The Red Queen

by Margaret Drabble

  There is little evidence so far, here, in this room, of the aggressive electronic age that our first narrator evoked at the end of her section. The digital clock glows red, and a small, red light emanates from the large woman’s bedside radio, but there is no television set to be seen. This is not a woman who watches television in bed. Hers is a timeless room, offering less of a shock to the trans-secular senses of the time traveller than might have been expected. The view out of the window, were the woman to rise and look out over the gardens, is more than timeless. It is ancient. It is antiquity itself. The stone of the building is a softly pitted honey yellow, tinged with the greys and rusts and ochres of lichen. A spreading mulberry tree stands in the quadrangle. It is centuries older than the story that the woman will carry on to the aeroplane in her little green case.

  The lower branches of the ancient mulberry tree are supported by wooden props and elaborate metal brackets. The grand herbaceous borders of the walled garden are ripe with the closed green buds of flowers of pink and purple and white. The green nubs of these spikes and spires will begin to open soon, in the searching and sad pale gold of a lowly piercing September English dawn. The striped and neatly mown grass is damp with early autumn English dew.

  She is a fortunate woman, to overlook so fine, so finely maintained a view. She must be a princess of her time. What has she done to deserve these riches? Has she inherited them, or married them, or earned them? What is her tenure? Are they hers in perpetuity, or are they on loan to her? What right has she to lie in state?

  She has at last fallen into a deep sleep, and is dreaming that she is on an aeroplane heading towards the wrong city. This is not Seoul the Unknown that she approaches, but Denver or Dallas. The airship is flying too low over a tightly clustered crystal forest of fragile skyscrapers, and it is clipping them with its wide wings. At any moment the aeroplane will burst into a ball of flame – but, no, that alarm bell is the ringing of the clock, and simultaneously the telephone by her bed begins to clamour at her, and she awakes, averting the disaster that in dreams may never come.

  Dr Babs Halliwell (so that is her name, we are learning fast) answers the prompt college intercom alarm, kicks off her duvet, struggles violently from her bed, switches off the alarm button of her clock before it can scream at her, and waits to answer the preordered double-safe wake-up telephone call before going to the bathroom to run her bath. As she strides across the room, we see that she is even taller than we thought. She has a commanding figure, and she has an air of command. Even alone, unobserved except by the viewless little fluttering denizens of the upper air, she seems to be on show. She performs to herself, a little drama of self-importance, of self-encouragement. She does not speak aloud to herself – it is perhaps too early in the morning for that – but we can guess that at times she may.

  Energetically she turns on the bath taps, rescues a thickset, round, short-legged spider from the tub with her face flannel, releases it upon the carpet, brushes her teeth, tests the water, submerges herself, and sponges herself. The aromatic herbal perfumes of her bath gel fill the bathroom air. She raises one foot from the foam, and inspects the chipped and lurid garnet nail varnish with shallow and transitory disapproval. So far, so good, her manner indicates.

  Her black academic gown hangs bat-like and severe from a hook on the back of the bathroom door. Her gaze fixes on it, blankly. For a moment she drifts. Is she thinking of abandoning her career?

  Dr Halliwell knows she cannot possibly be late, but nevertheless she suddenly begins, nervously, to accelerate. She leaps out of the bath, towels herself, and dresses hastily, while taking sips from a cup of black instant coffee brewed from the kettle in her en-suite kitchen. (Why is she washing down quite so many pills so early in the morning? Is she a health fanatic, a vitamin addict, or is she combating some chronic but invisible malady?) Her undergarments are a healthy and hygienic white, and her knee-high nylon socks are a sunny tan. She assumes a soft cream shirt with cuffs and tortoiseshell cuff links, and, over the shirt, she pulls on a long fawn-and-mauve-checked smock-like dress flowing loosely from a low, round, gathered yoke. Her brown leather shoes are flat-heeled and gold-buckled and new.

