The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  The children were innocent enough to watch quietly in the darkened room as the adults lit the touch-papers, their faces illuminated by the candles on the mantelpiece and the small glow of the Japanese illuminations. Some of us watched the light playing on the grave sweet attentive children’s faces instead of watching the small display. They composed a painting, a Joseph Wright, a de la Tour. Our children were so good, our hopes for them so high. Goodness seemed to be their birthright. How could any of them go astray?

  The gap-t oothed boy, the pure gold baby, the freckled fox girl, the dusky little despot, the white-faced flower, the luminous lamb, the lion charmer. Naughty Ollie, mild-mannered Anna, silent Stuart, black-braided Polly, lisping Sam, choir-boy Joshua, beetle-browed Ben, birth-marked Harry, quick and clever Chloe, angular Andrew. They were all beautiful, all good, all in bud. Even Andrew, subject as he was to spasms and to fits of incoherent rage, was beautiful, and full of undisclosed personal promise.

  Most beautiful of all, at that age, was Joshua. A light shone from him, a light shone upon him. Each of us favoured our own, but we all recognised that Joshua Raven, Sylvie’s younger boy, had an angelic perfection of feature. There are such children. Anna was the pure gold baby, the child without a shadow, but Joshua was the luminous lamb. He looked as pretty as a Christmas card, with his light auburn hair curling down to his shoulders, his perfect porcelain skin, his turquoise eyes. He was drawn in pencil and aquatint, a Renaissance boy. His delicate skin seemed translucent.

  After the fireworks, we sang. Anna and Bob taught us ‘The River is Flowing, Flowing and Growing’ and we sang it as a round. Then we sang some carols, and some of the songs of the Beatles. But as the evening wore on, Jim grew more aggressive, and Katie more angry, and they began to shout at one another, and just before midnight Katie ran out into the street, screaming ‘That’s enough, I’m leaving, I’m leaving, I’m off to the airport!’ and her children ran after her crying and the neighbours started to peer through their curtains and Jim fell into the ill-placed Christmas tree. Steve kept trying to intervene, in his bumbling, good-hearted, counter-productive way, and Jim got very cross with him and called him a parasitic shit and a great lump of useless lard and a eunuch.

  Jess intervened at this point, as she didn’t like to see Steven being abused, and said we’d all better go home and leave her to clear up.

  That wasn’t the end of Jim and Katie’s marriage, but it was the beginning of the end.

  Anna didn’t like it when people quarrelled. She seemed to take discord upon herself, to try to absorb it into herself. When Bob and Jess in the inevitable course of things started to cross each other, she was distressed. Bob was an intruder into her relationship with her mother, but she didn’t want him driven away. She would never have tried to make difficulties between her mother and her stepfather. She was an appeaser.

  That first vacation from Marsh Court went well, warmed by the friction and activity of Christmas stress, but never bursting into angry flames, or at least not in Jess’s household. Anna did not seem reluctant to return to school, to Jess’s relief, but of course Anna always tried to be obliging, and was stoically adept at hiding distress. One of her characteristics was an ability to suffer minor physical pain without making a fuss: little injuries such as bruises and scratches which made our children yell for attention she would endure with the minimum of noise or complaint. ‘It’s nothing, it doesn’t hurt at all,’ she would assure us, smiling eagerly, as she dabbed at the blood on her knee with her hanky. And I don’t think that was anything to do with her pain threshold, as some observers might have thought. It was to do with her good manners.

  (Jess once read out to me a phrase from an early anthropological textbook on the Negro, which had clearly lodged unpleasantly in her memory, as it then did in mine: The nervous system of the Negro is not very sensitive, and the appreciation of pain is dull. She had also discovered research that indicated that sensitivity to pain showed a positive correlation to intelligence. Of this, she had remarked, ‘It depends what you mean by pain.’ Measurement of pain is a dangerous business.)

