The Ghost

I would like to thank Andrew Crofts for permission to use the quotes from his excellent handbook,
Ghostwriting
(A & C Black, 2004). Two other successful ghostwriters, Adam Sisman and Luke Jennings, were kind enough to share their experiences with me. Philippe Sands, QC, generously provided advice about international law. Rose Styron spent several days showing me round Martha’s Vineyard: I could not have had a more gracious and well-informed guide. My publisher, David Rosenthal, and my agent, Michael Carlisle, were even more helpful and encouraging than usual—although each is as unlike his fictional counterpart as it is possible to be.

Robert Harris
Cap Bénat, July 26, 2007

THE MOMENT I HEARD
how McAra died, I should have walked away. I can see that now. I should have said, “Rick, I’m sorry, this isn’t for me, I don’t like the sound of it,” finished my drink, and left. But he was such a good storyteller, Rick—I often thought
he
should have been the writer and I the literary agent—that once he’d started talking there was never any question I wouldn’t listen, and by the time he had finished, I was hooked.

The story, as Rick told it to me over lunch that day, went like this:

McAra had caught the last ferry from Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to Martha’s Vineyard two Sundays earlier. I worked out afterward it must have been January the twelfth. It was touch-and-go whether the ferry would sail at all. A gale had been blowing since midafternoon and the last few crossings had been canceled. But toward nine o’clock the wind eased slightly, and at nine forty-five the master decided it was safe to cast off. The boat was crowded; McAra was lucky to get a space for his car. He parked belowdecks and then went upstairs to get some air.

No one saw him alive again.

The crossing to the island usually takes forty-five minutes, but on this particular night the weather slowed the voyage considerably: docking a two-hundred-foot vessel in a fifty-knot wind, said Rick, is nobody’s idea of fun. It was nearly eleven when the ferry made land at Vineyard Haven and the cars started up—all except one: a brand-new tan-colored Ford Escape SUV. The purser made a loudspeaker appeal for the owner to return to his vehicle, as he was blocking the drivers behind him. When he still didn’t show, the crew tried the doors, which turned out to be unlocked, and freewheeled the big Ford down to the quayside. Afterward they searched the ship with care: stairwells, bar, toilets, even the lifeboats—nothing. They called the terminal at Woods Hole to check if anyone had disembarked before the boat sailed or had perhaps been accidentally left behind—again: nothing. That was when an official of the Massachusetts Steamship Authority finally contacted the Coast Guard station in Falmouth to report a possible man overboard.

A police check on the Ford’s license plate revealed it to be registered to one Martin S. Rhinehart of New York City, although Mr. Rhinehart was eventually tracked down to his ranch in California. By now it was about midnight on the East Coast, nine p.m. on the West.

“This is
the
Marty Rhinehart?” I interrupted.

“This is he.”

Rhinehart immediately confirmed over the telephone to the police that the Ford belonged to him. He kept it at his house on Martha’s Vineyard for the use of himself and his guests in the summer. He also confirmed that, despite the time of year, a group of people were staying there at the moment. He said he would get his assistant to call the house and find out if anyone had borrowed the car. Half an hour later she rang back to say that someone was indeed missing, a person by the name of McAra.

Nothing more could be done until first light. Not that it mattered. Everyone knew that if a passenger had gone overboard it would be a search for a corpse. Rick is one of those irritatingly fit Americans in their early forties who look about nineteen and do terrible things to their body with bicycles and canoes. He knows that sea: he once spent two days paddling a kayak the entire sixty miles round the island. The ferry from Woods Hole plies the strait where Vineyard Sound meets Nantucket Sound, and that is dangerous water. At high tide you can see the force of the currents sucking the huge channel buoys over onto their sides. Rick shook his head. In January, in a gale, in
snow
? No one could survive more than five minutes.

A local woman found the body early the next morning, thrown up on the beach about four miles down the island’s coast at Lambert’s Cove. The driver’s license in the wallet confirmed him to be Michael James McAra, age fifty, from Balham in south London. I remember feeling a sudden shot of sympathy at the mention of that dreary, unexotic suburb: he certainly was a long way from home, poor devil. His passport named his mother as his next of kin. The police took his corpse to the little morgue in Vineyard Haven and then drove over to the Rhinehart residence to break the news and to fetch one of the other guests to identify him.

It must have been quite a scene, said Rick, when the volunteer guest finally showed up to view the body: “I bet the morgue attendant is still talking about it.” There was one patrol car from Edgartown with a flashing blue light, a second car with four armed guards to secure the building, and a third vehicle, bombproof, carrying the instantly recognizable man who, until eighteen months earlier, had been the prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

THE LUNCH HAD BEEN
Rick’s idea. I hadn’t even known he was in town until he rang me the night before. He insisted we meet at his club. It was not
his
club, exactly—he was actually a member of a similar mausoleum in Manhattan, whose members had reciprocal dining rights in London—but he loved it all the same. At lunchtime only men were admitted. Each wore a dark blue suit and was over sixty; I hadn’t felt so young since I left university. Outside, the winter sky pressed down on London like a great gray tombstone. Inside, yellow electric light from three immense candelabra glinted on dark polished tables, plated silverware, and rubied decanters of claret. A small card placed between us announced that the club’s annual backgammon tournament would be taking place that evening. It was like the changing of the guard or the houses of parliament—a foreigner’s image of England.

“I’m amazed this hasn’t been in the papers,” I said.

“Oh, but it has. Nobody’s made a secret of it. There’ve been obituaries.”

And, now I came to think of it, I
did
vaguely remember seeing something. But I had been working fifteen hours a day for a month to finish my new book, the autobiography of a footballer, and the world beyond my study had become a blur.

“What on earth was an ex–prime minister doing identifying the body of a man from Balham who fell off the Martha’s Vineyard ferry?”

“Michael McAra,” announced Rick, with the emphatic delivery of a man who has flown three thousand miles to deliver this punch line, “
was helping him write his memoirs.
”

And this is where, in that parallel life, I express polite sympathy for the elderly Mrs. McAra (“such a shock to lose a child at that age”), fold my heavy linen napkin, finish my drink, say good-bye, and step out into the chilly London street with the whole of my undistinguished career stretching safely ahead of me. Instead I excused myself, went to the club’s lavatory, and studied an unfunny
Punch
cartoon while urinating thoughtfully.

“You realize I don’t know anything about politics?” I said when I got back.

“You voted for him, didn’t you?”

“Adam Lang? Of course I did. Everybody voted for him. He wasn’t a politician; he was a craze.”

“Well, that’s the point. Who’s interested in politics? In any case, it’s a professional ghostwriter he needs, my friend, not another goddamned politico.” He glanced around. It was an iron rule of the club that no business could be discussed on the premises—a problem for Rick, seeing as he never discussed anything else. “Marty Rhinehart paid ten million dollars for these memoirs on two conditions. First, it’d be in the stores within two years. Second, Lang wouldn’t pull any punches about the war on terror. From what I hear, he’s nowhere near meeting either requirement. Things got so bad around Christmas, Rhinehart gave him the use of his vacation house on the Vineyard so that Lang and McAra could work without any distractions. I guess the pressure must have gotten to McAra. The state medical examiner found enough booze in his blood to put him four times over the driving limit.”

“So it was an accident?”

“Accident? Suicide?” He casually flicked his hand. “Who’ll ever know? What does it matter? It was the book that killed him.”

“That’s encouraging,” I said.

While Rick went on with his pitch, I stared at my plate and imagined the former prime minister looking down at his assistant’s cold white face in the mortuary—staring down at his ghost, I suppose one could say. How did it feel? I am always putting this question to my clients. I must ask it a hundred times a day during the interview phase: How did it feel?
How did it feel?
And mostly they can’t answer, which is why they have to hire me to supply their memories; by the end of a successful collaboration I am more them than they are. I rather enjoy this process, to be honest: the brief freedom of being someone else. Does that sound creepy? If so, let me add that real craftsmanship is required. I not only extract from people their life stories, I impart a shape to those lives that was often invisible; sometimes I give them lives they never even realized they had. If that isn’t art, what is?

I said, “Should I have heard of McAra?”

“Yes, so let’s not admit you haven’t. He was some kind of aide when Lang was prime minister. Speechwriting, policy research, political strategy. When Lang resigned, McAra stayed with him, to run his office.”

I grimaced. “I don’t know, Rick.”

