The Gates of Ivory. Margaret Drabble

willing to deal with the Khmer Rouge.

      Robert, eating a raspberry, idly wonders whether any reels of that old movie still survive, and what they would be worth to a blackmailer. They had showed figures more illustrious, more newsworthy than himself rashly disporting themselves amidst the tumbling slabs and twining creepers, upon the terrace of the Leper King, beneath the orange Indo-Chinese moon.

      The Leper King, who was neither King nor Leper. The Monkey Prince, who was neither Prince nor Monkey. The King who was no King. The country, which had made itself into No Country in Year Zero.

      In his flat in Holland Park Robert had a carved stone fish and a smiling lizard which he lifted all those years ago from the ruins of Angkor. With his own hands he had picked them from the crumbling masonry at Ta Prohm, and pulled the suckers of the creeper from them, and brought them home. He is no orientalist, but he cherishes them. He keeps them in an oriental corner, with bonsai-trees he has grown himself, from seed, from stone. He is good with bonsai. His little peaches bear tiny, useless, gemlike fruit.

      Robert Oxenholme the vandal. At least no Cambodian Minister of Culture will start a campaign for the return of Robert’s modest pickings. Cambodia has other things on its mind. It will take a mighty act of sponsorship to rescue Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom from the jungle, from mutilations heaped upon mutilations. The armless, the legless, the leprous. The Khmer Rouge are said to have blackened the cloisters with their camp fires, and the antique trade on the border flourishes still. The Khmer Rouge blacken, and the Indians pour in new grey-white cement. Like the sallow French woman, Robert doubts if the Indians are doing a good job, though unlike her he is too polite to let a shadow of this cloud his pleasant social face.

      At least he had been a vandal in a great tradition, in the buccaneer footsteps of André Malraux, French Minister-of-Culture-to-be. Sihanouk had pointed to the empty niches from which Malraux had hacked his spoils. Robert is glad to have seen these things, in better days. How would Esther have responded to the caparisoned elephants, to the palanquins, to the golden turrets and the emerald gloom?

      Would she have taken to the saxophones and the water-skis and the many-flavoured water-ices?

      His thoughts return to his suit of Esther. Why should she accept him? He is not a serious person. He has been a dilettante all his life. He has been too fastidious to make an effort, too afraid of failure. His glance flicks across the table to Charles Headleand, that ambitious hard-working middle-class meddler, who had failed once and twice, and picked himself up, and driven on. Nobody had thought the worse of him, and now he was on a winning streak again, with his fingers in more pies than ever. And what of Fun Prince Sihanouk? He was still trying to outwit them all, he was still hoping to die in his own palace in Phnom Penh. Had Sihanouk feared failure and ridicule, he would have been dead long since.

      I am a small person in a small country, thinks Robert Oxenholme. (He is in fact over a foot taller than Sihanouk, and a not unprominent figure in a country with a population more than ten times that of Cambodia, give or take a million or two dead.) But although I have never written what could be called a book, I have written a useful scholarly monograph on an Italian painter. And I have asked Esther Breuer to marry me. I am not totally without talent and without courage.

      As he gazes thoughtfully at Esther across the table, watching as she crumbles and rubs the remains of her bread roll into a heap of unsightly, friendly little pellets, Liz Headleand suddenly breaks in noisily upon his musing. She demands to know if he ever knew André Malraux.

      He starts, slightly, as the plates of his mind reconnect. Is Liz Headleand a thought-reader? He has never trusted shrinks.

      Yes, he admits, as a matter of fact he had met him, several times, back in the early seventies. In Paris. And they had played tennis together, one winter, in Morocco. In Marrakesh. What makes her ask?

      ‘Oh,’ says Liz. ‘I was just wondering about all those stories about his plundering Angkor Wat. Are they true? When was it? Do you know what really happened?’

