The Red Queen (26 page)

On the way, he asks her what she is doing in Seoul, and she tells him. His English, once he gets his ear attuned to her responses, is good: it is as good, and as American-accented, as the English of the baby-faced, Berkeley-educated Mong Joon. She tells him about her conference, and he tells her that he is in Seoul to attend a different conference, on a different topic. He is not a doctor of sociology or philosophy or economics or even of psychiatry, but a medical doctor, a neurologist. His speciality is the stroke. The conference will discuss new treatments for stroke patients. She finds this reassuring. If she has a stroke, he will resuscitate her. If she faints, he will revive her. Her profession is abstract and frivolous in comparison with his. She is full of admiration for this small, neat, self-possessed and courteous gentleman.

Her one regret, at this stage, is that she had not taken a shower before ringing him. She had been too impulsive, too eager to right her wrong. He has travelled much better than she has. She feels gross and dirty, and she is afraid that she stinks. She knows that it is said that people of the East think that all Westerners stink, and in her case she fears it may be true. She sniffs at herself, surreptitiously, and the result is not reassuring. He must find her disgusting. She is ashamed. How much more the gentleman he, to escort so gallantly so unattractive and so large and so deeply stupid a female! Is there anything that she can do to reclaim her self-respect, to dignify herself a little in his eyes?

Luckily, she finds that the bundle of Korean
won
that she has with her will be more than enough to cover the two-way taxi fare. She had been wise to change some money, although it is her own folly that has made its use so necessary. He protests that he will pay, but of course she insists that she must, and, correctly, he allows her to do so. Once more she trails after him, as he leads the way to baggage enquiries and, after some hassle, successfully extracts her suitcase from a back room. This time she belatedly, superfluously and carefully, before witnesses, checks its label, and her name, and its baggage tag. She is not sure that the young men in baggage enquiries are sniggering at her, but she concedes they would have a right to do so if they so chose. Dr Oo certainly does not snigger; on the contrary, he is at pains to point out that her suitcase is indeed the very same as his own. Anyone, he says, could easily have made such a mistake. This is not true, but it is very politely put.

She could embrace this man. She could kiss him, were she not so repulsive to herself. He has a steel tooth. She has always fancied men with steel teeth.

On the way back to the hotel, along a route with which she is rapidly becoming too familiar, she relaxes enough to tell him that she is simply longing for a nice hot shower, and that she blames the Crown Princess of Korea for her absent-mindedness at the baggage belt. ‘I had been reading all day and all night,’ she says. ‘I have been reading this extraordinary book.’

She cannot tell whether or not he responds to the name of the Crown Princess because he is so very polite that he nods with seeming interest at everything she says.

When they get back to the Pagoda Hotel, he insists on carrying her suitcase for her, up the marble entrance staircase from the street level, and into the lift, and up to the fifteenth floor, and along the corridor to her room. He watches, benevolently, as she fumbles clumsily with her room key to Room 1517. ‘You are tired,’ he says, kindly. Yet more tears well in her eyes, as she stretches out her hot, large, not-very-clean hand to him in gratitude and farewell.

‘Perhaps,’ he says, as he (perhaps a little reluctantly) takes this distasteful hand, ‘perhaps, if we have some free time, we may meet for a drink? Perhaps I may take you for a tour of the Crown Princess’s palace? The garden is beautiful. You may see where she lived, if you would like.’

So he did know of the Crown Princess, this enigmatic foreign doctor man. She so longs to recover herself in his eyes that she perhaps rashly says that she would be delighted to meet him again. She will leave him a note, or he will leave her a note, when they have sorted out their respective schedules. They will make an assignation. Again, profusely, she thanks him. And she retires into her room, at last, and throws herself in exhaustion and disgrace upon her bed. She sees that her red message light is blinking furiously, and, as she begins to peel down her socks from her swollen ankles, her phone begins to ring. Her broad-cheeked, smiling, putto minder, Mong Joon, is after her. He will want to know why she tried to escape. But, she vows, he will never, ever find out. It is all too shaming. She will never tell.

