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Overview
A woman tries to uncover the mysterious fate of a friend in Cambodia in this “very smart” and suspenseful novel (The New York Times Book Review).
Liz Headleand is one of London’s best-known and most prominent psychiatrists. One day she arrives at work to find a mysterious package, postmarked from Cambodia. Inside, she finds various scraps of paper, a laundry bill from a Bangkok hotel, old newspaper clippings—and pieces of human finger bones.
Shocked but intrigued, she realizes the papers belong to her old friend Stephen Cox, a playwright who moved to Cambodia to work on a script about the Khmer Rouge. Convinced Stephen is trying to send her some sort of message, Liz follows the clues in the box to the jungles of Cambodia, risking her life to find her friend.
In this thrilling novel, Margaret Drabble continues the trilogy she began in The Radiant Way and A Natural Curiosity, taking us far from the civilized, familiar streets of London, and painting an “urgent, brilliant” portrait of the tumultuous, terror-ridden landscape of Cambodia in the late twentieth century (The Boston Globe).
“A tour de force.” —Calgary Herald
“Unputdownable . . . A sojourn within The Gates of Ivory is not something one soon forgets.” —Edmonton Journal
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780544286900 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 480 |
| Sales rank: | 841,221 |
| File size: | 958 KB |
About the Author
Hometown:
London, EnglandDate of Birth:
June 5, 1939Place of Birth:
Sheffield, EnglandEducation:
Cambridge UniversityRead an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
This is a novel — if novel it be — about Good Time and Bad Time. Imagine yourself standing by a bridge over a river on the border between Thailand and Cambodia. Behind you, the little town of Aranyaprathet, bristling with aerials and stuffed with Good Time merchandise, connected by road and rail and telephone and post office and gossip and newspapers and banking systems with all the Good Times of the West. Before you, the Bad Time of Cambodia. You can peer into the sunlit darkness if you wish.
Many are drawn to stare across this bridge. They come, and stare, and turn back. What else can they do? A desultory, ragged band of witnesses, silently, attentively, one after another, they come, and take up the position, and then turn back. A Japanese journalist, an American historian, an English photographer, a Jewish survivor of the holocaust, a French diplomat, a Scottish poet, a Thai princess, a Chinese Quaker from Hong Kong. For different reasons and for the same reason they are drawn here. That young man with curly hair is the son of the British Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg. That broad-shouldered woman in the yellow Aertex shirt is the daughter of a discredited Oxford-educated Marxist scholar. Here they come, here they stand. They are asking a question, but there is no answer. Here too Stephen Cox will stand.
Good Time and Bad Time coexist. We in Good Time receive messengers who stumble across the bridge or through the river, maimed and bleeding, shocked and starving. They try to tell us what it is like over there, and we try to listen. We invoke them with libations of aid, with barley and blood, with rice and water, and they flock to the dark trenches, moaning and fluttering in their thousands. We are seized with panic and pity and fear. Can we believe these stories from beyond the tomb? Can it be that these things happen in our world, our time?
The dead and dying travel fast these days. We can devour thousands at breakfast with our toast and coffee, and thousands more on the evening news. It would be easy to say that we grow fat and greedy, that we thrive on atrocities, that we eagerly consume suffering. It is not as simple as that. We need them as they need us. There is a relationship between Good Time and Bad Time. There are interpenetrations. Some cross the bridge into the Bad Time, into the Underworld, and return to tell the tale. Some go deliberately. Some step into Bad Time suddenly. It may be waiting, there, in the next room.
While opening her post one dark morning, Liz Headleand was surprised to come across a package containing part of a human finger bone. It contained other objects, but the bone was the first to attract her attention. She could feel it before she saw it, through the scruffy layers of envelope and battered jiffy-bag. She shook the bag, and out it fell upon her desk, wrapped in a twist of thin cheap grey-green paper. She prodded it curiously with her own fleshy finger, and immediately and correctly identified it as kin.
On closer inspection, she discovered that she had before her two bones, the two middle joints of a small digit of a small hand, tied together with dirty fraying cotton thread. They took her back to anatomy lessons of yesteryear. A hundred years ago, she had studied bones and muscles, articulations and connections. She had learned the names of the small bones and of the large. This knowledge was not much use to her these days. But from a hundred years ago dry words whispered to her. The radius and the ulna, the carpal, metacarpal and phalangeal bones.
She regarded the missive without alarm but with respect. She touched it gingerly. She gazed at the rest of the package. There were envelopes within envelopes. Wads of paper, notebooks, newspaper clippings. A complex presentation. It had come from abroad, and the stamps were unfamiliar. Was it, she wondered, a gift of leprosy? Was a fatal illness lying there before her? The bones looked like an amulet, a charm against evil. Did it bring her good or ill? Which was intended? And by whom?
Liz, as a healer of hurt minds, was professionally familiar with distressing post. She knew the handwriting and the notepaper of derangement. She had received objects before now: once a used condom, once a dried purple rose. But never before had she received a human bone.
The ensemble exuded craziness, from string, from dirty peeling adhesive tape, from large crudely printed address, DR E. HEADLEAND, 33 DRESDEN ROAD, LONDON NW8, it requested. It was quite substantial. Manuscript size. Was it perhaps an unpublished and unpublishable novel, from a leper in the Congo? From a burnt-out case, shedding his unwanted thoughts and fingers on Elizabeth Headleand in St John's Wood? She wondered, half seriously, if it would be safe to touch it. She recalled the public library books of her childhood which had carried health warnings about contagious diseases. This looked a dangerous package. If any package could kill you without explosives, this would be it.
Liz thought of rubber gloves, but dismissed the notion as absurd. She picked up the bones, wrapped them up again in their wisp of creased paper, laid them to one side of her large leather-topped desk, and applied herself to the package.
First she extracted an airmail envelope of unfamiliar design, with her name upon it in an unfamiliar hand, written, like the address, in wandering capitals. She opened it. A piece of lined bluish-grey paper mysteriously informed her I ASK SEND YOU THIS GREAT CRISIS GOOD BYE! BYE! BYE! No date, no signature.
She moved on. Was she bored, was she intrigued? She could not have said. Everyday craziness is dull, but grand craziness compels attention. Could this be craziness on a grand scale? She eased the string from a brown envelope full of paper, and found the handwriting of her old friend Stephen Cox.
So, it was a novel. Stephen was a novelist, therefore this was a novel. She read its first sentence.
'And he came to a land where the water flows uphill.'
Stephen's script was small, hesitant, but tolerably legible. He had used a ball-point pen. She could have read on, but did not. She looked again at the finger. Was that Stephen's finger lying there?
She pushed the papers back into their envelope, noting that it had once been sealed with string and sealing wax. She approached another, smaller envelope. It too contained bits of script in Stephen's hand, some of it laid out in what looked like stage instructions and dialogue. Was it part of a play?
She remembered that Stephen had vanished to the East to write a play about Pol Pot. Or so he had said. Two years ago? Three or four years ago? Something like that.
There were cuttings, paperclipped together, indented with rust. News stories, photographs.
She realized she should treat these messages with the care of an archivist. Their order and disposition, once destroyed, would vanish for ever. Already she had forgotten precisely how, within the package, the finger had been placed. Posthumously, as an afterthought? But she had to look further. Now. Curiosity compelled her. She had to see whether there was a message there for her, for Liz Headleand, for herself alone.
