not necessary stay in horrid places,’ she said, firmly. ‘Is not necessary see poor people and horrid places.’
‘What if they are one’s subject?’ he suggested.
‘Why choose subject? People not want to read of horrid things and poor people. People like nice hotels and jewels and nice things. And if poor people necessary, use . . .’ (she searched for a word, and, triumphant, found it) ‘use invention. Is correct, invention?’
‘Yes, correct. Invention. Imagination. But these things have their limitations. They cannot make something out of nothing.’
‘Why not? Films and stories make out of nothing. Look.’ She gestured towards the silent screen, where a bronzed and derivative hero ran through long corn beneath a lowering, circling pursuing helicopter. ‘Look, is nothing. Is no person and no-thing and no place.’
He laughed. He was entranced by Miss Porntip. She was surely no-thing herself, she was surely a dream. Commandant Parodi flew on, five miles high over the Euphrates, towards the lopsided melon moon of Karachi.
*
The New Trocadero Hotel, Surawong Road, does not strike Stephen as particularly new. Surely it must be the old Trocadero, with a new neon sign? But it is new to Stephen, as indeed is the whole of this strange city, this City of Angels. He is not surprised that Miss Porntip had disapproved of his hotel. He is half inclined to disapprove of it himself, but checks himself sharply. He is not here to enjoy himself, after all.
His room (executive style with bath) has a certain authentic greyness that makes him seem a little more authentic himself. The window looks out on to a vast grey cylindrical water cooler dripping ceaselessly on to a gravel-clad roof. Stephen reflects that it must be spreading legionnaires’ disease throughout Thailand and half wishes he had bothered to make time to visit his GP to inquire about hepatitis and malaria and meningitis. One can carry the Death Wish too far, and anyway what is the point of succumbing to illness in a foreign hotel? There is no story in that, no copy to file, no message to send home.
He unpacks his clothes, hangs up his white suit and his blue, places his rolled socks tidily in a drawer. He examines the contents of his vast old-fashioned brand new refrigerator and reads the notices by the ill-placed mirror. They inform him that if he wishes to purchase any of the room’s fittings, the prices are as indicated. He looks around him. There is no way he could want to purchase any of these objects. They are all either old or unattractive or both. A bedside table, a bed, two chairs, a sheet, two pillows, an ashtray, a small wooden tray with a glass and a Thermos of purified water, a pair of flimsy and ill-fitting curtains, a doubtful rug. Each item is priced, even the grimy and slightly torn shower curtain in the bathroom. Door knob, 150 baht. As this is what Stephen paid for a taxi from the airport, it does not seem a bargain. A bedside light is listed, but does not exist. Should he report this to the management, lest he be charged for its removal?
There is a new television set, still encased in thick fleshy semitransparent grey polythene. He switches it on. It responds, but there is no picture, only a white blare. He switches it off. He will play with it later. It is priced at 11,000 baht, which seems quite cheap. The only misspelling on the list is a handwritten addendum, ‘Bath Mate’ for ‘Bath Mat’. The phrase reminds him pleasurably of Miss Porntip, with whom he has a date for the evening in the Oriental Hotel. He wonders whether she will keep it. He has no way of knowing. She has drawn him a little map, showing him the pedestrian’s route from the sombre Trocadero to the gay Oriental. It is, she says, a short walk. They have an assignation in the Authors’ Lounge at seven thirty.
He lies on the bed and stares at the ceiling. The room is basic, but it works. It is cool and air-conditioned. He has slept in worse rooms, far worse rooms than this. His own room, in Primrose Hill, currently occupied by a weary Hattie, is nearly as basic as this.
He wonders what on earth he is doing here. Is he in search of a story or of himself, or of an answer to the riddles of history? Or is he merely trying to colour in the globe?
He thinks of Joseph Conrad, whose own adventures in the South Seas began here in Bangkok. It was here that Conrad received his first command. Stephen Cox admires Conrad. He is drawn to his loneliness, his restlessness, his temptation to despair. He likes the possibly apocryphal tale of the young Conrad, pointing at the atlas and putting his finger ‘on a spot in the very middle of the then white heart of Africa’ and vowing to see it for himself. And so he had gone, into the unmapped quarter, amongst cannibals and savages. Stephen, like Conrad, had nourished his boyhood dreams with travel books, with Mungo Park and Marco Polo and Captain Cook and Pierre Loti and Gide in the Congo. Dreams of escape, dreams of distance. He had wanted to see, before he died, the whole wide world.
The bare light bulb dangles. The machine hums. A tap drips. Stephen fills in the turning globe, patch by patch. At prep school, in what was called Geography, he and his classmates had been taught to surround islands and continents with a blue edging of sea. A useless, harmless exercise. There were strict rules governing the angle of the blue pencil. A wide, rayed fuzz was not allowed. Little, even, horizontal strokes alone had been permitted. No reasoning for this had been provided. Prep school, like the army, had been without reason.
He is feeling very tired, but he dares not close his eyes lest he fall asleep and miss his rendezvous with the improbable Miss Porntip. He picks up a copy of the Bangkok Post purchased in the lobby below, and runs his eyes over news stories about Ronald Reagan and the Ayatollah and the King of Thailand and a logging concession. In this paper he will find no deaths, or none that he can call his own. He finds an item about the deployment of Vietnamese troops of the People’s Army in the Phnom Malai area of Battambang, an area briefly reconquered by the Khmer Rouge three years earlier. There is a picture of a young Khmer Rouge soldier in a denim jacket, sitting on the ground, smiling broadly, casually and proudly cradling a gun. His head is wrapped in a chequered cloth, on top of which perches what appears to be an American cowboy hat. His smile gives no indication that he is in any way aware that the Khmer Rouge are the folk monsters of the modern world. The author of the article speculates that there are 40,000 trained Khmer Rouge soldiers active on the frontier and inside Kampuchea, and that Pol Pot himself is in a hideout in the Cardamom mountains.
Stephen Cox’s own army experiences had been peaceful. He had lazed about in the Dorset countryside (during his National Service) with his friend Brian Bowen and a suspected shadow on his lung, and then had been transferred to a Russian language course in Cornwall. He could still speak a little Russian. He wondered if the People’s Army spoke Russian. The Soviet Union was Vietnam’s only friend. It was strange that while the world reviled the Khmer Rouge as mythical monsters, they also reviled the Vietnamese who had liberated Phnom Penh from the Khmer Rouge. Khmer and Thai and Vietnamese Stephen did not speak. There had been no National Service courses offered in these languages.
Stephen has never seen a war, never heard a shell explode. An American plane had crashed into the shallow waters of the Levels near his childhood home in Somerset in 1942, but that was as near as he had come to death by acts of war.
So why does he lie here? Is he looking for trouble?
He gets up, looks again in the refrigerator. There is no mineral water, only beer. He does not want a beer, but decides to have one nevertheless. Why not? But there is no bottle opener. The previous guest must have extravagantly purchased it. Feebly, he lies back, and waits for the time to pass.
*
The Swan of Ice
A swan of ice drips upon the chequered marble floor. A white-suited slave discreetly mops. Little naked oysters lie obediently in silver spoons, raying outwards in a spiral from a huge, spiny, not-quite-dead lobster. Its feelers
