Free The Red Queen by Margaret Drabble Page B

also capricious, vindictive, unfatherly. Our society laid such stress on the filial virtues: the child must honour the parent, no matter how ill that parent has conducted himself towards his child. How could Sado not run mad? He was spurned and rejected and tormented. How could he honour such a cruel father? He was caught in a trap from which there was no escape. I thought bitterly of these paradoxes, as I watched you take your first steps. You were so eager to please, so full of unwary smiles. And I, too, more wary, was also eager to please. One false step, one unwise word, and you would be taken from me as too precious for my care. You tottered over the reed mat, and fell, and laughed, and heaved yourself up again, and tottered bravely on. I walked on ice, on knives, on dragons’ teeth.
My father tried to be a comfort to me, during these difficult years, but he was delicately placed. He had to watch his every step. Intrigue surrounded him, and his motives were always suspect, for it was widely and not wholly wrongly believed that his first concern was not for the kingdom, but for the prosperity and survival of his own family line. How often in dark moments he must have regretted my selection as bride of the Crown Prince! Now I was learning to interpret the deep gloom which had overcome both my parents when I had passed through the last of those three bridal selection processes, when I had passed, as it were, the first grades of the examinations of my life. No wonder they feared for me and for themselves. But they had chosen to allow my name to be advanced, had they not? My fate was on their heads.
Some of my family chose – or were forced to choose – to live as scholars of the cave and the mountain, hidden from the eyes of envy, tending their gardens and writing poems about herons and flowering reeds and moons and butterflies and waterfalls. But my father had a restless ambition and a desire for the glories of this world. And in me there had been a desire for that red silk skirt.
Did my parents ever love me, as I loved my children? As I loved my dead little first-born, my surviving son and my two daughters? I cannot tell whether they did or did not. Politics intervened so early in our lives. For me, maternal love was a consuming passion, and in vain do the wise and the cynical point out to me that in my case the interests of maternal passion coincided with the material interests of myself and my family. Yes, it was so. But still, I remember the mother cat. Over the decades since my death, I have thought much of these matters, and I have made many comparisons of my fate with the fates and life stories of others. It now seems to me that it may be that all my passions were driven, as it were, into one narrow channel. Driven by circumstance of history, of family, of character. The force of my nature was very considerable. We human creatures are not born equal. We are not blank slates or lumps of putty. We are born with unequal passions and attributes. I was born with a powerful spirit, and it was dammed up in me. In other societies, it could perhaps have flowed more evenly, less violently. But in my time, in my lonely place, it could find no other object but my sons. I was driven back into a primitive maternal obsession, a fierce white cataract to which I gave the name of love.
And yet it was love. I can still recall the distant sensations of earthly love. I remember watching Chŏngjo’s small, earnest face as he bent intently over his piece of rice paper, as he dipped his brush in the black ink or prepared his ink stone: I remember his childish grief and despair when his hand could not reproduce the beautiful imaginings of his brain and his eye. Again and again I had to comfort him for a botched page, for a human imperfection. He was such a fierce and serious little child, and my heart went out to him. He was as sensitive as he was strong. I yearned to him. My whole body yearned to him. This was love. Was it not?
My nature