She found picture postcards, unscripted. Of a shrine, of a pagoda, of a boat on a wide river, of a lake with reflected drooping trees, of Buddhist monks robed in saffron, of a smiling carved face in a jungle, of dancing girls, of a marble mausoleum. Some were glossy, some were old and faded, some were new but poorly tinted. She found a long document with official stamps in an unknown language. She found a laundry bill from a hotel in Bangkok, and a currency exchange form, and a receipt from a hotel safe. She found two more little notebooks full of jottings and sketches. She found a quotation from John Stuart Mill, and a poem by Rimbaud. She found a scrap of orange ribbon and a flake of brittle pearly shell, and a tiny photograph of an ethnic child sitting on a buffalo. But her own name she did not find.
Was it there, somewhere, hidden, coded? Why had Stephen selected her? What obligation had he laid upon her?
She felt important, chosen, as she sat there at her desk. At the same time she felt neglected. Why had he not enclosed a note saying 'Good wishes, Stephen'? He had sent her postcards from foreign parts before, with brief messages. She had received a couple from this long absence, this long silence. From Singapore or Penang or Bangkok. Or somewhere like that. Why was he now so sparing with his signature?
Here was his story. Perhaps he was telling her that she would have to read it all.
Or perhaps he was dead, and this was all that was left of him.
Liz gazed at the array of relics and records. Her bell buzzed. Her first patient would be waiting for her. She could not look more closely now. But, as she left for her consulting room, she locked her study door. She did not want the Filipino cleaning lady to see Stephen's bones.
'A finger bone?' echoed Alix Bowen, Liz's first confidante, with disbelief, impressed.
'That's right. Well, two finger bones really. The two middle joints of a little finger, I think. They're too small to be Stephen's. He had quite long hands, didn't he?'
'Yes, he did.'
They had both fallen, instantly, into the habit of speaking of Stephen in the past tense. Wordlessly they acknowledged this and decided to strive against it.
Liz continued, into her new cordless telephone, to describe to her friend Alix the other varied contents of the package. The prose manuscripts, the attempts at a play, the diary notebooks, the postcards, the sketches.
'Sketches of what?' Alix wanted to know.
'Oh, all sorts of bits and pieces. Buildings. Temples. Styles of oriental architecture, labelled. Straw huts. A monkey. A cooking pot resting on three stones. A butterfly. A skull. A boat.'
'I didn't know Stephen could draw,' said Alix.
'He can't,' said Liz, restoring him to life. 'Or not very well. But he's had a go.'
'And there's no message, no instructions about what you're supposed to do with all this?'
'Nothing at all. Or not that I've found yet. There may be something hidden away in there. But I'm going to have to go through it all very carefully to find out. Why ever did he send all this stuff to me?' Alix was silent, wondering the same thing. She had been responsible for introducing Liz to Stephen, and had at one stage hoped and feared that a middle-aged romance might blossom, but they had remained Good Friends. Not such good friends, however, as Alix's husband Brian and Stephen had been. Brian and Stephen had been buddies, comrades in arms, comrades of letters. Brian would surely have been a more fitting receiver of literary goods. Why had Stephen selected Liz? Should Alix and Brian feel offended, excluded?
Both Liz and Alix appreciated, without mentioning it, the element of sexual innuendo in the sending of a bone. This might in some way be an act of courtship. Stephen would surely not have sent a bone to Brian Bowen.
'Maybe, of course,' said Liz, 'he didn't select me at all. Maybe somebody else did. The wording of the message to me is ambiguous. Maybe they just happened to come across my address.'
'Maybe,' said Alix, mollified.
'I suppose I'll have to try to read it,' said Liz, with a mixture of pride, perplexity and reluctance. 'I suppose, if there's anything publishable in there, it might be quite valuable? Do you think?'
