The Red Queen

by Margaret Drabble

  As she says this, she wonders, not for the first time, if this can be wholly true. She wonders why she is so anxious to present herself as a normal person. She thinks of Orchard View, in suburban Orpington, and of the swing in the garden, and of the goldfish pond. She thinks of her paternal grandmother’s Orpington garden, with its orchard and its vegetable patch and its gooseberry bushes. She thinks of her maternal grandmother’s house in Devon, with its sloping lawn and its grey-barked mauve-blossomed tree, the tree she had loved so much. It is true that she had been a happy child.

  ‘I am a very English person,’ she says. ‘As far as I know, all my genes are English. This will become more rare, I think.’

  He agrees that the nations of the world are merging. They comment on the faces of Seoul, the capital of what was once called the ‘Hermit Kingdom’. It, too, is changing. Seoul and South Korea are now open to the world. China, he tells her, is still very Chinese. And North Korea still lives in isolation and in fantasy.

  They do not, at this point, discuss the ethics of multicultural adoption, but the subject is present to both of them.

  ‘You are English,’ he says, as the waiter removes the soup bowls, ‘but you are well travelled.’

  ‘Who, these days, is not?’ she replies.

  ‘And perhaps, also, you are not typical,’ he says.

  ‘I think types also are changing,’ she says. ‘They, too, are not what they were. Types, archetypes. Even an archetype can mutate.’

  He smiles at her, and half raises his glass to her.

  ‘You are the first and last and only Englishwoman I have known,’ he says.

  She feels herself, astonishingly, to be blushing, for she knows that he is using the verb ‘to know’ in a carnal sense. She hides her rare blush behind her napkin, as the waiter approaches with the duck.

  Having dealt with their parents over soup, they move on to the subject of their spouses with the duck.

  Jan is forthcoming about his wives. She is flattered by his confidence. Either he trusts her not to kiss and tell, or he does not care if she does. His first wife was American, he says, his second French. His first wife was modest, and so were her two sons. They are still on good terms. His second wife is extortionate, both on her own behalf and on behalf of her two daughters. His French wife, he says ruefully, is a paradox. She has adopted the alimony culture, although she says she despises America, and he has had to pay the price. His third and current wife is different. She is crazy. She is a wild card. She is half Spanish, half Swedish. Jan says it is a lethal combination, a disastrous and dangerous genetic mix. Too much merging, too sudden a conjunction of cultures. He should never have married her, but she had been very insistent.

  ‘She followed me round,’ says Jan, plaintively, as he dabs at his pale lips with the damask napkin. ‘She pursued me. From country to country, from university to university, from conference to conference. What is that word for what people do when they follow celebrities?’

  ‘Stalk?’ suggests Babs.

  ‘Yes, “stalk”. That is the word. She stalked me. She would not let me go. So I married her.’

  ‘You must have fancied her,’ says Babs.

  ‘Oh, yes, I did “fancy” her, as you say. I was in love with her. I loved her. I was vain, and I was pleased that she followed me. She is very clever and very beautiful. But she is also mad. And she is manipulative. I knew this, all along. I should not have allowed myself to be captivated. She is not at all a stable person. She wanted to have a baby with me, a “genius baby” as she used to say, and look what has happened to that bad plan. It is a very good thing that she cannot have a baby. I am not at all sure if she is capable of looking after a Chinese baby. It is all very sad. In fact, it is a tragedy.’

  He looks more ironic than tragic as he says this. He seems to have become resigned to the situation.

  ‘What does your wife do?’ asks Babs, as the plates are cleared.

  ‘Do? She does nothing. She writes letters – she writes crazy letters to the press and to my colleagues. She takes singing lessons. She has a good voice, mezzo-soprano. Once she wanted to sing in opera. She is very maniaque. She says she believes in horoscopes and messages from the spirit world. She says she can invoke god of thunder, and god of water, and god of underworld, and god of riches, and god of health. This is not true, as I do not need to say. And she does not think that it is true. She plays games. She buys clothes, all the time. She is a shopper. She runs up bills at couture houses. I have had to cancel her accounts with some of the houses and stores. But maybe if she acquires this baby on which she has set her heart, she will become a normal person again. However, this is a big risk.’

