The Ghost

the manuscript until I reached the passage.
    It was at the time of the London elections that I first got to know Ruth Capel, one of the most energetic members of the local association. I would like to be able to say that it was her political commitment that first drew me to her, but the truth is that I found her immensely attractive—small, intense, with very short dark hair and piercing dark eyes. She was a North Londoner, the only child of two university lecturers, and had been passionately interested in politics almost from the time she could speak—unlike me! She was also, as my friends never tired of pointing out, much cleverer than I was! She had gained a First at Oxford in politics, philosophy, and economics, and then done a year’s postgraduate research in postcolonial government as a Fulbright scholar. As if that were not enough to intimidate me, she had also come top in the Foreign Office entrance examinations, although she later left to work for the party’s foreign affairs team in parliament.
    Nevertheless, the Lang family motto has always been, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” and I managed to arrange for us to go canvassing together. It was then a relatively easy matter, after a hard evening’s knocking on doors and handing out leaflets, to suggest a casual drink in a local pub. At first, other members of the campaign team used to join us on these excursions, but gradually they became aware that Ruth and I wanted to spend time alone together. A year after the elections, we began sharing a flat, and when Ruth became pregnant with our first child, I asked her to marry me. Our wedding took place at Marylebone registry office in June 1979, with Andy Martin, one of my old friends from Footlights, acting as my best man. For our honeymoon, we borrowed Ruth’s parents’ cottage near Hay-on-Wye. After two blissful weeks, we returned to London, ready for the very different political fray following the election of Margaret Thatcher.
    That was the only substantial reference to her.
    I slowly worked my way through the succeeding chapters, underlining the places where she was mentioned. Her “lifelong knowledge of the party” was “invaluable” in helping Lang gain his safe parliamentary seat. “Ruth saw the possibility that I might become party leader long before I did” was the promising opening of chapter three, but how or why she reached this prescient conclusion weren’t explained. She surfaced to give “characteristically shrewd advice” when he had to sack a colleague. She shared his hotel suites at party conferences. She straightened his tie on the night he became prime minister. She went shopping with the wives of other world leaders on official visits. She even gave birth to his children (“my kids have always kept my feet firmly on the ground”). But for all that hers was a phantom presence in the memoirs, which puzzled me, because she certainly wasn’t a phantom presence in his life. Perhaps this was why she had been keen to hire me: she guessed I would want to put in more about her.
    When I checked my watch I realized I’d already spent an hour going over the manuscript, and it was time for dinner. I contemplated the clothes she had laid out on the bed. I’m what the English would call “fastidious” and the Americans “tight-assed”: I don’t like eating food that’s been on someone else’s plate, or drinking from the same glass, or wearing clothes that aren’t my own. But these were cleaner and warmer than anything I possessed, and she had gone to the trouble of fetching them, so I put them on—rolling up the sleeves because I had no cuff links—and went upstairs.

    THERE WAS A LOG fire burning in the stone hearth, and someone, presumably Dep, had lit candles all around the room. The security lights in the grounds had also been turned on, illuminating the gaunt white outlines of trees and the greenish-yellow vegetation bending in the wind. As I came up into the room, a gust of rain slashed across the huge picture window. It was like the lounge of some luxurious boutique hotel out of season, which had only two guests.
    Ruth was sitting on the same sofa, in the same position she had adopted that morning, with her legs drawn up beneath her, reading the New York Review of Books . Arranged in a fan on the low table in front of her was an array of magazines, and beside them—a harbinger of things to come, I hoped—a long-stemmed glass of what looked like white wine.