The Gates of Ivory. Margaret Drabble

Esther is sitting between the Hon. Robert Oxenholme, Minister for Cultural Sponsorship, and a bearded white-robed Arabian. Liz catches her eye, and Esther smiles and waves as the king launches into his speech. This is a good sign: they will pick up their old, somewhat lapsed friendship, Esther’s smile tells her. Maybe they will be able to sit at the same table, if the placement permits. Maybe Robert has arranged the placement. Robert arranges a lot of things.

      The king is a small and well-braided gentleman with a round scholarly owl face and glasses. He is a Buddhist and a man of peace. He speaks eloquently and in excellent English of his country’s great architectural heritage. He speaks about international tourism and the protection of the environment and the forests. He alludes to the Olympic Games which will shortly take place in Korea and delicately regrets the closed frontiers of North Korea, Burma, Kampuchea and Vietnam. He applauds the new spirit of openness in China. He quotes a line or two in French from a poem on the ruins of Angkor Wat. Black poppies, flowers of night, dreams of eternity. Liz suddenly sees before her the little temple sketches inexpertly drawn by Stephen Cox.

      The audience is as attentive as a London audience can be on a warm night. Some doze, some fan themselves with programmes and appeal forms, some pinch themselves to stay awake, some wonder what there will be for dinner. There is strong representation from the Far Eastern embassies. Ladies in ethnic dress shimmer and twinkle.

      Esther Breuer lets her mind drift towards the furnishings of her new little flat in Kilburn. It is very near her old flat, above which the murderer Paul Whitmore had spent much of his time chopping up his neighbours. The old flat has been demolished, but Esther is busy re-creating its ambience. She has painted one room red, another dark blue. She has rearranged her collections. Some pieces have returned in trunks from Bologna, others have been reclaimed from friends. Will she ever get her little Roman fountain with doves back from Peggy and Humphrey in Somerset? They are loath to part, although they will not openly admit it.

      Robert Oxenholme is thinking about Esther Breuer, whom he had asked to marry him, and who has not yet given him a final refusal. Now she is back in London and freed by death from her demonic Italian lover, will she consider him more favourably? And does he hope that she will, or that she will not? He has been courting her, he has been taking her to parties, to galleries, to the opera, to the theatre. (He is a man with many free tickets.) He has enticed her into his own high-ceilinged apartments at the better end of Holland Park. Sometimes she has settled there for a whole night, but in the morning she is always off again, her small bag of possessions hanging from her small shoulder. Robert is beginning to think Esther is excessively territorial. But here she sits by him, captured for the evening, in her black silk trousers and her green taffeta shirt. What is she thinking of? Is she thinking about him? Is she thinking about Angkor Wat? Shall he tempt her with a honeymoon in Egypt, with pyramids and with Petra and Palmyra and the pleasures of ruins?

      There is polite and good-natured applause as the king ends his address. He is a well-mannered chap and the audience likes him. He flatters its ignorance and he has not spoken for too long. Released, off it surges for its wine and orange juice and Perrier.

      Robert has indeed arranged that the Headleands shall be at his table, and the four of them settle down together, in the company of an Indian shipping magnate, an Indonesian cultural attaché, a British diplomat and an austere sallow late-middle-aged French woman of mysterious provenance. They exchange pleasantries, and over the salmon it emerges that the British diplomat had been much moved by the king’s poetic reference to Angkor. ‘I was there, you see,’ he says, ‘in the old days. What a wonderful country! What a tragedy!’ Such a peaceful country Cambodia had been then, such a quiet, sweet, gentle, good-natured people! Nothing was too much trouble for them! Such simple people, but so kind!

      His watery innocent blue eyes film a little, misting over as he recalls that heroic journey of his youth: the bridge from Aranyaprathet bravely crossed on foot, the Cambodian border guards playing boules, the farmer who gave them a lift, the mayor of the village who arranged for them to sleep above the post office, the refusal of payment, the hospitality, the indifference to visas. The hired bicycles, the silence of the ruins, the water-lilies in the moat. The hornbills. Happy days.

