Hotel Nirvana, which didn’t tell us anything much. The lover (he’s called Indra) said John said that Stephen took him to a very up-market brothel, but Indra thought he might have been saying that to annoy him, that is him, Indra. Anyway, that’s jumping ahead, or back, and anyway it was a dead end.
The next thing that really happened was my meeting with Liz. I’d wanted to arrange to meet on neutral territory, but failed. I didn’t want to ask her round to Stephen’s old flat and I haven’t really got an office at the moment, so I suggested lunch at the Escargot but she said she was too busy for lunch and could I come round to her place at six for a drink. I didn’t really want to get sucked into her orbit, but didn’t see how to get out of it, so I said I would. She’s moved house. I remember going to a huge party of hers in Harley Street in the days when Charles Headleand was making documentaries, donkeys’ years ago, but they’ve sold that house (they must have been mad!) and now she lives in this very nice but rather suburban Edwardian maisonette in St John’s Wood. Actually I shouldn’t be rude about it, it’s very nice really, ’tis only envy that speaks, and I must say she poured me a very satisfactory slug of Scotch, none of that half-a-finger drowned-in-water ladylike nonsense you sometimes get from people old enough to know better. We had a bit of polite chit-chat about this and that and then she got down to business. She keeps the package in a large rectangular cardboard box (I think it had had a video machine in it, I don’t know why I mention that, just to be circumstantial I suppose) and she took off the lid with a sort of abracadabra look on her face, and there was this tatty jiffy-bag and these little plastic folders of stuff. I must say my first thought was that it didn’t look very publishable in its present condition, and I think I said as much. I thought she wasn’t going to let me get my fingerprints on it, but, after making it quite clear that it was still in her custody, she did let me have a look. It was at this point that she produced the finger bone, which she hadn’t mentioned on the telephone. She keeps it in a special little plastic money bag, the sort people produce in the bank, full of coppers on Monday mornings, while the queue gets longer and longer. She didn’t know what to make of it, but it seemed to me quite obvious that it was a joke. I mean, knowing Stephen, of course, it was a joke. I still think it was a joke, actually, though I agree I can’t explain how it got there, or why the package was sent without any instructions. Perhaps he was ill? Delirious? Dead? Or gone away? I suggested all these possibilities, and she said she’d thought of them all, but thinking of them hadn’t got her anywhere. I saw her point.
She said she’d tried to read the papers, but hadn’t made much headway. I said I’d have a go at them, if that’s what she wanted. She said she was worried about letting them out of her safekeeping. I said we could take photocopies. She said how would we photocopy the bone. Then we had quite a good laugh, so I suppose you could say the joke had worked. Stephen’s joke, I mean. We had a little chat about radioactivity and whether you can catch diseases from using word processors. I don’t know how we got on to that, something to do with having your feet X-rayed, I think. Apparently they used to go in for X-raying children’s feet to make sure their shoes fitted, in the old days, until they discovered it made their bones rot. O tempora, O mores. A whole generation of rotted feet.
We had another drink, and I admired her cat. I have a very good cat of my own, though I have to keep it out of sight of Mr Goodfellow, but I have to say her cat is quite a fine-looking cat. It’s a tabby. As we chatted, I was leafing through one of the little diary-booklets (Ryman’s Memo, coil back, lined, 81/4 × 57/8, red cover) and I could already see that there were a few things I probably could decode better than anyone. Indeed I was afraid I glimpsed some allusion to our horrible Last Supper. Thank God it looked pretty incomprehensible to an outsider. But it made me all the keener to get my hands on the stuff, and find time to go through it all without her standing over me.
We agreed that I could have a photocopy of everything that looked worth copying, including the laundry list. Laundry lists are very important to biographers, I told her, quoting an article by Victoria Glendinning in the TLS. I think she was impressed by that evidence of unexpected scholarship on my part. She said her secretary would do it in the morning and send the stuff round on a motorbike. Then we had a terminal conversation about who had last seen Stephen where and when. She said she thought someone called Peter Bloch in the embassy at Bangkok had had some kind of contact with him, and should she try to get hold of him. I said wait a while. Then I told her about John Geddes and the film of Victory. She’d never read Victory, so I found myself telling her the plot. In case you’ve forgotten (tactful, aren’t I?), Victory is that one about the lone mysterious Swede called Axel Heyst who mooches around the South Seas dwelling on the ineffable and eternal until he hitches up with a dancing girl (actually it’s a musician in a ladies’ orchestra, but we made her a dancing girl) at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, and runs away with her to a remote island. He is pursued by an aged British conman–playboy, his sidekick the evil and greasy Ricardo, and a Naked Savage, who are convinced he is hiding away with a lot of loot. The real villain of the piece is the Oriental hotel manager, a fat German. It’s a wonderfully racist piece and it would have made a bloody good movie, but it came to nought, as such projects usually do. I must say I think Carlo’s screenplay was brilliant, the best thing he’s ever done. But that’s beside the point.
The laundry bill was in fact from the Oriental Hotel. I didn’t point this out to Liz Headleand. I didn’t see why I should make things easy for her. I don’t think she’s ever been to Bangkok.
If Max von Sydow had been twenty years younger, he’d have been wonderful as Axel Heyst. But that’s beside the point too.
Anyway, we agreed that I should have a look at the photocopies before either of us made any further official inquiries. It’s not as though it’s a message in a bottle, or an SOS calling for a search party, is it, I said, and then we both looked at one another and though we didn’t say anything I could see that we were both thinking that perhaps it might, after all, be precisely that. I was still clutching the little red memo book, and I suddenly plucked up courage and said, ‘I say, do you think I could take this one with me now? Just for a look? I promise I’ll be ever so careful, but I really would like to start on it straightaway, I can see all sorts of fascinating things in there.’ I burbled on like this for a bit, and I could see she was embarrassed to say no outright. (People usually are. This is one of life’s more useful secrets.) All right, she said, but don’t lose it, will you. I swore I wouldn’t, and slipped it into my bag, thanked her for the drink, and away I went.
I must say I had an odd evening, reading Stephen’s orts and fragments. You see, I was with Stephen on his last night in London. It was ghastly. Really ghastly. I don’t like to think of it at all. He must have had an appalling flight. I can’t think what came over me. No wonder he ran away. Though of course he was on his way out anyway. It wasn’t me that drove him off. I must try to remember that. Whatever happened, it wasn’t all my fault.
*
It was a terrible evening. March 1985. Picture Stephen Cox and comrade Hattie Osborne, on their way to their elderly friend Molly Lansdowne, in the back of a taxi. They are to dine with her, à trois, before moving on to the seventieth birthday party of another friend, Marjorie Kinsman. Neither of them can remember how this arrangement stole upon them. It has just happened, and they have surrendered to it. They have to go to Marjorie’s, for over the years, severally and together, they have drunk many pints of her whisky and vodka, and they must turn up to celebrate her unlikely survival. But why add Molly to the evening’s jaunt? She must have added herself.
Hattie is already very drunk. She is high-pitched, fast-talking, feverish. She lets her hair down, in the back of the taxi, telling Stephen about her last lost lover, who had split from her for ever the week before over an incident involving his wife and his eldest daughter and a piano lesson. He is, she tells Stephen, a two-faced, double-crossing, feeble little shit of a liar who wants to have his cake and eat it. She loved him, she tells Stephen, she still loves him, she must be mad. Stephen utters soothing nothingnesses, as they roll past the opulent golden shop fronts
