Ghosting (19 page)

I hated almost everything about having to go to church—my too tight coat with the astrakhan collar, the joyless atmosphere once we got there, the endless drone of the pulpit voice. At the beginning of the sermon my mother would surreptitiously pass me a pandrop which had to last the whole way through—on this point she was emphatic. I didn't ever dare bite the pandrop; in fact I tried not to suck it for fear it would disappear too quickly and upset my mother. Instead I would push it to a place of safety under my tongue and then open my mouth a fraction in the hope that the dry church air would preserve it. This was more difficult than it sounds. Sometimes, even when I concentrated hard, my mouth would fill with warm spit and the pandrop would dissolve before the sermon ended.

Mary McNamara was to take her First Communion.

“What's that?” I asked.

“It's when you get to wear a white dress in church,” she said. “Mine has a lace bodice, puffed sleeves and pearl sequins.”

It sounded wonderful. I asked if I could see it but we both knew
I wasn't allowed to visit her house. Mary said that maybe I could come to the rehearsal after school the next day. She would speak to the priest. I asked her if she was remembering I wasn't a Catholic.

“No, but you're a Christian, so that's all right.”

“I'm not a Christian,” I corrected her, “I'm a Protestant.”

I knew it was risking a lot to enter St. Patrick's Church, but it was a place of such out-of-bounds mysteriousness that I judged it worth the risk. Awe and trepidation were mixed together in roughly equal measures. There was a lot to take in—statues everywhere, angels on the ceiling, a huge wooden cross, and the smell of warm wax. I stood at the back waiting for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. The only light came from a few dozen candles flickering at the front. These would be the candles that had been sprinkled on my birthday, I supposed. The priest stood at the altar dressed in a long purple robe with gold round the edges. There were several nuns sitting halfway up the church. One or two of them turned round when they heard me come in and gave me a smile. After a few minutes, Mary and her friends entered by a side door. Just as she'd promised, they all wore pure white dresses complete with veils held on by rings of flowers. I suppose there must have been boys too, but I don't remember them. I had eyes only for Mary and the other girls. They walked towards the priest, a slow procession of miniature brides, their hands pressed together as in prayer. Mary had said it would not be the real thing, only a rehearsal, but I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful in my whole life. They all knew exactly what to do, when to bob up and down, when to kneel, when to make the sign of the cross. There was a lot going on in this church, much more than in our boring private pew.

I was late getting home. I had prepared a lie, but my mother was
no fool. When I confessed, she was truly appalled—much worse than I had feared.

“Wait till your father gets home,” was all she said.

That meant only one thing: the belt. The belt was made of thick leather with the end slit in two for maximum effectiveness. It was used in schools throughout Scotland to deal with every classroom crime imaginable. The belt was made in my home town, Lochgelly, in a dark little room at the back of John Dick's ironmongery. I often went with my father to the iron-mongery to have our garden tools sharpened. John Dick didn't look like the sort of person who would spend his life shaping bits of leather to punish children. He was a neat, amiable man in brown overalls, and at weekends he visited his sister Bella who lived near us. She had a touch of facial palsy and a husband called Agnew. John Dick didn't have any children of his own, but in my mind this hardly excused what he did for a living.

For minor lapses my father belted us on our outstretched hands. If it was a more serious offence we were belted on the backs of our legs. It seemed there was no offence more serious than visiting the chapel—our name for the Catholic Church.

The days in the Dordogne settled into a rhythm. Every third day or so Tiger paid a visit to the
antiquaire
in one or other of the surrounding villages. His reputation for spending money had spread throughout the Dordogne valley, and those in the antique trade always looked delighted when they saw the Mercedes draw up outside. Tiger knew what he wanted and invariably went straight to the point.

“Vous avez des femmes nues?”

It was more the sort of question that might be asked at the massage parlour, or so I thought the first time I heard it, but it was clear that the shop owners were quite used to this opening bat and more than happy to oblige.

“Bien sür, monsieur!”
All French gestures seem to be a variation of the shrug. Even when Frenchmen are enthusing and affirming, their shoulders go up and down.

“Complètement nues?”
Tiger would ask, for nakedness was not to be compromised.

“Bien sür, monsieur!”
Another expansive, how-could-you-doubt-me shrug.

“Entièrement nues?”

“Bien sür, monsieur! Nues comme les nunus!”
—naked as nudists. Shoulders, arms and hands would swing and sway at the prospect of a sale. In practice each
antiquaire
almost always had something
extraordinaire
to show Tiger—a painting or perhaps a sculpted figure, something special that had been kept “just for him.”

“Exprès pour vous, monsieur!”

Once in an antiques shop near Sarlat there was a wonderful happening that I felt privileged to witness. As soon as the antiquaire saw Tiger enter the premises his face lit up. Without waiting for the usual
femmes nues
enquiry, he took a key and unlocked the top drawer of his desk. He removed a large box which he handled with great care, confiding in a whisper to Tiger that what he was about to see was something truly
exceptionnel.
And it was.

The box contained a collection of original daguerreotypes—the results of an early photographic technique using silvered plates and mercury vapour—taken in the pleasure houses of Paris in the
last years of the nineteenth century.
*
The women in the photographs, unlike modern pin-ups and models, were well filled-out, and seemingly happily so. They were arranged in a variety of tempting poses and looked distinctly huggable and inviting. Although they seemed perfectly at ease with their bodies, a slight shyness came through in some of the pictures, perhaps because they were not used to being photographed rather than because of any doubts about their profession. Tiger pored over the plates, savouring every one, soughing the occasional
formidable
and
mag-nifique.
After a while, he closed the box and said:

“Combien?”

