on a silver sea. Teeth bite, flash, smile. There is black caviare, and prawns of dangerous radiant coral pink. There are jewels, silks, perfumes. This is the gorgeous East. Conrad was here.
This, in Stephen’s handwriting, on the back of the torn-off front page of Staff Briefing Paper for the International Committee for Resettlement of Displaced People, folded in half and tucked into the memo book I’d nicked from Liz Headleand. I like it. Stephen’s high style. Well, it’s a parody of Stephen’s high style. Well, Stephen’s high style is parody. But what can you do with half a page? It sounds like the Oriental to me. I stayed there once with John Connell when he was making The Princess and the Talisman. It was a bit swan-of-ice-and-dying-lobster. Wonderful prawn soup. John was on good form that week. Ah well, never look back. ‘Conrad was here’, eh? Stephen always had a thing about Conrad, which is odd when you think that Conrad was such an amazing racist old reactionary, and frankly Stephen has always been somewhat to the left of Pol Pot.
There were quite a few notes about Conrad jotted about, though you’d have had to know your stuff to spot some of them. ‘The Violin of the Captain of the Otago’, for instance. The Otago was Conrad’s first command, and its previous skipper used to play the violin to himself mournfully all over the high seas. Conrad was haunted by ghostly water music. The old skipper was mad. Then there were quite a few notes about Victory, which Stephen must have been reading. Such as ‘Query: Portrait of hotel manager libellous?’ I should think so. Conrad had to print an apology, saying that of course he knew not all Germans were quite as ghastly as the appalling Schomberg. Not that I was all that interested in whether Conrad or Stephen had libelled a hotel or a hotel manager. I was much more keen to find out whether he’d libelled me, and if so, to destroy the evidence. I was sure I’d seen my own name jump out of the pages as I flipped through it under Liz’s nose. As one would expect one’s own name to do, if it were there. But when I looked more closely I was damned if I could find it. Had I gone and brought the wrong memo book, I wondered? Was Liz Headleand even now amusing herself with a description of my naked tits, while I was stuck with naked oysters? Maybe I’d imagined it, in a paranoid sort of way.
There was a lot of stuff about a character called Miss Porntip. She seemed to be some kind of erotic fantasy of poor old Stephen’s. Nothing very consecutive, just notes and scribbles. Jottings about her clothes and sayings. The wit, wisdom and wardrobe of Miss Porntip. To tell the truth, I don’t think Stephen ever got much further than fantasy. I think he was one of those men who put sex in a compartment and never let it get out. Not that I blame him. When it does get out, it is a menace. To tell the truth, I don’t think Stephen liked women, as such. I think they nauseated him. In the flesh. I’m only guessing, mind you, from putting two and two together from clues in his books. It’s funny really, because he was always a good friend to women. People like Marjorie and Molly adored him. And he was a good friend to me. I wonder if I nauseated him?
I don’t see why people shouldn’t be celibate if they want. It would certainly make life easier. I wish I did want. But oh alas I go on wanting the other thing.
I got quite excited when my eye lit on something that looked as though it might connect up with me. There were my initials, HO, written several times over, in red ball-point, and underneath them were the names of several London hotels and restaurants adorned by queries. The Carlton, Claridge’s, the Dorchester, the Ritz, the Troc and the Cri, Stephen inquired of himself. Then he had written DICKENS? NEW ZEALAND HOUSE? And again, HO?
At first I thought Stephen was trying to remember some do I’d been to with him, or at which I’d met him, and I did manage to dredge up a dim memory of a reception at Claridge’s, for Richard Burton (or was it Mrs Gandhi?) – and another on the Martini Terrace of New Zealand House where I had a good chat with Monica Dickens when she was one of the Authors of the Year. I think I behaved quite nicely on that occasion. But then as I read on I realized I was on the wrong tack altogether. HO wasn’t Harriet Osborne at all, it was Ho Chi Minh. Silly me. There was a lot more HO later on in the diary. Though what he had to do with Claridge’s or the Carlton or New Zealand House remains obscure. I’m sure he never went to parties at such places, did he? Did he ever come to England at all? I’ve no idea. Perhaps Stephen was planning to employ a little artistic licence and introduce a scene into his play with Pol Pot and Ho and Chairman Mao all dining in Claridge’s with Richard Burton and Mrs Gandhi and Monica Dickens. Why not?
He was at least half planning to write a play. I found one page laid out as a sort of screenplay, with camera directions. It was set in a Paris apartment, rue St André des Arts, 1952. POV Khieu Ponnary, POV Saloth Sar alias Pol Pot, that sort of thing. They were talking about regicide and how to get rid of Sihanouk. This Ponnary person appeared to be Pol Pot’s fiancée. I didn’t know Stephen knew the lingo for TV plays. Point of View, and all that. He never let on about it. I used to try to talk him into doing TV scripts, all those years ago, back in the seventies, when we both needed the ready, but he never would. He wasn’t interested. He said he’d had his bellyful of the cinema, translating subtitles when he was Down and Out in Paris in the sixties.
The rue St André des Arts rings a bell. I wonder if it’s where we went to see Maxence and Claudine. Bill and me. Or was it Harold and me?
Stephen seems to have been reading Macbeth as well as Victory. There were quite a few Macbeth quotes dotted about. Some in red ink. Very pretty. Bleed, bleed, poor country. Blood will have blood, they say. The unmentionable play. Was Ponnary a sort of Lady Macbeth figure, perhaps? Screwing Pol Pot to the sticking post?
They said Aaron Headleand’s new version of Coriolanus is worth seeing. I really ought to make an effort and get to it. He’s one of the up-and-coming. I liked his Squeaking Cleopatra. The boy Cleopatra. Bit Stoppardian, but not bad.
And from the blown rose, many stop their nose
That kneeled unto the bud.
I don’t know why those lines of Cleopatra haunt me. Well, no, that’s a lie. I know exactly why, and I don’t like the reason. I read a stupid article in the paper today by that ghastly skinny short-skirt skeleton Cassie O’Creagh about why men continue to be attractive in their fifties, when women go off in their forties. All to do with reproduction. Sexist crap.
I did find the reference to me, in the end, in Stephen’s diary. The one I’d subliminally glimpsed. It says, in a sort of scribble, ‘Hattie in her gold dress. Trumpet and kettledrum.’
Well, I like it. Better than a blown rose, anyway. I think it must be some sort of quotation, but I can’t place it. Dear God, how we all live in quotations. Trumpet and kettledrum. It makes me sound quite dignified. Shakespeare? Marlowe? Chapman’s Homer?
Oh well, plough on, I suppose. At the very least we can get some bibliographical collection in America to make an offer. Isn’t there a library in Austin, Texas, with a room full of Erle Stanley Gardner’s hats? They’ll like a finger bone.
*
The swan of ice drips. Stephen, waiting in the Oriental for the doubtful arrival of the hallucinatory Miss Porntip, sits on a chintz cushion in a rattan chair in a quiet corner confronting the Trimalchian cocktail party into which he has wandered. He had not expected the Authors’ Lounge to be so fully occupied, and was surprised to be admitted without invitation. His white suit is his passport. Is that the manager, that handsome lean-faced Scandinavian gentleman, shaking hands on the threshold? Is he the successor to the disreputable Schomberg and the disappeared silk merchant, eaten by tigers? He had let Stephen through without a murmur, and now here Stephen sits, as a novelist should, observing.
Conrad was here. And so, it seems, was Stephen’s old friend and rival Pett Petrie, best-selling author of the runaway upmarket success, Ziggurat. Stephen has discovered his name in the Authors’
