Читать книгу The Gates of Ivory - Margaret Drabble - Страница 9

This is a novel – if novel it be – about Good Time and Bad Time. Imagine yourself standing by a bridge over a river on the border between Thailand and Cambodia. Behind you, the little town of Aranyaprathet, bristling with aerials and stuffed with Good Time merchandise, connected by road and rail and telephone and post office and gossip and newspapers and banking systems with all the Good Times of the West. Before you, the Bad Time of Cambodia. You can peer into the sunlit darkness if you wish.

Many are drawn to stare across this bridge. They come, and stare, and turn back. What else can they do? A desultory, ragged band of witnesses, silently, attentively, one after another, they come, and take up the position, and then turn back. A Japanese journalist, an American historian, an English photographer, a Jewish survivor of the holocaust, a French diplomat, a Scottish poet, a Thai princess, a Chinese Quaker from Hong Kong. For different reasons and for the same reason they are drawn here. That young man with curly hair is the son of the British Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg. That broad-shouldered woman in the yellow Aertex shirt is the daughter of a discredited Oxford-educated Marxist scholar. Here they come, here they stand. They are asking a question, but there is no answer. Here too Stephen Cox will stand.

Good Time and Bad Time coexist. We in Good Time receive messengers who stumble across the bridge or through the river, maimed and bleeding, shocked and starving. They try to tell us what it is like over there, and we try to listen. We invoke them with libations of aid, with barley and blood, with rice and water, and they flock to the dark trenches, moaning and fluttering in their thousands. We are seized with panic and pity and fear. Can we believe these stories from beyond the tomb? Can it be that these things happen in our world, our time?

The dead and dying travel fast these days. We can devour thousands at breakfast with our toast and coffee, and thousands more on the evening news. It would be easy to say that we grow fat and greedy, that we thrive on atrocities, that we eagerly consume suffering. It is not as simple as that. We need them as they need us. There is a relationship between Good Time and Bad Time. There are interpenetrations. Some cross the bridge into the Bad Time, into the Underworld, and return to tell the tale. Some go deliberately. Some step into Bad Time suddenly. It may be waiting, there, in the next room.

*

While opening her post one dark morning, Liz Headleand was surprised to come across a package containing part of a human finger bone. It contained other objects, but the bone was the first to attract her attention. She could feel it before she saw it, through the scruffy layers of envelope and battered jiffy-bag. She shook the bag, and out it fell upon her desk, wrapped in a twist of thin cheap grey-green paper. She prodded it curiously with her own fleshy finger, and immediately and correctly identified it as kin.

On closer inspection, she discovered that she had before her two bones, the two middle joints of a small digit of a small hand, tied together with dirty fraying cotton thread. They took her back to anatomy lessons of yesteryear. A hundred years ago, she had studied bones and muscles, articulations and connections. She had learned the names of the small bones and of the large. This knowledge was not much use to her these days. But from a hundred years ago dry words whispered to her. The radius and the ulna, the carpal, metacarpal and phalangeal bones.

She regarded the missive without alarm but with respect. She touched it gingerly. She gazed at the rest of the package. There were envelopes within envelopes. Wads of paper, notebooks, newspaper clippings. A complex presentation. It had come from abroad, and the stamps were unfamiliar. Was it, she wondered, a gift of leprosy? Was a fatal illness lying there before her? The bones looked like an amulet, a charm against evil. Did it bring her good or ill? Which was intended? And by whom?

Liz, as a healer of hurt minds, was professionally familiar with distressing post. She knew the handwriting and the notepaper of derangement. She had received objects before now: once a used condom, once a dried purple rose. But never before had she received a human bone.

The ensemble exuded craziness, from string, from dirty peeling adhesive tape, from large crudely printed address. DR E. HEADLEAND, 33 DRESDEN ROAD, LONDON NW8, it requested. It was quite substantial. Manuscript size. Was it perhaps an unpublished and unpublishable novel, from a leper in the Congo? From a burnt-out case, shedding his unwanted thoughts and fingers on Elizabeth Headleand in St John’s Wood? She wondered, half seriously, if it would be safe to touch it. She recalled the public library books of her childhood which had carried health warnings about contagious diseases. This looked a dangerous package. If any package could kill you without explosives, this would be it.

Liz thought of rubber gloves, but dismissed the notion as absurd. She picked up the bones, wrapped them up again in their wisp of creased paper, laid them to one side of her large leather-topped desk, and applied herself to the package.

First she extracted an airmail envelope of unfamiliar design, with her name upon it in an unfamiliar hand, written, like the address, in wandering capitals. She opened it. A piece of lined bluish-grey paper mysteriously informed her I ASK SEND YOU THIS GREAT CRISIS GOOD BYE! BYE! BYE! No date, no signature.

She moved on. Was she bored, was she intrigued? She could not have said. Everyday craziness is dull, but grand craziness compels attention. Could this be craziness on a grand scale? She eased the string from a brown envelope full of paper, and found the handwriting of her old friend Stephen Cox.

So, it was a novel. Stephen was a novelist, therefore this was a novel. She read its first sentence.

‘And he came to a land where the water flows uphill.’

Stephen’s script was small, hesitant, but tolerably legible. He had used a ball-point pen. She could have read on, but did not. She looked again at the finger. Was that Stephen’s finger lying there?

She pushed the papers back into their envelope, noting that it had once been sealed with string and sealing wax. She approached another, smaller envelope. It too contained bits of script in Stephen’s hand, some of it laid out in what looked like stage instructions and dialogue. Was it part of a play?

She remembered that Stephen had vanished to the East to write a play about Pol Pot. Or so he had said. Two years ago? Three or four years ago? Something like that.

There were cuttings, paperclipped together, indented with rust. News stories, photographs.

She realized she should treat these messages with the care of an archivist. Their order and disposition, once destroyed, would vanish for ever. Already she had forgotten precisely how, within the package, the finger had been placed. Posthumously, as an afterthought? But she had to look further. Now. Curiosity compelled her. She had to see whether there was a message there for her, for Liz Headleand, for herself alone.

She found picture postcards, unscripted. Of a shrine, of a pagoda, of a boat on a wide river, of a lake with reflected drooping trees, of Buddhist monks robed in saffron, of a smiling carved face in a jungle, of dancing girls, of a marble mausoleum. Some were glossy, some were old and faded, some were new but poorly tinted. She found a long document with official stamps in an unknown language. She found a laundry bill from a hotel in Bangkok, and a currency exchange form, and a receipt from a hotel safe. She found two more little notebooks full of jottings and sketches. She found a quotation from John Stuart Mill, and a poem by Rimbaud. She found a scrap of orange ribbon and a flake of brittle pearly shell, and a tiny photograph of an ethnic child sitting on a buffalo. But her own name she did not find.

Was it there, somewhere, hidden, coded? Why had Stephen selected her? What obligation had he laid upon her?

She felt important, chosen, as she sat there at her desk. At the same time she felt neglected. Why had he not enclosed a note saying ‘Good wishes, Stephen’? He had sent her postcards from foreign parts before, with brief messages. She had received a couple from this long absence, this long silence. From Singapore or Penang or Bangkok. Or somewhere like that. Why was he now so sparing with his signature?

Here was his story. Perhaps he was telling her that she would have to read it all.

Or perhaps he was dead, and this was all that was left of him.

Liz gazed at the array of relics and records. Her bell buzzed. Her first patient would be waiting for her. She could not look more closely now. But, as she left for her consulting room, she locked her study door. She did not want the Filipino cleaning lady to see Stephen’s bones.

*

‘A finger bone?’ echoed Alix Bowen, Liz’s first confidante, with disbelief, impressed.

‘That’s right. Well, two finger bones really. The two middle joints of a little finger, I think. They’re too small to be Stephen’s. He had quite long hands, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, he did.’

They had both fallen, instantly, into the habit of speaking of Stephen in the past tense. Wordlessly they acknowledged this and decided to strive against it.

Liz continued, into her new cordless telephone, to describe to her friend Alix the other varied contents of the package. The prose manuscripts, the attempts at a play, the diary notebooks, the postcards, the sketches.

‘Sketches of what?’ Alix wanted to know.

‘Oh, all sorts of bits and pieces. Buildings. Temples. Styles of oriental architecture, labelled. Straw huts. A monkey. A cooking pot resting on three stones. A butterfly. A skull. A boat.’

‘I didn’t know Stephen could draw,’ said Alix.

‘He can’t,’ said Liz, restoring him to life. ‘Or not very well. But he’s had a go.’

‘And there’s no message, no instructions about what you’re supposed to do with all this?’

‘Nothing at all. Or not that I’ve found yet. There may be something hidden away in there. But I’m going to have to go through it all very carefully to find out. Why ever did he send all this stuff to me?’

Alix was silent, wondering the same thing. She had been responsible for introducing Liz to Stephen, and had at one stage hoped and feared that a middle-aged romance might blossom, but they had remained Good Friends. Not such good friends, however, as Alix’s husband Brian and Stephen had been. Brian and Stephen had been buddies, comrades in arms, comrades of letters. Brian would surely have been a more fitting receiver of literary goods. Why had Stephen selected Liz? Should Alix and Brian feel offended, excluded?

Both Liz and Alix appreciated, without mentioning it, the element of sexual innuendo in the sending of a bone. This might in some way be an act of courtship. Stephen would surely not have sent a bone to Brian Bowen.

‘Maybe, of course,’ said Liz, ‘he didn’t select me at all. Maybe somebody else did. The wording of the message to me is ambiguous. Maybe they just happened to come across my address.’

‘Maybe,’ said Alix, mollified.

‘I suppose I’ll have to try to read it,’ said Liz, with a mixture of pride, perplexity and reluctance. ‘I suppose, if there’s anything publishable in there, it might be quite valuable? Do you think?’

‘Yes, perhaps,’ said Alix cautiously. She did not like to say that if Stephen were dead, it would not be very valuable. Stephen had been a successful writer, after a fashion, and had made, latterly, a good living from his trade. His manuscripts no doubt resided in some North American university, in carefully controlled atmospheric conditions. This package could go and join them, if it proved authentic. But it would not fetch a very high price, if known to be the last. Stephen was – or had been – at that mid-stage in his career where his value depended upon a prospect of output, of œuvre. He had had more years of work ahead of him. A last message and then the silence of death would do his prospects no good. It would create a momentary stir, and no more. His publishers would not like it at all. Unless, of course, this last manuscript proved to be a masterpiece. But if it were, who would be able to tell? It sounded from Liz’s description as though it needed a good deal of editing. Alix knew, from the complaints of friends and from her own experience in the role, that editors these days are not what they were. It would take an exceptional editor to deal with this Do-It-Yourself Novel Pack that had landed up on Liz Headleand’s desk.

Liz, following this unspoken train of thought, inquired, ‘Did Stephen have an agent?’

Alix reflected.

‘He was rather keen on negotiating his own affairs. He was quite good at it, for such a vague sort of person. But I think there was somebody. Wasn’t that dotty woman he knew some kind of agent?’

‘What dotty woman?’

‘That drinking woman. Isn’t she in his flat in Primrose Hill now?’

Liz was silent. She had not known, or had forgotten, that there was a dotty drinking woman in Stephen’s flat.

‘Yes,’ said Alix, ‘I’m almost sure she was some kind of agent. You could always contact her, I suppose. He’d just changed publishers, with the last book. And anyway, he had two lots of publishers, one for his serious work and one for his thrillers.’

‘What was her name?’

‘I think she was called Hattie. Hattie Osborne.’

‘Hmm,’ said Liz, smelling a rival.

‘I say,’ said Alix. ‘Does it look a . . . newish sort of bone?’

And they continued to discuss severed bones, heads, feet and ears for some time. The use of, in the taking of hostages and the threatening of nearest and dearest. The use of, in emotional blackmail. They mentioned Van Gogh and Alix’s murderer-friend Paul Whitmore. They discussed jokes about finger bones found in soup in Chinese restaurants, about greyhounds discovered in the deep freezes of curry takeaways. And were there not stories, Alix wondered, about American soldiers in the Vietnam war collecting bags full of Viet Cong ears and sending samples back to their appalled girlfriends?

‘But those are just stories,’ protested Liz. ‘Like the Viet Cong playing Russian roulette. Atrocity stories. That thing on my desk is real. I promise you.’

‘You must ask Brian when he last heard from Stephen,’ she continued, modulating her tone to indicate seriousness. ‘We must try to work out who heard from him last. Can you remember when he left?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Alix. ‘Was it the year we came up north? I know he came up here to see us at least once. But he knew all sorts of people we don’t know, who may have much more recent news. Like that woman Hattie.’

‘I never went to his flat,’ said Liz.

‘Nobody ever went to his flat,’ said Alix. ‘He was the mystery man.’

‘Do you think I ought to report this package?’

‘I don’t see why. A bundle of manuscripts isn’t an offence, is it?’

They both laughed.

‘Well,’ said Liz, ‘you’re right. I’d better read the stuff. But I don’t know where to begin. Which bit did he mean me to read first?’

‘The finger bones.’

‘Yes. Of course,’ said Liz.

‘And after that, I guess, you can choose. Let me know how you get on.’

‘He should have sent it to you, really,’ said Liz, provocatively. ‘It’s you that’s good at cataloguing and deciphering manuscripts and that kind of stuff.’

‘And it’s you that’s good at crazy people,’ said Alix, refusing to be drawn, and trying not to think of the letters of her late employer, the poet Howard Beaver, which she was struggling, slowly, to collate. Come to think of it, the last thing she ever wanted to see was another heap of handwritten, ill-assorted papers. Liz was welcome to the lot.

‘But you will come and look?’ asked Liz.

‘Oh yes,’ said Alix, insincerely. ‘Yes, I’ll come and look. But you must have the first crack at the code.’

‘Yes,’ echoed Liz, a little hollowly. ‘Yes, at the code.’

Somehow she knew that Alix would not come. Alix never came to London these days. Alix, Liz suspected, had better things to do.

*

Neither Liz nor Alix found it easy to remember exactly when Stephen had departed. Their own lives were so busy and so piecemeal that markers disappeared into the ragged pattern. Neither kept a journal, so each, separately, was reduced to looking through old engagement books to see if Stephen’s name was mentioned. Liz, poring over the notation and logging of old dinners, parties, theatre visits, committee meetings and foreign trips, marvelled at her increasing ability to forget whole swathes of time. That great gap in the middle of the autumn of ’86, what on earth was that? She seemed to have done nothing for a month. Had she been in the USA, or Australia, or in hospital? She had no recollection.

At last, working backwards, she was rewarded with an entry in the January of 1985 that read ‘Dinner Stephen Bertorelli’s Notting Hill 8.30’. She closed her eyes and tried to summon up the restaurant, the meal, the conversation. Yes, that had surely been the occasion when she and Stephen had talked about Alix’s murderer, and Pol Pot, and whether it was partly a sense of failure that drove people into aggression. Does a sense of inferiority breed violence? Discuss. And this they had discussed, at length, if she remembered rightly. Alix’s adopted murderer Paul Whitmore had been cruelly rejected by his mother and taught to believe himself a burden, and, as an unfortunate result, had hacked the heads off several North Londoners within a mile or two of the spot where Stephen and Liz were quietly and peacefully devouring their fegato alla salvia (or had it been King Prawns ‘Grilled’?). Pol Pot’s problems and solutions had been less personal, more generic. He had not distinguished himself at school in Kompong Cham, at technical college in Phnom Penh, or at the École Française de Radio-électricité in Paris, where he had failed all his examinations. But this had not prevented his political ascent. Had a million Cambodians died to avenge Pol Pot’s defeat at the hands of the French educational system? Psychologically, Liz thought she had conceded to Stephen, this might have been possible. Overkill, she had murmured, but something must have tipped him over. Hitler’s parents had been held responsible by some historians and psychohistorians for his eccentric excesses. Something must have caused even Hitler.

Had this, then, been the dinner when Stephen had announced, half as a joke, half as a self-challenge, that he was determined to try to get into Kampuchea or Cambodia or whatever the wretched country then called itself? He had already been rejected by the Vietnamese Embassy, and was pursuing a visa through Oxfam or the Red Cross. He was off to write a play about Pol Pot. Or so he said.

She looked for more signs of later dinners with Stephen, but could find none. This did not mean they had not existed. She had quite probably conflated several dinners’-worth of conversation, for Pol Pot was a subject to which Stephen frequently returned. He had told her about Pol Pot’s Paris days with the Marxists and café revolutionaries, about his wife and sister-in-law who had also studied in Paris. He had asked her if she had read Hannah Arendt. He had expressed a desire to go and see for himself what really happened. She had asked him why he had picked on Cambodia, when the world was full of atrocities waiting for novelists, poets and screenwriters to descend upon them like vultures, and he had smiled his gentle, quizzical little smile and said, ‘Because it’s so extreme, I suppose. He had a great project, you know, P-p-Pol P-p-Pot. The greatest reconstruction project of the twentieth century. He was going to take Cambodia out of history, and make it self-sufficient. He was going to begin again. I suppose I want to find out what went wrong. Of course, everybody now blames P-Pol P-Pot. Pol Pot killed my father, Pol Pot killed my son. That’s what they all say. But Pol Pot still has 40,000 supporters. He’s still represented at the UN. And Sihanouk says he’s a man of great charm and charisma. He must have more to him than a radio-electrician manqué.’

‘Paul Whitmore didn’t have any charm or charisma,’ said Liz.

‘No. But he was a private killer, not an official one.’

‘So you think Pol Pot’s really a hero?’ Liz had asked, dipping her Amaretto into her strong black coffee and sucking on the moist dissolving almond crumbs as she waited for his reply.

‘No,’ said Stephen, carefully rolling himself a little cigarette. ‘No, I don’t think that. You know I don’t think that. But I’m interested in what happened. How did he get such a bad name? Such a big bad name? Such a big, bad, difficult name?’ And he had smiled, at his own difficulty.

‘Because he was such a big bad monster and was responsible for the death of a nation?’ suggested Liz, placidly.

‘Do you believe in monsters?’ Stephen had asked. ‘Single, self-generated monsters?’

Or something like that he had said, on one of those evenings before he disappeared. He had gone off to see if he could find out what had happened to the dreams of Pol Pot. Out of curiosity. To write a play, about the Rise and Fall.

‘Look, Liz,’ he had said, ‘you are curious about human nature. And so am I. So why should I not go?’

‘There’s plenty of human nature here at home,’ Liz had offered, in a tone and with a gesture that embraced the restaurant with its office-outing birthday table, its assorted couples, its solitary elderly diner with his book, its family gathering, its amiable smiling proprietors: the street life outside of dreadlocks and strollers and buskers and cruisers and crooks and drifters: the enshrined Campden Hill dignitaries to the west, the Bayswater backwaters to the east: the brutal and grand dwellings of Czech and Soviet and Indian diplomats: the Peking Ducks and Pizza Parlours of Queensway, the terrorist hotels and bed and breakfast doss houses of the dangerous shabby fire-gutted North Kensington squares, and the mean streets extending north to the grim terraces of the Mozart Estate and multiple murder, to the converted terrace houses of first-time first-baby double-mortgage young buyers.

And Stephen had taken all this in, and had shrugged his thin shoulders, and had said a little wistfully, ‘There is nothing to keep me here.’

Liz had not thought that Stephen really intended to write a play. He did not write plays, he wrote novels, and they were not, in her view, particularly strong on dialogue. All this talk about a play had been just talk. A blind, a screen, an act of bravado, a dramatic gesture. That was what she had thought then, and that was what she thought now, as she tried to force her mind back over old history. But he had meant to leave, and he had done so. ‘There is nothing to keep me here.’ That is what he had said. Those had been his very words. They rang in her ears. What had he meant by them? It came back to her that she had thought then of saying something rash and blind like, ‘You could stay for me.’ But neither the invitation nor the inclination to do so had been strong enough, so she had said nothing.

She was glad now that she had said nothing. If he would not stay for Hattie Osborne, who was allowed to live in the flat on Primrose Hill that none had ever entered, why should he stay for his dining companion Liz Headleand? Let him go, let him depart.

Memory is treacherous. How could they have discussed Alix’s murderer and his mother? At that stage he had not been Alix’s murderer at all, Alix had not even met him, and nobody had heard of his monster-mother. If the murderer had belonged to anybody in those days, he had belonged to their friend Esther Breuer, who had lived in a flat beneath him in a house at the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove. Paul Whitmore, Pol Pot. Paul Whitmore’s house was demolished now, and Pol Pot’s country in ruins, and Liz’s memory was full of gaps and inconsistencies. They disturbed her. Was there some clue that she had forgotten, some reason why Stephen Cox was now appealing to her with a bundle of old papers and bones and string?

Alix Bowen was able to be more precise about dates than Liz, because she had Brian and her son Sam to confirm them. Yes, Brian and Sam agreed, Stephen had been to stay with them in Northam in February 1985, not long after they had moved up from London. He had been the first person to sleep in their spare room. It had been very cold and he had been given a hot-water bottle. He had praised the room and the hot-water bottle highly, nay excessively. One never knew quite when or why Stephen was taking the piss. Sam’s view was that Stephen was giving a lecture on the historical novel at the uni. Alix had not remembered this but did not dispute it. She thought they had had osso buco for supper. What had they talked about? The disarray of the Labour Party, council-house sales, the failure of Marxism Today? Had they also talked about Pol Pot? Yes, Alix thought they had. There had been some jokes about Pol Pot and Northam’s council leader Perry Blinkhorn and the red flag. Stephen had said he was off to Phnom Penh, but they had not known whether to believe him. He’d only stayed with them one night, and then he had vanished.

Brian had had a letter from him in Bangkok, but he had lost it. He couldn’t remember what it was about. Or when he had received it. He looked for it in a half-hearted manner but was so depressed by the junk he turned up that he abandoned the search. ‘To think I’ve accumulated all this in three years!’ he said, irritably, as he stuffed the papers back into his desk.

It was Brian’s view that Stephen had taken himself off for artistic reasons. Stephen had abandoned his last novel, half-finished, in a fit of despondency, and was looking for a new theme. He had thought the Orient might jog his failing creative powers, as Rome had jogged Goethe’s. And the Cambodian theme was a grand one. The death of a nation, the death of communism, the death of hope. It had not yet been written to death. It was unresolved. Pol Pot was still alive, lurking in the bushes. Stephen might well embrace the fatal ghost of such a challenge.

