The Red Queen (44 page)

She has also humanely removed any evidence of her current semi-resident lover. We have not been introduced to him, and the few traces he has left tell us little about him. It is impossible to guess from these traces whether he is a long-term or a short-term proposition. He may be another seven-foot manic-depressive megalomaniac, with a face like the beak of a raven, though for her sake we hope that he is not. He may be another global intellectual with a heart condition, but again, for her sake, we hope that he is not. He has left a white towelling dressing gown hanging on the back of her bedroom door, but a dressing gown is no indication of height or of profile or of state of health. Nor is the monogram on its pocket likely to betray his identity: the large, navy-blue, machine-chainstitched A is standardized, not personalized, so we cannot assume that he is called Adam, or Andrew, or Adonis.

We can, however, assume some sense of his taste in reading matter, for she has not felt the need to purge his bedside table of its bedside books. There lie his small-framed reading glasses, tucked away in a blue case. Through them, he has been innocently reading a guide book to Athens: may we be allowed the conventional hope that Barbara and this unseen man are planning a holiday together? Beneath the guide book lies an old Penguin Classic of the tragedies of Euripides. This in itself gives little away. Beneath Euripides lies the latest paperback Arden edition of
Macbeth
. The two, taken together, are a little more suggestive. Perhaps he is a playwright, and the Crown Princess is now planning a dramatic adaptation of her story? By the side of the three books, beneath the glasses case, we can see a postcard showing an Impressionist painting of a sloping meadow full of scarlet poppies in high summer. This is one of the most reproduced images of the age of mechanical reproduction, so perhaps it is sheer chance that it rests here. The poppies scatter like drops of blood, like a haze of blood. A woman and a small child walk for ever through the field of red, towards the ever-waiting eye of the spectator. The field of red is full of blood and joy. The woman is the artist’s young wife, who was soon to die, though neither she nor the artist nor the child knew this when she was walking through this fair field in France.

The bottles of pills have disappeared from Babs’s bedside table. The osteoporosis placebo trial is over, and the results have been fed in to the programme. Babs has forgotten all about it. She has shed this concern. Whether her bones are more or less brittle than they were two years ago is of no interest to her. She is no longer a guinea pig or a laboratory mouse.

When Babs has settled Chen Jianyi for the night, and sung the ritual song that she always sings to her, she goes into her own bedroom, and sinks down heavily upon her bed. She is exhausted. The day has been stressful. Chen Jiangyi is a well-behaved child: indeed, most of the time, she is almost disconcertingly docile and self-contained. But a trip to Heathrow cannot be restful, and four hours with Viveca van Jost are more stimulating than restful. And Barbara Halliwell’s ardent desire to please this small child is in itself exhausting. She is not accustomed to the company of small children, and, although she sees Chen Jianyi frequently, she feels always that she must be on her best behaviour, and offer the child the best of everything. Never can she ignore this surrogate daughter. Never can she scold her, or let her down. Can this be good for either of them? It is the best that she can do. The child is on loan. She is neither a gift nor a purchase, nor a substitution. She is a visitor and a guest.

Barbara runs through the week’s plans, checking them for uncertainties and strategic difficulties. Will it rain on the day designated for the picnic on Hampstead Heath? Will they find the red dress on which the child had set her heart? Will Polly Usher have remembered the time that she has agreed to meet them at the Tate tomorrow, or should Barbara double-check?

Polly Usher and Barbara Halliwell are reconciled. Polly has conceded that her friend Barbara has acted not rashly, but, in her own way, properly. And, as Barbara knows, Polly is consumed by curiosity about the developmental progress of the Chinese orphan. She does not want to be left out of the plot.

She and Polly are meeting their new friend in the Tate. Their new friend is a novelist called Margaret Drabble, whom they had met a few months ago at the launch party for a book on medical ethics by a friend of a friend who was long ago at primary school with Margaret Drabble’s children in North London. Polly and Barbara had known quite a lot of people at this launch, which was a low-key, ingrown and intimate affair in a specialist bookshop in Bloomsbury, but Margaret Drabble had seemed less well connected. It was not clear why she was there at all: did she accept every invitation she was sent, however out of the way? Had she nowhere better to go? They had observed her alone in a corner, wearing a long, red dress with small white spots on. She was eating a nutrition-free cheese-flavoured sawdust snack, and surreptitiously inspecting a display of psychoanalytic books. She was pretending to be busy. She was looking older than she did on her book jackets, but they recognized her through the disguise of age. They had boldly gone up to her and introduced themselves to her. They claimed that they knew her already, for it was she, in a manner, that had introduced them, all those years ago, in a pub in Lamb’s Conduit Street, near the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children.