  Anna didn’t really know how to be bad. We were all, in our ways, bad—motivated by ambition, or rivalry, or envy, or lust, or spite, or sloth, and observing the seeds of these passions even in our beloved born-i nnocent children. But Anna didn’t know these emotions. The only one of the traditional seven deadly sins with which she had the slightest acquaintance was gluttony, for she did enjoy her food, and was fond of talking about what she might be going to have for her supper, but she would never grab at table. She did sometimes launch into her plateful without waiting for others to be served, but if Jess caught her eye she would put her knife and fork down, guiltily.

  Let you that is without sin among you cast the first stone, Jesus said. Anna wouldn’t have thrown a stone at anyone or anything, not even at a gate-post. She lacked aggression.

  It’s hard to survive without aggression. Her old schoolfriend Ollie concealed his attacks and predations by a winning charm and a wide smile, but her new schoolfriend Vincent was openly strung with aggression. His little wiry body and his language and his gestures were charged with attacking energy. He was fierce and insistent. He was a handful. His jaw worked with fury, his eyes shot bolts. He was full of knots. He threw stones, and other things, at people and at birds. When walking by the canal, he would stone the moorhens. Susie reprimanded him, but not very forcefully, as he wasn’t a very good shot, and he never managed to hit a moorhen.

  Susie was a wiry person too, her face sharp and angular, her body scrawny, her legs and sinews toughened by her bicycle round, her opinions made fierce by the frequent sight of pain and distress, her hair frizzled by a violent perm and dyed an aggressive and defiant red. She too was full of knots.

  Whereas Anna was a smooth, mild, benevolent person, with mild and rounded features.

  Unlike her mother, Jess, Anna was not highly strung.

  Jess registered the hints that Susie had let drop about the new views of the anti-psychiatrists and the regime at Kingsley Hall. They didn’t really apply to Anna, or to her inexplicably becalmed condition, but they were interesting to Jess. She read a book or two, attended a talk or two, about the knotted regions of the mind. She did not think that Anna would ever be awakened into a more adult state of stress and conflict. Undreaming, not knowing what dreams were, Anna lived in a dream, in an innocent charmed world without progress, without a goal, without an aim. If you measure your pain or hope or despair on a scale of ten, ten being anguish, Anna’s measurement was near to zero.

  Sometimes Jess dreamt of going back to the shining lake. Sometimes she dreamt of the field trips she might have taken, had she not been burdened with the sole care of an ever dependent child. Maternity had become by chance her destiny.

  Had Livingstone truly believed in the afterlife, believed in it as securely as he claimed? Believed in it as he believed in the existence of the maggots that burrowed into his limbs and popped their heads in and out of his flesh at him in those weary latter days? As he believed in the army of red ants that swarmed over him and devoured his foot like smallpox, and in the dark-grey swarming cannibal caterpillars that wormed their way through the waters of the lake? Did he know the afterlife of heaven as he knew the call of the tree-frog, the cry of the fish-eagle?

  He said the natives of some tribes did not like to talk to him about death, or even to consider it, and he thought this a clear sign of their lost and miserable pagan state, in which only wooden charms and idols could comfort them.

  He noted that birds of his domestic flock did not seem to recognise death either, for when the cock died the hens continued to try to feed him.

  Two very fine young men, of a ‘superior’ tribe, with well-developed ‘organs of intelligence’, once asked him whether people died with us, and where they went to after death. Have you no charm against death? they wanted to know. He seems to have thought this a highly intelligent question, presumably because, as a missionary, albe
it a very unpersuasive and unsuccessful missionary, he thought he had an answer to it. But of course we don’t agree with his answer, so need not regard the question as an intelligent question. Although it was a natural question to put to a visitor so clearly confident that he had all the answers.

  Adolescent Anna occasionally asked Jess, ‘What is death?’ or ‘What is sex?’ These metaphysical questions were difficult for Jess. She did not know how, or on what level, to attempt to reply to them.

