The Ghost (13 page)

A few hundred yards along the beach a pair of figures emerged from the dunes and started walking toward me, dark and tiny and frail amid all that raging nature. I glanced in the other direction. The wind was whipping spouts of water from the surface of the waves and flinging them ashore, like the outlines of some amphibious invasion force: they made it halfway up the beach and then dissolved.

What I ought to do, I thought, staggering slightly in the wind, is give all this to a journalist, some tenacious reporter from the
Washington Post
, some noble heir to the tradition of Woodward and Bernstein. I could see the headline. I could write the story in my mind.

Was that so implausible? I took another look at the figures on the beach. It seemed to me they had quickened their pace and were heading toward me. The wind slashed rain in my face and I had to wipe it away. I ought to get going, I thought. By the time I looked again they were closer still, stumbling determinedly up the expanse of sand. One was short, the other tall. The tall one was a man, the short one a woman.

The short one was Ruth Lang.

I WAS AMAZED THAT
she should have turned up. I waited until I was sure it was her, then I went halfway down the beach to meet her. The noise of the wind and the sea wiped out our first exchanges. She had to take my arm and pull me down slightly, so that she could shout in my ear.
“I said,”
she repeated, and her breath was almost shockingly hot against my freezing skin,
“Dep told me you were here!”
The wind whipped her blue nylon hood away from her face and she tried to fumble for it at the nape of her neck, then gave up. She shouted something, but just at that moment a wave exploded against the shore behind her. She smiled helplessly, waited until the noise had subsided, then cupped her hands and shouted, “What are you doing?”

“Oh, just taking the air.”

“No—really.”

“I wanted to see where Mike McAra was found.”

“Why?”

I shrugged. “Curiosity.”

“But you didn’t even know him.”

“I’m starting to feel as if I did.”

“Where’s your bike?”

“Just behind the dunes.”

“We came to fetch you back before the storm started.” She beckoned to the policeman. He was standing about five yards away, watching us—soaked, bored, disgruntled. “Barry,” she shouted to him, “bring the car round, will you, and meet us on the road? We’ll wheel the bike up and find you.” She spoke to him as if he were a servant.

“Can’t do that, Mrs. Lang, I’m afraid,” he yelled back. “Regulations say I have to stay with you at all times.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” she said scornfully. “Do you seriously think there’s a terrorist cell at Uncle Seth’s Pond? Go and get the car before you catch pneumonia.”

I watched in his square, unhappy face, as his sense of duty warred with his desire for dryness. “All right,” he said eventually. “I’ll meet you in ten minutes. But please don’t leave the path or speak to anyone.”

“We won’t, officer,” she said with mock humility. “I promise.”

He hesitated, then began jogging back the way he’d come.

“They treat us like children,” complained Ruth, as we climbed up the beach. “I sometimes think their orders aren’t to protect us so much as to spy on us.”

We reached the top of the dune and automatically we both turned round to stare at the sea. After a second or two, I risked a quick glance at her. Her pale skin was shiny with rain, her short dark hair flattened and glistening like a swimmer’s cap. Her flesh looked hard, like alabaster in the cold. People used to say they couldn’t understand what her husband saw in her, but at that moment I could. There was a tautness about her, a quick, nervous energy: she was a force.

“To be honest, I’ve come back here a couple of times myself,” she said. “Usually I bring a few flowers and wedge them under a stone. Poor Mike. He hated to be away from the city. He hated country walks. He couldn’t even swim.”

She quickly brushed her cheeks with her hand. Her face was too wet for me to tell whether she was crying or not.

“It’s a hell of a place to end up,” I said.

“Oh, no. No it’s not. When it’s sunny, it’s rather wonderful. It reminds me of Cornwall.”

She scrambled down the little footpath to the bike, and I followed her. To my surprise, she suddenly mounted it and pedaled away, coming to a stop about a hundred yards up the track, at the edge of the wood. When I reached her, she gazed intently at me, her dark brown eyes almost black in the fading afternoon light. “Do you think his death was suspicious?”

The directness of the question took me unawares. “I’m not sure,” I said. It was all I could do to stop myself telling her right then what I’d heard from the old man. But I sensed this was neither the time nor the place. I wasn’t sufficiently sure of my facts, and it seemed crass, somehow, to pass unverified gossip on to a grieving friend. Besides, I was a little scared of her: I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of her scathing cross-examinations. So all I said was, “I don’t know enough about it, to be honest. Presumably the police have investigated the whole thing pretty thoroughly.”

“Yes. Of course.”

