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, 8¼ × 5⅞, 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.