The Gates of Ivory. Margaret Drabble

She kisses them all. Liz responds stolidly, allowing her cheek to be brushed. Henrietta does not introduce them to the tall dark stranger she has in tow. She walks him off into the night.

      On the pavement, in the sultry London air, Charles and Liz, Robert and Esther, linger to exchange words of parting, but as they pause a large black limousine rolls smoothly up beside them. Its driver salutes Robert. ‘May I offer you a lift?’ Robert inquires of the Headleands. Charles shakes his head. It is beneath his dignity to get into another man’s chauffeured vehicle. But Liz, who is tired, who has as ever an early start the next morning, who knows that Charles is parked a good six minutes’ walk away, accepts. Charles bids them farewell. Liz thanks him for a pleasant evening. Very civilized, they all are, and very comfortable is the large dark upholstered leather interior. They sink in, thankfully. ‘What luxury!’ says Liz, as the driver takes instructions, and shuts his little glass window, and swims off through the heavy autumn night of Regent’s Park.

      ‘It’s so nice, being with Robert,’ says Esther, only half mockingly, sitting small and neat in the middle of the wide back seat. ‘It’s so nice, always to have a lift home.’

      ‘If you were to marry me,’ said Robert, ‘you could always have a lift home.’

      Esther stiffens. Liz cannot believe her ears.

      Robert appears not to notice these reactions. He appeals to Liz, leaning across Esther.

      ‘Why won’t she marry me? I’ve been trying to persuade her for months. She can’t have anything serious against me, can she? She doesn’t really think I’m a spy, does she?’

      His tone is light, playful, teasing, a pleasant party tone, but his remarks are received in a shocked silence. Esther covers her face with both hands in embarrassment. Liz is taken totally by surprise. The moment of silence, with all its implications, lasts and lasts, as the car glides round the Inner Circle. Robert puts an arm round Esther, and says, ‘You see, my sweet? She simply can’t believe you won’t have a nice cheerful eligible chap like me. She’s struck dumb.’

      ‘Indeed I am,’ says Liz, rising a little too late to the challenge. ‘I would marry anyone who would take me home in such style. Well, almost anyone. And I am a great convert to what we might I suppose tactfully call late marriages. Look how well Ivan Warner seems to be getting on with Alicia!’

      And they prattle harmlessly on about Ivan and Alicia, Charles and Henrietta, Henrietta’s tall dark stranger (could he represent relief to some of Charles’s alimony problems?), until Liz is delivered safely to her doorstep. And then the silence resumes.

      Robert and Esther are both shocked, Robert by the revelation that Esther had not gossiped about his proposal to Liz, Esther by the revelation that he had assumed that she had.

      Robert Oxenholme is accustomed to regarding himself as a figure of fun. An acceptable, by no means ridiculous figure of fun. An entertainer, a lightweight, a might-have-been. He had been sure that Esther would have laughed about him with Liz. Does the fact that she has not mean that she takes him, after all, seriously?

      Esther is appalled by Robert’s low opinion of her discretion. She is ashamed. Perhaps his tone implied that he had never meant to marry her at all, that she had been a fool even to consider accepting him? Perhaps the whole thing had been an incomprehensible upper-class joke?

      In the silence of profound uncertainty, they are conveyed magisterially through the back streets of Kilburn.

      Liz dreams of temples and monkeys and tigers, of chattering and screeching, of jungles and ruins and an ambush on an ill-made road.

      Esther dreams she is drowning in the Seine in a large limousine.

      Robert dreams that he is travelling through India in an old-fashioned wagon-lit with his first wife Lydia and her second husband Dick Wittering, eating chicken sandwiches.

      Charles Headleand dreams that a large blue life-size Chinese ceramic horse is standing in his office. It has been placed there by government regulation, and must not be removed.

      Hattie Osborne dreams that Stephen Cox has come home and wants his bed back. He is standing by her bedside, saying, ‘Get up, get out, get up.’

      *

      The dreams of the world suffuse and intermingle through a thin membrane. The thin silver-blue beating pulsing globe turns and they shift like a vapour with the darkness. Mme Savet Akrun dreams of the thud of spade on skull. It is like no other sound in the world. It repeats and repeats and repeats. In a dry sweat, dreaming, she wills herself to wake.

      Khieu Ponnary dreams of blood and brains, through thick Valium stew. Her husband Pol Pot dreams about his bank account in Zurich. All over Kampuchea the bereaved and the survivors (and all who survive are bereaved, all) dream of the thud and the skull, the blood and the brains, the corpses by the wayside, the vultures and the crows.

      Stephen Cox dallies in the soft beds of the East with Miss Porntip, unable to cross the frontier through the gates of horn. He dwells in the land of lotus and poppy and orchid and ivory. Miss Porntip, sweet succubus, sucks him and makes him flow away into the thin sheets of warm repose. She feeds him on lilies, then sucks his strength away.

      Miss Porntip has already sucked dry and cast away a Princeton economist, a film-producer, an agro-business chief, a top official at the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, a diamond merchant, and a general in the Thai Army. A British novelist will now be added to her closet of husks and bones. Stephen is almost unresisting as she weaves her spells and mixes her potions. He is fascinated by her. She lectures him upon the booming Thai economy and upon her own business triumphs. She has fingers in every pie. She tells him of the girls she has rescued from the concrete mixers and construction sites, girls who now work for Miss Porntip for good wages in hygienic conditions. She tells him of her logging concession and her interests in the management of tropical rain forests. She is interested not in conservation but in profit. ‘You conserve, you in old country,’ she tells him. ‘We make money. Is our turn now.’ She tells him of her pineapple-canning concern and her prawn farm and her project for preserving candiola fruit through judicious radiation. She tells him of her plastic box subsidiary and her television satellite stakes and her plans to launch a new Asian mini-tampon. Her empire is vast. She is insatiable. She is the New Woman of the East. He cannot but admire.

      ‘We make new history,’ she tells him, grandly. ‘In old days, was only one story for woman in Thailand. Is called Village Maiden to Beauty Queen. Sometimes tragedy story, sad lover lost, massage parlour, ruin, return to village, sometimes ill, sometimes crippled, sometimes disgrace. Sometimes family forgive, sometimes not, sometimes death. Is sad story. Other story, same story, but happy story. Beauty Queen, much riches, fame, glory, TV-star, Hollywood, bridal Western style with seven-tier cake and white icing. Now is new story. Now is success story of the woman, the independence of the woman. Is New Plot.’

      Stephen at one point dares to ask her if she happens to know her own IQ.

      ‘Is very very high,’ says Miss Porntip. ‘You surprise? You think no Thai ex-beauty queen intelligent? You think no woman intelligent? You think no Thai intelligent? You sexist and racist, perhaps?’ Stephen flinches from this bull’s-eye battery of questions, but she presses on. ‘Most of family except for auntie very very stupid,’ she says. ‘So, I am convergence towards norm. Is statistically correct.’

      Stephen ponders this.

      ‘A very sudden convergence,’ he ventures.

      ‘And why not sudden? These sudden times. Quick change. Heating economy. Huff puff all hot hot now.’

      And Stephen sighs, defeated.

      Miss Porntip is illuminating on the subject of Thai culture. She tells him that one of the intellectual tasks she had to perform to become beauty queen of her village was to name three varieties of garlic. ‘On national level, questions more difficult,’ she confides. ‘Name President of United States. Name star of Rambo.’ Other features taken into account, as well as intellect, had been ‘Face, shape, hair, movement, feet, bottom.’

      ‘Bottom?’