The Gates of Ivory. Margaret Drabble

      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 Was it perhaps an unpublished and unpublishable novel, from a leper in the Congo?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.