The Red Queen (29 page)

Her programme is filling up. Will she have time to get to Suwon-Hwaseong in the company of Dr Oo, to celebrate the anniversary of the sixtieth birthday of the crown-princess-turned-queen-mother?

She has solved one memory puzzle: it comes to her, suddenly, that the granite boulders of the Palace Gardens remind her of the artificial landscapes of New York’s Central Park.

Dr Babs Halliwell knows that she should, at this point in the afternoon, put her feet up and read her Venetian detective story, like a sensible young-middle-aged woman. But she cannot settle. First she washes her Lycra knee-highs with the hotel-provided sachet of detergent and hangs them from the towel rail to dry. Then she places her lecture trousers in the trouser press and switches them on to grill. Then she tries to lie down, and remembers to swallow a few of the pills from the bottles that she has arranged upon her bedside table. She attempts a little deep breathing relaxation exercise, inhaling and exhaling lungs full of the purified and air-conditioned air. Her guardian spirits, who have temporarily assumed the form of one small but rather noisy insect, watch this decorous and regulated behaviour with approval, but they suspect it will not last. They know her too well. And they are right. The hot brightly lit lure of the city and the dark challenge of the underground are too strong for the healthy appetites of Babs Halliwell, and she is too restless to dispose herself quietly upon either of her twin beds. She is overstimulated and overexcited. She has the sense to change her shoes, and to check that she has plenty of
won
in suitably small denominations about her person, and then she plunges recklessly off into modernity.

It is the first time that she has set foot out of doors on her own, without an official group guide or Mong Joon or Dr Oo to guard her, and she finds the street instantly confusing. A tide of people is flowing along it, and traffic is pouring in both directions along the impassably wide roads and round and round a monumental traffic island occupied by a vast and handsome three-storey-high medieval oriental gate. The junction is busier than Hyde Park Corner or Marble Arch. At first, she takes the line of least resistance, and allows herself to be carried along the pavement by the crowd of shoppers and homeward-bound workers, past little stalls selling gadgets and trinkets and socks and shoes and magazines and bottles of water, past shopfronts displaying stylish garments. It is an orderly and friendly chaos: everyone has told her Seoul is a safe city, and she feels safe, though she has no idea where she is going. She lingers long by a street trader selling an amazing variety of hosiery. She sees on display some highly desirable knee-high, scarlet nylon stockings, with a pretty pattern of butterflies in the weave. She really wants them. Shall she buy them? No, of course not. She really does not need a pair of scarlet socks.

She tears herself away, and glances back, to take her bearings, but her tall hotel, with its conspicuous purple logo, has already vanished from sight. She wonders if she will ever see it again. She is in an expensive downtown shopping neighbourhood of big hotels and big stores and international labels; she knows there are other, more distinctively Korean districts to explore, but how will she ever find them? Somewhere there are famous clothes markets and food markets and herb markets, and a celebrated tourist-favoured place called Insadong with traditional handicrafts and antiques and art galleries and tearooms. She longs to see all these things. But where are they? Is it worth trying to find them, or shall she just go with the flow? Can she reach them by subway, and dare she try to do so?

She has various maps, but they show bewildering conflicts and contradictions in scale, in orientation, and in the spelling of place names. The maps of Seoul are not like the maps of London or Manhattan. Plans of the underground, as Dr Oo had hinted, evidence more regularity. She will give the underground a try, if she can find where it is.

She plunges down steps that might or might not lead to a subway line, and is instantly sucked into another subterranean layer of the city. There is a whole new metropolis down here, with a spreading labyrinth of galleries and arcades and tunnels where touts are offering job lots of surprising items. Books, brassieres and packets of biscuits are heaped about in random piles on the pavement in front of bijou boutiques selling jewellery and shirts and sports shoes. It is confusing, chaotic, enticing. Babs’s sense of direction has by now vanished, but eventually she sees, in the far distance, a green sign saying, in English, ‘TRACKS’. She makes for the tracks.

