Ghosting (8 page)

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?