The Red Queen

by Margaret Drabble

  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 dis
playing 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.

  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 wa
iting 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.