  She inspects herself, not in the fancy oval Art Nouveau mirror on the wall, but in the full-length functional oblong mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door. She seems to approve of what she sees, and returns to the bathroom where she attends to the application of cosmetics, peering at herself a little myopically in a magnifying mirror. She darkens her eyelashes and her eyebrows, coats most of her face with a smear of foundation and a dab of powder, and wrestles with the recalcitrant cap of a small pot of rouge. It defeats her and she abandons it, pushing it back into her flower-bedizened cosmetics sachet to join its fellow ointments. She bares her large and carefully tended teeth at herself, then stretches her lips to the lipstick. (One of her front teeth is crowned: we suspect a schoolgirl sporting injury.) She paints her wide, curving lips in a dark cinnamon bow. She smiles at herself with a reassuring cinnamon smile. She is ready to face the day and the journey.

  She has ordered a taxi to take her the short journey from college to the coach station at Gloucester Green. It is there, waiting for her, at the lodge. The porter is up and attentive. He wishes her a good morning, and helps her into her cab. She has two pieces of baggage, one a medium-sized navy-blue Samsonite suitcase, the other her little green case-on-wheels. Both pieces are clearly and efficiently labelled. ‘Have a good journey, Dr Halliwell,’ says the porter, politely, as she arranges herself on the cab seat. She smiles, and thanks him. She is on her way.

  Her bedroom is empty. It sighs and settles in her absence. Her kitchen is empty. Her rooms are empty. Will somebody come to make up the bed, to clean the bath, to wash the coffee cup? Are there servants yet in England? We will not wait to see. The spies drop like dead flies. We will follow Dr Halliwell to Heathrow.

  On the coach, she chides herself for her earliness. She has given herself too much time to spare. She could have ordered the cab for half an hour later. She could have spent at least another half-hour in bed. She need not have worried that the taxi would not arrive, that the coach would be full, that she might have missed a coach by thirty seconds. There is always another coach. They are frequent and reliable. She need not have reflected on the occasion when one of her colleagues had been delayed and missed his flight because of an accident in thick fog on the A40. There is no fog this morning. It is a beautiful, sunny September morning, and the road is clear.

  No, she has not forgotten her passport, or her ticket, or her medication. She checks her bag, yet again. All these important objects are still where she has put them. They have not jumped out of her bag of their own accord, or been tweaked away by a hovering host of malevolent bedroom sylphs or coach-station imps. They are inanimate and inert, and they will stay where she put them. She is a rational woman, and she knows that they will stay in their places. Nevertheless, she looks for them once more, before the coach arrives at Heathrow, before she alights to catch the shuttle to her terminal. She has had some unpleasant shocks in her successful and high-achieving life, and is ever well prepared for another. Or so she thinks.

  She checks in at the Air France desk, concealing her foolish relief that her flight seems to exist and that it corresponds with the number on her ticket. (It is not always so. She has, in her time, been booked on nonexistent flights or discovered that what looks like a firm booking is merely notional.) She checks her larger navy-blue Samsonite case through to Seoul, and the receipt is stapled on to her ticket. She watches the case protectively as it moves along on the moving belt, almost confident that she will see it again before too long. Its distinctive purple Pagoda Hotel label, furnished by the travel company that had made the conference bookings, disappears from sight, like a flag over the horizon. Will it, will she, catch the connection at Charles de Gaulle?

  Now she has a mere two hours to fill, to kill. Shall she take breakfast? Shall she buy a newspaper? Shall she sit
down in a quiet corner to read one of the books she has brought with her to lighten the sixteen hours of her journey?

  She is too restless to read a book. She will be able to read only when she is strapped into her seat, as in a straitjacket of captive attention. She looks forward to this moment with pleasure, but she cannot allow herself or oblige herself to anticipate it. She is a serious reader, this large woman with her deceptively confident manner: she is an academic, and she needs to give the whole of her attention to a text. She is approaching her text, and the text is approaching her, but meanwhile she idles away the time with small distractions.

