Ghostwriting (2 page)

Ashworth stared at him. “What?”

“I’m a rationalist,” Russell said, “a believer in science. I’m also a novelist.”

At the word, Ashworth opened his eyes wide and said: “I don’t see...” he began.

Russell reached into his bag and pulled out the large manilla envelope containing his manuscript. He laid it upon his lap.

“I’m confident your experiences were no more than horrible coincidence. Please, so you can gain peace of mind, read this. At least, begin to read it.”

“I couldn’t!”

“There have been greater coincidences,” Russell began. “Four times is nothing...”

For the next half hour, as the train carried the two men through the winter wastes of the midlands, Russell worked at persuading Ashworth. There was something in his fervour, he realised as he spoke, of the missionary in his desire to enlighten, and save, the fear-ridden old man.

Only once did Russell consider the possibility that Ashworth’s story might be a mere tale, a ruse concocted for some unknown reason – but he soon dismissed the idea. Russell felt that Ashworth was too convincing in his recounting of his abject fear, too honest in his retelling of events, to be a liar.

It took Russell perhaps an hour to persuade Ashworth that the only way to rationally abolish his fears would be to begin the novel.

At last he laid the bulky package upon Ashworth’s lap, like an offering, and said: “Please, read it. You have time to read fifty pages before we reach London.”

“But what if...? I mean, I would have it on my conscience—”

“Superstitious fear!” Russell jibed. “For your own peace of mind, read it!”

As Ashworth reluctantly reached into the envelope, Russell stood. “I’m going to find the refreshment trolley. I’ll leave you to it.”

As he moved off along the carriage, he was aware of Ashworth bowing his head over the bulky ream, and he felt something of the satisfaction of an evangelist having made a convert.

He found the refreshment trolley and bought a coffee. Rather than rejoin Ashworth and distract him, he sat and stared through the window. He would let the oldster read for a while, and then rejoin him. He had never felt comfortable in the presence of someone reading his own work, anyway.

He finished his coffee and lay back his head, and the motion of the carriage lulled him into a light slumber.

He was awoken by the deceleration of the train as it drew into Kings Cross. He was disoriented for a second, and then recalled where he was, and recalled too his strange encounter with the old man. Thinking of Ashworth he stood and hurried back to where they had been sitting, half expecting the man to have vanished, the encounter to have been the figment of a dream.

But Ashworth was still in his seat, inserting the manuscript back into its manilla envelope.

“I hope you enjoyed it,” Russell began, taking his seat.

Ashworth smiled bleakly. “It was certainly...
different
, but I wanted to read on.”

Russell smiled. “I’ll send you a signed copy when it comes out.”

Ashworth nodded. “I certainly hope so...”

Smiling, Russell said: “How long in the past has it taken for the author to...” he gestured.

“Never more than six hours,” Ashworth said. “I sincerely hope—”

Russell interrupted: “Is there some way I can contact you tonight, after eight, with the good news that I’m still in the land of the living?”

Ashworth reached into the inner pocket of his suit and withdrew a retractable pencil and a notebook. He ripped out a page and in a meticulous hand set down a phone number. “The hotel where I’m staying tonight. I’m leaving early in the morning for Southampton. I’m going on a three month cruise of the Caribbean.”

“I’ll phone you after eight,” Russell promised.

The train drew into the station and the passengers gathered their belongings.

They stood, and Ashworth offered his hand. “Thank you for... for your understanding,” he said, but would not meet Russell’s gaze.

“The pleasure has been mine,” Russell said with a formality that, on reflection, made him smile.

They stepped from the train.

The last Russell saw of Ashworth, the old man was a sprightly, old-fashioned figure hurrying along the platform with his suitcase.

~

Russell checked into his hotel, showered and changed and, at seven, made his way to the Groucho club. A few of his fellow scribblers – Brooke and Ballantyne, among others – were slouching at the bar. He joined them, ordered a pint, and joined in the shop-talk.

Eight o’clock came and went without any sign of Edmund Perry – which was no surprise. Perry was one of the worst time-keepers Russell had ever met.

He glanced at his watch and announced to the group: “Well, I’m still alive.”

