Ghosting (23 page)

And he did. Indeed he managed to project onto the future a reality
that was absent in the present or the past, at least for him. He was never completely in the place that other people inhabit, but always halfway elsewhere, with only one foot on the ground, the other dangling fretfully in the air, trying to feel its way towards the next ten minutes. From the outside, it seemed an unenviable, tortured state. There was no time to pause and look, no time to tune into the deeper rhythm of things, no focus to set him firmly in the world or nourish the soul. There was a gap between him and the moment, so that the present was already part of the past and the future hadn't yet begun. It could have been one of Dante's circles of hell.

On another occasion, just for something to say, I touched on the logical feasibility of time travel. I mentioned the familiar thought experiment where the time-traveller goes back in time in order to murder his grandparents and thus prevent his own birth. At this Tiger became curiously uneasy. He found this sort of discussion sinister and threatening, and he immediately changed the subject. He felt himself on much safer ground planning the next half hour and checking the time obsessively. Inside his restlessness I wanted to believe there was a serenity trying to get free and bring itself into being. One day perhaps he would discover the joy of dawdling, of allowing the day to take its own course. Meanwhile there was an institutional regularity about the way of life in the Dordogne, and it could not be challenged without incurring a significant risk of miff or tiff.

Writing is hard and uses up a lot of energy. I think it is nearly always hard, though it is possible to forget in between times how
hard it is. When a chapter has been worked and reworked into a finished piece, it is easy to lose sight of how it came to be that way and how long it took. Some afternoons I went to the studio and nothing happened at all. I would stare into space or look through the windows, letting my mind drift, hoping an idea would take hold, persuading myself that this is what real writers did. At other times I concentrated on removing tiny insects and bits of dead skin from the spaces in between the keys of the computer keyboard. There are moments of terrible bleakness with the creative process, when you question what you are doing and why you are doing it. Ghosting, which is just a job after all, ought to offer some protection. But for some reason it doesn't.

Some progress had been made, however, and the nuts and bolts of the new novel were already in place. The setting, the main characters, and the voice had all been decided, though there was a whiff of compromise about all three. I had started out in the first person, hoping to achieve the immediacy and conviction that can come with a first-person perspective. But it felt too personal, too intimate, and I soon abandoned it for the third person. I had also thought of setting the story in Scotland, but that too would have been too subjective, and besides, Tiger would have hated it. Although he claimed to love Scotland, it was purely an abstract love, for he regarded it as a curious foreign land, quite inscrutable, and much more “abroad” than further-flung places. So instead I chose a sleepy Oxfordshire village in middle-class England. This is not my territory at all, but it allowed me to make one of the characters an academic at Oxford University (my daughter was there at that time and I had come to know it a little), and also to set a dramatic scene in the Ashmolean Museum (where I had first seen paintings by Pasternak). I drew up a list of main characters: the two married
couples, their children, the vicar next door and his long-suffering wife. I had also decided that the academic would have an ex-wife—she would be the mother of one of the children and confined in a psychiatric hospital near Oxford.

Nabokov says somewhere that any writer who claims that his characters are running away from him and assuming their own identity is simply failing to keep them in order. From memory, I think Nabokov was quite bad-tempered about this. He believed that, since characters are the creation of the writer, they should be made to do exactly as they are told. Well, yes and no. In one sense this is obviously the case: characters can be plucked from the air and made to fit any description. They can be given a twitch, a limp, a divorce, thick ankles, a dark secret—anything at all. Lives can be invented that never existed, and never will exist—all this is possible. But in the end, even if the characters are “invented,” they are usually not wholly contrived. They turn out to be strange composites of people you have known, who behave in ways you have observed, saying things you have heard or thought about. And the strange thing—the thing that Nabokov doubted—is that they
can
start behaving in ways that surprise you. But the real surprise is that they do something you hadn't planned for them, not that they do something completely out of character. In fact what they do is usually absolutely right for them.

According to the American writer Paul Auster,
*
it is when the characters in his books are most confined that they seem to be most free, and when they are free to wander, they are most lost and confused. This appears to be a baffling remark, yet it is more or less
what I found to be true. For example, the vicar in the story has an obvious part to play in comforting the bereaved parents, but instead of being tied down to the predictable role of bumbling, well-meaning clergyman offering the strength of faith as proof against despair, he is allowed to wander freely and ends up lurching between extremes and having a crisis himself. I suspect he fails to convince, partly because of the Paul Auster paradox: the character seems to be set free from the obvious, but he finishes up trapped in another kind of stereotype—the vicar who has lost his faith. By contrast, I intended the vicar's wife to be “confined,” bound by the limitations of her role. She would be a peripheral character, someone just for decoration, giving tea to distressed parishioners, feeling oppressed, and so on. But out of these initial restrictions, she developed into a much more interesting character than her husband. A dull marriage had altered the balance of her mind, and her life was lived at depths of concealment, marked by shame and guilt and disappointment. She ended up playing a pivotal part in the narrative.

