The Gates of Ivory. Margaret Drabble

in the world have been able to invent the workman’s caff? We had cheese and pickle and strong tea in those weird thick semi-translucent hardboiled-egg-white cups, and a chat about Firebird Holdings and pornography and L’Histoire d’O and suchlike matters, and I told Angus I’d had a phone call from Marlon Brando himself at the crack of dawn and how I’d told him to piss off before I realized it really was him and not some prankster, and he told me some similar tale about being invited to a party by Marlene Dietrich or was it Racquel Welch, and not going because he thought it was his mates having him on. Then we had another cup of shudder-making tea (you should have seen the chap serving, tragic, dear God, tragic, a chap with the shakes like that shouldn’t be allowed near a teapot, poor old boy) and Angus told me about his budget most of which seemed to be going on Miss Beeton, and I said would he ever want to make a really exotic film in some desperate location, and he told me that he’s heard that John Geddes had been frightened out of his wits in Peru because two British hikers had been assassinated by the Shining Path in the next village, and that he (John that is) was on his way home to Fulham Broadway. I asked if there was any news on the grapevine about Carlo’s Victory script, and he said PDJ had got cold feet because of David Lean’s Nostromo, which in his view would never get finished either. Or started, come to that. And then if I remember right we returned to the subject of Grace Lillo and Sally Beeton, and how strange it must be to have your own past self portrayed by some total stranger when you were yourself still alive and kicking. I don’t know what the legal situation is, really. I mean, if somebody decided to make a film about Harriet Osborne, would they have to pay me for it? Could I stop them? Could I sell them my life? Is my life story a property, or does someone have to write it up first?

      I think it was at this point that Cambodia came up. I said I’d seen this weirdo reading the Killing Fields book on the tube, and I asked Angus if he’d ever met Dith Pran, the real life hero, or come to that Haing S. Ngor who played Dith Pran in the movie. Dith Pran’s a journalist and Haing S. Ngor isn’t really an actor, or he wasn’t until he made the film, he was a doctor of sorts, I think, and now he’s a writer as well or at least a ghosted writer, and frankly his life and survival story is just as harrowing as Dith Pran’s. They could make a movie about Haing S. Ngor and Dith Pran could play him. Except that obviously Dith Pran can’t act, or he’d have acted himself, wouldn’t he? Alter ego, ghost-person, shadow-self, which-is-the-hero, which-the-impostor. I could tell Angus wasn’t really listening to my philosophical ramblings, even though they were highly pertinent to the problems he was having with Grace Lillo and Sally Beeton, because he suddenly interrupted me and said it was funny I’d brought up the subject of Cambodia, it was rather on his mind too, he’d had dinner the night before with an old school friend of his who’d just got back from Phnom Penh. From the White Hotel, figure-toi, in Phnom Penh. (I wonder what happened to that movie?)

      I could tell that something was suddenly weighing on my old friend Angus’s spirits so I went and got him another cup of tea and a Kit Kat and told him to tell. You should know that Angus, although he makes movies about erotic bondage, was once (well, maybe still is) a man with a conscience who wanted to make serious documentaries about housing estates and famines. The clue to Angus is that he went to a Quaker school. You need to know that. It explains a great deal. It certainly explains why unlike many movie men he was willing to spend an evening in a vegetarian restaurant being harangued by this woman who works for Médecins Sans Frontières. Angus didn’t actually say that she harangued him, and I don’t suppose she needed to. The contrast between Angus’s glamorous life eating cheese sandwiches and Kit Kats out in Romley and hers living on boiled rice and boiled water in Kampuchea must have been telling enough without her pointing it out. As a matter of fact Angus clearly did have a lot of admiration for this woman, Marianne, and says he’s kept up with her better than with anyone else from his school days. But that’s not the point of the story. The point of the story, from our POV, is that she produced this portfolio of photographs for him, of life in the north-west, and of her field hospital, and Angus was stunned by them, and said who took them, and she said this young man called Konstantin Vassiliou. Angus said who is he, and she said she was going to ask him, because that was the kind of thing she expected him to know, but as far as she knew he was an English freelance photographer who’d won various photojournalism awards, and she’d like to catch up with him if she could.

      Now the name Konstantin Vassiliou didn’t mean anything to me until I saw it in Stephen’s papers, where it appears quite a lot, particularly in the diary bits. But when Angus brought it up, naturally it caught my attention like a red flag. All I could get out of Angus was the info that he’d taken the photos a couple of years or so ago and that Vassiliou had been one of the nicest people Marianne had ever met in her life. He must have been quite nice or he wouldn’t have sent her the photos. In my experience photographers are always promising to send photos to their victims and subjects, whose time they waste for hours on end, but out of sight out of mind and never do you hear a word or see a contact sheet from them again. They flash you, print you, fix you, sell you, and vanish. So young Konstantin had got past square one of niceness simply by sending the photos. And what were they like, what were they of, I wanted to know. Oh, amputees, cripples, people in a workshop making wooden crutches and primitive wheelchairs. Not very jolly. But great photographs, Angus said, great.

      He found it hard to be more specific than that. He’s not really a word man, our Angus.

      He told me that Marianne at school had always wanted to study French and German, and had done just that, but then had gone off to some African country for the VSO for a year, and had come back and decided to be a doctor. She had to start from scratch, with Chemistry and Physics A-level. Dear God.

      Being a photographer is a lot easier than being a doctor. Being a journalist or an actor is a piece of cake.

      I thought I’d better try and get in touch with this Marianne, or with Konstantin Vassiliou himself. One or the other of them could surely give an update on Stephen. So I thanked Angus for the delicious lunch and packed him off to his warehouse, then I whizzed back on the tube to Primrose Hill and started with that elementary tool of research, the telephone directory.

      Well, in the London phone book there are a dozen or so Vassilious, none of them with a K, and most of them living in the lesser known postal codes of North London, so I started with the more promising regions and drew a few blanks. But on my fourth or fifth attempt I got this woman’s voice, from N22. Excuse me, I said, I’m trying to reach a photographer called Konstantin Vassiliou, do you happen to know where I can contact him? And she said, I only wish I did. So I said, you mean that is his number? And she said, no, not really, not any more. She said this in such a – well, I don’t know how to describe it – such a sad but stalwart kind of way, not like an abandoned wife, anyway, that I thought in for a penny, in for a pound, and I said you mean it used to be his number, and she said, well, yes, I’m his mother. Then she asked what I wanted him for, and I said I was trying to contact a friend of his and mine, last seen in Bangkok, and she said that Konstantin was still out there but she hadn’t heard from him for a long time. There was a sort of irritable motherly tremor in her voice as she said this, as though all were not well. Frankly, I didn’t know what to do. I could hardly cross-question this total stranger, could I, especially as I’d no idea what to cross-question her about. So I said, sorry to have bothered you, and rang off. I think I left my name and number. Or rather Stephen’s number. But I’m not sure. To tell the truth I was feeling a bit uneasy about the whole business.

      The more I think about it, the more I think the name Vassiliou sort of rings a bell. Of course, if you think about any name for long enough you can make yourself think that, I know. But there really is some sort of echo. Wasn’t there some scandal, back in the sixties, about a stolen baby? An heiress and a stolen baby? Or have I made it all up?

      *

      Konstantin Vassiliou and Stephen Cox, despite or perhaps because of the disparity in their ages, take to one another at once over their lunchtime beer and chicken. Konstantin, while modestly claiming not to be much of a reading man, expresses his admiration for Stephen’s work. He is tentative and polite, as though aware that he may have captured Stephen off guard in deep incognito. Stephen responds warmly. There is something very pleasing,