Over the years, since the mid seventies, Stephen and Brian had discussed the Cambodian question over many a pint. Vietnam had been a relatively simple issue; it had been easy for both of them as young men to cast the Americans as the villains in this protracted epic. When the Khmer Rouge had entered Phnom Penh in 1975, Brian had tended to take their side, and was tempted to dismiss as atrocity stories the tales of refugees who informed the Western world that their new leaders were ignorant child-peasants who killed anyone who spoke French or English or wore spectacles. But the evidence had swelled from a trickle to a flood and had borne Brian before it. The mysterious assassination in Phnom Penh of British fellow-traveller and friend-of-the-revolution Malcolm Caldwell had convinced him that the Khmer Rouge were almost as black as they were painted, and he had watched the unfolding retrospective horror story of skull landscapes and killing fields with revulsion and dismay. Had Brian identified with Caldwell, the gullible left-wing scholar? Perhaps. Brian had been so disillusioned that he could not even cast the invading Vietnamese as heroes when they defeated the Khmer Rouge in 1979. This was a story without heroes and without salvation. It had only victims. The exodus of the Vietnamese Boat People spoke for itself, if one were willing to listen. Brian had listened. Brian had been instrumental in persuading Northam’s ideologically committed red-flag council that it would not be betraying its colours if it set up a resettlement project for Vietnamese refugees. But some had been curiously hard to persuade, some had been reluctant to abandon their old allegiances. None of them, needless to say, had ever been to Vietnam.

Stephen had been less distressed because more sceptical. He tended not to believe anything he was told. He stuck to the view that there were more than two sides to every story, and that it was almost impossible to tell what was happening. The Vietnamese and Cambodians alike were secretive, evasive, paranoid. Stephen pointed out that they had good cause to be so.

Yes, said Brian to Alix, Stephen might well have thought that Cambodia would kick-start his imagination.

Kill or cure, you mean, said Alix, and then wished she hadn’t.

Alix accepted Brian’s diagnosis. Brian knew Stephen better than anyone, and if he thought Stephen had gone off in search of artistic renewal, then he was probably right. It seemed to her a somewhat flimsy reason for fleeing to the far side of the world, but then she was a woman, and she had no creative imagination, so she wouldn’t be likely to see the point of it, would she?

Alix missed Stephen Cox and wished he had not gone away. One does not have so many adult friends in a lifetime, and she had liked Stephen. He was a delicate, reticent, honourable man. He was Brian’s friend. She hoped he was still alive.

*

The more Liz looked at the package, the less she liked it. She took her duties seriously and purchased various plastic wallets to try to preserve the contents in their original order, but when it came to reading them she discovered in herself a deep resistance.

She started with the piece of prose that began ‘And he came to a land where the water flows uphill.’ It continued in portentous but lyrical style for a page or two, describing an oriental landscape, a broad river, and a young man on a boat travelling upstream into the heart, she supposed, of darkness. Liz found it rather boring, though she did not like to say so, even to herself. Notes in the margin directed her to ‘The Miracle of the Tonle Sap’, a phrase which meant nothing to her at all. Impatiently she abandoned the young man on his allegorical voyage and turned to the diaries, which were more fun, though unsatisfactorily enigmatic. She puzzled over ‘Miss P. on good form tonight with brothels and tales of Opium King’ and ‘Met S. G. at Press Club and talked of cannibals’. She was introduced to a character called K. V. who told Stephen about his grandfather’s estate in Norfolk, and another called H. A. who was the daughter of M. A., a fact which Stephen had thought worthy of underlining.

Then she flipped through the fragments of drama, but they too were non-starters. They consisted of sketches for a series of tableaux outlining the careers and confrontations of the principal actors in the Cambodian tragedy, Prince Sihanouk and Pol Pot. They were much crossed out and about. One read:

1. Paris, Latin Quarter. 1950. Double wedding of Pol Pot, Ieng Sary and the two Khieu sisters. A huge set-piece banquet prepared in rented ballroom by Thiounn Prasith. Dancing. Jokes. Thiounn Mumm toasts the two couples and pledges the overthrow of Sihanouk. Laughter. Lighthearted. Khieu sisters both strikingly beautiful, stylish, worldly. Champagne.

2. Paris, 28 rue St André des Arts. Domestic scene. Thirith with baby on knee. Her sister Ponnary bitching about why Sihanouk wouldn’t marry the Thiounn girl. Again, much laughter. [1951?]

3. Phnom Penh, September 1960. First Party Congress of Cambodian Communists convened in empty railcars at Phnom Penh Station. The Return of the Three Ghosts. The Three Ghosts speak. The Naming of the Party. The Beheadings on the Tennis Court.

4. Kompong Cham, 1970. Queen Mother’s Palace. Queen Kossamak consults the augurs and draws the tarnished sword of defeat from its scabbard. She reproaches her son Sihanouk: They use you as a buffalo to cross the waters. [NB she died in 1975? Check.]

5. The march of Lon Nol’s army to the Holy War. He Black Papa. Amulets, tattoos, sorcery, talismans, magic scarves. The casting of the horoscope. [NB The Khmer Rouge militant atheists? How militant?]

6. Ratanakiri, 1974. Pol Pot and wife Thirith in camp. She weeps for the children she has not seen for ten years, she demands return to city. [Some reports say they had no children? Check.]

7. Phnom Penh, September 1978. The Feast of the Undead Intellectuals. Fail not our Feast. The starving eat the food prepared by Thiounn Prasith of the Hôtel Royale.

8. The Jungle, 1980. Number One Jungle Actor Star drinks from skull.

9. United Nations Reception, New York, 1987. Thiounn Prasith and Ieng Sary drink blood.

Liz Headleand ran her eye down all this stuff and much more. She recognized Pol Pot and Sihanouk, the principal protagonists of the Cambodian tragedy, and correctly surmised that the Khieu sisters were the two Paris-educated Khmer women who had so intrigued Stephen. Had he not told her that one of them had studied English Literature? Was that his excuse for all his Shakespearian references?

Thiounn Prasith was a name that meant nothing to Liz. There was little in the package to indicate that he was one of the official representatives of the non-existent state of Democratic Kampuchea at the United Nations, and that he had been one of the architects of the Communist Party of Cambodia and of the Khmer Rouge. He was and is one of the most eloquent apologists for the Years of Zero, 1975–9. He does not let go. He wears a suit and a tie and he lives in New York. But Liz was not to know this.

Muddled, confused, irritated by her own ignorance and by all these foreign names and meaningless dates, Liz moved on, and came at last across something that she understood. It was a small booklet headed ‘Atrocity Stories’. These made sense. They also confirmed that she and Alix had been speaking on the telephone about a real person, about a Stephen who had really existed and whom, in the real world, they had really known. He had thought some of the thoughts that they had thought. She read one or two of the entries. Yes, it was easy enough to see what Stephen had been up to in this section. She took his point, and saluted it. She heard, for a moment, his clear light voice speak.

But then she lost it again in scraps and scrawls and jottings. Where was the story in all this, where was the glue that would stick it all together? Her fingers ached with impatience, with irritation. ‘Really, Stephen,’ she said, aloud. But he did not answer.

She distrusted her own impatience. She had always wanted to make sense of things immediately. She had a tendency to leap to conclusions, to cut Gordian knots. She would never have made a scholar. How much she now regretted the impetuosity with which she had burned her mother’s old papers! She had destroyed them through fear, and, though curiosity had long since devoured fear, she could no longer recover them, for they had been consumed by the Ideal Boiler. She was not afraid of Stephen’s papers (was she?); there could be nothing personal lurking there?

In one sense at least, Stephen’s papers somewhat resembled her mother’s. Her mother had collected newspaper cuttings about the Royal Family. Stephen seemed to have collected ageing yellow items from court circulars. She came across a little wad of them, stapled together, with some items picked out in fluorescent pink. He had highlighted the movements of various aircraft of the Queen’s Flight, had saluted the General Committee Dinner of the Kennel Club and the reception at St James in aid of the Racing Welfare Charities, and had noted royally attended events in aid of the NSPCC, CARE, MIND and Mencap. As Stephen had been a known republican, his intentions could not have had much in common with those of the late Rita Ablewhite. Except, perhaps, madness. Collecting newspaper cuttings is a well-known sign of derangement. Why on earth should anyone have wished to note that the Annual Newsletter of Moxley Hall School would be published in May of 1984 with full details of Old Moxleian Day? What junk, Liz found herself thinking, what a waste of time!

Atrocity stories, Parisian revolts, Mumm champagne, Kennel Clubs, Pol Pot’s baby niece, John Stuart Mill, they add up even less than Hestercombe and Oxenholme on a silver wine cooler. At least the Hestercombes and the Oxenholmes had inhabited the same country and spoken the same language. This stuff was all over the place.

On her third evening of study, she came across the photograph of Mme Savet Akrun. It was cut out from a newspaper, and the reproduction was not good, but nevertheless it had a power. The image looked hauntingly familiar. Had she seen it somewhere before? The caption was ‘Where is my son?’ Mme Savet Akrun, erect and dignified, her hands folded on her lap, sat on a low chair and stared at the camera. Her eyes were large, her face thin and wasted, her lips gently curved. She wore what looked like a slightly Westernized sarong. Her greying hair was neatly pulled back into a bun. Her expression, adopted perhaps for the camera, was of grave suffering. It was a posed shot, slow, expressive. (If Liz had thought to look for a credit, which at this stage she did not, she would have seen for the first time the name of Konstantin Vassiliou.) Liz read the story, which told her that Mme Savet Akrun, mother of four, was held in Camp Site Ten, on the Thai–Kampuchean border. She had walked over the border in 1979 with her three younger children, from the countryside of Siem Reap province, where she had been living and working in a village. Her husband, her parents, her parents-in-law, her sisters, a brother and several of her nieces and nephews had all died in the terror, some of illness and some by violence. Her husband had owned garages and a small cinema in Phnom Penh. She had taught in an infants’ school and was now employed in the camp by the Khmer Women’s Association Centre for Adult Education. ‘I am one of the lucky survivors,’ she was quoted as saying, ‘but my life can give me no joy until I find my son.’ She had last seen him in a small village near Battambang. He had been marched away by a group of Khmer Rouge soldiers, the article said. ‘Is he still alive? How can I find him?’ she asked. The journalist went on to say that she was one of thousands trying to trace lost relatives through the International Red Cross and other agencies.

A human interest story, not a hard-news story, and as such it interested Liz. She understood it. She had a displaced tremor of feeling for Mme Savet Akrun, sitting there so patiently with the sorrows of thousands resting on her thin, unbowed shoulders, asking, ‘Where is my son?’ Liz hoped very much that he was alive, but had to doubt it. How could he be, amongst the more than a million dead?

And if he were alive, searching for him would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. A needle in the haystack of the wide, wide world. She leafed through the pile of cuttings. Khmer refugees had spread to far corners of the earth, to Canada, France, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, even to Britain, to any country with the space and generosity to take them. They came from families fragmented over ten years by war and violence, and many of them did not know whether their relatives were alive or dead. Tracing was difficult, for the Khmer language was little known and hard to transcribe, and the spelling of names varied widely. Many had changed their names many times, for many reasons. For safety, for policy, to forget the past, because they carried forged papers. Where, indeed, was the son of Mme Akrun? Did she believe he was alive, or had she offered herself for this photo opportunity in a sacrificial spirit, as an emblematic figure for her nation?

Liz, until this moment, had not given much thought to the displaced people and refugees of the world. She had noted horror stories from the PLO camps, from the Afghan camps, from the Sudan. She had read of the Vietnamese Boat People. She had known of the existence of the Thai–Kampuchean camps, although she had not known they were so large. One of them, Site Two, with its population of over 170,000 people, was said to be the second largest Khmer city in the world, larger than Sisophon, larger than Battambang, nearly as large as Phnom Penh. Liz had, like many middle-class British citizens, given money to Oxfam for years by banker’s order, and had very occasionally, and against her better judgement, allowed herself to be moved to particular donation by a particular appeal for a particular catastrophe. She was surprised to find herself spending so much time gazing into the two-dimensional newspaper eyes of Mme Savet Akrun.

That same week Liz, her attention newly alerted to all things Kampuchean, was informed, along with the rest of the media-fed world, of a new atrocity in the west of America. An archetypal, all-American atrocity. A lone gunman in Darlington, California, had run mad and attacked an elementary school. He had killed five, and wounded dozens. Bad enough, one might say, too cruel anywhere, but the secondary wave of background information managed to compound the horror. For these children had been the children of Khmer refugees, who had escaped the terrors of their own country, who had escaped the Year Zero and the dreams of Pol Pot, and who had reached the land of the free. They had settled there, in the small town of Darlington, and they had been greeted with special schooling, special language tuition, special resettlement officers to advise them. And there they had died, in the school playground, amidst the smell of hot tarmac and jelly beans and popcorn, mowed down by a 24-year-old dressed in military fatigues wielding a Chinese-made AK47 assault rifle. He shot more than a hundred rounds at them. And then he blew out his own brains.

One of the mothers was quoted as saying of her daughter, ‘I brought her all this way to die.’ Irony had kept this woman company until the end. Or had the words been placed in her mouth by a newsman with an ear for a good line? Can one believe anything one reads in a newspaper?

The young gunman, it emerged, was the son of a soldier who had been on active service with the United States Army. Some reports said the father had served in Vietnam, others denied this. Some said he had died in a psychiatric hospital. Some said he had been honourably discharged ‘on mental grounds’. The killer son had been a fan of Libya and the PLO, said one paper. He was a copycat cretin, said another.

Since the war ended, 60,000 veterans have committed suicide, more than the number killed in combat, one of the stories claimed. ‘From generation unto generation,’ suggested another. We survive the ordeals of bunker and jungle and bombardment and Diarrhoea-Aid of the East to run amok amidst the fair fields of the West.

It makes one think. And Liz thought.

She came, at the end of the week, to the conclusion that she was making no progress with Stephen’s dossier. She did not know enough about Indo-China to tackle it. (Somebody told her that the very phrase, ‘Indo-China’, was no longer acceptable. She was so ignorant that she could not see the objections.)

Maybe there was some message in there for her, but she began to doubt it. Perhaps it had arrived at her address by accident? She needed help.

She thought of ringing Alix again, or their old friend Esther Breuer, or her ex-husband Charles, or her ex-husband Edgar Lintot, or her new half-sister Marcia Campbell. Any of them would lend an ear and some understanding. Then she thought of her stepsons Alan and Aaron, and her daughter Sally. They too would listen with sympathy. (Stepson Jonathan and daughter Stella had defected: she rarely dared to ring either of them now.) Or perhaps she should ring Charles’s friend Melvyn Stacey, who worked for the International Red Cross and knew about the Thai–Kampuchean border? She thought of ringing the Vietnamese Embassy, or Oxfam, or war correspondent Hugo Mainwaring, or Peter Bloch at the embassy in Bangkok. She even thought of ringing Stephen’s brothers, but had no idea where to find them. He had been a private man, a disconnected man. After a while, she settled on Aaron, as she wanted to speak to him anyway about tickets for his new play. He was out. Success had purchased him an answering machine, and she heard his voice informing her that Aaron Headleand was unavailable. Slightly offended, she rang off, swallowed her pride, and did what she knew she should have done earlier: she rang Hattie Osborne.

*

I’ve never much liked Liz Headleand. I’ve no reason to. For one thing although I’ve been introduced to her a hundred – well, at least a dozen times, she never has the slightest notion who I am, and always looks quite blank and bored at the very sight of me. That is not ingratiating. For another thing, she strikes me as a very bossy woman, and, as I am in some moods quite bossy myself, I naturally wouldn’t be expected to get on with her. Would I?

I can see these reasons are a bit flimsy. Actually, I hardly know the woman. I know her friend Esther Breuer a bit better, and I like Esther. Esther is an oddball, like myself. Liz Headleand pretends to be normal.

As a matter of fact, I didn’t really know Stephen Cox all that well either. Although he was one of my closest friends, and I one of his. Although I’ve known him for ever. Well, nearly for ever. I don’t think anyone really knew Stephen well. Perhaps those Bowens knew him. He always talked about them with a kind of sentimental fondness, probably because he’d known them such a hell of a long time. I only met Brian once, and I thought he was a crashing bore. And Alix Bowen is one of those women who always make me feel really uneasy. I mean, she is so fucking nice. She really is nice too, which makes it worse. Not that I know her well either. Though I remember having quite a good chat with her at Otto Werner’s Twelfth Night party. About death, as I remember. I think her father-in-law had just snuffed it, and Otto was about to go off to Washington. I think she was a bit in love with Otto, in those days. I haven’t seen her for years.

Anyway, Liz is the one I distrust most, so you can imagine how annoyed I was when she rang me and told me this rigmarole about Stephen’s papers. She got me at a bad moment too. So the whole thing got off to a bad start. I’d just had this row with this Natasha person about Siddhur’s screenplay for Partext and to comfort myself I’d gone out to buy a chicken korma, and on the way back to the flat I was sort of swinging it up and down in my basket in a brave and cheering sort of way when the lid came off one of the boxes and I got korma all down my skirt. It was an Indian skirt, so it sort of went with the print, but I wasn’t best pleased. I’d just wiped it off and put what was left in a soup dish and was settling myself down in front of the telly to eat it when the phone went and it was Liz. With this saga about papers.

I couldn’t work out what she was getting at, at first. She kept asking me if I was living in Stephen’s flat and if I was Stephen’s agent. I was pretty cautious to begin with because Stephen wasn’t really allowed to sublet, and then again I’m never really sure if I am Stephen’s agent. For some things and not for others, I think I said, in an offputting kind of way, because frankly I thought she was being a bit nosy. And then when I heard what she’d got I wished I’d been more forthcoming. I can’t remember quite what I said, but I think I claimed to be Stephen’s literary executor (which, after a manner of speaking, I am) and I said I’d have a look. Actually, I think that’s what she’d wanted. So that’s how it began.

It was strange, having to think about Stephen again. I’d behaved so atrociously on that last evening that I’d kind of blotted him out of my mind. Even though I am living in his pad and sleeping in his bed and I’m sorry to say drinking up his wine, even the bottles that said KEEP UNTIL 1992. I suppose I’d been hoping he wouldn’t come back too soon. He was well out of my way, and I was beginning to ingratiate myself with the landlord. (Mr Goodfellow, he’s called. A nice man.) Not that I wished Stephen any harm, of course, but he’d always been a bit of a wanderer, and I wasn’t at all surprised not to hear from him for a year or two. He sent me a postcard, and that was quite enough for me. I’m a very undemanding woman. It was of a sleeping Buddha, if I remember rightly. Which I do. I have it still. It’s on the mantelpiece.

But when Liz rang, I realized it was more than a year or two. It was more like a year or three. Time flies. I checked in my rent book, and it was indeed over two years since I took over his modest establishment. And then I did begin to feel a little anxious. Maybe something really had gone wrong?

I’d arranged to meet Liz in a couple of days, and during that time I made a few inquiries. He’d arranged for his royalties to be paid through his accountant, who’d been left in charge of the VAT and all that nonsense, so I rang them to ask when they’d last had any instructions from him (I was quite proud of that word, ‘instructions’, it sounded pretty professional, I thought). They said they couldn’t say. I asked where he was when they last heard from him, and they said they didn’t know, and I said who were his bankers, and they said they couldn’t tell me, very unhelpful. They said they thought he had a bank account abroad. I asked where, and they said it was nothing to do with me, and rang off.

Then I tried to remember if anyone had seen him or heard from him lately, but I drew a bit of a blank. And it wasn’t until then that I began to think it was a bit funny that he hadn’t published anything at all about his travels in all the time he’d been away. On previous trips he’d either been earning his keep by giving lectures, or he’d covered his airfare by printing bits and pieces for the papers. Maybe he didn’t need to do that any more? Maybe he’d passed the point of hack work? He must have made quite a bit out of his last couple of novels, since he won the Booker. Then I thought that perhaps he’d just got pissed off with old England, and had really wanted to disappear. If anyone might take it into his head to do a bunk, it would be Stephen. And if he wanted to disappear, who were we to try to stop him?

But Liz Headleand’s phone call nagged me. She’d sounded a bit rattled, which wasn’t like her, or not what I thought of as her. I’d always seen her as Super Competent. Offensively competent. With that big house, and all those children.

I had a feeling that somebody I knew had bumped into him within living memory in either Singapore or Bangkok, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember which or who, or when, or what they’d said. I tried to remember, but how on earth does one will oneself to remember? I mean, how does one make the memory brain cells work? Mine have all gone funny, I’m afraid, and I’d never have got the name back if it hadn’t been for a programme on telly (it sounds as though I watch a lot of telly, which I do) about the Opium Triangle and Burma, and suddenly, as I was watching this shot of little child soldiers marching up and down in the jungle with some donkeys, it came to me. John Geddes, that’s who it was. And it had definitely been Bangkok. I was so pleased with myself that I poured myself another Scotch, which might have been a mistake, but wasn’t – odd how drink sometimes makes the memory work better, when most of the time it buggers it up. Anyway, it all began to come back. John Geddes had been out there looking for locations for Carlo’s script of Victory and had run into Stephen in a bar in Bangkok. Stephen had been looking pretty good, according to John. Flush, I think was the word he’d used. Not flushed. Flush. So whenever that had been, Stephen was still doing fine, and wasn’t languishing in a Khmer Rouge prison or a fever hospital or a leper colony, or wherever it was that Liz thought he’d ended up. A bar in Bangkok. I rang John, to check, but not surprisingly he wasn’t in. He never is. His lover (who, rumour has it, is HIV-positive, poor bugger) was there, sounding pretty glum, which he would be, and he said John was in Peru trying to find locations for a movie about the Shining Path (not another Vargas Llosa adaptation, he said, wearily, an original screenplay). I asked if he could remember when John had been in Bangkok, and he said which time, for the Rain Forest movie or for the Khmer Rouge movie, and I said neither, it was for the Victory movie, and he said was that the Vietnam movie, and I said no, it was the Conrad movie, and he said he hadn’t the faintest idea. He sounded so sad that I arranged to meet him for a drink, but that’s another story. Well, almost another story, because when we met at the Spoils of War we worked out (but this is jumping ahead a bit) that John must have met Stephen in late ’85, in the Hotel Nirvana, which didn’t tell us anything much. The lover (he’s called Indra) said John said that Stephen took him to a very up-market brothel, but Indra thought he might have been saying that to annoy him, that is him, Indra. Anyway, that’s jumping ahead, or back, and anyway it was a dead end.

