Ghosting (26 page)

These moments were quite depressing, because they showed how far apart we were and how impossible it would be to get better connected. Such exchanges were hard to manage, not least because I truly wanted him to be happy with my work. In that respect my happiness was contingent upon his, and each new declaration of discontent was a blow to my spirits. At the same time this was evidence, if any were needed, that we occupied different ontological spheres. He was not interested in things psychological or the winding ways of the subconscious; in fact he was rather afraid of them. He was insensible to the notion that apparently ordinary, sensible people can often have quite ridiculous private lives.

As in life, so in books—he preferred the text to be straightforward and unambiguous. I was made intensely aware of this point on the occasion when he took a flight to Edinburgh in order to read Chapter Eight. He had told me of his plan the week before, so there was no question of the chapter not being finished. I picked him up at the airport and drove him to the Caledonian Hotel, where he had booked the finest suite overlooking the castle.

“Did you bring Chapter Eight?” he asked as soon as he had checked in.

“Of course,” I said.

“Then give it to me and I will put it somewhere safe. We don't want it to get lost.”

I had imagined he would want to read it straightaway, but no, he would settle into his suite, make some telephone calls, and at 6:40 precisely we would drink some champagne before having dinner at the Pompadour. Afterwards he would read the chapter—
“I will be relaxed then”—and in the morning we would discuss it—“Come to the hotel at 8:20
A.M.
”

Next day I knew the moment I saw him that all was not well. He was perfectly courteous, but at the same time there was a stiffness and formality in his approach that made me feel as if I had been called to the headmaster's study. We sat opposite each other at a desk and he placed the chapter between us. He licked his fingers and turned over the pages one by one, about twenty of them, making the same comment on each, repeated verbatim—“With this page I have no problem, with this page I have no problem”—and so on, until he reached the very last page by which time the tension was almost unbearable. “But with
this
page, number one hundred and nineteen, I have a big problem. There is something missing. It doesn't make sense.” And as before he read it to me so that I too would see. The chapter in question deals with the deepening friendship between the young people and ends with a description of the two girl cousins asleep in bed together after a stressful day. The final paragraph reads as follows:

By the time he reached the last sentence Tiger had worked himself up into what appeared to be a state of anger, banging out each word on the table. I could not imagine the point he was trying to
make. I remained silent and uncomprehending. After a few moments he banged the table again.

“Who
closed the door?” he suddenly demanded to know. “We say there is the click of the door closing, but we don't say who closed the door!”

“No, we don't,” I agreed.

“But
why
don't we say it? We
have
to say it! Otherwise how can the readers know? I read it so many times—twenty, maybe forty times—and each time I asked myself,
‘Who closed the fucking door?’
I got so irritated.”

This episode was something of a watershed for me. I suddenly felt weary. The tension between absurdity and normality was becoming too much. If you don't resist the madness, you become part of it. I had not resisted it, and now I was part of it. This was a crystalline moment and marked what I now think of as the beginning of the end. There was absolutely no point in trying to explain to Tiger the nature of dramatic suspense or the need to keep the reader in a state of curiosity. It was best left alone. There was such a thing as dignity, wasn't there?

I finished the book. It was, in the famous phrase, a learning experience. I travelled to London and handed it over, glad to be free of it. When I arrived back in St. Andrews a few days later, a large package was waiting for me. The covering letter informed me that the author had delivered his typescript and it was now ready for editing. Could I kindly turn it round as quickly as possible?

Publication of the second novel coincided with the French edition
of the first novel, and I persuaded myself that all that liquid romping really did sound better in French. Who would not agree that
il glisse sur sa peau humide
is more appealing than he slides over her moist skin? Or that
des gouttelettes perlent sur sa toison fauve
is a vast improvement on droplets of moisture sit on her copper fleece? Robert Frost thought that poetry got lost in translation, but perhaps poetry can also be found.

The party to launch the book was a bizarre event for me. People asked if I'd read the new novel, and what did I think of it. Sometimes I said, yes, and that it was very good, and sometimes I said, no, but I was looking forward to it. What I said didn't matter, I told myself. But later that same evening it did matter, because Tiger took me by the arm and introduced me to one of the guests, a well-known (but not to me) literary agent.

“This is my editor,” said Tiger to well-known agent.

“But she told me five minutes ago she hadn't read your book!” said well-known agent to author.

“Bloody hell, if she hasn't read it, I'm in trouble!” said Tiger.

Awkward laughter all round. Our alliance was a curious compound and we were held together by its strange elements.

