The Red Queen

by Margaret Drabble

  Is the auditorium full enough? Has she been boycotted because she is a woman? This, as she has been so many times warned, and as dear Dr Oo has confirmed, remains a sexist society, where women academics continue to suffer from discrimination, and she is prepared to be insulted by a poor attendance. But the room seems to be respectably full. Although she is an inferior woman, she is also something of a freak and a peep show. On the Western circuit, she is well known as a lively and controversial speaker. She has debated controversial issues on the radio. She has appeared, effectively, on television. Her lofty stature, such a disadvantage in some social situations, is an asset now. She draws herself up to her full height, adjusts her large tortoiseshell-rimmed varifocal glasses, and launches herself upon her discourse.

  Her paper goes down well enough. She delivers it professionally, with practised timing. Her material is dramatic. Unlike Dr Oo’s stories of patient stroke patients, her case histories deal with the extreme and rare, with the frontiers of experiment, with the philosophical and ethical aspects of moral decisions made in medical uncertainty. Her histories are the stuff of headline news. She has lived through melodrama, and this is her profit from it. She has the right. She is licensed by misfortune. This is not exploitation; it is a legitimate display of scholarship and abstraction.

  She does not, of course, mention the death of her own child, Benedict, but there is no doubt in the mind of Bob Bryant that the personal dilemma which had years ago directed the nature of her research has also informed her argument and the intensity of her delivery. She speaks of bone-marrow disorders, of transplants and donor banks and bone-marrow registers, of chemotherapy and gene therapy, and of the possibility that gene therapy may cause more cancers than it cures. She speaks of current research in Paris and London. She discusses the ethical position of parents who choose to have a second child, a ‘saviour sibling’, in the hope of providing a suitable matching donor for the first. She speaks of the geographical distribution of certain conditions, and of the mismatching geography of available remedies, either traditional or experimental.

  Her discourse is learned and informative. As she nears her final written paragraphs, she wonders which of her shock alternative endings she will select. She has two up her sleeve, one or the other of which she will deliver freestyle, without notes, with as much eye contact as she can force upon her audience. Thus, they will remember her and what she has said. She likes to be remembered.

  In her first shock ending, she will discuss the placebo dilemma. She will reveal that she herself is at this moment full of a mixture of chemicals which may or may not be a placebo, and which may or may not be affecting her bone density. Dr Babs Halliwell has gone in for medical risk in a big way. She is a volunteer. She has offered her body to a group of colleagues as a laboratory for tests on a drug, which, it is hoped, will help to develop a cure for osteoporosis. The clinical trials are in mid term, and the results are expected in several months’ time.

  Shall she confide this information? No, it is too risky and too personal. It might be considered bad form. And she cannot locate Jan van Jost in the gloom of the back rows.

  She opts for and embarks upon the second story.

  Her second ending is the case history of a woman whom she knows personally, a mother of four and a successful lawyer. After some months of suffering from fatigue and mysterious aches and pains, this woman was unexpectedly discovered in early middle age to have a rare bone-marrow disorder. When a name was given to her malady, she immediately contacted her doctor sister in Toronto, who proved not only to be a matching donor, as one might hope, but also, against any calculable odds, to be one of the world authorities on this rare condition. So she received from her sister expert advice and some comfort, as well as a bone-marrow transplant.

  (The long-term outcome of the transplant is still nervously awaited, and at the moment does not look good, but Dr Halliwell, in her lecture, does not mention this.)

  What, asks Dr Halliwell rhetorically, was the connection between this sister’s long-ago-selected field of expertise and this sibling’s later excessive production of red blood cells? Was there any? Was it coincidence? It can only have been a coincidence, for nothing in this woman’s medical history could have predicted the onset of this rare disease. It is a disease of which the origins are unknown, though it more commonly afflicts males over sixty than middle-aged professional women from Newcastle upon Tyne. So why had the sister been attracted to this field in the first place? And what effect did or should or could this kinship have on the nature of her medical advice to her sick sibling?

  She stares at her audience, leaving these interesting questions in the air. She knows they have no answer. Her story is a story of pure chance. It has no meaning. It is very interesting, but it has no meaning. Its lack of meaning is its meaning.

