The Red Queen (27 page)

She had never understood about the neckties. Peter had always hated to wear a tie. He said they were a ludicrous sartorial item and made him feel strangulated. So why, of all available methods, had he chosen to strangle himself? If he’d left it to the sleeping pills, he might have died a better death.

Crown Prince Sado and Benedict Halliwell and Peter Halliwell had been tormented by doctors. The lives of the crown prince and the baby had been artificially and painfully though unsuccessfully prolonged, and that of Peter Halliwell continues to be so.

Barbara Halliwell is a healthy woman who happens to have an unusual chromosomal abnormality that had caused her son’s severe combined immunodeficiency disease. This disease is extremely rare. It afflicts 1 in 100,000. She had been the carrier. The carrier female in these cases is asymptomatic and healthy. It had all been nothing other than genetic bad luck. There had been no guilt attached. Benedict’s illness could not have been foreseen. The treatment which might now have saved him was not then available, and is uncertain now. She had been offered the choice between two bad choices.

Benedict Halliwell is long dead, and his ashes are long dispersed on Primrose Hill, but his mother is alive, and she is drawing another pattern, this time of daisy heads, on the second page of her conference notepad.

Benedict had been cremated because Barbara had refused to allow his unusual body parts to be preserved for medical research. This choice had been illogical on her part, but she has never regretted it. The child had suffered enough. She suspects that the hospital had kept some bits anyway, without telling her. That’s all right by her. There are some questions it is better not to be asked, some choices one does not wish to confront.

One day, one day soon, all patterns will be revealed. One day, one day soon, all patterns will be understood, and all ills repaired or prevented. The virus with the corrective gene will be planted back into the system, and the system will be restored. Dementia will die, depression will die, and the dead will rise from their graves and be made whole. The dead will speak. Long before the last trump, the dead will speak. Or so some seem to say. So the Crown Princess believes and hopes.

Jan van Jost has his story to tell, the story of the leaden casket. He will tell it soon. He, too, like Babs Halliwell, is drawing patterns on his conference notepad. He favours Dutch daffodils. A little border of daffodils sprouts gaily from his purple pen. Everyone has a story to tell. The number of stories here is bewildering. The Sejong Auditorium rustles and bristles with competing and conflicting stories, all trying to find a mouth, a voice, a pen, a screen, an outlet. Australian stories, Korean stories, French stories, Japanese stories, English stories, American stories, and stories from the Netherlands and the nether world. They are all here, jostling about in this complex, overwhelming global muddle.

The tall woman and the smaller man keep their assignation. Here they are, in the late morning, walking together through the great gateway of Changgyeonggung, also known as Historic Site No. 123, or the Palace of Glorious Blessings. They are armed with tickets and information leaflets. Dr Halliwell may be seen to clutch her leaflet tightly: she can hardly believe that she, here, now, is about to enter the very gardens and see the very buildings where the Crown Princess lived out her life and wrote her remarkable memoirs. She is treading the very ground that sad Prince Sado trod, and her escort Dr Oo Hoi-Chang has assured her that she will see signboards and inscriptions written by the very hands of King Yŏngjo and King Chŏngjo. She is familiar with the glories of Hampton Court and Versailles, but the palace of Changgyeonggung seems to her to be a far more mysterious and portentous survival from the past. Who would have thought that this place could still be here on earth, and that she could in her body enter it? Truly, a paperback book can have much to answer for.

The tall woman and the smaller man walk with measured steps along the white gravel. Both are wearing dark glasses, for the September sun is bright. The ghost of the Crown Princess walks along with them, and a magpie jerks and struts its way before them. There are not many tourists to be seen, though a straggling line of small schoolchildren wanders off to their right, towards the Botany Garden. ‘What is your name? What is your name?’ they had eagerly pestered Westerner Babs as they passed, and they had mimicked her reply. ‘Barbara, Barbara!’ they had cried, in chirping happiness. The name of ‘Barbara’ resounds joyfully round the shrubberies, where in spring the azaleas bloom. On the lawn, a couple of gardeners squat and root for weeds with simple instruments. These gardeners are timeless, ageless, genderless. They could well have been there, unchanging, for two hundred years. It is peaceful and quiet, here in the Land of Morning Calm. Two old men sit companionably upon a bench, with cardboard cups of tea or coffee in their hands. A small, striped squirrel runs along the tiled ridge of a wall. The song of the cicadas is faint but persistent.

