The Red Queen

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘it is not easy.’

  ‘So, I think that perhaps I should take this large risk,’ he says. ‘For the child’s sake, for Viveca’s sake, for my own sake. It was a brave child, the way it looked at me. Its eyes were like a well of ink. Like an unwritten book. Like the blank page of an unwritten book. You think I am mad, perhaps. And maybe I am. What do you say?’

  ‘I don’t know why you are asking me,’ she says. She is alarmed by the strange intensity of his manner. She, who is accustomed to dissimulating her own intensity, has more than met her match.

  ‘I am asking you,’ he says, ‘because you know about uncertainty and fatality.’

  ‘But I don’t!’ she cries. ‘I know nothing! That was only a lecture. A string of not very new ideas. A passport to this conference. Two weeks abroad. It meant nothing. Well, very little. In life, I made all the wrong choices. You must not ask me for advice on such serious matters. It is unfair.’

  He sees that he has distressed her, and at once he retreats. He takes both her hands in his, and rubs them between his own. His hands are cold, despite the humming steady even temperature of the air-conditioned bedroom.

  ‘Of course it is unfair. I apologize. I do not truly ask you to play the oracle. It is a ridiculous conundrum, this conundrum of the baby and the crazy wife. There is no right answer to it. But I needed to talk. I needed to speak. And it was you that I selected as my confidante. It was because you were kind, and because you were there. You have been very kind to me. I apologize for my intrusion.’

  ‘No need, no need,’ she says. ‘It is an honour.’

  She starts to put the papers back in the folder, tidily. He watches her.

  ‘You must do what you think is right,’ she says, as she lowers the folder to the floor.

  She is suddenly feeling extremely exhausted. She, too, has had a long day, at the end of a long week. This strange conversation has been unaccountably and incalculably stressful and distressing. She feels as though she has been submitted to a lengthy oral examination, which she may well have failed. She feels as though she has herself been asked to shoulder the burden of an unknown child from a foreign land. Which, of course, is not what is on the cards at all. She lies back against the high white hotel pillows, and shuts her eyes. She must not stay long, as he has said that he has to get up early to catch a plane to Frankfurt and then a connecting flight to Barcelona, and she has a breakfast appointment in the coffee shop with Dr Oo. He gathers her gently towards him, and settles her head upon his shoulder, and folds his arms around her. He seems to want to hold on to her. This is very reassuring. The skin of his body is smooth and dry, and he smells pleasantly and expensively of aftershave. Armani, Gucci, Dior – one of those smart, modern male perfumes.

  Why should he not adopt a Chinese baby as a diversion for his wife, if that is what he wants? He is a rich man, and rich men have succumbed to far worse foibles than this. It is a generous impulse on his part. She is glad that he does not seem to be disappointed with her or angry with her. His arms are friendly and loving to her. It would not be a good idea to fall asleep, she tells herself, as she begins to drift peacefully away. As soon as he has fallen asleep, she tells herself, she will collect her treasures and creep out, and return to her single twin bed two floors below, and leave him sleeping, and the next morning it will all be as though it had never been.

  She is woken suddenly, she knows not how much later, by an unexpected and frightening sound. One moment she is asleep and dreaming, and the next moment she is listening to Jan van Jost fighting for his life. He is having some kind of attack. He is breathing hoarsely and loudly, and he is struggling, and his torso is rearing up from the bed in a spasm of sudden and brief agony.

  Afterwards, she will look back on the rapidity and fortitude of her instant response with disbelief. She is, when all will have been said, a doctor’s daughter. First, she leaps from the bed and reaches for his pills, and attempts to make him swallow one. But this is not possible, for he is choking and she cannot get the pill into his twisting mouth. Then she leans across his body, and reaches for the telephone, and dials Room 1529 for Dr Oo.

  By the time Dr Oo arrives, Jan van Jost is dead. She knows this, as she opens the door to Dr Oo. It has taken only a matter of minutes for Dr Oo to arrive on the scene, but Jan van Jost is already dead.

  So, just as suddenly, there is no hurry any more. There are only consequences.