The next thing that really happened was my meeting with Liz. I’d wanted to arrange to meet on neutral territory, but failed. I didn’t want to ask her round to Stephen’s old flat and I haven’t really got an office at the moment, so I suggested lunch at the Escargot but she said she was too busy for lunch and could I come round to her place at six for a drink. I didn’t really want to get sucked into her orbit, but didn’t see how to get out of it, so I said I would. She’s moved house. I remember going to a huge party of hers in Harley Street in the days when Charles Headleand was making documentaries, donkeys’ years ago, but they’ve sold that house (they must have been mad!) and now she lives in this very nice but rather suburban Edwardian maisonette in St John’s Wood. Actually I shouldn’t be rude about it, it’s very nice really, ’tis only envy that speaks, and I must say she poured me a very satisfactory slug of Scotch, none of that half-a-finger drowned-in-water ladylike nonsense you sometimes get from people old enough to know better. We had a bit of polite chit-chat about this and that and then she got down to business. She keeps the package in a large rectangular cardboard box (I think it had had a video machine in it, I don’t know why I mention that, just to be circumstantial I suppose) and she took off the lid with a sort of abracadabra look on her face, and there was this tatty jiffy-bag and these little plastic folders of stuff. I must say my first thought was that it didn’t look very publishable in its present condition, and I think I said as much. I thought she wasn’t going to let me get my fingerprints on it, but, after making it quite clear that it was still in her custody, she did let me have a look. It was at this point that she produced the finger bone, which she hadn’t mentioned on the telephone. She keeps it in a special little plastic money bag, the sort people produce in the bank, full of coppers on Monday mornings, while the queue gets longer and longer. She didn’t know what to make of it, but it seemed to me quite obvious that it was a joke. I mean, knowing Stephen, of course, it was a joke. I still think it was a joke, actually, though I agree I can’t explain how it got there, or why the package was sent without any instructions. Perhaps he was ill? Delirious? Dead? Or gone away? I suggested all these possibilities, and she said she’d thought of them all, but thinking of them hadn’t got her anywhere. I saw her point.

She said she’d tried to read the papers, but hadn’t made much headway. I said I’d have a go at them, if that’s what she wanted. She said she was worried about letting them out of her safekeeping. I said we could take photocopies. She said how would we photocopy the bone. Then we had quite a good laugh, so I suppose you could say the joke had worked. Stephen’s joke, I mean. We had a little chat about radioactivity and whether you can catch diseases from using word processors. I don’t know how we got on to that, something to do with having your feet X-rayed, I think. Apparently they used to go in for X-raying children’s feet to make sure their shoes fitted, in the old days, until they discovered it made their bones rot. O tempora, O mores. A whole generation of rotted feet.

We had another drink, and I admired her cat. I have a very good cat of my own, though I have to keep it out of sight of Mr Goodfellow, but I have to say her cat is quite a fine-looking cat. It’s a tabby. As we chatted, I was leafing through one of the little diary-booklets (Ryman’s Memo, coil back, lined, 81/4 × 57/8, red cover) and I could already see that there were a few things I probably could decode better than anyone. Indeed I was afraid I glimpsed some allusion to our horrible Last Supper. Thank God it looked pretty incomprehensible to an outsider. But it made me all the keener to get my hands on the stuff, and find time to go through it all without her standing over me.

We agreed that I could have a photocopy of everything that looked worth copying, including the laundry list. Laundry lists are very important to biographers, I told her, quoting an article by Victoria Glendinning in the TLS. I think she was impressed by that evidence of unexpected scholarship on my part. She said her secretary would do it in the morning and send the stuff round on a motorbike. Then we had a terminal conversation about who had last seen Stephen where and when. She said she thought someone called Peter Bloch in the embassy at Bangkok had had some kind of contact with him, and should she try to get hold of him. I said wait a while. Then I told her about John Geddes and the film of Victory. She’d never read Victory, so I found myself telling her the plot. In case you’ve forgotten (tactful, aren’t I?), Victory is that one about the lone mysterious Swede called Axel Heyst who mooches around the South Seas dwelling on the ineffable and eternal until he hitches up with a dancing girl (actually it’s a musician in a ladies’ orchestra, but we made her a dancing girl) at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, and runs away with her to a remote island. He is pursued by an aged British conman–playboy, his sidekick the evil and greasy Ricardo, and a Naked Savage, who are convinced he is hiding away with a lot of loot. The real villain of the piece is the Oriental hotel manager, a fat German. It’s a wonderfully racist piece and it would have made a bloody good movie, but it came to nought, as such projects usually do. I must say I think Carlo’s screenplay was brilliant, the best thing he’s ever done. But that’s beside the point.

The laundry bill was in fact from the Oriental Hotel. I didn’t point this out to Liz Headleand. I didn’t see why I should make things easy for her. I don’t think she’s ever been to Bangkok.

If Max von Sydow had been twenty years younger, he’d have been wonderful as Axel Heyst. But that’s beside the point too.

Anyway, we agreed that I should have a look at the photocopies before either of us made any further official inquiries. It’s not as though it’s a message in a bottle, or an SOS calling for a search party, is it, I said, and then we both looked at one another and though we didn’t say anything I could see that we were both thinking that perhaps it might, after all, be precisely that. I was still clutching the little red memo book, and I suddenly plucked up courage and said, ‘I say, do you think I could take this one with me now? Just for a look? I promise I’ll be ever so careful, but I really would like to start on it straightaway, I can see all sorts of fascinating things in there.’ I burbled on like this for a bit, and I could see she was embarrassed to say no outright. (People usually are. This is one of life’s more useful secrets.) All right, she said, but don’t lose it, will you. I swore I wouldn’t, and slipped it into my bag, thanked her for the drink, and away I went.

I must say I had an odd evening, reading Stephen’s orts and fragments. You see, I was with Stephen on his last night in London. It was ghastly. Really ghastly. I don’t like to think of it at all. He must have had an appalling flight. I can’t think what came over me. No wonder he ran away. Though of course he was on his way out anyway. It wasn’t me that drove him off. I must try to remember that. Whatever happened, it wasn’t all my fault.

*

It was a terrible evening. March 1985. Picture Stephen Cox and comrade Hattie Osborne, on their way to their elderly friend Molly Lansdowne, in the back of a taxi. They are to dine with her, à trois, before moving on to the seventieth birthday party of another friend, Marjorie Kinsman. Neither of them can remember how this arrangement stole upon them. It has just happened, and they have surrendered to it. They have to go to Marjorie’s, for over the years, severally and together, they have drunk many pints of her whisky and vodka, and they must turn up to celebrate her unlikely survival. But why add Molly to the evening’s jaunt? She must have added herself.

Hattie is already very drunk. She is high-pitched, fast-talking, feverish. She lets her hair down, in the back of the taxi, telling Stephen about her last lost lover, who had split from her for ever the week before over an incident involving his wife and his eldest daughter and a piano lesson. He is, she tells Stephen, a two-faced, double-crossing, feeble little shit of a liar who wants to have his cake and eat it. She loved him, she tells Stephen, she still loves him, she must be mad. Stephen utters soothing nothingnesses, as they roll past the opulent golden shop fronts of Knightsbridge. He is worried, a little embarrassed. He is used to confidences, for he is the kind of man in whom women choose to confide, but Hattie seems determined tonight to go over the top. He sits back, and decides to let her roll over him. Tomorrow he will have vanished. What does it matter?

The abuse continues, as Stephen, Hattie and Molly settle down to a little picnic of not-quite-defrosted potted shrimps, rubbery smoked chicken, random salad and unripe Camembert, washed down by gin and water. The conversation becomes more and more louche. The setting invites it. Molly’s flat has the air of a crumpled love nest. It is all bijoux and trinkets and tapestry cushions and French furniture. The plates are French china, chipped, pretty, non-matching. The glasses are dusty. Molly no longer sees as well as she did, but is too vain to wear spectacles. She is a handsome woman, with deep sharp blue eyes, and a delicate skin, and soft grey pompadour hair swept back into a coil tied with a blue velvet ribbon. Stephen had always admired her looks, but, as the evening wears on and the tone sinks yet further, he begins to see her as dyed and raddled, farded with the pink and the white and the blue. She is wearing rustling silver. Picture her, in her blue and silver, an English rose, dried and dyed and perfumed. Picture Hattie Osborne, a striking huge-eyed painted forty-year-old with a great headful of snaky falsely frizzed Medusa curls, and a long gold dress with a plunge neckline revealing glimpses of a naked bosom. Picture Stephen Cox, polite in his everlasting white suit. He sits neatly between them like a mascot, like a eunuch, as they tear to pieces the men that they have known. Bedecked and bedizened with jewels, they screech with tongues and talons.

Impotencies, meannesses, cowardices, treacheries, bad manners in and out of bed, all are hymned, bemoaned, indicted. Offences twenty years old are held up to the light, shaken, and savaged. Stephen thinks, this is the kind of dreadful conversation I quite enjoy, but it is going too far. The lipstick, the mascara, the oh so saddening march of merciless age upon them all, there, then, even then, as they sat there eating their salmonella-charged cold platter of treats from the delicatessen. ‘Pour réparer des ans l’irréparable outrage.’ The line from Athalie goes through and through his head. Jezebel, with her borrowed glory. They are all worn and used, they are on their way to the danse macabre, the leper’s ball, the bitter end. Hattie, frenzied, recoils in fear from her mirror image in Molly’s eye, and plunges on recklessly like a mad horse. It is of sex they sing, of the wrongs and pains of sex, and of its disappointments. Mad women, demented women, voracious, demanding, insatiable women.

‘Buggery may, of course, be the answer,’ says Molly, dabbing daintily at her lips, staining her old-fashioned damask napkin with deep sticky pink. ‘For satisfaction. After a certain age. Have you ever been buggered, Stephen? No? Have you, Hattie? I never have, and it’s too late now, I suppose. Is it the fashion, these days? One seems to read a lot about it. It wasn’t done, when I was young. Is buggery in, Stephen?’

She looks at him, demanding a response, but he is unable to answer, for the invitation in her eyes is too alarming. But Hattie careers on, unstoppable, taking this fence in her stride, the bit between her teeth.

‘But of course!’ she cries. ‘Of course! Many, many times! Orlando always preferred it! But then that was because he had such a tiny prick. And he wasn’t much good at buggery either!’

In vino veritas. She spoke the simple truth. And as she spoke, she suddenly unzipped the back of her gold dress, and let it fall forward from the waist over her turquoise-rimmed gold-plate and debris of cheese and biscuits. She sat there, topless, her excellent firm breasts eloquent over the Camembert. Stephen and Molly stared at them. Molly’s eyes filled with tears.

‘Yes,’ said Hattie, in a high-rhetorical trance, gazing into space like a priestess. ‘Yes, buggered, poked, screwed, raped, you name it, I’ve had it, and was it ever, ever enough, any of it? No, it was not,’ said Hattie. ‘It was never enough. It will never be enough. Never!’

Defiance blared from her nostrils, and she was breathing quickly and noisily, as though she had been running or violently making love. Her face was flushed with passion. She looked wonderful. She looked appalling. Stephen was frightened out of his wits. At any moment a breeze might blow upon her and she would turn grey and fall apart and crumble into ash before his eyes. This too too solid, this too too vibrant flesh would melt. Molly had already melted. Hattie hung on there, panting. Molly Lansdowne blew her nose, firmly, on a lace-edged handkerchief plucked from her own bosom, took another gulp of gin and water, reassembled her features, and heroically took charge.

‘There, there, my dear,’ she said, in her droll social voice. ‘You’d better fasten yourself up again, Hattie darling. You can’t go to Marjorie’s looking like that.’ She paused, and gallantly added, ‘Unfortunately.’

Hattie smiled, and descended from her height, and struggled back into her gold. Stephen helped to zip her up. The smooth skin of her womanly back tingled beneath his fingers. She was charged with electricity. She had a dark mole on her left shoulder. She was still dangerous, but for the moment docile. And off they had all gone, to Marjorie Kinsman’s birthday party, where there had been more drinking, more talking, more excited provocations. He had lost Hattie in the Circean throng of toads and pigs and monkeys and foxes. She had been sucked into the revelry, but he remained conscious of her presence throughout the long evening, catching her voice, her laugh, from beyond the alcove, from the tiny terrace, from the drawing room upstairs. He had made no commitment to depart with her, and she was accustomed to getting herself back from parties, but nevertheless she continued to beam towards him through the chatter and cigarette smoke and smouldering of idle passions, and at about half past one in the morning, as he was thinking he really must leave, as he hovered in the hallway trying to detach himself from Selina Mountjoy and Bruce Gibbon, he heard her cry out from the stairway. She cried out, but not to him. She cried to the world. ‘Oh shit,’ she cried, as she fell forwards, tripping over the hem of her long gold gown, caught by the ready arm of squat little Ivan Warner, always at hand whenever disaster struck. And Stephen had known that he could not leave her there, to be torn to pieces by her enemies, and he had gone to the rescue in his white suit, and for the second time that night she put herself together again, and they had made their farewells together and staggered out on to the cool pavement beneath a racing moon to look for a taxi. She took her shoes off and stood barefoot as they waited. ‘You’d better come back with me,’ said Stephen, who never said such things, as he gave the driver the address of his one-room flat on Primrose Hill. She held on to his hand in the taxi, and rocked and swayed. He made her coffee when they arrived, and she turned suddenly ice sober, and sat there calmly as though a storm had passed. ‘You’re a good friend, Stephen,’ she said. ‘You’re a pal.’ And they had cuddled together in the narrow bed, and whispered of little things. They recalled their first meeting, a hundred years ago, in a dubbing studio off Wardour Street, and a party at the Round House, and the time when Hattie had in her turn rescued Stephen from the clutches of a voracious bejewelled Italian journalist. They spoke of the moment when they had become friends. Hattie, observing Stephen romantically lunching alone in a self-service Italian restaurant near the British Museum, and struggling incompetently with a plate of spaghetti and some galley proofs, had boldly advanced upon him and his table with her tray, and sat herself down, and offered him a glass of wine from her carafe. He had not resisted. The proofs had snaked all over the floor, and Hattie, rescuing them, had offered her services as personal organizer. They had laughed a lot, over that, and over the years.

There was no way they could ever make love to one another, these two. They were saved from that. They had remained good friends.

And that was how Harriet Osborne came to take possession of Stephen Cox’s apartment. In the small of the night they arranged it, and, both being mad, in the morning they kept their bargain. ‘We mad people should stick to our agreements,’ said Stephen, as Hattie thanked him in the green dawn. And off he flew to Bangkok, and vanished from her sight.

It is not surprising that Hattie looks back on this night with horror. She cannot remember all of it, but she remembers enough to know that she behaved atrociously, even for her. But then, Stephen is a gentleman, and will not tell. And she has got a very low-rent flat out of it. And maybe he is dead and will never be able to tell. Molly Lansdowne is dead, dead of a heart attack in a hotel in Spain. Only Hattie remembers. And she will never tell.

*

Stephen Cox sits strapped into his Club Class seat at Charles de Gaulle Airport waiting for take-off on the Air France flight to Thailand and Vietnam, with his new discreet professionless passport in his pocket. He does not regret handing over his key and his rent book and his last will and testament to Hattie Osborne. One should obey impulses. His impulses had not enabled him to comfort Hattie in the way she most needed, but an empty apartment, however small, was an acceptable offering. He wondered how she would get on with his mysterious and philanthropic landlord, the aptly named Mr Goodfellow. And would she remember to give the bank the note he had scribbled requesting cancellation of the standing order for rent? It did not matter much, one way or the other. The rent was very low, and Mr Goodfellow was too honest to allow himself to be paid twice over.

He had told Hattie he had no idea how long he would be away. He said this to everybody. It was the truth.

He was feeling surprisingly well after his white night. Alert, light in the body, fancy free. The flight from Heathrow to Paris had been on time, and now, on the main leg of his journey eastward, he had happily been allocated a place near the Emergency Exit, with extra leg space, and the seat next to him was still free. He stretched and spread himself and began to browse through the copy of The Times he had purchased in London. Already the British news seemed irrelevant, parochial. Who cared about phone-tapping and Swiss takeover bids for British firms? Who cared if the Queen Mother had attended a ceremony in Nuneaton or the Countess of Snowdon a luncheon in Leith? Who cared that Lady Philippa Carlisle was six years old today, or that Princess Anne had tinted her hair red? Even the long slow diminuendo of the defeated miners’ strike and the rise of the new star Gorbachev failed to interest. Stephen read on, complacently, already half elsewhere, noting in passing that Paul Whitmore, the Horror of Harrow Road, was to appeal against his sentence, and that little Sophal May, an eleven-year-old Cambodian refugee, had been reunited with her parents in New York after a decade of searching.

His attention was caught only when he came across the obituaries of two of his acquaintances. It seemed a dangerously high body count. Both had died prematurely. One had once been his publisher. He had died, though it did not say so, of the drink. The other had been a fellow-scholar at Oxford. Cancer had killed him. Stephen paid a silent tribute to Michael Rowbotham and Stuart Cross, and registered the fact that Death was already his companion. Death had joined the caravan early, even though Stephen’s visa would take him only as far as Bangkok.

An announcement in French followed by English declared that the plane would take off in twenty minutes, and that the name of the captain was Commandant Parodi. Stephen was pleased by this. Who better to fly one into the unknown? We live in the age of parody, reflected Stephen. He had known another Parodi, years ago, in Normandy. He had been the manager of the Grand Hotel in Cabourg, the hotel of Balbec, which Proust had made his own. Stephen had arrived there on his bicycle, and the manager had been at first suspicious of his credentials, then appeased. Monsieur Parodi. Was it a common name, were these two related? Stephen did not know. The curving wide beach of Cabourg returned to him, the blue-grey watercolour sky, the yellow sands, the girls forever on their bicycles. He had walked from his hotel room across a marble foyer into the sea, wearing a white bathrobe. And in the evenings, he had played roulette in the casino, and eaten from little oval platters of fruits de mer, silver platters heaped with oysters and winkles and urchins and prawns and razor shells and mussels and green weeds of the sea. Good Time, he had then inhabited. He had been young enough to lay his chips for luck upon the number of his own age. Now he had long since left the board, and played roulette no more.

But luck was still with him, and the seat next to him was still empty. He appropriated it with his books, his briefcase, his plastic-bagged purchase of a small duty-free radio. He thought himself free from company, for Captain Parodi was already beginning to taxi towards the runway, but no, here at the last moment was a fellow-traveller, invading and claiming his space. He scooped up his belongings and redeployed them beneath his feet. As he did so, he took note that Death had been joined near the Emergency Exit by Lust.

Lust was extremely attractive. She was also tiny, and the extra leg-room was wasted on her, but Stephen did not grudge this. If the seat must be occupied, let it be by such an apparition. She settled herself in, clearly a practised last-minute traveller, without fuss, with a comfortable little rustling and patting of pillow and blanket. She seemed to have no baggage: perhaps the attentive steward had disposed of it in some privileged secret store? Stephen observed her covertly, as Captain Parodi swooped upwards to the skies. Of her legs he had a good view, for her tight emerald skirt rode high above her knees, and her ankles were extended, neatly crossed. Her little green lizard-skin high-heeled shoes were impractical fetishes. Her feet made Stephen’s feet look enormous. Her hands were neatly folded in her lap, and she wore large rings with flashing stones. In her lap reposed an absurdly small, soft, kingfisher-blue bag with a golden clasp and a golden chain. Her breasts were high and showy under a trim white silk shirt. She wore a lavish quantity of cosmetics upon her brown and flawless skin. She twinkled and jittered with light, although she sat so still. Fire leapt from her emeralds and her diamonds. She smelt of musk. She was infinitely composed.

Champagne was served, and Stephen and petite Lust each accepted one glass, then another. She seemed to be well known to the steward. They journeyed eastwards.

Caviare was served, in small glass pots. Black aphrodisiac. Petite Lust from time to time examined her even white teeth in her pocket mirror to make sure that no unsightly soft damp dark sea eggs adhered. Into the back of her gold powder-case a goldsmith had hammered a black enamel orchid. She drank half a bottle of white wine with her meal, and then calmly embarked, with her cheese, on half a bottle of red. Stephen stared in admiration. How could so much liquid accommodate itself so gracefully in so small a frame? She did not flush or fumble. She remained calm, cool, brown, self-possessed.

Over coffee, she announced to Stephen that her name was Miss Porntip, and that she lived in Bangkok and was Beauty Queen of Asia.

During the in-flight movie they exchanged further information. As gangsters and drug-dealers on the small silent screen raced and tumbled and cheated and sweated and fell over cliffs in fast cars, Stephen Cox and Miss Porntip told one another little stories about their lives. He admitted to being a writer and an adventurer. She claimed to be a woman with many assets as well as her beauty. They spoke of Thailand, Indonesia, the Pacific Basin, the New World. Miss Porntip was derisive about Vietnam and China and Kampuchea. ‘This plane,’ she said, ‘it fly on to Ho Chi Minh Ville. Is ruined, Ho Chi Minh Ville. Was fine city. Saigon was fine city. Café Continental, Rue Catinat. Dancing. Thés dansants. Is all ruined now.’

‘It must have been ruined long before your time,’ murmured Stephen, politely. She could not be more than thirty, he thought, though he had no way of judging the bloom on an oriental skin. Certainly, the Vietnamese who had boarded the plane in Paris had looked far, far older than his new friend. They had belonged to another epoch.

She wanted to know why he was interested in Indochina. He was hard pushed for an answer. ‘Is mainly the French and the Americans come there,’ she said. ‘Is not for the English. English did not fight there. No English missing soldiers to collect.’ She asked if he planned to stay in Bangkok, and if so at which hotel. He named his hotel. She wrinkled her nose in disgust. ‘Is old and not so nice,’ she said. ‘Many fine hotels in Thailand now.’

She spoke as though she owned half of them. Perhaps she did.

‘Writers do not stay in nice hotels,’ he tried, tentatively, more for his own benefit than hers, and realizing as he spoke that he was talking rubbish. The Grand Hotel in Cabourg had been one of the finest hotels in the world. She treated his remark with the contempt it deserved.

‘Is not necessary stay in horrid places,’ she said, firmly. ‘Is not necessary see poor people and horrid places.’

‘What if they are one’s subject?’ he suggested.

‘Why choose subject? People not want to read of horrid things and poor people. People like nice hotels and jewels and nice things. And if poor people necessary, use . . .’ (she searched for a word, and, triumphant, found it) ‘use invention. Is correct, invention?’

‘Yes, correct. Invention. Imagination. But these things have their limitations. They cannot make something out of nothing.’

‘Why not? Films and stories make out of nothing. Look.’ She gestured towards the silent screen, where a bronzed and derivative hero ran through long corn beneath a lowering, circling pursuing helicopter. ‘Look, is nothing. Is no person and no-thing and no place.’

He laughed. He was entranced by Miss Porntip. She was surely no-thing herself, she was surely a dream. Commandant Parodi flew on, five miles high over the Euphrates, towards the lopsided melon moon of Karachi.

*

The New Trocadero Hotel, Surawong Road, does not strike Stephen as particularly new. Surely it must be the old Trocadero, with a new neon sign? But it is new to Stephen, as indeed is the whole of this strange city, this City of Angels. He is not surprised that Miss Porntip had disapproved of his hotel. He is half inclined to disapprove of it himself, but checks himself sharply. He is not here to enjoy himself, after all.

His room (executive style with bath) has a certain authentic greyness that makes him seem a little more authentic himself. The window looks out on to a vast grey cylindrical water cooler dripping ceaselessly on to a gravel-clad roof. Stephen reflects that it must be spreading legionnaires’ disease throughout Thailand and half wishes he had bothered to make time to visit his GP to inquire about hepatitis and malaria and meningitis. One can carry the Death Wish too far, and anyway what is the point of succumbing to illness in a foreign hotel? There is no story in that, no copy to file, no message to send home.

He unpacks his clothes, hangs up his white suit and his blue, places his rolled socks tidily in a drawer. He examines the contents of his vast old-fashioned brand new refrigerator and reads the notices by the ill-placed mirror. They inform him that if he wishes to purchase any of the room’s fittings, the prices are as indicated. He looks around him. There is no way he could want to purchase any of these objects. They are all either old or unattractive or both. A bedside table, a bed, two chairs, a sheet, two pillows, an ashtray, a small wooden tray with a glass and a Thermos of purified water, a pair of flimsy and ill-fitting curtains, a doubtful rug. Each item is priced, even the grimy and slightly torn shower curtain in the bathroom. Door knob, 150 baht. As this is what Stephen paid for a taxi from the airport, it does not seem a bargain. A bedside light is listed, but does not exist. Should he report this to the management, lest he be charged for its removal?

There is a new television set, still encased in thick fleshy semitransparent grey polythene. He switches it on. It responds, but there is no picture, only a white blare. He switches it off. He will play with it later. It is priced at 11,000 baht, which seems quite cheap. The only misspelling on the list is a handwritten addendum, ‘Bath Mate’ for ‘Bath Mat’. The phrase reminds him pleasurably of Miss Porntip, with whom he has a date for the evening in the Oriental Hotel. He wonders whether she will keep it. He has no way of knowing. She has drawn him a little map, showing him the pedestrian’s route from the sombre Trocadero to the gay Oriental. It is, she says, a short walk. They have an assignation in the Authors’ Lounge at seven thirty.

He lies on the bed and stares at the ceiling. The room is basic, but it works. It is cool and air-conditioned. He has slept in worse rooms, far worse rooms than this. His own room, in Primrose Hill, currently occupied by a weary Hattie, is nearly as basic as this.

He wonders what on earth he is doing here. Is he in search of a story or of himself, or of an answer to the riddles of history? Or is he merely trying to colour in the globe?

He thinks of Joseph Conrad, whose own adventures in the South Seas began here in Bangkok. It was here that Conrad received his first command. Stephen Cox admires Conrad. He is drawn to his loneliness, his restlessness, his temptation to despair. He likes the possibly apocryphal tale of the young Conrad, pointing at the atlas and putting his finger ‘on a spot in the very middle of the then white heart of Africa’ and vowing to see it for himself. And so he had gone, into the unmapped quarter, amongst cannibals and savages. Stephen, like Conrad, had nourished his boyhood dreams with travel books, with Mungo Park and Marco Polo and Captain Cook and Pierre Loti and Gide in the Congo. Dreams of escape, dreams of distance. He had wanted to see, before he died, the whole wide world.

The bare light bulb dangles. The machine hums. A tap drips. Stephen fills in the turning globe, patch by patch. At prep school, in what was called Geography, he and his classmates had been taught to surround islands and continents with a blue edging of sea. A useless, harmless exercise. There were strict rules governing the angle of the blue pencil. A wide, rayed fuzz was not allowed. Little, even, horizontal strokes alone had been permitted. No reasoning for this had been provided. Prep school, like the army, had been without reason.

He is feeling very tired, but he dares not close his eyes lest he fall asleep and miss his rendezvous with the improbable Miss Porntip. He picks up a copy of the Bangkok Post purchased in the lobby below, and runs his eyes over news stories about Ronald Reagan and the Ayatollah and the King of Thailand and a logging concession. In this paper he will find no deaths, or none that he can call his own. He finds an item about the deployment of Vietnamese troops of the People’s Army in the Phnom Malai area of Battambang, an area briefly reconquered by the Khmer Rouge three years earlier. There is a picture of a young Khmer Rouge soldier in a denim jacket, sitting on the ground, smiling broadly, casually and proudly cradling a gun. His head is wrapped in a chequered cloth, on top of which perches what appears to be an American cowboy hat. His smile gives no indication that he is in any way aware that the Khmer Rouge are the folk monsters of the modern world. The author of the article speculates that there are 40,000 trained Khmer Rouge soldiers active on the frontier and inside Kampuchea, and that Pol Pot himself is in a hideout in the Cardamom mountains.

Stephen Cox’s own army experiences had been peaceful. He had lazed about in the Dorset countryside (during his National Service) with his friend Brian Bowen and a suspected shadow on his lung, and then had been transferred to a Russian language course in Cornwall. He could still speak a little Russian. He wondered if the People’s Army spoke Russian. The Soviet Union was Vietnam’s only friend. It was strange that while the world reviled the Khmer Rouge as mythical monsters, they also reviled the Vietnamese who had liberated Phnom Penh from the Khmer Rouge. Khmer and Thai and Vietnamese Stephen did not speak. There had been no National Service courses offered in these languages.

Stephen has never seen a war, never heard a shell explode. An American plane had crashed into the shallow waters of the Levels near his childhood home in Somerset in 1942, but that was as near as he had come to death by acts of war.

So why does he lie here? Is he looking for trouble?

He gets up, looks again in the refrigerator. There is no mineral water, only beer. He does not want a beer, but decides to have one nevertheless. Why not? But there is no bottle opener. The previous guest must have extravagantly purchased it. Feebly, he lies back, and waits for the time to pass.

*

The Swan of Ice

A swan of ice drips upon the chequered marble floor. A white-suited slave discreetly mops. Little naked oysters lie obediently in silver spoons, raying outwards in a spiral from a huge, spiny, not-quite-dead lobster. Its feelers struggle and waver, its maxillary palps feebly panic and tick. Tiny swans of cream-filled light-buff puff pastry float on a silver sea. Teeth bite, flash, smile. There is black caviare, and prawns of dangerous radiant coral pink. There are jewels, silks, perfumes. This is the gorgeous East. Conrad was here.

This, in Stephen’s handwriting, on the back of the torn-off front page of Staff Briefing Paper for the International Committee for Resettlement of Displaced People, folded in half and tucked into the memo book I’d nicked from Liz Headleand. I like it. Stephen’s high style. Well, it’s a parody of Stephen’s high style. Well, Stephen’s high style is parody. But what can you do with half a page? It sounds like the Oriental to me. I stayed there once with John Connell when he was making The Princess and the Talisman. It was a bit swan-of-ice-and-dying-lobster. Wonderful prawn soup. John was on good form that week. Ah well, never look back. ‘Conrad was here’, eh? Stephen always had a thing about Conrad, which is odd when you think that Conrad was such an amazing racist old reactionary, and frankly Stephen has always been somewhat to the left of Pol Pot.

There were quite a few notes about Conrad jotted about, though you’d have had to know your stuff to spot some of them. ‘The Violin of the Captain of the Otago’, for instance. The Otago was Conrad’s first command, and its previous skipper used to play the violin to himself mournfully all over the high seas. Conrad was haunted by ghostly water music. The old skipper was mad. Then there were quite a few notes about Victory, which Stephen must have been reading. Such as ‘Query: Portrait of hotel manager libellous?’ I should think so. Conrad had to print an apology, saying that of course he knew not all Germans were quite as ghastly as the appalling Schomberg. Not that I was all that interested in whether Conrad or Stephen had libelled a hotel or a hotel manager. I was much more keen to find out whether he’d libelled me, and if so, to destroy the evidence. I was sure I’d seen my own name jump out of the pages as I flipped through it under Liz’s nose. As one would expect one’s own name to do, if it were there. But when I looked more closely I was damned if I could find it. Had I gone and brought the wrong memo book, I wondered? Was Liz Headleand even now amusing herself with a description of my naked tits, while I was stuck with naked oysters? Maybe I’d imagined it, in a paranoid sort of way.

There was a lot of stuff about a character called Miss Porntip. She seemed to be some kind of erotic fantasy of poor old Stephen’s. Nothing very consecutive, just notes and scribbles. Jottings about her clothes and sayings. The wit, wisdom and wardrobe of Miss Porntip. To tell the truth, I don’t think Stephen ever got much further than fantasy. I think he was one of those men who put sex in a compartment and never let it get out. Not that I blame him. When it does get out, it is a menace. To tell the truth, I don’t think Stephen liked women, as such. I think they nauseated him. In the flesh. I’m only guessing, mind you, from putting two and two together from clues in his books. It’s funny really, because he was always a good friend to women. People like Marjorie and Molly adored him. And he was a good friend to me. I wonder if I nauseated him?

I don’t see why people shouldn’t be celibate if they want. It would certainly make life easier. I wish I did want. But oh alas I go on wanting the other thing.

I got quite excited when my eye lit on something that looked as though it might connect up with me. There were my initials, HO, written several times over, in red ball-point, and underneath them were the names of several London hotels and restaurants adorned by queries. The Carlton, Claridge’s, the Dorchester, the Ritz, the Troc and the Cri, Stephen inquired of himself. Then he had written DICKENS? NEW ZEALAND HOUSE? And again, HO?

At first I thought Stephen was trying to remember some do I’d been to with him, or at which I’d met him, and I did manage to dredge up a dim memory of a reception at Claridge’s, for Richard Burton (or was it Mrs Gandhi?) – and another on the Martini Terrace of New Zealand House where I had a good chat with Monica Dickens when she was one of the Authors of the Year. I think I behaved quite nicely on that occasion. But then as I read on I realized I was on the wrong tack altogether. HO wasn’t Harriet Osborne at all, it was Ho Chi Minh. Silly me. There was a lot more HO later on in the diary. Though what he had to do with Claridge’s or the Carlton or New Zealand House remains obscure. I’m sure he never went to parties at such places, did he? Did he ever come to England at all? I’ve no idea. Perhaps Stephen was planning to employ a little artistic licence and introduce a scene into his play with Pol Pot and Ho and Chairman Mao all dining in Claridge’s with Richard Burton and Mrs Gandhi and Monica Dickens. Why not?

He was at least half planning to write a play. I found one page laid out as a sort of screenplay, with camera directions. It was set in a Paris apartment, rue St André des Arts, 1952. POV Khieu Ponnary, POV Saloth Sar alias Pol Pot, that sort of thing. They were talking about regicide and how to get rid of Sihanouk. This Ponnary person appeared to be Pol Pot’s fiancée. I didn’t know Stephen knew the lingo for TV plays. Point of View, and all that. He never let on about it. I used to try to talk him into doing TV scripts, all those years ago, back in the seventies, when we both needed the ready, but he never would. He wasn’t interested. He said he’d had his bellyful of the cinema, translating subtitles when he was Down and Out in Paris in the sixties.

The rue St André des Arts rings a bell. I wonder if it’s where we went to see Maxence and Claudine. Bill and me. Or was it Harold and me?

Stephen seems to have been reading Macbeth as well as Victory. There were quite a few Macbeth quotes dotted about. Some in red ink. Very pretty. Bleed, bleed, poor country. Blood will have blood, they say. The unmentionable play. Was Ponnary a sort of Lady Macbeth figure, perhaps? Screwing Pol Pot to the sticking post?

They said Aaron Headleand’s new version of Coriolanus is worth seeing. I really ought to make an effort and get to it. He’s one of the up-and-coming. I liked his Squeaking Cleopatra. The boy Cleopatra. Bit Stoppardian, but not bad.

And from the blown rose, many stop their nose

That kneeled unto the bud.

I don’t know why those lines of Cleopatra haunt me. Well, no, that’s a lie. I know exactly why, and I don’t like the reason. I read a stupid article in the paper today by that ghastly skinny short-skirt skeleton Cassie O’Creagh about why men continue to be attractive in their fifties, when women go off in their forties. All to do with reproduction. Sexist crap.

I did find the reference to me, in the end, in Stephen’s diary. The one I’d subliminally glimpsed. It says, in a sort of scribble, ‘Hattie in her gold dress. Trumpet and kettledrum.’

Well, I like it. Better than a blown rose, anyway. I think it must be some sort of quotation, but I can’t place it. Dear God, how we all live in quotations. Trumpet and kettledrum. It makes me sound quite dignified. Shakespeare? Marlowe? Chapman’s Homer?

Oh well, plough on, I suppose. At the very least we can get some bibliographical collection in America to make an offer. Isn’t there a library in Austin, Texas, with a room full of Erle Stanley Gardner’s hats? They’ll like a finger bone.

*

The swan of ice drips. Stephen, waiting in the Oriental for the doubtful arrival of the hallucinatory Miss Porntip, sits on a chintz cushion in a rattan chair in a quiet corner confronting the Trimalchian cocktail party into which he has wandered. He had not expected the Authors’ Lounge to be so fully occupied, and was surprised to be admitted without invitation. His white suit is his passport. Is that the manager, that handsome lean-faced Scandinavian gentleman, shaking hands on the threshold? Is he the successor to the disreputable Schomberg and the disappeared silk merchant, eaten by tigers? He had let Stephen through without a murmur, and now here Stephen sits, as a novelist should, observing.

Conrad was here. And so, it seems, was Stephen’s old friend and rival Pett Petrie, best-selling author of the runaway upmarket success, Ziggurat. Stephen has discovered his name in the Authors’ Lounge menu. Various writers have given their names to cocktails. Conrad and Somerset Maugham one might have expected, and Morris West and Peter Ustinov and Gore Vidal he is not surprised to find. He salutes with respect the presence of the old seafarer William Golding. He notes that Barbara Cartland has given her name not only to a cocktail of pink champagne but also to the Dish of the Month, a confection of fillet of sea bass with mousse of rhubarb. All this, though strange, is acceptable to Stephen. This is the Oriental, not the Trocadero. But the sight of Pett Petrie’s name jolts him. How has Pett, his contemporary, joined this international literary jetset, this self-promoting sybaritic elite? Until ten years ago, Pett was nobody. A struggling author, a minor Wimbledon short-story writer and poet who had never been further afield than a poetry reading in Rotterdam. And now he is a world-famous novelist and has given his name to an oriental cocktail of brandy, vermouth and candiola juice.

What the hell is candiola juice? Stephen feels outsmarted. He smarts.

He conjures up the sombre Trocadero, with its serious clientele, the haunt of war correspondents and international relief workers. He tells himself that he is a serious person, not a best-seller. He is the Graham Greene character in a dingy corner with a cockroach. Not for him the fleshpots and the transient glitter of hype. (He peeps, surreptitiously, to see if there is a Graham Greene cocktail, and is relieved to note that there is not. Or not yet, not yet.)

He sips his glass of free-flowing champagne, and gazes round at the motley of hotel guests. Japanese, German, Thai, American, Korean, French, Swedish. Some chatter, some wander lonely through the crowd, nibbling and grazing. Stephen does not look out of place in his white suit. His white suit is made of miracle material. It never creases or crumples. It never picks up dirt. Stephen’s face and accent do not crease and crumple. He is the English public-school product, the mad Englishman abroad. He is an asset, a decoration. He is a man for whom doors glide open. So he reassures himself, as he sits alone.

Will Miss Porntip be admitted? Has she perhaps an invitation?

A large blond Nordic bronzed film-star or mountaineer is speaking to a small gleaming Malaysian statesman or industrialist. Are they speaking of holiday-making or drug-smuggling or gun-running or Hollywood? An elderly European woman with an ebony silver-topped cane and an air of minor royalty is listening patiently to an excited girl in a flame-coloured mini-dress who may or may not be her granddaughter. A handsome middle-aged Thai in white uniform with gold braid addresses a dark-suited Japanese gentleman. A lonely drinking Dutchman, rawly clad, towers above the throng. Two little Japanese girls in immaculate sailor suits dart nimbly through the knee-level forest. The little one is chasing the larger. They are identical except in size, their hair cut in straight and solid carved fringes, their perfect features lucid and bright, their little white ankle socks flashing, their polished black pumps twinkling. They are enjoying the party more than most. They are extraordinarily beautiful. Their sailor suits remind Stephen that he is in the great port of Bangkok, on the Gulf of Siam. So far he has not seen a glimpse of river or of sea. As he watches the little sisters, a wave of emotion pours through Stephen. He knows not what it is, but it makes the hair rise on the nape of his neck. It is a tremor from the globe itself, and from its many peoples.

But now the party is disturbed by a small commotion. It is, of course, the arrival of Miss Porntip. Here she is! She is greeted with smiles and salutations. The suave manager bows deeply from his great height, and kisses her hand. Slaves cluster, proffering titbits, silver-haired gentlemen bend with deference over her small body. She makes a royal progress. She is now robed in floor-length dazzling cyclamen-shot-pink, trimmed with gold. Her hair is full of purple flowers. From her brown arm dangles a small magenta bag. She flits, laughs, twirls neatly on her slender heels, accepting greetings from the very air, accepting from a specially presented silver tray a specially elegant glass of bubbly. She is making her way towards Stephen, fluttering, indirect, the butterfly’s way, but here she is, and, with a smile and an outstretched hand, she gestures that he should not rise, and she sinks beside him, upon the rattan couch.

The slaves melt discreetly away. The swan melts. The children laugh in the undergrowth.

‘So,’ says Miss Porntip. ‘It seems here is party. This is not nice quiet rendezvous as planned. You enjoy party?’

‘I enjoy watching the party.’

‘There is often party. These not real people, these mostly passing people.’

‘Birds of passage.’

‘Yes. Is so. You have drink?’

He lifts his empty champagne glass.

‘Here,’ she says, and offers him hers. She waves her hand, and, as he takes his first sip, another materializes as if by magic at her elbow. They clink glasses, smile, and pledge one another.

‘So,’ she says. ‘And how is hotel?’

‘Dim,’ he says. ‘Dim, but serviceable.’

She laughs. The swan drips. It is losing its glassy essence.

‘We will not stay here long,’ she says. ‘We will go eat. You hungry?’

‘Yes,’ he says.

She laughs again. He smiles, more slowly. She places her little brown hand upon his knee. He notices that she has changed her rings to complement her costume. Gone are the emeralds. She is now sporting amethyst and ruby and sapphire. She is a symphony of hard reds, hard pinks and blues. She taps his knee with small light fingers.

‘Welcome,’ she says. ‘Welcome to Bangkok.’

Her lips are a glossy, varnished, violent pink. Unnatural, delightful. Her nails are painted a bluish pink.

‘Stephen,’ she says, experimentally, affectionately, a little smugly. She seems surprisingly proud of him. He wonders how, amongst all these rich travellers, he has managed to catch her fancy. He wonders whether he should reply with a murmured ‘Porntip’, but cannot quite make it. She seems to acknowledge that her name might ring oddly in his ears, and to pay this possibility no attention. She has assurance, she has dignity. She is a sophisticated woman, Miss Porntip, a woman of the world. Is she to be trusted? (He supposes he ought to ask himself, trusted for what?)

Trusted for dinner, anyway. That is agreed. She leads him out of the party, scattering little nods and thanks as she goes, a compact princess. She takes his arm, and trips beside him, propelling him firmly through high rooms furnished with antique furniture and gilt mirrors, and pushing her way through a white curtain woven of ropes of fresh white jasmine. Now they are in a perfumed garden, twinkling with Chinese lanterns of orange and deep iris blue. She leads him on, towards the river. They stand, on the parapet, overlooking the Chau Praya. They stand where Conrad stood. They gaze at the broad heaving swell, at glittering bedecked barges, at buzzing hydrotaxis, at water ferries, at dark slow moving hulks, at twinkling lights and reflections, at a whole city on the move. ‘Come, come,’ she says, and leads him further onwards, to a swaying landing stage of wood. They stand there, rising and falling to the irregular rhythm of the water. Green and purple water hyacinth float and suck in the current. The flood slaps and tugs. Miss Porntip takes Stephen’s left hand, and kisses each of his fingers, and then sucks, gently, upon the smallest of them. They both stare at the water.

Miss Porntip sighs, happily. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Now we go eat, and I tell you more about my poor childhood and my business success. Yes?’

‘Yes,’ says Stephen. He is struck into docility by this strange little woman, by this warm night. She can suck him dry if she wants. If she can. The water sucks at the wooden legs of the landing stage. A smell of burning diesel and rotting vegetation mingles erotically with the scent of jasmine and the vinous musk of Miss Porntip.

‘Come,’ she says. And they go.

They walk through dark narrow streets full of people, through the smell of noodles and soya and oil, and knock on an unlikely door let into a wooden building on stilts over water. They are no longer by the wide river. This is a backwater, a hidden way, a secret canal. ‘Klong,’ murmurs Miss Porntip, mysteriously. ‘Klong.’ They make their way past alcoved diners to a low table on a wooden terrace overlooking the reflections. A flowering tree bends over them from an inner courtyard. ‘Sit, sit,’ she says, and he sits, a little creakily, as the seats, though prettily cushioned, are low. He looks around him with keen interest. Is he about to be murdered? Is Miss Porntip about to produce from her person a tiny jewelled dagger and slit his throat? He really does not care.

Does the whole terrace move and sway a little, or is it his head that swims? It seems to him that there is a slight, almost imperceptible motion, a giving, a non-resisting. The wooden walls of the building behind them are a deep polished red brown. They slope and incline, tapering upwards and inwards, slightly off true. He has left the Bangkok of right angles and marble and cement. Silk hangings portray temples, bamboo groves, little goddesses. A calm stone head smiles serenely from the depths of thick foliage. A little spirit shrine adorned by candles flickers in the leafy distance like a magical dovecot. It is hard to tell whether they are indoors or out. The table at which they sit is elaborately lacquered in red and gold. The only discordant note is the clash between its rich flamelike tones and Miss Porntip’s harsher metallic pinks. He half expects her to click her fingers and change colour like a chameleon, but it does not seem to cross her mind to do so.

Pretty pickings. Electric spoils. Is this the Thai equivalent of high Victoriana?

A small silk waitress approaches and sinks to her knees beside Miss Porntip. They converse, quickly, briefly, in a foreign tongue, with many smiles and nods. She vanishes. Miss Porntip smiles at him with confidence.

‘I order meal,’ she explains.

He nods acquiescence.

‘And now I tell you more of my sad story,’ she says, ‘and you tell me more of yours.’

‘It’s a deal,’ he says.

For the first time in their acquaintance she looks very faintly disconcerted.

‘A deal?’ she echoes, as though she has never heard the word.

‘A deal,’ he repeats. ‘You know, a bargain. Your life for mine.’

This time she gets it, and she smiles, radiant again.

‘Is my life first, then yours,’ she says.

He is glad of this small hesitation, this retreat and advance. It proves she is not an automaton, a musical doll. She can understand most of what he says. Can those be real gems around her little throat? A bird sings from the spirit house. It is not a real bird. It is a jewelled toy.

