The Gates of Ivory. Margaret Drabble

ingredients for a suitable cocktail. Juice of toad, essence of opium. As they converse, another little flotilla of tiny porcelain vessels sails gaily on to the table. Stephen had thought the meal was over, but finds he is still hungry, so continues to pick and toy. The delicate morsels melt away without trace. The evening lasts for weeks, for months. Little medicinal bitter liqueurs arrive in golden thimbles. The lights bloom softly on the oiled canal.

      He wonders if he will be able to pay the bill, but there is no bill. It is all arranged, the little waitresses murmur. Perhaps this restaurant is one of Miss Porntip’s many establishments? Now she is suggesting they move on to sample the delights of others. He wonders if he will be able to stand up. His legs have stiffened and will not uncrumple. He is not as young as the supple, the super-flexible, the supremely adaptable Miss Porntip. He has pins and needles as he stands, stretching. Carved dragons and many-armed warriors surround him. Three-legged, three-toed birdmen form a guard of honour as they move towards the door. The whole building is surely moving slightly, it sways and gives. Thai people very flexible people, Miss Porntip had informed him. They like to please. They like to be pleased, but they like to please. Stephen and Miss Porntip, arm in arm, leave the dark scented sloping teak house over the water.

      *

       The Bridal Brothel

      The street dazzles. Night life, Western Thai style. Neon lights burst and splatter. Red, purple, green, orange, blue. Acid, metallic, harsh. The hot street smells nauseously of cooking, of French fries and onions and ketchup, of Oxford Street in the tropics, of pizza and beer. Giant cocktails shake in the sky, naked breasts jut at the moon. The blandishments of Babel fizz and the polystyrene cartons fly. Japanese, French, Austrian, Mexican, Swiss, Vietnamese, Lao, Indian, Cantonese, Pekingese, Spanish, Polish, Turkish, Sinhalese: the base cuisines of the world jostle for attention. British pubs with shamrocks and tartans and Union Jacks and Irish whiskey, American hamburger joints with giant plastic tomatoes and six-foot-long fibreglass gherkins. From one doorway blares a jazzy version of the ‘Londonderry Air’, from another Pink Floyd. Sex shows and Thai masseuses invite. A street trader offers Mozart’s Greatest Hits! Others flog fake Rolex and fake Benetton and fake Beatles. Buoyant mystical brand names bespatter the street market of the world in an orgy of commerce. This is the Nite Spot of Nightmare, the pedestrian precinct of Porn. A shyly smiling little prostitute with a paint-brush clasped in her vagina begins to inscribe WELCOME TO BANGKOK on a white sheet of paper over which she squats. Her hips rotate. Her expression becomes more and more tense with concentration. She forgets to smile, until she has triumphantly finished her task. Then, like a good girl in class, she smiles once more, waits for approval, for applause.

       WELCOME TO BANGKOK. They wander through brothels Red Indian style, brothels Honolulu style, brothels geisha-girl style, brothels in the style of the Kingdom of Old Siam. They wander into a brothel full of brides, dressed in white and cream and ivory lace, in satins and silks and sprigged muslins, with white and cream roses in their hair and pearls around their throats. A discreet and restful place this is, with a seven-tiered iced white wedding cake as centrepiece, topped with an icing-sugar bride and groom, he fully dressed in Western morning suit, she naked but for her veil. Organ music plays softly, and little white leather-bound hymnals and prayer books fall open to display portraits of gentle rosy erotic brides clad in ecru underwear. Champagne stands in ice buckets, and bridal bouquets flow from silver chalices. A couple of brides play cards at a low table. White chocolates are offered upon a silver tray.

      *

      Hattie Osborne is right to suppose that Liz Headleand has never been to Bangkok. When Liz comes across purple passages describing the City of Vice and Angels, she has no way of testing them against reality. Unlike Hattie, she does not pick up allusions to the Oriental Hotel. She has never heard of the Oriental Hotel. She does not know whether prostitutes who write messages with vagina-propelled paint-brushes or brothels full of brides are the pornographic equivalent of atrocity stories, or whether they are commonplace tourist attractions. They seem at once excessively fanciful and all too plausible. She has heard that blasé Californian and Japanese couples these days choose to marry in the strangest venues: in underwater caverns, in department stores, in floating hotels moored to the Great Barrier Reef, in ski-lifts halfway up the Matterhorn, in the catacombs of Sicily. Why not a brothel bride, a rent-a-bride, a fake wedding with cakes and lilies? Everybody loves lace and confetti. Well, almost everybody.