Brooke cocked an eye. “Expecting a visit from the Grim Reaper?”

“I had an interesting encounter on the train down,” Russell said. “I’ll tell you all about it later. I have a quick phone-call to make.”

Leaving behind him a barrage of quizzical expressions, Russell stepped into the corridor and got through to Ashworth’s hotel on his mobile. Seconds later he was speaking to the old man.

“Russell?” Ashworth said. “Is that really you, Russell?”

“None other. I thought I’d ring to say I’m fighting fit and never felt better.”

“My Goodness,” Ashworth sounded overcome. “My word, what a relief! You can’t imagine what I’ve been through. The second I stepped from the station I forgot all about your rational explanations. You don’t know how good it is to hear your voice!”

“It’s been well over six hours now,” Russell laughed. “Take my advice. Go out and buy yourself a pile of good books for your holiday.”

Ashworth sounded as if he were near to tears. “I will. I will indeed. In fact, I’ll find a bookshop first thing and pick up some of your novels.”

Russell smiled to himself. “You do that,” he said.

“You don’t know how much you’ve helped me, Russell. I feel as if a curse has finally been lifted!”

“I’m delighted for you,” Russell said. “Have a great holiday – and happy reading!”

He made his farewells and cut the connection. He was still smiling to himself when he returned to the bar.

“Out with it,” Ballantyne said. “We’re all ears...”

So he filled the next thirty minutes with the story of his odd encounter, and like the beer it went down well.

At nine, with still no sign of the tardy Perry, they decided to adjourn to a nearby Chinese restaurant and left word at the bar in case Perry turned up late. The following morning, after too many bottles of Tsingtao lager, Russell woke up with a thick head and only fleeting memories of the night before.

He skipped breakfast and made his way to his publishers on Fulham Road, his new manuscript a pleasing weight in his shoulder bag.

Carstairs met him in reception and showed him up to his office on the third floor. It was, in essence, little more than a cubby-hole, filled with the publisher’s latest titles and stacked manuscripts. Every square metre of available wall space was taken up with paperback covers and garish posters.

Carstairs sat behind his desk and Russell eased himself into a swivel chair, delving into his bag for the manuscript.

His editor made his habitual performance of rubbing his hands, as if in anticipation of a feast, and pulled the manilla envelope towards him.

“I’ve been looking forward to this one for a long time,” he said. He would have a quick riffle through the typescript, as usual, and then suggest a decent restaurant.

“Well, I hope you won’t be disappointed,” Russell said. “It’s something of a departure...”

Carstairs glanced at the title page, frowned, and quickly turned to the first page. He flicked through the pages, glancing at the headers.

Then he looked up at Russell and smiled. “Have you and Perry decided to deliver each other’s manuscripts?” he asked.

“What?”

Carstairs laughed. “I don’t know how this happened, but this is Edmund’s latest. Wasn’t expecting it till next week.”

“Bloody hell!” Russell said. “I was reading it for him last thing Monday night. I picked up the wrong bloody manuscript...”

He thought, then, of his encounter with Ashworth on the train yesterday – and tried to dismiss the fears that followed.

“I’ll post the manuscript as soon as I get back,” he promised.

“That’ll be fine,” Carstairs said. “How about the Bistro? I have a little project I think you might be interested in.”

“Sounds good to me,” Russell said, an annoying disquiet spoiling his anticipation.

They were leaving the office when the phone rang. “One second,” Carstairs said. “I’ll just get that.”

As his editor returned to his desk, Russell’s heart set up a fearful hammering.

Carstairs picked up the phone. “What?” he said after a second. “My God...” He slumped into his seat, ashen. “When was that? A heart attack? Jesus Christ, poor Edmund.”

Russell clutched at the door-frame, feeling faint.

Carstairs replaced the receiver and stared at Russell. “That was Edmund’s agent. Edmund died last night. Massive heart attack.”

Edmund... dead? But the man was too vital, too larger than life, to be
dead
.

It couldn’t be, could it, that there was some link to the events of the day before? Of course not – it had to be coincidence. It had to be...

The world was logical, rational!