‘We were both reading your book,’ Babs had said, ‘and so it was that we got talking.’

They did not tell her, at this stage, that they had argued about the book. Polly had liked it better than Babs had liked it. Neither of them has read it since, and they have not kept up with her later output, but she won’t know this, will she?

The lonely novelist had seemed pleased by this overture, and so, encouraged, they had told her more. She had subsequently met Babs for lunch in Museum Street, in a new Korean restaurant called Bi-Bim-Bap, and Babs had poured out much of her life’s story. She had spoken about Peter Halliwell, and Benedict Halliwell, and Jan van Jost, and the Crown Princess, and Chen Jianyi. The novelist had seemed peculiarly receptive to this mixed and melodramatic material, as Babs had guessed she would be. The novelist had dutifully read the memoirs of the Crown Princess, and had professed herself as struck by them as Babs herself had been. In a way, Babs now feels she has handed over the Crown Princess to a suitable recipient and can forget about her. Let the lady nest and roost in a new dwelling. Let her nibble away at a new host. Babs has done her best for her. The Prince of the Rice Chest has appeared in the footnotes of the last, posthumous work of Jan van Jost, and his Princess can haunt and torment Margaret Drabble for a while, while Barbara Halliwell pursues her own life.

She and Margaret Drabble have become friends. Margaret Drabble seems to prefer Babs to Polly Usher, which, in the view of Babs, is as it should be. She says she is anxious to meet Chen Jianyi. (Everyone is anxious to meet Chen Jianyi.) So they will all meet on the morrow, in Tate Modern, for a virtual journey along the Silk Road.

Novelists, the novelist had warned Barbara Halliwell amidst the ruins of Halicarnassus in Room 21 of the British Museum, are not to be trusted. They steal; they borrow; they appropriate. You should never tell them anything, if you want to keep it a secret.

Barbara Halliwell, sitting on her bed, thinking of all these things, yawns and sighs.

Medical ethics, literary ethics, maternal ethics. The ethics of multicultural adoption.

Will the child prosper? Who knows?

So be it, says Barbara Halliwell to herself, aloud. I have done my best.

So be it, she says.

As we watch Barbara Halliwell, a thought seems to strike her. She hesitates, about to rise, then rises, and crosses the room to the old-fashioned polished mahogany Edwardian chest of drawers by the window. She pulls open the top right-hand drawer, where she keeps her socks and her tights and her stockings, and she rummages round amongst them. After a while, at the back of the drawer, she finds what she is looking for. It is a tiny crumpled soft red ball. She takes it out, and sits down again, and solemnly unfolds the little pair of cheap red socks that van Jost had bought for her, on that hot autumn evening in Seoul. Small when new, they have puckered and shrunk to the size of socks fit for a doll’s wardrobe. Wonderingly, she inserts a hand into one of them, and looks at the little woven butterflies. They are still there, still distinct. She fingers the artificial fabric. She likes its unreal texture. It is frail, but it is imperishable, and its colour has hardly faded. It will outlive her. It may endure for centuries. Perhaps she is wondering whether she should give the socks to her adopted daughter, to go with her new red dress? Has her adopted daughter not a right to these socks? But no, as we watch, she rolls them up again, first fitting toe to toe, then rolling them, the one inside the other. She puts them back in the drawer. She hides the little red bundle safely at the back of the drawer.

Afterword

When I was a child, I had a little red velvet dress. It was my party dress. It may have been handed down, as many of my clothes were, but for a while it was allowed to be mine. I was very fond of that little red dress. It had a bodice made of a different and lighter fabric, covered in a pattern of little pink and red rosebuds.

If the Crown Princess had not mentioned her longing for a red silk skirt, I do not think I would have responded to her story as I did. It is an arbitrary connection. I am wearing a red dress as I write these words. If she had not mentioned her red silk skirt, I would not have been entrapped by her.

