The Red Queen (21 page)

These are posthumous stories. The story is not over yet. The north of our country still attempts to lead a hermit life. It now is labelled ‘evil’. It is part of the ‘axis of evil’, whatever that may be. Evil is not a word for which, at my advanced age, I feel much need.

My writings survived. At first they were known only to a few. The tragedy of Prince Sado has always been a legend in our land, but my writings, which give the true account of one who was both an eyewitness and a chief player in the drama, were not so widely known. But now they have found their way into the wider world, and into other languages. I have watched the process of their dissemination with interest and amazement. My story has seized the imaginations of generations then unborn. Artistic renderings of my life in media then unknown have been projected. My amanuenses and translators discuss and at times misinterpret my affairs in cyberspace. I prompt them, I prompt them. I am not a jealous ghost. I am proud, but I am not jealous. I wish you all to know my story.

It may be that manuscripts describing these events still await discovery. Only last week, a new epitaph on Prince Sado by his father King Yŏngjo was discovered, which is said to cast new light on that tragic death. I found it on the Internet. No story is ever finished. Mine continues.

How could I have foreseen the nature of the world that I have now posthumously entered? I haunt it, and it haunts me. It is an astonishing place, busy and complex and confusing. Its peoples are ever restlessly, needlessly on the move. It attempts improbable syntheses. Its frontiers are porous. There are few hermit kingdoms now.

I come from a time of paper and of silk. Paper lanterns glowed in the night for us, and paper boats with silken sails floated upon the lake for us. Ours was a world of silk and rosewood and hemp and jade and stone and ink and water. Our floors were warm and smooth; our screens were light; our minds were subtle. It was a quiet and violent and brutal and secret country, inside the palace walls.

Outside those walls, ours was a hard land with a harsh climate, a land of gneiss and granite and petrified waterfalls, a kingdom surrounded by water, a country of mountains and of cold peaks and wastes, of banishments and exiles and brambles.

Or so the stories say. I did not see much of it. Maybe it was not like that at all. I did not see the way the common people lived.

It is all changed now. It is a modern country now.

And now I must lead you through the gates of harsh cacophony, through the hideous clamour, through the metallic inferno, through the plastic polymer hell, to the lavish luxuries of the air-conditioned, global, universal third millennium. Stop your nose against the pollution; stop your ears against the uproar. Follow me, to the world of globalization and multiple choice. You may like it there. It is the future. It is your future. Take it. It is yours.

PART TWO
Modern Times

She will arrive too early at the airport. She always arrives early at airports. It is foredoomed that she will arrive early at Heathrow. She tosses and turns, after a late and festive farewell night, alone in her wide and queenly bed, half sleeping and half waking, waiting for the alarm clock (which she does not trust) and the prearranged telephone calls (which she does not trust) and for the morning light of Oxford, which will filter, slowly, through the pale blinds of her high windows, whether she trusts it or not. She must rise at six-thirty. She will rise before six-thirty. She cannot make herself wait patiently for the full light of day, although at this time of year the days are still long, and the dawn still comes early to the city.

We watch her, but she does not know that we watch. She ignores our intrusion. Why are we summoned to her bedside? We are summoned by the book in her hand baggage. It would appear that she intends to read it on the aeroplane. It is already packed, in one of the several easily accessible outer zip compartments of her little dark green case-on-wheels.

The script pulls us towards her, by the magnet of its 200-year-old message. We enter the room, whether we will or no. We flock and throng and cluster near her ceiling, little winged spies, looking down on her restless form. We look around her bedroom, and flow out into her bathroom, her corridors, her apartment. The air is thick with our attention. We are here; we are watching; we will report on what we see.

This restless woman does not have the body of an anxious woman, nor do the furnishings of her room express excessive neurosis. Only the evidence of the methodical nature of her packing betrays her ingrained and perhaps not irrational fear of missing trains and aeroplanes. Those lists on her bedside table, by the water carafe and the bottles of pills, also betray some form of anxiety. But, at the same time, they indicate method. This is an efficient woman, trained in outwitting her weaknesses, in medicating her real or imagined illnesses, in forestalling accidents of forgetting and of oversight.

By the bed, on the floor, a pair of large old-fashioned tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles lies unashamed and eloquent across the spine of an open book. The book lies face down. The spectacles look like a large winged creature that has alighted there.

