The Red Queen (43 page)

It is partly to the hospital’s credit that the Englishwoman and the Swedish–Spanish woman have made this long journey. Far from quietly pocketing the $1,000 deposit and attempting to resell the child to the next bidder, the hospital staff had done their best to track down the depositor. This search had taken time, but it had been accomplished, and here the foreign women are, to claim their child. These women are the heirs of the Dutchman, and the child they have inherited is called Chen Jianyi.

Viveca van Jost, as Barbara had half suspected, is not nearly as crazy as her husband had wished to suggest. She is eccentric, impulsive and volatile, but she is not mad. She and Barbara are good friends now, bonded by bureaucracy. Viveca will be First Mother, for she has the prior claim, but Barbara will offer regular and regulated support as Second Mother. Viveca has been much in need of support. As she has told Barbara many times, she would not have risked this enterprise on her own. Barbara’s letter had fortified her. She had been on the verge of giving up her quest.

First Mother completes the final documents, and signs her name with a flourish. Is that it, then?

They are told that the child will be delivered to their hotel room in the evening, with her passport and her papers and her little bag of worldly goods. The homeward flight is safely booked. The women are to return to Europe the next day, with their new charge.

If Viveca and Barbara are frightened by their new responsibility, they do not display their fear to one another. They are possessed by a show of generous bravado. There is no retreating now.

Jan van Jost is impressed by their perseverance. His women have proved themselves to be women of character.

The Crown Princess is also impressed. Her envoy has done well, and this is a child after her own heart, a child of determination and promise.

The child, when she is brought to the hotel, is silent. Her silence is uncanny. She does not cry. She makes no sound. She casts no lingering glance after the uniformed official who deposits her. She sits, in one corner of the hotel settee, and stares, and stares, and stares. She waits, and waits, and stares.

Is she hungry? Is she thirsty? Will she sleep? What is she thinking? Is she deaf? Is she dumb? What does this silence signify?

Chen Jianyi is disconcerting. The women do not know how to address her. She is small, and complete, but at the same time demanding. What does she want of them? Will she sit there, awake, staring at them from those great dark eyes, all night? She watches them as they move nervously round the room. She is wearing a little pale blue cotton outfit held together with white plastic press-studs. The women have brought some changes of Western-style clothes for her, but they do not know if she will accept them. Maybe she will be particular about her garments? However will they learn her ways? They have understood her to be potty-trained, but is this true? They have a small plastic pot in their luggage, but it would seem rude and crude to offer it so soon in their acquaintance.

Viveca cedes authority to Barbara, who had once had a child of her own, a child who had died at the age that this child is now. This new girl child succeeds Benedict, and steps into his shoes. Barbara is on the verge of panic, but she forces herself to be calm. It is only a small child, after all, a small child who had been dumped not long after birth at a bus station in a plastic bag.

Barbara sits down on the settee by the child, and dares to touch the soft skin of the child’s dimpled hand. The child looks down at her own hand, impassively, and at Barbara’s large fingers, and then looks up again, to meet Barbara’s eyes. She tries to hold Barbara’s gaze. Her expression is one of great solemnity. Still, she makes no sound. How will she respond to their foreign accents, their alien voices? They are not even sure how to pronounce her name. The gulf between them is immeasurable, and yet she stares across it, sucking out the soul of their attention.

Barbara has brought one or two toys, described as suitable for a two-year-old. She had bought them, on advice, at the Early Learning Centre, a store that specializes in practical and educational playthings. Diffidently, she takes from her shoulder bag a nest of simple hollow plastic coloured cubes, and offers it to the child. Politely, the child accepts the object, then puts it down on the settee. Barbara retrieves it, and demonstrates its properties. The cubes can make a nest, or, alternatively, a tower. The child watches, impassively, as big Barbara plays with the blocks. Barbara takes them out, and lays them out, and fits them back again into one another. She builds them up, then takes them apart again. It is impossible to tell if the child is interested or not. Will the child ever cry? Does she ever smile? Does she even know how to smile?