  Did her audience hear her? Or are they all fast asleep, worn out by their morning’s trudging round the concrete-and-fibreglass acres of the Expo? She bows politely as she gathers her papers together on the lectern, and detaches the heavy microphone box from the waistband of her trouser suit. There is a decent spatter of applause. She leaves the podium, reflecting that most of them had probably stopped listening long ago, despite her heroic efforts to keep them awake. Throughout her paper, on which she had laboured for so long, her audience would have been thinking about its supper or its salary or its sex life. That’s the way it goes with academic papers and lectures. Lectures, like examinations, are an anachronism, a quaintly surviving form of a medieval endurance test, and will soon go the way of the eight-legged Chinese Confucian essay. Anyone will be able to read what she has to say on the Internet, anyway, if anyone is interested. Why bother with the labour of bodily attention, of bodily presence? Why bother with the slow and awkward machinery of headphones and simultaneous translation? Why bother to come all the way to Seoul in the first place?

  Text, subtext, content, presentation. The trouser press in Room 1517 has done wonders for the crease in Dr Babs Halliwell’s trousers. She looks down, approvingly, as she descends the steps from the platform. At least she looks quite smart, she tells herself, as she struggles against a growing and familiarly dreary sense of inadequacy and post-performance depression. It hadn’t been a complete disaster, had it?

  Babs Halliwell knows that she will have to go to Jan van Jost’s lecture, even though he had not taken the trouble to attend hers. She is morally committed to this because of the immaterial butterfly that had landed upon her shoulder. She knows her place. So, when the faithful Dr Oo contacts her about their tentative Suwon-Hwaseong project, she explains that she cannot go on the day he had first suggested because she wishes to hear about ‘The Leaden Casket: Meditations on the Apocalypse’. What about the day after that? Fine, said Dr Oo, obligingly. Perhaps, says Dr Oo, he would come with her to hear van Jost? It is not every day that one has the opportunity to hear so great a man, and nobody would notice a cross-conference interloper, surely? It has been very gracious of van Jost to spend so long in Seoul, and to attend so much of this extended conference. Van Jost has not regally breezed in and regally breezed out again, as conference stars so often do. Dr Oo agrees with Dr Halliwell that it would be improper not to listen to van Jost. Suwon-Hwaseong can wait.

  So Dr Oo and Babs Halliwell sit side by side to hear Jan van Jost address the subject of the leaden casket of death. His performance is at once highly impressive and almost wholly incomprehensible. Is he talking literally, or figuratively? Is he talking sense, or nonsense? Is he talking ecology, or ethics, or epidemiology, or psychology, or philosophy? He ranges widely through the cultures of the West, invoking Epicurus and Lucretius, Freud and Frazer, Lacan and Foucault, Gotthold Lessing and Doris Lessing, Zola and Lévi-Strauss. He speaks of the diseases of the soul and of the universe, and of the approaching end of human life on earth, and of the backward shadow that the end casts upon our earthly endeavours. He speaks of year zero, ground zero and world zero. He speaks of the Casket Letters which hid the secrets o
f the passions of Mary Queen of Scots, and of the wooden casket in which Princess Diana of Wales tried to hide the squalid secrets of the British Crown and Court. He speaks of AIDS and of the lure of the Gothic vision of death. He quotes from King Lear and from Edgar Allen Poe. He speaks of the ‘unreturned gaze’, and of the ‘beseeching eye’. He speaks of the failure of the Enlightenment and of the transcultural tragedy. Babs wonders at first what on earth poor Dr Oo can be making of all this, but decides it is too late to worry about that: Dr Oo is a grown man, and he’d got into this of his own free will. He must have sat through more perplexing discourses in his time.

  The lecture emerges from profound obscurity to end with a simple but inexplicable image, an image of living entombment. Van Jost presents man, buried alive in the body, trapped in the coffin-casket, dying a slow and inevitable death, in a darkening planet, alone in the empty sterile universe.

  Jan van Jost bows, to tumultuous and uncomprehending applause. What on earth had he been talking about?