      The French woman has also been to Angkor, but she does not share the diplomat’s view of the Khmer character. She asks, rhetorically, whether he believes a nation can change its character overnight? Her father, she tells them, had been killed by guerrillas on the Saigon–Phnom Penh highway in the 1950s. A discussion of the legacy of colonialism and the brutalization of native populations ensues. The tone is less apologetic, Liz notes, than it would have been ten years earlier. It is not comfortable. Diplomatically she tries to return her neighbours from politics to the slightly less explosive subject of the ruins. Was the jungle really full of tigers? How overgrown were the temples? How sophisticated were the carvings? How base the bas-reliefs?

      (Very base, mutters the French woman, sotto voce. Crude. Primitif.)

      Charles volunteers the information that an enterprising tour operator, undeterred by the Khmer Rouge and the country’s continuing economic troubles, is offering visits to Angkor Wat even now and Liz can go and see it for herself if she wants.

      (‘Panthers,’ murmurs the French woman.)

      The Indian shipping magnate says that a team of Indian archaeologists is currently working on its restoration. The French woman looks sceptical and gazes haughtily at the guests at the next table. The Indonesian cultural attaché murmurs of the immense monuments of Borobudur in central Java, which represent the centre of the universe, but nobody listens to him, for none of them have been to Java, and none of them save the Indian have heard of Borobudur. It is not yet upon the tourist itinerary of the world, though it will be before the decade is out.

      Robert Oxenholme has not been to Java, but he has been to Angkor, as he now admits. ‘Yes,’ he says, politely refilling the French woman’s glass, ‘I was there with Prince Sihanouk. Odd chap, Sihanouk. Quite a character.’

      The Indian shipping magnate embarks upon a description of the great Temple of the Sun at Konarak, with its mystic wheels and erotic carvings. He is more persistent than the Indonesian, and makes his voice heard.

      Robert does not listen. His memory drifts. Angkor had seemed to him demented, a folly on a godly scale. The smooth face of the endlessly repeated mad-god-king Jayavarman had stared blandly down, as the more lively yet equally enigmatic features of his successor Prince Sihanouk had egged Robert and his chums on to follies of their own. Water-skiing, home movies. It had been quite a party. Sunglasses, saxophones, flutes and dancing girls. Sihanouk had been obsessed by his home movies. Robert had been prevailed upon to play the part of a Cambodian deity, a disguised monkey prince, courting a giggling royal damsel in high-heeled Gucci shoes, a scarlet silken robe, and a flame-tiered medieval head-dress inset with real Pailin rubies. Mad, they had all been, and probably sacrilegious, but it had been many years ago when they were all young things, and now Angkor Wat and the Bayon were returned once more by violence to the jungle, and Sihanouk was said to be in Peking, striking devious deals with his enemy-allies, the Khmer Rouge.

      Jayavarman had been many-faced, a mild and modest man of peace who mercilessly tortured his enemies and engaged slave labour to carve his face a thousand thousand times. Sihanouk too was a man of many faces. The Playboy Prince who had once been the Playboy King (he had demoted himself, like Wedgwood Benn, for political purposes), the fixer who had wheeled and dealed and turned and turned again in his efforts to preserve himself and his small country. His faction for the liberation of Kampuchea from the Vietnamese occupation is called FUNCINPEC. What an acronym! The National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Co-operative Cambodia! What a slogan! FUN-SIN-PECK!!

      Pol Pot’s face has not been much repeated. Pol Pot’s image is shy and obscure. He is not known to be fond of home movies.

      Now Sihanouk is said to want to return to the old country, to die at home in style. He had certainly lived in style. A hybrid, cross-bred, well-fed, jetset style. Sihanouk has planned menus for dinners at abortive peace conferences around the world. He prefers Paris as a meeting point, for obvious reasons. Under Pol Pot, Sihanouk lost five children and fourteen grandchildren. He has a son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, who teaches