Hunters in the Dark (8 page)

“Ah.”

“Have you ever had them? Of course not, you are too young. You've been raised and brainwashed by
doctors.
You are all vegetarians now, or worse. Let me take you back in time then. Tournedos Rossini. Steak with foie gras riding on its back. I am a doctor eating such things. My wife does not know. Shall we have two orders of that? And no salads, please!”

“No salads,” Robert said, and they seemed to instantly agree on something—but it was not the undesirability of salads.

A waiter brought to the table what looked like a cologne bottle, with a label that read
Huile d'Olive.
He set it down.

“So I put out an ad,” Sar went on, his hands relaxing on the surface of the tablecloth. “I thought there must be a fair number of nice educated young foreign men in a city like this—and one of them might be the right person to teach my daughter perfect English. Between you and me, however, we want—how can I say it?—a gentleman. We are not going to hire someone in cargo shorts and flip-flops who wants a few months bumming around Cambodia.”

“I understand.”

“I interviewed a few fellows. They showed up in shorts.”

“I'm sorry to hear it.”

The doctor expelled a heavy sigh tinged with a kind of macabre hidden humor.

“This is the way it is these days. Well, I won't have it in my house. Do you wear shorts, Mr. Beauchamp?”

“Never.”

“Not even at the beach?”

“I never go to the beach.”

“Excellent answer, by Buddha.” The doctor finally laughed. “I think that merits a glass of Sancerre, don't you?”

“I do.”

The doctor's hand rose and the ordering of the Sancerre consisted of two quick motions of his index finger but no click. A whole world of sly provincial wealth was expressed in that gesture, an authority whose true root was obscure to an outsider.

“They know me here. They know what I drink.”

He's easy, Robert thought, and he relaxed. The doctor looked like he would give him some work. He just had to be a gentleman.

“Naturally,” Sar was continuing, “we need to know a little about you. My daughter has been rather ill lately so she is staying at home with us. Nervous exhaustion, I think.”

“Was she working here?”

“Not yet. She is looking. Her time in Paris didn't do her much good. I don't know what she got so exhausted from—I have scratched my head over it for weeks. My wife says—but she always has a theory. It's easy to have a theory, isn't it?”

“It is, yes.”

“I say there's no point having a theory. Just give me an explanation and a plan of action. I thought working on her English would do her the world of good. The social scene here—”

He pulled a face which, unexpectedly, made his face much handsomer. The wine arrived and they made a silent toast, but the doctor had not let go of his train of thought.

“—I mean, for kids of good family. The high-society kids. Well, it's appalling. They can do what they want. Sophal hangs out with the sons of air force generals and suchlike. The children of the rich. I can't seem to talk any sense into her. They do a lot of drugs and do what they want and no one will touch them. The boys are utterly worthless. They can kill any homeless person they want and nothing will happen. It's difficult to explain to you, you being a foreigner. I can't stand the thought of her ending up with one of them. I thought if she got her English up to speed…”

The doctor emitted his second sigh and the Tournedos Rossini arrived, the foie gras laid carefully on their surfaces. It was
service au guéridon,
the steaks prepared tableside.

“Then her chances for happiness will increase?” Robert said to himself.

“Wrong wine for steak,” Sar laughed, “but I don't care. Do you care, Mr. Beauchamp?”

“I don't care, no.”

“Then we don't care. If we don't care, no one does!”

“It's delicious wine—thank you.”

“Thank you for coming to a job interview at such short notice. Bon appétit. Now tell me about you. What brought you to Phnom Penh?”

On his long walk over from the National Museum Robert had prepared his story. He thought it best to be at least half truthful. The issue was whether he should own up to being a teacher; it had its pros and cons.

