Ghosting (32 page)

“Amazing,” said Tiger, “who would have believed it?”

The agony with The Greek lasted more than a year. As the Bank stepped up the pressure, disaster seemed inevitable. The days in the palace had become a living hell for everyone, and with Tiger
in extremis
it seemed even more impossible to make a run for it. The secretary, unable to stand it any longer, had already fled, and though her shadow had once been light, she was nonetheless denounced as a she-devil and a traitor. Those of us who remained
spoke in hushed voices among ourselves and continued with our allotted tasks. The cook produced splendid lunches to delight Tiger's palate, Girl Friday massaged his head and pushed back his cuticles, and I got on with writing the next line.

The journey to Frankfurt in 1999 was unusually grim. Right up to the last moment the trip was in doubt—“How can I go when I have this crisis?” he kept saying, though the situation had gone on for too long to be called a crisis. Only the requirement to be seen at the Book Fair made it happen. “We have to be seen, otherwise we're dead.” He was wearing a burgundy shahtoosh—a delicate wool scarf made from the hair of the wild Tibetan antelope, a critically endangered species. “Feel it! It's much softer than pashmina. The antelope hair is so much nicer than the goat hair, so much nicer. A whole shahtoosh can fit through the ring on your finger!” At the airport I handed over my passport meekly and followed him through the boarding-gate and down the tunnel to the aeroplane. Sometimes you don't need to see a man's face to know how he is feeling. You can tell from the way he walks, you can even tell from the back of his head.

Everything proceeded smoothly from bad to worse. The atmosphere was baleful. To survive the journey, I tried to concentrate on lines of poetry and pieces of music, hoping to drive out malign forces in the shape of mobiles and Greeks and banks. Once we landed in Germany, I absorbed the language around me, listening in on conversations, reading newspapers over people's shoulders. German was much safer than English.

We arrived at the hotel in the late afternoon, the same luxury hotel in Kaiser Friedrich Platz. “We must continue to live well,” said Tiger, heading for the presidential suite. “We must never compromise
our standards.” He told me to be ready to go down for dinner in one hour and fifty minutes. I lay on the bed and let my head empty. Blissful to be alone.

Five minutes early, in good time for dinner, I knock at the room of the presidential suite and wait for the usual “Come!” Nothing happens. Perhaps he is in his bathroom, I think, so I wait outside for a decent interval, long enough to allow for a chain-pull and hand-washing. But as I wait I hear a terrible sound—not the sound of a flushing loo or hands being washed, but the sound of a man sobbing. Slowly, tentatively, I open the door and see him sitting at the leather-topped desk, head in hands. I approach the desk hesitantly, saying his name so that I don't startle him, but because of the sobbing he doesn't hear me, so I say it louder, and he looks up, his vision blurred by his sad salt tears. There are few images from art or from life that can still evoke universal pity and compassion: one is that of a man weeping. Especially a man like Tiger who is not given to weeping, or who is afraid to weep, or perhaps has forgotten how to weep. I go round to his side of the desk and put my arm on his shoulder. He is making quiet, choking noises. I ask what's happened, what's the matter, what's wrong, the way helpless people do when they want to help but know they can't. And in any case, there's no need to ask, for I
know
what's wrong. The Bank—that's what's wrong. There is no other possibility. They have pulled the plug. It's all over. Tiger hands me a sheet of shiny fax paper—confirmation from the Bank. Liquidation. Ruination. End of Empire.

But it's not from the Bank. It's from the
gardien
in the Dor-dogne and this is what he has written:

This moment lives with me still. The tight mask had slipped and I felt I had glimpsed another man hidden inside the man I had known all these years. A vulnerable man, broken by the death of a dog.

Once it was over, however, it was as if it had never happened. This place, the place where he had wept, was at such depths of concealment that he could not remain there for long.

There is no normal perspective in this story. It is not a rounded picture. For me, it is a way of gaining a little purchase on some things that happened long ago and not so long ago. If it were a painting, we would think the composition lopsided, asymmetrical, in some way foreshortened. The size, the relative positions, and the point where the earth meets the sky—all these would be distorted. In a sense, it is more like a child's drawing where the most important part, the clue to the workings of the child's mind, is out of proportion to the rest of the picture.