‘Yes,’ she says, as a thin tapering glass of pale straw wine appears at her elbow, at his. ‘Yes, my sad story.’

They sip the wine, nod approval. A person less formed for sadness it would be hard to conceive.

‘I tell you more of the village,’ she says. ‘The hard life, the poor land. My parents were farmers. Like your grandparents. But not good land. Very poor land. Your grandparents very rich fields, many cows, farm subsidies, you tell me. For us, not so. Our land is very poor. Very porous soil, hard to store water, and saline deposits also. Many droughts, then floods. Very primitive farming. Low yield farming. My family own twenty acres, but very poor crops. Only 750 kilograms per year of paddy we produce. We have no mechanism, only buffalo.’

She smiles, nostalgically, and from her tiny bag produces a tiny square photograph. A small child in a limpet hat sits on a water buffalo against a green sunset. Miss Porntip when young, or a favourite niece?

‘For many years my family farm this land. Once we had been more rich. Our house was good house. Teak house. But many bad harvests made many difficulties, and my grandfather sold land. So we had only twenty acres. We gathered also food in the forest. Bamboo and toads.’

She smiles, dazzlingly.

‘Delicious toads.’

She pauses, dramatically, and continues.

‘And then came Americans and the new roads.’

She looks at him interrogatively, to see if he is paying attention. He nods. He follows her.

‘I was born 1955,’ she says. ‘I was little girl when the Americans come and build highway. They build highway, airbase. They chop forest. They take the women. My aunt, she live with American man in town. She keep his house and cook his food. The Americans bring much money to our district. But not to our village. We too far away in hills. My aunt, she go live in town with American man. With Uncle Mort.’

She sips her wine, reflectively. Little bowls and dishes begin to scatter themselves upon the table.

‘Uncle Mort eat a lot of meat,’ she says. ‘It is true that Americans eat much meat, much more meat than Thai people. Thai people like meat, but Americans more so. American meat. It arrive in deep-freeze. Airloads of meat. Also ice-cream and maple syrup. Is also true about ice-cream and maple syrup.’

Piquant little sauces cluster in shallow vessels. Green herbs float in a watery pool. The aroma of lemon grass rises.

‘Uncle Mort give me much ice-cream.’ She shakes her head, pulls a slight face. ‘I did not so much like the ice-cream. But he kind man, he nice man, he good to auntie. She good to him. Auntie, Uncle Mort and me, we sit in bed and eat ice-cream. His face red. Big and red. Whiskers, also. He was from Idaho. I-da-ho. He tell us many stories about Idaho. In bed with ice-cream.’

He cannot tell if this memory is sweet or sour. Her narrative tone is light, neutral, quizzical. With her chopsticks she picks up a carved star of radish and a green frond, and nibbles, delicately, with her small even white teeth. He imitates her, less elegantly. He feels large and red like Uncle Mort.

‘The village change,’ she says. ‘The population grow. More and more babies. No contraception, in hills. My mother have six babies. More and more farmers sell land. More tenants. The people are still very very poor because the land is bad and no investment. Harvests very bad in 1960s. Forests disappear. Toads disappear. Bamboo is cut back. More and more poor people. No money to buy machinery. Bullock and buffalo is only labour. One pair of bullock cost 10,000 baht.’

She pushes a dish of rice towards him, helps herself to a piece of fish.

‘Average income, annual, per household, 10,000 baht.’

She pauses, lets him try to work this out.

‘Emerges,’ she says, ‘Ricardian rent.’

He is arrested with a morsel dangling from his chopstick somewhere near his chin.

‘Excuse me?’ he says.

‘Emerges,’ she says, firmly, ‘Ricardian rent. David Ricardo. British economist. Theory of rent and wages.’

‘That’s what I thought you said,’ said Stephen, returning the morsel to his plate in order to reorganize himself.

‘Yes,’ she continues. ‘No capital for development. My brothers work for wages. They work like buffalo. There is no money, no work in village. My auntie makes good money. Is now the time of the women.’

‘The time of the women?’ he echoes, stupidly.

‘The time of the economic power of the women. I watch, I learn. When fifteen years old, I win beauty contest. I very pretty child. The children in our village not so very pretty, but my family very pretty. My auntie very pretty when she young.’

This calm self-appraisal is clearly part of her lesson in the economic development of north-eastern rural Thailand, but nevertheless Stephen feels it requires some acknowledgement. He gallantly remarks that she must indeed have been a very pretty child, as she is now a very beautiful woman. A fleet little sequence of expressions dimples rapidly over her face in response: pleasure, coquetry, a bridling modesty, an irritated dismissal of a diversionary tactic, and a renewed pleasure and amusement.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Very pretty. An asset, prettiness. My capital. At this time, the girls begin migration. To the big cities. To Bangkok. In 1974, Americans leave. My auntie, she go to Bangkok. The girls work in coffee shops, in massage parlours. Big business tourism begins now. These girls send big money home. The villagers buy bullock, they build new houses. The men labour like bullock. The women labour like women. There are stories of great riches. Fairy stories, like this fairy story I tell you this night. Eat, eat, you do not eat.’

‘I am too enraptured by your story,’ he says, but at her persuasion heaps more little titbits into his porcelain bowl. She continues to pick, lightly, with her imported lacquered Chinese chopsticks, as she speaks.

‘My auntie very clever woman,’ she says. ‘She give me good advice. She teach me accounts.’

‘Excuse me,’ Stephen again interrupts. ‘May I ask you a question?’

‘Please.’ She smiles graciously, but manages to imply it would be better if the question were pertinent.

‘I just wanted to know how many years’ schooling you had,’ said Stephen, humbly. The question is acceptable.

‘Four years elementary,’ she says. ‘Education good investment, but slow return. No time to wait. So only four years elementary. Then I learn from Uncle Mort and Auntie.’

‘Did they teach you about Ricardo?’

‘Of course not, Mr Stephen Cox, of course not. They peasant people. Uncle Mort also peasant person. And not very intelligent. Auntie very intelligent, but peasant person.’

Suddenly she giggles, relents, changes demeanour, strokes his hand.

‘You storyteller, you say. You know how to tell stories. Not to hurry. But you want me hurry. You want me tell story quickly. All right, I tell you. You want to know how I know Ricardo? You want to miss five years’ story? Okay, I tell you. I meet Ricardo with American economist. He writing book on Thai economy. He interview me. I get to know him very well.’

A look of nervous distrust must have entered Stephen’s transfixed gaze, for she adds quickly, ‘But he gone now, gone long long ago, gone back to University of Princeton. He finished. He very nice man, very useful man, but he finished now.’ She pauses, reflects. ‘Very useful man,’ she repeats, ‘but not rich. Not like business clients. He count change, he bargain. He – what you say – he make deal.’ She laughs, a clear, delighted laugh. ‘He economist,’ she repeats, inviting Stephen to share her enjoyment of this eccentricity.

‘I get it,’ says Stephen.

‘You spoil story,’ she says. ‘I try to tell with much suspense. My days in coffee shop with auntie, my days in massage parlour, my days in own parlour. My beauty queen titles. Miss Banta, Miss Udon Thani, Miss Thailand, Miss Asia, Miss World, Miss Universe. My empire. My business investments. I make much money now, Stephen. I wear diamonds and rubies and sapphires.’

‘You mean those are real?’

‘Oh yes, they real.’ She flashes them at him. ‘I like real. I like real things. I not like pretend.’

‘And how long did this economic miracle take you?’ he wants to know.

She tells him he wants to know everything too quickly. She recommends a little more of the prawn. She decides, generously, that it is his turn to speak, and asks him about his own career. Has he too won prizes?

‘Oh yes,’ says Stephen. ‘I too won a prize. The beauty prize of novelists.’

‘And are you rich?’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘by my standards, by British standards, let us put it this way, Princeton economists earn good salaries.’

His response is too oblique for her. She ignores it.

‘Britain is poor country,’ she informs him. ‘Post-industrial country. You import from Japan, from Korea, from Thailand. You no more manufacturing. You cooling, we heating. You protectionist now. You senile now.

‘So, you are poor man, Mr Stephen Cox. You Trocadero man, not Oriental man.’

Stephen protests, mildly, for his own honour rather than that of his nation.

‘No, I am not poor,’ he says. ‘I have enough money for what I like. I like to be here, so I am here. I am a free man. I can choose. Freedom is riches.’

She looks at him as though he has missed some basic point of logic.

‘What your income?’ she asks. He evades, elaborates.

‘I have no family, no wife, no children, no dependants. I own no house, I spend little money. I am a success.’

She looks unconvinced.

‘I am a celebrity,’ he continues. ‘Of a sort.’

She raises, very slightly, both plucked and arched eyebrows. He sits before her, a man in a white suit, from an old, old country, far away.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I am not as much of a celebrity as Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, Barbara Cartland and Pett Petrie, but I am a celebrity nevertheless.’

‘Explain these people, please,’ she says. So he explains the celebrity ratings of the Authors’ Lounge. She has never heard of Pett Petrie and Barbara Cartland, but Conrad and Maugham have, like David Ricardo, entered her personal Hall of Fame. She expresses indignation at Stephen’s omission from the Drinks of the Month, and says she will have a word with the manager. She proceeds to suggest ingredients for a suitable cocktail. Juice of toad, essence of opium. As they converse, another little flotilla of tiny porcelain vessels sails gaily on to the table. Stephen had thought the meal was over, but finds he is still hungry, so continues to pick and toy. The delicate morsels melt away without trace. The evening lasts for weeks, for months. Little medicinal bitter liqueurs arrive in golden thimbles. The lights bloom softly on the oiled canal.

He wonders if he will be able to pay the bill, but there is no bill. It is all arranged, the little waitresses murmur. Perhaps this restaurant is one of Miss Porntip’s many establishments? Now she is suggesting they move on to sample the delights of others. He wonders if he will be able to stand up. His legs have stiffened and will not uncrumple. He is not as young as the supple, the super-flexible, the supremely adaptable Miss Porntip. He has pins and needles as he stands, stretching. Carved dragons and many-armed warriors surround him. Three-legged, three-toed birdmen form a guard of honour as they move towards the door. The whole building is surely moving slightly, it sways and gives. Thai people very flexible people, Miss Porntip had informed him. They like to please. They like to be pleased, but they like to please. Stephen and Miss Porntip, arm in arm, leave the dark scented sloping teak house over the water.

*

The Bridal Brothel

The street dazzles. Night life, Western Thai style. Neon lights burst and splatter. Red, purple, green, orange, blue. Acid, metallic, harsh. The hot street smells nauseously of cooking, of French fries and onions and ketchup, of Oxford Street in the tropics, of pizza and beer. Giant cocktails shake in the sky, naked breasts jut at the moon. The blandishments of Babel fizz and the polystyrene cartons fly. Japanese, French, Austrian, Mexican, Swiss, Vietnamese, Lao, Indian, Cantonese, Pekingese, Spanish, Polish, Turkish, Sinhalese: the base cuisines of the world jostle for attention. British pubs with shamrocks and tartans and Union Jacks and Irish whiskey, American hamburger joints with giant plastic tomatoes and six-foot-long fibreglass gherkins. From one doorway blares a jazzy version of the ‘Londonderry Air’, from another Pink Floyd. Sex shows and Thai masseuses invite. A street trader offers Mozart’s Greatest Hits! Others flog fake Rolex and fake Benetton and fake Beatles. Buoyant mystical brand names bespatter the street market of the world in an orgy of commerce. This is the Nite Spot of Nightmare, the pedestrian precinct of Porn. A shyly smiling little prostitute with a paint-brush clasped in her vagina begins to inscribe WELCOME TO BANGKOK on a white sheet of paper over which she squats. Her hips rotate. Her expression becomes more and more tense with concentration. She forgets to smile, until she has triumphantly finished her task. Then, like a good girl in class, she smiles once more, waits for approval, for applause.

WELCOME TO BANGKOK. They wander through brothels Red Indian style, brothels Honolulu style, brothels geisha-girl style, brothels in the style of the Kingdom of Old Siam. They wander into a brothel full of brides, dressed in white and cream and ivory lace, in satins and silks and sprigged muslins, with white and cream roses in their hair and pearls around their throats. A discreet and restful place this is, with a seven-tiered iced white wedding cake as centrepiece, topped with an icing-sugar bride and groom, he fully dressed in Western morning suit, she naked but for her veil. Organ music plays softly, and little white leather-bound hymnals and prayer books fall open to display portraits of gentle rosy erotic brides clad in ecru underwear. Champagne stands in ice buckets, and bridal bouquets flow from silver chalices. A couple of brides play cards at a low table. White chocolates are offered upon a silver tray.

*

Hattie Osborne is right to suppose that Liz Headleand has never been to Bangkok. When Liz comes across purple passages describing the City of Vice and Angels, she has no way of testing them against reality. Unlike Hattie, she does not pick up allusions to the Oriental Hotel. She has never heard of the Oriental Hotel. She does not know whether prostitutes who write messages with vagina-propelled paint-brushes or brothels full of brides are the pornographic equivalent of atrocity stories, or whether they are commonplace tourist attractions. They seem at once excessively fanciful and all too plausible. She has heard that blasé Californian and Japanese couples these days choose to marry in the strangest venues: in underwater caverns, in department stores, in floating hotels moored to the Great Barrier Reef, in ski-lifts halfway up the Matterhorn, in the catacombs of Sicily. Why not a brothel bride, a rent-a-bride, a fake wedding with cakes and lilies? Everybody loves lace and confetti. Well, almost everybody.

Liz Headleand struggles with Stephen’s struggles with genre. She is whisked from the overwritten spun sugar of Bangkok to the plain man’s trip up the Mekong, from Sartrean dialogues about the Strong Man to adventure story scraps of Conrad and Buchan and André Malraux. She does not congratulate herself on identifying these sources, as they are plainly identified by Stephen himself, in asides and footnotes. She has never read any Malraux, and is not quite sure who he is. Or was. She intends to ask Esther Breuer or her ex-husband Charles. It is the sort of thing they might know.

She rings up Hattie Osborne, and they compare notes on progress and discuss plans of action. Liz is in favour of chasing up the accountants for further disclosures about recent transactions. Hattie is in favour of pursuing Peter Bloch at the embassy in Bangkok. But both agree that they are reluctant to do anything suggestive of setting the police or the law or even the Inland Revenue on to Stephen. Therefore, for the time being, they do nothing. They carry on with their own lives, dipping from time to time into the Cambodian packet.

But from now onwards their lives are and will be different. Stephen has altered them. He has posted Cambodia to them, and now its messages are everywhere. Like a cancer, like the Big C itself, it spreads. They may not yet have caught the disease, but their cells are predisposed to receive it. They seem to hear the mysteriously self-transforming name of Cambodia-Kampuchea-Kambuja-Cambodge wherever they go. They hear it whispered in Sainsbury’s and on the 24 bus. It flickers in the headlines of newspapers glimpsed over the shoulders of others, and repeats subliminally in the afterglow of zapped documentaries. They are solicited by posters from Oxfam and reports from the Save the Children Fund. References to Nixon and Kissinger and Sihanouk and Sean Flynn glob up at them from the fermenting sludge of the seventies. Liz happens upon an old copy of Time magazine at the dentist’s, and finds herself gripped by a prize-winning article by a young Australian woman who claimed to have spent a week with the Khmer Rouge in their hidden headquarters.

Hattie takes herself for a cocktail to Claridge’s in search of the ghost of Ho Chi Minh. Liz is visited by the sad features of Mme Savet Akrun, asking in endless replication, ‘Where is my son?’ Hattie patrolling the Isle of Dogs, by the cormorant-haunted Thames, sees a slogan on a wall which she knows in her quick gut is written in Khmer. Liz receives a new patient who works with Khmer and Vietnamese orphans. Hattie meets someone who filmed with John Pilger and prompts him to retell some of the stories of the Horror. Liz meets someone who knows William Shawcross, and promises herself that she will read Shawcross’s books.

It is as though that small, expendable country, that hole in the map of the world, were trying to speak to them. Liz, one morning, impulsively rings the Vietnamese Embassy to ask how to get a visa to go to Kampuchea. She has tried this before, but got nowhere. Again, she gets nowhere. They laugh at her request. They do not laugh like officials, they laugh like human beings in a homely desperate house. Kampuchea does not exist. Officially, it does not exist. No, she cannot get a visa. No possibility. She rings the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office tells her that Kampuchea does not exist. It has not existed, for Britain, for many years.

Liz is discouraged, but not dismayed. She knows that more lights will flash up on the dark screen, that more connections will be made. She will remain on alert, with the power switched on.

It is in her second week on alert that she finds herself attending an evening function as the guest of her ex-husband Charles. It is the annual dinner of the International Archaeological Commission, and there is to be an address by the King of Brandipura. According to Charles, it is something to do with UNESCO and an appeal for funds for temple restoration. Most events these days seem to involve appeals for funds. Liz, zipping herself stoutly into her yellow dress, wonders why on earth she agreed to go and why she is still so willing to humour Charles, but an hour or two later finds herself rewarded by a glimpse, across the crowded auditorium, of her old friend Esther Breuer, whom she has not seen for some time. Esther is sitting between the Hon. Robert Oxenholme, Minister for Cultural Sponsorship, and a bearded white-robed Arabian. Liz catches her eye, and Esther smiles and waves as the king launches into his speech. This is a good sign: they will pick up their old, somewhat lapsed friendship, Esther’s smile tells her. Maybe they will be able to sit at the same table, if the placement permits. Maybe Robert has arranged the placement. Robert arranges a lot of things.

The king is a small and well-braided gentleman with a round scholarly owl face and glasses. He is a Buddhist and a man of peace. He speaks eloquently and in excellent English of his country’s great architectural heritage. He speaks about international tourism and the protection of the environment and the forests. He alludes to the Olympic Games which will shortly take place in Korea and delicately regrets the closed frontiers of North Korea, Burma, Kampuchea and Vietnam. He applauds the new spirit of openness in China. He quotes a line or two in French from a poem on the ruins of Angkor Wat. Black poppies, flowers of night, dreams of eternity. Liz suddenly sees before her the little temple sketches inexpertly drawn by Stephen Cox.

The audience is as attentive as a London audience can be on a warm night. Some doze, some fan themselves with programmes and appeal forms, some pinch themselves to stay awake, some wonder what there will be for dinner. There is strong representation from the Far Eastern embassies. Ladies in ethnic dress shimmer and twinkle.

Esther Breuer lets her mind drift towards the furnishings of her new little flat in Kilburn. It is very near her old flat, above which the murderer Paul Whitmore had spent much of his time chopping up his neighbours. The old flat has been demolished, but Esther is busy re-creating its ambience. She has painted one room red, another dark blue. She has rearranged her collections. Some pieces have returned in trunks from Bologna, others have been reclaimed from friends. Will she ever get her little Roman fountain with doves back from Peggy and Humphrey in Somerset? They are loath to part, although they will not openly admit it.

Robert Oxenholme is thinking about Esther Breuer, whom he had asked to marry him, and who has not yet given him a final refusal. Now she is back in London and freed by death from her demonic Italian lover, will she consider him more favourably? And does he hope that she will, or that she will not? He has been courting her, he has been taking her to parties, to galleries, to the opera, to the theatre. (He is a man with many free tickets.) He has enticed her into his own high-ceilinged apartments at the better end of Holland Park. Sometimes she has settled there for a whole night, but in the morning she is always off again, her small bag of possessions hanging from her small shoulder. Robert is beginning to think Esther is excessively territorial. But here she sits by him, captured for the evening, in her black silk trousers and her green taffeta shirt. What is she thinking of? Is she thinking about him? Is she thinking about Angkor Wat? Shall he tempt her with a honeymoon in Egypt, with pyramids and with Petra and Palmyra and the pleasures of ruins?

There is polite and good-natured applause as the king ends his address. He is a well-mannered chap and the audience likes him. He flatters its ignorance and he has not spoken for too long. Released, off it surges for its wine and orange juice and Perrier.

Robert has indeed arranged that the Headleands shall be at his table, and the four of them settle down together, in the company of an Indian shipping magnate, an Indonesian cultural attaché, a British diplomat and an austere sallow late-middle-aged French woman of mysterious provenance. They exchange pleasantries, and over the salmon it emerges that the British diplomat had been much moved by the king’s poetic reference to Angkor. ‘I was there, you see,’ he says, ‘in the old days. What a wonderful country! What a tragedy!’ Such a peaceful country Cambodia had been then, such a quiet, sweet, gentle, good-natured people! Nothing was too much trouble for them! Such simple people, but so kind!

His watery innocent blue eyes film a little, misting over as he recalls that heroic journey of his youth: the bridge from Aranyaprathet bravely crossed on foot, the Cambodian border guards playing boules, the farmer who gave them a lift, the mayor of the village who arranged for them to sleep above the post office, the refusal of payment, the hospitality, the indifference to visas. The hired bicycles, the silence of the ruins, the water-lilies in the moat. The hornbills. Happy days.

The French woman has also been to Angkor, but she does not share the diplomat’s view of the Khmer character. She asks, rhetorically, whether he believes a nation can change its character overnight? Her father, she tells them, had been killed by guerrillas on the Saigon–Phnom Penh highway in the 1950s. A discussion of the legacy of colonialism and the brutalization of native populations ensues. The tone is less apologetic, Liz notes, than it would have been ten years earlier. It is not comfortable. Diplomatically she tries to return her neighbours from politics to the slightly less explosive subject of the ruins. Was the jungle really full of tigers? How overgrown were the temples? How sophisticated were the carvings? How base the bas-reliefs?

(Very base, mutters the French woman, sotto voce. Crude. Primitif.)

Charles volunteers the information that an enterprising tour operator, undeterred by the Khmer Rouge and the country’s continuing economic troubles, is offering visits to Angkor Wat even now and Liz can go and see it for herself if she wants.

(‘Panthers,’ murmurs the French woman.)

The Indian shipping magnate says that a team of Indian archaeologists is currently working on its restoration. The French woman looks sceptical and gazes haughtily at the guests at the next table. The Indonesian cultural attaché murmurs of the immense monuments of Borobudur in central Java, which represent the centre of the universe, but nobody listens to him, for none of them have been to Java, and none of them save the Indian have heard of Borobudur. It is not yet upon the tourist itinerary of the world, though it will be before the decade is out.

Robert Oxenholme has not been to Java, but he has been to Angkor, as he now admits. ‘Yes,’ he says, politely refilling the French woman’s glass, ‘I was there with Prince Sihanouk. Odd chap, Sihanouk. Quite a character.’

The Indian shipping magnate embarks upon a description of the great Temple of the Sun at Konarak, with its mystic wheels and erotic carvings. He is more persistent than the Indonesian, and makes his voice heard.

