The Red Queen (25 page)

The young man’s accent is globalized American. He has studied at Berkeley, as he has already informed her.

In the ladies’ room, she does her best to repair her complexion. The lights are more flattering than those of the aeroplane toilet, and the application of a little powder and moist cinnamon lip paint restores her equanimity. She combs her hair, and sniffs at herself: does she smell of overnight transit? Perhaps, but it is too late to do much about that. She sprays herself with a little eau de Cologne, a refreshingly innocent Orpington perfume to which she has been lastingly loyal. She is ready to face the music and Jan van Jost.

The Chosŏn Suite is already full of labelled people of many nationalities. She registers her name, and takes her badge, and looks around her. Whom does she recognize? As yet, nobody. Cameras flash; drinks are offered. Perhaps unwisely she accepts what she takes to be a glass of wine. Her smooth-faced young minder introduces her to a clutch of Korean professors, and a journalist asks her to pose with one of them. She makes small talk. Soon, she knows, there will be speeches.

But the speeches do not come. More drinks come, and nuts and crisps and varnished rice crackers and pickled radishes also come, but no speeches. Everybody is waiting for the speeches, and for the opportunity to attack the buffet lunch, temptingly displayed on a side table. Babs Halliwell, whose minder is not-so-discreetly watching her every movement, has managed to find an acquaintance in the form of a microbiologist from Australia, whom she had first met three years earlier at a dinner at All Souls in Oxford. She remembers him well, partly because he had at this dinner claimed an earlier acquaintance with her husband Peter, and partly because they have since been in e-mail correspondence on medical matters. He remembers her, and seems pleased to see her. He is billed to give a paper, if she remembers rightly, on fertility rates and gender imbalance in post-industrial societies. He has put on weight since their last meeting, but on this she does not comment. His name (she peers myopically at his label, just to make sure it really is him) is Bob Bryant.

Bob Bryant voices the opinion that they are all having to wait for Jan van Jost, who is too grand to be prompt, and who wishes to make an entrance. He is said to be flying in from a lecture tour of China, but he should have arrived by now. Indeed, he should have arrived the night before. Bob is hungry and wants his lunch. Babs says she is not so hungry, but would like a chance to check out her hotel room and hang up her clothes. Does Bob know van Jost? Well, he wouldn’t say he knew him, but he has shared a platform with him, says Bob. ‘What is he like?’ asks Barbara. ‘Dapper,’ says Bob, who is not. ‘An Armani intellectual,’ says Bob. ‘Aha,’ says Babs, as though she had known this, though in fact she had not.

The proceedings begin without the King of the Conference Circuit. He has been delayed, some whisper. He is resting, others mutter. He is playing hard to get, conclude the journalists. Babs Halliwell is disappointed in him. In her view, the great should condescend. They should not stand on ceremony and make difficulties for the organizers of public events. She is annoyed with him for keeping her from her shower and her deodorant and her change of garments. Bob Bryant looks crumpled and casual, but that’s all right for him – he is an Australian, and that’s his style. It is not her style. She is from Orpington and Oxford, and she likes to impress.

The delegates are warmly welcomed in several languages, and more photographs are taken. The unfortunate and conspicuous absence of Jan van Jost from these official records will be keenly noted. Maybe somebody will be able to airbrush him in. Babs is not sure if she is hungry or not, but allows herself to be propelled towards the buffet and a plateful of small slivers of this and that. Somebody speaks to her about the Korean national dish of
kimchi
, and she samples it and praises it. She likes it: she likes ferocious foods.

She is beginning to feel very blurred, and is desperate for a siesta before the evening’s plenary address and the ceremonial dinner. How will she ever learn to distinguish these polite and grey-suited Korean gentlemen one from another? It will be hard to memorize their unfamiliar names, and she feels she cannot continue to peer down at their chests through her large varifocal glasses. She knows that everybody will find it all too easy to recognize her, for she sticks out in this assembly like a giraffe. There are so few women here, and she is so tall. This is nothing to be proud of. If anything, it is a disadvantage. Everything she does is far too conspicuous. At times, this is useful, but not when one is trying to slip away unobtrusively.

