The Red Queen (42 page)

Benedict’s father, Peter Halliwell, does not know the days of the week, or the months of the year.

Babs, on the way home on the top of the 91 bus, thinks about her ‘Three Dead Men’ – Peter Halliwell, Benedict Halliwell and Jan van Jost. She chastises herself for this hysterical, this histrionic phrase, which had sprung uninvited, unbidden, unwanted to her mind.

She has tried so hard to rationalize and to control and to conceal the melodrama of her life, but nonetheless, from time to time, it swoops over her and possesses her. She despises it. She does not wish to live hysterically, like Viveca van Jost, on fantasies and dreams. She wishes to be a serious person.

Jan had dignified her with the words ‘wise’ and ‘beautiful’. She believes herself, at times, on her good days, to have a little beauty, but she knows she is not wise. She is grateful to him, nevertheless, for bestowing this quality briefly upon her. Wisdom negates vanity. It forgives the red socks, the red silk skirt.

The Crown Princess bides her time. She is very old and very dead, so she ought not to be too impatient. Occasionally, perhaps, she wishes to prompt her hesitant emissary, who seems to have fallen into uncertainty and randomness. Maybe, she reflects, Viveca van Jost would have been a better vehicle of transmission? Maybe the energetic Viveca van Jost would by now have commissioned an opera or a ballet on the plot of the life of the Crown Princess and her Tragic Prince of the Rice Chest? There are so many different ways of telling stories, of perpetuating lives. But soon, one day soon, Barbara Halliwell will meet somebody to whom she will hand on the narrative. It will continue. It will not perish. One day soon, Barbara will meet, by design or by chance, a historian, or a psychoanalyst, or a criminologist, or a novelist, who will adopt the narrative, and allow it to continue its wandering exploration through the future. For the Crown Princess, old and tired though she is, has not abandoned her desire to make sense of her unique place in history. She is still willing to struggle on through eternity, even if the quest involves barbaric phrases such as ‘contextual universalism’ and ‘postmodern relativism’ and ‘postcolonial Orientalism’. She cannot give up now.

Barbara Halliwell’s social life has been restricted, not enlarged, by her move back to London. She turns down many invitations because getting about London is so fraught and so time-consuming. (Thus she narrowly misses a chance of meeting a woman novelist who would certainly have responded to the story of the Crown Princess.) She tries the Crown Princess and Prince Sado out on an elderly diplomat at a reception on the penthouse floor of New Zealand House, but, although he nods his head a lot as she speaks, she can tell that either he is too deaf or the noise level is too high for him to be able to hear her properly. He nods and smiles and gazes beyond her, at the panorama of the city and the turning London Eye, but, unlike van Jost in the Dutch Embassy overlooking Seoul, he does not follow the thread of her story.

Her story has a thread, a scarlet thread, but she does not know where it is leading her. She is looking for something, but she does not yet know what it is. She is looking for some resolution to her oriental journey, for some connection that will enable her to move on to the next chapter of her life. She is haunted by superimposed images, by palimpsests of memories. Time past and time present, London and Seoul, seem to be flowing through one another. They have not merged, they remain distinct, but they coexist, in some dreamlike time of correspondences. They do not fuse or melt. They seem to pass through one another, like clouds of bees, like distant galaxies. Which is real? Perhaps neither of them is real?

She is not accustomed to such swarms of ghostly apprehensions. She is a realist, a materialist, a modern woman, and she is far too young to have anything to do with the spirit world. Anyway, she comes from the wrong kind of culture, or so she tells herself, sharply, as she goes about her complex daily business. She has no access to any kind of belief system that can account for the tremulous connections between her grandparents’ English garden, with its straggling gooseberry bushes and yellow tormentil and mauve mallow flowers, and the autumnal garden behind the Hall of Illuminating Ethics where she had strayed with Dr Oo. Why had she felt, there, that she had been on the verge of illumination? And why does she keep returning to the memory of the footbridge and the pathway that had led to the royal Jongmyo shrines, and to the great sign marked ‘Solemnity’?

