The Ghost

dinner?”
    “Amelia Bly, are you asking me on a date ?”
    “I’ll meet you outside in ten minutes. Freddy!” she called. “Nice to see you.”
    Even as she moved away to talk to someone else, the crowd before me seemed to part, and Ruth emerged, looking very different from the last time I had seen her: glossy haired, smooth skinned, slimmed by grief, and designer clad in something black and silky. Sid Kroll was just behind her.
    “Hello, you,” she said.
    She took my hands in hers and mwah-mwahed me, not kissing me but brushing her thick helmet of hair briefly against each of my cheeks.
    “Hello, Ruth. Hello, Sid.”
    I nodded to him. He winked.
    “I was told you couldn’t stand these kinds of parties,” she said, still holding my hands and fixing me with her glittering dark eyes, “or else I would have invited you. Did you get my note?”
    “I did. Thanks.”
    “But you didn’t call me!”
    “I didn’t know if you were just being polite.”
    “Being polite!” She briefly shook my hands in reproach. “Since when was I ever polite? You must come and see me.”
    And then she did that thing that important people always do to me at parties: she glanced over my shoulder. And I saw, almost immediately and quite unmistakably in her gaze, a flash of alarm, which was followed at once by a barely perceptible shake of her head. I detached my hands and turned around and saw Paul Emmett. He was no more than five feet away.
    “Hello,” he said. “I believe we’ve met.”
    I swung back to Ruth. I tried to speak, but no words would come.
    “Ah,” I said. “Ah—”
    “Paul was my tutor,” she said calmly, “when I was a Fulbright scholar at Harvard. You and I must talk.”
    “Ah—”
    I backed away from them all. I knocked into a man who shielded his drink and told me cheerfully to watch out. Ruth was saying something earnestly, and so was Kroll, but there was a buzzing in my ears and I couldn’t hear them. I saw Amelia staring at me and I waved my hands feebly, and then I fled from the hall, across the lobby and out into the hollow, imperial grandeur of Whitehall.

    IT WAS OBVIOUS THE moment I got outside that another bomb had gone off. I could hear the sirens in the distance, and a pillar of smoke was already dwarfing Nelson’s Column, rising from somewhere behind the National Gallery. I set off at a loping run toward Trafalgar Square and barged in front of an outraged couple to seize their taxi. Avenues of escape were being closed off all over central London, as if by a spreading forest fire. We turned into a one-way street, only to find the police sealing the far end with yellow tape. The driver flung the cab into reverse, jerking me forward and onto the edge of my seat, and that was how I stayed throughout the rest of the journey, clinging to the handle beside the door, as we twisted and dodged through the back routes north. When we reached my flat I paid him double the fare.
    “The key to everything is in Lang’s autobiography—it’s all there at the beginning.”
    I grabbed my copy of the finished book, took it over to my desk, and started flicking through the opening chapters. I ran my finger swiftly down the center of the pages, sweeping my eyes over all the made-up feelings and half-true memories. My professional prose, typeset and bound, had rendered the roughness of a human life as smooth as a plastered wall.
    Nothing.
    I threw it away in disgust. What a worthless piece of junk it was, what a soulless commercial exercise. I was glad Lang wasn’t around to read it. I actually preferred the original; for the first time I recognized something honest at least in its plodding earnestness. I opened a drawer and grabbed McAra’s original manuscript, tattered from use and in places barely legible beneath my crossings-out and overwritings. “Chapter One. Langs are Scottish folk originally, and proud of it…” I remembered the deathless beginning I had cut so ruthlessly in Martha’s Vineyard. But then, come to think of it, every single one of McAra’s chapter beginnings had been particularly dreadful. I hadn’t left one unaltered. I searched through the loose pages, the bulky manuscript fanning open and twisting in my clumsy hands like a living thing.
    “Chapter Two. Wife and child in tow, I decided to settle in a small town where we could live away from the hurly-burly of London life…Chapter Three. Ruth saw the possibility that I might become party leader long before I