Robert does not listen. His memory drifts. Angkor had seemed to him demented, a folly on a godly scale. The smooth face of the endlessly repeated mad-god-king Jayavarman had stared blandly down, as the more lively yet equally enigmatic features of his successor Prince Sihanouk had egged Robert and his chums on to follies of their own. Water-skiing, home movies. It had been quite a party. Sunglasses, saxophones, flutes and dancing girls. Sihanouk had been obsessed by his home movies. Robert had been prevailed upon to play the part of a Cambodian deity, a disguised monkey prince, courting a giggling royal damsel in high-heeled Gucci shoes, a scarlet silken robe, and a flame-tiered medieval head-dress inset with real Pailin rubies. Mad, they had all been, and probably sacrilegious, but it had been many years ago when they were all young things, and now Angkor Wat and the Bayon were returned once more by violence to the jungle, and Sihanouk was said to be in Peking, striking devious deals with his enemy-allies, the Khmer Rouge.

Jayavarman had been many-faced, a mild and modest man of peace who mercilessly tortured his enemies and engaged slave labour to carve his face a thousand thousand times. Sihanouk too was a man of many faces. The Playboy Prince who had once been the Playboy King (he had demoted himself, like Wedgwood Benn, for political purposes), the fixer who had wheeled and dealed and turned and turned again in his efforts to preserve himself and his small country. His faction for the liberation of Kampuchea from the Vietnamese occupation is called FUNCINPEC. What an acronym! The National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Co-operative Cambodia! What a slogan! FUN-SIN-PECK!!

Pol Pot’s face has not been much repeated. Pol Pot’s image is shy and obscure. He is not known to be fond of home movies.

Now Sihanouk is said to want to return to the old country, to die at home in style. He had certainly lived in style. A hybrid, cross-bred, well-fed, jetset style. Sihanouk has planned menus for dinners at abortive peace conferences around the world. He prefers Paris as a meeting point, for obvious reasons. Under Pol Pot, Sihanouk lost five children and fourteen grandchildren. He has a son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, who teaches law at the University of Aix-en-Provence. Sihanouk is willing to deal with the Khmer Rouge.

Robert, eating a raspberry, idly wonders whether any reels of that old movie still survive, and what they would be worth to a blackmailer. They had showed figures more illustrious, more newsworthy than himself rashly disporting themselves amidst the tumbling slabs and twining creepers, upon the terrace of the Leper King, beneath the orange Indo-Chinese moon.

The Leper King, who was neither King nor Leper. The Monkey Prince, who was neither Prince nor Monkey. The King who was no King. The country, which had made itself into No Country in Year Zero.

In his flat in Holland Park Robert had a carved stone fish and a smiling lizard which he lifted all those years ago from the ruins of Angkor. With his own hands he had picked them from the crumbling masonry at Ta Prohm, and pulled the suckers of the creeper from them, and brought them home. He is no orientalist, but he cherishes them. He keeps them in an oriental corner, with bonsai-trees he has grown himself, from seed, from stone. He is good with bonsai. His little peaches bear tiny, useless, gemlike fruit.

Robert Oxenholme the vandal. At least no Cambodian Minister of Culture will start a campaign for the return of Robert’s modest pickings. Cambodia has other things on its mind. It will take a mighty act of sponsorship to rescue Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom from the jungle, from mutilations heaped upon mutilations. The armless, the legless, the leprous. The Khmer Rouge are said to have blackened the cloisters with their camp fires, and the antique trade on the border flourishes still. The Khmer Rouge blacken, and the Indians pour in new grey-white cement. Like the sallow French woman, Robert doubts if the Indians are doing a good job, though unlike her he is too polite to let a shadow of this cloud his pleasant social face.

At least he had been a vandal in a great tradition, in the buccaneer footsteps of André Malraux, French Minister-of-Culture-to-be. Sihanouk had pointed to the empty niches from which Malraux had hacked his spoils. Robert is glad to have seen these things, in better days. How would Esther have responded to the caparisoned elephants, to the palanquins, to the golden turrets and the emerald gloom?

Would she have taken to the saxophones and the water-skis and the many-flavoured water-ices?

His thoughts return to his suit of Esther. Why should she accept him? He is not a serious person. He has been a dilettante all his life. He has been too fastidious to make an effort, too afraid of failure. His glance flicks across the table to Charles Headleand, that ambitious hard-working middle-class meddler, who had failed once and twice, and picked himself up, and driven on. Nobody had thought the worse of him, and now he was on a winning streak again, with his fingers in more pies than ever. And what of Fun Prince Sihanouk? He was still trying to outwit them all, he was still hoping to die in his own palace in Phnom Penh. Had Sihanouk feared failure and ridicule, he would have been dead long since.

I am a small person in a small country, thinks Robert Oxenholme. (He is in fact over a foot taller than Sihanouk, and a not unprominent figure in a country with a population more than ten times that of Cambodia, give or take a million or two dead.) But although I have never written what could be called a book, I have written a useful scholarly monograph on an Italian painter. And I have asked Esther Breuer to marry me. I am not totally without talent and without courage.

As he gazes thoughtfully at Esther across the table, watching as she crumbles and rubs the remains of her bread roll into a heap of unsightly, friendly little pellets, Liz Headleand suddenly breaks in noisily upon his musing. She demands to know if he ever knew André Malraux.

He starts, slightly, as the plates of his mind reconnect. Is Liz Headleand a thought-reader? He has never trusted shrinks.

Yes, he admits, as a matter of fact he had met him, several times, back in the early seventies. In Paris. And they had played tennis together, one winter, in Morocco. In Marrakesh. What makes her ask?

‘Oh,’ says Liz. ‘I was just wondering about all those stories about his plundering Angkor Wat. Are they true? When was it? Do you know what really happened?’

Robert tries to remember. It had been the early twenties, he thinks. Malraux and his wife Clara, in their early twenties, had set off into the jungle and returned with crates full of priceless statues, wrenched from the living walls. Iconoclasts, thieves, blasphemers. They had been arrested, detained in Phnom Penh, tried, convicted, fined. It had been a great scandal, a cultural sensation. The artists of Paris (well, some of the artists of Paris) had sprung to their defence, and they had been released on appeal. Yes, he agrees, he had been quite a character, Malraux. (He keeps one eye on the French woman as he speaks. Where do her sympathies lie? She gives nothing away.) Malraux, the amateur intellectual who wanted to be a man of action. Dabbling in architecture, dabbling in crime, dabbling in Indo-Chinese politics. Terrorism, communism. Has Liz ever read La Condition humaine? No, neither has he, but it was a sensation in its day. And in later years, Malraux had become more Gaullist than de Gaulle. He had become Minister of Culture and had expiated his crimes against the buildings of Cambodia by cleaning up the buildings of Paris.

‘Is that not right, broadly speaking?’ he asks of the disapproving French woman. Reluctantly she concedes that it is.

Robert confesses to his stolen fish and his stolen lizard, and Esther nods: her nod implies she knows them well. Liz, watching the interplay of familiarity between Esther and Robert, is distracted, intrigued. What are these two plotting? Esther has already been back in England for a month, and has bought a new flat. Nobody, she had told Liz, as they moved towards their table, had seen it yet. Does nobody include Robert? Is he the privileged secret guest? Does Esther spend time with Robert Oxenholme in Holland Park?

‘Ho Chi Minh,’ says Robert, still on the subject of the French passion for the Orient, ‘used to work in an antique shop in Paris, in the sixième, just by the École des Beaux-Arts. Touching up fake oriental antiques.’

‘Really?’ says Liz. ‘What odd things you do know, Robert.’

‘And before that,’ says Robert, ‘he used to work in London. Sweeping a school playground. And washing dishes at the Carlton. Or was it the Dorchester?’

‘I think Robert’s really a spy,’ says Esther, smiling enigmatically at the table at large. ‘He knows such very peculiar things. And such unlikely people. And his job is an obvious front. I mean, how could anyone be a Minister for Sponsorship?’

The French woman looks affronted. She does not care for the British sense of humour. And she happens to know that Ho Chi Minh did not work in a hotel, he was in the merchant navy before he took up politics. (She also happens to be a spy: though that is irrelevant.)

Chatter chatter glitter, munch munch, chatter chatter munch. Coffee and mints are served. Chatter lick and munch. The King of Brandipura wipes his glasses on a large old-fashioned blue silk handkerchief. Far away across the long room, Charles Headleand’s second ex-wife, the Lady Henrietta, laughs her high-pitched neigh of a laugh. Saharan scholar Frances Wingate tries hard to catch the soft murmurs of a modest but relentless Sinhalese monk. A pregnant television announcer dressed in navy-and-white spots turns faint and is carried out. Film-maker Gabriel Denham flirts heavily and a little automatically with the daughter of a Pakistani general. A Swiss banker pockets the card of a Japanese industrialist. An elderly bearded goat of an architect advises a shocked young actress on how to fiddle her income tax. The Brazilian-born wife of an American conglomerate thinks she will die of boredom if her neighbour does not stop talking about the ecosystem. A Scottish laird informs a pretty Dutch archaeologist that his son is dying of drug abuse in a hospice. A New Zealand animal rights activist harangues a Korean airline operator about the eating of cats and dogs.

The United Nations are at play. The world goes round.

Pol Pot lurks in his tent in the Cardamom mountains.

Pol Pot lies ill of cancer in a Chinese hospital.

Pol Pot waits like a fat tiger in a suite in the Erewan Hotel in Bangkok.

Pol Pot has 40,000 armed men.

Pol Pot is dead.

Chinese whispers. The world goes round.

On the way out of the institute, Charles cannot avoid a brief encounter with Henrietta. She waves and swoops. Charles darling, Liz darling, Robert darling. She kisses them all. Liz responds stolidly, allowing her cheek to be brushed. Henrietta does not introduce them to the tall dark stranger she has in tow. She walks him off into the night.

On the pavement, in the sultry London air, Charles and Liz, Robert and Esther, linger to exchange words of parting, but as they pause a large black limousine rolls smoothly up beside them. Its driver salutes Robert. ‘May I offer you a lift?’ Robert inquires of the Headleands. Charles shakes his head. It is beneath his dignity to get into another man’s chauffeured vehicle. But Liz, who is tired, who has as ever an early start the next morning, who knows that Charles is parked a good six minutes’ walk away, accepts. Charles bids them farewell. Liz thanks him for a pleasant evening. Very civilized, they all are, and very comfortable is the large dark upholstered leather interior. They sink in, thankfully. ‘What luxury!’ says Liz, as the driver takes instructions, and shuts his little glass window, and swims off through the heavy autumn night of Regent’s Park.

‘It’s so nice, being with Robert,’ says Esther, only half mockingly, sitting small and neat in the middle of the wide back seat. ‘It’s so nice, always to have a lift home.’

‘If you were to marry me,’ said Robert, ‘you could always have a lift home.’

Esther stiffens. Liz cannot believe her ears.

Robert appears not to notice these reactions. He appeals to Liz, leaning across Esther.

‘Why won’t she marry me? I’ve been trying to persuade her for months. She can’t have anything serious against me, can she? She doesn’t really think I’m a spy, does she?’

His tone is light, playful, teasing, a pleasant party tone, but his remarks are received in a shocked silence. Esther covers her face with both hands in embarrassment. Liz is taken totally by surprise. The moment of silence, with all its implications, lasts and lasts, as the car glides round the Inner Circle. Robert puts an arm round Esther, and says, ‘You see, my sweet? She simply can’t believe you won’t have a nice cheerful eligible chap like me. She’s struck dumb.’

‘Indeed I am,’ says Liz, rising a little too late to the challenge. ‘I would marry anyone who would take me home in such style. Well, almost anyone. And I am a great convert to what we might I suppose tactfully call late marriages. Look how well Ivan Warner seems to be getting on with Alicia!’

And they prattle harmlessly on about Ivan and Alicia, Charles and Henrietta, Henrietta’s tall dark stranger (could he represent relief to some of Charles’s alimony problems?), until Liz is delivered safely to her doorstep. And then the silence resumes.

Robert and Esther are both shocked, Robert by the revelation that Esther had not gossiped about his proposal to Liz, Esther by the revelation that he had assumed that she had.

Robert Oxenholme is accustomed to regarding himself as a figure of fun. An acceptable, by no means ridiculous figure of fun. An entertainer, a lightweight, a might-have-been. He had been sure that Esther would have laughed about him with Liz. Does the fact that she has not mean that she takes him, after all, seriously?

Esther is appalled by Robert’s low opinion of her discretion. She is ashamed. Perhaps his tone implied that he had never meant to marry her at all, that she had been a fool even to consider accepting him? Perhaps the whole thing had been an incomprehensible upper-class joke?

In the silence of profound uncertainty, they are conveyed magisterially through the back streets of Kilburn.

Liz dreams of temples and monkeys and tigers, of chattering and screeching, of jungles and ruins and an ambush on an ill-made road.

Esther dreams she is drowning in the Seine in a large limousine.

Robert dreams that he is travelling through India in an old-fashioned wagon-lit with his first wife Lydia and her second husband Dick Wittering, eating chicken sandwiches.

Charles Headleand dreams that a large blue life-size Chinese ceramic horse is standing in his office. It has been placed there by government regulation, and must not be removed.

Hattie Osborne dreams that Stephen Cox has come home and wants his bed back. He is standing by her bedside, saying, ‘Get up, get out, get up.’

*

The dreams of the world suffuse and intermingle through a thin membrane. The thin silver-blue beating pulsing globe turns and they shift like a vapour with the darkness. Mme Savet Akrun dreams of the thud of spade on skull. It is like no other sound in the world. It repeats and repeats and repeats. In a dry sweat, dreaming, she wills herself to wake.

Khieu Ponnary dreams of blood and brains, through thick Valium stew. Her husband Pol Pot dreams about his bank account in Zurich. All over Kampuchea the bereaved and the survivors (and all who survive are bereaved, all) dream of the thud and the skull, the blood and the brains, the corpses by the wayside, the vultures and the crows.

Stephen Cox dallies in the soft beds of the East with Miss Porntip, unable to cross the frontier through the gates of horn. He dwells in the land of lotus and poppy and orchid and ivory. Miss Porntip, sweet succubus, sucks him and makes him flow away into the thin sheets of warm repose. She feeds him on lilies, then sucks his strength away.

Miss Porntip has already sucked dry and cast away a Princeton economist, a film-producer, an agro-business chief, a top official at the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, a diamond merchant, and a general in the Thai Army. A British novelist will now be added to her closet of husks and bones. Stephen is almost unresisting as she weaves her spells and mixes her potions. He is fascinated by her. She lectures him upon the booming Thai economy and upon her own business triumphs. She has fingers in every pie. She tells him of the girls she has rescued from the concrete mixers and construction sites, girls who now work for Miss Porntip for good wages in hygienic conditions. She tells him of her logging concession and her interests in the management of tropical rain forests. She is interested not in conservation but in profit. ‘You conserve, you in old country,’ she tells him. ‘We make money. Is our turn now.’ She tells him of her pineapple-canning concern and her prawn farm and her project for preserving candiola fruit through judicious radiation. She tells him of her plastic box subsidiary and her television satellite stakes and her plans to launch a new Asian mini-tampon. Her empire is vast. She is insatiable. She is the New Woman of the East. He cannot but admire.

‘We make new history,’ she tells him, grandly. ‘In old days, was only one story for woman in Thailand. Is called Village Maiden to Beauty Queen. Sometimes tragedy story, sad lover lost, massage parlour, ruin, return to village, sometimes ill, sometimes crippled, sometimes disgrace. Sometimes family forgive, sometimes not, sometimes death. Is sad story. Other story, same story, but happy story. Beauty Queen, much riches, fame, glory, TV-star, Hollywood, bridal Western style with seven-tier cake and white icing. Now is new story. Now is success story of the woman, the independence of the woman. Is New Plot.’

Stephen at one point dares to ask her if she happens to know her own IQ.

‘Is very very high,’ says Miss Porntip. ‘You surprise? You think no Thai ex-beauty queen intelligent? You think no woman intelligent? You think no Thai intelligent? You sexist and racist, perhaps?’ Stephen flinches from this bull’s-eye battery of questions, but she presses on. ‘Most of family except for auntie very very stupid,’ she says. ‘So, I am convergence towards norm. Is statistically correct.’

Stephen ponders this.

‘A very sudden convergence,’ he ventures.

‘And why not sudden? These sudden times. Quick change. Heating economy. Huff puff all hot hot now.’

And Stephen sighs, defeated.

Miss Porntip is illuminating on the subject of Thai culture. She tells him that one of the intellectual tasks she had to perform to become beauty queen of her village was to name three varieties of garlic. ‘On national level, questions more difficult,’ she confides. ‘Name President of United States. Name star of Rambo.’ Other features taken into account, as well as intellect, had been ‘Face, shape, hair, movement, feet, bottom.’

‘Bottom?’ Stephen echoes, slightly shocked.

‘Yes,’ repeats Miss Porntip firmly. ‘Bottom. Arse. Bum. Bottom. Is great asset, good bottom. More important than breast, is bottom. Is good, my bottom?’

Miss Porntip tells him her stories, and occasionally she allows him to tell his, though she is forever interrupting him with pertinent or impertinent queries. He tells her of his aged mother, now in her nineties, lying senile and speechless in an old people’s home with a fine view of the Quantocks, and even as he speaks he can see her working out how soon the lengthening life span of the Thai population will make investment in old folk a profitable affair. He tells her of his last night in Knightsbridge with Hattie Osborne, but she tells him it is bad story, anti-woman story, and will not listen. He tells her of his younger days in Paris in the heady sixties, sitting alone at a restaurant in the rue Léopold-Robert, eating cassoulet or stuffed cabbage with his books propped up against a water carafe. Stephen has eaten alone all over the world, but this was his formative period, this was where he acquired the habit. He tells her about the married woman, wife of a finance minister who picked him up one day as he was reading the poems of René Longuenesse. She had picked him up and played games with him in her husband’s bed and manned the barricades with him and climbed down fire escapes with him and swum naked with him in a little lake in the forest of Fontainebleau. She had taken him to the races and to clandestine political gatherings, she had introduced him to Marxists and Algerians and Vietnamese, to friends of Frantz Fanon and acquaintances of Ho Chi Minh. She had showed him the house in the rue Compoint where Ho had lodged and studied and read Dickens and Dostoevsky and written poetry by the midnight oil. Then one night, trapped in the marital bed by the approaching footsteps of the finance minister, she had pushed him out of a high first-floor window into a rose bed.

‘You see the scars,’ says Stephen, delicately raising one corner of his trouser leg, showing a white streak on his slim ankle. ‘There’s metal in there. She left me a metal pin as a billet-doux.’

Miss Porntip laughs.

‘You like bad girls,’ she comments.

‘Yes,’ says Stephen.

‘And then?’

‘Oh, then came others. Other wild women. Other adventures.’

‘More windows? More jumpings?’

‘Well, yes, more of that kind of thing. But no more broken bones. I learned to land with more care. It’s all a question of relaxing as you fall.’

‘And me, am I wild woman?’ she wants to know. ‘Am I bad girl?’

‘You must answer that,’ he tells her. ‘You’re certainly not the kind of girl my mother wanted me to marry, that’s for certain.’

‘So you never marry? No children?’

He agrees, returns the question. She concedes that she too has never married, she too has no children.

‘And what for you here in Thailand? What you do here in Bangkok?’ she asks.

He tries to explain not for the first time that he is here – well, to be crude, he is here looking for copy. He repeats his old alibi, that he is trying to write a play about Pol Pot. Once more she wrinkles her nose in disgust. She tells him Khmer people of no interest, she tells him communism and socialism are dead, she tells him his copy is here, here in Thailand. This is where the action is, she says. She tells him how and with whom to open a tax-free bank account. She says Pol Pot old hat. Is a time of trade now, she says. He says, if it is a time of trade, why is it so bloody hard to get a visa for Phnom Penh? She says he can buy visa anywhere, but she does not advise to.

Miss Porntip is Stephen’s Oriental self, but he retains his Trocadero self. Sometimes he sleeps with Miss Porntip in grand luxe in her lofty modern apartment in a condominium overlooking the temples and palaces, but more often he sleeps in his own grey room. And, as he sits there of an evening adjusting his television set, or as he eats alone in the gloomy restaurant, he asks himself what he is here for in Thailand.

There is no easy answer. Here he is, but for no good reason. There had been nothing to keep him in England, but is that a good enough reason for being, in particular, here?

It is true that it is Pol Pot that has brought him here, though his plans to write a play are notional. He has, as Liz would confirm, long been taken with the prospectus of the Khmer Rouge and the plan to return to Year Zero. Stephen has a bleak view of human nature as it exists in its known manifestations, and an ecstatic view of its possibilities if ever it were to be released from them. He is that dangerous creature, a dreamer of ideological dreams. He does not much like the human race, with its chitter chatter munch munch aggressive acquisitive competitive pettiness. He is as guilty as anyone of chitter chatter petty mutter petty bitty bitch bunch bite and suck, but that doesn’t mean he likes it. Or himself.

He thinks the species is capable of something better. It is holding itself back, it has taken a wrong turn, it ‘could do better’. It is afraid of the big risks. It clings to a shabby past. It needs a Big Idea. A really Big Idea.

Stephen carries a text in his wallet, photocopied from the works of John Stuart Mill. It is a key text, and this is why he carries it. It reads thus: ‘If the institution of private property necessarily carried with it as a consequence, that the produce of labour should be apportioned as we now see it, almost in inverse ratio to the labour – the largest portions to those who have never worked at all, the next largest to those whose work is almost nominal, and so in descending scale, the remuneration dwindling as the work grows harder and more disagreeable, until the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labour cannot count with certainty on being able to earn even the necessaries of life; if this or Communism were the alternative, all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism would be but as dust in the balance.’

This great and classic text would be endorsed by many with less eccentric views than Stephen: by his old friend Brian Bowen, by Brian’s wife Alix, by Perry Blinkhorn of Northam City Council, by Liz Headleand’s youngest stepson Alan Headleand, and by many defenders of variant forms of socialism and the egalitarian society. But he parts company from most of these in his view that the test is as pertinent now as it ever was. He does not see, as they do, the slow march of bloodless reform, which qualifies Mill’s fears. This slow march to Stephen is a slow poisoning of hope, a slow acceptance of defeat. Stephen believes that a deep, violent, volcanic shift is required to change the way things are. After this cataclysm, human nature, purged and pure, will find its own sweet natural level, freed from 10,000 years of exploitation, encrustation, sediment and stratification. It will flow forth free and clear, from the crystal skull of Pol Pot, from the pure well of Cambodia, and fill the world with joy.