She got off the bike and handed it to me and we started ascending through the scrub oak toward the road. It was much calmer away from the sea. The downpour had almost stopped and the rain had released rich, cold smells of earth and wood and herbs. I could hear the ticking of the rear wheel as we walked.

“The police were very active at first,” she said, “but it’s all gone quiet lately. I think the inquest was adjourned. Anyway, they can’t be that concerned—they released Mike’s body last week and the embassy have flown it back to the UK.”

“Oh?” I tried not to sound too surprised. “That seems very quick.”

“Not really. It’s been three weeks. They did an autopsy. He was drunk and he drowned. End of story.”

“But what was he doing on the ferry in the first place?”

She gave me a sharp look. “That I don’t know. He was a grown man. He didn’t have to account for his every move.”

We walked on in silence and the thought occurred to me that McAra could easily have left the island for the weekend to visit Richard Rycart in New York. That would explain why he’d written down Rycart’s number and also why he hadn’t told the Langs where he was going. How could he?
“So long, guys. I’m just off to the United Nations to see your bitterest political enemy…”

We passed the house where I’d sought shelter from the downpour. I kept an eye out for the old man, but the white clapboard property appeared as deserted as when I’d first seen it—so freezing, locked, and abandoned, in fact, that I half wondered if I might not have imagined the whole encounter.

Ruth said, “The funeral’s in London on Monday. He’s being buried in Streatham. His mother’s too ill to attend. I’ve been thinking that perhaps I ought to go. One of us should put in an appearance, and it doesn’t seem likely to be my husband.”

“I thought you said you didn’t want to leave him.”

“It rather looks as though he’s left me, wouldn’t you say?”

She didn’t talk anymore after that but started fumbling around for her hood again, even though she didn’t really need it. I found it for her with my free hand and she pulled it up roughly, without thanking me, and walked on, slightly ahead, staring at the ground.

Barry was waiting for us at the end of the track in the minivan, reading a Harry Potter novel. The engine was running and the headlights were on. Occasionally, the big windscreen wiper scraped noisily across the glass. He put aside his book with obvious reluctance, got out, opened up the rear door, and pushed the seats forward. Between us we maneuvered the bike into the back of the van, then he returned to his place behind the wheel and I climbed in beside Ruth.

We took a different route from the one I’d cycled, the road twisting up a hill away from the sea. The dusk was damp and gloomy, as if one of the massive storm clouds had failed to rupture but had gradually subsided to earth like a deflated airship and settled over the island. I could understand why Ruth said the landscape reminded her of Cornwall. The minivan’s headlights fell on wild, almost moorland country and in the side mirror I could just make out the luminous white horses flecking the waters of Vineyard Sound. The heater was turned up full and I had to keep rubbing a porthole in the condensation to see where we were going. I could feel my clothes drying, sticking to my skin, releasing the same faintly unpleasant odor of sweat and dry cleaning fluid I had smelled in McAra’s room.

Ruth didn’t speak for the whole of the journey. She kept her back turned slightly toward me and stared out of the window. But just as we passed the lights of the airport, her cold, hard hand moved across the seat and grasped mine. I didn’t know what she was thinking, but I could guess, and I returned her pressure: even a ghost can show a little human sympathy from time to time. In the rearview mirror, Barry’s eyes stared into mine. As he indicated to turn right into the wood, the images of death and torture, and the words “for as in Adam all die” flickered briefly in the darkness, but as far as I could see the little hut was empty. We rocked down the track toward the house.

THE FIRST THING I
did when we got back was run a hot bath, tipping in half a bottle of organic bath oil (pine, cardamom, and ginger) I found in the bathroom cabinet. While that was filling, I drew the curtains in the bedroom and peeled off my damp clothes. Naturally, a house as modern as Rhinehart’s didn’t have anything so crudely useful as a radiator, so I left them where they fell, went into the bathroom, and stepped into the large tub.

Just as it’s worth getting really hungry occasionally, simply to savor the taste of food, so the pleasure of a hot bath can truly be appreciated only if you’ve been chilled by the rain for hours. I groaned with relief, let myself slide right down until only my nostrils were above the aromatic surface, and lay there like some basking alligator in its steamy lagoon for several minutes. I suppose that’s why I didn’t hear anyone knock on my bedroom door and became aware that someone was next door only when I broke the surface and heard a person moving around.

“Hello?” I called.

“Sorry,” Ruth called back. “I did knock. It’s me. I was just bringing you some dry clothes.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I can manage.”

“You need something that’s been properly aired, or you’ll catch your death. I’ll get Dep to clean the others.”

“Really, there’s no need.”

“Dinner’s in an hour. Is that okay?”

“That’s fine,” I said, surrendering. “Thank you.”

