The Red Queen

by Margaret Drabble

  Her eyes move sternly over the pages, as the aeroplane’s pilot tells her in three languages that he has reached a cruising altitude of 36,000 feet. She does not listen to what he says: her altitude in the heavens means nothing to her, and if he told her an outright lie she would not hear him. Her chief aim at this point seems to be to isolate herself in her own space and to insulate herself from her fellow travellers. On her left is an unpromising middle-aged man, unprovided with reading matter, who looks as though he might wish to embark on a conversation. This is not what she wants. So she keeps her eyes firmly on multiculturalism, as she toys with her first lunch. By the time that her tray is cleared, she has finished multiculturalism. She slips multiculturalism into the seat pocket, and she idly takes out the memoirs of the Korean Crown Princess. She starts to read, in an uncommitted manner, as she hurtles eastwards at nearly a thousand kilometres an hour.

  Five hours later, she has hardly lifted her eyes from the text. Many thousands of miles she has travelled into darkness through the upper air, but she is unaware of time or space. She is gripped by the eloquent ghost of the lady. The nameless lady of the family of Hong has her in thrall.

  It is evident that the story moves and distresses her, for from time to time she lets out little physical signs of a painful mental engagement – an intake of breath, a tugging at her hair, a clicking or clenching of her teeth, a turning down of a page corner, or a rapid consultation of the notes or the index (for the names are confusing, to a Western reader, and far too many of them begin with the letter H). She writes in the margins with fine blue ink; she colours in passages with lurid, glowing pink and green. The childhood and child marriage of the princess, the birth and death of her first-born son, the birth of her second son and of her daughters, the clothing mania of her husband Prince Sado, the slaughter of his concubine Pingae, the prince’s thwarted efforts at suicide, the rice chest death of Sado, the death of the old king, the sixtieth birthday state visit to Hwaseong – all these long-ago events enter her consciousness with explosive effect, and detonate there, spreading a fallout of small mental particles through her brain and her body. A lifetime’s tragedy erupts suddenly in her head in a puffball cloud of spores. The bodily Dr Barbara Halliwell shifts in her seat, and hitches at the uncomfortably constricting garter tops of her knee-highs, and twists and torments her cuff links, but she reads on, ignoring in-flight movies, patrolling stewardesses and the bored heaving of the large man on her left. She takes a passing glass of water from time to time from the stewardess’s tray, but she seems not to notice that she does it. The princess is taking her over, bodily and mentally. Dr Babs Halliwell is no longer herself.

  At high altitude, mental particles penetrate and interact with extraordinary velocity, and initiate strange chemical reactions that cannot be quantified. Science has never formally recognized this process, but Dr Halliwell has observed it before, on other flights to other countries, while reading other books. But never has this interchange taken place with such intensity. The princess has entered her, like an alien creature in a science-fiction movie, and she is gestating and growing within her. The pages turn, rapidly, as the princess gains presence and power.

  But at last, after several hours, Dr Halliwell is getting tired. She is worn out by so much intensity, and the palace plots and family intrigues after the princess’s son’s death confuse her. She feels that the princess is not telling her the whole truth about them, and she cannot follow the detail. She tells the princess that she must rest, that she must shut her eyes, that she must go to the lavatory, that she must take a break. The princess, who is herself not at all comfortable at this height, even in her disembodied state, agrees to relinquish her grip for a while: she is sure by now that she has Dr Halliwell at her mercy, and is prepared to grant her a short reprieve.

  Dr Halliwell closes the by now well-annotated paperback pages, and places the book in the seat pocket in front of her, looking down with dissatisfaction at her hands as she does so. Her pen has reacted unpleasantly and with hostility to the cabin’s air pressure, and has started to leak. Her fingers are blotched blue with its liquefying azure blood. She must go to wash them. It is mid movie, and there is no queue for the toilets. She marches along the aisle on her slightly swollen feet and ankles, and bolts herself into the small prison cubicle. How large is a rice chest, she wonders? The notes on the text have described it and given its dimensions, and there is a helpful photographic illustration of a similar object, housed in a private collection in Paris. It belongs to a family connection of the translator. Nevertheless, she cannot quite visualize the fatal rice chest. Perhaps she does not wish to do so. She has always been mildly claustrophobic, with a not unnatural or indeed uncommon fear of enclosed spaces. Being stuck in a lift between floors is near the top of her list of unpleasant situations, and on planes and coaches she always tries to select an aisle seat. This fear cannot in itself wholly account for the violent nature of her response to this old crime, this ancient tragedy, but it may bear some small part in it.

