Ghosting (22 page)

In those days I thought a lot about how life could be turned upside
down without warning. Lives could be thrown into disarray by a single decision acted upon, a simple choice made, a mad moment. This is not to say that the choice is always wrong, or the decision irrational. Reasons can be found for anything after all. It is rather to say that the choosers or deciders are generally caught up in something that has altered their normal vision, and they forget for a brief time that actions beget consequences. They are fleet-ingly freed by dint of passion or misery or some other driver from the normal shackles of cause and effect. A friend snubbed, a promise broken, a secret told, a lover taken, a family abandoned—any one of these can leave a trail of wreckage, unintended, unimagined in the mind of the prime mover. I believe this is an empirical truth.

The empirical truth that really worried me, however, indeed possessed and obsessed me for years, was not the terrible things we do to one another, but the random bolt from the blue which nothing can prevent. At a day-to-day level, so I persuaded myself and still do, we may to some extent affect what happens. With the people we love and those we meet, we can choose to make things better or worse, make a point of being kind or not kind; we can even alter the pattern of our existence, or make small adjustments to the way we live. But against the big blasts, the hammer blows, the freak accidents, there's nothing to be done. Once you sign up for this way of thinking it is but a short step to imagining unspeakable things beneath the murk, something nasty lying in wait at the bottom of the pile, ready to pounce. It is also an observable fact that there are no fair shares where suffering is concerned. There is no master plan to allot a precise amount of pain to one person and then move on to another. The sheer prevalence and casual concentration of suffering are proof against such a notion. Alas, it's all utterly,
stupefyingly random. Tempting to think otherwise perhaps, but ultimately self-deluding. This baseless anxiety of mine gorged on
The Child in Time
and reinforced itself. The snatching of a child—how could it be borne? How could one go on? How might one go about surviving a loss ofthat order? At that point, in 1987, during the immediate aftermath of my marriage breakdown, I felt stripped bare by events and had the instincts of a nervous animal protecting its young. It was difficult to dislodge a vague sense of calamities to come. I could drive myself mad with imagined tragedies. They arrived in my mind in no particular sequence, and no effort of will seemed strong enough to keep them at bay. It felt like continuing to throw up long after you believed you'd finished.

Eight years on, I sat in the cool blue light of the studio on a hillside in the Dordogne, and as I looked beyond the trees and back in time, the scent ofthat fear came wafting back. It had lost its sharpness, but I knew it was still fetid in the memory trenches. I decided to go back there and smell it. I would start Tiger's new novel with the disappearance of a child and see where it led. I opened the laptop on the desk and typed the first paragraph.

I had only the vaguest idea of where these opening sentences might lead. But already I had received a fax from the design manager at the publishers asking for background information so that the illustrator could get to work on the book cover. It was clear he had been told that the book was finished and that I was in the process of copy-editing it. Where and when is the book set, he asked, and what do the women look like? Did I agree that they should be naked on the jacket? And was it a lesbian relationship? Straight questions, yet I didn't know the answer to any of them. I hadn't the first idea of what the women looked like, nor yet whether they should be naked on the jacket. Replying to him was therefore quite a challenge. As was the blurb for the dust-cover which had to be written before even the first few pages were complete. The world of blurbs is of course renowned for imprecision and exaggerated claims, but the blurb that is written before the book is properly begun is a rare arsy-varsy sort of specimen. It is a neither-fish-nor-fowl piece, relying heavily on generalities. Thus:

It was, you might say, a blanket blurb. Though it was true that I didn't know at that stage what shape the book would take, I already had a feeling that the ending would be optimistic and humane.
There was a desire to wander over the territory of loss, but despair would not prevail. This was a good thing, for I could now happily tick off
triumph of the human spirit
from the blurb list. And all would surely be well, provided I could mix together
frailties
and
qualities
and bake them in a moderate oven of
compassion.
This was only the beginning, and already a mild craziness was taking hold.

I spent the next few days trying to shape the narrative in my own mind, trying to ground it in something real. Of course it would be an account of something that hadn't happened, at least not to me, but the underlying drift would be that loss is generic, universal. The story would be a means of confronting the beast, looking at fear, and thereby taming it. The initial event, sudden and unforeseen, would trigger an immediate outpouring of grief, and this would be the catalyst for a range of hitherto dormant emotions. It would not be a detective story or a police investigation into the child's disappearance; rather it would be a study in bereavement, the tragic event acting as a means for probing fragile family relationships. I imagined two families, related by blood and marriage, coming to terms with the loss of one of the children. The shock and its aftermath would produce a sort of anarchy in which the normal constraints on family relations would give way. Perhaps this framework would allow for rather unorthodox entanglements—at the back of my mind I had the idea that the emotional chaos following the event would somehow accommodate Tiger's requirement. Beyond these initial thoughts about the book, I knew very little.