He had the look of a man who had searched for, and just found, the centre of human happiness.

The mornings were mostly taken up with visits to the market to buy the food for lunch. The kitchen was Tiger's domain. He loved cooking and prepared the most wonderful meals—fresh haricot beans in garlic oil and lemon juice, shiitake mushrooms in a herb marinade, salads straight from the garden. And sometimes we ate soft-boiled eggs freshly laid by the hens on the estate. “Did you ever taste anything so beautiful?” he would ask. He didn't only cook, but laid the table and served the wine like an experienced
maÎtre d‧.
Afterwards he would clear up, washing and wiping till everything sparkled. He never allowed me to help, and he became agitated if ever I offered. As with other areas of his life he was fastidious in his attention to detail. Nothing was left to chance. As we ate, he kept up a running commentary on the food, its preparation,
the health benefits it would confer, the character of the wine, the quality of the grape, and so on. At these times Tiger seemed deeply content.

In the early afternoons I would make my way to the studio with my laptop. The studio was some way from the main house, along a private track at the foot of the hillside, in the direction of the swimming pool and the original property. I thought of it as a kind of sanctuary, with its wraparound stillness, broken only by bird-song and the chirp of crickets. It consisted of a small kitchen and bathroom off a large open-plan room with a tiled floor and windows on three sides. The French doors opened to the south, but there was plenty of shade from the trees nearby. The light from the windows was also pleasantly dappled because of the wisteria and jasmine climbing up the outside walls. The creepers extended to the aviary next door, forming a canopy over the mesh construction that was home to dozens of exotic birds—parakeets, canaries, weavers, lovebirds and finches.
Tous les oiseaux du monde,
said the
gardien
when he came to feed them.

To be a writer you have to have something to say. But what did I have to say? Nothing at all. And even if I had things to say, would I know how to say them? Then did I
feel
anything, I asked myself? Not enough to write about it. And so, in the absence of feeling, I decided that it would have to be an exercise in technique.

Slowly, painfully, the book took shape.

Almost the one thing I didn't mind was that it was to be a love story. After all, what else is there? It's only half a life without love. And a novel would be nothing without it. The prospect of writing
about love was even faintly appealing. It is one of those eternal themes that can be endlessly reworked. But every silver lining has a cloud: as I had feared it might, love was coming perilously close to denoting sex.

Tiger was obsessively concerned with its place in the novel. Each day when I returned from the studio he would ask, “Have we done the fucky-fucky yet?” I counselled against it, as anyone in my place would have done, suggesting that discretion was the better part of ardour. But he pooh-poohed and said that a novel by him would be
unimaginable
without sex.

“Beloved, we
need
the jig-jig! Don't you
see
?”

He laughed and clapped his hands, willing me to share his enthusiasm. But I didn't want to see.

I held out for a long time, pointing out that countless authors had believed they could “do” sex in a novel and had ended up falling into a terrible black hole. I reminded him of the
Literary Review's
Bad Sex Prize, awarded annually by Auberon Waugh, a friend of Tiger's and a man who had made it his mission to discourage the tasteless and perfunctory use of sexual description in the modern novel. Surely he agreed with Bron? I argued that sex in the novel was nearly always bad sex, and that it was best avoided. I said that not even fine writers could manage it without sounding ridiculous or absurd or embarrassing. I argued that Jerry Hall—a woman he admired—was wrong when she claimed that bad sex writing was like bad sex, in that both were better than nothing. They were not better than nothing, I said. Nothing was better by far.

“You are talking like a
nun!”
he squealed. “What's got into you? Trust me, beloved, we will do the sex beautifully! It will be very distinguished.”

Distinguished
was one of Tiger's words. It covered a multitude
of sins. It was becoming clear that sex was an argument I was not going to win. My reservations, however, were not based on squea-mishness or prudishness. It was a matter of aesthetics. I sincerely believe that descriptions of lovemaking are high-risk for any writer. A lifetime's reading has convinced me that very few writers can manage them. Why should this be? Perhaps it's because the sexual act itself has little to do with words. And when it is put into words the inherent absurdity of trying to capture it is laid bare, in all senses.

The literary treatment of sex is beset with vexed questions. First there is the problem of getting the characters to take their clothes off—buttons and zips and hooks can be so awkward, and you couldn't ever allow a man to keep his socks on. Then there are the body parts which either have to be named (very unwise) or else replaced with dubious symbolism. And what about the verbs, the doing words? How can you choose to make people
enter, writhe, thrash, smoulder, grind, merge, thrust
—and still hope to salvage a smidgen of self-respect? Not easily. If you doubt me, try it. The sound effects are even worse—
squealing, screaming, the shriek of coitus.
(In the event I opted for
sobbing,
which caused the man in my life to raise an eyebrow and quickly became a matter of regret.) No, the English language does not lend itself to realistic descriptions of sex. We are too used to irony. The alternative is to use metaphors, but metaphors are just asking for more trouble—all that edge of volcano and burning fire stuff. Some people claim that sex sounds better in French, and I'm inclined to agree, but that may be because just about everything sounds better in French.