The Red Queen (31 page)

What, asks Dr Halliwell rhetorically, was the connection between this sister’s long-ago-selected field of expertise and this sibling’s later excessive production of red blood cells? Was there any? Was it coincidence? It can only have been a coincidence, for nothing in this woman’s medical history could have predicted the onset of this rare disease. It is a disease of which the origins are unknown, though it more commonly afflicts males over sixty than middle-aged professional women from Newcastle upon Tyne. So why had the sister been attracted to this field in the first place? And what effect did or should or could this kinship have on the nature of her medical advice to her sick sibling?

She stares at her audience, leaving these interesting questions in the air. She knows they have no answer. Her story is a story of pure chance. It has no meaning. It is very interesting, but it has no meaning. Its lack of meaning is its meaning.

Did her audience hear her? Or are they all fast asleep, worn out by their morning’s trudging round the concrete-and-fibreglass acres of the Expo? She bows politely as she gathers her papers together on the lectern, and detaches the heavy microphone box from the waistband of her trouser suit. There is a decent spatter of applause. She leaves the podium, reflecting that most of them had probably stopped listening long ago, despite her heroic efforts to keep them awake. Throughout her paper, on which she had laboured for so long, her audience would have been thinking about its supper or its salary or its sex life. That’s the way it goes with academic papers and lectures. Lectures, like examinations, are an anachronism, a quaintly surviving form of a medieval endurance test, and will soon go the way of the eight-legged Chinese Confucian essay. Anyone will be able to read what she has to say on the Internet, anyway, if anyone is interested. Why bother with the labour of bodily attention, of bodily presence? Why bother with the slow and awkward machinery of headphones and simultaneous translation? Why bother to come all the way to Seoul in the first place?

Text, subtext, content, presentation. The trouser press in Room 1517 has done wonders for the crease in Dr Babs Halliwell’s trousers. She looks down, approvingly, as she descends the steps from the platform. At least she
looks
quite smart, she tells herself, as she struggles against a growing and familiarly dreary sense of inadequacy and post-performance depression. It hadn’t been a complete disaster, had it?

Babs Halliwell knows that she will have to go to Jan van Jost’s lecture, even though he had not taken the trouble to attend hers. She is morally committed to this because of the immaterial butterfly that had landed upon her shoulder. She knows her place. So, when the faithful Dr Oo contacts her about their tentative Suwon-Hwaseong project, she explains that she cannot go on the day he had first suggested because she wishes to hear about ‘The Leaden Casket: Meditations on the Apocalypse’. What about the day after that? Fine, said Dr Oo, obligingly. Perhaps, says Dr Oo, he would come with her to hear van Jost? It is not every day that one has the opportunity to hear so great a man, and nobody would notice a cross-conference interloper, surely? It has been very gracious of van Jost to spend so long in Seoul, and to attend so much of this extended conference. Van Jost has not regally breezed in and regally breezed out again, as conference stars so often do. Dr Oo agrees with Dr Halliwell that it would be improper not to listen to van Jost. Suwon-Hwaseong can wait.

So Dr Oo and Babs Halliwell sit side by side to hear Jan van Jost address the subject of the leaden casket of death. His performance is at once highly impressive and almost wholly incomprehensible. Is he talking literally, or figuratively? Is he talking sense, or nonsense? Is he talking ecology, or ethics, or epidemiology, or psychology, or philosophy? He ranges widely through the cultures of the West, invoking Epicurus and Lucretius, Freud and Frazer, Lacan and Foucault, Gotthold Lessing and Doris Lessing, Zola and Lévi-Strauss. He speaks of the diseases of the soul and of the universe, and of the approaching end of human life on earth, and of the backward shadow that the end casts upon our earthly endeavours. He speaks of year zero, ground zero and world zero. He speaks of the Casket Letters which hid the secrets of the passions of Mary Queen of Scots, and of the wooden casket in which Princess Diana of Wales tried to hide the squalid secrets of the British Crown and Court. He speaks of AIDS and of the lure of the Gothic vision of death. He quotes from
King Lear
and from Edgar Allen Poe. He speaks of the ‘unreturned gaze’, and of the ‘beseeching eye’. He speaks of the failure of the Enlightenment and of the transcultural tragedy. Babs wonders at first what on earth poor Dr Oo can be making of all this, but decides it is too late to worry about that: Dr Oo is a grown man, and he’d got into this of his own free will. He must have sat through more perplexing discourses in his time.

