The Gates of Ivory. Margaret Drabble

Thank God it looked pretty incomprehensible to an outsider. But it made me all the keener to get my hands on the stuff, and find time to go through it all without her standing over me.

      We agreed that I could have a photocopy of everything that looked worth copying, including the laundry list. Laundry lists are very important to biographers, I told her, quoting an article by Victoria Glendinning in the TLS. I think she was impressed by that evidence of unexpected scholarship on my part. She said her secretary would do it in the morning and send the stuff round on a motorbike. Then we had a terminal conversation about who had last seen Stephen where and when. She said she thought someone called Peter Bloch in the embassy at Bangkok had had some kind of contact with him, and should she try to get hold of him. I said wait a while. Then I told her about John Geddes and the film of Victory. She’d never read Victory, so I found myself telling her the plot. In case you’ve forgotten (tactful, aren’t I?), Victory is that one about the lone mysterious Swede called Axel Heyst who mooches around the South Seas dwelling on the ineffable and eternal until he hitches up with a dancing girl (actually it’s a musician in a ladies’ orchestra, but we made her a dancing girl) at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, and runs away with her to a remote island. He is pursued by an aged British conman–playboy, his sidekick the evil and greasy Ricardo, and a Naked Savage, who are convinced he is hiding away with a lot of loot. The real villain of the piece is the Oriental hotel manager, a fat German. It’s a wonderfully racist piece and it would have made a bloody good movie, but it came to nought, as such projects usually do. I must say I think Carlo’s screenplay was brilliant, the best thing he’s ever done. But that’s beside the point.

      The laundry bill was in fact from the Oriental Hotel. I didn’t point this out to Liz Headleand. I didn’t see why I should make things easy for her. I don’t think she’s ever been to Bangkok.

      If Max von Sydow had been twenty years younger, he’d have been wonderful as Axel Heyst. But that’s beside the point too.

      Anyway, we agreed that I should have a look at the photocopies before either of us made any further official inquiries. It’s not as though it’s a message in a bottle, or an SOS calling for a search party, is it, I said, and then we both looked at one another and though we didn’t say anything I could see that we were both thinking that perhaps it might, after all, be precisely that. I was still clutching the little red memo book, and I suddenly plucked up courage and said, ‘I say, do you think I could take this one with me now? Just for a look? I promise I’ll be ever so careful, but I really would like to start on it straightaway, I can see all sorts of fascinating things in there.’ I burbled on like this for a bit, and I could see she was embarrassed to say no outright. (People usually are. This is one of life’s more useful secrets.) All right, she said, but don’t lose it, will you. I swore I wouldn’t, and slipped it into my bag, thanked her for the drink, and away I went.

      I must say I had an odd evening, reading Stephen’s orts and fragments. You see, I was with Stephen on his last night in London. It was ghastly. Really ghastly. I don’t like to think of it at all. He must have had an appalling flight. I can’t think what came over me. No wonder he ran away. Though of course he was on his way out anyway. It wasn’t me that drove him off. I must try to remember that. Whatever happened, it wasn’t all my fault.

      *

      It was a terrible evening. March 1985. Picture Stephen Cox and comrade Hattie Osborne, on their way to their elderly friend Molly Lansdowne, in the back of a taxi. They are to dine with her, à trois, before moving on to the seventieth birthday party of another friend, Marjorie Kinsman. Neither of them can remember how this arrangement stole upon them. It has just happened, and they have surrendered to it. They have to go to Marjorie’s, for over the years, severally and together, they have drunk many pints of her whisky and vodka, and they must turn up to celebrate her unlikely survival. But why add Molly to the evening’s jaunt? She must have added herself.

