The Red Queen (40 page)

And this, of course, had been what she had wanted. She had not wanted her role to go unrecognized. She wants the whole world to know that it was she who had been there, at the end. She wants to go down in history, as the last love, as the last fling, of Jan van Jost. This is not a dignified desire, but it is a deep one. Fortunately, correctitude of behaviour and shamefulness of desire have coincided. She has not even done the right thing for the wrong reason. She did the right thing, spontaneously and instinctively, for the right reason. Her conscience is clear. Chopping logic is her profession, and she now acquits herself of any impropriety.

She tries to replay everything Jan has ever said to her, during their brief acquaintance, as she talks her way through the day. The British Embassy contacts her, offering support, should she need it. She takes coffee in the Dutch Embassy, and receives the condolences of the ambassador himself, as though she were a bona fide widow. She remembers that it is there, a hundred years ago, in that very building, sitting on a sea-green plush settee, that she had told van Jost the 200-year-old story of Prince Sado and the Crown Princess. The Crown Princess had been to blame for all these subsequent events. If van Jost had not listened so eagerly to the story, she would never have ended up in his bed. He might have died at the same hour of the same day, but he might have died alone.

Everybody treats her, at least to her face, with great courtesy. She cannot tell what is being said behind her back. She wonders how much of the true story has leaked out, and how many people and countries it has reached. Gossip knows no frontiers. There is no way of telling. Dr Oo keeps company with her during the morning, acting as interpreter and counsellor, but in the afternoon he has to depart. He has managed to transfer from his Lufthansa flight via Frankfurt to a later Korean Airline flight via Heathrow, but he cannot delay any longer. His hospital and his family need him, he says. They part, in the foyer of the Pagoda Hotel. She protests her undying gratitude. She watches him, as he goes off to his taxi, with his all-too-familiar navy-blue Samsonite suitcase, to take the high road to the airport island and the airy silver-spun buildings of Incheon. They have exchanged their e-mail addresses. They will keep in touch.

Most of the delegates of both the conferences have left by now for other conferences, other destinations. The hotel has absorbed a new intake of transients. New notices for new events are posted up on the notice boards. Another visit to the Expo is announced, this time for members of an international dental association. Babs stares at this notice, forlornly, morbidly, as she remembers the virtual butterfly, which had come like a dream and gone like a dream. She is beginning to feel, at last, after all this excitement, unbearably sad. What will have happened to her friend Jan’s Armani suits, to his expensive ties, to his socks and his shoes and his presentation Chinese dressing gown? Are they still lying where they were, in Suite 1712? Is his Braun battery-operated toothbrush still in his bathroom, with his Philips razor and his striped sponge bag? And what about his books and his papers and his palmtop? If she were his true widow, instead of a virtual widow, she could go up there now, and pack them for him. But as it is, she has no right. She is a ghost, on the edge of his finished life. How will she get through the long evening alone? She is far too tired to go to bed. Shall she walk the night streets, alone in her scarlet socks?

She walks, and walks, and walks.

Postmodern Times

She is even more tired, as she flies homewards. She is too tired to read, and she is too tired to sleep. She has been transferred to a Korean Airline flight, and upgraded to a business-class window seat, but she cannot sleep in it. She shuts her eyes, and tries to think of the future, but she is ensnared by the events of the past week, of the past two hundred years. She searches for meaning, and finds none. How had these things come to pass? She retraces every word, every gesture of her brief acquaintance with van Jost. She examines and re-examines the script. It was the mystery book that had brought them together. The memoirs of the Crown Princess had initiated their romance. The book is packed safely away now in the dark blue Samsonite suitcase in the hold of the aeroplane, where it can do no harm. It is hygienically isolated in a plastic bag, but its interleaved and intertextual marginalia, written in red and blue, remain proof of and witness to what has passed.

The Crown Princess watches her drowsy envoy with some suspicion. Perhaps this envoy was ill chosen. She has become distracted from her mission. Maybe the Red Queen had been wrong to select a vain, ambitious and flirtatious academic, who is at an age when she still seems to think she has so many free choices to make. Will Dr Halliwell pursue the message of the memoirs when she gets back to her homeland, or will she be distracted by subplots and secondary issues? By Chinese babies, by mad widows, and by the obituaries of that low-born Dutch professor, whose irrelevant demise seems to have caused such a stir? Maybe Dr Halliwell will simply return to work and pick up her life where she left it, before the infection took. Maybe the Crown Princess has wasted her missionary efforts. Maybe Dr Halliwell will neglect her task, which is to perpetuate the enigma of the Crown Princess’s life, and to urge on the unearthly reading of her sufferings.

