The Red Queen (37 page)

Again, he reads her mind. ‘You can have it back tonight,’ he says, ‘but only if you agree now to come back tomorrow night.’

‘You may not want me to come back tomorrow night,’ she says.

‘No,’ he says. ‘It is you that may not want to. But I am asking you to come back to me tomorrow night. This is important for me. Three nights is correct. It is a magic number. Two is inartistic. And I am a very superstitious person. I shall always be unhappy about you and always regret you, if you do not return to me for the last night. Also, tomorrow night, you must give me your wise and beautiful advice.’

Of course, she agrees to return. How could she resist? There is nothing she wants more than to spend one more night with him. She would have been mortified had he wished otherwise. They make a pact. Now, she will return to Room 1517, with the memoirs. But they will agree to meet the next day. The next day will be his last and her penultimate day in Seoul: he is scheduled to speak at the National University; she at Ewha Woman’s University. They both have lunch engagements. In the afternoon, there is free time. In the evening, there will be the official conference banquet, where they will see each other from a distance. After the banquet and the speeches, they will repair to Suite 1712, and spend their final night together, and exchange their final confidences.

‘So, it is agreed,’ says the miner’s son.

‘Yes, it is agreed,’ says the doctor’s daughter.

This time, she remembers to take the book, but, when she gets back to her room, she finds she has left her glasses by Jan van Jost’s bed. Oh, well, never mind. She has lots of pairs of glasses. She is always losing her glasses. He will keep them safely for her, until their last tryst.

The miner’s son and the doctor’s daughter do not see one another again until the final banquet. Babs Halliwell, in happy anticipation of their reunion, shamelessly enjoys her day. The campus of Ewha Woman’s University is spacious and finely landscaped. It occupies a hillside with trees and statues and buildings ancient and modern. The members of staff are charming; the students seem courteously interested in what she has to say. Babs admires the valuable collection of ancient ceramics and the rich display of textiles in the University Museum. She feels that her eye for things Korean is improving a little: objects that had at first seemed formless are beginning to take on form. She is gaining perspective, and seeing better. She cannot yet care for dragons, but maybe in time she will learn to like them, too.

She lunches on the Pear Blossom Campus with her hosts, and they talk of the changing lives of women in Korea: they all agree with her that they are fortunate to live in modern times. This is the largest women’s university in the world, claim her hosts, with 17,000 students, at least some of whom will move on into careers and professions. A whole army of fashion vendors is encamped in the shopping street just outside the university gates, ready to waylay the young scholars and to divert them from their higher purposes, tempting them with heaped emporia of shoes and jeans and cosmetics and evening gowns and wedding dresses. But some will surely make their way safely through the consumer gauntlet. It is a shame that the wedding-dress industry thrives so well in Seoul, and that such fortunes are wasted upon weddings, says Professor Pak, shaking her well-groomed head in mild pedagogic censure. It is not the custom to spend so much in Europe, she believes?

It depends on your social class, says Babs, who had married Peter Halliwell in midsummer in a register office in Bromley, clad in a full-length, bright-red cotton dress made in Morocco. Those had been the days.

Babs thinks, with guilty affection, of her cheap and frivolous red socks, and of the little red skirt of the Crown Princess. She thinks of mentioning the Crown Princess, but the conversation strays elsewhere, and she does not do so. This is perhaps a pity, for had Babs mentioned her, she would have learned that a professor attached to this very campus had recently published a bestselling historical detective story involving the princess and her son, King Chŏngjo. She will discover this one day, but not yet.

Boldly, after accepting a soothing cup of tea in a traditional tearoom, she insists on returning alone by the subway to her hotel. Her hosts bow to her desire to test herself in this manner. She survives the journey triumphantly, without making a false move. She is pleased with herself. She has conquered the subways of Seoul. Back at the hotel, she finds a message on her machine from Dr Oo. He says he is leaving for Amsterdam the next day; will she be able to find time to say goodbye? She rings him back in his room, but he is out. She leaves a message suggesting that they could take breakfast together the next day in the Jade Coffee Shop, if he is not leaving at dawn. At eight-thirty, perhaps?