The blank slate, the empty vessel, the well of ink, the unwritten book. The universal, essential, patient, driven, unique, determined self.

Then, suddenly, as Barbara begins to despair of any interaction, the child reaches out her hand for the toy. She deigns to reach out for her gift. She looks at Barbara, enquiringly, as she reaches out her hand, and Barbara feels a shiver, a birth pang, deep in her entrails. Barbara gives the toy to the child. Soundlessly, seriously, the child unstacks the blocks, and lays them in a row. Then, silently, seriously, the child begins to put them together again, fitting one into another, one by one. She is dexterous and neat, and hardly falters in her selection. She understands the blocks, and how they are made to fit together.

The two women watch, spellbound, as the child demonstrates her skills. It is a miracle. This child is a survivor. This child is gifted beyond all other children the world has ever seen. She is a treasure, and she has condescended to allow them to bestow their care upon her. She has commanded them to come to her side, and they have answered her summons. It is a miracle; it is a mystery.

The child looks up from her childish cubes, and gazes from one woman to the other. She is wondering where that Dutchman has gone, that man with faded blue eyes who had sworn to return for her. She is too young to understand that he is dead. But she knows that these women will do her bidding. She is imperial in her demeanour, and queenly in her expectations. The Crown Princess observes her new heir with satisfaction. Her interests will be safe with her.

There will be times, in her childhood, when Chen Jianyi will suffer moments of doubt about her eccentric upbringing and her rigorous education. But these will be few. On the whole, she will be confident that she has chosen the better part. These years, at the beginning of the second millennium, are good years for transcultural exchanges, and for clever multilingual children of mixed heritage. It is as well to be clever, in this sharp and fast new world of accelerating fusion and diffusion, but she is clever. She is very clever. She will direct her career with skill and style, and set her sights at the highest of goals. Maybe she will return to conquer her homeland of China, who knows? Maybe America will invite her to deploy her talents on behalf of its expanding empire? Maybe Europe, her foster mother, will manage to retain her in its service? As the posthumous stepdaughter of Jan van Jost, she will set her heart on degree after degree, piling them high upon one another like the tower of coloured cubes that was her first gift from the West. Her first doctoral dissertation will take the unification of North and South Korea as its topic: Jan van Jost and Kim Dae Jung will applaud from the grave, and Barbara and Viveca will applaud from the front row. But a tower of degrees alone will not content her. Doctoral dissertations will not appease her restless and determined spirit. She has set her heart on power. She has endured enough of powerlessness.

When she comes in her eighth year to pay her annual July visit to Second Mother Barbara in London, the fulfilment of these long-term plans is still far in the future. But she has many short-term girlish plans in her head. She wants to go round on the London Eye, and she would like to see the crown jewels and their guardian jackdaws. She is keen to visit the widely advertised and allegedly sensational new installation at Tate Modern, which offers a breathtaking virtual journey through space and time. It is designed by a young Chinese sculptor whom Viveca had met in Stockholm, and it is called ‘Silk Road’. She has also requested an out-of-town trip to Legoland or Stonehenge. Babs has encouraged her in all these wishes, for Babs is herself an ardent sightseer, eager to find an excuse to visit these attractions – the thought of Legoland she finds particularly intriguing, although she would never admit this to her colleagues. What
can
Legoland
be
? She has often wondered, and this will be her chance to find out. The Queen of England has been to see it, so why should not Barbara Halliwell and her honoured guest?

Chen Jianyi also wants to go shopping. First Mother Viveca has infected her adopted daughter with an awesome appetite and capacity for shopping. Babs, who is an episodic rather than a perpetual shopper, looks forward, perhaps a little apprehensively, to taking her borrowed daughter on a shopping spree.

