The Gates of Ivory. Margaret Drabble

repeats Miss Porntip firmly. ‘Bottom. Arse. Bum. Bottom. Is great asset, good bottom. More important than breast, is bottom. Is good, my bottom?’

      Miss Porntip tells him her stories, and occasionally she allows him to tell his, though she is forever interrupting him with pertinent or impertinent queries. He tells her of his aged mother, now in her nineties, lying senile and speechless in an old people’s home with a fine view of the Quantocks, and even as he speaks he can see her working out how soon the lengthening life span of the Thai population will make investment in old folk a profitable affair. He tells her of his last night in Knightsbridge with Hattie Osborne, but she tells him it is bad story, anti-woman story, and will not listen. He tells her of his younger days in Paris in the heady sixties, sitting alone at a restaurant in the rue Léopold-Robert, eating cassoulet or stuffed cabbage with his books propped up against a water carafe. Stephen has eaten alone all over the world, but this was his formative period, this was where he acquired the habit. He tells her about the married woman, wife of a finance minister who picked him up one day as he was reading the poems of René Longuenesse. She had picked him up and played games with him in her husband’s bed and manned the barricades with him and climbed down fire escapes with him and swum naked with him in a little lake in the forest of Fontainebleau. She had taken him to the races and to clandestine political gatherings, she had introduced him to Marxists and Algerians and Vietnamese, to friends of Frantz Fanon and acquaintances of Ho Chi Minh. She had showed him the house in the rue Compoint where Ho had lodged and studied and read Dickens and Dostoevsky and written poetry by the midnight oil. Then one night, trapped in the marital bed by the approaching footsteps of the finance minister, she had pushed him out of a high first-floor window into a rose bed.

      ‘You see the scars,’ says Stephen, delicately raising one corner of his trouser leg, showing a white streak on his slim ankle. ‘There’s metal in there. She left me a metal pin as a billet-doux.’

      Miss Porntip laughs.

      ‘You like bad girls,’ she comments.

      ‘Yes,’ says Stephen.

      ‘And then?’

      ‘Oh, then came others. Other wild women. Other adventures.’

      ‘More windows? More jumpings?’

      ‘Well, yes, more of that kind of thing. But no more broken bones. I learned to land with more care. It’s all a question of relaxing as you fall.’

      ‘And me, am I wild woman?’ she wants to know. ‘Am I bad girl?’

      ‘You must answer that,’ he tells her. ‘You’re certainly not the kind of girl my mother wanted me to marry, that’s for certain.’

      ‘So you never marry? No children?’

      He agrees, returns the question. She concedes that she too has never married, she too has no children.

      ‘And what for you here in Thailand? What you do here in Bangkok?’ she asks.

      He tries to explain not for the first time that he is here – well, to be crude, he is here looking for copy. He repeats his old alibi, that he is trying to write a play about Pol Pot. Once more she wrinkles her nose in disgust. She tells him Khmer people of no interest, she tells him communism and socialism are dead, she tells him his copy is here, here in Thailand. This is where the action is, she says. She tells him how and with whom to open a tax-free bank account. She says Pol Pot old hat. Is a time of trade now, she says. He says, if it is a time of trade, why is it so bloody hard to get a visa for Phnom Penh? She says he can buy visa anywhere, but she does not advise to.

      Miss Porntip is Stephen’s Oriental self, but he retains his Trocadero self. Sometimes he sleeps with Miss Porntip in grand luxe in her lofty modern apartment in a condominium overlooking the temples and palaces, but more often he sleeps in his own grey room. And, as he sits there of an evening adjusting his television set, or as he eats alone in the gloomy restaurant, he asks himself what he is here for in Thailand.

      There is no easy answer. Here he is, but for no good reason. There had been nothing to keep him in England, but is that a good enough reason for being, in particular, here?

      It is true that it is Pol Pot that has brought him here, though his plans to write a play are notional. He has, as Liz would confirm, long been taken with the prospectus of the Khmer Rouge and the plan to return to Year Zero. Stephen has a bleak view of human nature as it exists in its known manifestations, and an ecstatic view of its possibilities if ever it were to be released from them. He is that dangerous creature, a dreamer of ideological dreams. He does not much like the human race, with its chitter chatter munch munch aggressive acquisitive competitive pettiness. He is as guilty as anyone of chitter chatter petty mutter petty bitty bitch bunch bite and suck, but that doesn’t mean he likes it. Or himself.

      He thinks the species is capable of something better. It is holding itself back, it has taken a wrong turn, it ‘could do better’. It is afraid of the big risks. It clings to a shabby past. It needs a Big Idea. A really Big Idea.

      Stephen carries a text in his wallet, photocopied from the works of John Stuart Mill. It is a key text, and this is why he carries it. It reads thus: ‘If the institution of private property necessarily carried with it as a consequence, that the produce of labour should be apportioned as we now see it, almost in inverse ratio to the labour – the largest portions to those who have never worked at all, the next largest to those whose work is almost nominal, and so in descending scale, the remuneration dwindling as the work grows harder and more disagreeable, until the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labour cannot count with certainty on being able to earn even the necessaries of life; if this or Communism were the alternative, all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism would be but as dust in the balance.’

      This great and classic text would be endorsed by many with less eccentric views than Stephen: by his old friend Brian Bowen, by Brian’s wife Alix, by Perry Blinkhorn of Northam City Council, by Liz Headleand’s youngest stepson Alan Headleand, and by many defenders of variant forms of socialism and the egalitarian society. But he parts company from most of these in his view that the test is as pertinent now as it ever was. He does not see, as they do, the slow march of bloodless reform, which qualifies Mill’s fears. This slow march to Stephen is a slow poisoning of hope, a slow acceptance of defeat. Stephen believes that a deep, violent, volcanic shift is required to change the way things are. After this cataclysm, human nature, purged and pure, will find its own sweet natural level, freed from 10,000 years of exploitation, encrustation, sediment and stratification. It will flow forth free and clear, from the crystal skull of Pol Pot, from the pure well of Cambodia, and fill the world with joy.

      The flaws in Stephen Cox’s logic are blindingly obvious. A child could spot them, let alone a democratically elected back bencher. Stephen Cox can spot them all too well himself. He lost faith in Paris in 1968. He has already written one highly successful, cynical novel about that loss of faith. Yet, as he rolls himself a little cigarette while waiting for his bowl of soup in the dark and arctic restaurant, and listens to the hum of the world’s cooling machinery, he admits that he is still curious. Communism has failed and capitalism has triumphed and John Stuart Mill’s hypothesis has been rendered otiose. But had Pol Pot known that? Stephen has come here to try to find out. He is still curious.

      A fatal curiosity. He remembers invoking that phrase once while dining with his friend Liz Headleand in Bertorelli’s at the beginning of the year. Her memory of this conversation is vague and defective, and so is his, and so is mine, but it had nevertheless taken place, and it lingers on in both their recollections and in the limbo of my old Amstrad word processor like a formative shadow. They had talked of Pol Pot and Kampuchea and atrocity stories. Stephen had expressed his interest in his curiosity about a country which had tried to cut itself off from the forward march of what is called progress. It had refused all foreign aid. It had turned its back on electricity, electronics, mechanics, postal services, medicine. It had returned to People Power. Men yoked with oxen pulled the plough. Men and women with bare hands built dams and dykes as in the dawn of time. They had dosed one another with bitter leaves, and given one another transfusions of coconut juice.

      A