She takes a slow bath, and dresses carefully for the final banquet. She is feeling ridiculously happy. Her stay here, after its inauspicious opening, perhaps because of its inauspicious opening, has been glorious to her. She feels purged of old regrets and sorrows, charged with a new energy. Dr Oo and Professor Jan van Jost have done wonders for her morale. Between them, through their differing kindnesses, they have transformed her from a gross and stupid woman into a wise and beautiful woman. She feels power crackling through her hair, as she brushes it and ties it back with a golden ribbon. She clips a pair of dangling golden earrings to her ears, and fastens a golden necklace around her throat. She is in the prime of life, she tells herself, as she admires herself in the mirror in her long black silky crushproof rayon dress.

Her jewellery is not made of real gold. She would not travel with articles of real gold, even if she had any. The pieces that she wears are what shops used to call ‘costume jewellery’, and now call ‘travel jewellery’. The pieces are made of what the police call ‘yellow metal’. But the metal shines brightly. It glitters. She glitters.

Her guardian sylphs and spirits watch benignly. They approve of her appearance. They frequently urge her to pay more attention to her toilette. They deplore her intermittent moods of negligence and indifference. She may be an academic, but she is also a woman, as they often attempt to remind her, in their old-fashioned way. This anonymous and well-lit hotel room has been conducive to neatness and good grooming. At one point they had thought of urging her to book an appointment with the hotel hairdresser, but they had relented. In a few years, as they will be sure to advise her, she will be obliged to alter her hairstyle to one of greater gravitas. But, for the moment, this informal, beribboned mode will suffice. They circle round her, checking her from all angles, inspecting her hemline and her shoulder pads and her neckline, and they decide that she will do. She is ready to descend. They usher her out, towards the lift, and gaze after her as she goes to join the throng. Mong Joon, they know, will take over the task of surveillance on the floors below.

The banqueting hall is laid with many tables. At one end of the room there is a platform. There will be speeches and photographs. Dr Halliwell launches herself bravely upon the social sea, and floats from shoal to shoal. She chatters and laughs and utters compliments; she peers at labels and congratulates herself on the fact that during these five days she has correctly registered and recalled the names of a fair proportion of her colleagues. Most of them, modestly, are still wearing their labels. Most of these people are polite and unassuming. She is still wearing her own label, pinned high at a jaunty angle on her left shoulder.

Dr Barbara Halliwell does her tour of the stateroom floor, closely watched by the supervisory gaze of Mong Joon, who, towards the end of her perambulation, approaches her, ostensibly to steer her towards her table, but also to utter what she takes to be a remonstrance. It will be his last chance to control her: his official supervision of her ends with this banquet, for tomorrow she moves, for her last day, to the protection of the pharmaceutical company. But she somehow knows he will pop up again at the airport, just to make sure she leaves the country on time and as arranged.

‘You have been very busy during your visit,’ says Mong Joon. ‘I hear that you went two days ago to Suwon with two gentlemen?’ He does not quite wag his finger at her, but his intonation implies that he might well have done so.

‘Yes, indeed I did,’ she says, primly. ‘It was a very interesting outing.’

She can see that a smile is hovering somewhere behind his smoothly dimpled, diplomatic features. She hopes to God he has not heard about the fiasco with the royal bidet and the emergency alarum. If so, she blames that pretty Buddhist in her blue jeans and lemon-yellow top. She is probably Mong Joon’s sister or his cousin or his aunt.

‘This is your table,’ he says, and he firmly pulls out her chair. There, indeed, is her place, and her name card. She sits herself down, obediently.

As the meal and the speeches proceed, she manages to locate her brand-new three-day lover. He is sitting two tables away from her, between the president of the foundation and a handsome Korean woman wearing a stylish emerald-green, gold-trimmed, short-cut satin jacket and a tight long skirt. Maybe she is the president’s wife? Jan seems to be paying her a great deal of attention. He is inclining his head towards her, and listening to her with an attitude of studied concentration. Jan is too far away from Babs for Babs to be able to read his features. She is amused to find that she experiences a mixture of jealousy and possessiveness, as she watches him from afar. She knows that she has no right to either of these emotions. And they do not go very deep, which is why she is able to find them so pleasurable. For she is certain that he cannot be talking to the president’s wife about Chinese babies. Well, almost certain. Surely the Chinese babies are a bedtime secret that he shares with her alone?