At last, she manages to take her leave, and to make her way to the hotel desk, where she claims her key and enquires after her baggage. It has been taken up to her room, she is told. So she follows it, up to the fifteenth floor. The fifteenth floor appears to be not quite finished: its walls are in the process of being papered by a small army of female paper-hangers wearing combat dress of a pale hospital green. Curling strips of wallpaper cover the carpets and their marbled surround. Paranoia strikes at the proud heart of Babs Halliwell: she is sure that Jan van Jost will not be allocated a room on an unfinished floor. Even Bob Bryant will be better placed than she, for this is a male-dominant culture. (She had learned this from sociologist friends and, more recently, from the Crown Princess.) But she marches on, towards her door, and inserts the electronic key. At first it does not work, but that is because she has put it in the wrong way round. She removes it, squints at it, reverses it, and tries again. This time the little green eye blinks back, and the door gives, and at last she is received into the anonymous safety of Room 1517.

She sits down on one of her twin beds with a sigh of relief, and kicks off her flat-heeled, gold-buckled shoes, which are beginning to pinch. So far, so good. And yes, there is her little green case-on-wheels, and her navy-blue Samsonite suitcase, neatly arranged for her upon the canvas strut of the collapsible luggage holder. This also is a relief. She had been slightly flustered at the airport by the eager welcoming waves of her minder. But all is well. She unpacks from her hand baggage her sponge bag and her hairbrush and her change of underwear and her red nightshirt and her dressing gown and her slippers, and she takes out her reading matter, and she arranges her books and her conference papers and her pills by the bedside of the bed nearer the window that she has decided to favour. She thinks of taking a shower before opening her suitcase, but she decides that it would be better first to unpack the rest of her conference clothes and to let them hang out in the wardrobe.

This is a mistake, as she will now discover.

She approaches her suitcase, and peers at its combination lock. Her magic PIN is 7777. She has been told that it is unwise to have so obvious, so memorable a number, but she is afraid that she will forget anything more complicated, and, anyway, who in the world would want to open her bags and steal her dresses?

The suitcase does not seem to want to open. She fiddles with the combination, readjusts her glasses, and tries again. Again, the lock does not respond. Is it broken? What can have gone wrong with it?

Impatiently, with rising panic, she presses and pushes, to no avail. Then she pulls at the zip on the compartment on the suitcase’s top, where she knows she has stored her thin raincoat and her small umbrella. She gropes in the recess, but they are not there. Somebody has stolen them. But the compartment is not empty. From it, she pulls out a copy of
The Economist
, and a crushed wad of Korean newsprint, and a Korean magazine. She stares at these objects in horror. Somebody has broken her lock, stolen her rainwear and stuffed her case with foreign reading matter. Who could have done such a wicked thing?

It takes her what seem like whole minutes to work out what she has done. She cannot believe it. She has taken the suitcase of a stranger from the luggage belt, and left her own suitcase at the airport. She has become one of those fools at whom all those superfluous warnings are directed. ‘Many suitcases look alike’ – how often has she heard and read that phrase? She has failed to identify her own luggage, and she has seized the suitcase of another.

She tries to breathe calmly, and to look at the international, ubiquitous Samsonite suitcase. It is, indeed, identical to her own, in every way. It is the same shape, the same colour, the same size, and it has been subjected to the same degree of wear. It, too, has a purple Pagoda Hotel tag tied in an identical manner to its identical handle but – and here she has to force herself to gaze directly at the horrifying evidence –
it is labelled with an unknown name
. The owner of this suitcase is not Dr Barbara Halliwell from Oxford, but a Dr Oo Hoi-Chang from Amsterdam. She is still in too deep a state of shock to be grateful that this person has written out his name in her alphabet as well as in his own. These newspapers, this magazine, belong to Dr Oo Hoi-Chang, who, somewhere in this hotel, will be wondering what the hell has happened to his suitcase.

It is clear that he must be booked into this hotel and that he must have been on the same flight, or this confusion could never have taken place. That at least is a small mercy. It is a very small mercy, but it is a mercy and a mitigation.

Dr Babs Halliwell cannot face summoning her smiling boy-minder Mong Joon, although he had assured her he would be ready to help in any emergency. She feels too foolish. She sits down, and tries to work out what to do next.