      Robert tries to remember. It had been the early twenties, he thinks. Malraux and his wife Clara, in their early twenties, had set off into the jungle and returned with crates full of priceless statues, wrenched from the living walls. Iconoclasts, thieves, blasphemers. They had been arrested, detained in Phnom Penh, tried, convicted, fined. It had been a great scandal, a cultural sensation. The artists of Paris (well, some of the artists of Paris) had sprung to their defence, and they had been released on appeal. Yes, he agrees, he had been quite a character, Malraux. (He keeps one eye on the French woman as he speaks. Where do her sympathies lie? She gives nothing away.) Malraux, the amateur intellectual who wanted to be a man of action. Dabbling in architecture, dabbling in crime, dabbling in Indo-Chinese politics. Terrorism, communism. Has Liz ever read La Condition humaine? No, neither has he, but it was a sensation in its day. And in later years, Malraux had become more Gaullist than de Gaulle. He had become Minister of Culture and had expiated his crimes against the buildings of Cambodia by cleaning up the buildings of Paris.

      ‘Is that not right, broadly speaking?’ he asks of the disapproving French woman. Reluctantly she concedes that it is.

      Robert confesses to his stolen fish and his stolen lizard, and Esther nods: her nod implies she knows them well. Liz, watching the interplay of familiarity between Esther and Robert, is distracted, intrigued. What are these two plotting? Esther has already been back in England for a month, and has bought a new flat. Nobody, she had told Liz, as they moved towards their table, had seen it yet. Does nobody include Robert? Is he the privileged secret guest? Does Esther spend time with Robert Oxenholme in Holland Park?

      ‘Ho Chi Minh,’ says Robert, still on the subject of the French passion for the Orient, ‘used to work in an antique shop in Paris, in the sixième, just by the École des Beaux-Arts. Touching up fake oriental antiques.’

      ‘Really?’ says Liz. ‘What odd things you do know, Robert.’

      ‘And before that,’ says Robert, ‘he used to work in London. Sweeping a school playground. And washing dishes at the Carlton. Or was it the Dorchester?’

      ‘I think Robert’s really a spy,’ says Esther, smiling enigmatically at the table at large. ‘He knows such very peculiar things. And such unlikely people. And his job is an obvious front. I mean, how could anyone be a Minister for Sponsorship?’

      The French woman looks affronted. She does not care for the British sense of humour. And she happens to know that Ho Chi Minh did not work in a hotel, he was in the merchant navy before he took up politics. (She also happens to be a spy: though that is irrelevant.)

      Chatter chatter glitter, munch munch, chatter chatter munch. Coffee and mints are served. Chatter lick and munch. The King of Brandipura wipes his glasses on a large old-fashioned blue silk handkerchief. Far away across the long room, Charles Headleand’s second ex-wife, the Lady Henrietta, laughs her high-pitched neigh of a laugh. Saharan scholar Frances Wingate tries hard to catch the soft murmurs of a modest but relentless Sinhalese monk. A pregnant television announcer dressed in navy-and-white spots turns faint and is carried out. Film-maker Gabriel Denham flirts heavily and a little automatically with the daughter of a Pakistani general. A Swiss banker pockets the card of a Japanese industrialist. An elderly bearded goat of an architect advises a shocked young actress on how to fiddle her income tax. The Brazilian-born wife of an American conglomerate thinks she will die of boredom if her neighbour does not stop talking about the ecosystem. A Scottish laird informs a pretty Dutch archaeologist that his son is dying of drug abuse in a hospice. A New Zealand animal rights activist harangues a Korean airline operator about the eating of cats and dogs.

      The United Nations are at play. The world goes round.

      Pol Pot lurks in his tent in the Cardamom mountains.

      Pol Pot lies ill of cancer in a Chinese hospital.

      Pol Pot waits like a fat tiger in a suite in the Erewan Hotel in Bangkok.

      Pol Pot has 40,000 armed men.

      Pol Pot is dead.

      Chinese whispers. The world goes round.

      On the way out