“All Stanley’s life he said, ‘Never, ever go near power. Don’t become friends with anyone who has real power. It’s dangerous.’ We both were very nervous on journeys when you have to show your passport. He did not like that moment. We always had to go through separate entrances, he with [our] two American daughters upstairs, and me with my German daughter downstairs. The foreigners downstairs! He’d be looking for us nervously. Would he ever get us back?”

Christiane laughs. Of course they were always reunited. They spent a lifetime together inside Childwick, where Stanley created his self-governing mini-studio. I never meet their youngest daughter, Vivian. There was mention of her being in Los Angeles. Vivian had once been a big presence in the family. When she was nineteen she directed a brilliant documentary, The Making of The Shining. When she was twenty-six she composed the score for Full Metal Jacket. She shot eighteen hours of behind-the-scenes footage for that film, too, but it was never edited or released. It just sits in film cans in the stable block.

I watch some one day. Here’s Kubrick sitting in a chair on an old airstrip during a break from filming. Crew members stand around him. Vivian has caught a tense moment.

STANLEY KUBRICK: We fucked around for an hour and twenty minutes. . . .

CREW MEMBER: I know it seems like a lot of tea breaks but we had the tea break that was up at . . .

KUBRICK: You had a tea break at four o’clock? And you had a tea break at six o’clock? If you had a tea break at four, you don’t need to break for this tea break. This must be a complimentary tea break. So figure it out.

TERRY NEEDHAM (FIRST ASSISTANT DIRECTOR): I’d prefer to do away with them all. Because it gives me more fucking headaches, poxy tea breaks, I’d like to sling them right down their fucking piss holes.

KUBRICK: Right, Terry.

TERRY NEEDHAM: I’m the sort of man we need, eh, Stanley?

KUBRICK: That’s right.

You catch glimpses of Vivian in the rushes. She looks beautiful, effervescent.

“She is a fabulous person,” says Christiane. “Beautiful, very witty, enormously talented in all sorts of directions, very musical, a great mimic, she could play instruments easily, she could sing, she could dance, she could act, there wasn’t anything she couldn’t do. We had fights. But she was hugely loved. And now I’ve lost her.” She pauses. “You know that? I used to keep all this a secret, as I was hoping it would go away. But now I’ve lost hope. So. She’s gone.”

It all began, she says, while Stanley was editing Eyes Wide Shut, which starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Stanley asked Vivian to compose the score, but at the last moment she said she wouldn’t. Instead, she disappeared into San Francisco and Los Angeles. “They had a huge fight. He was very unhappy. He wrote her a forty-page letter trying to win her back. He begged her endlessly to come home from California. I’m glad he didn’t live to see what happened.”

On the day of Stanley’s funeral, Christiane says, Vivian arrived with a woman nobody recognized. “She just sat in Vivian’s room. Never said hello to us. Just sat. We were all spooked. Who was this person? Turns out she was a Scientology something-or-other, don’t know what.”

“Did Vivian give a reason why she joined the Scientologists?” I ask.

“It’s her new religion.” Christiane shrugs. “It had absolutely nothing to do with Tom Cruise, by the way. Absolutely not.”

“Maybe it was her way of dealing with her father’s death?”

“I think she must have been very upset,” Christiane says, “but, again, I wouldn’t know. I know nothing. That is the truth. I can’t reach her at all. I’ve had two conversations with her since Stanley died. The last one was eight years ago. She became a Scientologist and didn’t want to talk to us anymore and didn’t see her dying sister, didn’t come to her funeral. [Her sister Anya died of cancer, aged fifty.] And these were children that had been joined at the hip.”

I tell her that she seems to have handled all her tragedies with remarkable resilience. “I daresay I have, yes,” she says. “But I’ve also been very sad. I was helped by my children. Anya, in particular.”

She says that when Stanley was alive, he kept her and their daughters cosseted from stress, from life’s legal and financial arrangements, allowing them to float through Childwick without worries. But he died long before anyone expected he would, and Christiane has been left with burdens she never anticipated. So she’s forever finding herself second-guessing him. Would he have handled the Vivian situation differently? Would he have approved of letting me look though the boxes? She has bigger plans for the archive. She wants to donate them to a university. Would he have approved of that?

“I am very self-conscious and surrounded by his ghost,” she says. “I’m always having these conversations with him, as I am not terribly secure. And I try to live like I think he would want me to go on, because of the grandchildren and everything.”

At the end of our dinner I tell her, with some embarrassment, that I find her quite inspiring. She thinks about this for a moment. “I’m very pleased that Stanley liked me,” she replies.

•   •   •

FOR MONTHS, as I look through the boxes, I don’t bother opening the two that read Shadow on the Sun. But, one evening just before last Christmas, I decide to take a look.

It is amazing. The boxes contain two volumes of what appears to be a slightly cheesy sci-fi radio drama script. The story begins with a sick dog:

“Can you run me over to Oxford with my dog?” says the dog’s owner. “He’s not very well. I’m a bit worried about him, John.”

This is typed.

Kubrick has handwritten below it: “THE DOG IS NOT WELL.”

A virus has been carried to earth on a meteorite. This is why the dog is listless, and also why humans across the planet are no longer able to control their sexual appetites. It ends with a speech:

There’s been so much killing—friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor, but we all know nobody on this earth is to blame, Mrs. Brighton. We’ve all had the compulsions. We’ll just have to forgive each other our trespasses. I’ll do my part. I’ll grant a general amnesty—wipe the slate clean. Then perhaps we can begin to live again, as ordinary decent human beings, and forget the horror of the past few months.

This, too, is typed. But all over the script I find notes handwritten by Kubrick. (“Establish Brighton’s interest in extra-terrestrial matters.” “Dog finds meteorite.” “John has got to have very powerful connections of the highest level.” “A Bill Murray line!”)

“I know what this is,” says Tony.

Kubrick was always a keen listener to BBC radio, Tony explains. When he first arrived in the UK, back in the early sixties, he happened to hear this drama serial—Shadow on the Sun. Three decades later, in the early 1990s, after he had finished Full Metal Jacket, he was looking for a new project, so he asked Tony to track the scripts down. He spent a few years, on and off, thinking about Shadow on the Sun, reading and annotating the scripts, before he abandoned the idea and eventually—after working on and rejecting AI—made Eyes Wide Shut instead.

“But the original script seems quite cheesy,” I say.

“Ah,” replies Tony, “but this is before Stanley worked his alchemy.”

And I realize this is true. “Dog finds meteorite.” It sounds so banal, but imagine how Kubrick might have directed it. Do the words “Ape finds monolith” or “Little boy turns the corner and sees twin girls” sound any less banal on the page?

All this time I have been looking in the boxes for some embodiment of the fantasies of the outsiders like Mr. Sam Laks and me—but I never do find anything like that. I suppose that the closer you get to an enigma, the more explicable it becomes. Even the somewhat crazy-seeming stuff, like the filing of the fan letters by the towns from which they came, begins to make sense after a while.