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Dame Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of eighteen novels including A Summer Bird-Cage, The Millstone, The Peppered Moth, The Red Queen, The Sea Lady, The Pure Gold Baby and most recently, the highly acclaimed The Dark Flood Rises. She has also written biographies, screenplays and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980, and made DBE in the 2008 Honours list. She was also awarded the 2011 Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd.
‘A compelling voyage into the heart of darkness’
Daily Telegraph
‘Artfully constructed and at times mordantly funny’
Vanity Fair
‘Piquant characterization, wonderful dialogue and brainy, skilful writing’
Globe and Mail
‘An engrossing story, very well told’
Evening Standard
‘Interesting, detailed, amusing and horrifying by turns’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Drabble raises much to think about; her picture of Cambodia is scrupulously researched and deeply felt’
Daily Telegraph
‘One of the most thought-provoking and intellectually challenging writers around’
Financial Times
‘One of the most versatile and accomplished authors of her generation’
New Yorker
‘One of our foremost women writers’
Guardian
‘The novels brim with sharply observed life and the author’s seemingly infinite sympathy for “ordinary women”’
JOYCE CAROL OATES, New Yorker
First published as an eBook in Great Britain in 2014 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Copyright © Margaret Drabble, 1991
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in hardback in Great Britain in 1991 by Viking, Penguin Books Ltd
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
eBook ISBN 978 1 78211 438 3
For Joe Swift
For Chhiek Ieng That
For all those on the border
I would like to thank all those who helped me with the background material for this book. I hope they will not disapprove of the fictional use to which I have put their facts. It is not possible to name them all, but I would like to give particular thanks to Susan Balfour, Anthony Barnett, Elizabeth Becker, Jack Emery, Rosalind Finlay, Stanley and Romaly Harper, Tony Jackson, Judith Jacob, Mary Kay Magistad, Amanda Milligan, Chris Mullin, Minh Phuoc, William Shawcross, Nicki Sissons, M. R. Smansnid Svasti, Chhiek Ieng That, and the Manager of the Oriental Hotel.
Dreams, said Penelope to the stranger, may puzzle and mislead. They do not always foretell the truth. They come to us through two gates: one is of horn, the other is of ivory. The dreams that come to us through the traitor ivory deceive us with false images of what will never come to pass: but those that appear to us through the polished horn speak plainly of what could be and will be.
Homer, The Odyssey, Book XIX, 560–65
This is a novel – if novel it be – about Good Time and Bad Time. Imagine yourself standing by a bridge over a river on the border between Thailand and Cambodia. Behind you, the little town of Aranyaprathet, bristling with aerials and stuffed with Good Time merchandise, connected by road and rail and telephone and post office and gossip and newspapers and banking systems with all the Good Times of the West. Before you, the Bad Time of Cambodia. You can peer into the sunlit darkness if you wish.
Many are drawn to stare across this bridge. They come, and stare, and turn back. What else can they do? A desultory, ragged band of witnesses, silently, attentively, one after another, they come, and take up the position, and then turn back. A Japanese journalist, an American historian, an English photographer, a Jewish survivor of the holocaust, a French diplomat, a Scottish poet, a Thai princess, a Chinese Quaker from Hong Kong. For different reasons and for the same reason they are drawn here. That young man with curly hair is the son of the British Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg. That broad-shouldered woman in the yellow Aertex shirt is the daughter of a discredited Oxford-educated Marxist scholar. Here they come, here they stand. They are asking a question, but there is no answer. Here too Stephen Cox will stand.
Good Time and Bad Time coexist. We in Good Time receive messengers who stumble across the bridge or through the river, maimed and bleeding, shocked and starving. They try to tell us what it is like over there, and we try to listen. We invoke them with libations of aid, with barley and blood, with rice and water, and they flock to the dark trenches, moaning and fluttering in their thousands. We are seized with panic and pity and fear. Can we believe these stories from beyond the tomb? Can it be that these things happen in our world, our time?
The dead and dying travel fast these days. We can devour thousands at breakfast with our toast and coffee, and thousands more on the evening news. It would be easy to say that we grow fat and greedy, that we thrive on atrocities, that we eagerly consume suffering. It is not as simple as that. We need them as they need us. There is a relationship between Good Time and Bad Time. There are interpenetrations. Some cross the bridge into the Bad Time, into the Underworld, and return to tell the tale. Some go deliberately. Some step into Bad Time suddenly. It may be waiting, there, in the next room.
*
While opening her post one dark morning, Liz Headleand was surprised to come across a package containing part of a human finger bone. It contained other objects, but the bone was the first to attract her attention. She could feel it before she saw it, through the scruffy layers of envelope and battered jiffy-bag. She shook the bag, and out it fell upon her desk, wrapped in a twist of thin cheap grey-green paper. She prodded it curiously with her own fleshy finger, and immediately and correctly identified it as kin.
On closer inspection, she discovered that she had before her two bones, the two middle joints of a small digit of a small hand, tied together with dirty fraying cotton thread. They took her back to anatomy lessons of yesteryear. A hundred years ago, she had studied bones and muscles,