Throughout lunch I’d been half watching an elderly television actor at the next table. He’d been famous when I was a child for playing the single parent of teenage girls in a sitcom. Now, as he rose unsteadily and started to shuffle toward the exit, he looked as though he’d been made up to act the role of his own corpse. That was the type of person whose memoirs I ghosted: people who had fallen a few rungs down the celebrity ladder, or who had a few rungs left to climb, or who were just about clinging to the top and were desperate to cash in while there was still time. I was abruptly overwhelmed by the ridiculousness of the whole idea that I might collaborate on the memoirs of a prime minister.

“I don’t know—” I began again, but Rick interrupted me.

“Rhinehart Inc. are getting frantic. They’re holding a beauty parade at their London office tomorrow morning. Maddox himself is flying over from New York to represent the company. Lang’s sending the lawyer who negotiated the original deal for him—the hottest fixer in Washington, a very smart guy by the name of Sidney Kroll. I’ve other clients I could put in for this, so if you’re not up for it, just tell me now. But from the way they’ve been talking, I think you’re the best fit.”

“Me? You’re kidding.”

“No. I promise you. They need to do something radical—take a risk. It’s a great opportunity for you. And the money will be good. The kids won’t starve.”

“I don’t have any kids.”

“No,” said Rick with a wink, “but I do.”

WE PARTED ON THE
steps of the club. Rick had a car waiting outside with its engine running. He didn’t offer to drop me anywhere, which made me suspect he was off to see another client, to whom he would make exactly the same pitch he had just made to me. What is the collective noun for a group of ghosts? A train? A town? A haunt? At any rate, Rick had plenty of us on his books. Take a look at the bestseller lists: you would be amazed how much of it is the work of ghosts, novels as well as nonfiction. We are the phantom operatives who keep publishing going, like the unseen workers beneath Walt Disney World. We scuttle along the subterranean tunnels of celebrity, popping up here and there, dressed as this character or that, preserving the seamless illusion of the Magic Kingdom.

“See you tomorrow,” he said, and dramatically, in a puff of exhaust fumes, he was gone: Mephistopheles on a fifteen percent commission. I stood for a minute, undecided, and if I had been in another part of London it is still just possible things might have gone differently. But I was in that narrow zone where Soho washes up against Covent Garden: a trash-strewn strip of empty theaters, dark alleys, red lights, snack bars, and bookshops—so many bookshops you can start to feel ill just looking at them, from the tiny little rip-off specialist dealers in Cecil Court to the cut-price behemoths of Charing Cross Road. I often drop into one of the latter, to see how my titles are displayed, and that was what I did that afternoon. Once inside, it was only a short step across the scuffed red carpet of the “Biography & Memoir” department, and suddenly I had gone from “Celebrity” to “Politics.”

I was surprised by how much they had on the former prime minister—an entire shelf, everything from the early hagiography,
Adam Lang: Statesman for Our Time
, to a recent hatchet job titled
Would You Adam and Eve It? The Collected Lies of Adam Lang
, both by the same author. I took down the thickest biography and opened it at the photographs: Lang as a toddler, feeding a bottle of milk to a lamb beside a drystone wall, Lang as Lady Macbeth in a school play, Lang dressed as a chicken in a Cambridge University Footlights revue, Lang as a distinctly stoned-looking merchant banker in the nineteen seventies, Lang with his wife and young children on the doorstep of a new house, Lang wearing a rosette and waving from an open-topped bus on the day he was elected to parliament, Lang with his colleagues, Lang with world leaders, with pop stars, with soldiers in the Middle East. A bald customer in a scuffed leather coat browsing the shelf next to me stared at the cover. He held his nose with one hand and mimed flushing a toilet with the other.

I moved around the corner of the bookcase and looked up McAra, Michael in the index. There were only five or six innocuous references—no reason, in other words, why anyone outside the party or the government need ever have heard of him, so to hell with you, Rick, I thought. I flicked back to the photograph of the prime minister seated smiling at the cabinet table, with his Downing Street staff arrayed behind him. The caption identified McAra as the burly figure in the back row. He was slightly out of focus—a pale, unsmiling, dark-haired smudge. I squinted more closely at him. He looked exactly the sort of unappealing inadequate who is congenitally drawn to politics and makes people like me stick to the sports pages. You’ll find a McAra in any country, in any system, standing behind any leader with a political machine to operate: a greasy engineer in the boiler room of power. And this was the man who had been entrusted to ghost a ten-million-dollar memoir? I felt professionally affronted. I bought myself a small pile of research material and headed out of the bookshop with a growing conviction that maybe Rick was right: perhaps I was the man for the job.