tell. And she has got a very low-rent flat out of it. And maybe he is dead and will never be able to tell. Molly Lansdowne is dead, dead of a heart attack in a hotel in Spain. Only Hattie remembers. And she will never tell.
*
Stephen Cox sits strapped into his Club Class seat at Charles de Gaulle Airport waiting for take-off on the Air France flight to Thailand and Vietnam, with his new discreet professionless passport in his pocket. He does not regret handing over his key and his rent book and his last will and testament to Hattie Osborne. One should obey impulses. His impulses had not enabled him to comfort Hattie in the way she most needed, but an empty apartment, however small, was an acceptable offering. He wondered how she would get on with his mysterious and philanthropic landlord, the aptly named Mr Goodfellow. And would she remember to give the bank the note he had scribbled requesting cancellation of the standing order for rent? It did not matter much, one way or the other. The rent was very low, and Mr Goodfellow was too honest to allow himself to be paid twice over.
He had told Hattie he had no idea how long he would be away. He said this to everybody. It was the truth.
He was feeling surprisingly well after his white night. Alert, light in the body, fancy free. The flight from Heathrow to Paris had been on time, and now, on the main leg of his journey eastward, he had happily been allocated a place near the Emergency Exit, with extra leg space, and the seat next to him was still free. He stretched and spread himself and began to browse through the copy of The Times he had purchased in London. Already the British news seemed irrelevant, parochial. Who cared about phone-tapping and Swiss takeover bids for British firms? Who cared if the Queen Mother had attended a ceremony in Nuneaton or the Countess of Snowdon a luncheon in Leith? Who cared that Lady Philippa Carlisle was six years old today, or that Princess Anne had tinted her hair red? Even the long slow diminuendo of the defeated miners’ strike and the rise of the new star Gorbachev failed to interest. Stephen read on, complacently, already half elsewhere, noting in passing that Paul Whitmore, the Horror of Harrow Road, was to appeal against his sentence, and that little Sophal May, an eleven-year-old Cambodian refugee, had been reunited with her parents in New York after a decade of searching.
His attention was caught only when he came across the obituaries of two of his acquaintances. It seemed a dangerously high body count. Both had died prematurely. One had once been his publisher. He had died, though it did not say so, of the drink. The other had been a fellow-scholar at Oxford. Cancer had killed him. Stephen paid a silent tribute to Michael Rowbotham and Stuart Cross, and registered the fact that Death was already his companion. Death had joined the caravan early, even though Stephen’s visa would take him only as far as Bangkok.
An announcement in French followed by English declared that the plane would take off in twenty minutes, and that the name of the captain was Commandant Parodi. Stephen was pleased by this. Who better to fly one into the unknown? We live in the age of parody, reflected Stephen. He had known another Parodi, years ago, in Normandy. He had been the manager of the Grand Hotel in Cabourg, the hotel of Balbec, which Proust had made his own. Stephen had arrived there on his bicycle, and the manager had been at first suspicious of his credentials, then appeased. Monsieur Parodi. Was it a common name, were these two related? Stephen did not know. The curving wide beach of Cabourg returned to him, the blue-grey watercolour sky, the yellow sands, the girls forever on their bicycles. He had walked from his hotel room across a marble foyer into the sea, wearing a white bathrobe. And in the evenings, he had played roulette in the casino, and eaten from little oval platters of fruits de mer, silver platters heaped with oysters and winkles and urchins and prawns and razor shells and mussels and green weeds of the sea. Good Time, he had then inhabited. He had been young enough to lay his chips for luck upon the number of his own age. Now he had long since left the board, and played roulette no more.
But luck was still with him, and the seat next to him was still empty. He appropriated it with his books, his briefcase, his plastic-bagged purchase of a small duty-free radio. He thought himself free from company, for Captain Parodi was already beginning to taxi towards the runway, but no, here at the last moment was a fellow-traveller, invading and claiming his space. He scooped up his belongings and redeployed them beneath his feet. As he did so, he took note that Death had been joined near the Emergency Exit by Lust.
Lust was extremely attractive. She was also tiny, and the extra leg-room was wasted on her, but Stephen did not grudge this. If the seat must be occupied, let it be by such an apparition. She settled herself in, clearly a practised last-minute traveller, without fuss, with a comfortable little rustling and patting of pillow and blanket. She seemed to have no baggage: perhaps the attentive steward had disposed of it in some privileged secret store? Stephen observed her covertly, as Captain Parodi swooped upwards to the skies. Of her legs he had a good view, for her tight emerald skirt rode high above her knees, and her ankles were extended, neatly crossed. Her little green lizard-skin high-heeled shoes were impractical fetishes. Her feet made Stephen’s feet look enormous. Her hands were neatly folded in her lap, and she wore large rings with flashing stones. In her lap reposed an absurdly small, soft, kingfisher-blue bag with a golden clasp and a golden chain. Her breasts were high and showy under a trim white silk shirt. She wore a lavish quantity of cosmetics upon her brown and flawless skin. She twinkled and jittered with light, although she sat so still. Fire leapt from her emeralds and her diamonds. She smelt of musk. She was infinitely composed.
Champagne was served, and Stephen and petite Lust each accepted one glass, then another. She seemed to be well known to the steward. They journeyed eastwards.
Caviare was served, in small glass pots. Black aphrodisiac. Petite Lust from time to time examined her even white teeth in her pocket mirror to make sure that no unsightly soft damp dark sea eggs adhered. Into the back of her gold powder-case a goldsmith had hammered a black enamel orchid. She drank half a bottle of white wine with her meal, and then calmly embarked, with her cheese, on half a bottle of red. Stephen stared in admiration. How could so much liquid accommodate itself so gracefully in so small a frame? She did not flush or fumble. She remained calm, cool, brown, self-possessed.
Over coffee, she announced to Stephen that her name was Miss Porntip, and that she lived in Bangkok and was Beauty Queen of Asia.
During the in-flight movie they exchanged further information. As gangsters and drug-dealers on the small silent screen raced and tumbled and cheated and sweated and fell over cliffs in fast cars, Stephen Cox and Miss Porntip told one another little stories about their lives. He admitted to being a writer and an adventurer. She claimed to be a woman with many assets as well as her beauty. They spoke of Thailand, Indonesia, the Pacific Basin, the New World. Miss Porntip was derisive about Vietnam and China and Kampuchea. ‘This plane,’ she said, ‘it fly on to Ho Chi Minh Ville. Is ruined, Ho Chi Minh Ville. Was fine city. Saigon was fine city. Café Continental, Rue Catinat. Dancing. Thés dansants. Is all ruined now.’
‘It must have been ruined long before your time,’ murmured Stephen, politely. She could not be more than thirty, he thought, though he had no way of judging the bloom on an oriental skin. Certainly, the Vietnamese who had boarded the plane in Paris had looked far, far older than his new friend. They had belonged to another epoch.
She wanted to know why he was interested in Indochina. He was hard pushed for an answer. ‘Is mainly the French and the Americans come there,’ she said. ‘Is not for the English. English did not fight there. No English missing soldiers to collect.’ She asked if he planned to stay in Bangkok, and if so at which hotel. He named his hotel. She wrinkled her nose in disgust. ‘Is old and not so nice,’ she said. ‘Many fine hotels in Thailand now.’
She spoke as though she owned half of them. Perhaps she did.
‘Writers do not stay in nice hotels,’ he tried, tentatively, more for his own benefit than hers, and realizing as he spoke that he was talking rubbish. The Grand Hotel in Cabourg had been one of the finest hotels in the world. She treated his remark