Acknowledgements

The four lines from the poem on p. 71 are taken from p. 46 of
Songs of the Kisaeng
, translated and introduced by Constantine Contogenis and Wolhee Choe, Boa Editions Limited, Rochester, New York, 1997.

The translation of Lady SŏnhŬi’s epitaph on p. 146 is by James Gale, the Canadian scholar and missionary, and is to be found in
James Scarth Gale and His History of the Korean People
, Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch: a new edition annotated by Richard Rutt, 1972.

A Note on Sources

The memoirs of the Crown Princess, ‘Lady Hong’, are well known and celebrated in Korea. The original manuscripts of the four different memoirs are believed to be lost, but there are several copies, which show variations in script, content and chronology. The memoirs are known in English under various titles, and there are at least three translations, taken from variant texts. (The translation by Theaŏ. Landry mentioned in my text is, of course, a fiction.) The earliest is entitled
Han Joong Nok
:
Reminiscences in Retirement
(1980), by ‘Crown Princess Hong’, translated by Bruce C. Grant and Kim Chinman: this is a full and readable version which has, appropriately, many Shakespearean echoes and resonances. It is prefaced with an explanatory note by Kwang-yong Chun, which gives a brief account of the chronology of the composition of the memoirs, and the version used, but the volume lacks notes and any other critical apparatus.

I first came across the memoirs in the year 2000, in the scholarly and carefully annotated version by JaHyun Kim Haboush, published in 1996. Professor Haboush is the recognized authority on the period, and I read and consulted her translation and other related works by her, in which she has carefully reconstructed much that would have been unavailable to the general reader. I also read the other two translations, and related works, in any language I could understand, that seemed to illuminate the reflections inspired in me by the Crown Princess’s life. These sources include works of poetry, sociology, history and psychology.

I commend to the interested reader Professor Haboush’s
A Heritage of Kings
(see below) which contains a firsthand witness account by a diarist, Yi Kwanghyon, of the Crown Prince’s death. This document was discovered in the Yi family private royal family collection. Professor Haboush reproduces this, in translation (pp. 219–30), and discusses its authenticity in her Appendix 4 (pp. 251–3).

I would like to thank the Daesan Foundation for introducing me to Korea and its literature through its invitation to the First Seoul International Forum for Literature 2000.

Bibliography

‘Crown Princess Hong’,
Han Joong Nok
:
Reminiscences in Retirement
, translated by Bruce C. Grant and Kim Chinman (New York: Larchwood Publications, 1980). © Korea Literary Foundation.

Haboush, JaHyun Kim (ed.),
The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng
:
The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

Haboush, JaHyun Kim,
A Heritage of Kings
:
One Man’s Monarchy in the Confucian World
, Studies in Oriental Culture, no. 21 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

Haboush, JaHyun Kim & Martina Deuchler (eds),
Culture and State in Late Chosŏn Korea
, Harvard-Hallyam Series on Korean Studies, Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 182 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

‘Lady Hong’,
Memoirs of a Korean Queen
, edited, introduced and translated by Yang-hi Choe-Wall (London and Boston: Kegan Paul International Ltd, 1985).

Kyu-tae, Yi,
Modern Transformations of Korea
(Seoul: Sejong Publishing Company, 1970).

Lee, Peter H. (ed.),
Source Book of Korean Civilization
, vol. 11 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

Lee, Peter H. (ed.),
The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

McCall, John E., ‘Early Jesuit Art in the Far East’,
Artibus Asiae
, vol. 10, 1947–48.

McCann, David R.,
Early Korean Literature
:
Selections and Introductions
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

O’Rourke, Kevin (ed. & trans.),
The Book of Korean Shijo
, Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 215 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).

Rutt, Richard (ed. & trans.),
The Bamboo Grove
:
An Introduction to Sijo
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).

Tennant, Roger,
A History of Korea
(London and New York: Kegan Paul International Ltd, 1996).

Writing across Boundaries
:
Literature in the Multicultural World
. Proceedings of the Seoul International Forum for Literature, 2000 (Elizabeth, NJ: Hollym, 2002).
See
Drabble, pp. 447–65. © Daesan Foundation.