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.