The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  Blackstock Road has not yet, as I write, become gentrified, and may never become so. It was peaceful then, when we were young. Shabby, but peaceful. There were little shops, selling small cheap household objects, bric-à-brac, groceries, vegetables, stationery. Locksmiths, hairdressers, launderettes, upholsterers, bookmakers. A lot of people taking in one another’s washing. It is much the same today, although most of the shop-owners now come from different ethnic groups. There are fewer of the old white North Londoners. They are dying off, moving out. It remains on the whole a peaceful neighbourhood, though there have been eruptions of violence and suspicion, and one spectacular police raid by hundreds of uniformed officers that revealed, I believe, a tiny cache of ricin.

  Even a tiny cache wasn’t very pleasant, some of us old survivors thought, although we made light of it, laughed about it. It’s not nice to have neighbours who are trying to kill you, even if they are not trying very hard. We tried to be tolerant, but it wasn’t very nice.

  There was a time, not so long ago, when hatred was preached by a man with a hook for a hand from the redbrick mosque of Finsbury Park, the mosque that Prince Charles, Prince of Many Faiths, opened with such conciliatory optimism in 1994. It’s quieter now. It’s not a very big mosque, not one of those extravagant imposing new mosques with great golden domes, and its minaret is made of cement and pebble-dash. It is well guarded by spiked walls and CCTV Suburban net curtains drape its windows, with their green-painted frames. It doesn’t look much of a threat. As a mosque, it is a far cry from the glories of Isfahan and Samarkand and Cairo, and I’m not sure who is watching what on that CCTV

  You can’t tell what will happen to a neighbourhood. Jess studies its evolution with an expert eye. Her eye is better than mine, but we discuss its progress. I’ve learnt new ways of looking from Jess. She continues to find ways of employing her sociological and anthropological expertise.

  Finsbury Park tube station hasn’t seen much improvement. At our age, most of us tend to avoid it at night. It presents a small challenge. Too many drug-dealers. They’ve moved up the line towards us from King’s Cross.

  I visited a great and famous mosque in Cairo once. I forget its name. It was unutterably grand and sacred, lofty and empty, austere and sombre. It reared up from the deep ravine of the sloping street like a cliff face. I wandered round its solitude in silence and in awe.

  The Finsbury Park mosque is small, domestic, suburban. Rather English, really.

  Jess’s thesis on contrasting perceptions of witchcraft and disability in pre-i mperial and post-i mperial Africa was disputed, and she was rightly accused by some of having bitten off more than she could chew. She was also accused from a diametrically opposite angle by one of her assessors of having failed to include any mention of the superstitions surrounding the birth of twins in West Africa, and the heroic work of Scottish missionary Mary Slessor in rescuing some of these twin babes from being exposed at birth in the bush. (Jess had not mentioned Mary Slessor and the twins because she had never heard of them. Her knowledge, although arcane, was very patchy. But she was still very young. The assessor had himself specialised in Mary Slessor and twin studies, and if Jess had known that she might have been more diplomatic in her selection of material.)

  Theses were not nearly as rigorously overseen in those days as they are now, and the maverick globe-trotting conference-attending field-work-dabbling Guy Brighouse had been somewhat nonchalant about his duties towards her. You could get away with almost anything. You didn’t have to tick so many boxes.

  But her efforts, although criticised, were also moderately applauded, and she became Dr Jessica Speight. Her father, plain Mr Speight of Broughborough, was proud of her. And he loved his special granddaughter, Anna, although he was shy about paying too many visits. He told me this one cold afternoon in Clissold Park, as we sat on a bench together, while the children watched the mynah birds and listened to them screech and chatter. One of them had been taught to scream ‘Arsenal! Arsenal!’ My children thought this was very funny No longer children, they still support the Arsenal through thick and thin. This weekend, as I write, it’s a bit thin.

  Philip Speight hoped Jess’s small and eccentric little family would prosper. Maybe, one day, Jess would find another man, a better man, a husband, a father for Anna.

  Anna loved her grandfather. She was lucky there. She was a lucky child. She called him Gramps, and he liked that.