In the end he decided against it. English teachers were a dime a dozen in this city and in most cities like it. They formed a kind of sub-society all over the Far East, a loose confederation of dubious individuals with their own social niche and their severe reputation for being mangy and broke, though somewhat successful with the girls. Several of his friends at college had gone on to pursue that way of life in places where the koel birds sing and nothing more was ever heard of them. The tropical English teacher in his cargo shorts and flip-flops and his bad haircuts, saving his pennies by eating local every night and scouring his adopted city for sexual scraps and tidbits: easy to find here and free for the young. No money, yet still plenty of honey. But that was not his niche and he intended to stay as far away from it as he could. The clothes he had unexpectedly inherited, strangely enough, had nudged him into other ideas. It seemed absurd, in fact, to
step down
from them. He didn't really want to go this route at all, it was just that he couldn't think of any other way to make some quick cash. It was ironic, given that it was the only skill which he actually possessed. The doctor, meanwhile, seemed to sense—or rather wanted to believe—that this artfully disheveled youth was more than he appeared.

“The truth is,” Robert said, “I'm just traveling around Asia for a few months. I know it's a horrible cliché—but there we are. I was working at a bank in London and got absolutely fed up with it.”

“A bank, you say?”

“Just a company that audits banks, actually. Terribly boring.”

“I see. What was the company called?”

“Deloitte.”

“Well, all you young people seem to be traveling these days. Sophal says she wants to travel as well. Travel where? I ask her. She has no idea. Anywhere as long as it's travel. I can't really understand it myself, but then I am not twenty-five anymore. What is the point of travel just to travel? How old are you, if I may ask?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“A fine age, a fine age. A fine age for a man if you ask me.”

A fine age for anyone, Robert might have replied.

“At twenty-eight,” Sar added, “you can do whatever you want. Or you can nowadays. When I was twenty-eight it was rather a different matter. When I was thirty I was in the countryside being whipped.”

This seemed like an unpleasant topic so Robert steered the conversation away from it. He talked on about himself. Outside, the light visible through the windows dimmed a shade and Robert knew that the sunny part of the day was already over. He talked about England, life in London—tedium, monotony, gray skies, high taxes, the usual things that people living far away always like to hear about, as if they simultaneously both damaged and solidified the sterling image of Albion. He began to talk about his parents, but then stopped, thinking that he was overstepping the mark.

“No, no,” Sar objected, “do go on.”

“My father worked in a bank as well and my mother wrote plays for the radio. They live in East Grinstead.”

“East Grinstead?”

A thin smile came to the old man's lips. He always seemed to know more than he immediately let on.

“Are they aware that you are running around the world?”

“They disapprove, if that's what you mean.”

“I would disapprove too if I were them.”

Robert decided to find this amusing.

“It's only for a short while. I wanted to see the world a bit.”

“Where are you living, by the way?”

“I found a place called Colonial Mansions. It's just around the corner.”

“I know it well. The American embassy sets up many of its employees there. It's not terribly cheap, is it?”

Robert shrugged.

“It's all right. It's cheaper than East Grinstead.”

“Maybe you should come around for dinner at our house and meet everyone. Would you do that?”

“Certainly.”

“Not tonight, Sophal is out doing music. What about tomorrow then?”

“All right.”

Robert's voice wavered and he sensed some tensions coming to him from afar, like something clammy and malevolent carried over a body of still water.

“I'll have my wife ask the cook to make something Khmer. Do you like Khmer food?”

“Of course.”

“Some barangs won't eat it. They survive on steaks and milkshakes.”

Robert shook his head. “I find that hard to believe. It's so delicious.”

“I'm glad you think so. You seem like you've been here a long time.”

“A few weeks. But it feels like a few days.”

“A few weeks already. You don't sound too sure.”

“Maybe I've lost track of time.”

Robert smiled but the doctor did not return the gesture.

He said, instead, “That's what happens when you come here when you're young and you're not Khmer. It makes the time fly by. Everyone says so and I believe it.”