But Ashworth had read Edmund’s manuscript, and now the writer was dead. He was assailed by sudden wave of guilt, even though he knew it to be irrational.

Only then did he consider what Ashworth had told him on the phone the night before. The room faded and he slipped to the floor.

“I’ll find a bookshop first thing and pick up some of your novels...” Ashworth had told him.

“Russell?” Carstairs called out, rushing around his desk. “Russell? Oh, my God...”

The last thing Russell saw, before losing consciousness, was his editor reaching out to feel for his pulse.

Beauregard

He came back into my life on the evening of the first snowfall of winter. In retrospect the advent of bad weather might have been seen as something of a harbinger. The phone call that interrupted my work – I have never been able to consider the shrill ring of a phone as a summons, only an alarm – was unwelcome, as I was beginning the final chapter of a novelisation that had to be finished by the end of the week. More unwelcome still were the words that greeted me.

“Simon Charrington?” It was my name, spoken in a voice marinated over the years in a fatal combination of whisky and tobacco smoke. “Simon? Are you there?”

“Beauregard? Christ, is it really you?”

“I’m in the village,” he said by way of a reply. “How do I find you?”

Numbed, I gave him directions.

He was as laconic as ever. “See you soon.”

I sat in the armchair in the darkened study, illuminated only by the aqueous glow of the computer screen, and contemplated what I had done. I told myself that I should have lied, said that Simon Charrington had moved away from the village years ago – but then I recalled that you could not lie to Beauregard: he saw through dissimulation and deceit. Such was the acuity of his mind that I fancied, back then, he could read my every thought.

Back then
. Was it really twenty years since we had shared a room at Cambridge? In my memory the events of that last term were at once paradoxically clear and maddeningly vague: that is, I have impressions of what happened, but I am unsure, to this day, as to quite how they happened.

I cannot recall how I first met Beauregard, which, considering his singular character and appearance, I consider a strange failing. He seemed to be around our group, hovering on the periphery, for about a term before he introduced himself.

He was a mature student in his late twenties, though he struck me as being even older: he wore a soiled greatcoat, always buttoned, and his aquiline face was emphasised by the recession of his hairline.

He gave the girls the creeps, and even Paul and Dave found his company repellent. He had about him an aura of mystery and dissolute pathos that I considered intriguing. I had recently decided that I wanted to devote my life to the writing of great novels, and I made the beginner’s mistake of assuming that I had to actively seek my subject matter, rather than allow it to come to me.

I soon became obsessed with Beauregard. He was that which I had never before happened upon: a true original in a world populated by jejune copies. Although he never said as much in conversation, he disdained the modern world and all its meretricious and commercial trappings: while we were reading Fowles and Pirsig, he would immerse himself for days at a time in crumbling and dusty tomes he brought back from forays to antiquarian bookshops in London and Edinburgh. He was studying medieval history, and laboriously compiling a thesis on mysticism of the Twelfth Century, and in consequence he seemed to inhabit the world in body only: in mind, he was forever elsewhere.

Long into the early hours he would regale me with the results of his studies: he would tell me of worlds within the world we know, of realms that existed in the minds of philosophers, an onion skin series of realities that for him existed because they had been granted brief if incandescent life in the dreams of obscure thinkers and persecuted mystics.

I cannot recall my exact reaction to his hushed, late-night monologues describing the lore of alchemy and abstruse magic. In the company of my other friends I played the sardonic sceptic; with Beauregard I came fleetingly to perceive the disturbing possibility of a truth that existed independently of my quotidian perceptions.

Then he met Sabine, a German girl as strange in her own way as Beauregard: a slim, introverted Classics student, almost pathologically shy. They were seen together setting out on, or returning from, long walks, though they never frequented the usual student haunts. I cannot recall ever saying above a dozen words to Sabine – perhaps I was resentful of her having taken my friend – and I cannot claim to have known her. The others of my group were secretly gratified that his liaison with the German student, as they called her, meant that he had less time for us.

