The Ghost (24 page)

I added “The End” and then, I guess, I had a kind of nervous breakdown.

I DISPATCHED ONE COPY
of the manuscript to New York and another to the office of the Adam Lang Foundation in London, for the personal attention of Mrs. Ruth Lang—or, as I should more properly have styled her by then, Baroness Lang of Calder-thorpe, the government having just given her a seat in the House of Lords as a mark of the nation’s respect.

I hadn’t heard anything from Ruth since the assassination. I’d written to her while I was still in hospital, one of more than a hundred thousand correspondents who were reported to have sent their condolences, so I wasn’t surprised that all I got back was a standard printed reply. But a week after she received the manuscript, a handwritten message arrived on the red-embossed notepaper of the House of Lords:

Maddox was equally effusive, but without the love. The first printing was to be four hundred thousand copies. The publication date was the end of May.

So that was that. The job was done.

It didn’t take me long to realize I was in a bad state. I’d been kept going, I suppose, by Lang’s “wonderful humor & compassion & energy,” but once he was written out of me, I collapsed like an empty suit of clothes. For years I had survived by inhabiting one life after another. But Rick had insisted we wait until the Lang memoirs were published—my “breakthrough book,” he called it—before negotiating new and better contracts, with the result that, for the first time I could remember, I had no work to go to. I was afflicted by a horrible combination of lethargy and panic. I could barely summon the energy to get out of bed before noon, and when I did I moped on the sofa in my dressing gown, watching daytime television. I didn’t eat much. I stopped opening my letters or answering the phone. I didn’t shave. I left the flat for any length of time only on Mondays and Thursdays, to avoid seeing my cleaner—I wanted to fire her, but I didn’t have the nerve—and then I either sat in a park, if it was fine, or in a nearby greasy café, if it wasn’t; and this being England, it mostly wasn’t.

And yet, paradoxically, at the same time as being sunk in a stupor I was also permanently agitated. Nothing was in proportion. I fretted absurdly about trivialities—where I’d put a pair of shoes, or if it was wise to keep all my money with the same bank. This nerviness made me feel physically shaky, often breathless, and it was in this spirit, late one night, about two months after I finished the book, that I made what to me, in my condition, was a calamitous discovery.

I’d run out of whiskey and knew I had about ten minutes to get to the little supermarket on Ladbroke Grove before it closed. It was toward the end of May, dark and raining. I grabbed the nearest jacket and was halfway down the stairs when I realized it was the one I’d been wearing when Lang was killed. It was torn at the front and stained with blood. In one pocket was the recording of my final interview with Adam, and in the other the keys to the Ford Escape SUV.

The car! I had forgotten all about it. It was still parked at Logan Airport! It was costing eighteen dollars a day! I must owe
thousands
!

To you, no doubt—and indeed to me, now—my panic seems ridiculous. But I raced back up those stairs with my pulse drumming. It was after six in New York and Rhinehart Inc. had closed for the day. There was no reply from the Martha’s Vineyard house, either. In despair, I called Rick at home and, without preliminaries, began gabbling out the details of the crisis. He listened for about thirty seconds, then told me roughly to shut up.

“This was all sorted out weeks ago. The guys at the car park got suspicious and called the cops, and they called Rhinehart’s office. Maddox paid the bill. I didn’t bother you with it because I knew you were busy. Now listen to me, my friend. It seems to me you’ve got a nasty case of delayed shock. You need help. I know a shrink—”

I hung up.

When I finally fell asleep on the sofa, I had my usual recurrent dream about McAra, the one in which he floated fully clothed in the sea beside me and told me he wasn’t going to make it:
You go on without me.
But this time, instead of ending with my waking up, the dream lasted longer. A wave took McAra away, in his heavy raincoat and rubber-soled boots, until he became only a dark shape in the distance, facedown in the shallow foam, sliding back and forth at the edge of the beach. I waded toward him and managed to get my hands around his bulky body and, with a supreme effort, to roll him over, and then suddenly he was staring up naked from a white slab, with Adam Lang bending over him.