We see Babs watching eagerly, at the arrival gates, for the excitable Viveca and the small, resolute Chen Jianyi. Barbara Halliwell waves wildly, with both arms, like a windmill, when she sees them emerge from Customs. They see her at once. For even here, in England, amongst the English, Babs is conspicuous in a crowd. We see that she is looking well: her new, shorter, frizzle-curled hairstyle becomes her, and her skin is tanned and glowing with health. It has been, so far, a good spring, a good summer. It seems that the world is smiling on Dr Barbara Halliwell. On the way to the short-term car park, the child tightly, silently, holds the hand of Babs. The child’s hand is warm and delightful and confiding and full of trust. This friendly sensation of contact is of the greatest importance to Barbara Halliwell. Chen Jianyi’s gaze is often fierce, but her hand is always friendly. Babs continues to be surprised by the neat and proper manner in which their two hands fit together, the one so large, the other so small. The two hands seem to be made for another. This must be an illusion, but it is a sustaining and benevolent illusion. They make an odd couple, as they make their way towards the car park. Viveca follows, meekly pulling the child’s wheeled suitcase.

That night, Babs gives Chen Jianyi her favourite English supper, which consists of chicken korma from Sainsbury’s, followed by homemade pancakes tossed to the ceiling, then covered in Tate and Lyle golden syrup. The depraved delicacy of Sainsbury’s chicken korma is not available in Barcelona, and would not be permitted if it were, for Viveca is, at least currently, a food purist on a diet. Chen Jianyi looks forward to her chicken korma from visit to visit. Babs is not a good cook, but she knows what Chen Jianyi likes, and Babs enjoys making pancakes. Over her mild, pale yellow supper, Chen Jianyi, in her impeccably precise but very occasionally hesitant English, outlines her immediate needs. She is very anxious to acquire a new summer dress, like the one her schoolfriend Anna has recently acquired. This dress had been purchased in London, for her friend Anna is also a multi-ethnic infant, with indulgent diplomatic grandparents who live in somewhere called, Chen Jianyi believes, South Kensington. She does not know the name of the shop where it was purchased, but she believes the shop is also in South Kensington. Can they please go to South Kensington to look for a red dress just like Anna’s?

Of course, says Babs.

It is evident that Barbara Halliwell has made an effort not only to provide a desirable meal, but also to tidy her apartment in preparation for the arrival of the child. Babs is still living in Cantor Hill, as she was when we last saw her, but she has cleared away most of the books that were piled so high upon her desk and scattered over her floors. Her Korean volumes are sitting neatly in a bookcase now, along with a growing collection of books on Chen Jianyi’s native land. The Korean texts are shelved, but not forgotten: they have done their work. And she has finished her book on triage in the NHS, for there it is, two shelves below the Crown Princess. (It cannot be claimed that it has had an immediate effect on government policy, but that was not its intention. Babs is not a politician: she is an academic.)

The apartment has been dusted, and swept, and polished. The mice have long since been evicted, for a fastidious child would not like to see the little brown droppings of mice. Insects, also, have been, in so far as it is possible, expelled. If the stoic and spoiled Chen Jianyi has a childish frailty, it lies in her horror of flies and spiders, and Babs respects this phobia. Chen Jianyi is irrationally afraid of insects, a weakness she has not been able to conceal. She has got it into her small head that they are spies and that they watch her during the night. Chen Jianyi, unlike Barbara, likes magpies, which she thinks are lucky birds, but she does not like flies and spiders. Babs has not been able to work out whether this phobia relates to some Chinese folk memory from early infancy – had not Chairman Mao once initiated a notorious anti-fly campaign? – or whether it springs, perhaps, from a confusion about the meaning of the vulgar word ‘bug’. Perhaps all children are afraid of insects, and it is a normal universal childish aversion that she will soon outgrow? In vain so far has Babs tried to make Chen Jianyi more insect-friendly: the child still shudders, with involuntary distaste and alarm, whenever she sees a fly buzzing against a window pane, or, worse still, catches sight of a spider in the bathroom. Babs does not dislike spiders at all, but she has removed them from her apartment humanely by chasing them out of the window or capturing them in cups and releasing them into the garden.