The Ghost

followed her into the kitchen. “Is Mrs. Lang around?” I said.
    “No, sir. She go Vineyard Haven. Shopping.”
    She had fixed me a club sandwich. I sat on a tall stool at the breakfast bar and compelled myself to eat it, while she wrapped things in tinfoil and put them back in one of Rhinehart’s array of six stainless steel fridges. I considered what I should do. Normally I would have forced myself back to my desk and continued writing all afternoon. But for just about the first time in my career as a ghost, I was blocked. I’d wasted half the morning composing a charmingly intimate reminiscence of an event that hadn’t happened— couldn’t have happened, because Ruth Lang hadn’t arrived to start her career in London until 1976, by which time her future husband had already been a party member for a year.
    Even the thought of tackling the Cambridge section, which once I’d regarded as words in the bank, now led me to confront a blank wall. Who was he, this happy-go-lucky, girl-chasing, politically allergic, would-be actor? What suddenly turned him into a party activist, trailing around council estates, if it wasn’t meeting Ruth? It made no sense to me. That was when I realized I had a fundamental problem with our former prime minister. He was not a psychologically credible character. In the flesh, or on the screen, playing the part of a statesman, he seemed to have a strong personality. But somehow, when one sat down to think about him, he vanished. This made it almost impossible for me to do my job. Unlike any number of show business and sporting weirdos I had worked with in the past, when it came to Lang, I simply couldn’t make him up.
    I took out my cell phone and considered calling Rycart. But the more I reflected on how the conversation might go, the more reluctant I became to initiate it. What exactly was I supposed to say? “Oh, hello, you don’t know me, but I’ve replaced Mike McAra as Adam Lang’s ghost. I believe he may have spoken to you a day or two before he was washed up dead on a beach.” I put the phone back in my pocket, and suddenly I couldn’t rid my mind of the image of McAra’s heavy body rolling back and forth in the surf. Did he hit rocks, or was he run straight up onto soft sand? What was the name of the place where he’d been found? Rick had mentioned it when we had lunch at his club in London. Lambert something-or-other.
    “Excuse me, Dep,” I said to the housekeeper.
    She straightened from the fridge. She had such a sweetly sympathetic face. “Sir?”
    “Do you happen to know if there’s a map of the island I could borrow?”

TEN
    It is perfectly possible to write a book for someone, having done nothing but listen to their words, but extra research often helps to provide more material and descriptive ideas.
    Ghostwriting
    IT LOOKED TO BE about ten miles away, on the northwestern shore of the Vineyard. Lambert’s Cove: that was it.
    There was something beguiling about the names of the locations all around it: Blackwater Brook, Uncle Seth’s Pond, Indian Hill, Old Herring Creek Road. It was like a map from a children’s adventure story, and in a strange way that was how I conceived of my plan, as a kind of amusing excursion. Dep suggested I borrow a bicycle—oh yes, Mr. Rhinehart, he keep many, many bicycles, for use of guests—and something about the idea of that appealed to me as well, even though I hadn’t ridden a bike for years, and even though I knew, at some deeper level, no good would come of it. More than three weeks had passed since the corpse had been recovered. What would there be to see? But curiosity is a powerful human impulse—some distance below sex and greed, I grant you, but far ahead of altruism—and I was simply curious.
    The biggest deterrent was the weather. The receptionist at the hotel in Edgartown had warned me that the forecast was for a storm, and although it hadn’t broken yet, the sky was beginning to sag with the weight of it, like a soft gray sack waiting to split apart. But the appeal of getting out of the house for a while was overpowering and I couldn’t face going back to McAra’s old room and sitting in front of my computer. I took Lang’s windproof jacket from its peg in the cloakroom and followed Duc the gardener along the front of the house to the weathered wooden cubes that served as staff accommodation and outbuildings.
    “You must have to work hard here,” I said, “to keep it looking so good.”
    Duc