The lecture emerges from profound obscurity to end with a simple but inexplicable image, an image of living entombment. Van Jost presents man, buried alive in the body, trapped in the coffin-casket, dying a slow and inevitable death, in a darkening planet, alone in the empty sterile universe.

Jan van Jost bows, to tumultuous and uncomprehending applause. What on earth had he been talking about?

Babs Halliwell asks him, directly, that evening, at the reception in the Dutch Embassy that is being given in his honour. She sees him standing at a picture window, momentarily isolated and accessible, staring out from the diplomatic heights of a hilltop over the vast sprawling modern city of Seoul, and she goes up to him and addresses him, boldly. Had his final image referred, she provocatively demands, to the Korean Prince Sado, the Prince of the Rice Chest? The connections, she says, had been too striking to be coincidental.

Van Jost says that he has never heard of Prince Sado or of the rice chest. Who, van Jost asks, was Prince Sado?

Babs Halliwell tells him about Prince Sado. Somewhat to her surprise, he appears to be as gripped by her narrative as she had been by the narrative of the Crown Princess, and, although she fears the story may be losing something in the telling, she can see that she has his entire attention. He ushers her, wine glass in hand, away from the wide expanse of window to a deeply upholstered ambassadorial sofa, and persuades her to sink down upon it by his side. He presses her for more details about the clothing phobia and the death in the rice chest. He is not quite as interested in the princess herself as Babs is, but she supposes that that is just a natural gender difference, and that he is identifying with the male strand of the story. She is gratified by his eagerness to hear more, by his wish that he had known of this story earlier. He picks it up very quickly. The quickness of his mind is a delight to her. ‘I could have worked it in so easily,’ he says, annoyed with himself for having missed a trick. ‘It would have been an excellent point of reference. I suppose all Koreans know about Prince Sado and this Imo Incident?’

Babs has to confess that she doesn’t really know how widespread the knowledge of the princess’s memoirs is in their native land. She says she longs to find out. She herself as yet knows so little about them, they came her way by accident, she had brought them with her to Seoul more or less by accident, she tells him. She also finds herself telling him about her acquaintance with Dr Oo. (She does not confess to the suitcase incident.) She tells him that she is going to Suwon the next day with Dr Oo, to see Prince Sado’s final resting place. Would he like to come too, she enquires? She has had several glasses of wine by now, and is on excellent form. It is always pleasant to be monopolized by the highest-ranking and most famous man in the room. She glows with confidence. She no longer feels herself to be too ugly and too big. She knows that she is handsome, and admirable, and admired.

Jan van Jost says that he will think about it. He says that he admires her for having got to grips with their host country so quickly. He has been too tired to make the best of his visit so far, but today he feels a little better. He says he would like a bibliographical reference for the memoirs: perhaps he can add Prince Sado to his essay on the Leaden Casket before he publishes. Would he like to borrow them, she offers. Well, yes, he admits that he would. Can she spare them? Of course, of course, she assures him. She hates lending books to people, but van Jost does not count as people.

Later that evening, she brings them down to the lobby of the Pagoda Hotel and entrusts them to him. He says he will read them overnight and return them in the morning. He says he needs little sleep. He sleeps badly, and he reads fast.

She can well believe that he reads fast. The evidence of his erudition is overpowering. He must have been reading all night, every night, for decades. How else could he know so much?

In the morning, he rings her in her room at eight and asks if he can join her expedition to Suwon-Hwaseong with Dr Oo. He has read the Crown Princess’s story overnight, and longs to follow up his introduction to her, with the chance of a knowledgeable escort like Dr Oo. He would like to see a little bit of the real Korea, while he is here. Would she mind, would Dr Oo mind, would he be an intrusion? Not at all, says Babs. She is excited by his excitement, and slightly relieved not to be spending a whole day tête-à-tête with Dr Oo. A tête-à-tête could have had its awkward moments. She is sure that Dr Oo will be pleased. Well, almost sure. Dr Oo is a happily married man, or so he says. And three is a good number for an outing.