  Babs agrees that it would be a big risk. But Babs is a kind-hearted person, and she feels secretly sorry for this unknown mad woman, the last wife of Mr Rochester. Also, she thinks that Jan himself is not entirely alienated from this wife, for he speaks of her extravagances with a rueful pride. His own clothes, moreover, are not cheap. He is no stranger to haute couture. He may have set his crazy wife a bad example.

  She volunteers, sympathetically, that her own husband, to whom she is still legally married, is not wholly sane. But he is not therefore to be wholly written off and abandoned, she says.

  Jan van Jost seems to know a good deal about Peter Halliwell. And, as she had half suspected, he does indeed seem to have been acquainted at some point in the past with Peter’s father, the charismatic and delinquent anthropologist. She cannot decide whether he has known what he knows for a long time, or whether he has been secretly interrogating Bob Bryant in the bar of the Pagoda Hotel. Perhaps in the privacy of his suite he has been curious enough about her past to press prying questions into his globally connected palmtop. The Internet has a fair amount of information about Halliwell père et fils, though Babs does not spend much time looking for it. There is too much there that she does not want to know.

  Babs is not sure if she wants to talk to Jan about Peter, although it was she that brought him up. She hopes that Jan’s interest in her is not in any way connected with her late father-in-law. She is pleased when, over coffee, they move to more present topics.

  Over coffee Jan reverts to the memoirs of the Crown Princess, and thanks her, yet again, for introducing him to them. They had been full of fascination for him, he repeats, although he is not yet sure why. The oedipal conflict, the state examination stress, the palace intrigues, the arcane Confucian system, the clothing phobia, the claustrophobic death in the rice chest? (Interestingly, he does not mention the nature of the unique voice of the female narrator: this does not seem to have struck him as forcibly as it has struck her.) He embarks on a brilliant and well-illustrated digression on the nature of claustrophobia and enclosure: it is so brilliant and it makes her mind race so fast that she can hardly bear to listen to it, though she knows she ought to be trying to concentrate on this privileged discourse. He is the best talker she has ever stared at across a dining table, and there have been some strong competitors. Will his words lodge, somewhere, in some part of her cerebral cortex, whence she will be able to hook them out at some calmer, less erotically charged moment?

  He tells her that although he does not know why he has been so interested in the story of the Crown Princess, which had brought them together so strangely and in his view so happily, he does know that he has her to thank for their most enjoyable and interesting visit to Suwon. Suwon will always be one of his happiest and most surprising travel memories. ‘It has been a great pleasure to me,’ he says, formally, ‘to make your acquaintance here. I was not expecting to find any happiness here. I was so very tired, when I flew in from China. I was so very, very tired. You have given me a new lease of life, for these few days.’

  He raises his glass to her, and salutes her. She likes his oblique and old-fashioned language and his manners very much. They gaze at one another, intently, over the heavily starched white tablecloth, blue eye to brown eye, as lovers gaze, attempting to read the soul. Despite the rapid
telepathic exchanges and short cuts of their long conversation, he has some secret that she cannot read. Whatever it is, it draws her. She gazes into the depths of its enigma. He is at once so present and so absent. She can see many reasons why a woman might want to stalk this man. He is famous; he is handsome; he is urbane. He is well dressed and in every way well presented, and presumably, despite the alimony and the high-spending Viveca, he is rich. He is also very quick and very clever. (Well, he would be, wouldn’t he?) But there is more to it than that. There is some other attraction in him that calls to her. Will she have time to discover what it is, in the next two short days they will have together? Or will she, too, be compelled to stalk him? Will she find herself tracking him down at the globalization conference on El Hierro? Will she turn up on his doorstep there, to the music of the wild Atlantic surges, like the lady from the sea?

