Ghosting (18 page)

We had many conversations just like this one and we became used to our respective roles. Mine was to persuade; his—so I decided—was to be persuaded. I shamelessly used whatever devious means I could to coax and convince—anything to make the task ahead more workable in my own terms. I was cruel, and over the next month or two he endured a great deal. The main objective for me was not to win the argument but to gain enough concessions to be able to deliver the book. Although it would nominally be his book, and to that extent he would have to be happy with it, it was impossible to lose sight of the fact that the actual writing would be done by me.

Despite all the difficulties, we seemed, surprisingly, to have a mutuality of purpose. Tiger wanted the book to be done well, and I wanted to do it well. Ever since childhood I had been a watcher and a listener, taking it all in but not sharing with anyone, at least not in a structured way. Up till now I had thought that all the watching and listening had perhaps been wasted. Now I found I was putting it to use, making it work for its living. My reservations about the feasibility of writing someone else's novel never entirely disappeared, but in the weeks that followed I tried hard to set them aside. There is a brilliant observation in Mary McCarthy's
The Groves of Academe
to the effect that, if you have the duty of washing the dishes, renounce the duty—this leaves you existentially free to wash the dishes.

You don't know what will happen until you start writing. Only then do you discover things that previously you knew nothing about. There is a level at which you know what you are doing, it is
a conscious process: you decide what to put in this chapter, what to leave for the next. But at another level, there seem to be deep forces at work that take you in unexpected directions. How much does the unconscious have to do with writing? Writers have spoken eloquently about this for generations. And in some sense it does seem reasonable to regard a novel as an accident of the unconscious, not in the sense of mishap, but in the sense of various buried strands colliding. The fact that I was writing as someone else—with a mask on, as it were—inevitably added yet another layer of complexity. I did and did not feel responsible for the words on the page, I did and did not feel that they belonged to me; I did and did not feel that I could defend them in my heart.

For the next week or so, however, I found myself doing a good imitation of a man writing a novel. I tried to free up the flow by telling myself that it was just another job that had to be done, that none of this mattered, that I was free to write anything that came into my head. I decided to call the main character Carlo—I had once known an Italian student named Carlo—and make him a successful advertising executive living in London. The novel would begin with Carlo's return to his native Italy to attend his mother's funeral. The reason for giving him dual nationality was twofold: it fitted very generally with Tiger's own background, and it would act as a metaphor for further conflict and dichotomy. The trip to Italy was surely a stroke of genius: it would allow for our hero's journey in all senses—physical, mental, spiritual and emotional. It would also enable the affair to take place in the hot and steamy Mediterranean climate and, finally, it would conveniently provide the backdrop of Catholicism—Tiger's professed faith—which would in turn introduce the familiar tensions between faith and reason and passion. Carlo could be a latter-day Graham Greene
character, tortured by Catholic guilt and spiritual
angst.
Catholicism provides such rich opportunities for this sort of exploration compared with other religions, even other Christian denominations. Who could imagine being interested in Methodist guilt, for example? I warmed to my theme. So far so good.

Except that I was kidding myself, whistling in the dark. Within a few pages, a central difficulty emerged and it never completely went away. The difficulty was, loosely speaking, the question of sincerity. While I don't for a moment imagine that all novelists have to write a personal story, or one in which they are intimately involved, I like to believe—even if I am wrong—that the author is sincere, and that the reader can sense if he (or she) is not. Words matter, the novel matters. That has been, and remains, my passionate belief. Writers are judged by the distinctive way in which words and the effect of these words on the reader combine. As a reader you somehow just know when every word is meant, even if the work is not a first-person narrative. Writing a novel is an intuitive thing and, while you can choose to write—or indeed ghostwrite—an academic book or a work of non-fiction by doing the required research, it is probably true to say that in the case of a novel the subject matter invariably chooses you. I think you have to live with the idea for a novel, be obsessed by it even, before you are able to write it. Of course you might have just the vaguest of images as a starting point, or there might be an event that has lodged in the imagination. But unless you are committed, unless there is some element of compulsion attaching to it, the whole business can end up hollow at the centre.

Predictably, I agonised about the opening line. Again, it is a matter of confidence and belief. When you are searching your mind for that first sentence it is difficult not to be assailed by
truths universally acknowledged and the similarity between all happy families. And easy to think that anything less brilliantly epigrammatic is small potatoes. The opening line also marks you. It can imprison you in a style and tone that are not easily shaken off. I pondered the possibilities, weighed and considered, wavered and faltered to the point of paralysis. Eventually, desperately, I wrote the first sentence:

There! Done it. But would it do? It surely had a lot going for it—our hero is introduced in the first word, the present tense lends the journey a certain immediacy, and there is the neat juxtaposition of birth and death, a pointer to the weighty themes to come. It would do.