  Babs Halliwell asks him, directly, that evening, at the reception in the Dutch Embassy that is being given in his honour. She sees him standing at a picture window, momentarily isolated and accessible, staring out from the diplomatic heights of a hilltop over the vast sprawling modern city of Seoul, and she goes up to him and addresses him, boldly. Had his final image referred, she provocatively demands, to the Korean Prince Sado, the Prince of the Rice Chest? The connections, she says, had been too striking to be coincidental.

  Van Jost says that he has never heard of Prince Sado or of the rice chest. Who, van Jost asks, was Prince Sado?

  Babs Halliwell tells him about Prince Sado. Somewhat to her surprise, he appears to be as gripped by her narrative as she had been by the narrative of the Crown Princess, and, although she fears the story may be losing something in the telling, she can see that she has his entire attention. He ushers her, wine glass in hand, away from the wide expanse of window to a deeply upholstered ambassadorial sofa, and persuades her to sink down upon it by his side. He presses her for more details about the clothing phobia and the death in the rice chest. He is not quite as interested in the princess herself as Babs is, but she supposes that that is just a natural gender difference, and that he is identifying with the male strand of the story. She is gratified by his eagerness to hear more, by his wish that he had known of this story earlier. He picks it up very quickly. The quickness of his mind is a delight to her. ‘I could have worked it in so easily,’ he says, annoyed with himself for having missed a trick. ‘It would have been an excellent point of reference. I suppose all Koreans know about Prince Sado and this Imo Incident?’

  Babs has to confess that she doesn’t really know how widespread the knowledge of the princess’s memoirs is in their native land. She says she longs to find out. She herself as yet knows so little about them, they came her way by accident, she had brought them with her to Seoul more or less by accident, she tells him. She also finds herself telling him about her acquaintance with Dr Oo. (She does not confess to the suitcase incident.) She tells him that she is going to Suwon the next day with Dr Oo, to see Prince Sado’s final resting place. Would he like to come too, she enquires? She has had several glasses of wine by now, and is on excellent form. It is always pleasant to be monopolized by the highest-ranking and most famous man in the room. She glows with confidence. She no longer feels herself to be too ugly and too big. She knows that she is handsome, and admirable, and admired.

  Jan van Jost says that he will think about it. He says that he admires her for having got to grips with their host country so quickly. He has been too tired to make the best of his visit so far, but today he feels a little better. He says he would like a bibliographical reference for the memoirs: perhaps he can add Prince Sado to his essay on the Leaden Casket before he publishes. Would he like to borrow them, she offers. Well, yes, he admits that he would. Can she spare them? Of course, of course, she assures him. She hates lending books to people, but van Jost does not count as people.

  Later that evening, she brings them down to the lobby of the Pagoda Hotel and entrusts them to him. He says he will read them overnight and return them in the morning. He says he needs little sleep. He sleeps badly, and he reads fast.

  She can well believe that he reads fast. The evidence of his erudition is overpowering. He must have been reading all night, every night, for decades. How else could he know so much?

  In the morning, he rings her in her room at eight and asks if he can join her expedition to Suwon-Hwaseong with Dr Oo. He has read the Crown Princess’s story overnight, and longs to follow up his introduction to her, with the chance of a knowledgeable escort like Dr Oo. He would like to see a little bit of the real Korea, while he is here. Would she mind, would Dr Oo mind, would he be an intrusion? Not at all, says Babs. She is excited by his excitement, and slightly relieved not to be spending a whole day tête-à-tête with Dr Oo. A tête-à-tête could have had its awkward moments. She is sure that Dr Oo will be pleased. Well, almost sure. Dr Oo is a happily married man, or so he says. And three is a good number for an outing.

  And so it is that the three of them find themselves on a suburban train, which is making a slow stopping journey towards Suwon. Suwon is now a commuter suburb of Seoul, and it is easier to get there by train than by hire car or taxi, says Dr Oo. They are off on a spree, to visit the UNESCO World Heritage Site. They have escaped their guides and minders and fellow delegates, and privatized themselves.