Where will her own suitcase now be reposing? Will it still be at the airport? Has she still got her baggage tag? Yes, she has. Here it is in her handbag. It is stapled on to her air ticket, as it should be. She supposes she could take a taxi back to the airport and try to effect an exchange, but she is not sure if she can manage this, in view of her inability to speak or read a word of the Korean language, in view of her panic and fatigue. She knows she has provided herself with a token supply of Korean money, but God knows how much a taxi to the airport is supposed to cost.

She thinks, hard. She decides to try to throw herself on the mercy of Dr Oo Hoi-Chang, if she can locate him. Maybe he is attending her very own conference on the New Frontiers of Health: Globalization and Medical Risk? If so, would that simplify or complicate her position? She scours through her conference papers, but can find no mention of him. (How does she know he is a man? Because of the magazines. Women do not read magazines like that. They are not pornographic magazines or motoring magazines, but they are inescapably male.) Would he speak English if she could locate him? How could she bring herself to confess to him her stupid, her unforgivable error?

Dr Halliwell decides to be brave. She works out her plan. She rings down to reception, and asks to speak to Dr Oo Hoi-Chang. She is asked to spell out his name, and she does so. She is not sure if she is relieved or appalled when the receptionist says that she will put her through.

She hears the phone ringing in the stranger’s room. She hears the voice of the doctor. Naturally, he responds in Korean. ‘Do you speak English?’ is all that she can find to say, and she says it. ‘Yes,’ says the doctor, hesitantly. ‘I have your suitcase,’ says big, bold Babs Halliwell, on the verge of childish tears. ‘I have it here, in my room. It is a mistake. You understand? A mistake.’

The doctor understands. Moreover, he sounds mightily relieved, which she had not quite bargained for, though it is a logical response. In fact, he sounds quite excited. Where is she? Here, in this very hotel? Yes, she is in Room 1517. Shall she bring him his suitcase, at once, she asks? No, he will come to collect it. He is on the same floor. He is in Room 1529, just along the corridor, and he will be with her very shortly.

She rushes to the mirror, to dab at her face. Her scratchy eyes are glistening and red-rimmed with shame and anxiety and exhaustion. She hears his feet along the corridor; she hears his discreet tap at the door. She opens it, and there he is, the doctor whose goods she has appropriated. He stares at her, shocked, as she guesses, by her size, and his eyes dart beyond her to his treasure.

Faintly, she waves him in. He is all smiles. Yes, yes, this is his very own case. He checks the combination lock, and it springs open to reveal the lucky man’s suits and shirts, neatly pressed and contained beneath their stretching diagonal straps.

‘It was identical,’ she says, and repeats, and parrots, with pathos. He seems to understand this.

What next?

This is the moment at which Dr Oo reveals himself as a hero. Instead of making off at once with his possessions, and making good his escape from this barbarian madwoman, he stays to enquire after her suitcase and to examine her plight. He is a man of sublime intelligence. He tells her that her case must still be at the airport. He had waited in vain for his, he says – or this is what she thinks he is saying – and he had seen one very like his own, with a Pagoda label, travelling round and round the belt. In the end, he had worked out what might have happened, but by this time the suitcase had disappeared from the belt and must have been taken into storage. So he had reported his loss, and had made his way to the hotel, to wait on events. He says he is very glad to see his things again, and now he will accompany her to the airport in a taxi to retrieve her suitcase for her.

She cannot believe that Dr Oo is such a gentleman. She cannot believe that this is what he is proposing to her: to her, a stupid stranger. But it is. He makes many comforting and conciliatory sounds, as he instructs her to pick up her shoulder bag, and to make sure that she has her room key, and to follow him to Room 1529, where he will deposit his case and pick up his wallet. She trails after him, as he trots briskly along the corridor – a corridor which by now seems, miraculously, to be completely repapered and workwoman-free – and she waits meekly at the threshold of his twin-bed room (a room which is, like his suitcase, identical to hers), as he reorganizes himself. Down in the lift they travel together, as she makes deferential noises and looks humble and grateful. Into a taxi he ushers her, and they find themselves bowling along, back the way she had come that morning, across the wide, flat river, past the posters, past the radio masts, past the bridges and the marshy banks of pink marine sedge, towards her lost bag.