Everyone tells stories. And all story-tellers are liars—not to be trusted. They have an excessive need to make sense of experience, and so things get twisted and shaped to suit. It need not be deliberate, but it's as well to admit that it happens. We fumble about in the fog, and patterns come to us eerily like distant foghorns over water. We put forward versions of ourselves. And versions of others.

What is known about any man is finite, but what is not known is infinite. Others who worked for Tiger might say, no, this is not the man I know. Or perhaps, yes, this is the man, but only in some
measure, not the whole man. What they would probably all confirm is that he lived as people rarely do nowadays, dangerously and passionately. His obsessive personality could cause fury and despair in those around him, but his faults were all tangled up with virtues. And a warm heart more than made up for the failings. In an age of big business publishing characterised by remoteness and detachment, he was heroically original and human.

The Greek turned out to be a charlatan, not so much a crook as a terrible fantasist. “Can you
believe
it!” Tiger squealed, as though it were a shock. But the main feeling seemed to be one of relief that it was finally over. Accountants moved in, but there was no dramatic Fall of Empire, no moonlight flit. They did their job and spoke calmly of temporary liquidity issues. Everything was going to be fine. And like a phoenix—a phoenix come true—Tiger rose from the ashes, wearing his brightest colours and finest jewels. Before long there was talk of the next book. “I have an idea—we could do a big book on God.” It was definitely time to leave now.

When Tiger realised I was serious he announced his retirement from the literary world. The last thing to be written was a valediction. It was styled, in Donne's beautiful line, a valediction forbidding mourning. Poetic to the end.

Three months later, I left the palace bearing the gift of a Mont Blanc pen. “We made a great team, you and I,” he said as we hugged each other goodbye. In Regent Street I caught a No. 12 bus and tears fell all the way to Waterloo.

Things would never be different again.

The author and publishers acknowledge the following sources of quotations reproduced in this book on the pages listed.

pp. 94-95: Germaine Greer, “The Sultan of Soho and his harem,”
The Observer Magazine,
11 October 1987.

p. 103: (Enoch Powell): Naim Attallah,
Of a Certain Age,
Quartet Books, 1992, p. 235, reproduced by kind permission of the author.

pp. 103–4: (Mary Soames, Diana Mosley): Naim Attallah,
Asking Questions,
Quartet Books, 1996, pp. 451-2, 278, reproduced by kind permission of the author.

p. 104: (Francis Stuart): Naim Attallah,
In Conversation with Naim Attallah,
Quartet Books, 1998, p. 315, reproduced by kind permission of the author.

p. 118: Henry Miller,
The Colossus of Maroussi,
Penguin, 1950.

pp. 136-7: Gillian Glover, “Cat who got the cream,”
The Scotsman,
18 November 1994.

pp. 142, 154-5,155-6, 158-9, 159-60: Naim Attallah,
A Timeless Passion,
Quartet Books, 1995, pp. 1, 75, 75-6, 98, 30, 82-5, reproduced by kind permission of the author.

p. 157: Carole Mansur, “Murder, metaphor and mystery,”
The Daily Telegraph,
1995.

p. 157: Ulick O'Connor, “Less sex please,”
The Oldie,
June 1995.

p. 157: Cristina Odone, “A lusty Beatrice leads her Dante,”
The Catholic Herald,
9 June 1995.

pp. 179, 180, 192-4, 195-6, 200-1, 201-2, 202-3, 204-5, 206-7, 208, 210: Naim Attallah,
Tara and Claire,
Quartet Books, 1996, p. 1, flyleaf, pp. 175-7, 131-2, 47, 106, 115-16, 148-9, 166-7, 167-8, 120, reproduced by kind permission of the author.

pp. 212-3: Nicola McAllister,
The Daily Telegraph,
Saturday Review, 23 November 1996.

p. 214: Alice Thomas Ellis, “A sensitivity unusual in a man,”
The Literary Review,
October 1996.

p. 222: Adam Nicolson, “All that twinkles,”
The Sunday Telegraph Magazine,
9 June 1996.

p. 222: Andrew Biswell,
The Independent,
22 July 1995.

p. 233: Philip Larkin, “This be the verse,”
High Windows,
Faber and Faber, 1974.

p. 259: Naim Attallah, “Knickers in a twist,”
The Erotic Review,
Nov.-Dec. 1998.

pp. 260, 261: Letters,
The Erotic Review,
March 1999.