I listened for the click of the door as she left. Immediately I rose from the bath and grabbed a towel. On the bed, she had laid out a freshly laundered shirt belonging to her husband (it was handmade, with his monogram, APBL, on the pocket), a sweater, and a pair of jeans. Where my own discarded clothes had been there was only a wet mark on the floor. I lifted the mattress—the package was still there—then let it fall.

There was something disconcerting about Ruth Lang. You never knew where you were with her. Sometimes she could be aggressive for no reason—I hadn’t forgotten her behavior during our first conversation, when she virtually accused me of planning to write a kiss-and-tell memoir about her and Lang—and then at others she was bizarrely overfamiliar, holding hands or dictating what you should wear. It was as if some tiny mechanism was missing from her brain, the bit that told you how to behave naturally with other people.

I drew my towel more tightly around me, knotted it at my waist, and sat down at the desk. I’d been struck before by how strangely absent she was from her husband’s autobiography. That was one of the reasons I’d wanted to begin the main part of the book with the story of their meeting—until I discovered that Lang had made it up. She was there, naturally enough, on the dedication page—

To Ruth,

and my kids,

and the people of Britain

—but then one had to wait another fifty pages until she actually appeared in person. I leafed through the manuscript until I reached the passage.

That was the only substantial reference to her.

I slowly worked my way through the succeeding chapters, underlining the places where she was mentioned. Her “lifelong knowledge of the party” was “invaluable” in helping Lang gain his safe parliamentary seat. “Ruth saw the possibility that I might become party leader long before I did” was the promising opening of chapter three, but how or why she reached this prescient conclusion weren’t explained. She surfaced to give “characteristically shrewd advice” when he had to sack a colleague. She shared his hotel suites at party conferences. She straightened his tie on the night he became prime minister. She went shopping with the wives of other world leaders on official visits. She even gave birth to his children (“my kids have always kept my feet firmly on the ground”). But for all that hers was a phantom presence in the memoirs, which puzzled me, because she certainly wasn’t a phantom presence in his life. Perhaps this was why she had been keen to hire me: she guessed I would want to put in more about her.

When I checked my watch I realized I’d already spent an hour going over the manuscript, and it was time for dinner. I contemplated the clothes she had laid out on the bed. I’m what the English would call “fastidious” and the Americans “tight-assed”: I don’t like eating food that’s been on someone else’s plate, or drinking from the same glass, or wearing clothes that aren’t my own. But these were cleaner and warmer than anything I possessed, and she had gone to the trouble of fetching them, so I put them on—rolling up the sleeves because I had no cuff links—and went upstairs.

THERE WAS A LOG
fire burning in the stone hearth, and someone, presumably Dep, had lit candles all around the room. The security lights in the grounds had also been turned on, illuminating the gaunt white outlines of trees and the greenish-yellow vegetation bending in the wind. As I came up into the room, a gust of rain slashed across the huge picture window. It was like the lounge of some luxurious boutique hotel out of season, which had only two guests.

Ruth was sitting on the same sofa, in the same position she had adopted that morning, with her legs drawn up beneath her, reading the
New York Review of Books
. Arranged in a fan on the low table in front of her was an array of magazines, and beside them—a harbinger of things to come, I hoped—a long-stemmed glass of what looked like white wine. She glanced up approvingly.

“A perfect fit,” she said. “And now you need a drink.” She leaned her head over the back of the sofa—I could see the cords of muscle standing out in her neck—and called in her mannish voice in the direction of the stairs, “Dep!” And then to me, “What will you have?”

“What are you having?”

“Biodynamic white wine,” she said, “from the Rhinehart Vinery in Napa Valley.”

“He doesn’t own a distillery, I suppose?”

“It’s delicious. You must try it. Dep,” she said to the housekeeper, who had appeared at the top of the stairs, “bring the bottle, would you, and another glass?”

I sat down opposite her. She was wearing a long red wraparound dress, and on her normally scrubbed-clean face was a trace of makeup. There was something touching about her determination to put on a show, even as the bombs, so to speak, were falling all around her. All we needed was a windup gramophone and we could have played the plucky English couple in a Noël Coward play, keeping up brittle appearances while the world went smash around us. Dep poured me some wine and left the bottle.

“We’ll eat in twenty minutes,” instructed Ruth, “because first,” she said, picking up the remote control and jabbing it fiercely at the television, “we must watch the news. Cheers,” she said and raised her glass.

“Cheers,” I replied and did the same.

I drained the glass in thirty seconds. White wine. What
is
the point of it? I picked up the bottle and studied the label. Apparently the vines were grown in soil treated in harmony with the lunar cycle, using manure buried in a cow’s horn and flower heads of yarrow fermented in a stag’s bladder. It sounded like the sort of suspicious activity for which people quite rightly used to be burned as witches.

