The Gates of Ivory. Margaret Drabble

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