The Ghost

the world. This is about making sure that every political and military leader, when he makes a decision, knows that he will be held to account by international law. Thank you.”
    A reporter shouted, “If you’re called to testify, sir, will you go?”
    “Certainly I’ll go.”
    “I bet you will, you little shit,” said Ruth.
    The news bulletin moved on to a report about a suicide bombing in the Middle East, and she turned off the television. At once her mobile phone started ringing. She glanced at it.
    “It’s Adam, calling to ask how I think it went.” She turned that off, as well. “Let him sweat.”
    “Does he always ask your advice?”
    “Always. And he always used to take it. Until just lately.”
    I poured us some more wine. Very slowly, I could feel it starting to have an effect.
    “You were right,” I said. “He shouldn’t have gone to Washington. It did look bad.”
    “We should never have come here ,” she said, gesturing with her wine to the room. “I mean, look at it. And all for the sake of the Adam Lang Foundation. Which is what, exactly? Just a highclass displacement activity for the recently unemployed.” She leaned forward. “Shall I tell you the first rule of politics?”
    “Please.”
    “Never lose touch with your base.”
    “I’ll try not to.”
    “Shut up. I’m being serious. You can reach beyond it, by all means—you’ve got to reach beyond it, if you’re going to win. But never, ever lose touch with it altogether. Because once you do, you’re finished. Imagine if those pictures tonight had been of him arriving in London—flying back to fight these ridiculous people and their absurd allegations. It would’ve looked magnificent! Instead of which—God!” She shook her head and gave a sigh of anger and frustration. “Come on. Let’s eat.”
    She pushed herself off the sofa, spilling a little wine in the process. It spattered the front of her red woolen dress. She didn’t seem to notice, and I had a horrible premonition that she was going to get drunk. (I share the serious drinker’s general prejudice that there’s nothing more irritating than a man drunk, except a woman drunk: they somehow manage to let everybody down.) But when I offered to top her up, she covered her glass with her hand.
    “I’ve had enough.”
    The long table by the window had been laid for two, and the sight of Nature raging silently beyond the thick screen heightened the sense of intimacy: the candles, the flowers, the crackling fire. It felt slightly overdone. Dep brought in two bowls of clear soup and for a while we clinked our spoons against Rhinehart’s porcelain in self-conscious silence.
    “How is it going?” she said eventually.
    “The book? It’s not, to be honest.”
    “Why’s that—apart from the obvious reason?”
    I hesitated.
    “Can I talk frankly?”
    “Of course.”
    “I find it difficult to understand him.”
    “Oh?” She was drinking iced water now. Over the rim of her glass, her dark eyes gave me one of her double-barreled-shotgun looks. “In what way?”
    “I can’t understand why this good-looking eighteen-year-old lad who goes to Cambridge without the slightest interest in politics, and who spends his time acting and drinking and chasing girls, suddenly ends up—”
    “Married to me?”
    “No, no, not that. Not that at all.” (Yes, is what I meant: yes, yes, that; of course.) “No. I don’t understand why, by the time he’s twenty-two or twenty-three, he’s suddenly a member of a political party. Where’s that coming from?”
    “Didn’t you ask him?”
    “He told me he joined because of you. That you came and canvassed him, and that he was attracted to you, and that he followed you into politics out of love, essentially. To see more of you. I mean, that I can relate to. It ought to be true.”
    “But it isn’t?”
    “You know it isn’t. He was a party member for at least a year before he even met you.”
    “Was he?” She wrinkled her forehead and sipped some more water. “But that story he always tells about what drew him into politics—I do have a distinct memory of that episode, because I canvassed in the London elections of seventy-seven, and I definitely knocked on his door, and after that was when he started showing up at party meetings regularly. So there has to be a grain of truth in it.”
    “A grain,” I conceded. “Maybe he’d joined in seventy-five, hardly showed any interest for two years, and then he met you and