“You like it?” asked Ruth.

“Subtle and fruity,” I said, “with a hint of bladder.”

“Pour us some more, then. Here comes Adam. Christ, it’s the lead story. I think I may have to get drunk for a change.”

The headline behind the announcer’s shoulder read “
LANG: WAR CRIMES.
” I didn’t like the fact that they weren’t bothering to use a question mark anymore. The familiar scenes from the morning unfolded: the press conference at The Hague, Lang leaving the Vineyard house, the statement to reporters on the West Tisbury highway. Then came shots of Lang in Washington, first greeting members of Congress in a warm glow of flashbulbs and mutual admiration, and then, more somberly, Lang with the secretary of state. Amelia Bly was clearly visible in the background: the official wife. I didn’t dare look at Ruth.

“Adam Lang,” said the secretary of state, “has stood by our side in the war against terror, and I am proud to stand by his side this afternoon and to offer him, on behalf of the American people, the hand of friendship. Adam. Good to see you.”

“Don’t grin,” said Ruth.

“Thank you,” said Adam, grinning and shaking the proferred hand. He beamed at the cameras. He looked like an eager student collecting a prize on speech day. “Thank you very much. It’s good to see you.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” shouted Ruth.

She pointed the remote and was about to press it when Richard Rycart appeared, passing through the lobby of the United Nations, surrounded by the usual bureaucratic phalanx. At the last minute he seemed to swerve off his planned course and walked over to the cameras. He was a little older than Lang, just coming up to sixty. He’d been born in Australia, or Rhodesia, or some part of the Commonwealth, before coming to England in his teens. He had a cascade of dark gray hair that flooded dramatically over his collar and was well aware—judging by the way he positioned himself—of which was his better side: his left. His tanned and hook-prowed profile reminded me slightly of a Sioux Indian chief.

“I watched the announcement in The Hague today,” he said, “with great shock and sadness.” I sat forward. This was definitely the voice I’d heard on the phone earlier in the day: that residual, singsong accent was unmistakable. “Adam Lang was and is an old friend of mine—”

“You hypocritical bastard,” said Ruth.

“—and I regret that he’s chosen to bring this down to a personal level. This isn’t about individuals. This is about justice. This is about whether there’s to be one law for the rich, white, Western nations and another for the rest of the world. This is about making sure that every political and military leader, when he makes a decision, knows that he will be held to account by international law. Thank you.”

A reporter shouted, “If you’re called to testify, sir, will you go?”

“Certainly I’ll go.”

“I bet you will, you little shit,” said Ruth.

The news bulletin moved on to a report about a suicide bombing in the Middle East, and she turned off the television. At once her mobile phone started ringing. She glanced at it.

“It’s Adam, calling to ask how I think it went.” She turned that off, as well. “Let him sweat.”

“Does he always ask your advice?”

“Always. And he always used to take it. Until just lately.”

I poured us some more wine. Very slowly, I could feel it starting to have an effect.

“You were right,” I said. “He shouldn’t have gone to Washington. It did look bad.”

“We should never have come
here
,” she said, gesturing with her wine to the room. “I mean, look at it. And all for the sake of the Adam Lang Foundation. Which is what, exactly? Just a highclass displacement activity for the recently unemployed.” She leaned forward. “Shall I tell you the first rule of politics?”

“Please.”

“Never lose touch with your base.”

“I’ll try not to.”

“Shut up. I’m being serious. You can reach beyond it, by all means—you’ve got to reach beyond it, if you’re going to win. But never, ever lose touch with it altogether. Because once you do, you’re finished. Imagine if those pictures tonight had been of him arriving in London—flying back to fight these ridiculous people and their absurd allegations. It would’ve looked magnificent! Instead of which—God!” She shook her head and gave a sigh of anger and frustration. “Come on. Let’s eat.”

She pushed herself off the sofa, spilling a little wine in the process. It spattered the front of her red woolen dress. She didn’t seem to notice, and I had a horrible premonition that she was going to get drunk. (I share the serious drinker’s general prejudice that there’s nothing more irritating than a man drunk, except a woman drunk: they somehow manage to let everybody down.) But when I offered to top her up, she covered her glass with her hand.

“I’ve had enough.”

The long table by the window had been laid for two, and the sight of Nature raging silently beyond the thick screen heightened the sense of intimacy: the candles, the flowers, the crackling fire. It felt slightly overdone. Dep brought in two bowls of clear soup and for a while we clinked our spoons against Rhinehart’s porcelain in self-conscious silence.