It is late afternoon, and Dr Barbara Halliwell sits in the middle of the second row of the Sejong Auditorium, as she inattentively listens through her multilingual headphones to yet more welcoming addresses. On the bench in front of her is her conference pack of papers, her conference ballpoint pen, her conference notepad, her conference map of Seoul, and the by now well-read, dog-eared memoirs of the imperative Crown Princess. As the speeches proceed, Babs begins methodically to draw an egg-and-dart pattern round the edge of the top sheet of her virgin notepad. She appears to be listening, but her mind is scattered into particles and is wandering. Global harmony, global resources, global warming, information interchange, international cooperation, birth rates, death rates, tuberculosis, malaria, the human genome, genetic patenting, AIDS… The phrases hover and buzz through the air-conditioned atmosphere, but they do not settle for long in the jet-lagged consciousness of Dr Halliwell. Altitude and the Crown Princess have shattered her perceptions into many little disconnected but perhaps potentially interlocking fragments.

She is in other places and in other times. One of her many astral bodies is travelling restlessly, like a shuttle, apologetic, ashamed, backward and forward along an airport highway, clutching a suitcase and smelling of sweat and dirt and pressurized bodily gases. This bodily persona is attempting to charm a kind but inscrutable man with a sexually attractive steel tooth. Another of her bodies is sitting immobile in a hospital in a sterile room, gazing at a small child in drug-controlled pain, a child she can no longer touch or reach, a child behind glass, a child doomed to an early death by her own ignorance and by her protective love and by her defective genes and by the overheating imperfections of medical science. Another persona that seems to have attached itself to her by some form of metempsychosis is cramped in a male body in a rice chest, listening to the punishing god of thunder. Yet another crouches in the shade of a compound wall, hiding from the heat of the noonday sun, penning a letter of urgent appeal for a stay of execution. An offspring of this crouching woman is dialling 999 and the emergency services in the small hours of the morning in Kentish Town in North London.

The Crown Princess sits invisibly at the elbow of Babs, self-summoned from two centuries of sleep, urgent with her messages from the other world. Dr Halliwell cannot yet decode them. They are in an alien language. They are about illness and madness. They are about the abuses of parental power. They are about transmission, and failures of transmission. They are about maternity, and death, and progress. Dr Halliwell is the chosen vessel. Dr Halliwell is feeling a little unwell. It is all too much for her. She is clever, but not
that
clever. She feels overwhelmed and inadequate. What is she doing here in Seoul? She has strayed too far from home. She understands nothing. She has tried to think of herself as a reasonably competent person, but incompetence has now struck her like a whirlwind. She is off course. She has no course. She is lost.

Professor Jan van Jost, however, is found. That is him, sitting at the end of the front row, a few places to her right, in this modern but rather gloomy auditorium. He is somewhat smaller of stature but better looking than she had expected him to be. He is neat, even-featured, lightly tanned, and his hair is a crisp, short-cropped, silvery grey. The back of his head signifies effortless authority. He is also, as her Australian colleague Bob had forewarned her, extremely well dressed, in a well-cut suit of an unusual shade of pale straw-green. A glow seems to emanate from him and to bathe him in its soft warm light. He glows like a royal personage or a film star, discreetly but inescapably positioned in a gathering of subdued and attendant courtiers and peasants. This is surely the quiet, steady glow of fame.

Jan van Jost’s keynote address, which he will deliver in mid conference, is entitled ‘The Leaden Casket: Meditations on the Apocalypse’. He is known for his colourful literary allusions and what some consider his excessively flamboyant prose. He appears to be intending to lob an explosive into this sober conference. Will it be about AIDS? Will it be a warning of the end of the world? It has occurred to Babs Halliwell that his title may seem to have some connection with her own, though this, if so, is a coincidence. She is to speak on triage and risk assessment in complex experimental choices of medical intervention. Her approach is ethical, rather than medical. His remit appears to be even more comprehensive, as befits a guru of the globe.

She will not speak about the fatal choice that she herself had made for her own child. Will Jan van Jost also have a concealed agenda? Yes, of course. Which of us has not, however abstract our reasoning may claim to be? A scarlet thread runs through all things. But Babs Halliwell has no idea of what that thread might be, for she knows nothing at all of van Jost’s personal history.

