Ghosting (28 page)

“Is what true?”

“About the phoenix. I was so moved I nearly wept. But is it
true?”

“Well, mythologically speaking, it's true.”

“It's amazing! I love it!”

There was something endearing about this, in much the same way as when children ask after a bedtime story: Did they
really
? Is it
true
? And something that provoked similar feelings of fond pro-tectiveness. Indeed Tiger could be heart-movingly open to new knowledge—the history of ideas, natural laws, classical references, biblical quotations, and so on. Provided there was no trace of condescension, and Occam's razor was applied to every explanation, he would embrace well-known facts as marvellous new discoveries, greeting them with a radiant, childlike wonder. Or occasionally, if my attempt to explain something didn't quite come off, he would listen politely in a state of baffled incomprehension, but with eyes displaying a kind of clever-buggers-these-Chinese look. I liked this side of him. It was guileless and open-hearted. But every so often I sneered inwardly at his ignorance of something or other. How could he not know
that!
—I gasped, looking down on him from my cruel smug perch on Mount Parnassus. I hate myself for that now. Tiger knew many things I didn't know. Besides, Orwell was probably right: ignorance is strength.

As often as not, however, Tiger didn't like what I'd done with
the column, and this would lead to contentious phone calls often stretching over several hours as I tried to shape it to his satisfaction. And sometimes, even the beloved allusions could go terribly wrong. Once, for example, I began a piece with:

• They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
  

• They may not mean to, but they do.
  

“Are you
crazy
?” Tiger's phone calls were all mid-stream specimens—he didn't mess around with
hello, how are you
formalities. “You want to get us sacked?”

“What's the problem?”

“Beloved, we can't say
fuck!
I don't believe you put it! No newspaper will let us say
fuck!”

“Well, we can put three asterisks if you like.”

“Asterisks? No, I don't like asterisks. We have to find another word.”

“But it's a quote. From Larkin. It says so in the next line.”

“So you mean it's not something we say?”

“No, it's Philip Larkin. It's poetry.”

“Poetry?”

A pause. Poetry—this could change things.

“Yes, it's poetry.”

He thought for a moment. I held my breath. Would poetry prevail?

“No, we still can't do it. We have to find another word. Have you got pen and paper? Let's say, ‘they
screw
you up, your mum and dad.’ There, we've solved it.”

He was also sensitive to repetition in any shape or form, even if it was intended for stylistic effect, or when it was entirely innocuous
as with repeated pronouns or common verbs. The first thing he did when I faxed the finished copy was to hunt down a repeated word and ring me up with his findings. “There is
repetition!
he would say, triumphantly, loftily. I found
three
‘takes.’ We have to throw two of them.” And sometimes—this fascinated me—he would object to a particular word, not a word that was in any way improper or out of place; but a perfectly harmless, unoffending, plain, ordinary, innocent sort of word. For example, he hated the word
befell,
as in “a tragedy befell the country,” such a word could spoil a whole day, never mind a tabloid text. By the same token, he would never allow
quantity,
though he couldn't quite say why. “I just don't like it,” he said, pulling a bad-smell sort of face, though when pressed he said that it wasn't poetic. Which was true after all. As well as proscribed words he also had favourites, and I learned to scatter them like seed:
wisdom, mystique, serenity, exquisite, perilous, beguiling
and, most beloved of all,
vicissitudes.
“Ah, vicissitudes—such a wonderful word …”

Once I used the word
humility,
as in “I felt a deep sense of humility”—to explain how Tiger had felt in the presence of a woman he very much admired and who had borne a heavy cross. I was confident that he would love
humility.
But he didn't.

“Isn't it the same like
humiliation?”
he asked.

I thought: up to a linguistic point, Lord Copper. But what I said was:

“I think humility is the right word in this context. It's to do with feeling humble in comparison to her strength and courage.” He wasn't convinced.

“Humble … humble,” he said, trying it out for size, “no, it's not good for me.”

And then, with the thoroughness of a lexicographer, he did an
eyes-closed sift and search for the right word. When he found it, he said:

“I've got it! I've got it!
Foreboding.
Listen—” I felt a deep sense of foreboding. “It's much better. Write it down.”

This is Lewis Carroll territory, I thought.

But I held out for humility. Foreboding never moved anyone to tears, I said, whereas humility could pack a powerful punch. Nothing else would do. When the piece appeared he received a letter from the woman's husband, the editor of a broadsheet newspaper, saying how moved he had been and confirming that “we all feel humility in her presence.” Tiger, jubilant, rang me up and read me the letter.

“Aren't you pleased now we said
humility?”
he cooed.

Anyone who has written a weekly column will know that after a while it exerts a kind of tyranny. Although it appears just once a week, the other six days are also affected, each day slightly different from the next depending on its position relative to the deadline. Copy for Tiger's column was required on a Wednesday for publication on a Friday. On the Thursday the newspaper sent a proof to him by fax, and he then faxed it on to me. It is not easy to read—far less to proofread—a fax of a fax of newspaper print. The text is blurred, the punctuation unclear, the precious semi-colons
obliterated. I asked Tiger to arrange for the newspaper to fax me the proof directly, but he wouldn't hear of it. Several typos slipped through the net in this way.