  Anna’s grandfather was much more attentive to Anna than Anna’s grandmother. We speculated (but not in Jess’s hearing) that this was because Anna’s grandmother feared the suspicion of a hereditary taint. Women, irrationally but not surprisingly, tend to take the idea of genetic blame more seriously than men.

  And, in the cause of mitochondrial disorders, they are right to do so. Although we did not know that then. And it doesn’t do us much good to know it now.

  Jess’s sister Vee avoided Jess and Anna, possibly for the same reasons. Or maybe it was just common or garden sibling rivalry that kept them apart. Jess was, despite the difficulties, a formidable sister.

  The story of Anna unfolded peaceably and uneventfully over those early years of nursery school and primary school and caused, as such stories do, both happiness and anxiety in almost equal measure. Anna was a fact in all our lives, and a part of our mapping of the world.

  The birth of children such as Anna may become rarer year by year. And that would be a loss, though the nature of that loss is hard to describe. It is important to recognise it as loss, although we cannot describe it.

  An innocence, with children such as Anna, would be gone from the world. A possibility of another way of being human would be lost, with all that it signifies. They are God’s children, les enfants du bon Dieu, we used to say, but now we no longer believe in God. Their lives are hidden with God, as Wordsworth wrote in defence of his Idiot Boy, but God himself is now hidden. God has absconded, but he has left us his children.

  Anna had no father to miss or mourn, as she had never met him. But she had a loving grandfather and many willing surrogate-father figures in our little neighbourhood community. She knew what fathers were. There were several happy to take her on their knee with a storybook, to pick her up from school, to make sure she got her fair share of the sandwiches. Even the irresponsible and frequently absconding Rick Raven was respectful to Anna, when he was around. She provoked good behaviour.

  The Professor as father and, we may assume, as lover proved disposable, as his emotional and intellectual limitations became more and more obvious to Jess, and off he went, unregretted, with his professor wife, to a year’s fieldwork on the borders of Manchuria. He was something of a fellow-traveller, the Professor, but Jess was beginning to think he was also a bit of a fool. She began to wonder what she had ever seen in him, apart from the size of his penis, and it sometimes crossed her mind that he had behaved rather badly in seducing her when she was still a student in her early twenties, though she tried not to allow this suspicion to linger and fester. She brushed it away. Looking after Anna had enabled her to see the Professor as an undeveloped and childish person. She was well rid of him, and, after several years of him, she was ready to move on.

  The two professors went off to make a study of child rearing and infanticide in agrarian communities in a remote Chinese border community. The two professors were prepared to consider infanticide an appropriate response to many family problems, or so it seemed to Jess. They had no children. (Anna did not count.) Sweden, as Jess did not then know, as not many people in Britain then knew, practised compulsory sterilisation of those with learning difficulties until 1975, which seems a long-lasting anomaly in what is rightly held to be a tolerant, liberal egalitarian society.

  Anthropologists are a strange breed. Jess didn’t like it when outsiders made fun of them, but she couldn’t help noticing that some of the most celebrated anthropological narratives have curious gaps in them. You read hundreds of pages of observation and analysis, and are suddenly made aware that the
observer was, all the while, not embedded lonely in an alien tribe living on worms and bats and insect stew, as he appeared to be and indeed as he frequently suggested he was, but living near by in semi-comfort with his wife and a servant or two in a de-luxe tent or a mobile home, with access to the highway or the helicopter. Much work, of course, has recently been done on deconstructing anthropological narratives, and it is sometimes hard to tell which revisionist readings are true, and which malicious. But some primary and very famous accounts are, for sure, misleading.

  Living amongst the Nambikwara in Brazil, Lévi-Strauss describes a meal consisting of a few fruits, two fat poisonous spiders, tiny lizards’ eggs, one or two lizards, a bat, palm nuts and a handful of grasshoppers. He claimed that the group gobbled these up cheerfully, and that he happily shared the repast.

  Maybe so, maybe not. When his wife developed an eye infection, she was evacuated very promptly to the nearest hospital.

