The Gates of Ivory. Margaret Drabble

doing TV scripts, all those years ago, back in the seventies, when we both needed the ready, but he never would. He wasn’t interested. He said he’d had his bellyful of the cinema, translating subtitles when he was Down and Out in Paris in the sixties.

      The rue St André des Arts rings a bell. I wonder if it’s where we went to see Maxence and Claudine. Bill and me. Or was it Harold and me?

      Stephen seems to have been reading Macbeth as well as Victory. There were quite a few Macbeth quotes dotted about. Some in red ink. Very pretty. Bleed, bleed, poor country. Blood will have blood, they say. The unmentionable play. Was Ponnary a sort of Lady Macbeth figure, perhaps? Screwing Pol Pot to the sticking post?

      They said Aaron Headleand’s new version of Coriolanus is worth seeing. I really ought to make an effort and get to it. He’s one of the up-and-coming. I liked his Squeaking Cleopatra. The boy Cleopatra. Bit Stoppardian, but not bad.

      And from the blown rose, many stop their nose

      That kneeled unto the bud.

      I don’t know why those lines of Cleopatra haunt me. Well, no, that’s a lie. I know exactly why, and I don’t like the reason. I read a stupid article in the paper today by that ghastly skinny short-skirt skeleton Cassie O’Creagh about why men continue to be attractive in their fifties, when women go off in their forties. All to do with reproduction. Sexist crap.

      I did find the reference to me, in the end, in Stephen’s diary. The one I’d subliminally glimpsed. It says, in a sort of scribble, ‘Hattie in her gold dress. Trumpet and kettledrum.’

      Well, I like it. Better than a blown rose, anyway. I think it must be some sort of quotation, but I can’t place it. Dear God, how we all live in quotations. Trumpet and kettledrum. It makes me sound quite dignified. Shakespeare? Marlowe? Chapman’s Homer?

      Oh well, plough on, I suppose. At the very least we can get some bibliographical collection in America to make an offer. Isn’t there a library in Austin, Texas, with a room full of Erle Stanley Gardner’s hats? They’ll like a finger bone.

      *

      The swan of ice drips. Stephen, waiting in the Oriental for the doubtful arrival of the hallucinatory Miss Porntip, sits on a chintz cushion in a rattan chair in a quiet corner confronting the Trimalchian cocktail party into which he has wandered. He had not expected the Authors’ Lounge to be so fully occupied, and was surprised to be admitted without invitation. His white suit is his passport. Is that the manager, that handsome lean-faced Scandinavian gentleman, shaking hands on the threshold? Is he the successor to the disreputable Schomberg and the disappeared silk merchant, eaten by tigers? He had let Stephen through without a murmur, and now here Stephen sits, as a novelist should, observing.

      Conrad was here. And so, it seems, was Stephen’s old friend and rival Pett Petrie, best-selling author of the runaway upmarket success, Ziggurat. Stephen has discovered his name in the Authors’ Lounge menu. Various writers have given their names to cocktails. Conrad and Somerset Maugham one might have expected, and Morris West and Peter Ustinov and Gore Vidal he is not surprised to find. He salutes with respect the presence of the old seafarer William Golding. He notes that Barbara Cartland has given her name not only to a cocktail of pink champagne but also to the Dish of the Month, a confection of fillet of sea bass with mousse of rhubarb. All this, though strange, is acceptable to Stephen. This is the Oriental, not the Trocadero. But the sight of Pett Petrie’s name jolts him. How has Pett, his contemporary, joined this international literary jetset, this self-promoting sybaritic elite? Until ten years ago, Pett was nobody. A struggling author, a minor Wimbledon short-story writer and poet who had never been further afield than a poetry reading in Rotterdam. And now he is a world-famous novelist and has given his name to an oriental cocktail of brandy, vermouth and candiola juice.

      What the hell is candiola juice? Stephen feels outsmarted. He smarts.

