The Gates of Ivory. Margaret Drabble

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