The Ghost

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:
    This book would not exist without the dedication, support, wisdom, and friendship of the late Michael McAra, who collaborated with me on its composition from the first page to the last. Thank you, Mike—for everything.
    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