The Red Queen Read online

  This is a mistake, as she will now discover.

  She approaches her suitcase, and peers at its combination lock. Her magic PIN is 7777. She has been told that it is unwise to have so obvious, so memorable a number, but she is afraid that she will forget anything more complicated, and, anyway, who in the world would want to open her bags and steal her dresses?

  The suitcase does not seem to want to open. She fiddles with the combination, readjusts her glasses, and tries again. Again, the lock does not respond. Is it broken? What can have gone wrong with it?

  Impatiently, with rising panic, she presses and pushes, to no avail. Then she pulls at the zip on the compartment on the suitcase’s top, where she knows she has stored her thin raincoat and her small umbrella. She gropes in the recess, but they are not there. Somebody has stolen them. But the compartment is not empty. From it, she pulls out a copy of The Economist, and a crushed wad of Korean newsprint, and a Korean magazine. She stares at these objects in horror. Somebody has broken her lock, stolen her rainwear and stuffed her case with foreign reading matter. Who could have done such a wicked thing?

  It takes her what seem like whole minutes to work out what she has done. She cannot believe it. She has taken the suitcase of a stranger from the luggage belt, and left her own suitcase at the airport. She has become one of those fools at whom all those superfluous warnings are directed. ‘Many suitcases look alike’ – how often has she heard and read that phrase? She has failed to identify her own luggage, and she has seized the suitcase of another.

  She tries to breathe calmly, and to look at the international, ubiquitous Samsonite suitcase. It is, indeed, identical to her own, in every way. It is the same shape, the same colour, the same size, and it has been subjected to the same degree of wear. It, too, has a purple Pagoda Hotel tag tied in an identical manner to its identical handle but – and here she has to force herself to gaze directly at the horrifying evidence – it is labelled with an unknown name. The owner of this suitcase is not Dr Barbara Halliwell from Oxford, but a Dr Oo Hoi-Chang from Amsterdam. She is still in too deep a state of shock to be grateful that this person has written out his name in her alphabet as well as in his own. These newspapers, this magazine, belong to Dr Oo Hoi-Chang, who, somewhere in this hotel, will be wondering what the hell has happened to his suitcase.

  It is clear that he must be booked into this hotel and that he must have been on the same flight, or this confusion could never have taken place. That at least is a small mercy. It is a very small mercy, but it is a mercy and a mitigation.

  Dr Babs Halliwell cannot face summoning her smiling boy-minder Mong Joon, although he had assured her he would be ready to help in any emergency. She feels too foolish. She sits down, and tries to work out what to do next.

  Where will her own suitcase now be reposing? Will it still be at the airport? Has she still got her baggage tag? Yes, she has. Here it is in her handbag. It is stapled on to her air ticket, as it should be. She supposes she could take a taxi back to the airport and try to effect an exchange, but she is not sure if she can manage this, in view of her inability to speak or read a word of the Korean language, in view of her panic and fatigue. She knows she has provided herself with a token supply of Korean money, but God knows how much a taxi to the airport is supposed to cost.

  She thinks, hard. She decides to try to throw herself on the mercy of Dr Oo Hoi-Chang, if she can locate him. Maybe he is attending her very own conference on the New Frontiers of Health: Globalization and Medical Risk? If so, would that simplify or complicate her position? She scours through her conference papers, but can find no mention of him. (How does she know he is a man? Because of the magazines. Women do not read magazines like that. They are not pornographic magazines or motoring magazines, but they are inescapably male.) Would he speak English if she could locate him? How could she bring herself to confess to him her stupid, her unforgivable error?

  Dr Halliwell decides to be brave. She works out her plan. She rings down to reception, and asks to speak to Dr Oo Hoi-Chang. She is asked to spell out his name, and she does so. She is not sure if she is relieved or appalled when the receptionist says that she will put her through.

  She hears the phone ringing in the stranger’s room. She hears the voice of the doctor. Naturally, he responds in Korean. ‘Do you speak English?’ is all that she can find to say, and she says it. ‘Yes,’ says the doctor, hesitantly. ‘I have your suitcase,’ says big, bold Babs Halliwell, on the verge of childish tears. ‘I have it here, in my room. It is a mistake. You understand? A mistake.’