  The Africans whom Livingstone encountered were not converted, but they enjoyed watching magic lantern shows of Bible stories. Moses in the bulrushes reminded them of the shores of Bangweulu, and they liked the baby in the manger with the ox and the ass. But they did not care at all for the crucifix. They expressed the view that crucifixion was cruel, and that not even the cruel Moors went in for it. Livingstone was not sure that they fully understood that crucifixion was not being recommended by the Gospels. Teaching the heathen was not an easy task. Nor was discovering the source of the Nile. But he persevered.

  Anna went mildly and obediently back to school in January, and Bob and Jess resumed their domestic life together, in a rhythm that was to last for a year or so. Jess says she thinks it was only a year, and she should know, but I think she and Bob cohabited for at least two years. At my age my sense of time is notional, whole decades blur and elide, let alone the years and the months, but I think I’m right about this bit of Jess’s chronology.

  To outsiders, Jess’s arrangements for Anna and Bob seemed to be working adequately, but it was also clear that this marriage was not destined or even very seriously intended to last. Marriages were splintering all around them, and Bob and Jess had no common bond, no mutual concern, apart from sex, ethnography and anthropology. Children were the problem for most of us when we ran on the rocks. Children sometimes kept us together, sometimes forced us apart. But it was clear that Jess and Anna formed a unit that would survive and eventually exclude Bob. It was only a matter of time. We watched, we waited, I would like to think without too much malice or Schadenfreude, although of course none of us are malice-free.

  Jess had the upper hand in the relationship. She had the house, she had the confidence, she had a network of her friends around her. It was the time of the women. She had her niche at SOAS, whereas Bob was somewhat stranded and dépaysé, and in that first year or two remained on his best behaviour. But there was something of the cuckoo-in-the-nest about Bob. He’d displaced Anna, and now he opened his mouth and expected to be fed. Chitterlings, locusts, honey, little cakes. He did prepare a meal, occasionally, but Jess did most of the cooking.

  Also, he stuck around more than perhaps might have been expected. He was supposed to be an adventurer, but he seemed more than happy to hang out in North London. He took shots of swinging seventies London which he sold to magazines in the States. Hampstead Heath, the King’s Road, the Post Office Tower, the Commonwealth Institute, the London Zoo, the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury, even the then deeply unfashionable ponds and lawns and aviaries of Clissold Park. Miniskirts, maxi-skirts. He was digging himself in, appropriating our city. He did ‘city-scapes’: people behaving in an urban environment, crowd responses to new buildings, patterns of occupation. He wanted to photograph Maroussia and the children in the Secret Garden, but she wouldn’t let him. She was an actress and she didn’t want publicity.

  Jess was relieved when eventually he said he was going off to film fishing communities for a month in British Colombia with an old pal of his from the University of Chicago. That was more like the sort of work she thought he ought to be doing. (‘Ought’ was a not uncommon word in her vocabulary) She didn’t know she was relieved, but she was. She encouraged him to time his absence so that she could have Anna to herself during what I think was the second long Marsh Court summer holiday. The first summer had been a bit of a strain. She looked forward to a time with Anna during which she didn’t have to worry about entertaining Bob. They’d be fine on their own, she and Anna. They were a self-contained little duo. Jess was getting tired of trying to please two incompatible sets of interests, two incompatible temperaments. She didn’t know it, but she was.

  Bob flew off with Jerry to Vancouver on a French Caravelle and Jess and Anna did their own things, as they’d done in the happy old days before Bob had popped up. They went out for cheap high street meals, they went to the park and to the cinema, they joined in and helped with the street parties which were a feature of that time.

  Jess didn’t have to worry about Bob, but a rival worry almost immediately presented itself, in the form of Steve. Our latent and long-standing apprehensions about our neighbourhood poet proved well founded. As soon as Bob took himself off to Canada, Steve saw his opportunity and attempted to move in with Jess. Jess didn’t let him, but that summer she allowed him to hang around and cadge meals off her and read his poems to her. Steve was good with Anna, as Bob had been, and Jess found it hard to close the door on him. Anna had prised the door of Jess’s heart open, and Steve got his foot in quickly when Bob left. The greedy presence of his misery, like a third party in the room, afflicted her, and she could not resist trying to feed it and soothe it and make it grow strong enough to go away.