      He conjures up the sombre Trocadero, with its serious clientele, the haunt of war correspondents and international relief workers. He tells himself that he is a serious person, not a best-seller. He is the Graham Greene character in a dingy corner with a cockroach. Not for him the fleshpots and the transient glitter of hype. (He peeps, surreptitiously, to see if there is a Graham Greene cocktail, and is relieved to note that there is not. Or not yet, not yet.)

      He sips his glass of free-flowing champagne, and gazes round at the motley of hotel guests. Japanese, German, Thai, American, Korean, French, Swedish. Some chatter, some wander lonely through the crowd, nibbling and grazing. Stephen does not look out of place in his white suit. His white suit is made of miracle material. It never creases or crumples. It never picks up dirt. Stephen’s face and accent do not crease and crumple. He is the English public-school product, the mad Englishman abroad. He is an asset, a decoration. He is a man for whom doors glide open. So he reassures himself, as he sits alone.

      Will Miss Porntip be admitted? Has she perhaps an invitation?

      A large blond Nordic bronzed film-star or mountaineer is speaking to a small gleaming Malaysian statesman or industrialist. Are they speaking of holiday-making or drug-smuggling or gun-running or Hollywood? An elderly European woman with an ebony silver-topped cane and an air of minor royalty is listening patiently to an excited girl in a flame-coloured mini-dress who may or may not be her granddaughter. A handsome middle-aged Thai in white uniform with gold braid addresses a dark-suited Japanese gentleman. A lonely drinking Dutchman, rawly clad, towers above the throng. Two little Japanese girls in immaculate sailor suits dart nimbly through the knee-level forest. The little one is chasing the larger. They are identical except in size, their hair cut in straight and solid carved fringes, their perfect features lucid and bright, their little white ankle socks flashing, their polished black pumps twinkling. They are enjoying the party more than most. They are extraordinarily beautiful. Their sailor suits remind Stephen that he is in the great port of Bangkok, on the Gulf of Siam. So far he has not seen a glimpse of river or of sea. As he watches the little sisters, a wave of emotion pours through Stephen. He knows not what it is, but it makes the hair rise on the nape of his neck. It is a tremor from the globe itself, and from its many peoples.

      But now the party is disturbed by a small commotion. It is, of course, the arrival of Miss Porntip. Here she is! She is greeted with smiles and salutations. The suave manager bows deeply from his great height, and kisses her hand. Slaves cluster, proffering titbits, silver-haired gentlemen bend with deference over her small body. She makes a royal progress. She is now robed in floor-length dazzling cyclamen-shot-pink, trimmed with gold. Her hair is full of purple flowers. From her brown arm dangles a small magenta bag. She flits, laughs, twirls neatly on her slender heels, accepting greetings from the very air, accepting from a specially presented silver tray a specially elegant glass of bubbly. She is making her way towards Stephen, fluttering, indirect, the butterfly’s way, but here she is, and, with a smile and an outstretched hand, she gestures that he should not rise, and she sinks beside him, upon the rattan couch.

      The slaves melt discreetly away. The swan melts. The children laugh in the undergrowth.

      ‘So,’ says Miss Porntip. ‘It seems here is party. This is not nice quiet rendezvous as planned. You enjoy party?’

      ‘I enjoy watching the party.’

      ‘There is often party. These not real people, these mostly passing people.’

      ‘Birds of passage.’

      ‘Yes. Is so. You have drink?’

      He lifts his empty champagne glass.

      ‘Here,’ she says, and offers him hers. She waves her hand, and, as he takes his first sip, another materializes as if by magic at her elbow. They clink glasses, smile, and pledge one another.

      ‘So,’ she says. ‘And how is hotel?’

      ‘Dim,’ he says. ‘Dim, but serviceable.’

      She laughs. The swan drips. It is losing its glassy essence.

      ‘We will not stay here long,’ she says. ‘We will go eat. You hungry?’

      ‘Yes,’ he says.