Dr Oo and Dr Halliwell are playing truant from the second morning sessions of their respective conferences. She is supposed to be listening to a Japanese sociologist, and he should be listening to an American cognitive scientist talking about aphasia and speech recovery. But they have decided instead to stroll together in the palace gardens. Dr Oo turns out to be very well informed about the lives of the Crown Princess and Prince Sado, and the Yi monarchs of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Dr Halliwell had at first found this level of knowledge surprising, in a middle-aged neurologist on the far side of the culture gap (surely not all contemporary expatriate Koreans can have so refined an historical awareness?), but she has now discovered that Dr Oo’s interest in the subject and the period is not wholly coincidental. His sister, it appears, works for UNESCO in New York, and has been closely involved with the plans for the restoration of the fortress of Suwon-Hwaseong, which was registered in the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List in 1997. Hwaseong, says Dr Oo, is Historic Site No. 3, and well deserves its important listing. It is an extraordinary monument, or collection of monuments, says Dr Oo – and, yes, it is indeed the very place where the Crown Princess celebrated her sixtieth birthday in such a spectacular manner in the year 1795. It is a very well-documented event, says Dr Oo. Would Dr Halliwell like to visit the fortress? He would be happy to show it to her.

Babs Halliwell makes non-committal noises. This man is too kind, too kind, and she is touched by his apparently altruistic forgiveness. She is not sure that she can interpret it correctly. In a Western colleague, she would take his politeness as a presage to some kind of sexual overture, for she knows she is considered attractive and usually feels herself to be so, but she cannot escape the conviction that to him she must still appear gross. She is much cleaner than she had been on their first encounter, but she is still large and unwieldy. As a growing girl, as a too rapidly growing girl, she had been self-conscious about her height. (One of the attractions of Peter Halliwell had been his tall stature: he was one of the few men who could look down on her.) It does not take very much to revive that early self-consciousness in her, and she suspects that Dr Oo cannot possibly find her appearance and her person pleasing. Nor can he be lonely in Seoul, for this is his birthplace. He has not lived here for some years, and most of his family has emigrated, but he must have friends here, so he cannot be suffering from conference-isolation. So why is he wasting his time on her? It is a puzzle.

It is a puzzle, but she cannot afford to dwell on it too closely, for her curiosity about the Crown Princess and her need to step in the footsteps of the Crown Princess are powerful, and she needs him as a guide. She would never have found this palace compound by herself, even though it is listed as Historic Site No. 123. She cannot believe that she is gazing at the buildings where the drama of the princess’s long life was enacted. True it may be, as Dr Oo explains, that many of the original buildings have been over the years destroyed by storms and fires and invasions, but, nevertheless, some of the fabric is authentic, the layout is as it always was, and the bronze sundial and the astronomical observatory and the heptagonal stone
taeshil
that contains the placenta of King Songjong long predate the tenure of the princess. So, too, do some of the trees. They had been old when the Crown Princess was born in Pansong-bang. Like the mulberry tree of Babs’s Oxford courtyard, they have been propped and cherished over hundreds of years. She peers at their inscriptions. Seven hundred and fifty years old is this twisted juniper, with its long, grey, reaching branches and its green, spiked tufts! And here is a tree with foot-roots of stone, a petrified tree, a tree that is neither vegetable nor mineral, a rock tree of nameless age.

The landscaped granite slopes set in grass remind her of somewhere vaguely familiar, but she cannot work out where.

The pavilions and halls of history take shape before her. So that is the writing of King Sunjo, the grandson of the Crown Princess. Those are his bold and flowing Chinese characters, emblazoned over the threshold of this fine banquet hall with its beautifully decorated tile-ends and its aspiring eaves! She gapes like the tourist she has become. And here is the hall called Sungmungdang where Sunjo’s grandfather, the temperamental King Yŏngjo, used to receive and test university students in person, and, according to her English-language pamphlet, ‘throw parties to encourage them’. And that is the hall where he greeted those who had achieved the highest grades in the civil and military examinations – a formal graduation ceremony, she supposes? Dr Oo is not sure, but agrees with her suggestion that the culture of the period that has so caught her interest was indeed dominated by the examination system. And still is so, in so many ways, he adds. The old-fashioned Confucian examinations had at last disappeared, amidst wars and invasions and modernizations, but a new examination system has replaced them. Students protest – Korean students are good at protesting, they have a fine tradition of protest – but they submit.