  The doctor understands. Moreover, he sounds mightily relieved, which she had not quite bargained for, though it is a logical response. In fact, he sounds quite excited. Where is she? Here, in this very hotel? Yes, she is in Room 1517. Shall she bring him his suitcase, at once, she asks? No, he will come to collect it. He is on the same floor. He is in Room 1529, just along the corridor, and he will be with her very shortly.

  She rushes to the mirror, to dab at her face. Her scratchy eyes are glistening and red-rimmed with shame and anxiety and exhaustion. She hears his feet along the corridor; she hears his discreet tap at the door. She opens it, and there he is, the doctor whose goods she has appropriated. He stares at her, shocked, as she guesses, by her size, and his eyes dart beyond her to his treasure.

  Faintly, she waves him in. He is all smiles. Yes, yes, this is his very own case. He checks the combination lock, and it springs open to reveal the lucky man’s suits and shirts, neatly pressed and contained beneath their stretching diagonal straps.

  ‘It was identical,’ she says, and repeats, and parrots, with pathos. He seems to understand this.

  What next?

  This is the moment at which Dr Oo reveals himself as a hero. Instead of making off at once with his possessions, and making good his escape from this barbarian madwoman, he stays to enquire after her suitcase and to examine her plight. He is a man of sublime intelligence. He tells her that her case must still be at the airport. He had waited in vain for his, he says – or this is what she thinks he is saying – and he had seen one very like his own, with a Pagoda label, travelling round and round the belt. In the end, he had worked out what might have happened, but by this time the suitcase had disappeared from the belt and must have been taken into storage. So he had reported his loss, and had made his way to the hotel, to wait on events. He says he is very glad to see his things again, and now he will accompany her to the airport in a taxi to retrieve her suitcase for her.

  She cannot believe that Dr Oo is such a gentleman. She cannot believe that this is what he is proposing to her: to her, a stupid stranger. But it is. He makes many comforting and conciliatory sounds, as he instructs her to pick up her shoulder bag, and to make sure that she has her room key, and to follow him to Room 1529, where he will deposit his case and pick up his wallet. She trails after him, as he trots briskly along the corridor – a corridor which by now seems, miraculously, to be completely repapered and workwoman-free – and she waits meekly at the threshold of his twin-bed room (a room which is, like his suitcase, identical to hers), as he reorganizes himself. Down in the lift they travel together, as she makes deferential noises and looks humble and grateful. Into a taxi he ushers her, and they find themselves bowling along, back the way she had come that morning, across the wide, flat river, past the posters, past the radio masts, past the bridges and the marshy banks of pink marine sedge, towards her lost bag.

  On the way, he asks her what she is doing in Seoul, and she tells him. His English, once he gets his ear attuned to her responses, is good: it is as good, and as American-accented, as the English of the baby-faced, Berkeley-educated Mong Joon. She tells him about her conference, and he tells her that he is in Seoul to attend a different conference, on a different topic. He is not a doctor of sociology or philosophy or economics or even of psychiatry, but a medical doctor, a neurologist. His speciality is the stroke. The conference will discuss new treatments for stroke patients. She finds this re
assuring. If she has a stroke, he will resuscitate her. If she faints, he will revive her. Her profession is abstract and frivolous in comparison with his. She is full of admiration for this small, neat, self-possessed and courteous gentleman.

  Her one regret, at this stage, is that she had not taken a shower before ringing him. She had been too impulsive, too eager to right her wrong. He has travelled much better than she has. She feels gross and dirty, and she is afraid that she stinks. She knows that it is said that people of the East think that all Westerners stink, and in her case she fears it may be true. She sniffs at herself, surreptitiously, and the result is not reassuring. He must find her disgusting. She is ashamed. How much more the gentleman he, to escort so gallantly so unattractive and so large and so deeply stupid a female! Is there anything that she can do to reclaim her self-respect, to dignify herself a little in his eyes?

