Neither Liz nor Alix found it easy to remember exactly when Stephen had departed. Their own lives were so busy and so piecemeal that markers disappeared into the ragged pattern. Neither kept a journal, so each, separately, was reduced to looking through old engagement books to see if Stephen’s name was mentioned. Liz, poring over the notation and logging of old dinners, parties, theatre visits, committee meetings and foreign trips, marvelled at her increasing ability to forget whole swathes of time. That great gap in the middle of the autumn of ’86, what on earth was that? She seemed to have done nothing for a month. Had she been in the USA, or Australia, or in hospital? She had no recollection.

At last, working backwards, she was rewarded with an entry in the January of 1985 that read ‘Dinner Stephen Bertorelli’s Notting Hill 8.30’. She closed her eyes and tried to summon up the restaurant, the meal, the conversation. Yes, that had surely been the occasion when she and Stephen had talked about Alix’s murderer, and Pol Pot, and whether it was partly a sense of failure that drove people into aggression. Does a sense of inferiority breed violence? Discuss. And this they had discussed, at length, if she remembered rightly. Alix’s adopted murderer Paul Whitmore had been cruelly rejected by his mother and taught to believe himself a burden, and, as an unfortunate result, had hacked the heads off several North Londoners within a mile or two of the spot where Stephen and Liz were quietly and peacefully devouring their fegato alia salvia (or had it been King Prawns ‘Grilled’?). Pol Pot’s problems and solutions had been less personal, more generic. He had not distinguished himself at school in Kompong Cham, at technical college in Phnom Penh, or at the École Française de Radio-électricité in Paris, where he had failed all his examinations. But this had not prevented his political ascent. Had a million Cambodians died to avenge Pol Pot’s defeat at the hands of the French educational system? Psychologically, Liz thought she had conceded to Stephen, this might have been possible. Overkill, she had murmured, but something must have tipped him over. Hitler’s parents had been held responsible by some historians and psychohistorians for his eccentric excesses. Something must have caused even Hitler.

Had this, then, been the dinner when Stephen had announced, half as a joke, half as a self-challenge, that he was determined to try to get into Kampuchea or Cambodia or whatever the wretched country then called itself? He had already been rejected by the Vietnamese Embassy, and was pursuing a visa through Oxfam or the Red Cross. He was off to write a play about Pol Pot. Or so he said.