  The departure lounge of Terminal 2, never a particularly attractive venue, is even more unattractive than usual, as it seems to be undergoing some form of refurbishment. Areas are walled off with amateur panels of hardboard, and sections of roofing gape to reveal unhealthy vistas of pipe and wiring and wadding and cladding. Although it is not raining, water drips from aloft into a bucket. There must be a leak, somewhere up there in the guttering. People from every gene pool of the globe clutter the place, in various stages of exhaustion and expectation, in attitudes of impatience and resignation and despair. Loudspeakers make superfluous announcements about baggage retention and smoking prohibitions. Babies slumber lop-headed in buggies, pale with fatigue. Whole families have set up encampments in corners, on the floor. It is a distressing scene, a scene of refugees in transit rather than of free travellers in a free world. Lucky the few who have a right to wait in the executive airport lounges. Is Dr Halliwell wishing she had been bold enough to insist on an upgrade? Should she have stood on ceremony and status? What is her status? Should she have risked putting it to the test? Is she a rising star and a mini-celebrity, as she sometimes believes herself to be? Or has she peaked already, at the age of forty-two? Will she get promotion this year, next year? And if so, promotion to what? It has been a long climb to the midway place where she now finds herself: must she go on climbing for the rest of her life?

  At first Dr Barbara Halliwell paces more or less randomly through the Escheresque network of self-duplicating duty-free shops, eyeing perfumes and bottles of liquor and cartons of cigarettes and tins of caviar and Burberry coats and Bally shoes and expensively packaged gift boxes of biscuits and of tea. She returns from time to time to stare at a desirable red silk shirt in an expensive Italian designer-label boutique, but she resists its allure. She likes it, but she has enough shirts, and she may know from past experience that goods bought in boredom in airports frequently prove strangely unsatisfactory, occasionally even defective. When she has walked up and down for half a mile or so, she sits down for a lukewarm cappuccino and a cold wood-wool and kapok croissant, and glances through a couple of broadsheet newspapers which she has purchased.

  What does she find in the papers?

  She finds home news from the small world of her homeland about cliques and cabals and Underground strikes and errant ministers and defective transport policies. She reads about these matters with a detached interest, and pays grateful tribute to the efficiency of the Oxford Tube and the services of the X70 and the X90. Her gracious Oxford sabbatical has made her loath to return to the chaos and squalor of London traffic and the expense of London life. Living in Oxford is a positional good, a placing beyond price. But she knows she will never get an Oxford job. She has been lucky to have enjoyed a year of Oxford. The cloisters and the mulberry tree and the well-tended herbaceous borders of Japanese anemone and aster and salvia and snapdragon are on loan to her. Her time will soon be up, and she will be obliged to return to the chic and scruffy pavements of North London and Cantor Hill.

  She finds new scandals about university admissions and A-grades and rejected students threatening litigation. She sighs. She is glad she is not an admissions tutor, and glad she has no more examinations to take.

  She sighs again, and turns to international news, about anti-globalization protests at a summit on another continent. This piece she reads impassively, respectfully. She flips onwards, and in the health section of one of the two papers, she finds an article on a newly developed treatment for multiple sclerosis, and its controversial expense. In the science section of the other, she discovers a précis of an article from The Lancet on the efficacy of vitamin treatments for Parkinson’s disease. She reads both these pieces with considerable attention, and at one point cross-refers from one to the other. Perhaps, despite her appearance of glowing health, she is a hypochondriac? Or is she a health professional, on her way to a medical conference?

  But the stories – and they are stories – which seem to engross her most concern two lurid cases involving the subject of capital punishment. One is the story of an African woman condemned by Islamic sharia law to be stoned to death for adultery. An appeal is in progress, and there has been much international condemnation, even from some who in most circumstances describe themselves as multiculturalists. Dr Halliwell reads both accounts of this extreme case, in both papers, with a marked expression of distaste upon her cultured features.

  The second story concerns the fate of a condemned prisoner on death row in an American state infamous for its fondness for judicial executions. Convicted of multiple rape and murder while a minor, this no-longer-young man has been appealing against his fate for nearly twenty years. He has twice attempted suicide, and twice been judicially resuscitated. The end of his appeals appears to be nigh. The electric chair or the lethal injection approaches.