  For such a strong and independent woman, she was curiously vulnerable to the claims of others. She must have known that looking after Steve was an unrewarding and probably hopeless task, but she listened to him for hour after hour, as he told her of his damaged childhood and his ambiguous sexuality and his troubled spiritual journey. Steve, like many birth-damaged people, was at once extremely interesting and hypnotically dull, and some of the most cynical literary editors and hardened publishers of the day succumbed from time to time to his Ancient Mariner grasp. A volume of his poems called The Dance of the Grieving Child, after a painting by Paul Klee, was published by a distinguished publishing house with the Klee image on the jacket, a breach of copyright that brought the poems some notoriety if not many sales. Steve was somebody, he had made himself into somebody, and that long summer he presented that person to Jess and Anna, in hope of its salvation.

  Anna didn’t mind Steve. She didn’t mind anybody who even appeared to be friendly. But Jess grew impatient. Too many improvised meals of scrambled eggs on toast (preferably with bacon), too many take-aways of chicken korma and chicken Madras from the Taj Mahal along the high street, too much mango chutney, too many packets of chocolate digestive biscuits. Steve devoured. He was insatiable. He devoured curry, he devoured Jess. Anna listened to his tales of wicked stepmothers and Eastern sages and his dramatic renderings of Wordsworth’s ballads (The Idiot Boy, The White Doe of Rylstone, The Affliction of Margaret) until late into the evening, her eyelids drooping slightly with sleepiness. She loved the simple rhymes and rhythms of The Idiot Boy, and seemed to understand this tale of motherly pride and devotion, but it did go on a bit, and Anna could not help but yawn. Steve was not good at knowing when to stop.

  Jess would make an excuse of Anna, one night too abruptly. ‘You must go home now, Steve, I need to put Anna to bed.’

  ‘I can go to bed by myself,’ said Anna plaintively, to which Jess snapped ‘Well, go on, then, go’—words meant for Steve but directed at Anna, who took herself off promptly and went upstairs in some embarrassment.

  Jess was so ashamed of this tiny volcanic outburst, this little home firework, that she resolved to be sterner with Steve next time. And, disastrously, was. No, she said to Steve on her doorstep, no, you can’t come in, not even for a moment, I’m writing a long review for the New Anthropological Journal. No, you really can’t.

  She said this more harshly and abruptly than she had intended, because saying it was so difficult, and she saw his long large face freeze and then flinch in response, as he bumbled an apology. As soon as he had gone, she regretted her tone if not her words, although she did settle down at once at her typewriter to bash out 2,000 ill-paid words on kinship, totemism and bark painting in a small tribe inhabiting the north coast of Australia, a topic
about which she knew hardly anything, although as ever she was glad to learn. She soon lost herself in her unfamiliar subject, and forgot Steve. Anna was watching an episode of a very basic science-fiction series on television, as absorbed in its incomprehensible plot as Jess was in the domestic taboos and artistic impulses of a primitive people she would never encounter, in a land she would never visit.

  One was allowed to use the word ‘primitive’ then.

  At that time, it was still believed by some that Down’s syndrome children encapsulated an early phase of the evolution of the human race, and that in their very features lingered a racial imprint of an earlier age, a long-ago migration from the East. As the developing human embryo lives through evolutionary time from primitive cell to tadpole to gilled fish to mammal, so the Down’s child bears witness to a moment of past time, when the mind and the brain were simpler. This hypothesis was long ago dismissed as ludicrous in scientific terms, but clung on in the popular imagination because it had a certain poetry. It may be pleasant to believe that the world was once peopled by men and women without guile.