fact something quite subtle was at work during these conversations. Tiger, while affecting a boyish ingenuousness, was actually endowed with a Machiavellian shrewdness. He could flatter, disparage, coax and intimidate, interchangeably and with consummate artistry. He would do almost anything to get his own way. I had witnessed many performances over the years, sometimes from the wings, at other times from the front stalls, more often than not sharing the stage with him and fluffing my lines. At times it seemed ungenerous not to succumb to his childlike excitement, which came over as a kind of innocent hopefulness endlessly generated and regenerated. However, I knew it was driven by something
that was not at all innocent. The more formidable his proposal and the less appealing to me, the more fervently he tried to proselytise. It would be so easy, a joy to do, I would soon be able to see that for myself, and besides we would make
pots
of money and, best of all, we would have
such fun.

Fun ranked high in Tiger's scheme of things. And during these dialogues he played his part well. He was the enthusiast, the fanatic, the zealot, the mad inventor, the prime mover, the armchair philosopher. I played the killjoy, the doubter, the wet blanket, the party-pooper. I didn't enjoy my part much but, over the years, we had settled into our respective roles, and we stuck to them steadfastly.

“You don't want to? You don't
want
to? But darling,
why
don't you want to?”

“It's just, well, a second novel will be quite a lot of hard work.”

“Beloved”—the voice is lowered to impart a confidence—“let me tell you something.
Life
is hard work. Bloody hell, we all have to work hard. Otherwise we get
nowhere.
Isn't it?”

“Yes, that's true, but…”

“But what? What is this ‘but'? There is no ‘but’ We can do anything we put our minds to. We are
amazing
together!”

“All I mean is …”

“You still have a problem? Tell me your problem, my darling. I will solve your problem. That's what I'm here for.”

And so on. And so on. The pattern of these exchanges was invariably the same. In no time at all they degenerated into low farce with a diminishing ratio of reason to emotion.

I set about the second novel with a joyless heart. This only made things worse because Tiger loathed low spirits in others. It was
joie de vivre
he loved—he often said so—and he could not bear even
the slightest lack of enthusiasm for something he favoured. Whenever he detected reluctance on my part he would put on his evangelist hat and set about converting me. Before too long it would usually strike me that the idea I was rejecting was preferable to the process of indoctrination, so I would generally cave in.

With this new novel he had explained that I could have
carte blanche
—“You can do
whatever
you like,” he had said, and he clapped his hands together like a pair of cymbals, sealing his lav-ishness. He then sat back in his chair and smiled benignly. His expression was one of utter benefaction. It was not possible for a man to be more reasonable.

But it wasn't true. It turned out there was a requirement, though to hear him you might easily have imagined it was nothing at all. He was talking it down so much—“It's just a small idea, that's all, it's not anything
big
”—and as he continued it got so very small that I imagined it as a tiny dot on an old television screen, disappearing into the void. Alas, this scarcely-a-requirement-at-all, this small thing-let, this little idea-let, slowly began to take on monstrous dimensions. As before, there were to be two women and a man. The man, so Tiger explained, was to be the lover of both women, and each woman would be aware of the other and quite relaxed about the sharing arrangement. So far so good. The women were to be cousins who had been born on the same day— “Under the same star sign, so they're more like sisters,” said Tiger. Sounds quite manageable so far, I thought. There followed a lot of eager talk about how very close sisters can be, how twins can feel each other's pain, how they seem almost to inhabit each other's bodies. “It's like they're one person, not two,” he said.

“Yes …” I said, beginning to wonder where all this was leading, looking out for the catch. I was not prepared for what came next.

“So,” he said, clasping and unclasping his large soft hands, working up to the
pièce de résistance,
“when the one girl gets
orgamsi
the other gets
orgamsi
also!”

“How do you mean exactly?” I asked. I felt sure I had missed something. I took a few moments to consider the possibilities before venturing, “Are we talking about simultaneous orgasm?”

“Precisely!” he purred in a go-to-the-top-of-the-class way. “Simultaneous
orgamsi.
You've got it! Bravo!”

But I knew I hadn't got it. Not really anyway. As far as I was aware, simultaneous orgasm happened—if it happened at all—between the two principal players, as it were. It was not something that could be dispensed at will to a third party, not even a close cousin. Such a phenomenon would in any case have to be called a
telekinetic
orgasm. Strictly speaking, that is. This was no time to be finicky, however. I had to know more, I had to discover what was in Tiger's head. Besides, my mind was already racing ahead to the alarming business of having to convert this far-fetchery into plausible fiction.