In the afternoons when the weather was fine we went to the swimming pool. It was a sizeable pool and beautifully maintained by the
gardien,
who used brushes and a long pole with a large ladle on the end to keep it free of leaves and insects. Sometimes as we drew near he would be scooping out a solitary fly or giving the tiles a final polish. But as soon as he saw us he would scurry off, for he knew that the poolside was designated a place of absolute privacy. The etiquette there was complete nakedness—
comme les
animaux
—as Tiger put it, and it was a requirement—so he said— that applied to all his houseguests, without exception. It was a matter he often raised on the short walk to the pool, and invariably he invoked the health-giving properties of fresh air on bare skin or the freedom bestowed on the spirit once clothes had been discarded—as if the case for what he called “being
au naturel”
had to be made anew each time. “Skin is
amazing,”
he would say, sinking into a rhapsody. “There's nothing like skin. It's so soft, it breathes, it is
alive.
Why on earth do we cover it up?” Why indeed, I would say, for it was easier just to agree, and in any case nakedness was no big deal. At other times he would ask, rhetorically, in the manner of Falstaff's disquisition on honour, “What is the point of clothes? Do the beasts of the jungle wear clothes? Do the birds of the air?” His answer was brisk and decisive: “No, of course they don't. Bloody hell, when you think about it, it's the strangest thing on earth to wear clothes!” Like a Bach fugue his subject could be cut up, inverted, quickened, slowed to half its speed, given a change of key, or several, but it always remained recognisably the same first subject, stated in all its clarity at the beginning.

What must we have looked like, the pair of us, as we lay side by side on the sunbeds by the pool? I often thought we must have made an absurd picture. Scottish pallor next to Levantine swarth—not to mention my blond mop, his dark walnut whip topknot, and our various assorted dangly bits and bobs. Of course, Tiger was quite unable to lie still. And his nudity was in fact not absolutely total, for he kept on his watches, checking them constantly and counting down the minutes and seconds till the next event, the designated time for launching himself in the pool. “In fifteen minutes I will go in the water … in ten minutes I will go in the water … in
eight minutes …” In between he talked about how relaxing it was, how peaceful, how calm. “Don't you feel relaxed?” he asked every few moments. “Aren't you calm?”

In truth I was far from calm on the days when Éclair, the killer Doberman, was on the prowl. The security system was devised in such a way that the three dogs were shuffled round the various parts of the estate. This meant that there were always two guarding the main house and one guarding the smaller property and pool area. The theory was that, by moving them around, no dog would spend too much time on its own and all of them would enjoy a bit of variety. I dreaded the times when Éclair was on duty and I felt especially vulnerable in the scud. Tiger was aware of my fear and exploited it mercilessly. “I wonder which of my babies is here today,” he would say, starting out innocently enough. And then with a devilish touch. “Maybe it's Éclair. It's funny, you know, I haven't seen him yet. Have you seen him? I wonder where he can be—maybe I should call him.” He would discharge the short stiff laugh of the tormentor before calling out,
“Eclair, mon bébel Oil es-tu? Viens id! Joue avec moi!”

Can dogs smell fear? I have no idea, but it seems likely that they can. After all, we know that our nervous systems respond to stress with certain physiological changes such as increased heart rate and sweat gland activity. So although fear is an emotion, it almost certainly has a smell. As Éclair approached, I would note the quickening of my heart and a dampening on my skin. Sometimes there was cause for even greater alarm; for if dogs can smell fear, they can almost certainly smell a woman who is menstruating, as inevitably I was some of the time (not a subject that could easily be raised with Tiger). I had once heard a radio programme about grizzly bear attacks on women in Canadian national parks. The
speculation was that women may be more prone to savage attacks because of odours associated with menstrual periods, and although the evidence was inconclusive the advice to women was not to camp in bear country during their periods. It may be argued that being under canvas in bear country and lying on a sunbed in dog territory are not remotely the same thing. But for me there was no conceptual distinction between being mauled by a grizzly and mauled by a Doberman.

At these times of greatest dread it was always a relief to get into the pool and swim. I have always been at home in the water. Swimming is sensual and self-renewing. Water washes away pain. It holds you in a gentle embrace and allows you to let go. The rhythms of swimming feel natural; air in, air out, arms forward, arms back, legs together, up and kick, swishing cleanly like a kelpie. I feel I can keep going for hours without tiring. The body movements of swimming are efficient yet graceful, and they are woven into the fabric of the species more than any other form of propulsion. Walking and running are relatively recent activities, but man has known how to swim since before he was fully human. The water supports you and allows you to trust, to breathe deeply, to be confident and carefree. Swimming cultivates the imagination, the fluent motion relaxing the body and allowing the mind to roam free. There is rapture to be had in water.

Even so, no one who observed Tiger in the pool would ever have believed in an aquatic theory of evolution. Tiger was unable to swim and afraid to learn; yet, determined to do something of the same order, he went through a ritual that was much more elaborate and strenuous than even the most vigorous swimming. As I did lengths up and down the pool, he stood waist-deep at one corner and behaved like a man in the throes of a delirium. He performed
a series of hectic exertions of his own devising, counting from one to a hundred for each separate activity, all the while panting and blowing like a birthing mother. The exercises involved desperate movements—slapping the water with the flat of his hands, or doing frantic futile kicks as he clung to the side of the pool—and they continued for a heartbreaking length of time. Because he didn't like getting splashed, he kept his eyes closed and his face screwed up during the entire frenzy. It could have been a form of theatre designed to disturb the spectator, or a morality play concerned with the forces of evil and man's Fall and Redemption.