What, she enquires, does King Yŏngjo’s calligraphy mean, up there over the doorway of Sungmungdang? Those three large Chinese characters, what do they signify? He shakes his head. He cannot read them. He can find out for her, perhaps. They will say something grandiose, he has no doubt.

Dr Oo is proud of her close attention to his nation’s cultural treasures, but after half an hour and more earnest perambulation he suggests that maybe they could both now do with a cup of coffee. There is a machine nearby in the gardens that makes excellent Maxwell House, he says: let him show her how to use it, the knowledge may come in useful during her stay, for these machines may be found in many places – on the underground stations, in subway shopping malls, at street corners, in the corridors of universities. ‘We live too fast in Seoul now,’ says Dr Oo. ‘All cities live too fast. We grab our coffee as we go.’

She watches carefully as he puts the coins in the machine. She will never remember the symbol on the button for ‘black without sugar’. She has not time to get the hang of the
han’gŭl
alphabet, although he assures her it is much easier than it looks. The shot of coffee is, as he had said it would be, excellent. They sit together on a bench by the lake, and watch the imprisoned fish leap from its still, small waters.

‘So,’ says Dr Oo, ‘you give your paper tomorrow. And so do I. And then, the next day, we can go to Suwon-Hwaseong for a day trip and a walk round the fortress walls.’

He is pushing it a bit, but she does not discourage him. She does not say that the day after tomorrow she thinks she is supposed to attend the long-awaited plenary presentation of Jan van Jost because she is not quite sure if she has got her conference programme straight in her head.

She has tested the name of Jan van Jost on Dr Oo, but cannot tell whether or not he has responded to its full glory. Dr Oo can be inscrutable when he wants, but so, she guesses, can anyone. The truth is that she herself has failed to respond to Jan van Jost’s glamour because Jan van Jost has so far failed to notice her existence. She is still annoyed with him for being late in arrival, and does not think he has been sufficiently diligent in turning up to conference events. The general opinion, amongst delegates, is that Professor van Jost thinks too much of himself. He is arrogant and evasive. He is not convivial. He does not mix. She is quite sure that he will not attend her paper tomorrow afternoon, so why should she attend his? Would it not be better to take a day off, with this charming and well-mannered stranger?

She sips the last dregs of her bracingly strong coffee. This well-attended conference is so far doing little for her academic morale. It has made her uneasy about her status and her prospects. She has to vacate her handsome Oxford lodgings by the end of the month, to make room for a new Hanbury Fellow. She must return to the rat race of London, and to her teaching commitments there. She is not sure if she has spent her fellowship year well enough. She is not sure if she wants to go on teaching at all. She has played her cards badly with Robert Treborough, and anyway she does not like him very much. Why is she always attracted to such competitive bastards? Is it because she is so competitive herself?

Would she have been different, if Benedict had lived? Or if she had dared to have another child, with one of her subsequent and saner lovers?

This thought, which rarely visits her, comes to her now like a little bird, and perches in her spirit.

They rise then, the tall woman and the smaller man, and they continue their tour along the pathway that leads them to the royal Jongmyo shrines. They cross a footbridge that takes them over a busy, multilaned city road. They are elevated, this modern couple, high above the traffic of the modern city. They look down from the green past, on to the busy metal bonnets of Hyundai and Daewoo. They are uplifted, on another plane. Time here is on two levels, and old time leads them from the queen’s palace, across the gasoline-polluted ravine of the twenty-first century, to a vast, silent, empty, pale, paved courtyard, bisected by a narrow royal pathway of slate blue. The ravine reminds the woman of somewhere that she knows well, but she cannot quite bring it into consciousness. It hovers, this other place, this concept of a place, just out of her reach. It makes some join, some connection, in the intricate pathways of her memory.