The Gates of Ivory. Margaret Drabble

and Stephen wander the streets and temples of Bangkok together. They take a trip upriver and Konstantin takes photographs of family groups in temple gardens while Stephen (very badly) sketches. They take a trip downriver to the port and see the great grey rust-patched ocean-going container ships from Hong Kong and Panama and Kingston, some of them inscribed with strange hieroglyphics, others with familiar script. The Sang-Thai Breeze, the Sang-Thai Jewellery, the Crown Prince, the Manchester Reward, the Primrose, the Uni-Handsome. They see old wooden junks and laden rice barges and children swimming by a banana grove. A woman smiles at them while washing her hair in brown river water. A red hawk circles above.

      They chat to schoolboy monks about Mrs Thatcher and Madonna and Maradona, and they win virtue by presenting neatly packaged plastic buckets of offerings of rice and tinned milk and Ovaltine to older monks. They fly up to Chiang Mai for a few days to visit a monk who meditates on the death of the forest in a sacred grove of crape myrtle and mango and trees bearing emerald-green strychnine apples. They speak to the villagers in the valley below who imbibe the monk’s doctrine and with their bare hands dig water courses to save the forest.

      They play squash and swim at the Otis Club. They watch boys playing kites. They watch a parade and a firework display. They smoke, not very successfully, a little opium, and Stephen regrets, too late, his life of alcohol. Konstantin often lays his hand in friendship upon Stephen’s arm or shoulder. It is an innocent romance.

      Bangkok is full of diversions. Stephen wonders whether to acquire a tattoo, or to have the ancient wart on the ball of his foot removed. He and Konstantin stare in admiration and alarm at a poster which claims BY SKULL EXPANSION MY CHARACTER RADICALLY IMPROVED, and decline to have themselves checked out at the Chromosome Center.

      They visit a wat to have their fortunes told. Konstantin shows Stephen how to shake the wooden box of wooden sticks until one falls out upon the temple paving. Stephen shakes and shakes but no sticks fall. His fortune is recalcitrant. Shake harder, says Konstantin, who is practised, whose thin numbered wooden fate lies neatly at his knees. Stephen shakes harder, and lo, three fates fall before him, a multiple destiny. He selects the one he thinks fell first. Konstantin tries to dissuade him, but Stephen, arbitrarily, insists. They take the little paper fortune slips from the little wooden drawers, and offer them to a bilingual monk for translation. Konstantin’s is Number Thirteen, and it is a Golden Fortune. All will be good health and prosperity for Konstantin. But Stephen has insisted on Number Four, the Number of Death. His fate is deadly. It is Bad Time for Stephen, says the quizzical monk. Time of obstacles and sorrows. Time to Retreat.

      Konstantin, displeased on Stephen’s behalf by this incident, insists that they consult a proper fortune-teller, a wise old man with a placard which promises PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE PREDICTED. Sweet and wrinkled, he tells them that they will undertake a dangerous journey, but will be led to safety by a good spirit. And on the higher steps of Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn, they agree that soon they will travel together to the border. And, who knows, beyond. It is a pledge, an assignation.

      Konstantin is Stephen’s good angel. Miss Porntip is his bad angel. She does not let go easily. She senses she has a rival, and she reinforces her attack, inveigling Stephen with erotic little offerings and lecturing him the while on the triumph of capitalism. She appeals to his better nature by demanding English lessons, although she cannot concentrate on her conjugations for more than three minutes at a time, and will clearly never improve: they pick their way slowly through Conrad’s descriptions of Schomberg’s hotel, with its Japanese lanterns and its ladies’ orchestra and its white mess jackets, and she tries hard to follow, but cannot find the patience, although she chose the book. Conrad is racist sexist swine, she says, aligning herself firmly and problematically with Chinua Achebe and other literary intellectuals. Is horrible. How can he make so bad man, so good girl? Why Swedish guy such good guy? Why Swedes so much hero? Why so much ‘white men catering’ talk? Everyone know white man food bad, Thai food extra good. Hamburgers, Coca-Cola, pizza is rubbish food. Noodles is good. Lemon grass is good. Prawn soup is good. All agree this.

      Bobbing up from these deep waters, she tries to ingratiate herself by imploring him to stop calling her Miss Porntip and to start calling her by her pet name, her nickname, which is ‘O’. ‘Miss Porntip my given name,’ she says. ‘Is silly name. Here is common, but for English and Americans silly name. Here in Thailand we use pet name. My real name Porntip Pramualratana, but that difficult name. My friends call me O.’ Stephen has not the heart to tell her that to him, corrupted at an early age by that anonymous French pornographic masterpiece, L’Histoire d’O, her pet name is far more seriously suggestive than her given name: he tries out ‘O’ occasionally, at suitable moments, but finds himself drawn irresistibly towards the Miss Porntip for more formal occasions. He finds the name, and her, entrancing.

      Another new ploy is the jewel game.

      She has a fine collection of gems and jewels, and she entertains Stephen by taking off all her clothes and adorning herself with trinkets. She languishes upon the marble floor with a ruby and diamond necklace about her throat, a ruby pendant in her navel, and a honey diamond dragonfly brooch pinned into her pubic hair. She sits watching television clad in nothing but pearl, ruby and diamond ear studs, a pearl and diamond tiara, with an emerald bracelet round her ankle. She prances off to make coffee, lit by a little shimmer of fiery stones. Stephen, admiring, comments that she looks a lot larger naked than dressed: the clothed Miss Porntip is essentially neat and diminutive, but the naked Miss Porntip is curved, rounded, womanly, important. She smiles, accepting the compliment.

      But she is annoyed with him, mildly, for not taking more interest in the jewels themselves. Her gemstone vocabulary is extensive, and she speaks to him of parures and sautoirs, of marquise shapes and pavé cuts, of briolettes and baguettes and claws and carats and brilliants, of cabochon drops and stones set en tremblant. Her most hideous possession is a gold brooch, c. 1939, representing a little cottage with an open door and a large heart stuck clumsily on its side: the smoke is of diamonds, the garden blooms with sapphires and garnets. Proudly she tells him that it is designed as une chaumière et un cœur: what this is in English she does not know. She speaks no French. Is jewel talk, she says firmly, confidently. Her noblest piece is a diamond parure with variously cut stones of (she quotes) ‘yellow, cognac, champagne and brown tint’: she can gaze at these happily for hours, and even Stephen can see that they gain a certain glory when laid upon her pale brown belly. ‘Lick, lick,’ she says, and obediently he licks, and they quiver.

      But he is a disappointing scholar. He cannot learn to tell the difference between Burmese and Siamese rubies, however hard he tries. He guesses Burmese, of a bracelet she dangles over the copy of the Bangkok Post he is trying to read, but she shakes her head impatiently. ‘No, no,’ she says, ‘these poor Cambodian rubies, these cheapo rubies of Pailin.’ He cannot distinguish a cultured from an uncultured pearl, or an aquamarine from an amethyst. You ignorant person, she tells him, as she strokes him with fingers covered in rings that look like the spoils of empires, though she claims they were purchased on the black market, quite above board, in Hong Kong.

      ‘I love the jewels,’ she says, as she caresses him and them. ‘They living things, they my friends. They my children, my pets, my darlings.’

      She says this to provoke and tease him. Sometimes he rises.

      When he rises, she garlands him with gold.

      When he tires of the jewels, she lures him away from thoughts of Konstantin with her library. Stephen is a rapid consumer of books, and Miss Porntip’s gleaming electronically operated apartment is, surprisingly, well stocked with reading matter. She allows him to wander freely, although there is one locked cabinet which contains material not fit, she says, for his eyes.

      Her books are classified not by the Dewey decimal system but by lover. Stephen browses now in the refugee section, now in the economics section, now in the section dealing with the strategy of rural counter-insurgency in Thailand, now amongst glossy brochures on the exploitation of the pineapple and the cabbage and the potato, and now amongst old Sotheby’s catalogues. He reads about the ancient enmity of the Siamese and the Cambodian peoples, the ancient despising of the Vietnamese by the Khmer Krom. He discovers magazines