The Ghost

useful to have a page or two of heroic struggle against inner demons, etc., etc.
    In the superficially tedious business of politics I found solace for my hurt. I found activity, companionship, an outlet for my love of meeting new people. I found a cause that was bigger than myself. Most of all, I found Ruth…
    In my telling of his story, Lang’s political involvement really got going only when Ruth came knocking at his door two years later. It sounded plausible. Who knows? It might even have been true.
    I started writing Memoirs by Adam Lang on February the tenth and promised Maddox I’d have the whole thing done, all one hundred and sixty thousand words, by the end of March. That meant I had to produce thirty-four hundred words a day, every day. I had a chart on the wall and marked it up each morning. I was like Captain Scott returning from the South Pole: I had to make those daily distances, or I’d fall irrevocably behind and perish in a white wilderness of blank pages. It was a hard slog, especially as almost no lines of McAra’s were salvageable, except, curiously, the very last one in the manuscript, which had made me groan aloud when I read it on Martha’s Vineyard: “Ruth and I look forward to the future, whatever it may hold.” Read that, you bastards, I thought, as I typed it in on the evening of the thirtieth of March: read that, and close this book without a catch in your throat.
    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:
    You have done all that I ever hoped you wd do—and more! You have caught his tone beautifully & brought him back to life—all his wonderful humor & compassion & energy. Pls. come & see me here in the HoL when you have a spare moment. It wd be great to catch up. Martha’s V. seems a v long time ago, & a long way away! Bless you again for yr talent. And it is a proper book !!
    Much love,
R.
    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