  She stares at herself in the toilet mirror with some horror. She has often noticed that journeys on aeroplanes lend to the skin a particularly unpleasant colouring, and her large, brown, slightly bloodshot eyes now stare back at her from a face which has assumed an unseemly hard, mauve, cracked complexion. Broken veins walk across her cheeks and her nose, and her eyes are rimmed with an unfashionable red, as well as with suave dark brown eyeliner. She looks gross and ugly. Not thus, she hopes, did she appear the night before, in her long, black, silky rayon dress and gold earrings, at the Gladwyn dinner!

  The memory of the Gladwyn dinner attempts to cut across and divert the disturbing interpenetrating current of the life of the Crown Princess of Korea, but the powerful ghost of the Crown Princess does not give up so easily. She insists on flowing on, into the bloodstream. She refuses to allow Dr Babs Halliwell to retreat into a comfortable or uncomfortable replay of the previous night’s entertainment, into an interior monologue on the petty personal subject of the frustrated amorous attentions of Dr Halliwell’s current influential admirer and patron, the notorious philandering historian Robert Treborough. The Crown Princess urges Dr Babs to stick closer to her own royal Korean story, and to dwell on the nature of speeches and ceremonies, hierarchies and protocol, discomfort and ritual, tradition and survival, robes and symbols, power and subjugation. The Crown Princess is not very interested in Dr Halliwell’s fleeting earthly loves and losses. Sexual satisfaction had played a very small part in her own life on earth, but protocol and power had loomed heavily over her. Oxford, like eighteenth-century Korea, is a city of ancient proprieties and obsolete customs, of cloisters and cabals, and it is thence, surely, from this common area, that mutual recognition will flow. The Crown Princess believes that it is through the traditions of England and Oxford and the old mulberry tree of the Great Court that she has captivated the attention and colonized and terrorized the imagination of Dr Babs Halliwell.

  But she is wrong – well, somewhat wrong. There are connections, but they are not all rooted in Oxford or in mulberries. Dr Halliwell is not herself yet sure what they may prove to be.

  Dr Babs Halliwell, having powdered her unsatisfactorily mauve nose with a clumsy dusting of inadequate beige, returns to her seat and opens the text once more. She has nearly finished the last section of the princess’s memoirs. She reads on to the end, through the last, fullest and most devastating account of the illness and death of Prince Sado.

  Is Dr Halliwell reflecting that her own life, unlike that of the princess, has been of late passed quietly and safely and comfortably, in shady courtyards, by green lawns, in a peaceful and prosperous land, far from primitive and irrational decrees, far from cruel and violent deaths? Is she reflecting on the suburban safety of her childhood, in Orchard View, Banville Road, Orpington, and her happy schooldays at Tonbridge School? Is she casting her mind back to her carefree college days in Sussex, when the world lay all before her?

  No, she is not. She i
s thinking of the true horrors and true sorrows of her own life, sorrows that have been reawakened in her by the memoirs she has been reading. Irrationality, sickness, cruelty and violence may not be relegated to the dark backward and abysm of history. They have not yet been written out of the plot.

  Usually Dr Halliwell manages to keep some kind of formal barrier between herself and the most unhappy of her life memories, for she is an academic, an intellectual, and she is accustomed to using her intellect to control and to distance pain. She has used her brain rigorously and in her view righteously in attempts to banish fruitless suffering and vain regret. It is a tribute to the narrative power of the Crown Princess and the skills of her translator that the text on Dr Halliwell’s knee has so keenly pierced her intellect and so deeply penetrated her heart.