  Dr Oo, neat in his grey pyjamas and his European paisley-patterned dressing gown, sits on the bedside, by the body of Jan van Jost, and composes his limbs, and closes his staring eyes. Babs, sitting on a chair by the bed, on top of the heap of her clothes, has buried her face in her hands, to avoid those staring eyes, but now she looks up. She is in a state of profound shock. She is also naked, under the bathrobe. Van Jost is wholly naked. It is an impossible situation. Dr Oo pulls the sheets discreetly up, over the professor’s corpse. Dr Oo and Babs Halliwell confront one another, like guilty accomplices, though neither of them has as yet done anything wrong.

  ‘I am sorry,’ says Dr Oo, encompassing the entire deathbed drama.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she says. ‘I should not have called you.’

  ‘You did right to call me,’ he says. ‘I might have been able to help. I can still help.’

  Jan van Jost, lying pale beneath the white sheet, looks like a dead emperor. He looks like the noblest Roman of them all. Dr Babs Halliwell stares at him. She has not seen so many dead people in her life, despite her professional interest in death. He assumes, second by second, an extraordinary and growing dignity. Time passes, slowly.

  ‘We must think about how to inform the hotel authorities,’ says Dr Oo, gently, after a while.

  ‘Perhaps I should get dressed,’ says Babs.

  Dr Oo does not contradict her, so she stands up to collect her clothes, with the intention of taking refuge in Jan van Jost’s bathroom. But, as she gets to her feet, she starts to tremble. She is overcome with dizziness, a sharp pain shoots through her left leg, and something seems to have gone wrong with her breathing. She collapses back on to the bedside chair, as waves of heat and icy chill pour through her entire living, corporeal body. She gasps for breath. She knows she, too, is, absurdly, inappropriately, inconveniently, about to die.

  That is Dr Oo, by her side, forcing her head down towards a brown paper bag that he has somehow managed to produce. Is he trying to suffocate her? ‘Breathe,’ says Dr Oo, urgently. ‘Breathe. Breathe deeply into the bag. Deep breaths. One, two, three…’

  She tries to obey him, and gradually the trembling subsides, and the flushes of prickly heat abate.

  ‘It was a panic attack,’ says Dr Oo, when she is sufficiently recovered. ‘It is natural. You are in shock. It is a question of carbon dioxide.’

  ‘Whatever shall we do?’ says Babs.

  ‘You must go back to your room,’ says Dr Oo. ‘Leave it to me. I will ring the hotel doctor.’

  ‘I think I should stay,’ says Babs.

  Dr Oo also thinks she should stay, though he does not like to say so. He would clearly have been willing to cover for her, but he is relieved that she does not expect this of him, for he is a law-abiding and respectable medical man. He advises her to get dressed, if she is ready to do so, and she disappears into the bathroom with her inappropriate silky black party dress and her frivolous high-heeled shoes. When she returns to the bedside, she is collected enough to say, ‘Please, Dr Oo, I think it is better if I stay to explain to them exactly what happened. But I would very much like you to be with me when they come. And I would be most grateful if you would make the telephone call.’

  He agrees that this would be a sensible procedure.

  ‘These big hotels,’ he says, in an attempt at reassurance, ‘they must be accustomed to…’ – he hesitates, searching for a word – ‘… to incidents.’

  He goes into the other room to make the call, leaving her alone for the last time with Jan van Jost. She is by now engaged in
replaying every moment of their last night together, and she can see that he had been busy dying all the time. All night, all week, he had been busy with the business of dying.

  She can hear Dr Oo, speaking in his birth language in a hushed tone. She sits on the bed by Jan, and takes his hand in hers. It is still warm and malleable. His fingers move in hers, as she kneads them, but his marble face has by now taken on an engraved and immemorial calm. She lays her lips against his cheek, and as she does so she recognizes that all the cool kisses he had so generously and thoughtfully bestowed upon her had been the kisses of a man on the edge of immortality. She speaks to him, although he cannot hear her. She bids him farewell. She bows her head and rests it for a moment upon his handsome and by now ungiving chest.