The flaws in Stephen Cox’s logic are blindingly obvious. A child could spot them, let alone a democratically elected back bencher. Stephen Cox can spot them all too well himself. He lost faith in Paris in 1968. He has already written one highly successful, cynical novel about that loss of faith. Yet, as he rolls himself a little cigarette while waiting for his bowl of soup in the dark and arctic restaurant, and listens to the hum of the world’s cooling machinery, he admits that he is still curious. Communism has failed and capitalism has triumphed and John Stuart Mill’s hypothesis has been rendered otiose. But had Pol Pot known that? Stephen has come here to try to find out. He is still curious.

A fatal curiosity. He remembers invoking that phrase once while dining with his friend Liz Headleand in Bertorelli’s at the beginning of the year. Her memory of this conversation is vague and defective, and so is his, and so is mine, but it had nevertheless taken place, and it lingers on in both their recollections and in the limbo of my old Amstrad word processor like a formative shadow. They had talked of Pol Pot and Kampuchea and atrocity stories. Stephen had expressed his interest in his curiosity about a country which had tried to cut itself off from the forward march of what is called progress. It had refused all foreign aid. It had turned its back on electricity, electronics, mechanics, postal services, medicine. It had returned to People Power. Men yoked with oxen pulled the plough. Men and women with bare hands built dams and dykes as in the dawn of time. They had dosed one another with bitter leaves, and given one another transfusions of coconut juice.

A sort of original Green party, Stephen had suggested to Liz, with his dubious little smile.

‘Yes,’ Liz had said smartly, thinking she had indulged him far enough, ‘and they had slaughtered one another with their bare hands too. With sticks and spades. And what about your hero, the charming and charismatic Pol Pot? He was probably living on champagne and caviare, while the slaves toiled.’

‘Probably,’ Stephen had conceded. ‘Yes, probably. But we don’t know that, do we?’

‘I sort of think we do,’ Liz had insisted, frowning over her coffee, dunking her little Italian macaroon.

‘Anyway,’ Stephen had said with gay bravado, ‘perhaps I shall go and see.’

‘You’d better be careful,’ said Liz.

‘Why should I be careful?’ Stephen had more or less memorably said. ‘I have nothing to lose. There is nothing to keep me here.’

And, looking back, as he rolls his little cigarette, he reflects that this was probably the moment at which what had been fancy had hardened into purpose. Everything had unrolled from there. And now he sits here, nearer but not very much nearer his goal, waiting for his soup.

Be careful, Liz had said. But he has nothing to lose. Except his life, except his life, except his life.

Stephen Cox’s thoughts about human nature are deeply lonely. He is a lonely man, as you can at once perceive if you see him sitting there, his book propped up against his bottle of Singha beer, thinking visibly about the turpitude of man. Loneliness comes off him like a cloud of gnats. Yet he is a romantic figure, a mysterious and sympathetic figure, in his white suit. As he perhaps intends to be. He may be a rolling stone, but he does not look demented, dishevelled, dulled. An observer might well wonder (might well be intended to wonder) if the man in the white suit is not perhaps a person of distinction? And even as he sits there, he is approached by a young man much slung about with cameras and bags, who pauses at the corner of Stephen’s table and says, ‘Excuse me, but am I right in thinking you’re Stephen Cox, the novelist? I’m most awfully sorry to intrude, but I just thought I had to say hello, and to tell you how much I’ve liked your books.’

Stephen, being human, is delighted. Such words are balm to one outshone in the Orient by Pett Petrie and Gore Vidal. He smiles, admits that he is, he thinks, himself, invites his new friend to join him.

His new friend is blond, tall, handsome, open faced, brown, with unfashionably long hair held back by a sweat band. He wears shorts and trainers and a khaki shirt. He has a gold chain round his neck. He sits down with Stephen, and tells him that he is a photographer and that he has just got back from the border camps. He too is staying at the Troc. His name, he says, is Konstantin Vassiliou.

*

Well, that is what I call a coincidence. A whole day full of coincidences. It makes you think, doesn’t it? I mean, I hadn’t heard from Stephen or of Stephen for years, and suddenly his name is everywhere. Suddenly Stephen is the buzz. The hot property. It won’t come to anything, of course, but never mind, there might be an option in it somewhere. The first thing that happened was a call at seven fourteen this morning from a chap who said he was Marlon Brando, and I said do you know what time it is, piss off, but it actually was Marlon Brando his very self, and he was interested in the rights for Stephen’s French novel. He went into this great spiel about how the bicentenary of the French Revolution was coming up and everybody would be making French Revolution films and didn’t I think Barricades would make a wonderful movie and who had the rights and where was Stephen and could I give him some contact numbers, and I said Stephen was abroad but as far as I knew the film rights were negotiable, and to get in touch with Derry & Michaelis, and then I suddenly realized what he was on about and said but you know Stephen’s novel isn’t about the French Revolution at all, it’s about the Paris Commune, and he said wasn’t that the same thing, and I said oh I suppose so, sort of. But frankly the man’s a fool. Of course it’s not the same thing. Wrong bloody anniversary. Anyway, I left him to chase it up himself. I’ll be interested to know if D. and M. claim to have had any recent dealings with Stephen.

Anyway, that early morning call stimulated me to ring Stephen’s accountants again, but I was a bit more devious this time, I said I was a Miss Price calling from Customs and Excise about an irregularity in Mr Cox’s returns, and they went away in a fluster and came back and said what was I talking about, he’d deregistered eighteen months ago. So I hung up, before they could retaliate with any tricky questions. But that was interesting, wasn’t it? Perhaps I could embark on a new career as a detective.

I don’t suppose it was exactly a coincidence that the man sitting opposite me on the tube on the way to Romley was reading The Road to the Killing Fields. After all, it was a best-seller, and a lot of people must have been reading it up and down the country, if sales and best-seller lists figures mean anything at all. (Which I’m told they don’t.) There were a lot of spin-offs from that movie. Well, that’s not quite fair, you could argue that the movie was a spin-off from some of the real-life stuff that’s begun to come out of Kampuchea recently. Art and life, life and art. I wonder if Stephen saw The Killing Fields? Maybe it hadn’t been released, when he left. Somebody rang me up the other day with an idea for a script about that Scottish fellow-traveller who got himself murdered in Phnom Penh in 1978. Malcolm Caldwell, was that his name? One of the last Westerners to see Pol Pot alive. I poured cold water on it, told him all that had been done, but in fact I don’t think it has, and the more I think about it the better it seems as an idea. Ah well, we all make mistakes. He’s probably sold it to Warner Brothers or David Puttnam by now.

This chap opposite me on the tube was an odd-looking guy. Not what you might call a reading man. Black leather, skull and crossbones on his T-shirt, earrings, punkish black hair. But his boots were the most scary. They had high heels and these weird silver metal square toes. Really kinky. I’ve never seen anything like them. Must have been custom-made. One couldn’t help thinking his interest in the Killing Fields was hardly wholesome. But then, whose is?

The tube is hell. I hate it. But how else do you get to Romley?

Why go to Romley at all, you might well ask, and the answer is that I was on an errand of mercy to see my friend Angus who’s filming The Lillo Story out there in a nice cheap warehouse. Well, mercy and business combined, to be honest, because I had a little proposition of my own to put to Angus. I’d hoped I’d get a nice lunch at the Caprice out of him, but he said no, he hadn’t time, come and have a bacon sandwich in Romley, and you can have a look at the real Grace Lillo and tell me how to stop her annoying Sally Beeton.

Mercy, business and curiosity. I couldn’t resist a look at the real Grace Lillo. You remember the Lillo scandal? Remember the Harrises, who abducted Grace Lillo when she was sixteen and kept her as a sex slave in a back room for three years in Sevenoaks, of all places? She wrote her life story, or rather she had it ghosted, and now Angus is turning it into a nice piece of cheap intense erotic British domestic 1950s claustrophobia, with every hair of every hairstyle and every gleam on the Formica, a period gem. The only problem is that Grace, now in her fifties, keeps wanting to come and watch the filming, and pesters Sally Beeton night and day with weird phone calls. Sally is playing Grace-chained-to-the-bedstead. Angus says Grace is dotty, which I must say wouldn’t be surprising after all she’d been through. Apparently she was in love with both the Harrises. They’d completely brainwashed her. If brainwashed is the word.

I personally think Sally Beeton is a pain. Nor do I think she looks very 1950s. Sexy girls in the fifties still managed to look sort of clean and healthy, and Sally looks completely decadent. Those lips. Too much, really. Red Tory lips, I call them. Anyway, that’s all beside the point. She can act, and she’s beautiful, and she’s box office, and she’s only twenty-two, and she doesn’t want to be pursued by obscene phone calls from her alter ego. I can see that.

I don’t know what Angus thought I could do with Grace Lillo, and, as it turned out, I didn’t get the chance to do anything as she didn’t turn up. I watched an hour or two of boring retakes of a scene with Mrs Harris frying bacon in a sort of allusive Kitchen Sink manner, then I had a heart-to-heart for ten seconds with Sally, which was about all I could take, and then Angus and I slipped off down the road for a bite. I must say England’s an odd country. Would anywhere else in the world have been able to invent the workman’s caff? We had cheese and pickle and strong tea in those weird thick semi-translucent hardboiled-egg-white cups, and a chat about Firebird Holdings and pornography and L’Histoire d’O and suchlike matters, and I told Angus I’d had a phone call from Marlon Brando himself at the crack of dawn and how I’d told him to piss off before I realized it really was him and not some prankster, and he told me some similar tale about being invited to a party by Marlene Dietrich or was it Racquel Welch, and not going because he thought it was his mates having him on. Then we had another cup of shudder-making tea (you should have seen the chap serving, tragic, dear God, tragic, a chap with the shakes like that shouldn’t be allowed near a teapot, poor old boy) and Angus told me about his budget most of which seemed to be going on Miss Beeton, and I said would he ever want to make a really exotic film in some desperate location, and he told me that he’s heard that John Geddes had been frightened out of his wits in Peru because two British hikers had been assassinated by the Shining Path in the next village, and that he (John that is) was on his way home to Fulham Broadway. I asked if there was any news on the grapevine about Carlo’s Victory script, and he said PDJ had got cold feet because of David Lean’s Nostromo, which in his view would never get finished either. Or started, come to that. And then if I remember right we returned to the subject of Grace Lillo and Sally Beeton, and how strange it must be to have your own past self portrayed by some total stranger when you were yourself still alive and kicking. I don’t know what the legal situation is, really. I mean, if somebody decided to make a film about Harriet Osborne, would they have to pay me for it? Could I stop them? Could I sell them my life? Is my life story a property, or does someone have to write it up first?

I think it was at this point that Cambodia came up. I said I’d seen this weirdo reading the Killing Fields book on the tube, and I asked Angus if he’d ever met Dith Pran, the real life hero, or come to that Haing S. Ngor who played Dith Pran in the movie. Dith Pran’s a journalist and Haing S. Ngor isn’t really an actor, or he wasn’t until he made the film, he was a doctor of sorts, I think, and now he’s a writer as well or at least a ghosted writer, and frankly his life and survival story is just as harrowing as Dith Pran’s. They could make a movie about Haing S. Ngor and Dith Pran could play him. Except that obviously Dith Pran can’t act, or he’d have acted himself, wouldn’t he? Alter ego, ghost-person, shadow-self, which-is-the-hero, which-the-impostor. I could tell Angus wasn’t really listening to my philosophical ramblings, even though they were highly pertinent to the problems he was having with Grace Lillo and Sally Beeton, because he suddenly interrupted me and said it was funny I’d brought up the subject of Cambodia, it was rather on his mind too, he’d had dinner the night before with an old school friend of his who’d just got back from Phnom Penh. From the White Hotel, figure-toi, in Phnom Penh. (I wonder what happened to that movie?)

I could tell that something was suddenly weighing on my old friend Angus’s spirits so I went and got him another cup of tea and a Kit Kat and told him to tell. You should know that Angus, although he makes movies about erotic bondage, was once (well, maybe still is) a man with a conscience who wanted to make serious documentaries about housing estates and famines. The clue to Angus is that he went to a Quaker school. You need to know that. It explains a great deal. It certainly explains why unlike many movie men he was willing to spend an evening in a vegetarian restaurant being harangued by this woman who works for Médecins Sans Frontières. Angus didn’t actually say that she harangued him, and I don’t suppose she needed to. The contrast between Angus’s glamorous life eating cheese sandwiches and Kit Kats out in Romley and hers living on boiled rice and boiled water in Kampuchea must have been telling enough without her pointing it out. As a matter of fact Angus clearly did have a lot of admiration for this woman, Marianne, and says he’s kept up with her better than with anyone else from his school days. But that’s not the point of the story. The point of the story, from our POV, is that she produced this portfolio of photographs for him, of life in the north-west, and of her field hospital, and Angus was stunned by them, and said who took them, and she said this young man called Konstantin Vassiliou. Angus said who is he, and she said she was going to ask him, because that was the kind of thing she expected him to know, but as far as she knew he was an English freelance photographer who’d won various photojournalism awards, and she’d like to catch up with him if she could.

Now the name Konstantin Vassiliou didn’t mean anything to me until I saw it in Stephen’s papers, where it appears quite a lot, particularly in the diary bits. But when Angus brought it up, naturally it caught my attention like a red flag. All I could get out of Angus was the info that he’d taken the photos a couple of years or so ago and that Vassiliou had been one of the nicest people Marianne had ever met in her life. He must have been quite nice or he wouldn’t have sent her the photos. In my experience photographers are always promising to send photos to their victims and subjects, whose time they waste for hours on end, but out of sight out of mind and never do you hear a word or see a contact sheet from them again. They flash you, print you, fix you, sell you, and vanish. So young Konstantin had got past square one of niceness simply by sending the photos. And what were they like, what were they of, I wanted to know. Oh, amputees, cripples, people in a workshop making wooden crutches and primitive wheelchairs. Not very jolly. But great photographs, Angus said, great.

He found it hard to be more specific than that. He’s not really a word man, our Angus.

He told me that Marianne at school had always wanted to study French and German, and had done just that, but then had gone off to some African country for the VSO for a year, and had come back and decided to be a doctor. She had to start from scratch, with Chemistry and Physics A-level. Dear God.

Being a photographer is a lot easier than being a doctor. Being a journalist or an actor is a piece of cake.

I thought I’d better try and get in touch with this Marianne, or with Konstantin Vassiliou himself. One or the other of them could surely give an update on Stephen. So I thanked Angus for the delicious lunch and packed him off to his warehouse, then I whizzed back on the tube to Primrose Hill and started with that elementary tool of research, the telephone directory.

Well, in the London phone book there are a dozen or so Vassilious, none of them with a K, and most of them living in the lesser known postal codes of North London, so I started with the more promising regions and drew a few blanks. But on my fourth or fifth attempt I got this woman’s voice, from N22. Excuse me, I said, I’m trying to reach a photographer called Konstantin Vassiliou, do you happen to know where I can contact him? And she said, I only wish I did. So I said, you mean that is his number? And she said, no, not really, not any more. She said this in such a – well, I don’t know how to describe it – such a sad but stalwart kind of way, not like an abandoned wife, anyway, that I thought in for a penny, in for a pound, and I said you mean it used to be his number, and she said, well, yes, I’m his mother. Then she asked what I wanted him for, and I said I was trying to contact a friend of his and mine, last seen in Bangkok, and she said that Konstantin was still out there but she hadn’t heard from him for a long time. There was a sort of irritable motherly tremor in her voice as she said this, as though all were not well. Frankly, I didn’t know what to do. I could hardly cross-question this total stranger, could I, especially as I’d no idea what to cross-question her about. So I said, sorry to have bothered you, and rang off. I think I left my name and number. Or rather Stephen’s number. But I’m not sure. To tell the truth I was feeling a bit uneasy about the whole business.

The more I think about it, the more I think the name Vassiliou sort of rings a bell. Of course, if you think about any name for long enough you can make yourself think that, I know. But there really is some sort of echo. Wasn’t there some scandal, back in the sixties, about a stolen baby? An heiress and a stolen baby? Or have I made it all up?

*

Konstantin Vassiliou and Stephen Cox, despite or perhaps because of the disparity in their ages, take to one another at once over their lunchtime beer and chicken. Konstantin, while modestly claiming not to be much of a reading man, expresses his admiration for Stephen’s work. He is tentative and polite, as though aware that he may have captured Stephen off guard in deep incognito. Stephen responds warmly. There is something very pleasing, very disarming, about young Konstantin’s manner. He looks as though he has modelled himself rather too consciously on some kind of Easy Rider, but his laid-back grace has a sweetness, an innocence, a deference which takes Stephen in and seduces him. If this young man is playing at being a hero, he is playing with finesse. He seems to know his way around the world. Stephen instantly sees in him a passport not only to the other Bangkok, the city which Miss Porntip disdains, but also to the frontier and the gates of horn.

And so it proves to be. Konstantin, settling back into his old rooms in the Trocadero annexe, invites Stephen up for a drink that evening. Stephen, leaving his bare dangling bulb and torn shower curtain, his grey bath mat and spartan bed and view of the cooling tower, makes his way along the corridor, up two floors, along another corridor, past a billiard table and a child’s cot and various bundles of laundry and a plate of curry, and taps on Konstantin’s door. Konstantin opens it upon a room that looks rather more like home than most of the pads that Stephen has, over the years, lightly inhabited. There are shelves of books, heaps of magazines, cushions, posters on the wall stuck up with Blu-Tack, a pot plant, a music system, glasses, bottles, a guitar, a typewriter, a rucksack, a small embroidered elephant, and other accoutrements of semi-permanent living. It is a young man’s room, untidy, heaped, busy. Stephen settles into the corner of a settee, and begins to ask questions.

Konstantin claims to have been based in Bangkok for some months. He is a freelance photographer with a sort of semi-contract with Global International, or so he says. With fitting diffidence, when requested, he shows Stephen some of his work. There are landscapes, trees, temples, mountains, and shots of buildings both whole and blasted, but the majority of the pictures are portraits of people. Single figures, solemnly grouped families, children in a row. The tone is formal, grave, dignified. Peasants in Kampuchea, street people in Saigon and Hanoi, displaced people in the Thai border camps, refugees in Hong Kong stare a little reproachfully at the camera, in suspension, in a prolonged and questioning silence. Stephen gazes at the prize-winning portrait of Mme Akrun. It is a high-quality, 5 x 8 reproduction, without text. Here, she has no caption. She does not here ask, ‘Where is my son?’ She is silent. She speaks. She seems somehow familiar to Stephen, as she will seem also to Liz Headleand and, later, to Alix Bowen.

He pauses over her image, and is about to ask about her, when there is a knock at the door, and another visitor arrives and is greeted with a beer. Then another knock, and another visitor. News of Konstantin’s return has got around. In his room they gather, the journalists and aid workers, the displaced people of the West, accepting beer and whisky and coffee, nesting down in corners and on cushions, exchanging news personal, news international, news trivial, news professional. Konstantin smiles and welcomes. He is the special friend with the open door. He is the special friend of everyone. The room hums with chatter and laughter, with light background music. Stephen is introduced discreetly, as Stephen from England. Mme Akrun, propped up on the bookshelf, watches them all.

These are by Stephen’s standards young people, in their twenties and thirties. A Dane, two Americans, an Australian, a woman from Cheshire, a Japanese–Canadian. What has brought them all here? They tell tall stories, they boast and demur. They speak of dengue fever and Chomsky and Lacouture and Oxfam and broken gaskets. They speak of Thai Rangers and border passes and the Leper’s Ball at the Siam Hilton. In-jokes, camaraderie, oneupmanship. It is a pleasant evening, an impromptu party. It makes Stephen feel a hundred years old. Casual drifters, hard workers. They gossip and drink and nod. As Stephen watches and listens and takes stock, he begins to recognize hotel habitués, familiar types and faces. That curly-haired fast-talking small bespectacled American, Jack Crane, surely he is the man glimpsed from time to time in the room on the second floor with the photocopier? And sombre Piet the Dane, the oldest of the group, he has observed drinking with a soldier in the bar. This is a society within a society. Shall Stephen join it? Is he acceptable? Does he carry the right cards? Will these people be of use to him?

When he gets up to leave, Konstantin follows him to the door, and lays a hand on Stephen’s arm. It is an intimate, soft, placatory gesture, a pledge, an apology for the intrusion of others, a promise of more exclusive future meetings. ‘I’m so very pleased to have met you,’ says Konstantin, with impeccable good manners. ‘Thank you so much for coming round.’

Stephen stands there in the doorway and smiles at his host.

‘Thank you for inviting me,’ he says.

Konstantin smiles, and brushes back his hair. His eyes are a very pale, light, clear grey blue. They insist on looking. They insist on eye contact. They instantly establish complicity. Why is this attention so flattering? The hand on the arm lingers into meaning, into a special relationship. Stephen allows himself to be enchanted. He is overcome. He submits. He departs to his dull and empty room.

The enchantment lingers, and Stephen, to his own surprise, finds himself watching and waiting for Konstantin and news of Konstantin. Konstantin is, it appears, a local hero. Stephen picks up allusions, rumours, Chinese whispers. Konstantin is a multimillionaire. Konstantin is the most brilliant photographer of his generation. Konstantin has entered zones that none has ever penetrated. Konstantin has visited the secret base of the Khmer Rouge and photographed the mad wife of Pol Pot. Konstantin knows not fear. Konstantin is a mystic. Konstantin has the ear of kings and princes. Konstantin was left as dead on the battlefield and rose again.

Rumour speaks no ill of Konstantin. Stephen wonders at this marvel. Has he enchanted and seduced the whole of Bangkok’s aid-worker society? Has he laid a hand on every sleeve? Or is it the free-flowing beer, the open door, that has subdued them all? To know Konstantin is a privilege, a blessing, a rare piece of luck. He spreads good fortune.

Konstantin’s own version of the legends surrounding him is modest, prosaic, but none the less seductive. Over dinner one evening he admits to Stephen that he has private means and does not have to worry about money. His grandfather left him a small fortune, which was, says Konstantin, ‘unsettling’. He had been unsettled, and had been through a period of profound depression, during which he decided he didn’t care whether he was alive or dead and nearly got himself killed in Korea. ‘It’s quite easy to be a hero,’ says Konstantin, ruefully, ‘if you don’t care if you die.’ Recovering from the near-death and the depression, he took up Buddhism and photography, and now considers himself a properly reconstituted person, working more or less regularly as commissions come up in South East Asia. He says he is particularly interested in Kampuchea. Why? Because he likes the Khmers so much. Because it’s all such a bloody awful mess. Because it’s there. Because I watched Blue Peter with my kid sister when I was still a kid myself. Because it’s so difficult to get people interested in it these days. After all that excitement in ’79, all that holocaust and famine talk, says Konstantin, now nobody wants to know. But I do, I still want to know.

Konstantin’s answers to Stephen’s questions are not very ideological. He is much less ideological than Miss Porntip or than Stephen himself. He seem to be a holy innocent, without side or guile. People gaze without fear into his lens and speak secrets to his receiving ear. Unlike Miss Porntip, he is a good listener.

