The Rose of Tibet (35 page)

I saw the p.c.’s report, and in it the boy states he could not remember
whether the shoes had been left on the beach from the previous day,
which sometimes happened. The p.c. questioned the local taxi service,
bus drivers, etc., but nobody remembered picking up Mr Houston
either the previous night or in the morning. (In any case he could have
walked to Wilmington, two miles away, where there is a choice of
three buses to Scarborough. The p.c. did not pursue his inquiries
there, and by the time a reporter of the
Tobago Times
did so, nobody
could remember. Nevertheless, I am confident this is what he must
have done.)

Bearing in mind that Mr Houston never went bathing by himself,
that no reports of drowning have come to light, that he paid off his
house staff, and he has gone away in this way before, you will see it
is very premature to jump to hasty conclusions
.

As I have already promised to keep you informed and as I am
quite sure that either I, as realtor, or our
Tobago Times
news
service will be the first to hear anything, I hope you will not find it
necessary to insert this inquiry in the Trinidad
Guardian
which
will serve only to raise groundless fears and cast grave aspersions
which might reluctantly have to be answered in other ways
. 

‘What do you think?’

‘I think the lunkies have been busy,’ Oliver Gooch said.

‘I wonder if Oliphant could have known this?’

‘How could he?’

‘I don’t mean specifically the lunkies. But he might have worked out the Earth-Pig business and guessed something like this would happen. There was a funny sort of look about him when he told me the story first.’

‘Well, what do you want to do about it?’

‘You think Houston is definitely dead?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think we’ve had it.’

‘Yes.’

‘You think we’ve what?’ Father Harris said.

‘To me,’ T.L. said, ‘the situation is completely crazy. You say Harris won’t agree to pay back the advances and that as co-trustee he still means to try and get the book published – elsewhere if necessary. How can he do that?’

‘He can’t, without my approval.’

‘So meanwhile the stuff lies here.’

‘Yes. We’re in a state of deadlock.’

‘And your idea is what?’

‘I haven’t got one. Unless we could produce Houston we
wouldn’t have a leg to stand on in case of trouble. And to try and do the book without him would need so much fiddling we’d never get any reputable scholar to touch it. The fact is, we’ve simply got to get more material. We must turn up — in New Zealand and — in Portugal. We must also in view of the strong presumption of Houston’s death try and get the bank in Zurich to play. Without all this we just don’t have a book.’

‘You don’t think there will be a book?’

‘No. I don’t.’

‘And meanwhile you have contracted with nine publishers including – I hesitate to mention it – ourselves, to produce one within a year.’

‘Yes.’

‘And should therefore tell them the situation and return the advances.’

‘Quite.’

‘Which your co-trustee won’t agree to do.’

‘That’s the situation.’

‘All right,’ T.L. said. ‘I’ve got it now.’           

‘Look,’ he said, in the afternoon. ‘Just sit down a minute. And don’t blow your top. I’ve been having a word with Harris. I think there’s something in his idea.’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes. You didn’t mention it to me.’

‘Because it’s simply preposterous. Can’t you imagine the wild, rubbishy job a journalist would make of it?’

‘There are journalists and journalists,’ T.L. said mildly. ‘And anyway, it will need fictionalizing a bit.’

‘It’s out of the question. Look, I’ve spent more time on this than anyone else, and I tell you the situation would be simply impossible.’

‘It looks a good deal more possible to me than it has looked for some time. For one thing, the copyright headache seems to have vanished. You and Harris are now the sole arbiters of what is to be done with this. You’ve got to find some common ground. A great deal of money has already been spent, and I’m not disposed to drop it so easily. Besides, I quite like the story.’

‘I gave certain promises to that old man Oliphant. I told him the job wouldn’t be vulgarized or sensationalized in any way. I mean to keep those promises.’

‘Fine. You’ll be in an excellent position.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ve been telling me how much time you’ve spent with it. I don’t suppose anyone knows the material better than you. Harris agrees with me. He now suggests that since you’re publisher, agent and co-trustee, you might just as well be author into the bargain. For my part,’ T.L. said, lighting up his pipe, ‘you can set it up in type, too, if you want. So. Now you’re the complete one-man band.’

That was in April 1960. It took some time to make up my mind, a bit longer for the other publishers to make up theirs, longer still to sort out, mentally and on paper, the enormous mass of notes and letters that had accumulated. I began writing in August, at week-ends and in the evenings, and it was July 1961, before the first complicated draft was finished.

Because there was still no definite news of ‘Sheila Wolferston’, ‘Da Costa’ or Houston himself (and still is not – the reader must formulate his own theories) and because these phantoms had been constantly in my mind as I wrote, denying this and underlining that, bringing injunctions and starting actions, in a way that made it impossible for me to assess the readability of the MSS, I sent it first to a couple of readers before showing it to T.L.

One of their comments I quote on the very first page of this book; for T.L.’s (which he gave me first on the telephone and then put in a memo) the reader will have to turn to page 6. He ended his memo:    

A letter had come in from Dr Shankar Lal Roy in that morning’s post, and I turned from the memo and read it again.             

I enclose
(he wrote)
the most recent issue of the
Shih Shih Shou
Tse (Peking Current Affairs Handbook)
which, as you will see
from the translation of the item on p.
22
.
seems to answer one more
outstanding point
.    

The translation, headed
Bank Loans
, read:    

AGRARIAN BANK
:
700,000
New Yuan, interest-free, to the
Commune of Yamdring (Tibetan Autonomous Region) for seeds,
fertilizers and implements. This commune, established at the eager
request of the citizens after they had dealt a firm rebuff to local
separatists has been very rapidly converted into a lively community
by the arrival of Volunteers from the Motherland. One thousand
spinsters, formerly unable to find husbands due to reactionary customs
and the gangster activities of separatists, are now joyfully married
and raising a new generation to assist in the success of the Com
mune
.
…

I had been smoking too much recently, and my mouth was sour. The thought of the lively Volunteers and the generating priestesses seemed to make it sourer still.

Miss Marks saw me shaking my head over the letter.

‘Not very nice, is it?’

‘Not very,’ I said.

‘But maybe it’s all for the best.’

‘Maybe it is.’

‘It’s hard to know how it could have continued in the old way. And anyway there wasn’t anything very marvellous about that, was there?’

‘They liked it.’

‘Yes. … It’s an odd story, isn’t it, all of it?’

‘Very,’ I said, as I had said once before, to Mr Oliphant.

‘And this’ – she nodded to the letter – ‘seems to complete it somehow. I wonder if it’s the rounding-off that T.L. asks for in his memo.’

‘I wonder,’ I said.

Miss Marks had provided, indirectly, the beginning. There was a sense of fitness that she should provide the end.

Lionel Davidson was born in 1922 in Hull, Yorkshire. He left school early and worked as a reporter before serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. His first novel,
The Night of Wenceslas
, was published in 1960 to great critical acclaim and drew comparisons to Graham Greene and John le Carré. It was followed by
The Rose of Tibet
(1962),
A Long Way to Shiloh
(1966) and
The Chelsea Murders
(1978). He has thrice been the recipient of the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award and, in 2001, was awarded the CWA’s Cartier Diamond Dagger lifetime achievement award.