  The hotel doctor arrives very promptly. If he is astonished to find a group composed of one large Englishwoman in a long, black evening dress, one Korean gentleman in grey pyjamas and a paisley dressing gown, and one naked dead Dutch professor, he conceals it well. He examines the body, while Babs retires into the other room. He and Dr Oo converse, in low, urgent tones. Dr Oo, she surmises, must be explaining the identities of the parties involved in the incident. After a while, both of them come to join her, shutting the double doors discreetly behind them. The hotel doctor says, in English, that he has a few questions to put to her. May he ask her these questions now, or would she prefer to wait until the morning?

  ‘Now, please,’ says Babs, casting a glance of appeal at Dr Oo, her friend and her ally.

  She is able to describe most of the events of the evening with admirable clarity. Professor van Jost had requested her to accompany him to his suite, as he had purchased a small gift for her, and wished to present it to her. They had left the banquet a little early, at his suggestion, as he was feeling tired. It was just before eleven-thirty. She had noted the time. They had conversed, for an hour or so, and then, again at his suggestion, they had put themselves to bed. At this point in the narrative, she stumbles, very slightly, but the encouraging expression of Dr Oo urges her onwards, and she is able to say that in bed, they had talked for a little, and then they had both fallen asleep. She had been woken by the sound of his distress. She had attempted to make him swallow one of his heart pills (she assumed they were heart pills?), but had failed, and then she had telephoned Dr Oo because he was a medical doctor and a friend of the professor. While waiting for Dr Oo, the professor had died.

  ‘He died in my arms,’ she says.

  She is warming to her tragic situation. What choice has she but to warm to it? She has no other role to play.

  ‘He died in my arms,’ she says, with melancholy pride. Then, to her own surprise, she bursts into tears, moved by the sound of the words of her own epitaph.

  The hotel doctor and Dr Oo are very kind to her. She has behaved admirably, they assure her. The professor could have died at any moment. He was fortunate not to be alone when he died. Nobody likes to die alone in a strange hotel room in a foreign city. She had done the best that she could do.

  She tells herself that this may be true. Van Jost had seemed to be comforted by her presence, except during the last brief moments of desperate struggle. He had wanted to keep her there. He had fallen peacefully asleep by her side. And she had done her best. She had done better than most others could have done. In death, she had not abandoned him. She need not feel ashamed of herself.

  Dr Oo urges her to go to her bed now, to get some sleep. There will be more questions, in the morning. He will see if he can alter his flight, so that he can fly out from Seoul a little later. He will try to see her through this crisis.

  Light-headed and giddy with weariness, she prepares to take her leave. She does not wish to see Jan again, for she has already taken her leave of him, but she is careful, this time, to follow his injunction, and to collect all her possessions. She gathers up her little lacquer cabinet, and her chae’kori card, and her evening bag, and her spare pair of glasses. Dr Oo accompanies her into the lift, and down to her corridor. He makes sure that she gets safely into her room. In the privacy of Room 1517, she sinks on to her bed, and tries to look ahead, at all the complications that she sees banking up in the clouds of the future.

  Will there be an autopsy? A postmortem? What will it reveal?

  Room 1517 is buzzing with indignation. Where had Mong Joon been, in Dr Halliwell’s hour of need? She should never have been let out on her own. She is not fit to look after herself, in these dangerous and immoral and godless times. It is high time she was sent back to England, where she can try to salvage her compromised reputation. She must put this disgraceful episode behind her, and get on with her real life.

  The news of the death of Jan van Jost is greeted with the mixture of delighted horror and informed sadness that greets all such small sensations. It speeds westwards on the couriers of the dawn, reaching Europe in time for the next morning’s headlines. ‘VAN JOST EST MORT,’ declares the front page of Le Monde. The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Germany pay similar tribute. ‘VAN JOST IST OVERLEDEN,’ ‘VAN JOST ESTA MUERTO,’ ‘MORRE JAN VAN JOST,’ ‘VAN JOST TOT,’ read the multilingual messages. During the day the news feeds back eastwards to Korea and China and Japan through the Internet, disseminating itself into other languages and into other scripts. Even Britain, preoccupied as so often with some antique minor royal scandal, finds space on the inside pages of a broadsheet or two for a small foreign-news item announcing the sudden decease of this celebrated international intellectual. Quite a lot of people in Britain have heard of Jan van Jost, and some of them, unlike Babs Halliwell, have read his books. But they are not the kind of people who count for very much in terms of column inches. There will be decent obituaries in the broadsheets, in the days to come. But nobody in Britain will assume deep mourning for the unexpected and premature death of Jan van Jost.

