The Ghost

an outsider, unsure of what I was supposed to do and still twisting with embarrassment over my gaffe at the airport. So I lingered outside in the cold for a while. To my surprise, the person who realized I was missing and who came out to fetch me was Lang.
    “Hi, man!” he called from the doorway. “What on earth are you doing out here? Isn’t anybody looking after you? Come and have a drink.”
    He touched my shoulder as I entered and steered me down the passage toward the room where I’d had coffee that morning. He’d already taken off his jacket and tie and pulled on a thick gray sweater.
    “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to say hello properly at the airport. What would you like?”
    “What are you having?” Dear God, I prayed, let it be something alcoholic.
    “Iced tea.”
    “Iced tea would be fine.”
    “You’re sure? I’d sooner have something stronger, but Ruth would kill me.” He called to one of the secretaries: “Luce, ask Dep to bring us some tea, would you, sweetheart? So,” he said, plonking himself down in the center of the sofa and flinging out his arms to rest along its back, “you have to be me for a month, God help you.” He swiftly crossed his legs, his right ankle resting on his left knee. He drummed his fingers, wiggled his foot and inspected it for a moment, then returned his cloudless gaze to me.
    “I hope it will be a fairly painless procedure, for both of us,” I said, and hesitated, unsure how to address him.
    “Adam,” he said. “Call me Adam.”
    There always comes a moment, I find, in dealing with a very famous person face-to-face, when you feel as if you’re in a dream, and this was it for me: a genuine out-of-body experience. I beheld myself as if from the ceiling, conversing in an apparently relaxed manner with a world statesman in the home of a media billionaire. He was actually going out of his way to be nice to me. He needed me. What a lark, I thought.
    “Thank you,” I said. “I have to tell you I’ve never met an ex–prime minister before.”
    “Well,” he said with a smile, “I’ve never met a ghost, so we’re even. Sid Kroll says you’re the man for the job. Ruth agrees. So how exactly are we supposed to go about this?”
    “I’ll interview you. I’ll turn your answers into prose. Where necessary, I might have to add linking passages, trying to imitate your voice. I should say, incidentally, that anything I write you’ll be able to correct afterward. I don’t want you to think I’ll be putting words in your mouth that you wouldn’t actually want to use.”
    “And how long will this take?”
    “For a big book, I’d normally do fifty or sixty hours of interviews. That would give me about four hundred thousand words, which I’d then edit down to a hundred thousand.”
    “But we’ve already got a manuscript.”
    “Yes,” I said, “but frankly, it’s not really publishable. It’s research notes, it’s not a book. It doesn’t have any kind of voice.” Lang pulled a face. He clearly didn’t see the problem. “Having said that,” I added quickly, “the work won’t be entirely wasted. We can ransack it for facts and quotations, and I don’t mind the structure, actually—the sixteen chapters—although I’d like to open differently, find something more intimate.”
    The Vietnamese housekeeper brought in our tea. She was dressed entirely in black—black silk trousers and a collarless black shirt. I wanted to introduce myself, but when she handed me my glass, she avoided meeting my gaze.
    “You heard about Mike?” asked Lang.
    “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
    Lang glanced away, toward the darkened window. “We should put something nice about him in the book. His mother would like it.”
    “That should be easy enough.”
    “He was with me a long time. Since before I became prime minister. He came up through the party. I inherited him from my predecessor. You think you know someone pretty well and then—” He shrugged and stared into the night.
    I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. It’s in the nature of my work to act as something of a confessor figure, and I have learned over the years to behave like a shrink—to sit in silence and give the client time. I wondered what he was seeing out there. After about half a minute he appeared to remember I was still in the room.
    “Right. How long do you need from me?”
    “Full time?” I sipped my drink and tried not to wince at the sweet