She started with the piece of prose that began ‘And he came to a land where the water flows uphill.’ It continued in portentous but lyrical style for a page or two, describing an oriental landscape, a broad river, and a young man on a boat travelling upstream into the heart, she supposed, of darkness. Liz found it rather boring, though she did not like to say so, even to herself. Notes in the margin directed her to ‘The Miracle of the Tonle Sap’, a phrase which meant nothing to her at all. Impatiently she abandoned the young man on his allegorical voyage and turned to the diaries, which were more fun, though unsatisfactorily enigmatic. She puzzled over ‘Miss P. on good form tonight with brothels and tales of Opium King’ and ‘Met S. G. at Press Club and talked of cannibals’. She was introduced to a character called K. V. who told Stephen about his grandfather’s estate in Norfolk, and another called H. A. who was the daughter of M. A., a fact which Stephen had thought worthy of underlining.
Then she flipped through the fragments of drama, but they too were non-starters. They consisted of sketches for a series of tableaux outlining the careers and confrontations of the principal actors in the Cambodian tragedy, Prince Sihanouk and Pol Pot. They were much crossed out and about. One read:
1. Paris, Latin Quarter. 1950. Double wedding of Pol Pot, Ieng Sary and the two Khieu sisters. A huge set-piece banquet prepared in rented ballroom by Thiounn Prasith. Dancing. Jokes. Thiounn Mumm toasts the two couples and pledges the overthrow of Sihanouk. Laughter. Lighthearted. Khieu sisters both strikingly beautiful, stylish, worldly. Champagne.
2. Paris, 28 rue St André des Arts. Domestic scene. Thirith with baby on knee. Her sister Ponnary bitching about why Sihanouk wouldn’t marry the Thiounn girl. Again, much laughter. [1951?]
3. Phnom Penh, September 1960. First Party Congress of Cambodian Communists convened in empty railcars at Phnom Penh Station. The Return of the Three Ghosts. The Three Ghosts speak. The Naming of the Party. The Beheadings on the Tennis Court.
4. Kompong Cham, 1970. Queen Mother’s Palace. Queen Kossamak consults the augurs and draws the tarnished sword of defeat from its scabbard. She reproaches her son Sihanouk: They use you as a buffalo to cross the waters. [NB she died in 1975? Check.]
5. The march of Lon Nol’s army to the Holy War. He Black Papa. Amulets, tattoos, sorcery, talismans, magic scarves. The casting of the horoscope. [NB The Khmer Rouge militant atheists? How militant?]
6. Ratanakiri, 1974. Pol Pot and wife Thirith in camp. She weeps for the children she has not seen for ten years, she demands return to city. [Some reports say they had no children? Check.]
7. Phnom Penh, September 1978. The Feast of the Undead Intellectuals. Fail not our Feast. The starving eat the food prepared by Thiounn Prasith of the Hôtel Royale.
8. The Jungle, 1980. Number One Jungle Actor Star drinks from skull.
9. United Nations Reception, New York, 1987. Thiounn Prasith and Ieng Sary drink blood.
Liz Headleand ran her eye down all this stuff and much more. She recognized Pol Pot and Sihanouk, the principal protagonists of the Cambodian tragedy, and correctly surmised that the Khieu sisters were the two Paris-educated Khmer women who had so intrigued Stephen. Had he not told her that one of them had studied English Literature? Was that his excuse for all his Shakespearian references?
Thiounn Prasith was a name that meant nothing to Liz. There was little in the package to indicate that he was one of the official representatives of the non-existent state of Democratic Kampuchea at the United Nations, and that he had been one of the architects of the Communist Party of Cambodia and of the Khmer Rouge. He was and is one of the most eloquent apologists for the Years of Zero, 1975–9. He does not let go. He wears a suit and a tie and he lives in New York. But Liz was not to know this.