  Dr Barbara Halliwell, in mourning and in shock in Seoul, finds herself in a fantastic, implausible and anomalous position. She knows that she is the last person to have seen van Jost alive, and that she has a story to tell. If she were a different kind of person, she might even have a story to sell. But to whom can she speak? And what is it that she wants to say? She needs to speak. She cannot keep her secrets to herself. She wishes, posthumously, to claim van Jost as her own. Fleetingly her own, but nevertheless her own. Too late, yet not too late, she realizes the significance of his insistence on the third night. One night may be dismissed as a one-night stand, and could be said to lack dignity, even in modern times. One-night stands with famous men are for star-fuckers. Two nights with famous men are inelegant and inconclusive. But three nights constitute a romance and a relationship. Van Jost has protected her reputation from beyond the grave. Three nights have given her the right to own him and confess him. Three nights have given her a stake in the magnanimous heart of Jan van Jost.

  It was his heart that had failed him, although, it will be revealed, he had also been suffering from an endemic form of environmental pit-country lung cancer. He had died of natural causes. Although he had died suddenly and on foreign soil, there will be no need for any kind of inquest. His remains will be repatriated. No forensic evidence will be required to link his death with or to detach it from any form of sexual activity. He had been a dying man, with a full knowledge of his mortal condition, and with bottles of pills and inhalers and prescriptions to prove it. The lung cancer will be found to date back to the black fields of his childhood, not to the modest nicotine consumption of his college days. Death had been unavoidable. Why he had chosen to spend what had proved to be the last weeks of his life on a gruelling and ill-paid lecture tour of China and South Korea is a mystery to many, but not to Babs Halliwell. He had wanted to see all the countries of the world before he died. He had told her so, in the early autumn sunshine on the walls of the fortress at Suwon. And he had wished to cheat death by bringing home a little orphan child. He had told her so, in Suite 1712 in the Pagoda Hotel. These were the caprices of his greatness. They seem to her the caprices o
f a mighty prince.

  Her day’s appointments are cancelled, as she is interviewed by various concerned parties about the details of Jan van Jost’s last hours. It occurs to her, very early in this long day, that she could have avoided all of this, had she so chosen. It would in theory have been easy for her to have abandoned Jan van Jost in his death throes and crept away and disowned him and returned to her own room. She could have left him dead in his bed, and her presence in his suite and his bed would never have been detected. Why would anyone have been looking for her fingerprints? She remembers the tumbler of J&B by the bed, which she had not thought to remove. But it is not a crime to take a drink in a man’s hotel room, is it? In this modern day and modern age?

  She knows, however, that abandoning him had never been an option. She is a law-abiding doctor’s daughter from Orpington. She had done the right thing. She had rung Dr Oo in order to try to save Jan, and she knows that she had been right to do so. And even if Jan had died instantly, before she had time to pick up the phone, she would still have rung for Dr Oo because she would not have trusted herself to be absolutely certain of Jan’s death. Although she is entitled to call herself a doctor, she is not a medical doctor, and has never been called upon to certify a death. She has never before been present at the act of death. (Benedict had died while she was trying to find a meter to park her car in Queen Square near the hospital – not that her presence would have made any difference to anything, least of all to him, as she sometimes bitterly tells herself and others.) She has heard of trances and comas and corpses who have breathed again. She has heard of those who have been buried alive. (Jan van Jost had mentioned rather a lot of them in his final farewell lecture, and even more over the table at their last dinner.) How could she have left him, entombed in his leaden casket, in his king-sized hotel bed, and coldly quit the scene? The arrival of Dr Oo had provided a witness not only to Jan’s death, but also to her presence at his death.