  Luckily, she finds that the bundle of Korean won that she has with her will be more than enough to cover the two-way taxi fare. She had been wise to change some money, although it is her own folly that has made its use so necessary. He protests that he will pay, but of course she insists that she must, and, correctly, he allows her to do so. Once more she trails after him, as he leads the way to baggage enquiries and, after some hassle, successfully extracts her suitcase from a back room. This time she belatedly, superfluously and carefully, before witnesses, checks its label, and her name, and its baggage tag. She is not sure that the young men in baggage enquiries are sniggering at her, but she concedes they would have a right to do so if they so chose. Dr Oo certainly does not snigger; on the contrary, he is at pains to point out that her suitcase is indeed the very same as his own. Anyone, he says, could easily have made such a mistake. This is not true, but it is very politely put.

  She could embrace this man. She could kiss him, were she not so repulsive to herself. He has a steel tooth. She has always fancied men with steel teeth.

  On the way back to the hotel, along a route with which she is rapidly becoming too familiar, she relaxes enough to tell him that she is simply longing for a nice hot shower, and that she blames the Crown Princess of Korea for her absent-mindedness at the baggage belt. ‘I had been reading all day and all night,’ she says. ‘I have been reading this extraordinary book.’

  She cannot tell whether or not he responds to the name of the Crown Princess because he is so very polite that he nods with seeming interest at everything she says.

  When they get back to the Pagoda Hotel, he insists on carrying her suitcase for her, up the marble entrance staircase from the street level, and into the lift, and up to the fifteenth floor, and along the corridor to her room. He watches, benevolently, as she fumbles clumsily with her room key to Room 1517. ‘You are tired,’ he says, kindly. Yet more tears well in her eyes, as she stretches out her hot, large, not-very-clean hand to him in gratitude and farewell.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he says, as he (perhaps a little reluctantly) takes this distasteful hand, ‘perhaps, if we have some free time, we may meet for a drink? Perhaps I may take you for a tour of the Crown Princess’s palace? The garden is beautiful. You may see where she lived, if you would like.’

  So he did know of the Crown Princess, this enigmatic foreign doctor man. She so longs to recover herself in his eyes that she perhaps rashly says that she would be delighted to meet him again. She will leave him a note, or he will leave her a note, when they have sorted out their respective schedules. They will make an assignation. Again, profusely, she thanks him. And she retires into her room, at last, and throws herself in exhaustion and disgrace upon her bed. She sees that her red message light is blinking furiously, and, as she begins to peel down her socks from her swollen ankles, her phone begins to ring. Her broad-cheeked, smiling, putto minder, Mong Joon, is after her. He will want to know why she tried to escape. But, she vows, he will never, ever find out. It is all too shaming. She will never tell.

  It is late afternoon, and Dr Barbara Halliwell sits in the middle of the second row of the Sejong Auditorium, as she inattentively listens through her multilingual headphones to yet more welcoming addresses. On the bench in front of her is her conference pack of papers, her conference ballpoint pen, her conference notepad, her conference map of Seoul, and the by now well-read, dog-eared memoirs of the imperative Crown Princess. As the speeches proceed, Babs begins methodically to draw an egg-and-dart pattern round the edge of the top sheet of her virgin notepad. She appears to be listening, but her mind is scattered into particles and is wandering. Global harmony, global resources, global warming, information interchange, international cooperation, birth rates, death rates, tuberculosis, malaria, the human genome, genetic patenting, AIDS… The phrases hover and buzz through the air-conditioned atmosphere, but they do not settle for long in the jet-lagged consciousness of Dr Halliwell. Altitude and the Crown Princess have shattered her perceptions into many little disconnected but perhaps potentially interlocking fragments.

  She is in other places and in other times. One of her many astral bodies is travelling restlessly, like a shuttle, apologetic, ashamed, backward and forward along an airport highway, clutching a suitcase and smelling of sweat and dirt and pressurized bodily gases. This bodily persona is attempting to charm a kind but inscrutable man with a sexually attractive steel tooth. Another of her bodies is sitting immobile in a hospital in a sterile room, gazing at a small child in drug-controlled pain, a child she can no longer touch or reach, a child behind glass, a child doomed to an early death by her own ignorance and by her protective love and by her defective genes and by the overheating imperfections of medical science. Another persona that seems to have attached itself to her by some form of metempsychosis is cramped in a male body in a rice chest, listening to the punishing god of thunder. Yet another crouches in the shade of a compound wall, hiding from the heat of the noonday sun, penning a letter of urgent appeal for a stay of execution. An offspring of this crouching woman is dialling 999 and the emergency services in the small hours of the morning in Kentish Town in North London.

