The Red Queen (41 page)

Yes, she can see why this
locus classicus
of inertia, pessimism and despair would have appealed to van Jost. She can imagine his vivid red commentary, his notes, his queries.

Her mind runs on her days and nights with van Jost. She manages to retrieve snatches of his conversation, but much of it is gone for ever. She thinks about his widow, Viveca, and the Chinese baby Viveca had so crazily wished to adopt. She even thinks about the thousand dollars of deposit that van Jost had said he had paid to the adoption agency.

She remembers that van Jost had said that the child had looked at him. This is the most unlikely thing that any man has ever said to her. How can she forget it?

Her son Benedict had looked at her, when he was newborn. His eyes had gazed into hers. He had gazed at her and she at him during the first months of his life, before she had known that she had given birth to a doomed child, before he had been banished from her contaminating care. But after his banishment, he had slowly but steadily withdrawn his gaze from her. He had begun to forget her. He had retreated from her, into his short institutional life. He had ceased to appeal to her for rescue. He had given up all hope of her. She wished she had spoken of this to Jan van Jost. Had they had more time, she might have told him. But, had they had more time, he would not have offered himself to her, would he?

Barbara Halliwell has not mentioned her brief affair to anybody except her friend Polly Usher, and Polly Usher had not received the news in a gratifying manner. Polly had even seemed to doubt her word. Babs had told the story over supper in Polly’s cramped and poky little house in Gospel Oak, expecting a better audience. Polly, serving a homely meal of beans and bacon in a thick garlic and tomato stew, had seemed at times to be frankly disbelieving. As a result, Babs has come to feel a coolness about her old friend Polly. Polly had overstepped the mark of friendship. Moreover, for the first time Babs had perceived Polly’s house not as comfortingly cosy, but as stifling. Even Polly’s food had seemed a little gross and coarse. The Red Queen, watching over Babs’s shoulder, had not thought much of the peasant bean stew and the stinking deliquescent French cheese that had followed it. The Red Queen finds London in many ways unpleasant. Babs, who had suffered from culture shock in Seoul, is now suffering culture shock at one remove in her homeland. She feels displaced.

Polly Usher had not exactly cross-questioned her friend about her alleged three-night romance, but she had from time to time put in an innocent-seeming query, as though seeking circumstantial evidence for it. Of course, it was clear to both of them that any woman can say anything she likes about the last hours of a dead man, provided there is no witness and no medical evidence to contradict the narrator’s self-seeking version of events. In the circumstances, Babs can invent extravagant claims without any fear of contradiction. She does not do so. She tries to tell it as it was, though she does not tell it all.

Eventually, what with the detailed recitation citing the pills and the cups of ginseng tea and the J&B and the Dutch gin and the Chinese dressing gown and the striped sponge bag and the battery-operated toothbrush and the arrival of the saintly Dr Oo, and with Polly’s knowledge of her old friend’s track record, Polly did come to believe that Barbara had spent at least one night in the hotel room of Jan van Jost. (Barbara made a better job of summoning up these intimate bedroom particulars than she did of providing an abstract of van Jost’s lecture on the leaden casket.)

The story of the proposed purchase of the Chinese baby, however, was unacceptable to Polly Usher. She was so dismissive about it that Barbara regretted having divulged it.

‘You seem to be trying to argue that he as good as left you this baby in his will,’ said Polly, who had by this stage in the evening drunk several glasses of red French wine.

‘No,’ said Barbara, ‘I didn’t say that at all. I didn’t say anything of the sort. I said that I felt that perhaps it was my moral obligation to do something about this baby. That’s why he told me about it. It was his last wish, even if it wasn’t exactly written down in his last will and testament. He did make a point of it, I promise you. I can see that there’s nothing I can do about it now, but I can’t help feeling that’s unsatisfactory. I don’t like having to abandon that child.’

Polly continued to look dubious, and after a while risked a remark about Babs’s biological clock, and her unacknowledged wish that she herself had had another child, to replace Benedict. Although Babs listened submissively to these suggestions, she did not take them well. She sat there quietly, while Polly accused her of mid-life sexual hallucinations, and of feeling distress and irritation when forced to contemplate her own childlessness.