Muddled, confused, irritated by her own ignorance and by all these foreign names and meaningless dates, Liz moved on, and came at last across something that she understood. It was a small booklet headed ‘Atrocity Stories’. These made sense. They also confirmed that she and Alix had been speaking on the telephone about a real person, about a Stephen who had really existed and whom, in the real world, they had really known. He had thought some of the thoughts that they had thought. She read one or two of the entries. Yes, it was easy enough to see what Stephen had been up to in this section. She took his point, and saluted it. She heard, for a moment, his clear light voice speak.
But then she lost it again in scraps and scrawls and jottings. Where was the story in all this, where was the glue that would stick it all together? Her fingers ached with impatience, with irritation. ‘Really, Stephen,’ she said, aloud. But he did not answer.
She distrusted her own impatience. She had always wanted to make sense of things immediately. She had a tendency to leap to conclusions, to cut Gordian knots. She would never have made a scholar. How much she now regretted the impetuosity with which she had burned her mother’s old papers! She had destroyed them through fear, and, though curiosity had long since devoured fear, she could no longer recover them, for they had been consumed by the Ideal Boiler. She was not afraid of Stephen’s papers (was she?); there could be nothing personal lurking there?
In one sense at least, Stephen’s papers somewhat resembled her mother’s. Her mother had collected newspaper cuttings about the Royal Family. Stephen seemed to have collected ageing yellow items from court circulars. She came across a little wad of them, stapled together, with some items picked out in fluorescent pink. He had highlighted the movements of various aircraft of the Queen’s Flight, had saluted the General Committee Dinner of the Kennel Club and the reception at St James in aid of the Racing Welfare Charities, and had noted royally attended events in aid of the NSPCC, CARE, MIND and Mencap. As Stephen had been a known republican, his intentions could not have had much in common with those of the late Rita Ablewhite. Except, perhaps, madness. Collecting newspaper cuttings is a well-known sign of derangement. Why on earth should anyone have wished to note that the Annual Newsletter of Moxley Hall School would be published in May of 1984 with full details of Old Moxleian Day? What junk, Liz found herself thinking, what a waste of time!
Atrocity stories, Parisian revolts, Mumm champagne, Kennel Clubs, Pol Pot’s baby niece, John Stuart Mill, they add up even less than Hestercombe and Oxenholme on a silver wine cooler. At least the Hestercombes and the Oxenholmes had inhabited the same country and spoken the same language. This stuff was all over the place.
On her third evening of study, she came across the photograph of Mme Savet Akrun. It was cut out from a newspaper, and the reproduction was not good, but nevertheless it had a power. The image looked hauntingly familiar. Had she seen it somewhere before? The caption was ‘Where is my son?’ Mme Savet Akrun, erect and dignified, her hands folded on her lap, sat on a low chair and stared at the camera. Her eyes were large, her face thin and wasted, her lips gently curved. She wore what looked like a slightly Westernized sarong. Her greying hair was neatly pulled back into a bun. Her expression, adopted perhaps for the camera, was of grave suffering. It was a posed shot, slow, expressive. (If Liz had thought to look for a credit, which at this stage she did not, she would have seen for the first time the name of Konstantin Vassiliou.) Liz read the story, which told her that Mme Savet Akrun, mother of four, was held in Camp Site Ten, on the Thai–Kampuchean border. She had walked over the border in 1979 with her three younger children, from the countryside of Siem Reap province, where she had been living and working in a village. Her husband, her parents, her parents-in-law, her sisters, a brother and several of her nieces and nephews had all died in the terror, some of illness and some by violence. Her husband had owned garages and a small cinema in Phnom Penh. She had taught in an infants’ school and was now employed in the camp by the Khmer Women’s Association Centre for Adult Education. ‘I am one of the lucky survivors,’ she was quoted as saying, ‘but my life can give me no joy until I find my son.’ She had last seen him in a small village near Battambang. He had been marched away by a group of Khmer Rouge soldiers, the article said. ‘Is he still alive? How can I find him?’ she asked. The journalist went on to say that she was one of thousands trying to trace lost relatives through the International Red Cross and other agencies.
A human interest story, not a hard-news