And so it is that the three of them find themselves on a suburban train, which is making a slow stopping journey towards Suwon. Suwon is now a commuter suburb of Seoul, and it is easier to get there by train than by hire car or taxi, says Dr Oo. They are off on a spree, to visit the UNESCO World Heritage Site. They have escaped their guides and minders and fellow delegates, and privatized themselves.

The one-time Crown Princess, reincarnated as the Mother Queen, had travelled to Suwon-Hwaseong for her sixtieth birthday celebrations with great pomp. This was the only grand state progress of her long life. Unlike Queen Elizabeth I of England, or Marie Antoinette of France, or Catherine the Great of Russia, she had led a retired though not a very peaceful life. But on her way to Suwon, an immense retinue of colourful pageantry had attended her. A thousand-strong procession of bowmen and horses and musicians had crossed the great river Han upon a wide and magnificent pontoon, and scores of court artists had documented every inch of the event for posterity. The Mother Queen had peered through the curtains of the heavily draped royal palanquin at the broad river, and at the hills, and at the spreading southern plain, and at the waving and petitioning crowds of her unknown and distant people, and she had looked back on the turbulent times she had so far so unexpectedly and so shrewdly survived. She had wondered that she had lived so long to see so much. Some of these impressions she later recorded; some she did not.

In her memoirs, the Mother Queen had dwelt much on her gratitude to her son King Chŏngjo for this lavish display of filial respect, and pretended to make much of her own humility and unworthiness. But she was a self-serving and unreliable narrator, and a self-confessed diplomat in her family’s cause, as well as in her own. How much of the truth, wondered Dr Babs Halliwell, could one deduce from her various accounts? Babs is irrationally convinced that she can read the subtext of much of the Mother Queen’s memoirs. Babs has a sense that she is in direct communion with her. She also knows that this sense must be an illusion, for there are as many subtexts as there are readers. She has been brought up in a postmodern relativist world, therefore she cannot believe in direct messages, either from a text or from beyond the grave. Nevertheless, there is some kind of a message, and it is she herself that is receiving it. If she has a self, which is also problematic.

Babs peers out, not through the embroidered and thickly shrouded curtains of a queenly palanquin, but through the train’s glassy modern windows. Jan van Jost and Dr Oo are speaking together in Dutch. Babs cannot understand a word that they are saying, which makes her feel slightly paranoid, but her sense of exclusion is offset by her sense of satisfaction in having been the agent for bringing these two unlikely characters together. It is quite a coup. Probably Jan (as she is now allowed to call him) is pleased to find someone with whom he can speak a little in his native tongue. Dr Oo is something of a linguist, it appears. This will be an outing to remember, an outing for the diary that alas she does not keep. She will be able to dine out on it. If ever she is asked to dine in All Souls’ again, she will be able to boast about travelling to Suwon with Jan van Jost.

And so it is that the three of them find themselves disembarking from their commuter train and climbing into a taxi at Suwon station. The taxi heads off up through busy nondescript modern streets and then up a winding wooded hill towards the main entrance of the ancient fortress. Dr Oo now sits in front, chatting with the driver, and Babs and Jan sit in the back. Babs Halliwell is in a mood of happy exhilaration and anticipation. She feels that her powers are restored to her. After a disastrous start, this strange visit is turning out well. It is all far more interesting than she could ever have expected. The sheer good luck of meeting Dr Oo fills her with delight. Her whole life seems to have taken a turn for the better. Surely all will be well. Her guardian spirits, who had temporarily abandoned her at Incheon airport, have not deserted her. Perhaps they had not abandoned her at all – perhaps they had planned the whole thing. She can hardly believe that she is going sightseeing with this distinguished and well-mannered man, and that he seems to be content with her company. How lucky she is, to be where she is, and who she is, and to be living at this moment of history!