The Red Queen (34 page)

‘Thank you,’ she says, demurely, playing for time.

He, too, takes another deliberate sip from his glass.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Beautiful.’

He lets the word linger.

‘And so difficult,’ he says, ‘with the simultaneous translation. Which is so unnecessary, as they have the text.’

Maybe he is referring to something as trivial as her delivery, which she knows to be good. She doesn’t need him to tell her that she has a loud and musical voice, and that she speaks clearly.

They seem to be poised, motionless, on the edge of some glassy ridge or slope. It is not a bad place to be, but they cannot stay there for long. It is too exposed and too chilly and too alarming. She tries not to slip or waver.

‘So you have no children,’ he says, out of this silence.

This is a surprise move. It could lead in any direction.

‘No,’ she says, looking at him directly.

‘You had a child who died,’ he says, returning her gaze.

‘Yes, I did. How did you know that?’

‘I was told,’ he says, unhelpfully.

Shall she ask who told him? She does not dare. But speak she must, now.

‘And you?’ she decides to ask. ‘Do you have children?’

‘Oh, yes,’ he says, in a resigned and despondent manner. ‘Oh, yes, I have children. But they are no longer children. They are grown now.’

She does not want to descend into the banality of an explanation of the whereabouts and a recitation of the exploits of these grown children, so she remains silent, and refuses to enquire after them. She is not interested in the grown children of strangers. She is interested in the sick babies of strangers, but that is for other reasons. So she says nothing, and waits for him to continue his discourse. This strategy works well, perhaps too well.

‘But my wife,’ he says, ‘my wife has no children.’

‘Oh,’ says Babs.

This is new territory. They have abandoned neutral ground. A third party has entered the room to join them, and Babs is not at all sure if she wants her there. But she is not sure how to evict her. She keeps silence, and so does he. He gives way first.

‘My wife,’ he says, ‘is very anxious to have a child. She is very much younger than I am. She is, you know, my third wife. And I am getting old.’

She manages to assume an expression of denial, which he waves away, as though his age is not the issue. She wonders if he is about to leap into another banality, the banality of telling her that his wife does not understand him. She is not sure what she wants by now – bed or exposition, or both? She is certain that she does not want banality. She wants to continue in her admiration for this man, and she wants him to admire her.

She can see that he is bracing himself to make another significant move, and, shortly, he does.

‘I want your advice,’ he says.

‘Yes?’

‘My wife wants to adopt a baby. We shall never have a baby. I believe that she will never have a baby. I want your advice on this subject.’

‘Why?’ is all that she can think of to say.

She could hardly have asked a better question.

‘Because,’ he says, ‘you look so wise and so beautiful. In those large spectacles that you always wear.’

He leans towards her now, across the firmly upholstered arms of the chair and the settee, and puts his right hand gently on the side of her face. He strokes her cheek, and then he removes her glasses, and lays them down on the glass table, between their twin tumblers of cut glass. She gazes at him, mesmerized. It is a very intimate and delicate gesture. Nobody has ever done this to her before. Nobody has ever dared to do this to her before. Does this gesture come from some well-known continental or Hollywood repertoire, written before she was born? She knows that it must, but she does not care if it does. She is entranced.

‘You look just as beautiful and as wise without your glasses,’ he says. ‘You look like Athena.’

‘Thank you,’ she says.

He takes her hand now, and holds it, and caresses it. She returns the pressure. This is all very good. It cannot go wrong now.

‘Tell me about your wife,’ she prompts him.

His wife, it seems, is young, and she is infertile. For two or three years, she had attempted to conceive. She submitted to all the tests, and had now given up hope. ‘And now,’ he says, in a plain way, ‘I do not wish to sleep with her anyway. I have had enough of that. That is finished between us.’

Other people have said this sort of thing to Babs Halliwell, and other people, as she has on several occasions subsequently discovered, have been lying when they said it. But nevertheless she feels inclined to believe him. She wishes to believe him. For the short period of their acquaintance, in this foreign demilitarized zone, she might as well believe him.

‘My wife wants to adopt a Chinese orphan,’ says Jan van Jost. ‘She sent me to an orphanage in Beijing, to look at babies, and to negotiate. It is on this subject that I want your advice.’

She knows that seduction may take strange forms, but this is the strangest that she has ever encountered. He approaches her not as a swan or as a shower of golden rain, but as a prospective adoptive father. It seems that he seriously wishes to discuss with her the practicalities of transcultural adoption, and the ethics of the purchasing of an unwanted little Chinese girl.

She asks if he wants to stay married to his wife. Why not, he says. He will not marry again, he is too old, he has been married often enough. And it is easier for his wife to adopt if she is still in a regular marriage. Even in the enlightened Netherlands, he says, it is easier for a married couple to adopt than for a single person. So he will stay married to his wife for her convenience. And of course he will pay for the child, and take an interest in the child, in so far as his interest seems desirable to his wife and useful to the child.

‘But what about you?’ she asks. ‘Do you want to adopt a Chinese baby?’

‘It will not matter to me,’ he says. ‘One way or the other.’

‘Why not? What do you want?’

‘At this moment,’ he says, ‘what I want is to be with you, and to listen to what you have to say. And I think we could talk better about this in bed.’

He is still holding her hand, and he is looking intently from his keen blue eyes into her myopic brown eyes. She leans forward towards him, slightly, and places her other hand on top of his.

‘Are you sure that would be a good place to talk?’ she enquires.

‘Yes,’ he says. Then he smiles, suddenly, in a different and less grave mode, and says, ‘Well, almost sure. It would depend on whether you agreed that it might be a good idea.’

She will have to commit herself now, one way or another. The chance may not come again. Her heart is pounding. He has made it necessary for her to speak. He has cornered her into a verbal response.