Fridays were the best days for both of us: it was the single day I didn't have to think about the column, and for Tiger the pleasure of it appearing in the newspaper was more than enough. He bought lots of copies: one for keeping in a leather-bound file and the others to give to guests invited to his new Soho palace. I came to love Fridays—their relative quietness and normality. But the other days assumed a pitiless momentum. In a previous existence I used to think that people probably dashed off columns over a cup of coffee. How could I ever have believed that? It could take over your whole life if you weren't careful.

Because of the column I wasn't allowed to have holidays. “We don't want to lose our slot,” said Tiger, his voice taking on a low, death knell pitch. And because the pieces had to be topical, they couldn't be written in advance and banked. Sometimes I forgot I was a man and wrote something careless. I once described (in the first-person) how Tiger responded to a stressful situation by curling up on a sofa with a hot-water bottle and cucumber patches on his eyes. “But that's ludicrous!” said N-H when he read it in the newspaper. “That's what
you
do. No man would ever do that!” In desperation I made a decision: I would think about the column only on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. That way there would be four remaining days—more than half the week in fact— in which to sort out my head and restore the balance necessary for A Happy Home Life.

But this worked only for a short time. As the months passed and the column became established, Tiger was content just to choose the subject and leave the rest to me, provided we went
through the normal rituals of reading aloud, repetition checks, and so on at the end. Which would have been fine, except that he became pathologically anxious about the deadline being met. His anxiety levels could be calibrated by the number of phone calls he made to check on progress—“How are we doing? Are we winning? Are we nearly there?”—until the daily tally was scarcely to be borne. He seemed determined that the column should occupy my frontal lobes at all times.

When I first started working for Tiger he had paid for a dedicated telephone line to be installed in my house. My children called this The Hotline—they knew from an early age never to pick it up—and the name had stuck. Its ring, though distinct, was perfectly ordinary, but it carried such undertones of urgency that the whole family reacted whenever it rang and there would be a chorus of
“Quick! It's The Hotline!”
If I was speaking on the other phone in the house, I used to hang up immediately whenever The Hotline rang. Tiger didn't like to be kept waiting, and in any case he just kept ringing till I answered. Friends at the other end of the phone sometimes got upset about this—what could possibly be so urgent and why couldn't I ring
him
back, they asked—and they chided me for being a complete pushover. One even wrote me a stiff letter on the subject, breaking off our friendship, saying my behaviour was offensive, that he and his wife felt badly treated and that they were sure other friends felt the same. But it's my job, I said pathetically, as if that explained everything. When I moved house in 1995 The Hotline came with me, and I had extensions fitted in the kitchen and the sitting room, as well as my work-space in the garden. N-H drew the line at our bedroom. “We are not sleeping with The Hotline,” he said.

The Hotline was never so hot as during the years of the newspaper
column. It started ringing at 8:30
A.M.
and it continued shrilly throughout the day. One day I counted the calls, drawing a line of a stick man on the gallows each time the phone rang. At the end of the day there was a graveyard of forty-seven lines and five hanged men. Tiger was rhetorically committed to reasonableness—“I don't want to disturb you,” he sometimes said when he rang in the evening or at weekends, but he seemed unable to help himself. In fact, I think he meant well and saw it as his way of helping
me.
Even on Fridays he was already thinking about the following week's column—we
must
find someone,
who
is in the spotlight? Who can we write about? This was all part of the teamwork. Sometimes he got fretful: My God, this is terrible, he would say, we're running out of women. On Saturdays he would scour the newspapers for a suitable subject, and if he failed to find one, he bought the early editions of Sunday newspapers, available in London on Saturday night, and intensified his search, phoning me at frequent intervals to discuss the options, occasionally edging towards hysteria. “Time is running out. We
have
to find a woman.”

In the beginning, N-H complained very little, but I knew he was nursing a slow-burning resentment. “It's too much,” he sometimes said, “he's too big in your life.” And so The Hotline became a sort of barometer of domestic harmony. Its ring could stop a marital moment in its tracks, sending a sudden depth-charge through our Shangri-La. I had been so programmed over the years to respond immediately that I found it impossible to ignore and would leap across the room like some mad thing. “Leave it! Just leave it!” N-H sometimes said, but there was no point. Tiger could outring any resolve ofthat sort.

Things came to a head one Saturday evening. We were hosting a dinner party for some visiting speakers to the university. Dinner
parties in St. Andrews can be nerve-racking occasions—getting the academic mix right, being prepared to talk about post-structuralism while serving linguini, making out that a small medieval town in the East Neuk of Fife is at the centre of the intellectual universe, trying to appear competent and nonchalant at the same time. On this occasion, however, things were going well, and we were feeling rather pleased with the shape of the evening. Until The Hotline rang.

Whereupon N-H, who has a naturally accommodating vision of the world and a serene manner with his fellow man, quite forgot himself and leapt to his feet, shaking his fist, raging at a nameless adversary, and screaming blue murder in my direction:
“Kill that fucking phone, will you! Just tell him to fuck off and leave us in peace, for fuck's sake!”
As I grabbed the phone and left the room there were concerned looks, which seemed to say: It's just a phone ringing, isn't it? Does he always react like this when the phone rings? Why, only a moment ago, this gentle, quiet man was filling our glasses with Pinot Grigio, and now he is completely deranged. Perhaps the sea air does this to people after a while …

“This can't go on,” said N-H after everyone had gone home.

“No, it can't,” I said.