She dreams of the footbridge over the ravine, and of the pathway to the shrines. She dreams of writing to Viveca van Jost. She dreams of the Chinese baby, waiting in vain for Jan van Jost to come for her. She dreams of van Jost, dead in her arms, and of the Coffin Prince, listening to the punishment of thunder.

She feels she is lapsing into solitude and eccentricity. Her future is opaque. She has lost a clear trajectory. She is in the early prime of her life, but she sees the mocking ghost of her ageing self, beckoning to her across the ravine.

She is waiting for a sign from the Crown Princess, who seems to be scrabbling around the pile of books on her table like a mouse, chewing and munching, munching and chewing, rustling and suggesting, suggesting and reminding, insisting and gnawing.

The old Edwardian houses of Cantor Hill are full of mice. The air of Cantor Hill, once famed as salubrious, is now perpetually disturbed by building works and loft conversions and road works. It is thick with the rising spores of the past. Ancient matter drifts and eddies. It fills the branching lungs and seeps into the convoluted folds of the brain.

The autumn leaves fall, in Cantor Woods and on Adelaide Park, as the year withers. The threatening season of Christmas approaches, with all its fabled ill will. Barbara recalls the slim and pretty vegetarian Buddhist guide who had shown Dr Oo and Jan and herself round the Fortress of Grass at Hwaseong: this young woman, in September, had been dreading the advent of the Korean Harvest Festival of Chusŏk. Barbara does not dread Christmas unduly, for she spends it not unpleasantly in Orpington with her parents and her sister and her sister’s husband and her sister’s children. She is a good aunt, and comes to Christmas not uncheerfully, bearing gifts. But Christmas always reminds her of her childless state, and of the double negatives of her life. How could it not? She broods, a little, as the Festival of Christ’s Nativity approaches.

One dark bright evening in mid December, on her homeward journey from a six o’clock guest lecture at the London School of Economics, her taxi comes to a protracted halt on the lofty thoroughfare of Gallax Bridge, which links the one-time old-world village of Highgate with the rapidly developing satellite suburb of Cantor Hill. Impatiently, she peers out of the window at the solid traffic before and behind, and at the immense drop from the bridge down to the busy four-lane motorway below. This is Lover’s Leap, the site of the most favoured death plunge of North London, where tired bouquets of commemorative flowers are perpetually tied to the high iron railings that unsuccessfully attempt to inhibit the suicide bids of the desperate. (Its name, Gallax Bridge, is said, on unreliable authority, to be a corruption of Gallows Bridge.) Babs is not often detained here, stationary, for quite so long, and, as she gazes downwards, a sign comes to her. Gallax Bridge reminds her of the footpath in Seoul, the footpath that is strung across the ravine, the footpath that links the Secret Garden of Prince Sado and the palace of the Crown Princess to the Royal Shrines. It has been at the back of her mind, this connection, for weeks, for months. This is what she has been looking for. This is the link. This is the bridge from death to life, from past to present. Below, above, ahead: this is the way, this is the path, this is the walk, this is the route that she needs to tread.

The Western year in the western hemisphere nears its shortest day, when the sap sinks. Babs Halliwell walks alone along the Woodland Walk from Cantor Hill to Finsbury Park, in the gathering gloom of a wintery Sunday afternoon. She walks towards the east. The route will, her map assures her, take her under Gallax Bridge. But how can it? Although she has made a sharp descent down wooden steps from a city pavement to reach this hidden path, and feels herself to be in the deeps, she also seems at the same time to be walking along a raised spine, past sunken back gardens of houses that exist in some other plane. This walk follows the route of an old, abandoned rail track, or so she has been told. She has never been down here, to this parallel underworld, sunk low beneath the surface, although she has driven above the fissure many times, on the high road above. She has never known how to reach it, or thought of trying to plunge down into it. Yet here she is, walking, beneath the layer of her daily life, beneath the level of the known.

