It was Brian’s view that Stephen had taken himself off for artistic reasons. Stephen had abandoned his last novel, half-finished, in a fit of despondency, and was looking for a new theme. He had thought the Orient might jog his failing creative powers, as Rome had jogged Goethe’s. And the Cambodian theme was a grand one. The death of a nation, the death of communism, the death of hope. It had not yet been written to death. It was unresolved. Pol Pot was still alive, lurking in the bushes. Stephen might well embrace the fatal ghost of such a challenge.

Over the years, since the mid seventies, Stephen and Brian had discussed the Cambodian question over many a pint. Vietnam had been a relatively simple issue; it had been easy for both of them as young men to cast the Americans as the villains in this protracted epic. When the Khmer Rouge had entered Phnom Penh in 1975, Brian had tended to take their side, and was tempted to dismiss as atrocity stories the tales of refugees who informed the Western world that their new leaders were ignorant child-peasants who killed anyone who spoke French or English or wore spectacles. But the evidence had swelled from a trickle to a flood and had borne Brian before it. The mysterious assassination in Phnom Penh of British fellow-traveller and friend-of-the-revolution Malcolm Caldwell had convinced him that the Khmer Rouge were almost as black as they were painted, and he had watched the unfolding retrospective horror story of skull landscapes and killing fields with revulsion and dismay. Had Brian identified with Caldwell, the gullible left-wing scholar? Perhaps. Brian had been so disillusioned that he could not even cast the invading Vietnamese as heroes when they defeated the Khmer Rouge in 1979. This was a story without heroes and without salvation. It had only victims. The exodus of the Vietnamese Boat People spoke for itself, if one were willing to listen. Brian had listened. Brian had been instrumental in persuading Northam’s ideologically committed red-flag council that it would not be betraying its colours if it set up a resettlement project for Vietnamese refugees. But some had been curiously hard to persuade, some had been reluctant to abandon their old allegiances. None of them, needless to say, had ever been to Vietnam.

Stephen had been less distressed because more sceptical. He tended not to believe anything he was told. He stuck to the view that there were more than two sides to every story, and that it was almost impossible to tell what was happening. The Vietnamese and Cambodians alike were secretive, evasive, paranoid. Stephen pointed out that they had good cause to be so.

Yes, said Brian to Alix, Stephen might well have thought that Cambodia would kick-start his imagination.

Kill or cure, you mean, said Alix, and then wished she hadn’t.