Her body seems to be a confident body, not an anxious body. She is tall, and she lies at a diagonal across the large bed, sprawling in restless abandon, filling it from corner to corner with her smooth, large limbs. Her legs protrude from beneath her duvet, and her arms are flung wide. Her large toenails are painted a cracked and peeling garnet-red. The duvet cover is of cotton cloth, with a crisp, bold, blue-and-white Delft design, and the crumpled white pillowcases have borders of broderie anglaise. The woman wears a scarlet nightshift of light, loosely woven muslin, which has ridden high over her round belly. Her pubic hair is thick and curling and tawny chestnut. One of her full breasts is exposed to view: it splays out proudly and firmly beneath her jutting collarbone. It is a breast that has been admired and handled. It is not a lonely breast. It is a voluptuous breast.

Her eyes are shut, although she may not be sleeping. Her lashes are thick. They are slightly clotted and matted with the dissolute remains of the previous day’s mascara.

Her hair is thick and curled and tousled. It is tawny brown, with false golden highlights, and it sticks to her high, wide brow in warm tendrils.

This woman is not young, but neither is she old. She is glossy and firm, and she is in her prime. She is a woman who rates herself highly. All this we can read from her recumbent, semi-sleepless form. She hovers between sleep and waking, in that realm where dreams converge with fears and plans and memories.

We can read her destination from the pile of books by her bedside, from the list of contact addresses and dates that she has placed by her carafe of water. Her air ticket and her passport are in the pocket of her well-worn brown-leather shoulder bag, but the computer-printed list tells us that her destination is Seoul, in South Korea, and that she is taking an Air France plane from Heathrow to Paris’s Roissy-Charles de Gaulle, where she will change flights for Seoul-Incheon. It seems that she intends to spend several days in South Korea. In Seoul, she will stay in the Pagoda Hotel. It appears that she has contacts in the British Embassy and the British Council, at a Korean women’s hospital, and at a pharmaceutical foundation.

The buzz is that she is flying off to a conference, to deliver a paper. So we whisper as we cluster in the upper air. Has she written her paper? Has she made at least two copies of it? Has she made sure to keep one with her in her hand luggage? Is she planning to take her laptop computer with her? Or has she decided that travelling with such a valued and expensive item would be too much of a worry?

In her little, dark green case-on-wheels, the memoir of the Crown Princess is waiting for her. Its author is waiting to speak to her. Its author, long locked in the silence of death, has found another listener. This fitfully sleeping woman is her new victim. The book is a trap, an infection, a time bomb.

She is well endowed, this living woman. Her bedroom is large and airy and elegantly austere. Our eyes can see clearly now in the first light of the end of the dark, and we can see that the blinds of the bedroom are a pale shade of sky blue with a printed border of clouds, that the walls are a perhaps unfashionable eggshell white and that two white, fleecy sheepskin rugs lie upon the highly polished wooden floor. Dusky saxe blue cushioned seats line the deep embrasure of the window. There is a bookcase, the contents of which indicate an interest in art and architecture, but we may conjecture that this is but a small and decorative selection from her library, and that her working books are kept elsewhere. A large celadon vase of a delicate pale blue-green, placed on a white painted wooden table in the window bay, holds an arrangement of pale, dried, silvery seed heads of honesty, mixed with orange, papery Chinese lanterns. There is an oval Art Nouveau white wood-framed mirror over the bookcase, in which we may fancy that she frequently admires herself.

It is an uncluttered room. Maybe she has tidied it in anticipation of her imminent departure. Maybe she is a tidy person. Maybe she has a person who tidies this room for her. The only clothes we can see are those that she has carefully laid out for her journey on the back of the blue loose-covered armchair. There is a touch of an institutionalized Walter Pater Oxford about this elegant, lightly inhabited bedroom. Her mark on it is not deep. She is a visitor.

Does she always sleep alone? She has not always slept alone. She wears a golden wedding ring on her left hand, and a gold ring set with pearls on the ring finger of her right hand. For a single person, this is a large bed. She lies in state.

There is one photograph on display, in a slightly tarnished ornate silver Victorian frame. It stands on top of a small table near the window. It shows a very young child of indeterminate sex. The child is propped up against a cushion or a pillow, somewhat far from the camera. A remote, removed child. The child is not smiling at the camera.

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.