  Dr Halliwell’s life has been neither unhappy nor unsuccessful, and her public front of cheerful confidence is not unwarranted. But the double negatives in that last sentence have their place in the story, too. Dr Halliwell is partial to double negatives. A colleague, commenting on a draft script of her latest publication, had pointed out this stylistic preference to her. He claimed to have run her electronic text through a grammar analysis program, in order to verify his impression. She had laughed, but she had registered his comment, and checked it, and found that what he said was true. She does indeed tend to espouse the double negative. She has attempted to restrict the proliferation of this grammatical tic in the script of the paper that she is shortly to deliver at the conference in Seoul. She is still doubtful about some of her paper’s arguments, but at least they will not now be expressed wholly in double negatives.

  Her paper is called ‘Dying by Lot: Uncertainty and Fatality’.

  She has been neither unhappy nor unsuccessful in her life and in her career, and the freedom of choice and the freedom of movement that she has enjoyed in her forty-two years would have been unimaginable to the Crown Princess or to any of the Crown Princess’s female contemporaries. But she, too, has been acquainted with sorrow, loss, fear, restriction, enclosure, premature death. She, too, has tried to live with madness. She, too, feels she has failed to save others from madness. But, unlike the Crown Princess, she has been free to move away from her failures and her sorrows. She has relegated them to her past. She has been free to accept the temporary protection of her Hanbury Foundation Fellowship, in an Oxford haven. She has been free to toy with the idea of a dalliance with Robert Treborough. She has enjoyed many dalliances in her time, for she has a healthy sexual appetite, an appetite condoned and indeed encouraged by late twentieth-century Western culture. But the memories of her earlier womanhood and its sadly doomed accidents and choices continue to inform and to haunt her.

  The acuteness of the Crown Princess’s comments on Prince Sado’s mental state strike Dr Halliwell as implausibly, uncannily, ahistorically perceptive. This woman must have been hundreds of years ahead of her time. Indeed, time has not yet caught up with the Crown Princess. Had she been one of those few rare souls born out of time? Had special pleading sharpened her wits? Does special pleading often sharpen the wits? Has it sharpened Dr Halliwell’s own wits? Or has it perverted and diverted them to no good end?

  Dr Halliwell knows she ought to try to seize an hour or two of sleep before she arrives in Seoul, for she is flying against the clock and towards the rising sun, and she will lose a whole day (or is it a whole night?) of her life. She needs some beauty sleep, if she is not to arrive looking too utterly hideous. (Although she is an intellectual, she is vain and she is female, and she wants to make a good impression.) She turns off her reading light, and shuts her eyes, but of course she cannot sleep. It is just too damned uncomfortable, crammed into this mean economy seat, next to a large stranger whose elbow has strayed over the armrest into her already inadequate space. Her clothes, chosen though they were for looseness and comfort, are now digging into her and pinching her at various pressure points. Maybe she should have worn tights, instead of knee-highs? No, maybe not. A constriction at the waist is more irritating than a constriction just below the knee.

  She should have paid for an upgrade and travelled business class. She should have refused to travel in an economy seat. It is beneath her dignity to travel like this. She has a suspicion that on this very aeroplane there might be more important lecturers than herself travelling to the same conference, but in greater style. Who is there, up front, in the privileged seats? She will be very annoyed if she finds that unworthy speakers have been promoted.

  A friend of hers had once travelled back from a film festival in Bangkok on the same aeroplane as the Queen of Thailand. He was travelling first class, at the expense of his publishers, but because of the queen he had been obliged to make do with the business-class toilets. The flight attendants who waited on the queen had crawled obsequiously on their hands and knees to offer her canapés and to serve her drinks and her meals. It seemed that they were not allowed to stand in her presence. Although Babs Halliwell’s friend had reported on this experience with some mirth, she could see he had been affected by it. He had never been invited to fly first class before, and probably never would be again, so it was a pity to have this treat buggered up, as he put it, by foreign royalty.

