The bare light bulb dangles. The machine hums. A tap drips. Stephen fills in the turning globe, patch by patch. At prep school, in what was called Geography, he and his classmates had been taught to surround islands and continents with a blue edging of sea. A useless, harmless exercise. There were strict rules governing the angle of the blue pencil. A wide, rayed fuzz was not allowed. Little, even, horizontal strokes alone had been permitted. No reasoning for this had been provided. Prep school, like the army, had been without reason.
He is feeling very tired, but he dares not close his eyes lest he fall asleep and miss his rendezvous with the improbable Miss Porntip. He picks up a copy of the Bangkok Post purchased in the lobby below, and runs his eyes over news stories about Ronald Reagan and the Ayatollah and the King of Thailand and a logging concession. In this paper he will find no deaths, or none that he can call his own. He finds an item about the deployment of Vietnamese troops of the People’s Army in the Phnom Malai area of Battambang, an area briefly reconquered by the Khmer Rouge three years earlier. There is a picture of a young Khmer Rouge soldier in a denim jacket, sitting on the ground, smiling broadly, casually and proudly cradling a gun. His head is wrapped in a chequered cloth, on top of which perches what appears to be an American cowboy hat. His smile gives no indication that he is in any way aware that the Khmer Rouge are the folk monsters of the modern world. The author of the article speculates that there are 40,000 trained Khmer Rouge soldiers active on the frontier and inside Kampuchea, and that Pol Pot himself is in a hideout in the Cardamom mountains.
Stephen Cox’s own army experiences had been peaceful. He had lazed about in the Dorset countryside (during his National Service) with his friend Brian Bowen and a suspected shadow on his lung, and then had been transferred to a Russian language course in Cornwall. He could still speak a little Russian. He wondered if the People’s Army spoke Russian. The Soviet Union was Vietnam’s only friend. It was strange that while the world reviled the Khmer Rouge as mythical monsters, they also reviled the Vietnamese who had liberated Phnom Penh from the Khmer Rouge. Khmer and Thai and Vietnamese Stephen did not speak. There had been no National Service courses offered in these languages.
Stephen has never seen a war, never heard a shell explode. An American plane had crashed into the shallow waters of the Levels near his childhood home in Somerset in 1942, but that was as near as he had come to death by acts of war.
So why does he lie here? Is he looking for trouble?
He gets up, looks again in the refrigerator. There is no mineral water, only beer. He does not want a beer, but decides to have one nevertheless. Why not? But there is no bottle opener. The previous guest must have extravagantly purchased it. Feebly, he lies back, and waits for the time to pass.
*
The Swan of Ice
A swan of ice drips upon the chequered marble floor. A white-suited slave discreetly mops. Little naked oysters lie obediently in silver spoons, raying outwards in a spiral from a huge, spiny, not-quite-dead lobster. Its feelers struggle and waver, its maxillary palps feebly panic and tick. Tiny swans of cream-filled light-buff puff pastry float on a silver sea. Teeth bite, flash, smile. There is black caviare, and prawns of dangerous radiant coral pink. There are jewels, silks, perfumes. This is the gorgeous East. Conrad was here.
This, in Stephen’s handwriting, on the back of the torn-off front page of Staff Briefing Paper for the International Committee for Resettlement of Displaced People, folded in half and tucked into the memo book I’d nicked from Liz Headleand. I like it. Stephen’s high style. Well, it’s a parody of Stephen’s high style. Well, Stephen’s high style is parody. But what can you do with half a page? It sounds like the Oriental to me. I stayed there once with John Connell when he was making The Princess and the Talisman. It was a bit swan-of-ice-and-dying-lobster. Wonderful prawn soup. John was on good form that week. Ah well, never look back. ‘Conrad was here’, eh? Stephen always had a thing about Conrad, which is odd when you think that Conrad was such an amazing racist old reactionary, and frankly Stephen has always been somewhat to the left of Pol Pot.
There were quite a few notes about Conrad jotted about, though you’d have had to know your stuff to spot some of them. ‘The Violin of the Captain of the Otago’, for instance. The Otago was Conrad’s first command, and its previous skipper used to play the violin to himself mournfully all over the high seas. Conrad was haunted by ghostly water music. The old skipper was mad. Then there were quite a few notes about Victory, which Stephen must have been reading. Such as ‘Query: Portrait of hotel manager libellous?’ I should think so. Conrad had to print an apology, saying that of course he knew not all Germans were quite as ghastly as the appalling Schomberg. Not that I was all that interested in whether Conrad or Stephen had libelled a hotel or a hotel manager. I was much more keen to find out whether he’d libelled me, and if so, to destroy the evidence. I was sure I’d seen my own name jump out of the pages as I flipped through it under Liz’s nose. As one would expect one’s own name to do, if it were there. But when I looked more closely I was damned if I could find it. Had I gone and brought the wrong memo book, I wondered? Was Liz Headleand even now amusing herself with a description of my naked tits, while I was stuck with naked oysters? Maybe I’d imagined it, in a paranoid sort of way.
There was a lot of stuff about a character called Miss Porntip. She seemed to be some kind of erotic fantasy of poor old Stephen’s. Nothing very consecutive, just notes and scribbles. Jottings about her clothes and sayings. The wit, wisdom and wardrobe of Miss Porntip. To tell the truth, I don’t think Stephen ever got much further than fantasy. I think he was one of those men who put sex in a compartment and never let it get out. Not that I blame him. When it does get out, it is a menace. To tell the truth, I don’t think Stephen liked women, as such. I think they nauseated him. In the flesh. I’m only guessing, mind you, from putting two and two together from clues in his books. It’s funny really, because he was always a good friend to women. People like Marjorie and Molly adored him. And he was a good friend to me. I wonder if I nauseated him?
I don’t see why people shouldn’t be celibate if they want. It would certainly make life easier. I wish I did want. But oh alas I go on wanting the other thing.
I got quite excited when my eye lit on something that looked as though it might connect up with me. There were my initials, HO, written several times over, in red ball-point, and underneath them were the names of several London hotels and restaurants adorned by queries. The Carlton, Claridge’s, the Dorchester, the Ritz, the Troc and the Cri, Stephen inquired of himself. Then he had written DICKENS? NEW ZEALAND HOUSE? And again, HO?
At first I thought Stephen was trying to remember some do I’d been to with him, or at which I’d met him, and I did manage to dredge up a dim memory of a reception at Claridge’s, for Richard Burton (or was it Mrs Gandhi?) – and another on the Martini Terrace of New Zealand House where I had a good chat with Monica Dickens when she was one of the Authors of the Year. I think I behaved quite nicely on that occasion. But then as I read on I realized I was on the wrong tack altogether. HO wasn’t Harriet Osborne at all, it was Ho Chi Minh. Silly me. There was a lot more HO later on in the diary. Though what he had to do with Claridge’s or the Carlton or New Zealand House remains obscure. I’m sure he never went to parties at such places, did he? Did he ever come to England at all? I’ve no idea. Perhaps Stephen was planning to employ a little artistic licence and introduce a scene into his play with Pol Pot and Ho and Chairman Mao all dining in Claridge’s with Richard Burton and Mrs Gandhi and Monica Dickens. Why not?
He was at least half planning to write a play. I found one page laid out as a sort of screenplay, with camera directions. It was set in a Paris apartment, rue St André des Arts, 1952. POV Khieu Ponnary, POV Saloth Sar alias Pol Pot, that sort of thing. They were talking about regicide and how to get rid of Sihanouk. This Ponnary person appeared to be Pol Pot’s fiancée. I didn’t know Stephen knew