Three hours later, in the safety of the Pagoda bar, she tries to tell Bob Bryant where she has been, but she does not make a very good job of it. Her account is as baffling to him as her adventures had been to her: the only part of it he latches on to is her confession that she had forgotten the magic word of ‘Bi-Bim-Bap’, and had ended up by default with a small plateful of the most disgusting cold red noodles covered in chilli sauce. She, who prides herself on being able to devour anything, had been unable to get them down, and now, after all that walking, she declares that she is famished. She is ravenously awaiting the chicken wings with fries that she and Bob have ordered to accompany their beer. Bob has had one or two suppers already, but he is game for another.

Bob has been to Seoul several times, and he is far more interested in conference gossip and catching up on stories of academic life in the United Kingdom and the United States than in Babs’s naive impressions of a foreign culture. He can do without the travelogue news, for South-East Asia is not nearly as foreign to him as it is to her. He is no stranger to the many varieties of
bibimpap
. After this conference, he is on his way to another conference in Japan, but he does not want to talk about that either. He wants to tell her about the implications for the nature–nurture debate of the latest findings on a fancy new way of rewiring the brains of laboratory rats, and he wants to share with her the view that Dr Radda’s paper on the hereditability of certain forms of resistance to bowel cancer had been substantially lifted from a paper delivered some weeks ago at Stanford and subsequently pasted all over the Internet. It had all been about high salt and low fat, and it had racist implications anyway, says Bob.

Babs picks up a crispy, brown chicken wing and starts to tear at it with unladylike ferocity.

‘What doesn’t?’ she comments, as she swallows the tender white fibres of fowl and gobbles a few fries.

‘God,’ she says, still chewing vigorously, and in excuse for her poor manners, ‘those noodles were the end. Cold and slimy and hot at the same time. I like hot food, but cold-hot food is horrid. Could anyone really like them? Mind you, it was a very cheap, touristy kind of eatery. It wasn’t very authentic.’

‘Do your students plagiarize?’ asks Bob, as he attacks his bowl of high-salt, high-fat fries with similar gusto.

‘I haven’t had any students for a year. But yes, when I have, they do. And so do I. I plagiarize, and I appropriate. So do we all. Don’t we? Nothing comes from nowhere, does it? And with the Internet, you can’t always tell, can you? I just copy out these chunks of argument, and then I can’t remember who thought of it first. What does it matter who thought of it first, as long as it gets you somewhere interesting?’

‘That’s a very dangerous attitude, Dr Halliwell.’

‘Dangerous for me, perhaps, but I don’t suppose it hurts anyone else very much.’

Both fall silent, as they gnaw at the small bird bones. Both are thinking of Peter Halliwell’s father, a famous anthropologist who had been accused of falsifying the controversial results of years of remote fieldwork in Africa. The principal accusation had not been substantiated, but he had committed other smaller but more easily verifiable professional offences, and his career and reputation had suffered disastrously. Each knows that the other is thinking of this. It does not need a fancy theory of telepathy or neural interaction to explain it, and Babs is not at all surprised when Bob’s next remark is ‘And how’s your ex, Babs?’

Peter is not Babs’s ex, for she is still legally married to him, and still wears her wedding ring, but she is used to this terminology and does not challenge it. She considers it a fair question, for Bob Bryant had known Peter Halliwell in the old days, before Peter lost his mobility and most of his mind. Bob had met Peter long before he met Babs. Bob had met Peter before Babs had met Peter. Bob and Peter had been tennis partners when they had both been postgraduates at Cambridge. This seems unlikely now, for Bob Bryant looks too unfit to play tennis, and Peter Halliwell can hardly walk and rarely leaves his room in the Retreat. But twenty years earlier, they had been contenders, and had together won the Ashley College Cup.

‘Oh, God,’ says Babs, in initial response.

‘Don’t say if you don’t want,’ says Bob, who is kind, though curious.

‘I don’t mind saying,’ says Babs.

And she says. Bob Bryant listens, courteously. It is a sad story. Babs has had a tough time, a raw deal. That’s what all her friends say, and it is true. But Peter Halliwell has had a tougher time, and a worse deal.