  However hard we stare at Lévi-Strauss’s photographs of the Nambikwara, we can never read them. Are they human? Are they of the same human species as ourselves, are they of the same branch of the family of man? What did these people make of Lévi-Strauss and his low-profile but attendant wife? We stare at them as adolescents in a more sheltered age used to stare at photographs suggesting or partially disclosing nudity: hungry for knowledge, hungry for revelation. As Jess as a child stared at her father’s kid-bound booklet, as Jess as a mother stares at the photographs in Lionel Penrose’s classic books on Mental Defect. She gazes at the High-Grade Feeble-Minded Girl, so demure and pretty with her dark dress and wide lace collar, at the physically less appealing Laurence-Moon syndrome man with retinitis pigmentosa and six toes on his right foot. But you can never penetrate the photograph. They do not reveal more, however long you stare at them. They remain static, frozen, sealed. They do not, cannot move. They cannot speak to us.

  On the new medium of television, to which we were all beginning to succumb, the images moved. They seemed to tell us more. They seemed to be three-dimensional, those animals in the savannah, those tribesmen in their shacks and huts, those patients with rare diseases, those travellers in the outback. But you can’t believe anything you see on television, ever. You seem to see more than you see in an old-fashioned ethnological photograph, but you don’t. We all know that now. Look for the shadow of the cameraman. Look for the footprint of the cameraman.

  It wasn’t quite as bad as that in those early days. Television wasn’t either as smart or as stupid as it is now. It was simpler.

  Katie’s Jim in the sixties and seventies worked in television for Granada. He directed a current-affairs programme. He worked very hard. Those were the heroic days of Granada, when it was inventive, investigative, radical. Katie worked part time at Bush House for the BBC World Service, reviewing new poetry from the Commonwealth and chairing a poetry quiz. This was a characteristically gendered division of labour in those days.

  Both their lives are very different now.

  Jess’s one and only African journey was to the shining lake, where Livingstone died. She remained pure gold and told no lies. She never pretended to have been where she hadn’t been. She never made up anthropological stories.

  That is how we like to see her, our Jess, the shining one who did not lie and did not falter.

  So Jess moved on, liberating herself from the irresponsible, emotionally arrested, possibly mythical, possibly mythologised Professor, and when she was well settled into her life with Anna in her own new home in Kinderley Road she began to look around for somebody more her own age, as her father had hoped she would. Or that’s what I thought she was doing. And I was proved to be right.

  We talked about men, Jess and I, as well as about more intellectual concerns, in those early feminist days of the sixties. We laughed a lot and complained and made fun of men and marriage. But we weren’t ideologically separatist, as some women at that time were. I was married, and was to remain married until widowhood, despite some scary passages, and I did not tell tales about my husband, nor would Jess have wished to hear them. But we gossiped remorselessly about our neighbours, particularly about Jim and Katie, and about Rick Raven, whose departure from our lives and Sylvie’s life we had correctly predicted. I remember one evening at my house, while Anna and the boys and Ollie were making a racket up in the attic playroom with a horrible and wholly incorrect new toy called a Johnny Seven Gun, Jess and I discovered that Rick had made a pass at each of us, and maybe in the same week.

  We didn’t use the word ‘incorrect’ then, but we were well familiar with the concept.

  We were drinking whisky that evening, not very much of it, not a John Updike evening, but enough to make us mildly indiscreet. I’d been given a bottle of Laphroaig for my birthday the day before—I loved a good malt in those days though I rarely risk it now—and we were sipping in a ladylike way out of two darling little matching engraved souvenir glasses, one called ‘Loch Lomond’ and the other ‘The Road to the Isles’. I liked water with my Scotch, but Jess preferred hers neat.

  Jess told me that Rick had given Jess and Anna a lift home when they’d been to tea with Sylvie and her boys, and he’d put his hand on her thigh and propositioned her. He said he’d always fancied her and could he call round later. She’d said no, certainly not, but thank you for asking.

  Rick was a smooth customer, a Fleet Street man who wrote about culture and society; he fancied his own heterodox and slightly right-wing views, and we didn’t think he was very bright. But he was a good-looker, and he thought he could get away with it.

