The Red Queen

by Margaret Drabble

  One dark bright evening in mid December, on her homeward journey from a six o’clock guest lecture at the London School of Economics, her taxi comes to a protracted halt on the lofty thoroughfare of Gallax Bridge, which links the one-time old-world village of Highgate with the rapidly developing satellite suburb of Cantor Hill. Impatiently, she peers out of the window at the solid traffic before and behind, and at the immense drop from the bridge down to the busy four-lane motorway below. This is Lover’s Leap, the site of the most favoured death plunge of North London, where tired bouquets of commemorative flowers are perpetually tied to the high iron railings that unsuccessfully attempt to inhibit the suicide bids of the desperate. (Its name, Gallax Bridge, is said, on unreliable authority, to be a corruption of Gallows Bridge.) Babs is not often detained here, stationary, for quite so long, and, as she gazes downwards, a sign comes to her. Gallax Bridge reminds her of the footpath in Seoul, the footpath that is strung across the ravine, the footpath that links the Secret Garden of Prince Sado and the palace of the Crown Princess to the Royal Shrines. It has been at the back of her mind, this connection, for weeks, for months. This is what she has been looking for. This is the link. This is the bridge from death to life, from past to present. Below, above, ahead: this is the way, this is the path, this is the walk, this is the route that she needs to tread.

  The Western year in the western hemisphere nears its shortest day, when the sap sinks. Babs Halliwell walks alone along the Woodland Walk from Cantor Hill to Finsbury Park, in the gathering gloom of a wintery Sunday afternoon. She walks towards the east. The route will, her map assures her, take her under Gallax Bridge. But how can it? Although she has made a sharp descent down wooden steps from a city pavement to reach this hidden path, and feels herself to be in the deeps, she also seems at the same time to be walking along a raised spine, past sunken back gardens of houses that exist in some other plane. This walk follows the route of an old, abandoned rail track, or so she has been told. She has never been down here, to this parallel underworld, sunk low beneath the surface, although she has driven above the fissure many times, on the high road above. She has never known how to reach it, or thought of trying to plunge down into it. Yet here she is, walking, beneath the layer of her daily life, beneath the level of the known.

  It is potentially alarming but not quite deserted terrain, thinly populated by the emblematic figures of the modern urban wasteland. These apparitions do not perturb her, for she is tall and she is fit. One or two harmless solitary middle-aged joggers come towards her, pass her, and recede. She observes a bearded terrorist, immobile in the bedraggled bushes, speaking to an accomplice on his mobile phone, and a rapist, his back to a crumbling brick wall, fumbling at his flies. Large wolf dogs plod on with their sullen owners, their unmuzzled snouts hung low. A bag lady sits amidst her travelling luggage on the stump of a felled tree. These are the outcasts; these are the living ghosts of the city. The rusting and blackened skeletons of old motorcycles litter the undergrowth. She sees charred patches of cindery ash, memorials of last summer’s conflagrations and cremations. She walks past high red railway arches, embellished with graffiti. A faint illicit odour of smoking hemp lingers in the evergreen leaves of the holly.

  The path weaves onwards, now ascending, now descending, now ridged, now furrowed. Time past arches over and then threads its way beneath time present. The ancient and the modern coexist and bypass one another, like the curving spirals of a double helix, but they do not touch. They are simultaneous but discontinuous. The path is a metaphor of memory, of the interweaving of disparate strands.

  Barbara Halliwell walks alone underneath the city. It is turning colder now, and a light powdery snow begins to drift and wander uncertainly downwards out of the dull iron upper air into the old railway cutting. This fine frozen dust of the sky will not settle on the trodden earth of the walkway, nor on the leafless branches of its brown and barren bushes, but its light flakes catch and rest weightlessly on the hooks of the wool of Babs Halliwell’s grey winter coat.

  She walks under Gallax Bridge, named for the gallows, and ahead of her she sees, in the trodden ravine, a hanging man. He dangles, from a wooden gibbet, a poor potato sack of a guy with a lolling head, playfully strung up with a dead magpie, a dead crow and some bunches of coloured feathers. Strange symbols are scrawled on the woodwork. The young of the undergrowth play strange games. She thinks of Prince Sado, prostrating himself in the snow before his angry father, and cowering when he heard the god of thunder. She flinches, like a coward, as she passes the dangling man, but then she stiffens her shoulders, and straightens her back, and strides boldly on, up the winding ramp, into the future.

  At the next turning she will find an old-fashioned children’s playground, with swings and a slide and a little roundabout. That is the sound of children’s voices that we hear, as they play in the middle distance. They are not playing at hangman or funerals. They are playing pleasant games, childish games. She approaches them. We hear the laughter of small children. It is not mocking laughter, the laughter that passing adults fear. It is indifferent; it is self-absorbed.

  She sits on a wooden bench, and watches as the children play. They do not seem to see her. It is as though she were not there at all. She can see them, but they cannot see her. She is invisible. They look towards her, but they look through her. Not one of them can see her. No adults attend them. They do not look like the little English children with whom she had played in the green public parks and asphalted school-yards of Orpington. Not one of them looks towards her. They ignore her, as though she inhabited another world.

  The white flakes drift, and fall, and rest, and melt, and vanish. She sits, as the seasons change. Spring comes, slowly, and the menace of the bleak walkway slowly vanishes under foliage and wild flowers. She rises, and walks onwards. She walks, and walks, and walks, through the hours, and through the days, and through the weeks. From time to time, she watches the children play. Then, one day, she goes home, and writes a letter to Viveca van Jost in Barcelona.

  It takes months of intricate manipulation of Euro-legislation and of the Chinese quota system to procure the correct adoption papers for the Chinese orphan. The Chinese orphan is almost too old for adoption by the time the arrangements are completed. Van Jost, being dead, watches helplessly through these long delays. He could have done things better himself, had he managed to stay alive for just a little longer. The Crown Princess watches with curiosity: this is a promising development, though it is not quite what she had anticipated.

  The orphan almost abandons hope, but she is a tenacious child, and she cannot believe that they will not come for her. She waits and waits. And, in time, they do come. She sees them as they walk the length of the long ward, with its rows of little institutional cribs. It is not as she expected, but it will do. From the large playpen in the corner, she fixes them with her compelling gaze, as she had fixed the travelling Dutchman. But the two women pass on, towards the supervisor’s office at the end of the corridor: they do not as yet return her stare, as they are too confused and anxious to pause and take her in, and indeed she has not yet been identified to them, although she at once recognizes them. The women are in a state of shock. They are astonished by what they seem to have accomplished. They have taken a great risk, amidst great uncertainty, and here they are, with their almost-verified credentials, awaiting a final signature. They have no idea what will become of this enterprise.

  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 appe
tite 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?