‘You’re always complaining,’ said Polly, ‘that Cantor Hill is too full of babies. You should hear yourself.’

‘You’re saying that I invented the Chinese baby?’ said Babs.

‘Not quite,’ said Polly, though she was.

‘I think that’s just vulgar psychological claptrap,’ said Babs, looking at her old friend and ally through new and distanced eyes. She had been thinking of asking Polly to share a Korean meal of
bibimpap
with her in New Malden one day, at a family-run restaurant called You-Me recommended by Dr Oo, but she was now reconsidering her invitation.

Polly’s ex-husband Solomon Usher is a society analyst. He is said to have royal clients on his books. Perhaps he would be able to produce an interesting interpretation of Prince Sado’s clothing phobia? Psychoanalysts are rarely at a loss for an interpretation. Would he have found words for Sado’s affliction? The Oedipus complex? Paranoid schizophrenia? Or perhaps autism, which apparently causes some afflicted children to rend and tear their clothing? ‘Himatiophobia’, the word used by one of the Crown Princess’s translators, does not seem to have caught on, but Solomon Usher may have heard of it. And would Solomon Usher have been able to cure Prince Sado? How can one know, thinks Babs to herself. Solomon Usher’s view of Peter Halliwell’s affliction had been interesting, but not useful. Solomon Usher had left Polly some years ago, to marry another analyst, and Polly had subsequently married a largely invisible medieval historian, but she had kept her first husband’s name, and phrases from Solomon’s professional vocabulary jargon had stuck with her, and still enter her conversation from time to time. Babs had once found this amusing, but suddenly she finds it irritating, although she had quite liked Solomon, in the old days. She has not seen him for years. Now she wonders if she wants to see much more of Polly Usher. Polly is prim, and she thinks she knows everything. Her face is tight and small and censorious, and her greying hair is cramped. Babs has had enough of Polly Usher. She has had enough of her old life. A novel restlessness consumes her.

Since her visit to Seoul, Barbara Halliwell’s life seems to have changed its course. One does not expect a run-of-the-mill academic conference to have such a far-reaching effect. The synapses of Barbara’s brain have been mysteriously rewired, and messages are running backward and forward through them in unfamiliar directions.

Babs has lost faith in the wisdom of Polly Usher, and she has lost what little interest she had in Robert Treborough. She does not respond to his telephone calls. She lets his voice speak from Oxford into her London space. Her silence at first seems to stimulate him, for he rings quite frequently, but gradually his attentions wither and die. She knows he will forget all about her soon. She has cast him off, with the rest of her Oxford sabbatical year.

Babs’s attentions continue to hover around van Jost, Korea and the Crown Princess. She searches for signs and symbols and correspondences. She reads of funerary rites in ancient Seoul. She reads of the annual mowing of the ancestral lawns around the ancestral shrines, before the feasts of the ancestors, and she remembers Dr Oo and the fake Confucians in the ancient courtyard. She reads of the mourning robes of undyed hemp, and of the mourning staffs cut from the wood of a tree called
Paulownia tomentosa
. She finds those Latin words ‘
Paulownia tomentosa
’ so inexplicably distressing on the page that she is obliged to look for an alternative English name for this tree in her childhood tree book. Here, she finds it is none other than her old friend, the foxglove tree. This handsome tree, she reads, is a member of the ill-sounding Scrophulariaceae, or figwort family, and its natal home is China. She knows this tree well because a fine example of it grows in what was once her grandmother’s garden in Devon. It likes the south-west, as it likes the gardens of Korea. As a child, she and her sister had tried to catch its large and tender mauve and purple blooms, with their deep cream spotted throats, as they fell in the May breeze from its pale grey leafless branches to the grassy slope below.

She remembers the garden near the Munmyo shrines, which had reminded her so unexpectedly of her paternal grandparents’ garden in Orpington. She remembers the footpath over the ravine, bridging time past and time present. She remembers the trees in the princess’s garden, the ancient trees with petrified feet, the trees with feet of stone.

