thought of ringing Stephen’s brothers, but had no idea where to find them. He had been a private man, a disconnected man. After a while, she settled on Aaron, as she wanted to speak to him anyway about tickets for his new play. He was out. Success had purchased him an answering machine, and she heard his voice informing her that Aaron Headleand was unavailable. Slightly offended, she rang off, swallowed her pride, and did what she knew she should have done earlier: she rang Hattie Osborne.
*
I’ve never much liked Liz Headleand. I’ve no reason to. For one thing although I’ve been introduced to her a hundred – well, at least a dozen times, she never has the slightest notion who I am, and always looks quite blank and bored at the very sight of me. That is not ingratiating. For another thing, she strikes me as a very bossy woman, and, as I am in some moods quite bossy myself, I naturally wouldn’t be expected to get on with her. Would I?
I can see these reasons are a bit flimsy. Actually, I hardly know the woman. I know her friend Esther Breuer a bit better, and I like Esther. Esther is an oddball, like myself. Liz Headleand pretends to be normal.
As a matter of fact, I didn’t really know Stephen Cox all that well either. Although he was one of my closest friends, and I one of his. Although I’ve known him for ever. Well, nearly for ever. I don’t think anyone really knew Stephen well. Perhaps those Bowens knew him. He always talked about them with a kind of sentimental fondness, probably because he’d known them such a hell of a long time. I only met Brian once, and I thought he was a crashing bore. And Alix Bowen is one of those women who always make me feel really uneasy. I mean, she is so fucking nice. She really is nice too, which makes it worse. Not that I know her well either. Though I remember having quite a good chat with her at Otto Werner’s Twelfth Night party. About death, as I remember. I think her father-in-law had just snuffed it, and Otto was about to go off to Washington. I think she was a bit in love with Otto, in those days. I haven’t seen her for years.
Anyway, Liz is the one I distrust most, so you can imagine how annoyed I was when she rang me and told me this rigmarole about Stephen’s papers. She got me at a bad moment too. So the whole thing got off to a bad start. I’d just had this row with this Natasha person about Siddhur’s screenplay for Partext and to comfort myself I’d gone out to buy a chicken korma, and on the way back to the flat I was sort of swinging it up and down in my basket in a brave and cheering sort of way when the lid came off one of the boxes and I got korma all down my skirt. It was an Indian skirt, so it sort of went with the print, but I wasn’t best pleased. I’d just wiped it off and put what was left in a soup dish and was settling myself down in front of the telly to eat it when the phone went and it was Liz. With this saga about papers.
I couldn’t work out what she was getting at, at first. She kept asking me if I was living in Stephen’s flat and if I was Stephen’s agent. I was pretty cautious to begin with because Stephen wasn’t really allowed to sublet, and then again I’m never really sure if I am Stephen’s agent. For some things and not for others, I think I said, in an offputting kind of way, because frankly I thought she was being a bit nosy. And then when I heard what she’d got I wished I’d been more forthcoming. I can’t remember quite what I said, but I think I claimed to be Stephen’s literary executor (which, after a manner of speaking, I am) and I said I’d have a look. Actually, I think that’s what she’d wanted. So that’s how it began.
It was strange, having to think about Stephen again. I’d behaved so atrociously on that last evening that I’d kind of blotted him out of my mind. Even though I am living in his pad and sleeping in his bed and I’m sorry to say drinking up his wine, even the bottles that said KEEP UNTIL 1992. I suppose I’d been hoping he wouldn’t come back too soon. He was well out of my way, and I was beginning to ingratiate myself with the landlord. (Mr Goodfellow, he’s called. A nice man.) Not that I wished Stephen any harm, of course, but he’d always been a bit of a wanderer, and I wasn’t at all surprised not to hear from him for a year or two. He sent me a postcard, and that was quite enough for me. I’m a very undemanding woman. It was of a sleeping Buddha, if I remember rightly. Which I do. I have it still. It’s on the mantelpiece.
But when Liz rang, I realized it was more than a year or two. It was more like a year or three. Time flies. I checked in my rent book, and it was indeed over two years since I took over his modest establishment. And then I did begin to feel a little anxious. Maybe something really had gone wrong?
I’d arranged to meet Liz in a couple of days, and during that time I made a few inquiries. He’d arranged for his royalties to be paid through his accountant, who’d been left in charge of the VAT and all that nonsense, so I rang them to ask when they’d last had any instructions from him (I was quite proud of that word, ‘instructions’, it sounded pretty professional, I thought). They said they couldn’t say. I asked where he was when they last heard from him, and they said they didn’t know, and I said who were his bankers, and they said they couldn’t tell me, very unhelpful. They said they thought he had a bank account abroad. I asked where, and they said it was nothing to do with me, and rang off.
Then I tried to remember if anyone had seen him or heard from him lately, but I drew a bit of a blank. And it wasn’t until then that I began to think it was a bit funny that he hadn’t published anything at all about his travels in all the time he’d been away. On previous trips he’d either been earning his keep by giving lectures, or he’d covered his airfare by printing bits and pieces for the papers. Maybe he didn’t need to do that any more? Maybe he’d passed the point of hack work? He must have made quite a bit out of his last couple of novels, since he won the Booker. Then I thought that perhaps he’d just got pissed off with old England, and had really wanted to disappear. If anyone might take it into his head to do a bunk, it would be Stephen. And if he wanted to disappear, who were we to try to stop him?
But Liz Headleand’s phone call nagged me. She’d sounded a bit rattled, which wasn’t like her, or not what I thought of as her. I’d always seen her as Super Competent. Offensively competent. With that big house, and all those children.
I had a feeling that somebody I knew had bumped into him within living memory in either Singapore or Bangkok, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember which or who, or when, or what they’d said. I tried to remember, but how on earth does one will oneself to remember? I mean, how does one make the memory brain cells work? Mine have all gone funny, I’m afraid, and I’d never have got the name back if it hadn’t been for a programme on telly (it sounds as though I watch a lot of telly, which I do) about the Opium Triangle and Burma, and suddenly, as I was watching this shot of little child soldiers marching up and down in the jungle with some donkeys, it came to me. John Geddes, that’s who it was. And it had definitely been Bangkok. I was so pleased with myself that I poured myself another Scotch, which might have been a mistake, but wasn’t – odd how drink sometimes makes the memory work better, when most of the time it buggers it up. Anyway, it all began to come back. John Geddes had been out there looking for locations for Carlo’s script of Victory and had run into Stephen in a bar in Bangkok. Stephen had been looking pretty good, according to John. Flush, I think was the word he’d used. Not flushed. Flush. So whenever that had been, Stephen was still doing fine, and wasn’t languishing in a Khmer Rouge prison or a fever hospital or a leper colony, or wherever it was that Liz thought he’d ended up. A bar in Bangkok. I rang John, to check, but not surprisingly he wasn’t in. He never is. His lover (who, rumour has it, is HIV-positive, poor bugger) was there, sounding pretty glum, which he would be, and he said John was in Peru trying to find locations for a movie about the Shining Path (not another Vargas Llosa adaptation, he said, wearily, an original screenplay). I asked if he could remember when John had been in Bangkok, and he said which time, for the Rain Forest movie or for the Khmer Rouge movie, and I said neither, it was for the Victory movie, and he said was that the Vietnam movie, and I said no, it was the Conrad movie, and he said he hadn’t the faintest idea. He sounded so sad that I arranged to meet him for a drink, but that’s another story. Well, almost another story, because