The next morning I left the flat early and walked down the hill to the tube station. It really wouldn’t take much to kill myself, I thought. One swift leap out in front of the approaching train, and then oblivion. Much better than drowning. But it was only the briefest of impulses, not least because I couldn’t bear the idea of someone having to clean up afterward.
(“We eventually found the killer’s head on the terminal roof.”)
Instead I boarded the train and traveled to the end of the line at Hammersmith, then crossed the road to the other platform. Motion, that’s the cure for depression, I decided. You have to keep moving. At Embankment I changed again for Morden, which always sounds to me like the end of the world. We passed through Balham and I got off two stops later.

It didn’t take me long to find the grave. I remembered Ruth had said the funeral was at Streatham Cemetery. I looked up his name and a groundsman pointed the way toward the plot. I passed stone angels with vultures’ wings, and mossy cherubs with lichened curls, Victorian sarcophagi the size of garden sheds, and crosses garlanded with marble roses. But McAra’s contribution to the necropolis was characteristically plain. No flowery mottoes, no “Say not the struggle naught availeth” or “Well done, thou good and faithful servant” for our Mike. Merely a slab of limestone with his name and dates.

It was a late spring morning, drowsy with pollen and petrol fumes. In the distance, the traffic rolled up Garratt Lane toward central London. I squatted on my haunches and pressed my palms to the dewy grass. As I’ve said before, I’m not the superstitious type, but at that moment I did feel a current of relief pass through me, as if I’d closed a circle, or fulfilled a task. I sensed he had wanted me to come here.

That was when I noticed, resting against the stone, half obscured by the overgrown grass, a small bunch of shriveled flowers. There was a card attached, written in an elegant hand, just legible after successive London downpours: “In memory of a good friend and loyal colleague. Rest in peace, dear Mike. Amelia.”

WHEN I GOT BACK
to my flat, I called her on her mobile number. She didn’t seem surprised to hear from me.

“Hello,” she said. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Why’s that?”

“I’m reading your book—Adam’s book.”

“And?”

“It’s good. No, actually, it’s better than good. It’s like having him back. There’s only one element missing, I think.”

“And what’s that?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you if I see you. Perhaps we’ll get the opportunity to talk at the reception tonight.”

“What reception?”

She laughed. “
Your
reception, you idiot. The launch of your book. Don’t tell me you haven’t been invited.”

I hadn’t spoken to anyone in a long while. It took me a second or two to reply.

“I don’t know whether I have or not. To be honest, I haven’t checked my post in a while.”

“You must have been invited.”

“Don’t you believe it. Authors tend to be funny about having their ghosts staring at them over the canapés.”

“Well, the author isn’t going to be there, is he?” she said. She wanted to sound brisk, but she came across as desperately hollow and strained. “You should go, whether you’ve been invited or not. In fact, if you really haven’t been invited, you can come as my guest. My invitation has ‘Amelia Bly plus one’ written on it.”

The prospect of returning to society made my heartbeat start to race again.

“But don’t you want to take someone else? What about your husband?”

“Oh, him. That didn’t work out, I’m afraid. I hadn’t realized quite how bored he was with being my ‘plus one.’”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Liar,” she said. “I’ll meet you at the end of Downing Street at seven o’clock. The party’s just across Whitehall. I’ll only wait five minutes, so if you decide you do want to come, don’t be late.”

AFTER I FINISHED SPEAKING
to Amelia, I went through my weeks of accumulated mail carefully. There was no invitation to the party. Bearing in mind the circumstances of my last encounter with Ruth, I wasn’t too surprised. There was, however, a copy of the finished book. It was nicely produced. The cover, with an eye to the American market, was a photograph of Lang, looking debonair, addressing a joint session of the U.S. Congress. The photographs inside did not include any of the ones from Cambridge that McAra had discovered; I hadn’t passed them on to the picture researcher. I flicked through to the acknowledgments, which I had written in Lang’s voice:

My name wasn’t mentioned. Much to Rick’s annoyance, I’d forgone my collaborator credit. I didn’t tell him why, which was that I thought it was safer that way. The expurgated contents and my anonymity would, I hoped, serve as a message to whoever out there might be paying attention that there would be no further trouble from me.