The reviews of the new novel were mostly kind, though there was general agreement that the three-way extravaganza was a mistake. The
Daily Telegraph
reviewer was particularly clear-sighted. Having commended the author's “mild, thoughtful tone” he gave the cousinly capers the thumbs-down:

By far the most interesting and favourable review came from the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis. In the
Literary Review
she wrote:

Tiger was thrilled with this review and read it out to me on the telephone. I too was pleased, but I also felt something else—something akin to shame and compunction. For I knew from a newspaper article that, some twenty years earlier, Alice Thomas Ellis had lost her son, aged nineteen, in a freak accident. Suddenly, this fictional account of loss struck me as a trivial counterfeit. I had believed all my adult life that writing was important, that the novel mattered, that the reader should be able to trust the author. Now I had sullied that belief. Frederic Raphael once said in an interview,
“Novel writing is really a matter of coming to terms with your own squalor.” Whatever he meant by that, I agree with him.

At the end ofher piece Alice Thomas Ellis wrote something intriguing, and if I ever meet her I shall ask her if perhaps she had rumbled the fact that things were not quite what they seemed.

The author accepted these words at face value and in due course they appeared in bold print on the cover of the paperback edition.

In the end I decided that this novel for me was not after all a complete sham. Of course it was contrived, but in the contrivance there emerged a certain shape to the world that was quite telling. The way things bubble beneath the surface is deeply mysterious, and if they occasionally boil up and spill over, something is set free. Indeed whenever I managed to loosen the shackles of the ghost, I quite enjoyed writing. There were even the beginnings of a belief that I may always have been a writer in my head. As a child I had a sense of strangeness, a sense of otherness that has never entirely left me. I was always trying to make sense of everything, in thrall to the power of language and, later, being thrilled with what it could do. But then you grow up, and for a long time you forget who you were.

What I discovered was that writing has a lot to do with unlocking secrets that are inside you. The familiar maxim “write what
you know” implies that you describe something that has happened to you, and in so doing you are examining the past and trying to make sense of it. We know this works, and it can work well. But in fact what I came to understand—and this was a startling revelation—is that in some sense you also write in advance of what you know, and that as you write you create the shapes and patterns that emerge later in your life. “What you know” may in fact be what you know only at a subliminal level, and it might not be “known” in the normal sense for a long time. This is not as arcane as it might sound. After all, the imagination is not some obscure element unrelated to living; indeed we imagine our lives even as we are living them. Imagination is rooted in memory and experience. And often what we imagine is what we are then impelled to live out. Through writing we are not so much creating a new pattern as uncovering one that is already in us. There is an interplay, only dimly understood, between the novels and the life. Writing is always personal. You reveal yourself to yourself. This may not become clear immediately, perhaps not for years afterwards. That second novel—I can see now—was about the letting go of pain. It also contained the genesis of a resolve: to pull out of this bizarre arrangement. To give up the ghost.

I had arrived in a place that felt dangerous. I had begun to think hypothetically, contingently, subjunctively. If only I didn't have to do this. Supposing I were simply to hand in my notice and leave. What if? What then? I wanted to write something different, something more open that didn't betray obvious signs of strain. Language creates us and defines us, but the stuff I was producing was a curious hybrid. I could never really trust it; it was too artificial, too much like a confidence trick. In odd melodramatic moments I thought of myself as a slave, toiling away, belonging to someone else, deprived of freedom.

Tiger was displaying a luminous sense of purpose and flitting from success to success. He promoted himself on a heroic scale, talking excitedly about all his projects, usually in the context of lavish displays of generosity, such as champagne lunches for journalists and newspaper editors. He loved these occasions and was an excellent host, working the room with his charm, his fine feathers fluttering, his coloured crest sparkling with purpose and poise. Even if the outcome was only a small paragraph in a diary column it was considered a triumph. There was now a steady trickle of
commissions from serious newspapers, and the great and the good were queuing up to be interviewed. Amidst the everyday frivolity of life at the imperial court, a new gravitas was emerging.

Meanwhile I was losing the will to ghost. Outwardly I remained calm and got on with the work in hand, while inside I was building up a quiet fury at every new demand, every fresh enthusiasm. Psychologists call this emotional dissonance, pretending to feel one thing when you experience another—and it is bad for you, so they say. If you hide your negative emotions while displaying positive emotions, you can end up a bit of a wreck. This is one of the reasons why people who work in customer service centres suffer from early burnout—they have to be nice to people who scream and shout at them, and after only a short time they can't take it any more and start biting the carpet. Evidently there are two kinds of emotional dissonance:
residual,
when feelings from a previous event or conversation are carried over to the next; and
anticipatory,
when the prospect of the next event or conversation leads to an emotional schism. I'm sure I experienced both kinds.

