Stephen Cox’s own army experiences had been peaceful. He had lazed about in the Dorset countryside (during his National Service) with his friend Brian Bowen and a suspected shadow on his lung, and then had been transferred to a Russian language course in Cornwall. He could still speak a little Russian. He wondered if the People’s Army spoke Russian. The Soviet Union was Vietnam’s only friend. It was strange that while the world reviled the Khmer Rouge as mythical monsters, they also reviled the Vietnamese who had liberated Phnom Penh from the Khmer Rouge. Khmer and Thai and Vietnamese Stephen did not speak. There had been no National Service courses offered in these languages.

Stephen has never seen a war, never heard a shell explode. An American plane had crashed into the shallow waters of the Levels near his childhood home in Somerset in 1942, but that was as near as he had come to death by acts of war.

So why does he lie here? Is he looking for trouble?

He gets up, looks again in the refrigerator. There is no mineral water, only beer. He does not want a beer, but decides to have one nevertheless. Why not? But there is no bottle opener. The previous guest must have extravagantly purchased it. Feebly, he lies back, and waits for the time to pass.

The Swan of Ice

A swan of ice drips upon the chequered marble floor. A white-suited slave discreetly mops. Little naked oysters lie obediently in silver spoons, raying outwards in a spiral from a huge, spiny, not-quite-dead lobster. Its feelers struggle and waver, its maxillary palps feebly panic and tick. Tiny swans of cream-filled light-buff puff pastry float on a silver sea. Teeth bite, flash, smile. There is black caviare, and prawns of dangerous radiant coral pink. There are jewels, silks, perfumes. This is the gorgeous East. Conrad was here.

This, in Stephen’s handwriting, on the back of the torn-off front page of Staff Briefing Paper for the International Committee for Resettlement of Displaced People, folded in half and tucked into the memo book I’d nicked from Liz Headleand. I like it. Stephen’s high style. Well, it’s a parody of Stephen’s high style. Well, Stephen’s high style is parody. But what can you do with half a page? It sounds like the Oriental to me. I stayed there once with John Connell when he was making The Princess and the Talisman. It was a bit swan-of-ice-and-dying-lobster. Wonderful prawn soup. John was on good form that week. Ah well, never look back. ‘Conrad was here’, eh? Stephen always had a thing about Conrad, which is odd when you think that Conrad was such an amazing racist old reactionary, and frankly Stephen has always been somewhat to the left of Pol Pot.