‘Yes,’ she says, carefully following his lead and his syntax. ‘Yes, I think it might be a good idea.’

She is thinking that whatever happens to her, in bed with Jan van Jost, cannot be unwelcome to her. If he wants to talk, she will talk. If he wants to make love to her, she will make love to him. If he wants to do both, she will do both. He is a very attractive man, and her hand is burning in his. His mixture of confidence and diffidence is extraordinarily calming. She feels elevated and unreal. Part of her consciousness seems to be floating somewhere near the ceiling, looking down with interest and approval upon this unearthly bodily drama. She watches herself lean further towards him: he releases her hand, and cups her face with both his hands, and kisses her, very lightly but very slowly and carefully, upon the lips.

‘Come,’ he says, and rises to his feet, and draws her upright. She is only an inch or two taller than he is.

‘I will take my glass through with me,’ he says, reaching for it. ‘My Dutch courage. Shall I take yours?’

But she has already picked up her glass. He leads her to the double door that opens into the spacious and luxurious bedroom: he does not attempt to carry her large person over the threshold, but he does usher her over it, with a certain formality. The bed has already been turned down, she presumes by the room staff, and two white bathrobes with royal purple trim and Pagoda monograms upon their breast pockets are laid upon it in expectant attitudes. She sits down, on what she takes to be her side of the bed, and kicks off her shoes. He takes up his bathrobe, and disappears into the bathroom. She looks around her, covertly, rapidly, taking in the large pile of books and papers and the bottles of pills on his bedside table, the beige canvas slippers neatly placed under the oriental lacquer bureau, and the aggressive television set that is openly staring from its winged mahogany shutters at the king-sized bed. One cannot tell from any of this if he is a tidy man or an untidy man. Then, rapidly, decisively, she undresses, and heaps her outer clothes on the bedside chair, and folds herself into the hotel bathrobe in her underwear, and climbs into the wide bed of Jan van Jost.

He takes his time, and, as she is about to reach for one of his bedside books, she realizes she has left her glasses in the outer room. But she does not want to get out of this bed to go to look for them, in case she is caught in some indeterminate attitude. She needs to stay where she is, looking composed. Shall she switch on the television? No, that would be very vulgar. Instead, she rapidly scans the titles of his bedside reading matter, which she can read quite well without her spectacles. Like most intellectuals, she has a habit of spying on the titles of other people’s books, and the habit does not abandon her now. She recognizes the names of Ulrich Beck, Jonathan Spence, Michael Walzer and Pierre Bourdieu, the texts all well marked with Post-It notes. There are one or two Chinese titles, evidence of his recent travels – she is just trying to make out what appear to be the words ‘Lu Xun’ on the spine of one of these volumes when he reappears from the bathroom, wearing not the white hotel robe, but a rather attractive black Chinese silk dressing gown embroidered with dragons of scarlet and gold.

She immediately averts her eyes from his travelling library, as though caught out in an act of minor espionage, and speaks, to cover herself. ‘Help,’ she says. ‘I’ve left my glasses through there, on the table.’

He does not ask her what she wants her glasses for, but goes off, like a gentleman, to retrieve them for her. He also takes the opportunity to switch off most of the outer lights. Then he gets into bed, by her side, and puts his arm round her shoulder. She settles against him, comfortably. He is the most reassuring, undemanding man she has ever been about to sleep with. She is amazingly happy and light of heart.

‘Tell me about the Chinese babies,’ she says. ‘And tell me about your dressing gown. Is that Chinese, too?’

He looks down at it, somewhat absent-mindedly, as though to remind himself of its appearance and its provenance. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It was a gift. People in China kept giving me things. It was very embarrassing. I am afraid it may be rather expensive. It is very much a gift culture, you know. Like Japan. But the babies, those you have to pay for.’

‘Tell me more.’

‘They cost about $5,000. They are not really orphans, as you know. They are little girls who have been abandoned by their parents. I think you probably know something about this from your friend Bob Bryant?’

She agrees that she does. She knows all about the tens of thousands of female babies abandoned every year, as a result of China’s one-child-per-family policy. She knows about gender imbalance and the missing girls. He describes to her the cots in rows, the newborn babies sleeping quietly, the larger children varying from the blank-eyed to the hopefully friendly. Some of them had been taught to utter the word ‘Mama’, in an attempt to arouse the attention of Western visitors. What should he do, what should he think? His wife Viveca is passionately desirous of having a baby to rear, but he cannot tell if this is a deep impulse, or a vindictive impulse, or a displaced desire, or a biological tic that will pass with time.

His hand has stolen downwards to her breast, and rests warmly upon it. She sighs. She tells him a little of the birth, the few weeks of hope and happiness, the short and isolated months, and the sad death of Baby Benedict. Does she feel deprived, maternally deprived? How can she tell? She tries to answer his unspoken questions. She says that she does not think she will ever attempt to have another baby. It is too high a risk. She has a chromosome hazard. It is getting late, and she is getting older. And she has a full life without a baby. She does not think that a woman has a right to a baby. But, with the Chinese babies, she can see that that is not the only issue. Does a baby have a right to a mother? Would Jan be doing wrong, to aid his wife in this perhaps transient whim? She does not know, she knows she is not wise enough to say.

‘They were very appealing, the little ones,’ says van Jost. Would she like to see some photographs? He has a wallet of photographs, here, by the bed.

It is clear that he wants her to see the photographs, he needs her to see them. She does not wish to see them, but she knows she must submit. She reaches for her glasses, he reaches for the wallet. She inspects the grave little faces. Each child has an institutional name and a number. Tears gather in her eyes. They brim over.