      Hattie is already very drunk. She is high-pitched, fast-talking, feverish. She lets her hair down, in the back of the taxi, telling Stephen about her last lost lover, who had split from her for ever the week before over an incident involving his wife and his eldest daughter and a piano lesson. He is, she tells Stephen, a two-faced, double-crossing, feeble little shit of a liar who wants to have his cake and eat it. She loved him, she tells Stephen, she still loves him, she must be mad. Stephen utters soothing nothingnesses, as they roll past the opulent golden shop fronts of Knightsbridge. He is worried, a little embarrassed. He is used to confidences, for he is the kind of man in whom women choose to confide, but Hattie seems determined tonight to go over the top. He sits back, and decides to let her roll over him. Tomorrow he will have vanished. What does it matter?

      The abuse continues, as Stephen, Hattie and Molly settle down to a little picnic of not-quite-defrosted potted shrimps, rubbery smoked chicken, random salad and unripe Camembert, washed down by gin and water. The conversation becomes more and more louche. The setting invites it. Molly’s flat has the air of a crumpled love nest. It is all bijoux and trinkets and tapestry cushions and French furniture. The plates are French china, chipped, pretty, non-matching. The glasses are dusty. Molly no longer sees as well as she did, but is too vain to wear spectacles. She is a handsome woman, with deep sharp blue eyes, and a delicate skin, and soft grey pompadour hair swept back into a coil tied with a blue velvet ribbon. Stephen had always admired her looks, but, as the evening wears on and the tone sinks yet further, he begins to see her as dyed and raddled, farded with the pink and the white and the blue. She is wearing rustling silver. Picture her, in her blue and silver, an English rose, dried and dyed and perfumed. Picture Hattie Osborne, a striking huge-eyed painted forty-year-old with a great headful of snaky falsely frizzed Medusa curls, and a long gold dress with a plunge neckline revealing glimpses of a naked bosom. Picture Stephen Cox, polite in his everlasting white suit. He sits neatly between them like a mascot, like a eunuch, as they tear to pieces the men that they have known. Bedecked and bedizened with jewels, they screech with tongues and talons.

      Impotencies, meannesses, cowardices, treacheries, bad manners in and out of bed, all are hymned, bemoaned, indicted. Offences twenty years old are held up to the light, shaken, and savaged. Stephen thinks, this is the kind of dreadful conversation I quite enjoy, but it is going too far. The lipstick, the mascara, the oh so saddening march of merciless age upon them all, there, then, even then, as they sat there eating their salmonella-charged cold platter of treats from the delicatessen. ‘Pour réparer des ans l’irréparable outrage.’ The line from Athalie goes through and through his head. Jezebel, with her borrowed glory. They are all worn and used, they are on their way to the danse macabre, the leper’s ball, the bitter end. Hattie, frenzied, recoils in fear from her mirror image in Molly’s eye, and plunges on recklessly like a mad horse. It is of sex they sing, of the wrongs and pains of sex, and of its disappointments. Mad women, demented women, voracious, demanding, insatiable women.

      ‘Buggery may, of course, be the answer,’ says Molly, dabbing daintily at her lips, staining her old-fashioned damask napkin with deep sticky pink. ‘For satisfaction. After a certain age. Have you ever been buggered, Stephen? No? Have you, Hattie? I never have, and it’s too late now, I suppose. Is it the fashion, these days? One seems to read a lot about it. It wasn’t done, when I was young. Is buggery in, Stephen?’

      She looks at him, demanding a response, but he is unable to answer, for the invitation in her eyes is too alarming. But Hattie careers on, unstoppable, taking this fence in her stride, the bit between her teeth.

      ‘But of course!’ she cries. ‘Of course! Many, many times! Orlando always preferred it! But then that was because he had such a tiny prick. And he wasn’t much good at buggery either!’

      In vino veritas. She spoke the simple truth. And as she spoke, she suddenly unzipped the back of her gold dress, and let it fall forward from the waist over her turquoise-rimmed gold-plate and debris of cheese and biscuits. She sat there, topless, her excellent firm breasts eloquent over the Camembert. Stephen and Molly stared at them. Molly’s eyes filled with tears.

      ‘Yes,’ said Hattie, in a high-rhetorical trance, gazing into space like a priestess. ‘Yes, buggered, poked, screwed, raped, you name it, I’ve had it, and was it ever, ever enough, any of it? No, it