It is potentially alarming but not quite deserted terrain, thinly populated by the emblematic figures of the modern urban wasteland. These apparitions do not perturb her, for she is tall and she is fit. One or two harmless solitary middle-aged joggers come towards her, pass her, and recede. She observes a bearded terrorist, immobile in the bedraggled bushes, speaking to an accomplice on his mobile phone, and a rapist, his back to a crumbling brick wall, fumbling at his flies. Large wolf dogs plod on with their sullen owners, their unmuzzled snouts hung low. A bag lady sits amidst her travelling luggage on the stump of a felled tree. These are the outcasts; these are the living ghosts of the city. The rusting and blackened skeletons of old motorcycles litter the undergrowth. She sees charred patches of cindery ash, memorials of last summer’s conflagrations and cremations. She walks past high red railway arches, embellished with graffiti. A faint illicit odour of smoking hemp lingers in the evergreen leaves of the holly.

The path weaves onwards, now ascending, now descending, now ridged, now furrowed. Time past arches over and then threads its way beneath time present. The ancient and the modern coexist and bypass one another, like the curving spirals of a double helix, but they do not touch. They are simultaneous but discontinuous. The path is a metaphor of memory, of the interweaving of disparate strands.

Barbara Halliwell walks alone underneath the city. It is turning colder now, and a light powdery snow begins to drift and wander uncertainly downwards out of the dull iron upper air into the old railway cutting. This fine frozen dust of the sky will not settle on the trodden earth of the walkway, nor on the leafless branches of its brown and barren bushes, but its light flakes catch and rest weightlessly on the hooks of the wool of Babs Halliwell’s grey winter coat.

She walks under Gallax Bridge, named for the gallows, and ahead of her she sees, in the trodden ravine, a hanging man. He dangles, from a wooden gibbet, a poor potato sack of a guy with a lolling head, playfully strung up with a dead magpie, a dead crow and some bunches of coloured feathers. Strange symbols are scrawled on the woodwork. The young of the undergrowth play strange games. She thinks of Prince Sado, prostrating himself in the snow before his angry father, and cowering when he heard the god of thunder. She flinches, like a coward, as she passes the dangling man, but then she stiffens her shoulders, and straightens her back, and strides boldly on, up the winding ramp, into the future.

At the next turning she will find an old-fashioned children’s playground, with swings and a slide and a little roundabout. That is the sound of children’s voices that we hear, as they play in the middle distance. They are not playing at hangman or funerals. They are playing pleasant games, childish games. She approaches them. We hear the laughter of small children. It is not mocking laughter, the laughter that passing adults fear. It is indifferent; it is self-absorbed.

She sits on a wooden bench, and watches as the children play. They do not seem to see her. It is as though she were not there at all. She can see them, but they cannot see her. She is invisible. They look towards her, but they look through her. Not one of them can see her. No adults attend them. They do not look like the little English children with whom she had played in the green public parks and asphalted school-yards of Orpington. Not one of them looks towards her. They ignore her, as though she inhabited another world.

The white flakes drift, and fall, and rest, and melt, and vanish. She sits, as the seasons change. Spring comes, slowly, and the menace of the bleak walkway slowly vanishes under foliage and wild flowers. She rises, and walks onwards. She walks, and walks, and walks, through the hours, and through the days, and through the weeks. From time to time, she watches the children play. Then, one day, she goes home, and writes a letter to Viveca van Jost in Barcelona.

It takes months of intricate manipulation of Euro-legislation and of the Chinese quota system to procure the correct adoption papers for the Chinese orphan. The Chinese orphan is almost too old for adoption by the time the arrangements are completed. Van Jost, being dead, watches helplessly through these long delays. He could have done things better himself, had he managed to stay alive for just a little longer. The Crown Princess watches with curiosity: this is a promising development, though it is not quite what she had anticipated.

The orphan almost abandons hope, but she is a tenacious child, and she cannot believe that they will not come for her. She waits and waits. And, in time, they do come. She sees them as they walk the length of the long ward, with its rows of little institutional cribs. It is not as she expected, but it will do. From the large playpen in the corner, she fixes them with her compelling gaze, as she had fixed the travelling Dutchman. But the two women pass on, towards the supervisor’s office at the end of the corridor: they do not as yet return her stare, as they are too confused and anxious to pause and take her in, and indeed she has not yet been identified to them, although she at once recognizes them. The women are in a state of shock. They are astonished by what they seem to have accomplished. They have taken a great risk, amidst great uncertainty, and here they are, with their almost-verified credentials, awaiting a final signature. They have no idea what will become of this enterprise.