The Gates of Ivory. Margaret Drabble

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