Stephen does not mention Miss Porntip to Konstantin. He keeps her in another compartment.

Konstantin has a whole network of acquaintances in Bangkok. Stephen meets them, becomes part of them, pondering as he does so the way in which Konstantin keeps everybody happy. There are no outbreaks of jealousy or possessiveness, for everybody believes himself or herself to have Konstantin’s own private personal attention. Stephen believes this himself, although he knows it cannot be true. Is it some sleight of hand, some trick? Or does this magic well from some more profound, more generous source? Stephen even finds himself buying a couple of books on Buddhism, as he searches for clues to Konstantin, but they are not very helpful, though he is quite taken with the imagery of The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Stephen is half in love with Konstantin. Stephen tries to keep this to himself. It gives him pleasure to talk about Konstantin to Jack Crane, the American who works for the ICRDP (whatever that may be), and to Jack’s friend Piet the Dane who works for the Red Cross tracing agency. They tell him stories about the border camps and the war. They both love Konstantin. He is a special person, says Jack Crane, a very special person. This is a phrase that usually infuriates Stephen, but he finds himself nodding in agreement. Why?

Konstantin and Stephen wander the streets and temples of Bangkok together. They take a trip upriver and Konstantin takes photographs of family groups in temple gardens while Stephen (very badly) sketches. They take a trip downriver to the port and see the great grey rust-patched ocean-going container ships from Hong Kong and Panama and Kingston, some of them inscribed with strange hieroglyphics, others with familiar script. The Sang-Thai Breeze, the Sang-Thai Jewellery, the Crown Prince, the Manchester Reward, the Primrose, the Uni-Handsome. They see old wooden junks and laden rice barges and children swimming by a banana grove. A woman smiles at them while washing her hair in brown river water. A red hawk circles above.

They chat to schoolboy monks about Mrs Thatcher and Madonna and Maradona, and they win virtue by presenting neatly packaged plastic buckets of offerings of rice and tinned milk and Ovaltine to older monks. They fly up to Chiang Mai for a few days to visit a monk who meditates on the death of the forest in a sacred grove of crape myrtle and mango and trees bearing emerald-green strychnine apples. They speak to the villagers in the valley below who imbibe the monk’s doctrine and with their bare hands dig water courses to save the forest.

They play squash and swim at the Otis Club. They watch boys playing kites. They watch a parade and a firework display. They smoke, not very successfully, a little opium, and Stephen regrets, too late, his life of alcohol. Konstantin often lays his hand in friendship upon Stephen’s arm or shoulder. It is an innocent romance.

Bangkok is full of diversions. Stephen wonders whether to acquire a tattoo, or to have the ancient wart on the ball of his foot removed. He and Konstantin stare in admiration and alarm at a poster which claims BY SKULL EXPANSION MY CHARACTER RADICALLY IMPROVED, and decline to have themselves checked out at the Chromosome Center.

They visit a wat to have their fortunes told. Konstantin shows Stephen how to shake the wooden box of wooden sticks until one falls out upon the temple paving. Stephen shakes and shakes but no sticks fall. His fortune is recalcitrant. Shake harder, says Konstantin, who is practised, whose thin numbered wooden fate lies neatly at his knees. Stephen shakes harder, and lo, three fates fall before him, a multiple destiny. He selects the one he thinks fell first. Konstantin tries to dissuade him, but Stephen, arbitrarily, insists. They take the little paper fortune slips from the little wooden drawers, and offer them to a bilingual monk for translation. Konstantin’s is Number Thirteen, and it is a Golden Fortune. All will be good health and prosperity for Konstantin. But Stephen has insisted on Number Four, the Number of Death. His fate is deadly. It is Bad Time for Stephen, says the quizzical monk. Time of obstacles and sorrows. Time to Retreat.

Konstantin, displeased on Stephen’s behalf by this incident, insists that they consult a proper fortune-teller, a wise old man with a placard which promises PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE PREDICTED. Sweet and wrinkled, he tells them that they will undertake a dangerous journey, but will be led to safety by a good spirit. And on the higher steps of Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn, they agree that soon they will travel together to the border. And, who knows, beyond. It is a pledge, an assignation.

Konstantin is Stephen’s good angel. Miss Porntip is his bad angel. She does not let go easily. She senses she has a rival, and she reinforces her attack, inveigling Stephen with erotic little offerings and lecturing him the while on the triumph of capitalism. She appeals to his better nature by demanding English lessons, although she cannot concentrate on her conjugations for more than three minutes at a time, and will clearly never improve: they pick their way slowly through Conrad’s descriptions of Schomberg’s hotel, with its Japanese lanterns and its ladies’ orchestra and its white mess jackets, and she tries hard to follow, but cannot find the patience, although she chose the book. Conrad is racist sexist swine, she says, aligning herself firmly and problematically with Chinua Achebe and other literary intellectuals. Is horrible. How can he make so bad man, so good girl? Why Swedish guy such good guy? Why Swedes so much hero? Why so much ‘white men catering’ talk? Everyone know white man food bad, Thai food extra good. Hamburgers, Coca-Cola, pizza is rubbish food. Noodles is good. Lemon grass is good. Prawn soup is good. All agree this.

Bobbing up from these deep waters, she tries to ingratiate herself by imploring him to stop calling her Miss Porntip and to start calling her by her pet name, her nickname, which is ‘O’. ‘Miss Porntip my given name,’ she says. ‘Is silly name. Here is common, but for English and Americans silly name. Here in Thailand we use pet name. My real name Porntip Pramualratana, but that difficult name. My friends call me O.’ Stephen has not the heart to tell her that to him, corrupted at an early age by that anonymous French pornographic masterpiece, L’Histoire d’O, her pet name is far more seriously suggestive than her given name: he tries out ‘O’ occasionally, at suitable moments, but finds himself drawn irresistibly towards the Miss Porntip for more formal occasions. He finds the name, and her, entrancing.

Another new ploy is the jewel game.

She has a fine collection of gems and jewels, and she entertains Stephen by taking off all her clothes and adorning herself with trinkets. She languishes upon the marble floor with a ruby and diamond necklace about her throat, a ruby pendant in her navel, and a honey diamond dragonfly brooch pinned into her pubic hair. She sits watching television clad in nothing but pearl, ruby and diamond ear studs, a pearl and diamond tiara, with an emerald bracelet round her ankle. She prances off to make coffee, lit by a little shimmer of fiery stones. Stephen, admiring, comments that she looks a lot larger naked than dressed: the clothed Miss Porntip is essentially neat and diminutive, but the naked Miss Porntip is curved, rounded, womanly, important. She smiles, accepting the compliment.

But she is annoyed with him, mildly, for not taking more interest in the jewels themselves. Her gemstone vocabulary is extensive, and she speaks to him of parures and sautoirs, of marquise shapes and pavé cuts, of briolettes and baguettes and claws and carats and brilliants, of cabochon drops and stones set en tremblant. Her most hideous possession is a gold brooch, c. 1939, representing a little cottage with an open door and a large heart stuck clumsily on its side: the smoke is of diamonds, the garden blooms with sapphires and garnets. Proudly she tells him that it is designed as une chaumière et un cœur: what this is in English she does not know. She speaks no French. Is jewel talk, she says firmly, confidently. Her noblest piece is a diamond parure with variously cut stones of (she quotes) ‘yellow, cognac, champagne and brown tint’: she can gaze at these happily for hours, and even Stephen can see that they gain a certain glory when laid upon her pale brown belly. ‘Lick, lick,’ she says, and obediently he licks, and they quiver.

But he is a disappointing scholar. He cannot learn to tell the difference between Burmese and Siamese rubies, however hard he tries. He guesses Burmese, of a bracelet she dangles over the copy of the Bangkok Post he is trying to read, but she shakes her head impatiently. ‘No, no,’ she says, ‘these poor Cambodian rubies, these cheapo rubies of Pailin.’ He cannot distinguish a cultured from an uncultured pearl, or an aquamarine from an amethyst. You ignorant person, she tells him, as she strokes him with fingers covered in rings that look like the spoils of empires, though she claims they were purchased on the black market, quite above board, in Hong Kong.

‘I love the jewels,’ she says, as she caresses him and them. ‘They living things, they my friends. They my children, my pets, my darlings.’

She says this to provoke and tease him. Sometimes he rises.

When he rises, she garlands him with gold.

When he tires of the jewels, she lures him away from thoughts of Konstantin with her library. Stephen is a rapid consumer of books, and Miss Porntip’s gleaming electronically operated apartment is, surprisingly, well stocked with reading matter. She allows him to wander freely, although there is one locked cabinet which contains material not fit, she says, for his eyes.

Her books are classified not by the Dewey decimal system but by lover. Stephen browses now in the refugee section, now in the economics section, now in the section dealing with the strategy of rural counter-insurgency in Thailand, now amongst glossy brochures on the exploitation of the pineapple and the cabbage and the potato, and now amongst old Sotheby’s catalogues. He reads about the ancient enmity of the Siamese and the Cambodian peoples, the ancient despising of the Vietnamese by the Khmer Krom. He discovers magazines of soft sexual porn from Pattaya and hard military porn from the Vietnamese war. Pert naked Thai women on tigerskins lie side by side with disembowelled Viet Cong women with rifles up their vaginas: the Thai general seems to have had a taste for both forms of abuse. They make Stephen feel a little sick. What worse atrocities can the locked cabinet conceal?

For light relief he turns to the film section, which is full of illustrated sanitized coffee-table books on Siamese dance and temple architecture and celadon pottery and flower festivals and elephant processions. They conjure up a grand, ersatz, Hollywood dream world, a City of Angels in which authentic details merge inauthentically into a vast, multi-faceted, kaleidoscopic, multi-ethnic, glittering exotic mirage of an oriental culture that never existed and never will exist. The dreams of the gates of ivory. Miss Porntip’s film-maker lover had been engaged in making a high-kitsch costume adventure movie set in the seventeenth century about a talisman and a lost princess and a battle with the invading Portuguese. He had picked and dipped, and insinuated a ruby here, a silk there, a religious fancy from elsewhere, weaving a tapestry of nonsense to delight the surfeited youth of many lands. And why not, Stephen wondered, why not? Perhaps Miss Porntip was right. Perhaps a future in which brightly dressed, well-paid film extras lounged idly around on call and overtime eating ice-cream and maple syrup and king prawns grilled was greatly to be preferred to a future of ancient enmities, to guerrilla warfare and foxholes and redoubts and ditches and Kalashnikovs and mortal terror and famine and fear and hate and death?

The worlds at times overlap and intersect. Stephen Cox meets a Kampuchean refugee who is playing the role of a Kampuchean refugee in an American semi-fictionalized documentary about Kampuchean refugees. He meets extras who have worked on The Killing Fields, some of them survivors of the killing fields. He meets a cameraman who worked on Apocalypse Now. He meets a man in the Press Club who knows a man who knows Marlon Brando. He meets a Balliol man working for COER who was once President of OUDS and gave a great performance as Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. He meets a man who has heard of a man who is conducting a drama school in the jungle with disaffected terrorists. Jungle Actor Number One Film Star Man. The gates of ivory, the gates of horn. The shadow world.

Miss Porntip, he has to admit, is more articulate than the charming Konstantin, even though she cannot speak English properly. And occasionally she consents to listen to him. One night he tells her (among many interruptions) about his mother. He tells her about the pink house in Somerset, with the purple Judas-tree in the garden, and the eels and apples. (He watches her mind flick to the exploitation of smoked eels and apple wine.) He tells her about his three brothers, those giants of his infancy, Francis, Jeremy and Andrew. How he had looked up, how he had admired, how he had been made to feel small. ‘Little shitty pants’ they had called him, in their boyish way. They had come and gone, from prep school and boarding school and college, with studded trunks and cricket bats and blazers and boots and books; bronzed, brazen, braying their schoolboy slang. He, the baby, had been left alone with his mother. How he had come to loathe the English countryside! How he had loathed his brothers!

His mother, stout and complacent, had tied him to her Mothers’ Union apron strings. He had been a delicate child, and without love she had coddled him. He had been a solitary child, reading books to keep out of harm’s way, playing patience and solitaire, collecting stamps, until packed off to the communal hell of prep school. His mother did not like friends in the house. Increasingly, she elevated the family as sanctuary. He was the child of her menopause. The Coxes ruled supreme in a nest feathered with family jokes, rituals, catch phrases, memories. All other families were ignorant, feckless, ill-bred, over-bred. The Coxes laughed at other people. They laughed at other people because they were not Coxes. His mother was frightened, increasingly frightened, of other people. His father, a country doctor who left home early in the morning and came home dutifully for his supper, said nothing. He quietly paid the bills.

His mother was red-faced, solid-salt-of-the-earth, bitter, bad-tempered, coy, immature, self-sacrificing, and deeply, deeply self-centred. She was deviousness incarnate. She managed to persuade herself and her neighbours that Moxley Hall and its disgraceful preparatory school were superior not only to all the local schools but also to Clifton, Ampleforth, Harrow, Eton, Rugby and Gordonstoun. She managed to persuade her boys that all girls were dirty and dishonest. Herself sexless and shapeless, she poisoned all hope and all fancy. How she had laughed at girls, with Francis, Jeremy and Andrew! How she had conspired with cakes and little sneers to trap them in their boyish juvenile world of mother-dependent greed and fear! Little Stephen, watching, had seen it all.

And he tried to explain it all to Miss Porntip, with some success. She was quick on the uptake.

‘Your brothers all homosexual now?’ she inquired, politely.

No, explained Stephen. That was not quite how it had worked. Two had married respectably, replicas of mother, and sent their offspring to Moxley Hall. They lived a life of gumboots and dogs and dances and pig ignorance. The third, Jeremy, had broken brilliantly away and ended up in gaol. Drugs had been his downfall.

‘And you?’

‘Oh, me. Me, I became an intellectual. That was my exit. I escaped through university.’

‘And then through bad girls and wild women?’

Stephen acknowledged this.

‘I can’t stick it all together,’ he said. ‘Sex, politics, the past, myself. I am all in pieces.’

‘Who can stick these things together? Why expect?’ she demanded.

‘But in me,’ persisted Stephen, ‘the gaps are so great. I am hardly made of the same human stuff. The same human matter. There is no consistency in me. No glue. No paste. I have no cohesion. I make no sense. I am a vacuum. I am fragments. I am morsels.’

She shook her head, worldly-wise.

‘Is not unusual,’ she said. ‘Is normal. Is naturally or common matter.’

‘The people I like I don’t approve,’ he persisted. ‘The people I approve I do not like. The women I like I cannot love. The woman I love I cannot like. The life I seek I could not endure. I seek a land where the water flows uphill. I seek simplicity.’

‘Is no simplicity. Is only way onwards. Is no way back to village. No way back to childhood. Is finished, all finished. All over world, village is finished. English village, Thai village, African village. Is burned, is chopped, is washed away. Is no way backwards. Water find level. Is no way back.’

‘But it is heart-rending, heart-rending,’ said Stephen Cox, crushing out his little cigarette in an enamel ashtray. ‘All this waste. All this wasted possibility. All this suffering. All these dreams. All this cruelty. All these dead.’

‘No, is not so. Is better now. Is better life expectancy, more electrics, more saloon cars, more soap, more rice, more nice clothings and suitings, more ice-cream, more maple syrup, more Coca-Cola, more cocktails, more Ovaltine, more champagne, more cassette players, more faxes, more aeroplanes, more Rolex watches, more perfumes, more satellites, more TV, more microwave, more word processor, more shower fitments, more motorbicycles, more ice boxes, more chips, more tampons, more tweezers, more fridges, more air conditionings, more cabinets, more musical, more confections, more bracelets, more prawns, more fruit varieties, more choice, more liberty, more democracy.’

‘You believe that?’

She nodded, seriously. ‘It never roll back now. Is finished. Socialism finished, simplicity finished, poverty finished, USSR and China and Vietnam all finished. Liberty, is all. Growth, is all. Dollars, is all.’ She smiled, encouraging. ‘Is good. Is better. Equality and fraternity is poverty and sickness. Is men working like beast, like buffalo. Is men killing one another like beast, like worse beast. Is no good, Stephen. Is finished. Is new world now. Is failed and finished.’

‘So you offer me nothing but desolation and loss. You offer me nothing but heartbreak.’

‘I offer you riches, I offer you choice, I offer you freedom. You can take, if only you choose. Forget old ideas. Choose.’

‘No,’ he repeated, forlornly. ‘You offer me desolation and loss. You offer me stones.’

*

Konstantin Vassiliou tries to enlist the help of his new friend Stephen Cox with an idea for a book. He will do the pictures, Stephen can write the text. Konstantin already has interest from a publisher, and with Stephen’s name the thing will be a piece of cake. Konstantin would be honoured. Please help. It will be a book about peaceful life, about the village. An anti-war book. Bitter Rice. The book that Robert Capa never made.

Stephen demurs. He thinks Konstantin is being naïve, but does not like to say so. He can hardly plead over-occupation as an excuse, as he has already lingered in the soft beds of the East for seven times seven nights with nothing to show for his sojourn but scribbles and sketches. But he does not like the idea of a picture book. He does not want to write the text for a book of glossy photographs of tragic people, even if the photographs are taken by his charming new friend. He has already turned down many offers to write texts and introductions to non-books. When he won the Booker, such requests had flooded in, and he had agreed, feebly, to write a foreword to an architectural guide to Paris Métro stations. This he had much regretted.

He regrets too that Konstantin has suggested something as banal as a book. Surely he should be above such things? He needs Konstantin to be the spiritual hero, not the cobbler-together of objects to put on Miss Porntip’s glass-topped coffee table.

He protests that he is not good at that kind of thing. He is an old-fashioned book person. Konstantin, the man with the camera, is the man of the future, the coming man. Why does he not write his own text?

Konstantin shrugs and smiles disarmingly and says he cannot write. He says to Stephen, I write like you draw. Stephen laughs. But does not give a firm assent. They will go along together to the border, he agrees, and they will see what happens. Jack Crane will give them a lift to Aranyaprathet in the ICRDP van.

Stephen continues to wish that Konstantin had not stooped to a commercial proposition, although he continues to be flattered by his attention. For some reason, he wishes Konstantin to remain beyond reproach and pure in heart. He tries to quell his doubts about photojournalism. Why, as a trade, should it be any worse than his own? Is he himself, hanging around on the edge of events, a parasite, a maggot on dying flesh, is he himself beyond reproach?

Sean Flynn and Tim Page, in the Vietnam war, experimented with a camera that could be attached to a soldier’s rifle so that when the gun was fired, it automatically recorded the death of its victim.

Sean Flynn vanished in Cambodia. He drove off, Easy Rider, on his Honda, and was never seen again. He left a legend, but no bones. Maybe he is still alive.

Konstantin insists that he is not a war photographer. I photograph survivors, he tells Stephen. I photograph life, not death. Stephen wonders if this is so. If it is possible.

Stephen, sitting in the Bangkok Press Club on the twentieth floor of a luxury hotel, sips a candiola juice, and sinks back into his deep armchair. He is evading the choice between Konstantin and Miss Porntip, between the light and the dark. He is reading a copy of Asia Today which informs him that most of Asia has leaped straight from illiteracy to the Visual Display Unit and has cut out the need for books. Stephen is a member of a threatened species. He is unnecessary. He reads that ‘Peasants in remote hill villages who have never mastered the art of reading and writing are quite at home with the electronic revolution. They have bypassed Gutenberg.’ He gazes at these words with incredulity. What fantasy world is this? Where do they find the electricity, in these remote hill villages? Do they all have their own generators? Are they not always in danger of storm or flood or guerrilla warfare or opium armies? Back home in the UK, in Good Time, Stephen has friends who have lost whole screenplays, whole novels, whole treatises on Wittgenstein into the unreachable limbo of their machinery. Are the hill peasants really that much smarter than his friends in Oxford and NW5?

Well, of course, judging by Miss Porntip, they may well be.

But what do they use their computers for, up there in the hills? Are they calculating the yield per acre of garlic versus cabbage, the profits of King Prawn versus Queen Porn, or are they rewriting the Tragedy of the Ravished Maiden?

It is the quiet hour, l’heure verte, when the spirit sinks. Other solitary figures slump in the gloom. Television screens flicker, and there is a hum of fax and telex. Stephen still writes with pen and ink, with pencil, with ball-point pen. The electronic revolution may or may not have reached Miss Porntip’s village, but it has certainly reached the Press Club of Bangkok.

The Khmer Rouge dispensed with the new technologies. They returned to people power, to bare hands.

Angkor had not been built, as the text books claim, by Suryavarman or Jayavarman or Indravarman or Hashavarman or any other Varman. It had been built by the bare hands of slave labour. By despised mountain people, nameless, known to history only as ‘Dog’, ‘Cat’, ‘Detestable’, ‘Loathsome’ and ‘Stinking Beast’. They had laboured and they had died. (Or this is what Stephen, erroneously, thinks, but his sixties’ Marxist scholarship is out of date: Dog and Cat had been in fact, we now believe, quite privileged people, whose pet names were perhaps adopted to ward off the evil eye. The true slaves remain – well, yet more deeply nameless and undistinguished.)

Democratic Kampuchea had not been built by willing patriots, by workers toiling to create a shared vision. It had been built by Dog Doctor, by Cat Teacher, by Rat Banker, by Detestable Clerk. They too had laboured and died, and no revisionist historian has yet rewritten their fate. The evil eye had beamed full upon them. Stephen Cox finds this disappointing. Who now will rebuild? No aid reaches Vietnam, no aid reaches Kampuchea. The Vietnamese cry out for American dollars. They are starving. They will withdraw from Kampuchea if aid is promised. They have had enough of proudly eating stones.

Over Stephen’s head dangles a TV monitor, relaying American newsreel of another explosion in Beirut, an explosion that cameramen have risked their lives to film. It is followed in rapid psychedelic succession by photographs of an adopted child in Denver, bruised and battered by its middle-class parents: by famine in Mozambique: by a report of a new method of making calorie-free cream cakes.

Stephen is depressed. The green hour is very green. He sinks into its subaqueous wash. He is about to go under. Who will save him? And suddenly, there before him, smiling and extending a hand, is Simon Grunewald, ethnologist, homosexual and adventurer, exclaiming with his habitual eagerness, ‘Stephen! I say, Stephen, is that really you? What luck!’ Stephen knows that he is, if not saved, reprieved.

*

Liz Headleand was invited to be one of the witnesses at the marriage of Esther Breuer and Robert Oxenholme. The marriage had followed quickly upon the limousine declaration. Robert, that night, had repeated his offer, and Esther had said, ‘Yes.’ Just the one word, ‘Yes.’ It had hopped out from her mouth, unexpectedly, like a toad or a diamond.