The dishonesty was also beginning to weigh more heavily. My mouth was filled with half-lies and half-truths. At dinner parties people asked me, and what do you do? I'm an editor, I said, or sometimes, I'm a researcher. But this seldom put an end to the questions.
(And what do you research? What sort of editor?)
Eventually I began to take a perverse delight in saying that I was a housewife, even though by the mid-nineties this risked pity or scorn by the bucketful. There's no harm in dissembling, I told myself. But there is. If you can't say what you do, if you can't talk about your daily life, there is a penalty to pay. Curiously, despite all the lies I told, or perhaps because of them, a truth was uncovered: that you can't go on living that way without suffering a loss. Over time I became
a martyr to social events where I might have to give an account of myself. I avoided questions, even from close friends, and was deliberately vague about my work. Secrets and lies are corrosive, I discovered, and when they begin to take over it is hard to get back to yourself. At times I felt I was living someone else's life, occupying someone else's head. And losing the way in my own.

Up till now I had tried to look upon the day-to-day pressures as living intensely, surely preferable to any number of dull existences. And the situation had contained enough weirdness to have a kind of wacky appeal. Tiger could be unconsciously hilarious, and mostly I had been able to see things through a comic prism, and if not comic, then ironic. Irony and absurdity, these two leaning towers, had exerted an enormous pull on me, though it was striking that they counted for nothing with Tiger. What had kept me interested was so very different from what kept him going. But all of that seemed to be changing. The absurdity was beginning to pall, and I was finding it hard to keep everything afloat—the pretence, the masquerade, the constant magnifying of an ego. It was sometimes exhausting. And having embarked on the writing of fiction with Tiger, it seemed that fiction now permeated everything. He could easily deny what was in front of his nose, and reality—whatever we mean by that—was cloaked in a layer that was not reality. Even something that had just occurred, something I had witnessed with my own eyes, could be transmogrified in an instant. The speed at which this could happen was truly remarkable. Innocent remarks were construed as vicious attacks, a glaring defeat presented as another dazzling success. One thing quickly became another, and it would be hard and then impossible to separate the new thing from the old.

Although I was gradually convincing myself that it was time to
make a move, I was deeply alarmed at the thought of living without a salary. My children were beginning to be expensive—two were already at university and my youngest would be starting at art college the following year. In addition to my mortgage I was also still paying off the company loan that had helped me secure the family house. Part of me was appalled by my own pusillanimity and mixture of motives. At least Tiger was openly ambitious, unashamedly self-publicising. He believed in his own story enough to act on it, and ambition insulated him from the world. He had an absolute commitment to whatever was happening in his life at that moment, a complete confidence in what he was saying or doing. But my own position was more complex and ignoble: the ghost was actually getting above herself. I wanted to give up, but I didn't want to be without money; I felt aggrieved at being exploited but I think I also enjoyed a sense of having become the power behind the throne; I had imagined myself immune from delusions of grandeur, but no—a feeling of importance, the proximity to celebrity, my vital role in the construction of a rising scribbler— these things gave me a vicarious kick. A megalomaniac ghost— what a weird idea. Shades of Lady Muck in the Roller once again.

A job is just a job, declared my Now-Husband (N-H). He had taken to wearing odd socks in flashy colours, just like Tiger's. No, no! I protested. It's much more than a job—why, it's almost a vocation. It certainly wasn't a normal job that could be left in the normal way, I said. And what about references? I could hardly expect Tiger to write me one. Then write one yourself, said N-H, you write everything else, don't you? In any case I had probably unfitted myself for other employment. This, and much more besides, was what I rehearsed to myself and to the man at home. Tiger and I had become so much a tandem act, I told him, that it was now
hard to imagine us functioning independently of each other. We were like two trapeze artists performing dangerous stunts in midair—he the flyer and I the catcher. How could I possibly give up? It would mean unmaking that which I had helped bring about, strangling the thing I had breathed life into.