I tried to think myself into what I imagined Tiger's style might be, but the more I searched for his voice, the more I caught my own breaking through; the more I tried to realise his literary aspirations, the more my own seemed to intrude. The novel did not grow organically; it was force-fed and boosted with steroids. Set pieces and ruminations on the human condition were thrown about like salt. It became a stilted, studied thing. I was consumed by doubt. The characters were not “real,” they were mouthpieces for various ideas, which shoved them around and kicked them to the ground. André Gide wrote something to the effect that the true novelist listens to his characters and watches how they behave, whereas the bad novelist simply constructs them and controls them. Without a doubt, I was constructing and controlling.

The more I struggled to be free, the more I felt constrained by
Tiger's expectations. Muriel Spark believes that writers sin against God because they create characters who cannot bring about their own salvation. How I longed to create such a character, to sample this sinfulness. But our hero, it had become clear, was not quite ready to be the stuff of fiction. I knew even before he was fleshed out that he would have to be saved. It was the only permissible outcome.

The misgivings multiplied. It just wasn't working. I tried to make the writing light and airy, but the more I tried, the heavier it became. The harder I tried to handle it sensitively, the harder it would bite back. And in a moment of dreadful incaution, I hit on the structure of the novel: there would be fourteen chapters, each one a Station of the Cross, linking Carlo's painful journey with Christ's passion. One reviewer was later to describe this as “an overweening conceit” and she was almost certainly right. With the curse of hindsight I can see it was a ghastly mistake (not least because it turned out that Tiger himself, though a cradle Catholic, was unfamiliar with the Stations of the Cross), but at the time I thought I could show off my knowledge of Catholicism. And in any case, I was desperate.

My parents gave me an interest in Roman Catholicism—exactly the opposite of what they intended to do. Religion, like bad grammar, is generally a habit picked up in childhood. But religious intolerance is a volatile substance which can have unexpected results.

It would be a mistake to imagine that sectarianism is confined to Northern Ireland or the west of Scotland. It is alive and well in
the Kingdom of Fife. Nowadays the official line is ecumenical, but during my childhood religious bigotry was a legitimate occupation. Catholics—Papes we called them—were the enemy, and they had to be defeated before they took us over.

“They breed like rabbits,” my father said.

“They spread like wildfire,” my mother warned.

It was one of the few subjects on which they were completely in agreement.

On my way to school I had to pass St. Patrick's, the primary school for Catholic children. The teachers were mostly nuns who lived in the convent next to the school. The school looked like any other school but the convent was hidden from the world behind a high beech hedge. In the wintertime I sometimes peered through the gaps in the hedge and saw dark figures swishing about in their robes. They looked so much more interesting than our teachers.

I made a friend called Mary McNamara, on whose mother's face my own mother professed to be able to see the map of Ireland. Though I looked hard, I was never able to find it. My mother said that Mary kicked with the left foot, which meant I wasn't allowed to be friends with her. The ban was strengthened by the fact that she lived in the scheme. But we usually left for school at the same time and would walk as far as St. Patrick's together. We soon discovered that our birthdays were just two days apart—hers was on 4 February, mine on 2 February. Mary told me I was really lucky to have that day as a birthday and she wished she could swap with me. When I asked why, she said that the second of February was Candlemas Day, the Feast of the Purification of Our Lady. They always had time off school that day for a special Mass when they consecrated all the candles that would be needed in the church for
the whole year. Consecration was evidently something the priest did with holy water and incense.

“Who's Our Lady?” I asked my parents when I got home. They looked completely horrified, so I explained, chirpily, that my birthday was apparently on the same day as Our Lady was purified.

“I'll Our Lady you!” thundered my father. “We'll have no Our Lady in this house!”

“Sorry,” I said.

“If there's any more Our Lady, you'll find out what sorry is!” he said.

There were often fights between the Papes and Prods (anyone who was not a Pape was a Prod), but when Mary was with me I was never picked on. Once, when she was off school with chicken-pox, a boy from St. Patrick's grabbed my schoolbag and threw it over the high hedge that surrounded the convent. When I went home without my bag and explained what had happened, my mother reacted with predictable fury. She immediately went to what we called the Special Drawer and took out a new pair of nylon stockings with seams up the back. This could mean only one thing—she was going to see the Mother Superior. As she pulled on her nylons, she nursed her ire. She would show her, give her what's for, put her gas on a peep. By the time she left the house the veins stood proud on her forehead. She wore her Sunday coat and her second-best feathered hat—essential accoutrements for a visit to the convent.

“I'll Mother Superior her!” was her parting shot.

My mother and I went to church every Sunday. My father had stopped going to church before I was born. Apparently he had
failed to get the contract for rebuilding the manse wall and had vowed never to go back. It was the principle of the thing, he said. I often longed for a principle like my father's so that I could stay at home and help him in the garden. In church we had our own pew with our name displayed in a small brass fitting at the end. Occasionally someone would sit in our pew by mistake. There was plenty of room, but according to my mother that was hardly the point. She would look daggers at the offending party and say in a loud highfalutin voice, “Excuse me, this is a private pew.” She appeared to relish the plosive sounds of
private pew.
At such times I wanted to die.