Bassanio, in
The Merchant of Venice
, paradoxically chooses life and love when he chooses the leaden casket. Gold and silver are the bad choices, the deadly choices, made by bad princes from foreign lands. They are the exotic, multicultural choices, the hostile choices of Africa and Spain. To choose dull lead is to choose real life. The leaden casket is not a coffin for a Coffin King. Lead represents humility, submission, virtue, grace, survival. Is this a universal symbolism? Hemp and cotton and silk; lead and silver and gold; magpies and ravens and birds of doom. These thoughts drift in and out of the well-stocked consciousness of Barbara Halliwell. Her head is too full of matter. She has seen
The Merchant of Venice
several times, and, like most twentieth-century spectators, she finds it a problematic play.

Peter Halliwell persistently refused to take his medication. He had that right. Their son Benedict had had no choice but to submit to his medication. He was an infant, and therefore he had no choice. He could not be informed of his condition, and he did not need to give consent. The medication killed him. It had been intended to offer him a chance of survival, but in fact it killed him. Thus their only child Benedict Halliwell had died. Peter Halliwell had never forgiven Babs Halliwell for this death and for the faulty gene and the false medication that had caused this death. He had accused her, to her face, of being a murderer. He had seized her by the throat and yelled at her that she was a murderer. She had shaken him off quite easily because she is a strong woman, and he had been drunk at the time, and not by nature a killer. And she had forgiven him for it because he was mad. She had tried to move on.

Peter Halliwell had not moved on. He became the Prince of Mournful Thoughts, the Coffin Prince of Kentish Town. It was not the death of his son that drove him to his ultimate despair, Babs now believes, though that was surely a precipitating factor. She is now convinced – or has convinced herself? – that it is the life of his father that destroyed him. These things have long, long fuses. Peter was encouraged and tormented and provoked and ultimately rejected by his father, and that is why he has ended up in such profound, imprisoned, helpless inertia, imprisoned in a well-guarded and expensive Retreat.

She had once, in their early days together, found the intensity of his despair glamorous. It had seemed theatrical and amenable. It had attracted her. But it had not been amenable. She is older, wiser and, on the whole, happier now.

The unmedicated and unassuaged Peter Halliwell had raved around the steep Victorian stairwell of the North London house that they had inhabited. He had threatened to kill himself, on more than one occasion, but when at last he made a serious attempt to do so he had fallen into the common error of not finishing the job properly. To be fair to his intentions, he could not have been said to be guilty of issuing a ‘cry for help’. He had been less histrionic, more committed to the act than that phrase would suggest. But he had chosen a bizarre form of self-execution. He had tried to hang himself from the stairwell, with a noose made out of knotted silk ties. He had tied together a motley collection of ties – an old school tie, a college tie, a club tie, a joke Christmas present tie with teddy bears – but he had tied them together very badly, under the influence of half a bottle of vodka and a bottle full of sleeping pills, and the improvised noose had broken. Babs, in bed, had heard the thud.

Maybe she should not have dialled for the emergency services. Maybe she should have let him lie, and let him die.

Is this the message of the Crown Princess? Surely not. There must be some more universal element in her story. She cannot have crossed the centuries simply to tell Babs Halliwell that four years ago Babs ought not to have dialled 999 for an ambulance.

Babs Halliwell shakes her head, as these thoughts buzz round her ears. She cannot concentrate on euthanasia in the Netherlands, even though, in her own country, she is chair of a committee on the right to die.

According to a footnote in Thea Landry’s translation, Crown Prince Sado had tried to kill himself, on that fatal day, on his father’s orders, by strangling himself with the girdle of his garments. ‘Die!’ his father had yelled at him, and the son had tried to oblige. But he hadn’t tried hard enough, and the doctors had intervened and revived him with pills and potions. And so he had died in the rice chest, some days later. So much for the Hippocratic oath. Though the Korean court doctors probably did not subscribe to the Hippocratic oath, so one couldn’t really blame Hippocrates.