  He hadn’t asked me if he could call round later, for obvious reasons, but he had suggested a rendezvous in town for lunch one day, and he’d squeezed my thigh in what I imagine was much the same manner. Skirts were very short then, and I can remember to this day the one I was wearing: it was grey but it had a gold thread in the weave. I suppose we were asking for it, showing all that leg and accepting lifts from other people’s husbands.

  Jess told me she gave him the brush-off because he wasn’t her type, and anyway she didn’t want to annoy the neighbourhood with unnecessary adultery. He wasn’t my type either, but I did agree to have a discreet lunch with him in Soho, and a very good lunch it was too.

  I didn’t tell Jess about that at the time. I didn’t confess to that lunch until several decades later, at Rick Raven’s funeral in St Bride’s.

  I was sorry when the little glass called Loch Lomond broke in the dishwasher. I’ve still got the Road to the Isles.

  Jess didn’t say that she was ready for a fling, but maybe Rick Raven had sensed it, and that’s why he’d grabbed her knee. It’s just that he didn’t fill the bill. The chap she found, without too much difficulty and after one or two more unsatisfactory overtures and experiments, wasn’t a neighbourhood man at all. There was nothing incestuous or even adulterous about him. He was new blood. He was half American, and he had long black curly hair, a hairy chest, and very smooth gleaming brown shoulders. He beautifully combined the hairy and the smooth. He had a child of his own from a previous marriage, but he’d left his wife and child behind in Chicago. He was divorced, and seemed keen to marry Jess. He was exactly the same age as Jess, take a couple of months. He was an ethnologist and a photographer, quite successful, and he took life lightly. He was a populist, and he made Jess laugh. Jess found his eagerness in itself seductive. Why not? He was an American citizen and he didn’t need a passport to settle in England. He didn’t try to borrow money from her. He wasn’t serious, but that seemed to Jess at that stage in her life to be an advantage. She was prepared to give him a try, to have a marital fling, and see how it worked out. Anna was for life, but Bob needn’t be. If it didn’t work out, never mind.

  We didn’t trust him.

  We could see that Jess needed some light relief, but Bob didn’t seem quite the ticket. But who were we to warn her? We were all busy making new mistakes, or learning how to live with our old ones. And he made us laugh too. There was something a li
ttle scandalous and subversive about his attitudes to the animals and the people that he photographed: something dodgy, something exhibitionistic, something self-regarding and possessive. Like the Professor, he was another bad lot, but of a less sinister, more manageable, more entertaining species. Jess, like her father, was a purist, and happy to confront disappointment that way. But Bob was a bit of a vulgarian—a bit too interested in the naked ape. (Desmond Morris’s book of this title had appeared in 1967: it was a key title of the next decade, and, although we laughed at it, we were also rather taken with it. Morris was much given to jokes about the penis.) We should have known that Bob would go into television in his forties, for a time quite successfully, but I don’t think we foresaw this. We hadn’t really foreseen television itself, except for The Magic Roundabout and Blue Peter and Top of the Pops and the BBC news and the sort of high-minded current-affairs documentary programmes that Jim made.

  Bob seemed to expect to be taken seriously as an ethnologist, and he was certainly very clever. And he was good-l ooking. I think we may have been jealous. But Jess deserved a bit of luck, or that’s what we generously decided to think. Not that it would have made much difference if we hadn’t.

  I liked Bob. I didn’t take him very seriously, but I liked him. I’m not sure if he liked me, in those days, but he didn’t need to, did he?

  The Professor was a wedge, a prow, a beak. Austere, determined, rock hard and unrelenting. Bob, as his name happily suggests, was a rounder chap, with animal spirits and a good deal of energy. He was a seal, a bear, a handsome beast with fur on his chest, a healthy mammal. He tumbled and laughed and talked smartly. He seemed to take stepdaughter Anna as part of the deal: Jess, North London, SOAS, a Bohemian intelligentsia, an inner ring, swinging London, long hair, impromptu street parties, a little hash. Jess didn’t smoke hash—she was too responsible in her maternal role to take any small risks—but she didn’t mind when other people did. She wasn’t the kind of woman who said ‘not in my house’.