I could not claim to have been grief stricken when Sabine was found hanging from an oak tree in the ancient forest beyond the college buildings, though naturally I was shocked. I tried to talk to Beauregard, but he was even more withdrawn than usual. He left Cambridge not long after, and it was ten years before I saw him again. He called at my flat in London, having obtained the address from a mutual university acquaintance, drank all the alcohol I had in the house and said little: it seemed that the years had built between us an insurmountable barrier. I tried to talk of our time at university, but he had gestured with his hand-rolled cigarette, as if to say the memories were too painful; I questioned him about what he was doing, but elicited little response. He spoke drunkenly of a book he was writing, though his description of its subject made little sense to me. I felt that he despised my materialism, and the shallow books I wrote at the behest of publishers eager for competent prose from someone who could meet a deadline.

That was ten years ago, and I had never seen him since: I had thought of him, though, often wondered what a man so unsuited to the modern world might be doing to get by. It seemed, now, that I might at last find out.

~

If I considered a phone call more of an alarm than a summons, then a knock at the door was tantamount to an intrusion. I jumped as the hollow thumps echoed through the house. I must have been daydreaming for longer than I thought. It seemed only a matter of a minute or two since I had spoken to him on the phone.

Taking a breath, I moved to the hall and opened the door. The first thing I noticed was not Beauregard, but the fact that a rapid snowfall had lain down a thick sparkling mantle beneath the light of the stars.

Then he stepped from where he had been trying to peer in through the window, and against the effulgent snowfield he bulked taller than I recalled, more stooped; his hair had receded further and his long face seemed even more attenuated.

“Simon,” he greeted me. He held out a hand, and I shook it. It was icy. I ushered him inside, only then noticing that he was wearing a greatcoat – though surely not
the
greatcoat of twenty years ago?

He stepped past me and paused on the threshold of my untidy study. His gaze seemed to take in everything with a silent though censorious regard, and I was transported back twenty years, to the time when I could not help but feel unworthy in his presence. He seemed to look upon those about him with silent disdain that antagonised many people. Perhaps it was a measure of my own lack of confidence that I felt his censure, then as now, was not wholly unwarranted.

I gestured to an armchair and turned on a nearby lamp. Beauregard winced at the sudden illumination, dumped his battered rucksack into the chair and sat upon the arm, where he proceeded to roll himself an impossibly thin cigarette.

I made some ill-judged comment, along the lines that he reminded me of a dissolute Withnail, though of course the popular cultural reference was lost on him. A line from Horace he might have acknowledged; of film lore he was ignorant.

I babbled small talk, asking him how he had travelled here, how he was keeping. As was his wont he made no reply, merely fixed me with an occasional sardonic half-smile.

In the light of the lamp I could see that the passage of years had not left him unscathed. His eyes were rheumy, and the skin around them had the thin blue translucence often seen in alcoholics and the ill. His fingers, as they painstakingly manufactured the roll-up, trembled as if afflicted by more than just the cold he had escaped.

“Can I get you something? Tea? Coffee?”

He looked up, fixed me briefly. “Tea. Black. Don’t you remember?”

“Of course. Black tea. I’ll be back in a second...”

It was with relief that I took refuge in the kitchen. The reality of Beauregard was coming back to me, the essence of the man that was impossible to recreate fully when considering him at a remove of years: he was so unlike anyone else I had ever met, so impossible to locate in terms of where he stood as regard culture and values, that I had the eerie sensation of being in the presence of an alien; that is, of someone not of this world. It was a feeling I had forgotten over the years, but as it returned now I began to sympathise with my friends at university, Dave and Paul, Cathy and Sue, who detested Beauregard and could not abide his presence.

I returned with the tea-tray. He had slipped down into the arm chair, his long legs, encased in baggy brown cords, stretched out towards the open fire.

He accepted the mug without a word, took a mouthful, and topped it up with alcohol from a silver hip flask.

I fetched an ashtray as his roving eye sought a place to deposit the foul smelling ash of his cigarette.

“So...” I said, “it’s been a long time – ten years?”

He ignored me. His eye had alighted on the glass-fronted bookcase in which I kept copies of my published work. “Still writing, Simon?” he asked, as if it had been a passing phase out of which I might have grown.