And so I did nothing. Or rather, I continued to do what was expected of me, pretending to Tiger that I shared his enthusiasm, while complaining on the pillow at night about each new assignment. “Give it up,” said the man on the other pillow. He was very patient, but even a patient man can feel he's had enough. Talking it over at home also helped me to see how weird the situation had become and convinced me that I had to take the necessary steps. More than once I resolved to say something to Tiger, but our exchanges were becoming ever more circumscribed. Only once did I raise the possibility that one day I might leave.

“But why?” he asked, sounding hurt. “Don't you like it here? And what would you
do
? What on earth would you
do
?”

“Well,” I wavered, “I thought I might try my hand at writing.”

“Writing?
Writing? You
think it's
easy
to write?”

At that point my nerve failed me and I drew back from conveying what was in my heart. Much easier to stick to the familiar pathways. It was to take another four years before the parting of the pathways. In the meantime I played to Tiger's expectations and got on with the job.

As luck would have it, just as I was hatching small doubts and raising them to be big strapping quandaries, Tiger was feeling particularly cock-a-hoop. In the summer of 1996, just before the second
novel appeared, he gave an interview to Adam Nicolson in the
Sunday Telegraph
in which he said. “I'm so excited. I've got so much to do. I've got four books coming out, I'm so optimistic, I'm looking forward so much to what is going to happen next.” I pretended to share this excitement, albeit a bit toned-down, but the fulfilment I had once experienced in the job seemed to have vanished. It had been there a minute ago, before I blinked and opened my eyes to the possibility of a different world, and though I sometimes searched for it still, or fancied that I felt it anew, it had actually gone.

No more novels, I had decided. But Tiger had different ideas. In a review of the first novel in the
Independent
Andrew Biswell had written:

“You see,” said Tiger, “he says we can write.” In my head I heard strange sounds, like circuits shorting. I could tell he had another novel coming upon him.

And indeed he had. It turned out that his imagination had been fired by the opening story in Julian Barnes’
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters,
in which there is an account of Noah's Flood, told from the point of view of a woodworm.

“It's so clever, don't you think? Don't you agree?”

“Yes,” I said.

“It has given me an idea,” he said.

Which was to draw on another Old Testament story, namely the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

“It will be amazing,” he said. “Can you imagine?
Everyone
will want to read it.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because of Sodom and Gomorrah! Let me explain. With the Flood there's no sex, but with Sodom and Gomorrah we can put all the sex we like! And sex sells! Isn't it?”

He rose from his chair and launched into the now familiar ardour for a new project—how beautifully we would do it, how simple it would be to write, how the critics would love it, and so on. At these times he reminded me of a Harlem Globetrotter—fast, deft, agile, bouncing his enthusiasm around the room, potting a new shot every minute or two, yet taking the time between goals to impress and bewitch. As always it was a masterful performance. But my own spirits were diving. I had been in this place before and I just couldn't face another novel. Even so, I didn't refuse outright. Instead I said I would have to research the subject and think about it.

“But we shouldn't think for too long,” he said, “or someone will pinch our idea.”

Mercifully, a different project soon beckoned: Tiger was to be a columnist on a tabloid newspaper. He was thrilled. The column was to appear once a week and would feature a woman in the news at the time, the particular slant to be left up to him. The fourth estate trusted him now. His massive volume on women had recently been reissued, and this had consolidated his reputation as an authority on the subject. “It's like the Bible,” he told a journalist in an interview. “People look it up when they want to learn something.”

By this time he was working from new premises, a fine five-storey house in the heart of Soho, with spacious salons, a private
bar in the basement and a studio flat at the top. He had poured love and money into its refurbishment, and it was now a source of great joy. The opulence of his new surroundings seemed to reflect his confidence in the future. The main room, which occupied the whole of one floor, was like a Cecil Beaton stage set: extravagant, resplendent and technically perfect. These qualities extended to the props and special effects—crystal chandeliers, elegant bookcases, photographs in silver frames, a sumptuous sofa, and of course the precious tiger skin. The colours of the paint and fabrics were bright and bold, softened only by the soft peach-pink flesh tones of the many female nudes that adorned the walls. The other
objets
also had a sultry, seductive quality, giving the room the air of an erotic theme park. Visitors felt themselves transported to another time and place—the Moulin Rouge perhaps, or a seraglio at the Ottoman Court. Tiger was in his element. Since he himself was always a blaze of colour with mad rococo touches, he seemed to belong here. He wore a different suit every day, each with its own eye-popping silk lining and matching trimmings. Some days, in certain colours, he could be perfectly camouflaged in the room, like a lizard on a rock; other days, in different colours, he looked conspicuous and splendidly gift-wrapped.