But Dr Halliwell does not forget. She does, it is true, take some time to readjust to her busy urban life. We watch her from afar, as she moves her remaining possessions from Oxford, and says her farewells, and re-engages with London and her large second-floor apartment. Her apartment, on the edge of Adelaide Park, overlooks the city from the newly fashionable heights of Cantor Hill. We recognize now that when we first observed her asleep in Oxford, on the eve of her departure for Seoul, we had received a false impression of her habits. For we had seen her in a controlled, a well-maintained environment, where she had been tended by hosts of helpful minions, and sheltered by regular hours and manageable distances, by centuries of protocol and routine. The mulberry tree in the courtyard and the ancient lichen on the ancient walls had been a protection to her, and the college porter had taken thought for her. In London, she is left more to her own devices, and she is forced to improvise her daily life.

She is teaching several hours a week in two different venues, she sits on a couple of committees, she has articles to write and papers to read and grade, and getting about London is a job in itself. She has a car, but she is very bad at parking it, after the trauma of Queen Square and the Hospital for Sick Children, so she usually leaves it standing safely by the kerb in Cantor Hill, where she hopes it will come to no harm. (It has been vandalized only twice in three years, which is not bad for London: Cantor Hill is not yet a high-risk area.) She is supposed to be writing a book on triage in the National Health Service for an academic press, but it is making slow progress. She visits her husband in the retreat in North-amptonshire once a week, at the weekend, like a dutiful wife, to make sure he is not being deliberately or casually neglected or tormented. These are not pleasant visits, for he tends to stare at her, wordlessly, perhaps reproachfully. Just as their son Benedict had stared at her, from his sterile bubble. But at least the visits help to calm her conscience and to exercise her car.

She takes him gifts from Seoul: a straw-yellow pair of woven hempen slippers, a large wooden box of ginseng tea. She had bought the slippers for him herself, in a street market, but the ginseng had been presented to her by Mong Joon, her minder. He had followed her to the airport with it. He had tracked her to the last, despite the alteration of her departure flight.

Peter puts the slippers on his feet, and he drinks a cup of the ginseng tea. Does he know where she has been? She cannot tell. She gets into her car, and drives home down the soothing M40, beneath the circling fork-tailed birds of prey, then round the North Circular, and back to Cantor Hill.

She is a busy woman. How will she find time to mourn for van Jost, and to commemorate the Crown Princess?

The manner of her mourning and her commemoration are evident from the leaning towers of books that begin to fill her study. Her Edwardian stained-glass-enhanced windows look out from Cantor Hill towards the south-east, over a great falling vista of London, but the view from her desk is partially obscured by books, which are heaped up on her desk and strewn round it upon the floor. Amongst them we can see not only the crumpled, well-travelled and doubly annotated text of Thea Landry’s translation of the Crown Princess’s memoirs, with its wedded commentaries, but also a variant earlier version, translated and edited by Yang-Hi Choe-Wall under the title of
Memoirs of a Korean Queen
, by Lady Hong, and what is generally regarded as the authoritative version, translated and annotated by Professor JaHyun Kim Haboush and published in 1996 by the University of California Press under the title
The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng
:
The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea
. Babs has been attempting to compare and collate the three translations, and to wrest further meaning from their stories. Both the Choe-Wall and the Haboush provide gripping narratives. The Yellow Fields Press version remains a highly enigmatic text: it lacks an ISBN, and there is no copy of it in the British Library. On closer inspection, the name of its translator is unconvincing.

There is a fourth translation, published in 1980, which she has on order in the library, but she has not yet read it.

Dr Halliwell has been reading widely round the subject of her new obsession, for we can also see on her desk many related works of travel and scholarship. We can see a library copy of Isabella Bird’s classic and recently reprinted book about her travels in Korea and her meetings with the intriguing Queen Min, the last queen of Korea. We can see pencilled notes on Henry Savage Landor’s lesser known and shockingly incorrect views on Orientalism and the oriental mind, and a paperback copy of Edward Said’s master text on Orientalism. (Alas, she can find no reference to Korea in Edward Said.) We can see books on
Culture and the State in Late Chosŏn Korea
, on shamanism, on Confucianism, on early Korean literature, on women in Korean ritual life, on Korean true view painting, on Korean screens and
chae’kori
painting, on Jesuit art in China and Japan. There are catalogues from the Musée Guimet in Paris, and a glossy art collectors’ magazine called
Orientations
, full of reproductions of eighteenth-century images of flowers and birds and other so-called ‘auspicious objects’, painted by Giuseppe Castiglione. (Castiglione is described as ‘a Jesuit painter at the court of the Chinese emperors’, and we gather that in this transcultural and transitional world he commands strangely high prices. He has become a good transcultural investment: we prize the displaced border artist these days.) There are even some books written mainly in
han’gŭl
, which we know Barbara Halliwell cannot read, and has neither the time nor the patience to learn. Why has she invested in these? The Crown Princess is an exacting mistress.

The robust London magpie that struts upon her windowsill regards these foreign books with an evil and an inauspicious eye. The sun glints on the wicked gloss of its stiff, purple-black feathers.

