Alix accepted Brian’s diagnosis. Brian knew Stephen better than anyone, and if he thought Stephen had gone off in search of artistic renewal, then he was probably right. It seemed to her a somewhat flimsy reason for fleeing to the far side of the world, but then she was a woman, and she had no creative imagination, so she wouldn’t be likely to see the point of it, would she?

Alix missed Stephen Cox and wished he had not gone away. One does not have so many adult friends in a lifetime, and she had liked Stephen. He was a delicate, reticent, honourable man. He was Brian’s friend. She hoped he was still alive.

The more Liz looked at the package, the less she liked it. She took her duties seriously and purchased various plastic wallets to try to preserve the contents in their original order, but when it came to reading them she discovered in herself a deep resistance.

She started with the piece of prose that began ‘And he came to a land where the water flows uphill.’ It continued in portentous but lyrical style for a page or two, describing an oriental landscape, a broad river, and a young man on a boat travelling upstream into the heart, she supposed, of darkness. Liz found it rather boring, though she did not like to say so, even to herself. Notes in the margin directed her to ‘The Miracle of the Tonle Sap’, a phrase which meant nothing to her at all. Impatiently she abandoned the young man on his allegorical voyage and turned to the diaries, which were more fun, though unsatisfactorily enigmatic. She puzzled over ‘Miss P. on good form tonight with brothels and tales of Opium King’ and ‘Met S. G. at Press Club and talked of cannibals’. She was introduced to a character called K. V. who told Stephen about his grandfather’s estate in Norfolk, and another called H. A. who was the daughter of M. A., a fact which Stephen had thought worthy of underlining.

Then she flipped through the fragments of drama, but they too were non-starters. They consisted of sketches for a series of tableaux outlining the careers and confrontations of the principal actors in the Cambodian tragedy, Prince Sihanouk and Pol Pot. They were much crossed out and about. One read: