The Gates of Ivory. Margaret Drabble

tigerskins lie side by side with disembowelled Viet Cong women with rifles up their vaginas: the Thai general seems to have had a taste for both forms of abuse. They make Stephen feel a little sick. What worse atrocities can the locked cabinet conceal?

      For light relief he turns to the film section, which is full of illustrated sanitized coffee-table books on Siamese dance and temple architecture and celadon pottery and flower festivals and elephant processions. They conjure up a grand, ersatz, Hollywood dream world, a City of Angels in which authentic details merge inauthentically into a vast, multi-faceted, kaleidoscopic, multi-ethnic, glittering exotic mirage of an oriental culture that never existed and never will exist. The dreams of the gates of ivory. Miss Porntip’s film-maker lover had been engaged in making a high-kitsch costume adventure movie set in the seventeenth century about a talisman and a lost princess and a battle with the invading Portuguese. He had picked and dipped, and insinuated a ruby here, a silk there, a religious fancy from elsewhere, weaving a tapestry of nonsense to delight the surfeited youth of many lands. And why not, Stephen wondered, why not? Perhaps Miss Porntip was right. Perhaps a future in which brightly dressed, well-paid film extras lounged idly around on call and overtime eating ice-cream and maple syrup and king prawns grilled was greatly to be preferred to a future of ancient enmities, to guerrilla warfare and foxholes and redoubts and ditches and Kalashnikovs and mortal terror and famine and fear and hate and death?

      The worlds at times overlap and intersect. Stephen Cox meets a Kampuchean refugee who is playing the role of a Kampuchean refugee in an American semi-fictionalized documentary about Kampuchean refugees. He meets extras who have worked on The Killing Fields, some of them survivors of the killing fields. He meets a cameraman who worked on Apocalypse Now. He meets a man in the Press Club who knows a man who knows Marlon Brando. He meets a Balliol man working for COER who was once President of OUDS and gave a great performance as Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. He meets a man who has heard of a man who is conducting a drama school in the jungle with disaffected terrorists. Jungle Actor Number One Film Star Man. The gates of ivory, the gates of horn. The shadow world.

      Miss Porntip, he has to admit, is more articulate than the charming Konstantin, even though she cannot speak English properly. And occasionally she consents to listen to him. One night he tells her (among many interruptions) about his mother. He tells her about the pink house in Somerset, with the purple Judas-tree in the garden, and the eels and apples. (He watches her mind flick to the exploitation of smoked eels and apple wine.) He tells her about his three brothers, those giants of his infancy, Francis, Jeremy and Andrew. How he had looked up, how he had admired, how he had been made to feel small. ‘Little shitty pants’ they had called him, in their boyish way. They had come and gone, from prep school and boarding school and college, with studded trunks and cricket bats and blazers and boots and books; bronzed, brazen, braying their schoolboy slang. He, the baby, had been left alone with his mother. How he had come to loathe the English countryside! How he had loathed his brothers!

      His mother, stout and complacent, had tied him to her Mothers’ Union apron strings. He had been a delicate child, and without love she had coddled him. He had been a solitary child, reading books to keep out of harm’s way, playing patience and solitaire, collecting stamps, until packed off to the communal hell of prep school. His mother did not like friends in the house. Increasingly, she elevated the family as sanctuary. He was the child of her menopause. The Coxes ruled supreme in a nest feathered with family jokes, rituals, catch phrases, memories. All other families were ignorant, feckless, ill-bred, over-bred. The Coxes laughed at other people. They laughed at other people because they were not Coxes. His mother was frightened, increasingly frightened, of other people. His father, a country doctor who left home early in the morning and came home dutifully for his supper, said nothing. He quietly paid the bills.

      His mother was red-faced, solid-salt-of-the-earth, bitter, bad-tempered, coy, immature, self-sacrificing, and deeply, deeply self-centred. She was deviousness incarnate. She managed to persuade herself and her neighbours that Moxley Hall and its disgraceful preparatory school were superior not only to all the local schools but also to Clifton, Ampleforth, Harrow, Eton, Rugby and Gordonstoun. She managed to persuade her boys that all girls were dirty and dishonest. Herself sexless and shapeless, she poisoned all hope and all fancy. How she had laughed at girls, with Francis, Jeremy and Andrew! How she had conspired with cakes and little sneers to trap them in their boyish juvenile world of mother-dependent greed and fear! Little Stephen, watching, had seen it all.

      And he tried to explain it all to Miss Porntip, with some success. She was quick on the uptake.

      ‘Your brothers all homosexual now?’ she inquired, politely.

      No, explained Stephen. That was not quite how it had worked. Two had married respectably, replicas of mother, and sent their offspring to Moxley Hall. They lived a life of gumboots and dogs and dances and pig ignorance. The third, Jeremy, had broken brilliantly away and ended up in gaol. Drugs had been his downfall.

      ‘And you?’

      ‘Oh, me. Me, I became an intellectual. That was my exit. I escaped through university.’

      ‘And then through bad girls and wild women?’

      Stephen acknowledged this.

      ‘I can’t stick it all together,’ he said. ‘Sex, politics, the past, myself. I am all in pieces.’

      ‘Who can stick these things together? Why expect?’ she demanded.

      ‘But in me,’ persisted Stephen, ‘the gaps are so great. I am hardly made of the same human stuff. The same human matter. There is no consistency in me. No glue. No paste. I have no cohesion. I make no sense. I am a vacuum. I am fragments. I am morsels.’

      She shook her head, worldly-wise.

      ‘Is not unusual,’ she said. ‘Is normal. Is naturally or common matter.’

      ‘The people I like I don’t approve,’ he persisted. ‘The people I approve I do not like. The women I like I cannot love. The woman I love I cannot like. The life I seek I could not endure. I seek a land where the water flows uphill. I seek simplicity.’

      ‘Is no simplicity. Is only way onwards. Is no way back to village. No way back to childhood. Is finished, all finished. All over world, village is finished. English village, Thai village, African village. Is burned, is chopped, is washed away. Is no way backwards. Water find level. Is no way back.’

      ‘But it is heart-rending, heart-rending,’ said Stephen Cox, crushing out his little cigarette in an enamel ashtray. ‘All this waste. All this wasted possibility. All this suffering. All these dreams. All this cruelty. All these dead.’

      ‘No, is not so. Is better now. Is better life expectancy, more electrics, more saloon cars, more soap, more rice, more nice clothings and suitings, more ice-cream, more maple syrup, more Coca-Cola, more cocktails, more Ovaltine, more champagne, more cassette players, more faxes, more aeroplanes, more Rolex watches, more perfumes, more satellites, more TV, more microwave, more word processor, more shower fitments, more motorbicycles, more ice boxes, more chips, more tampons, more tweezers, more fridges, more air conditionings, more cabinets, more musical, more confections, more bracelets, more prawns, more fruit varieties, more choice, more liberty, more democracy.’

      ‘You believe that?’

      She nodded, seriously. ‘It never roll back now. Is finished. Socialism finished, simplicity finished, poverty finished, USSR and China and Vietnam all finished. Liberty, is all. Growth, is all. Dollars, is all.’ She smiled, encouraging. ‘Is good. Is better. Equality and fraternity is poverty and sickness. Is men working like beast, like buffalo. Is men killing one another like beast, like worse beast. Is no good, Stephen. Is finished. Is new world now. Is failed and finished.’

      ‘So you offer me nothing but desolation and loss. You offer me nothing but heartbreak.’

      ‘I offer you riches, I offer you choice, I offer you freedom. You can take, if only you choose. Forget old ideas. Choose.’

      ‘No,’ he repeated, forlornly. ‘You offer me desolation and loss. You offer me stones.’

      *