  The Crown Princess sits invisibly at the elbow of Babs, self-summoned from two centuries of sleep, urgent with her messages from the other world. Dr Halliwell cannot yet decode them. They are in an alien language. They are about illness and madness. They are about the abuses of parental power. They are about transmission, and failures of transmission. They are about maternity, and death, and progress. Dr Halliwell is the chosen vessel. Dr Halliwell is feeling a little unwell. It is all too much for her. She is clever, but not that clever. She feels overwhelmed and inadequate. What is she doing here in Seoul? She has strayed too far from home. She understands nothing. She has tried to think of herself as a reasonably competent person, but incompetence has now struck her like a whirlwind. She is off course. She has no course. She is lost.

  Professor Jan van Jost, however, is found. That is him, sitting at the end of the front row, a few places to her right, in this modern but rather gloomy auditorium. He is somewhat smaller of stature but better looking than she had expected him to be. He is neat, even-featured, lightly tanned, and his hair is a crisp, short-cropped, silvery grey. The back of his head signifies effortless authority. He is also, as her Australian colleague Bob had forewarned her, extremely well dressed, in a well-cut suit of an unusual shade of pale straw-green. A glow seems to emanate from him and to bathe him in its soft warm light. He glows like a royal personage or a film star, discreetly but inescapably positioned in a gathering of subdued and attendant courtiers and peasants. This is surely the quiet, steady glow of fame.

  Jan van Jost’s keynote address, which he will deliver in mid conference, is entitled ‘The Leaden Casket: Meditations on the Apocalypse’. He is known for his colourful literary allusions and what some consider his excessively flamboyant prose. He appears to be intending to lob an explosive into this sober conference. Will it be about AIDS? Will it be a warning of the end of the world? It has occurred to Babs Halliwell that his title may seem to have some connection with her own, thou
gh this, if so, is a coincidence. She is to speak on triage and risk assessment in complex experimental choices of medical intervention. Her approach is ethical, rather than medical. His remit appears to be even more comprehensive, as befits a guru of the globe.

  She will not speak about the fatal choice that she herself had made for her own child. Will Jan van Jost also have a concealed agenda? Yes, of course. Which of us has not, however abstract our reasoning may claim to be? A scarlet thread runs through all things. But Babs Halliwell has no idea of what that thread might be, for she knows nothing at all of van Jost’s personal history.

  Bassanio, in The Merchant of Venice, paradoxically chooses life and love when he chooses the leaden casket. Gold and silver are the bad choices, the deadly choices, made by bad princes from foreign lands. They are the exotic, multicultural choices, the hostile choices of Africa and Spain. To choose dull lead is to choose real life. The leaden casket is not a coffin for a Coffin King. Lead represents humility, submission, virtue, grace, survival. Is this a universal symbolism? Hemp and cotton and silk; lead and silver and gold; magpies and ravens and birds of doom. These thoughts drift in and out of the well-stocked consciousness of Barbara Halliwell. Her head is too full of matter. She has seen The Merchant of Venice several times, and, like most twentieth-century spectators, she finds it a problematic play.

  Peter Halliwell persistently refused to take his medication. He had that right. Their son Benedict had had no choice but to submit to his medication. He was an infant, and therefore he had no choice. He could not be informed of his condition, and he did not need to give consent. The medication killed him. It had been intended to offer him a chance of survival, but in fact it killed him. Thus their only child Benedict Halliwell had died. Peter Halliwell had never forgiven Babs Halliwell for this death and for the faulty gene and the false medication that had caused this death. He had accused her, to her face, of being a murderer. He had seized her by the throat and yelled at her that she was a murderer. She had shaken him off quite easily because she is a strong woman, and he had been drunk at the time, and not by nature a killer. And she had forgiven him for it because he was mad. She had tried to move on.