‘What about medication?’ asks Bob, when she has finished her update on Peter’s condition.

She shrugs.

‘When it might have done him some good, he wouldn’t take anything. Maybe he was right not to want to, I don’t know. Now it’s too late, they fill him up with God knows what.’

‘Is it really too late?’

‘Far too late,’ says Babs. ‘You should see him. You wouldn’t ask.’

‘Dying by Lot, eh?’ says Bob, and waves at the waiter in hope of another pint of beer.

‘I suppose voluntary and involuntary euthanasia will have been adopted worldwide in a hundred years,’ says Babs, in indirect response to this. ‘But we’ll call them something different. I mean, it’s inevitable, isn’t it? Do you know what it costs, to keep Peter at the Retreat? It doesn’t matter to me – financially, it’s covered – but it is a lot of money, to keep somebody in such misery. Somebody who would much rather have been dead. No, I won’t, thanks, but I wouldn’t mind a shot of something. Is there any particular kind of Korean hard liquor I should try?’

She smiles ingratiatingly at the waiter, wondering if she will ever get rid of this overpowering sense of her own physical superfluity. She had hoped that in Bob’s large-bellied, bare-armed company, she might begin to feel a little more refined, but she still feels too big. Alice in Wonderland must have felt like this, when she went down the rabbit hole. Is there a shrinking potion on sale anywhere, she wonders?

The neat, slim, willowy, androgynous waiter recommends that she try some
soju
. OK, she says, she is game for that.

‘You can get this aphrodisiac,’ says Bob, ‘with a dead snake floating in it.’

‘Fair enough,’ says Babs.

‘Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader of North Korea,’ says Bob, ‘is famed to be one of the world’s greatest consumers of Hennessy VSOP Cognac.’

‘Fair enough,’ says Babs, sniffing cautiously at her glass of
soju
.

‘Are you going on the trip to the Expo?’ asks Bob, as he watches her take her first small sip of the tapioca-based firewater.

‘Of course,’ says Babs. ‘I never miss an outing. I love an outing.’

Babs Halliwell had predicted that Jan van Jost would not join the coach tour. She was wrong. She has made various false assumptions about Professor Jan van Jost, and this was one of them.

Professor Jan van Jost does join the coach tour. At ten o’clock the following morning, he ceases to sulk in his suite, emerges from his superior isolation, and joins the party. There he is, in the foyer, waiting to become a tourist, waiting to be handed his Tour Welcome Package and his Guide to the Expo and yet another map of Seoul. He is looking pale and affable: the halo of fame still surrounds him, but it glows a little less brightly, and his skin has a taut and tired transparency, a delicate pallor beneath the tan. It occurs to Babs, who is mollified by his very attendance, that he may be somewhat exhausted. He is in his late sixties, and he has been touring China. China is enough to tire a younger man.

She is further mollified when he follows her on to the coach, and elects to sit beside her. It is true that in her role as the only woman delegate who has signed up for the outing she has been directed to a good window seat at the front, with a good view: no doubt he takes his place next to her in his role of alpha male. Nevertheless, whatever the reasons, here he is, nodding pleasantly at her, and dutifully opening his map upon his knee. ‘Good morning,’ he says, agreeably. ‘And how are you this morning? Have you been enjoying Seoul? Is it your first visit here?’

She is disarmed by the condescension of this fairly elementary politeness, and, as they sit there waiting for something to happen, she tells him a little of her impressions of the city. He listens, with deference. ‘You have seen far more than I,’ he offers, when she mentions the queen’s palace and the stone tomb that houses the king’s placenta. ‘Do you have a special interest in Korea?’

She demurs. She does not embark on the story of the Crown Princess and Dr Oo because it is too long and too complicated: no, she says, she is here simply because she was invited. Does he know the country? And had he enjoyed his visit to China?

The coach is still stationary, in front of the hotel. What are they waiting for now? Babs can see her putto, Mong Joon, on the hotel steps, keeping his eyes on her until she is safely on her official way to her official destination.