The Ghost

was thrown across the bed: it was obviously the bedroom used by Special Branch during the night shift. The third door was locked, and I was about to try the fourth when I heard the sound of a woman weeping. I could tell it was Ruth: even her sobs had a combative quality. “There are only six bedrooms in the main house,” Amelia had said. “Adam and Ruth have one each.” What a setup this was, I thought as I crept away: the ex–prime minister and his wife sleeping in separate rooms, with his mistress just along the corridor. It was almost French.
    Gingerly, I tried the handle of the next room. This one wasn’t locked, and the aroma of worn clothes and lavender soap, even more than the sight of my old suitcase, established it immediately as McAra’s former berth. I went in and closed the door very softly. The big mirrored closet took up the whole of the wall dividing my room from Ruth’s and when I slid back the glass door a fraction, I could just make out her muffled wailing. The door scraped on its runner, and I guess she must have heard, for all at once the crying stopped, and I imagined her startled, raising her head from her damp pillow and staring at the wall. I drew away. On the bed I noticed that someone had put a box, stuffed so full the top didn’t fit. A yellow Post-it note said, “Good luck! Amelia.” I sat on the counterpane and lifted the lid. “MEMOIRS,” proclaimed the title page, “by Adam Lang.” So she hadn’t forgotten me after all, despite the exquisitely embarrassing circumstances of her departure. You could say what you liked about Mrs. Bly, but the woman was a pro.
    I recognized I was now at a decisive point. Either I continued to hang around at the fringes of this floundering project, pathetically hoping that at some point someone would help me. Or—and I felt my spine straightening as I contemplated the alternative—I could seize control of it myself, try to knock these six hundred and twenty-one ineffable pages into some kind of publishable shape, take my two hundred and fifty grand, and head off to lie on a beach somewhere for a month until I had forgotten all about the Langs.
    Put in those terms, it wasn’t a choice. I steeled myself to ignore both McAra’s lingering traces in the room and Ruth’s more corporeal presence next door. I took the manuscript from its box and placed it on the table next to the window, opened my shoulder bag, and took out my laptop and the transcripts from yesterday’s interviews. There wasn’t a lot of room to work, but that didn’t bother me. Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin—the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too hot, too cold, too early, too late. I had learned over the years to ignore them all and simply to start. I plugged in my laptop, switched on the lamp, and contemplated the blank screen and its pulsing cursor.
    A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and immediately it becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written. But the best must never be allowed to drive out the good. In the absence of genius there is always craftsmanship. One can at least try to write something that will arrest the readers’ attention, that will encourage them, after reading the first paragraph, to take a look at the second, and then the third. I picked up McAra’s manuscript to remind myself of how not to begin a ten-million-dollar autobiography:
    C HAPTER O NE
    Early Years
    Langs are Scottish folk originally, and proud of it. Our name is a derivation of “long,” the Old English word for “tall,” and it is from north of the border that my forefathers hail. It was in the sixteenth century that the first of the Langs…
    God help us! I ran my pen through it, and then zigzagged a thick blue line through all the succeeding paragraphs of Lang ancestral history. If you want a family tree, go to a garden center—that’s what I advise my clients. Nobody else is interested. Maddox’s instruction was to begin the book with the war crimes allegations, which was fine by me, although it could serve only as a kind of long prologue. At some point, the memoir proper would have to begin, and for this I wanted to find a fresh and original note, something that would make Lang sound like a