  This not-so-young man has a British connection, in the form of a British grandmother, which is one of the reasons why his case is receiving some unexpectedly sympathetic coverage in the British broadsheet press. A few British MPs have signed an appeal for clemency on his behalf. It is claimed that new evidence about his state of mind and state of health at the time of the offences has never been presented to the court. It is claimed that his legal defence at the time of the original trial was wholly inadequate, and that any competent undergraduate in the department of journalism at the Northwestern University of Illinois could have obtained a different verdict.

  The accounts of this case Dr Halliwell peruses with as much attention and apparent concern as she had devoted to the case of the woman allegedly taken in adultery. Perhaps she is an academic lawyer, on her way to a legal conference? Perhaps she is a human-rights spokesperson?

  She has by now finished her coffee, and rejected most of her deadwool croissant. She rises to her feet, and collects her shoulder bag and her little green suitcase-on-wheels. She crosses the thronged arena to stare more closely at the monitor through her large tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses. Her face has a noli-me-tangere look of myopic and anxious severity. The number of her gate has just been announced. She returns to the expensive Italian boutique, and inspects once more the desirable red silk shirt. It is of a ravishing shade of clear pure red. She has always been attracted to red. Will she regret it for ever if she leaves it hanging there? There is plenty of time to purchase it, should she choose to do so. Is she running through the items reposing in her checked-in suitcase with its purple Pagoda Hotel label? Is she wondering if she can justify the purchase of this shirt? Is she wondering what functions and dress codes will await her at this grand conference in South Korea? Is she telling herself that silk is an uncertain fabric, not always amenable to travelling or to home laundering, and that the style of the shirt may be too tailored for her taste and her figure and her comfort? Or is she thinking about the woman taken in adultery, and about the man who has spent more than half of his one and only life sentenced to death? Is she wondering if the nineteenth-century concept of social progress retains any validity?

  She rejects with some regret the red silk shirt, and marches herself towards the gate of embarkation.

  It is a good while yet before she is finally settled in her window seat. She has already been up for hours, and this is only the first, short leg of her journey. The day is long, and the night and the next flight will be long. She has furnished herself with a wide choice of reading matter,
but has considered it not worth her while to unpack much of it yet. On the way to Paris, she makes do with Multiculturalism: Is It Bad for Women? and a light second breakfast. She doesn’t want a second breakfast, but there it is, on a tray in front of her, and she eats it. She finds Multiculturalism surprisingly easy reading. It is a paperback collection of sociological essays, pleasantly packaged. She has nearly finished it by the time she disembarks at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle.

  She has to hang around there, too, for she has left herself too much time between flights. Air France flights, she has been told, are often late, often cancelled, and moreover there is, as so often, an Air France strike pending. So she has run no risks, and has therefore left herself with yet more useless hours to kill. Time passes slowly at Roissy. She should have lived more dangerously. At least, she reflects, there will be no chance of her luggage not being transferred, will there? Or has she left too much time, and will it precede her, skipping Korea, and go straight to China or Taiwan or Japan?

  The Crown Princess is as impatient as Dr Halliwell. She cannot wait to seize this wandering woman’s wandering attention.

  Eventually, Dr Babs Halliwell finds herself sitting safely in her aisle seat on her way to Seoul, as her plane lumbers noisily and clumsily up into the air, weighed down by its many gallons of heavy fuel. At last, she can begin to relax and to concentrate. She has by now deployed her reading matter efficiently: she has tucked two paperback books into the pocket on the back of the seat in front of her, a third book is on her knee, a fourth in the shoulder bag under the seat in front of her.

  She has brought books for various moods and seasons. The two in the seat pocket relate to her travels: one is the slim but classic diary of Lady Murasaki, published by Penguin and translated from the Japanese by Richard Bowring, and the other is a more substantial academic paperback, entitled A Message from the Crown Princess of Korea, in the form of a Court Memoir of the Eighteenth Century, translated, edited and annotated by Thea ŏ. Landry, and published by the Yellow Fields Press. Multiculturalism: Is It Bad for Women? lies upon her knee: she has decided she will polish this one off first. (Finally, secreted in her shoulder bag, she has hidden away a detective story set in Venice, in which she will take refuge if the novelty of the Orient and the stress of her conference prove too much for her.)