“And how do you see that working exactly?” I asked, matter-of-factly. We might have been discussing a new business plan or profit-sharing scheme. “Is the man stimulating both of them in such a way that they climax at the same time?”

Wrong question. Tiger smote his brow with the palm of his hand. It was his God-protect-me-from-imbeciles gesture.

“Daaarleeeng, you don't understand!” He was right. I didn't. I had led a sheltered life. “The women are not
together!
They are
miles
apart!” He was shouting now. He always shouted when stupid people failed to grasp the essential point. At these times there was a huge expenditure of spit. A salvo of saliva.

“I'm afraid,” I said—and for once perhaps I was a little afraid— “you're going to have to spell it out. I don't quite get it.”

He rose from his desk and started pacing up and down, his body language a narrative in itself. He enfolded himself in his own arms and rocked slightly from side to side, the way a man might move about a padded cell, trying to control the violent turmoil within. He fixed me with a look that said, how could you be so dim? The explanation when it came was bad-tempered and delivered
de haut en bas.
The gist of it was that the two women would be so closely harmonised, so much in tune with one another that, even if they were separated physically, even by oceans and by continents, they would be capable of experiencing the heights of pleasure at the same time. As he spoke he became more and more animated, his tiger eyes shining brightly in his head, his whole body in motion, semaphoric, balletic. And since I had been so obtuse, he did not mince matters. The speaking got plainer and plainer. To remove any lingering doubt he spelled it out.

“Look, it's simple! If one woman is in London, say, and the other is in New York, when he is fucking the one in London, the one in New York feels it in her fanny also!”

A number of conflicting thoughts went splat in my head.

“Now do you understand?” he said, regaining his composure.

“I understand,” I said.

Spinoza said that he had sought all his life to be able to understand—he had striven not to laugh, not to weep, and not to curse,
sed intelligere
—
but to understand.
Understanding is everything.

Writing is a lonely business; or, rather, it is a business done alone. In this sense writing imitates life. Although we may spend much of
our time with other people, essentially we live our lives alone. It may seem as if we are sharing our lives all the time—with commuters on the train, shoppers in supermarkets or, more intimately, with marriage partners, close friends, lovers. But these connections are as nothing compared with the lifelong communion we have with ourselves. What we tell others is only a tiny distillation of what we tell ourselves; and what we know of others is only what they choose to tell us, or what we have gleaned from the surfaces—the look in the eyes, the body posture, the sweat on the brow. Solitude is often seen as a dismal, cheerless state, yet there is surely great point and purpose in it. Indeed aloneness seems to contain a happy paradox: it is when we are alone that we best understand how we are hitched to the world, how we are connected to others. Our sense of self is manifestly shaped by others: our mothers, to begin with, then our immediate family and friends, also by random encounters and chance bondings. But that sense of self which is linked to our awareness of others resides, curiously, at the heart of being alone. Much of what is important in life takes place inside us.

Tiger did not share my liking for solitude. I often tried explaining that in order to write I needed to be alone. There is a separate world inside your head, I told him, and that's the place you have to try to occupy when you write. You can leave it behind and do other things, I said, but it is the place you have to return to each time. But he just looked at me as if I were insane. Sometimes when I asked for some time alone, he appeared to regard it as a personal affront. And even when I thought I had managed to get through to him, there would always come a point when he switched and started to view it as a business negotiation. “OK, let's compromise. Go now, and at quarter to three”—he checked all three watches as he spoke—“I shall pass by the studio and we shall go together to the pool.”

He obviously regarded solitude as an unnatural state, quite menacing in its way. He regularly talked about how he hated to be alone, either in the office or at home or during normal leisure activities like watching television. He often mentioned that he was incapable of eating alone, something I knew from experience to be completely true. I have never been able to face food early in the day—my constitution seems to pucker at the mere sight unless I have been up and about for a couple of hours—but each morning in France, very much against my own inclination, I did battle with breakfast so that Tiger would not have to eat alone. Put like that, it seems quite mad, and indeed it was. The idea that a rational grown woman could allow herself to be coerced into eating a meal for which she had no appetite is patently absurd. But such was my anxiety surrounding breakfast that I sometimes set my alarm clock a full two hours beforehand in the hope that I would be in a state of increased readiness for food. This was preferable to the slow burn of ill humour that would have resulted from my opting out. A bad miff could last indefinitely.