      Liz Headleand struggles with Stephen’s struggles with genre. She is whisked from the overwritten spun sugar of Bangkok to the plain man’s trip up the Mekong, from Sartrean dialogues about the Strong Man to adventure story scraps of Conrad and Buchan and André Malraux. She does not congratulate herself on identifying these sources, as they are plainly identified by Stephen himself, in asides and footnotes. She has never read any Malraux, and is not quite sure who he is. Or was. She intends to ask Esther Breuer or her ex-husband Charles. It is the sort of thing they might know.

      She rings up Hattie Osborne, and they compare notes on progress and discuss plans of action. Liz is in favour of chasing up the accountants for further disclosures about recent transactions. Hattie is in favour of pursuing Peter Bloch at the embassy in Bangkok. But both agree that they are reluctant to do anything suggestive of setting the police or the law or even the Inland Revenue on to Stephen. Therefore, for the time being, they do nothing. They carry on with their own lives, dipping from time to time into the Cambodian packet.

      But from now onwards their lives are and will be different. Stephen has altered them. He has posted Cambodia to them, and now its messages are everywhere. Like a cancer, like the Big C itself, it spreads. They may not yet have caught the disease, but their cells are predisposed to receive it. They seem to hear the mysteriously self-transforming name of Cambodia-Kampuchea-Kambuja-Cambodge wherever they go. They hear it whispered in Sainsbury’s and on the 24 bus. It flickers in the headlines of newspapers glimpsed over the shoulders of others, and repeats subliminally in the afterglow of zapped documentaries. They are solicited by posters from Oxfam and reports from the Save the Children Fund. References to Nixon and Kissinger and Sihanouk and Sean Flynn glob up at them from the fermenting sludge of the seventies. Liz happens upon an old copy of Time magazine at the dentist’s, and finds herself gripped by a prize-winning article by a young Australian woman who claimed to have spent a week with the Khmer Rouge in their hidden headquarters.

      Hattie takes herself for a cocktail to Claridge’s in search of the ghost of Ho Chi Minh. Liz is visited by the sad features of Mme Savet Akrun, asking in endless replication, ‘Where is my son?’ Hattie patrolling the Isle of Dogs, by the cormorant-haunted Thames, sees a slogan on a wall which she knows in her quick gut is written in Khmer. Liz receives a new patient who works with Khmer and Vietnamese orphans. Hattie meets someone who filmed with John Pilger and prompts him to retell some of the stories of the Horror. Liz meets someone who knows William Shawcross, and promises herself that she will read Shawcross’s books.

      It is as though that small, expendable country, that hole in the map of the world, were trying to speak to them. Liz, one morning, impulsively rings the Vietnamese Embassy to ask how to get a visa to go to Kampuchea. She has tried this before, but got nowhere. Again, she gets nowhere. They laugh at her request. They do not laugh like officials, they laugh like human beings in a homely desperate house. Kampuchea does not exist. Officially, it does not exist. No, she cannot get a visa. No possibility. She rings the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office tells her that Kampuchea does not exist. It has not existed, for Britain, for many years.

      Liz is discouraged, but not dismayed. She knows that more lights will flash up on the dark screen, that more connections will be made. She will remain on alert, with the power switched on.

      It is in her second week on alert that she finds herself attending an evening function as the guest of her ex-husband Charles. It is the annual dinner of the International Archaeological Commission, and there is to be an address by the King of Brandipura. According to Charles, it is something to do with UNESCO and an appeal for funds for temple restoration. Most events these days seem to involve appeals for funds. Liz, zipping herself stoutly into her yellow dress, wonders why on earth she agreed to go and why she is still so willing to humour Charles, but an hour or two later finds herself rewarded by a glimpse, across the crowded auditorium, of her old friend Esther Breuer,