Magpies breed well and multiply in Cantor Hill. Those species that thrive on urban density enjoy this north-eastern district of London. It is a youthful and multicultural neighbourhood, much favoured by young professionals and by magpies. Magpies and babies in buggies thrive here. Dr Halliwell does not like either the magpies or the babies, and she sometimes wonders why she moved to nouveau-chic Cantor Hill from cut-throat Kentish Town.

On Dr Halliwell’s desk, we can also see books by Professor Jan van Jost. She has purchased several volumes of his large
oeuvre
and attempted to penetrate them. But she makes heavy work of them. The indexing is not adequate, and she cannot take short cuts to matters of potential mutual interest, such as the death penalty, euthanasia, transcultural adoption, monoculturalism and global denationalization. (The word ‘triage’ does not appear anywhere in his works, as far as she can see, which is a pity, as she would have liked to have added a footnote leading to van Jost.) She consoles herself for her lack of perseverance by telling herself that he was an amorous gentleman scholar who had invited her into his bed, not his library, but nevertheless, her stupidity in the face of his prolix continental bravura depresses her combative spirit. We can see her distract herself from her intellectual shortcomings by opening and shutting the drawers of the little lacquer cabinet that he gave to her. In one of them, she has found a message from beyond the grave. It is neither very intimate nor very secret, but it is without doubt a message. It is a visiting card, with his earthly addresses and telephone numbers in Paris and Barcelona, and his personal e-mail address. He has circled the e-mail address in bright blue ink, just for her. This is – or was – very trusting of him.

Shall she try it? At first she thinks not, for she is afraid of an interception by the widowed Viveca van Jost, or by a secretarial custodian. But late one night, she cannot resist trying to reach the cyber body of her late admirer, and she attempts a brief message. ‘I wonder where you are now,’ she writes. ‘I think of you, and I send you my love.’ She clicks on Send/Receive, and waits. She is not surprised to get her message back again, almost immediately, with a note saying, ‘Returned Mail: User Unknown: Permanent Delivery Errors.’

This is not surprising, but it is not satisfactory. She would really like to know where he is. Are his mortal remains reduced to ashes and, like her grandfather’s in Orpington, stored in one of those ugly bronze-finish Thermos-flask-style plastic capsules? (Her grandmother cannot get round to disposing of them because she cannot make up her mind about where they should lie.) Have they been scattered beneath some branching academic tree, or do they await interment in the Pantheon, behind a marble slab? Will the Dutch claim them from the French? Or perhaps the flamboyantly grieving and appropriative Viveca has drunk them down in a glass of wine, as the widowed Artemisia drank the ashes of her husband Mausolus?

Babs Halliwell regrets now that the mildly sensational death of her professor had been handled with such exemplary diplomatic discretion. Her vain spirit would like to boast about him. She would like to lay claim to him, now, but she is not sure how she can do this in a dignified manner. Again and again, she reads the little note that he wrote to her in the Pagoda Hotel, after their first night together. She would like to show it to the world. She would like to publish it in the
Times Literary Supplement
, or in
Sociology Today
, or in the
Proceedings of the Conference on the New Frontiers of Health
. She would like to write an epitaph or an obituary for this man. She would like her relationship to him to be known in the present, and recorded for posterity. She would like to attend a memorial service, in St Germain des Prés or Ste-Geneviève, robed in black, the mystery mistress. The cameras would question her presence, admiringly.

Or she could perhaps show up in the parador at the conference on El Hierro, in the wild mid Atlantic, and speak to his last paper? She could volunteer to supplement this paper with a postscripted account of the Prince of the Rice Chest? Would this have been what he wanted? He cannot have had time to write it himself, fast worker though he was.

Sometimes she wonders if he had written any more messages for her in those books she had seen lying by his bedside in the Pagoda Hotel in Seoul. When his library is sold, will his marginalia reveal her cryptic name? The name of the first and last and only Englishwoman he had ever known?

While she is waiting for the rest of her books to turn up in the British Library one morning, she idly extends her research to examining a copy of the
Selected Stories of Lu Xun
and is surprised and a little alarmed to find that she discovers Jan’s most likely connection with this bedside book is to be found with unexpected ease in its first five pages. She has looked for a needle in a haystack, and found it. Lu Xun presents an image of an iron house without windows, with many people fast asleep inside. These sleepers will soon die painlessly of suffocation. Should the observer cry aloud to try to wake the lighter sleepers, and let them suffer the knowing agony of irrevocable death? Or is there hope for the future, even at the last? This image is connected with the author’s boyhood terror of his dying father’s terminal illness, pointlessly prolonged by useless and expensive medication. The boy Lu Xun had been obliged to go twice daily to the pawnshop to procure useless and expensive folk remedies – aloe root dug up in winter, sugar cane three years exposed to frost, twin crickets,
ardisia
… The father, thought the boy, should have been allowed to die in peace, as he was a hopeless case. His death throes had been cruel and unnecessary. So why should the man try to rouse the hopeless case of China into painful life from its deep and final slumber?