The Gates of Ivory. Margaret Drabble

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