From the shadowed corners of the room the boys in the bow ties watched them with a wary aloofness that found its only expression in the permanently upturned corners of their mouths. There was a fixity about them, a muted beauty which made them, strangely, unapproachable. They stood there watching the Englishman in his odd clothes listening to the old Khmer doctor, whom they knew for his kindness and dottiness, and they reminded Robert of the children he taught in Elmer and who sometimes walked home with him across the railway bridge to his cottage at the edge of the woods. Their eyes moved as slowly as marbles rolling on a gradient which the eye could not detect and they spoke reluctantly only when they were spoken to, but there was thought and a subtle malice in their stoniness and gravity. It was a form of respect that does not shrink from quietly judging. The children were always curious about him and he was sure that they felt sorry for him: he was a forlorn figure to them. They could smell his loneliness and mediocrity, and in a perverse way it drew them to him. The doctor, for his part, could sense the same thing but it didn't draw him to Robert. It made him aware that there was an opportunity here.

“Maybe you'll stay a while, now that you are here,” he said affably. Their plates were covered with mustard-seeded blood. “Do you not have a girlfriend back home—or something like that?”

“Not really, no.”

“That's a shame. Maybe you are living in the wrong place. It's always wise to live in the right place.”

“I guess it is at that.”

“What does your father say?”

“My father?”

“What does he say about you not having a girlfriend?”

“He doesn't say anything about it.”

“Does he not, indeed? Does he not?”

“Not at all.”

“That is rather strange. Maybe he is under the impression—”

“I'm an obscenity?”

The doctor roared with laughter and raised his fork.

Obscenity? Robert thought wildly. What did his father think he was? The doctor's insinuation was strange, but it was a provocation to sound him out about his sexuality. It was better to ignore it.

“Well, never mind, Robert. You are in our land now. You don't have to pretend to be anything you are not.”

“Pretend?”

“You know what I mean. You can let your hair down here.”

Again, the index finger was raised.

“Garçon, let's have some crème brûlées, by Buddha. Why not? Does anyone have anything against it? We'll grow fat for a day then deflate to normal size.”

The doctor now receded an inch or two from the edge of the table and took off his glasses and then wiped them with his starched napkin. He apologized for using the phrase “by Buddha,” which was entirely inappropriate and heretical, but he had taken to using it in the old days and he had stuck with it because he found it amusing. He discouraged his guest from doing the same.

“Tomorrow night, when you come—here's my card with the address—I'll give you crème brûlées again, it's our favorite dessert at home. I hope you won't be bored. We are rather quiet people who enjoy our evenings in our garden. We rarely go out or throw dinner parties.”

They drank green tea with the crème brûlées and Robert asked if Sophal would know why he was there when he came.

“We'll talk to her this afternoon. She's not terribly enthusiastic about English lessons, I'll admit, but she'll go along with it because it pleases her mother and she doesn't have to do it fanatically. We are thinking something like an hour every day or so. Would you be able to do that?”

“An hour every day?”

“Well, I know it's a bit bold of me to suggest every day, but we'd be very grateful. It's honestly what she needs to do in order to improve.”

“I suppose I could.”

“You sound a bit doubtful. I understand. I'll be willing to make it worth your while. If you could do two hours, even more so.”

“Two hours?”

“Of course, I don't know how much time you have—”

“I have time,” Robert said. He held himself back from adding, “A lot of time.” How easy it was! They finished up their meal and walked through the Royal corridors to the Elephant Bar, on the far side of the lobby, which was more crowded than the restaurant. There was a pool table there, the arches were painted with images of elephants and there was a case of fine cigars with a hygrometer and little boxed posters of Jalisco and Gaulois.

They went to the bar and ordered cosmopolitan flights and the doctor paid again. One of the three shots that made up the cosmopolitan was with black pepper; another with orange. The glasses were expertly iced and the little silver elephants around them seemed to be keeping an eye on Robert's hands. He noticed how short and curiously shaped the doctor was. Like a bowling pin. From where did his inexhaustible good humor come? But it was a humor that was like light playing on the surface of oily water. Peer into it and all you saw was rainbow oil and reflections that moved constantly.