‘No,’ said Stephen, carefully rolling himself a little cigarette. ‘No, I don’t think that. You know I don’t think that. But I’m interested in what happened. How did he get such a bad name? Such a big bad name? Such a big, bad, difficult name?’ And he had smiled, at his own difficulty.
‘Because he was such a big bad monster and was responsible for the death of a nation?’ suggested Liz, placidly.
‘Do you believe in monsters?’ Stephen had asked. ‘Single, self-generated monsters?’
Or something like that he had said, on one of those evenings before he disappeared. He had gone off to see if he could find out what had happened to the dreams of Pol Pot. Out of curiosity. To write a play, about the Rise and Fall.
‘Look, Liz,’ he had said, ‘you are curious about human nature. And so am I. So why should I not go?’
‘There’s plenty of human nature here at home,’ Liz had offered, in a tone and with a gesture that embraced the restaurant with its office-outing birthday table, its assorted couples, its solitary elderly diner with his book, its family gathering, its amiable smiling proprietors: the street life outside of dreadlocks and strollers and buskers and cruisers and crooks and drifters: the enshrined Campden Hill dignitaries to the west, the Bayswater backwaters to the east: the brutal and grand dwellings of Czech and Soviet and Indian diplomats: the Peking Ducks and Pizza Parlours of Queensway, the terrorist hotels and bed and breakfast doss houses of the dangerous shabby fire-gutted North Kensington squares, and the mean streets extending north to the grim terraces of the Mozart Estate and multiple murder, to the converted terrace houses of first-time first-baby double-mortgage young buyers.
And Stephen had taken all this in, and had shrugged his thin shoulders, and had said a little wistfully, ‘There is nothing to keep me here.’
Liz had not thought that Stephen really intended to write a play. He did not write plays, he wrote novels, and they were not, in her view, particularly strong on dialogue. All this talk about a play had been just talk. A blind, a screen, an act of bravado, a dramatic gesture. That was what she had thought then, and that was what she thought now, as she tried to force her mind back over old history. But he had meant to leave, and he had done so. ‘There is nothing to keep me here.’ That is what he had said. Those had been his very words. They rang in her ears. What had he meant by them? It came back to her that she had thought then of saying something rash and blind like, ‘You could stay for me.’ But neither the invitation nor the inclination to do so had been strong enough, so she had said nothing.
She was glad now that she had said nothing. If he would not stay for Hattie Osborne, who was allowed to live in the flat on Primrose Hill that none had ever entered, why should he stay for his dining companion Liz Headleand? Let him go, let him depart.
Memory is treacherous. How could they have discussed Alix’s murderer and his mother? At that stage he had not been Alix’s murderer at all, Alix had not even met him, and nobody had heard of his monster-mother. If the murderer had belonged to anybody in those days, he had belonged to their friend Esther Breuer, who had lived in a flat beneath him in a house at the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove. Paul Whitmore, Pol Pot. Paul Whitmore’s house was demolished now, and Pol Pot’s country in ruins, and Liz’s memory was full of gaps and inconsistencies. They disturbed her. Was there some clue that she had forgotten, some reason why Stephen Cox was now appealing to her with a bundle of old papers and bones and string?
Alix Bowen was able to be more precise about dates than Liz, because she had Brian and her son Sam to confirm them. Yes, Brian and Sam agreed, Stephen had been to stay with them in Northam in February 1985, not long after they had moved up from London. He had been the first person to sleep in their spare room. It had been very cold and he had been given a hot-water bottle. He had praised the room and the hot-water bottle highly, nay excessively. One never knew quite when or why Stephen was taking the piss. Sam’s view was that Stephen was giving a lecture on the historical novel at the uni. Alix had not remembered this but did not dispute it. She thought they had had osso buco for supper. What had they talked about? The disarray of the Labour Party, council-house sales, the failure of Marxism Today? Had they also talked about Pol Pot? Yes, Alix thought they had. There had been some jokes about Pol Pot and Northam’s council leader Perry Blinkhorn and the red flag. Stephen had said he was off to Phnom Penh, but they had not known whether to believe him. He’d only stayed with them one night, and then he had vanished.
Brian had had a letter from him in Bangkok, but he had lost it. He couldn’t remember what it was about. Or when he had received it. He looked for it in a half-hearted manner but was so depressed by the junk he turned up that he abandoned the search. ‘To think I’ve accumulated all this in three years!’ he said, irritably, as he stuffed the papers back into his desk.
It was Brian’s view that Stephen had taken himself off for artistic reasons. Stephen had abandoned his last novel, half-finished, in a fit of despondency, and was looking for a new theme. He had thought the Orient might jog his failing creative powers, as Rome had jogged Goethe’s. And the Cambodian theme was a grand one. The death of a nation, the death of communism, the death of hope. It had not yet been written to death. It was unresolved. Pol Pot was still alive, lurking in the bushes. Stephen might well embrace the fatal ghost of such a challenge.
Over the years, since the mid seventies, Stephen and Brian had discussed the Cambodian question over many a pint. Vietnam had been a relatively simple issue; it had been easy for both of them as young men to cast the Americans as the villains in this protracted epic. When the Khmer Rouge had entered Phnom Penh in 1975, Brian had tended to take their side, and was tempted to dismiss as atrocity stories the tales of refugees who informed the Western world that their new leaders were ignorant child-peasants who killed anyone who spoke French or English or wore spectacles. But the evidence had swelled from a trickle to a flood and had borne Brian before it. The mysterious assassination in Phnom Penh of British fellow-traveller and friend-of-the-revolution Malcolm Caldwell had convinced him that the Khmer Rouge were almost as black as they were painted, and he had watched the unfolding retrospective horror story of skull landscapes and killing fields with revulsion and dismay. Had Brian identified with Caldwell, the gullible left-wing scholar? Perhaps. Brian had been so disillusioned that he could not even cast the invading Vietnamese as heroes when they defeated the Khmer Rouge in 1979. This was a story without heroes and without salvation. It had only victims. The exodus of the Vietnamese Boat People spoke for itself, if one were willing to listen. Brian had listened. Brian had been instrumental in persuading Northam’s ideologically committed red-flag council that it would not be betraying its colours if it set up a resettlement project for Vietnamese refugees. But some had been curiously hard to persuade, some had been reluctant to abandon their old allegiances. None of them, needless to say, had ever been to Vietnam.
Stephen had been less distressed because more sceptical. He tended not to believe anything he was told. He stuck to the view that there were more than two sides to every story, and that it was almost impossible to tell what was happening. The Vietnamese and Cambodians alike were secretive, evasive, paranoid. Stephen pointed out that they had good cause to be so.
Yes, said Brian to Alix, Stephen might well have thought that Cambodia would kick-start his imagination.
Kill or cure, you mean, said Alix, and then wished she hadn’t.
Alix accepted Brian’s diagnosis. Brian knew Stephen better than anyone, and if he thought Stephen had gone off in search of artistic renewal, then he was probably right. It seemed to her a somewhat flimsy reason for fleeing to the far side of the world, but then she was a woman, and she had no creative imagination, so she wouldn’t be likely to see the point of it, would she?
Alix missed Stephen Cox and wished he had not gone away. One does not have so many adult friends in a lifetime, and she had liked Stephen. He was a delicate, reticent, honourable man. He was Brian’s friend. She hoped he was still alive.
*
The more Liz looked at the package, the less she liked it. She took her duties seriously and purchased various plastic wallets to try to preserve