'Yes, perhaps,' said Alix cautiously. She did not like to say that if Stephen were dead, it would not be very valuable. Stephen had been a successful writer, after a fashion, and had made, latterly, a good living from his trade. His manuscripts no doubt resided in some North American university, in carefully controlled atmospheric conditions. This package could go and join them, if it proved authentic. But it would not fetch a very high price, if known to be the last. Stephen was — or had been — at that mid-stage in his career where his value depended upon a prospect of output, of œuvre. He had had more years of work ahead of him. A last message and then the silence of death would do his prospects no good. It would create a momentary stir, and no more. His publishers would not like it at all. Unless, of course, this last manuscript proved to be a masterpiece. But if it were, who would be able to tell? It sounded from Liz's description as though it needed a good deal of editing. Alix knew, from the complaints of friends and from her own experience in the role, that editors these days are not what they were. It would take an exceptional editor to deal with this Do-It-Yourself Novel Pack that had landed up on Liz Headleand's desk.
Liz, following this unspoken train of thought, inquired, 'Did Stephen have an agent?' Alix reflected.
'He was rather keen on negotiating his own affairs. He was quite good at it, for such a vague sort of person. But I think there was somebody. Wasn't that dotty woman he knew some kind of agent?'
What dotty woman?'
'That drinking woman. Isn't she in his flat in Primrose Hill now?'
Liz was silent. She had not known, or had forgotten, that there was a dotty drinking woman in Stephen's flat.
'Yes,' said Alix, 'I'm almost sure she was some kind of agent. You could always contact her, I suppose. He'd just changed publishers, with the last book. And anyway, he had two lots of publishers, one for his serious work and one for his thrillers.'
What was her name?'
'I think she was called Hattie. Hattie Osborne.'
'Hmm,' said Liz, smelling a rival.
'I say,' said Alix. 'Does it look a ... newish sort of bone?'
And they continued to discuss severed bones, heads, feet and ears for some time. The use of, in the taking of hostages and the threatening of nearest and dearest. The use of, in emotional blackmail. They mentioned Van Gogh and Alix's murderer-friend Paul Whitmore. They discussed jokes about finger bones found in soup in Chinese restaurants, about greyhounds discovered in the deep freezes of curry takeaways. And were there not stories, Alix wondered, about American soldiers in the Vietnam war collecting bags full of Viet Cong ears and sending samples back to their appalled girlfriends?
'But those are just stories,' protested Liz. 'Like the Viet Cong playing Russian roulette. Atrocity stories. That thing on my desk is real. I promise you.'
'You must ask Brian when he last heard from Stephen,' she continued, modulating her tone to indicate seriousness. We must try to work out who heard from him last. Can you remember when he left?'
'I've no idea,' said Alix. Was it the year we came up north? I know he came up here to see us at least once. But he knew all sorts of people we don't know, who may have much more recent news. Like that woman Hattie.'
'I never went to his flat,' said Liz.
'Nobody ever went to his flat,' said Alix. 'He was the mystery man.'
'Do you think I ought to report this package?' 'I don't see why. A bundle of manuscripts isn't an offence, is it?'
They both laughed.
'Well,' said Liz, 'you're right. I'd better read the stuff. But I don't know where to begin. Which bit did he mean me to read first?'
'The finger bones.'
'Yes. Of course,' said Liz.
'And after that, I guess, you can choose. Let me know how you get on.'
'He should have sent it to you, really,' said Liz, provocatively. 'It's you that's good at cataloguing and deciphering manuscripts and that kind of stuff.'
'And it's you that's good at crazy people,' said Alix, refusing to be drawn, and trying not to think of the letters of her late employer, the poet Howard Beaver, which she was struggling, slowly, to collate. Come to think of it, the last thing she ever wanted to see was another heap of handwritten, ill-assorted papers. Liz was welcome to the lot.
'But you will come and look?' asked Liz.
'Oh yes,' said Alix, insincerely. 'Yes, I'll come and look. But you must have the first crack at the code.'
'Yes,' echoed Liz, a little hollowly. 'Yes, at the code.'
Somehow she knew that Alix would not come. Alix never came to London these days. Alix, Liz suspected, had better things to do.
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.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Gates of Ivory"
by .
Copyright © 1991 Margaret Drabble.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Table of Contents,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
Epigraph,
The Gates of Ivory,
Bibliography,
About the Author,