The Crown Princess trails Barbara Halliwell, as she makes a pilgrimage to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. We follow in their wake. The Crown Princess hesitates at the main entrance, as Dr Halliwell hesitates. The entrance is much obscured by scaffolding and rebuilding, for the historic hospital is in Phase 1B of a major redevelopment, but this does not deter them. Together, they pause to observe the faun-like statue of Peter Pan, erected in honour of J. M. Barrie and his patronage. They peer closely, through their large glasses, at the name of the sculptor, one D. Byron O’Connor, and Dr Halliwell cannot prevent a slight wrinkle of distaste from passing over her features. We note that she does not care for the sculpture. The Crown Princess also regards it with aristocratic disapproval. We observe and they observe that the plants in the shallow earth around the statue are in need of water, but they pass on, for these plants are not their responsibility. They enter, and observe the notice boards with childish drawings pinned upon them, and the signs directing them to the Cardiac Wing and the Maxillofacial Unit and the Craniofacial Unit. There are wards named after the wild animals of the world. Life-sized fibreglass cows graze in a courtyard, and cheerful murals portray idealized scenes of London transport. A playbus stands empty.

They walk past a work of art entitled ‘The Beginning of Fairies’. Dr Halliwell does not seem to care much for this either.

They walk past a cabinet displaying a small Japanese military headdress. What is that doing here? The Crown Princess gives it a passing glance of surprised recognition, but Dr Halliwell ignores it and marches on.

The air of this building is thick with grief and pain and prayer. We can hardly make our way through it, disembodied though we be. Dr Barbara Halliwell averts her eyes as a small child with a lolling head is wheeled by on a trolley attached to an accompanying drip stand. Then she turns to her left along a corridor and follows the signs to a small and highly ornate and brightly coloured Byzantine chapel, enclosed like a jewel within the modern, functional twentieth-century structure. The chapel declares that it was completed in 1875, and it is named for St Christopher, who must, we suppose, be the patron saint of children. Its floor is of mosaic, its columns of richly veined marble, and its domes are studded with painted stars.
Alleluia
, declares the chapel.
Pax
, beseeches the chapel. Icons of the sacrificial lamb and the self-sacrificing maternal pelican preside over images of the Infant Samuel and the Infant Jesus.
Feed My Lambs
,
Feed My Sheep
, its texts exhort us. Truth, Patience, Purity, Obedience and Charity are the names of the winged ministers that rise and keep watch behind its altar.

We watch Dr Halliwell as she sits down for a while, on a dark wooden pew in the church’s elaborate golden interior. Is she praying? We do not think she can believe in the efficacy of prayer, at this point in history. Nor have we seen any evidence that she is a Christian. So what is she doing here?

The chapel is not in its original location. During an earlier phase of rebuilding and refurbishment, it had been hermetically sealed on a concrete block in a waterproof casket, and stored away for years. Then it was moved on greased slides by hydraulic rams to its new position, and opened once more to those who wish to pray for the sick and the dead. Unlike those whom it commemorates, it was resurrected intact, after its brief burial.

We watch Dr Halliwell as she leaves the chapel, and pauses before an open Book of Remembrance, in which are written the names of children, and their ages on the dates of their death. ‘Lucia Andrews, aged four days.’ ‘Adewale Manawe, aged five months.’ ‘Tariq Malhotra, aged six years.’ And there is the name of Benedict Halliwell, inscribed in beautiful, anonymous copperplate script. For it is the day of the anniversary of his death. We watch her as she picks up and reads the messages written in the cards left by other parents, other families, who have lost a child on this day. ‘It is hard to be apart from you.’ ‘You are ever in our thoughts.’ ‘We shall never forget you.’ ‘May you sleep well, our dearest one.’ ‘Sue sent the yellow rose, and the other one is from our garden.’ ‘Patrick still asks for you every night.’

Babs Halliwell has not brought a card. Nor has she brought a flower, to add to those few roses and carnations placed humbly on the small shrine. We cannot tell if she comes every year on this day, or if she has been prompted to do so by some incident, some urgent memory. Maybe we should not have intruded upon her grief. She would not wish Polly Usher to know about this observance, so why should we? She is ill placed in this building. Her name is not on the scroll of the Guardian Angels who watch over it and sponsor it.