  She knows that she will not stalk him to El Hierro, or to any other place. Unlike Viveca, she is not at all mad. She is sane and she is healthy, and she has a busy life of her own. This is a mantra that she repeats to herself frequently, and for years, whether she believes it or not, it has served her well. She knows and she thinks he knows that he has nothing to fear from her. She will not demand improbable gifts from him or set him impossible tasks. She will not strike dangerous bargains with him. She will not commission him to purchase jewels or Chinese babies for her. She will make no demands on him. What harm can there be, for either of them, in an affair of three days?

  They walk back together, arm in arm, to the Pagoda Hotel, down the hot brightly lit street, past the street traders with their busy stalls. The city is glamorous, and its aroma is exotic: odours of gasoline and spices and pickle and burnt sugar and fish mingle in the night air. They are in no hurry; there is a whole night before them. A large yellow Chusŏk harvest moon, almost at the full, floats in the thick and hazy sky. They pass a row of twelve policemen sitting neatly on the pavement on their helmets, by their police bus. It is a strange and curiously orderly sight. Babs reflects, as she walks, that she is lucky to live in modern times, in peaceful, prosperous times. Jan and Babs observe, move on, and linger, gazing at fast food and heaps of merchandise. They pass the stall selling hosiery, and Babs’s eyes fall once more upon the scarlet butterfly-patterned knee-high socks. She does not think that Jan has seen her eyeing them, but he has. He is very quick, on her behalf. He has seen her yearning backward glances as they move on. He cross-questions her, she confesses, and he returns to buy her a pair. They cost a few pence. She is not as expensive as the second wife, or the third, he tells her. They are not a very handsome gift. He is ashamed to offer them to her, they are so cheap.

  ‘But I love them,’ she says. ‘They’ll probably be far too small for me. Everyone here is so petite. But they are so pretty. And I do so like red.’

  They are not too small for her. They stretch to accommodate her large feet. Later, in bed, they both admire the butterflies. She keeps the socks on, at his request, while they make love, this time more energetically, more confidently, and for a little longer. She knows the routine by now: afterwards, he will reach for his pills, and she will make him a mug of tea.

  The supply of ginseng has not been replenished. He selects jasmine; she camomile. This second selection process has acquired a pleasantly domestic intimacy.

  As they drink their teas, he switches on the television, and they sit there, sedately, side by side, watching an oriental operatic spectacular with the sound turned very low. It seems to be coming from some special Chinese commercial satellite channel, beamed towards Korea. He tells her about the bizarre Chinese opera he had seen in Beijing, with its startling libretto, and he describes the rows of underground terra-cotta warriors entombed in Xian. She tells him about the rehearsals for the Confucian ancestral rites that she had seen with Dr Oo in the gardens of the Munmyo shrines. She tells him about the pale and awful haunch of sacrificial meat. They speak, a little, of the marriage of Prince Sado and the Crown Princess, and Babs’s eyes flit covertly towards the heap of books on his bedside table. She can’t see the orange and carmine Yellow Fields Press spine of the memoirs, amidst the tower of volumes of philosophy and sociology and linguistics and biography that she had inspected the night before, and she really doesn’t want to leave without them. It would be an honour to have a book stolen from her by Jan van Jost, but she’d rather have the book than the honour. It may be out of print. The mysterious donor from Amazon may have sent her the last available copy. She has never heard of the press or the imprint, and suspects they might prove elusive.

  Again, he reads her mind. ‘You can have it back tonight,’ he says, ‘but only if you agree now to come back tomorrow night.’

  ‘You may not want me to come back tomorrow night,’ she says.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘It is you that may not want to. But I am asking you to come back to me tomorrow night. This is important for me. Three nights is correct. It is a magic number. Two is inartistic. And I am a very superstitious person. I shall always be unhappy about you and always regret you, if you do not return to me for the last night. Also, tomorrow night, you must give me your wise and beautiful advice.’