  Dr Halliwell does not know much about protocol and decorum in Korea. Presumably things have changed since the days of the Crown Princess, for the country has been through many traumas since the days of Prince Sado and his bride. South Korea is a modern, monarchy-free country now, a modern republic in the grip of a perpetual technological and electronic revolution. There will be no need to kowtow, though there may be a question of chopsticks. Do the Koreans still revere their ancestors, in Confucian style? Or have the old ways and old beliefs been discarded? She knows that in some situations Koreans are still given to removing their shoes and sitting on the floor, and has been warned to select her clothing accordingly. Although she is so large, she is still supple enough to sit on the floor without difficulty.

  She thinks fondly of the clothes in her navy-blue Samsonite suitcase, which she hopes has been stowed safely aboard this aeroplane.

  The vivid and compulsive story of Crown Prince Sado’s clothing phobia has gripped her even more than the account of the hideous manner of his death. She knows a good deal about phobias, but she does not think that she has ever read about this one. It is new to her, and she cannot think of any known parallel. Questions about its origins and meaning, prompted by the revisionist, posthumous thinking of the Crown Princess herself, begin to percolate through the spongy grey masses of her brain and to travel along the unmapped corrugated ridges and wrinkles and valleys of her consciousness. What had Prince Sado been suffering from, and why? Has his affliction yet been named? Was it physical or psychological? Had his torment been rooted in the body or the mind? Would it, in the twenty-first century, have submitted to any form of medication?

  The first and only husband of Dr Babs Halliwell, who is still more or less alive though long estranged from her and indeed from himself, suffers from a psychological illness that took (and takes) a physical form. She wonders what he would make of the illness that had seized Prince Sado. Peter Halliwell does not slice off the heads of eunuchs or batter ladies-in-waiting to death, nor does he engage in military games on horseback in his back garden. These anachronistic and extravagant expressions of madness are not available to him, nor is it likely that he would choose them if he could. But he does, like Prince Sado, suffer from a painful and disfiguring skin disease, which intermittently covers his legs and arms and other parts of his body with peeling scabs. This, think Dr Babs and some others more professionally qualified to hold such opinions than she, is an outward expression of his suicidal depressive tendencies. Dr Babs blames Peter’s famously charismatic and famously unreliable father for this skin disease, and for the suicidal tendencies. Peter’s father had been a hard act to follow. He, or it, had demanded too much of his son. His son had failed, and had gone mad. The father had not been a king, but he had been as cr
uel and as despotic as a king. His son, like Prince Sado, had never been allowed to succeed.

  Peter’s father had been caught out cheating. Not at cards, nor at examinations. He had not cheated, it would appear, for financial gain. He had been an abstruse professional cheat, an academic cheat, a falsifier of experiments. Those who wished to condone him called him a fantasist. Those who wished to condemn him called him a liar. He had been notorious, for good reasons and for bad. History has not yet written its final verdict on Peter Halliwell’s father. Peter had not waited to hear it. He had pre-empted it.

  Dr Babs Halliwell crosses and uncrosses her legs, and glances upwards at the monitor, which is showing a tiny model aircraft jerking and edging and edging and jerking its way across the map towards the Hermit Kingdom, the Land of Morning Calm. Then she shuts her eyes again. Three hours still to go.

  She has no inclination to embark on Lady Murasaki or the Venetian detective story, although those are the books that she had selected for this journey. The Crown Princess’s memoirs she had not, in any deep sense, selected, for a week ago she had never heard of them. They had been sent to her anonymously, packaged in cardboard, through Amazon.com, by somebody who seemed to have neglected to request the enclosure of a gift message. She recalls now that she had opened the package with suspicion, and looked for some time through the cardboard casing for the name of the sender. Clearly the gift was connected with her forthcoming journey, so it must have come from someone with whom she had discussed her visit to Korea, someone who had been interested enough to remember what she said. Was it from somebody involved in the organization of the conference? Had every participant been sent a copy? This, although possible, seemed unlikely, as the book did not seem to have any evident connection with the conference’s theme, which was, ostensibly, ‘The New Frontiers of Health: Globalization and Medical Risk’. Dr Halliwell can now think of many ways in which the Crown Princess’s work could be made to relate to this topic, but that is because she is clever, and because her mind works that way. She does not believe that these connections would have readily occurred to others.