There was a near liturgical observance of the pattern of the days in the Dordogne. Each morning there was a market in one of the neighbouring towns, and we went to them all. On Mondays it took place in Les Eyzies, a town famous for its pre-historic caves, and on Tuesdays it was in the nearby village of Le Bugue, situated on the river Vézère near its confluence with the Dordogne. The market there has been held on a Tuesday by royal decree for nearly seven centuries. On Thursdays it was market day in the
bastide
town of Domme and on Fridays in Le Buisson. Each Wednesday and Saturday we went to Sarlat, the largest centre in the vicinity. Sarlat is an almost wholly unspoilt medieval and Renaissance town with an abundance of culture, elegance and charm. It has the grandeur and simplicity of the Old Town of Edinburgh whose architecture the French copied and improved upon. The centre is a wonderful maze of narrow streets and wynds and split-levels. In the town square there is a statue of La Boétie, the sixteenth-century anti-royalist, idealist and beloved friend of Montaigne, the Dordogne's most famous literary son. Tiger loved to hear the story of how Montaigne was drawn to La Boétie from their very first meeting and continued to love him as a brother till his untimely death. His spiritual affinity with La Boétie famously defied analysis and when asked to explain his love Montaigne could only answer:
“Parce que cétait moi, parce que cétait lui.”
—“Because it was me, because it was him.” Tiger's eyes moistened at these words.

I came to love the French open-air markets, and in particular the market people—those who sell the produce, grow it, bake it, bottle it, cure it. Their passion for what they do is unmistakeable. It is a place of sensual pleasures—the ancient sounds of people trading with one another, greeting each other, the rich aromas of fruit and flowers, garlic and Gauloises—all played out under a
gentian blue sky. Everything strokes the senses and warms the spirit. The marketplace is also full of interesting characters—men in berets, hands in pockets, jackets buttoned up, assuming a
je pense done je suis
attitude. And somehow French women know how to be sexy at any age, even women with baskets of hens or strings of onions. I loved just standing around, taking it all in. But it wasn't ever possible to linger for long. Tiger liked me to keep up, and he became ill-tempered if I didn't. If I strayed even a few yards or stayed in one place too long he would upbraid me under the guise of concern for my safety. “I got so
worried,”
he would say, clutching his skull as if to stop it exploding with the worry of it all. “Don't wander off like that.” I was never convinced by this. What actually bothered him was the slightest show of independence.

There was very little flexibility in Tiger's timetable, and virtually no room for spontaneity. Even a stroll in the grounds—“taking the air” he called it—was planned ahead and allotted a time-limit in advance, making it impossible to relax. The days seemed to be divided up according to an externally determined set of rules. They were measured out in quarter hour spans in such a way that the next event was always anticipated and never allowed simply to happen. He kept up a running commentary on how the day would progress—we will do this, then we will do that, and afterwards we will drink some tea, and so on. Nothing was allowed just to happen by itself. Thus when we were eating lunch he would always announce the arrangements for dinner, or when we were at the market in the morning the shopping would be brought to an abrupt halt for no obvious reason, and we would have to sprint to the car as if fleeing from gunfire. The
gardienne
and I would exchange looks of sisterly sympathy as he clapped his hands and called to us
“Allez! Allez!”
As soon as we were in the car he would
calculate our arrival time back at the house to the nearest two minutes. He consulted his three watches with grievous frequency and not at all in the reserved way of the British, who tend to glance at the time with a discreet flick of the wrist. Tiger's arm movements were exaggerated and unequivocal, like those of a policeman directing the traffic. And he would invariably announce his findings, often in a kind of what-on-earth-happened puzzlement. Thus: “Let me see, what is the time now? OH, MY GOODNESS! It's seven minutes past eleven. I don't believe it!” I never got used to this element of his behaviour, and I never found a good way of coping.
What exactly is it you don't believe?
—I wanted to scream.
That three whole minutes have passed since you were last surprised?
He was also obsessed with punctuality—punctuality in his lexicon meaning being early rather than on time. He himself was never ever late, and he regarded lateness in others, or just-on-timeness indeed, as iniquitous.

What was it about, this unsettledness? Why was he fixated on time-keeping? Why was he afraid of things just taking their own course? Was it an attempt to beat time at its own game, show it who was boss? Once over dinner I tried to get him to talk about it. I told him that during philosophy tutorials at university we used to discuss the different theories of time, which have puzzled philosophers since the fifth century
BC.
He showed polite interest at first, so I explained that Zeno held that the appearance of temporal change was illusory, while Aristotle took the so-called “dynamic” view of time, arguing that the future lacked the reality of the past or the present. Tiger did not appear to subscribe to the Aristotelian view. “Me, I can't wait for the future,” he said. “I am not the same like Aristotle. Oh, no! I
love
the future.”