  Of course, she agrees to return. How could she resist? There is nothing she wants more than to spend one more night with him. She would have been mortified had he wished otherwise. They make a pact. Now, she will return to Room 1517, with the memoirs. But they will agree to meet the next day. The next day will be his last and her penultimate day in Seoul: he is scheduled to speak at the National University; she at Ewha Woman’s University. They both have lunch engagements. In the afternoon, there is free time. In the evening, there will be the official conference banquet, where they will see each other from a distance. After the banquet and the speeches, they will repair to Suite 1712, and spend their final night together, and exchange their final confidences.

  ‘So, it is agreed,’ says the miner’s son.

  ‘Yes, it is agreed,’ says the doctor’s daughter.

  This time, she remembers to take the book, but, when she gets back to her room, she finds she has left her glasses by Jan van Jost’s bed. Oh, well, never mind. She has lots of pairs of glasses. She is always losing her glasses. He will keep them safely for her, until their last tryst.

  The miner’s son and the doctor’s daughter do not see one another again until the final banquet. Babs Halliwell, in happy anticipation of their reunion, shamelessly enjoys her day. The campus of Ewha Woman’s University is spacious and finely landscaped. It occupies a hillside with trees and statues and buildings ancient and modern. The members of staff are charming; the students seem courteously interested in what she has to say. Babs admires the valuable collection of ancient ceramics and the rich display of textiles in the University Museum. She feels that her eye for things Korean is improving a little: objects that had at first seemed formless are beginning to take on form. She is gaining perspective, and seeing better. She cannot yet care for dragons, but maybe in time she will learn to like them, too.

  She lunches on the Pear Blossom Campus with her hosts, and they talk of the changing lives of women in Korea: they all agree with her that they are fortunate to live in modern times. This is the largest women’s university in the world, claim her hosts, with 17,000 students, at least some of whom will move on into careers and professions. A whole army of fashion vendors is encamped in the shopping street just outside the university gates, ready to waylay the young scholars and to divert them from their higher purposes, tempting them with heaped emporia of shoes and jeans and cosmetics and evening gowns and wedding dresses. But some will surely make their way safely through the consumer gauntlet. It is a shame that the wedding-dress industry thrives so well in Seoul, and that such fortunes are wasted upon weddings, says Professor Pak, shaking her well-groomed head in mild pedagogic censure. It is not the custom to spend so much in Europe, she believes?

  It depends on your social class, says Babs, who had married Peter Halliwell in midsummer in a register offi
ce in Bromley, clad in a full-length, bright-red cotton dress made in Morocco. Those had been the days.

  Babs thinks, with guilty affection, of her cheap and frivolous red socks, and of the little red skirt of the Crown Princess. She thinks of mentioning the Crown Princess, but the conversation strays elsewhere, and she does not do so. This is perhaps a pity, for had Babs mentioned her, she would have learned that a professor attached to this very campus had recently published a bestselling historical detective story involving the princess and her son, King Chŏngjo. She will discover this one day, but not yet.

  Boldly, after accepting a soothing cup of tea in a traditional tearoom, she insists on returning alone by the subway to her hotel. Her hosts bow to her desire to test herself in this manner. She survives the journey triumphantly, without making a false move. She is pleased with herself. She has conquered the subways of Seoul. Back at the hotel, she finds a message on her machine from Dr Oo. He says he is leaving for Amsterdam the next day; will she be able to find time to say goodbye? She rings him back in his room, but he is out. She leaves a message suggesting that they could take breakfast together the next day in the Jade Coffee Shop, if he is not leaving at dawn. At eight-thirty, perhaps?

  She takes a slow bath, and dresses carefully for the final banquet. She is feeling ridiculously happy. Her stay here, after its inauspicious opening, perhaps because of its inauspicious opening, has been glorious to her. She feels purged of old regrets and sorrows, charged with a new energy. Dr Oo and Professor Jan van Jost have done wonders for her morale. Between them, through their differing kindnesses, they have transformed her from a gross and stupid woman into a wise and beautiful woman. She feels power crackling through her hair, as she brushes it and ties it back with a golden ribbon. She clips a pair of dangling golden earrings to her ears, and fastens a golden necklace around her throat. She is in the prime of life, she tells herself, as she admires herself in the mirror in her long black silky crushproof rayon dress.