  The one-time Crown Princess, reincarnated as the Mother Queen, had travelled to Suwon-Hwaseong for her sixtieth birthday celebrations with great pomp. This was the only grand state progress of her long life. Unlike Queen Elizabeth I of England, or Marie Antoinette of France, or Catherine the Great of Russia, she had led a retired though not a very peaceful life. But on her way to Suwon, an immense retinue of colourful pageantry had attended her. A thousand-strong procession of bowmen and horses and musicians had crossed the great river Han upon a wide and magnificent pontoon, and scores of court artists had documented every inch of the event for posterity. The Mother Queen had peered through the curtains of the heavily draped royal palanquin at the broad river, and at the hills, and at the spreading southern plain, and at the waving and petitioning crowds of her unknown and distant people, and she had looked back on the turbulent times she had so far so unexpectedly and so shrewdly survived. She had wondered that she had lived so long to see so much. Some of these impressions she later recorded; some she did not.

  In her memoirs, the Mother Queen had dwelt much on her gratitude to her son King Chŏngjo for this lavish display of filial respect, and pretended to make much of her own humility and unworthiness. But she was a self-serving and unreliable narrator, and a self-confessed diplomat in her family’s cause, as well as in her own. How much of the truth, wondered Dr Babs Halliwell, could one deduce from her various accounts? Babs is irrationally convinced that she can read the subtext of much of the Mother Queen’s memoirs. Babs has a sense that she is in direct communion with her. She also knows that this sense must be an illusion, for there are as many subtexts as there are readers. She has been brought up in a postmodern relativist world, therefore she cannot believe in direct messages, either from a text or from beyond the grave. Nevertheless, there is some kind of a message, and it is she herself that is receiving it. If she has a self, which is also problematic.

  Babs peers out, not through the embroidered and thickly shrouded curtains of a queenly palanquin, but through the train’s glassy modern windows. Jan van Jost and Dr Oo are speaking together in Dutch. Babs cannot understand a word that they are saying, which makes her feel slightly paranoid, but her sense of exclusion is offset by her sense of satisfaction in having been the agent for bringing these two unlikely characters together. It is quite a coup. Probably Jan (as she is now allowed to call him) is pleased to find someone with whom he can speak a little in his native tongue. Dr Oo is something of a linguist, it appears. This will be an outing to remember, an outing for th
e diary that alas she does not keep. She will be able to dine out on it. If ever she is asked to dine in All Souls’ again, she will be able to boast about travelling to Suwon with Jan van Jost.

  And so it is that the three of them find themselves disembarking from their commuter train and climbing into a taxi at Suwon station. The taxi heads off up through busy nondescript modern streets and then up a winding wooded hill towards the main entrance of the ancient fortress. Dr Oo now sits in front, chatting with the driver, and Babs and Jan sit in the back. Babs Halliwell is in a mood of happy exhilaration and anticipation. She feels that her powers are restored to her. After a disastrous start, this strange visit is turning out well. It is all far more interesting than she could ever have expected. The sheer good luck of meeting Dr Oo fills her with delight. Her whole life seems to have taken a turn for the better. Surely all will be well. Her guardian spirits, who had temporarily abandoned her at Incheon airport, have not deserted her. Perhaps they had not abandoned her at all – perhaps they had planned the whole thing. She can hardly believe that she is going sightseeing with this distinguished and well-mannered man, and that he seems to be content with her company. How lucky she is, to be where she is, and who she is, and to be living at this moment of history!

  Dr Oo has a long conversation with the officials in the kiosk at the main gate, and returns to tell them that they do not need tickets, for the visit is free. The tickets for the royal palaces had been very cheap, but this is free. He shows them maps, and explains that it will take about two hours to make the full circuit of the fortress walls – are they game for this? He thinks it is about five kilometres: can they manage that? Yes, of course they can. It is a glorious day, the September sun is shining on them, and they are all wearing sensible shoes. Shall Dr Oo try to find a guide? He has only been here once in his life, he is ashamed to say, and then he hadn’t been paying too much attention to what he was looking at. ‘I was with my sister,’ says Dr Oo, ‘and we were talking too much.’