I nodded. “Keeps the wolf from the door,” I said, and immediately regretted it. I recalled the disdain with which he regarded those who compromised in order to get by.

He was rapidly thawing out before the dancing flames, and the process brought back another aspect of the man I had conveniently forgotten over the years: Beauregard had a body odour as distinctive as it was strong. I recalled debating with Dave and Sue as to the exact essence of the perfume: I think I described it at the time as something like the reek of an old jungle temple, leaf mould and guano. Now this compost odour filled the room.

 
“I must say, this is a surprise,” I waffled. “What have you been up to lately?”

It was some time before he replied. He took a mouthful of his charged tea, then a sharp inhalation of his cigarette.

“Travelling,” he said.

“Anywhere interesting?” I winced as I said this. What was it about Beauregard that made my every comment crass and ignorant? Wasn’t
everywhere
interesting, if one approached it with curiosity?

He nodded, his liquid eyes seeing far away places. “Patna, Kathmandu, Lhasa...”

I nodded, as if I were familiar with these cities.

“Working?”

He shook his head. Silly question. “Studying. Thinking. Reading.”

He always had been a voracious reader of obscure texts. He spoke at least six languages, read six more.

He swung his long head and stared at me. “I’ve seen things, Simon. I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe.”

I nodded, prepared to believe him, but was aware as I did so that I did not want him to tell me of these things.

Thankfully he seemed disinclined to go on.

“So you’ve been away for ten years?” I asked, feeling compelled to stoke the conversation.

He nipped the tab of his cigarette and inhaled with miserly economy, looked at me through the smoke, and nodded. “Almost ten years. Walked across Europe, through Greece, Turkey.”

“Walked all the way?”

“All the way, though in eastern Turkey I bought a horse. Rode through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and into India.”

I nodded, wondering whether to believe him. He rode through Iran and Afghanistan at the height of the troubles there?

I wanted to ask him how he paid his way – but there were some things that I had never enquired of Beauregard. I did not know his first name; nor his place of birth; I had no idea if he had brothers of sisters, or if his parents were still alive: it seemed as if the answers to these mundane questions might diminish in stature the man I regarded as something of a myth.

“Years ago I decided never to stop,” he said. “To settle down, to establish roots – that would be death, Simon. Possessions...” He gestured dismissively at my book-crammed study. “It isn’t what my life is about. I have nothing.”

“And you’ve been travelling ever since?”

He nodded. “I have to, Simon. I wish I could explain – I know that if I ever stop, then that’ll be the end.”

I nodded, at a loss for words.

When I next looked up from my tea, Beauregard had lodged himself further into the armchair and seemed to be asleep. I experienced an immediate relief.

I was washing the cups in the kitchen when I heard him cry out. I rushed back into the front room. He was talking to himself in his sleep, his head turning back and forth. I hovered, considering whether to wake him, when a decision was made redundant. He cried out a name and sat upright, eyes open wide and staring into the flames.

I sat down, embarrassed as he noticed my presence. The name he had shouted aloud had been Sabine’s.

“It was a terrible shock,” I said.

He knew what I meant. He nodded.

I looked at him. “What happened?”

We had not spoken of it at the time. Beauregard had quit university not long after, without so much as a farewell. One day his rucksack had been on the chair in the lounge we shared, and the next it was gone.

“I showed her something,” he said, and those four words, almost inaudible in his tobacco-wrecked voice, sent a cold shiver down my spine.

“Showed her something...?” My tone communicated my incomprehension.

He nodded. “You know in any relationship, if it means anything, there has to be a trading of truths.” He looked up at me.

I felt myself colouring. He asked, “Do you have anyone, Simon?”

I shook my head. “No... Not at the moment.”

He nodded again. Something in his eyes told me that he understood.

“Well... Sabine meant a lot to me. We were one person. I had to show her what I understood... I showed her that, my reality, and she couldn’t take it. She ran. I searched the city. I was worried about what she might do – I knew it had been too much. I think I knew, before the police arrived, what had happened. I woke at midnight with a terrible sense of presentiment. I knew what she had done.” He shrugged, almost casually, and lit another emaciated cigarette with shaking fingers.