I soaked in the bath for an hour that afternoon and contemplated whether or not to go to the reception. As usual, I was able to spin out my procrastination for hours. I told myself I still hadn’t necessarily made up my mind as I shaved off my beard, and as I dressed in a decent dark suit and white shirt, and as I went out into the street and hailed a taxi, and even as I stood on the corner of Downing Street at five minutes to seven; it still wasn’t too late to turn back. Across the broad, ceremonial boulevard of Whitehall, I could see the cars and taxis pulling up outside the Banqueting House, where I guessed the party must be taking place. Photographers’ flashbulbs winked in the evening sunshine, a pale reminder of Lang’s old glory days.

I kept looking for Amelia, up the street toward the mounted sentry outside Horse Guards, and down it again, past the Foreign Office, to the Victorian Gothic madhouse of the Palace of Westminster. A sign on the opposite side of the entrance to Downing Street pointed to the Cabinet War Rooms, with a drawing of Churchill, complete with V sign and cigar. Whitehall always reminds me of the Blitz. I can picture it from the images I was brought up on as a child: the sandbags, the white tape across the windows, the searchlights blindly fingering the darkness, the drone of the bombers, the crump of high explosive, the red glow from the fires in the East End. Thirty thousand dead in London alone. Now
that
, as my father would have said, is what you call a
war
—not this drip, drip, drip of inconvenience and anxiety and folly. Yet Churchill used to stroll to parliament through St. James’s Park, raising his hat to passersby, with just a solitary detective walking ten feet behind him.

I was still thinking about it when Big Ben finished chiming the hour. I peered left and right again, but there was still no sign of Amelia, which surprised me, as I had her down as the punctual type. But then I felt a touch on my sleeve and turned to find her standing behind me. She had emerged from the sunless canyon of Downing Street in her dark blue suit, carrying a briefcase. She looked older, faded, and just for an instant I glimpsed her future: a tiny flat, a smart address, a cat. We exchanged polite hellos.

“Well,” she said, “here we are.”

“Here we are.” We stood awkwardly, a few feet apart. “I didn’t realize you were back working in Number Ten,” I said.

“I was only on attachment to Adam. The king is dead,” she said, and suddenly her voice cracked. I put my arms around her and patted her back, as if she were a child who had fallen over. I felt the wetness of her cheek against mine. When she pulled back, she opened her briefcase and took out a handkerchief. “Sorry,” she said. She blew her nose and stamped her high-heeled foot in self-reproach. “I keep thinking I’m over it, and then I realize I’m not. You look terrible,” she added. “In fact, you look—”

“Like a ghost?” I said. “Thanks. I’ve heard it before.”

She checked herself in the mirror of her powder compact and carried out some swift repairs. She was apprehensive, I realized. She needed someone to accompany her; even I would do.

“Right,” she said, shutting it with a click. “Let’s go.”

We walked up Whitehall, through the crowds of spring tourists.

“So, were you invited in the end?” she asked.

“No, I wasn’t. Actually, I’m rather surprised that you were.”

“Oh, that’s not so odd,” she said, with an attempt at carelessness. “She’s won, hasn’t she? She’s the national icon. The grieving widow. Our very own Jackie Kennedy. She won’t mind having me around. I’m hardly a threat, just a trophy in the victory parade.” We crossed the road. “Charles the First stepped out of that window to be executed,” she said, pointing. “You’d have thought someone would have realized the association, wouldn’t you?”

“Poor staff work,” I said. “It wouldn’t have happened when you were in charge.”

I knew it was a mistake to have come the moment we stepped inside. Amelia had to open her briefcase for the security men. My keys set off the metal detector and I had to be searched. It’s come to something, I thought, standing with my hands up, having my groin felt, when you can’t even go to a drinks party without being frisked. In the great open space of the Banqueting House, we were confronted by a roar of conversation and a wall of turned backs. I’d made it a rule never to attend the launch parties of my own books, and now I remembered why. A ghostwriter is about as welcome as the groom’s unacknowledged love child at a society wedding. I didn’t know a soul.