She takes her cue from Jan van Jost, and applies herself to the entertainment of the neighbour sitting on her left, who proves to be the chair of a committee on medical ethics in Kyoto. He asks her if she has been to Japan, and she says no. She asks him if he has been to London, and he says that he has. As they engage in shallow tourist talk, her mind wanders round the room, overhearing words from other people’s conversations as they mingle in the common air. Has the conference been a success, she wonders? Has it achieved anything? Will it have improved the quality or provision or distribution of useful medication? Will it have enabled exciting exchanges of ideas to take place? Will it have enhanced the careers of any of its delegates, or brought more trade or higher status to its pharmaceutical sponsors? Will the new frontiers of health have been shifted to any perceptible or useful degree by the formal presentation of academic papers, by the generous press coverage, by the informal international gatherings in the hotel bar, by the eccentric group outing to the Expo, or by this grand assembly of sober-suited gentlemen and gaily clad ladies? Or has the whole thing simply been an elaborate corporate tax break?

There is a lot of soft money floating around in the ethically dubious sea of medical and pharmaceutical research, and some of it has drifted in the direction of the clever and well-connected Dr Barbara Halliwell. She has had a lucky year. Next year, she will have to work harder, and teach longer hours. Dr Barbara Halliwell thinks, briefly, of Dr Oo and his underfunded stroke patients. She wonders if he got her message about meeting for breakfast in the coffee shop.

For the first hour or so of the banquet, she savours the agreeable suspense and anticipation of waiting for her amorous assignation in Suite 1712. But eventually she begins to grow restless, and she is relieved when the formal proceedings seem to be drawing to an end. Thanks are given; toasts are drunk; applause is rendered. It is during one of the bouts of applause that she notes that Jan van Jost is rising to his feet and making his farewells. He has had enough. He is off to his bed. Is he abandoning her? What shall she do? She is wondering whether he intends that she should follow him, and, if so, how soon she may discreetly do so, when she sees that he is not leaving the room directly, but making his way towards her table. Is he about to cancel their last night together? Is he ill, or exhausted, or disaffected? It will break her heart if he cancels. She half rises, in anticipation of some rebuff. But no, a rebuff is not his intention. He has come not to reject her, but to claim her. He bends towards her, whispers, ‘Please, let us go now.’ He offers his arm, to help her to her feet. She rises, smiles her excuses vaguely round and about her table, and follows him, as he makes for the exit.

Do many spies turn to watch them as they leave the Grand Saloon together? Is their departure noted? They do not look back to see, but walk onwards, through the high portals, and into the wide and richly carpeted foyer of the mezzanine floor. They make their way towards the lift, and Jan van Jost presses the button to ascend. In the lift, he presses the button for Executive Floor 17. He looks at her now, and she can see that his world-weary face is suffused with a strange glitter. His eyes have a bright and visionary look, as though he has seen something strange. She almost asks him if he is feeling all right, but, as she hesitates, he speaks first.

‘I had to get out of there,’ he says. ‘Suddenly, I could not breathe in there. I am sorry. To make you leave like this.’

Is he speaking literally or figuratively about his breathing problem? She cannot tell. Quickly, she assures him that she, too, had had quite enough of the banquet, and she watches, a little anxiously, as he fumbles with his electronic key. Has he been drinking? She thinks not. Unlike Peter Halliwell and Robert Treborough and others she has known, he is not, she thinks, a hard-drinking man. The green eye blinks, and they enter Suite 1712, which welcomes them as though it had been expecting them. Babs sinks on to the settee, in a casually premeditated manner, and kicks off her high party heels, to show that she is at home. He sits by her, and takes her hand in his, and compels her to turn her head towards him, to meet his gaze. They look at one another, and, once more, he removes her glasses, and kisses her. It is an attentive but not an impassioned kiss. Then he says: