The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  The skills required by survival are not always attractive.

  Steve did not appear at first or third or fiftieth encounter to be a survivor, but he had learnt to manipulate others, and Jess, up to a point, had allowed herself to be manipulated. And Anna liked him.

  His suicide attempt, which followed closely on his doorstep rejection by Jess, was easily interpreted as another manipulative move, but it could as easily have ended in his death, in which case it would perforce have had to have been interpreted quite differently.

  It was a coincidence that Jess and Anna discovered him, but not a very extreme coincidence.

  It was a Saturday, a beautiful golden late-August urban day, and Jess had arranged to meet Maroussia and Katie and one or two more of us in the Secret Garden for a lunchtime picnic. Some of the children were getting too old and sullen to want to come to a family event, but there was still a critical mass of little ones, large enough to turn a picnic into a party. It was by chance that Jess got there first. She had her own key, and she arrived on the bus with her plastic box of egg and cress sandwiches, her bottle of wine, her bottle of juice, and she let herself in. She left Anna sitting in the sun with the basket under the shade of a little red-hipped hawthorn tree which had survived the clearance, and went over to the Wendy House to get out some deckchairs and some of the plastic beakers and bits of rush matting that were stored there. We’d assembled the Wendy House ourselves from lot of awkward, obstinate and confusing wooden parts that had arrived in a large cardboard box (what we’d now call, apprehensively, a flat-pack), and we were very proud of it: our combined manual skills were not great, but the little shed was a small and suitable monument to our cooperative effort. One of us (a lawyer) had wondered if we’d had the legal right to erect a structure on this bit of waste land, to which we had responded: who cares?

  Steve was sitting slumped in a striped deck-chair, just inside the hut, of which the door was ajar. He looked, said Jess later, rather like a younger John Betjeman, stranded in a beach hut on a desolate seaside promenade. (Steve did not admire the work of Betjeman.) Steve’s eyes were closed, the pouches under them grey and more than ever drooping. His jaw was slack, and he was breathing noisily through his mouth. Steve never looked healthy or well, but that noon he looked peculiarly unwell. Indeed, he looked as though he were dying.

  Jess, reading the scenario guiltily and self-referentially, her heart instantly pierced with remorse and self-blame, invoked his name.

  ‘Steve,’ she said urgently, ‘Steve.’

  Steve did not react, so she approached him more closely and nervously patted, then increasingly fiercely, shook his arm. He did not much stir, although he made a gurgling, moaning sound from his throat that could have been either a good or a very bad sign. Jess looked around for tablets or a note, and found evidence of the former on the Wendy House floor, by his dangling arm: an empty tube of Veganin, as clear a message as one might wish to receive. Jess did not dare to feel his pulse, and anyway she had no idea what constituted a normal pulse rate. She knew she must get help, and she ran back to Anna, who was sitting quietly under the tree with the picnic basket, looking like a child in a nursery rhyme.

  Polly, put the kettle on

  Polly, put the kettle on

  We’ll all have tea.

  ‘Anna, it’s Steve, he’s poorly, we need an ambulance,’ said Jess. ‘You just wait here, don’t move, don’t do anything, just wait, and I’ll go and get Maroussia to phone.’

  Maroussia lived on one of the three streets that backed on to the Bermuda Triangle of the Secret Garden, and her house had a little gate through which she could come and go. (Maroussia sometimes went into the garden at dead of night, and just stood there, on her own, breathing in the London air, as her two children slept safely in their bunk beds.) The gate would be locked, but Maroussia would be expecting them, and Jess could shout for her, or try to climb over: it would be quicker than going down the little countrified elder- sprouting urban lane and round the sides of the triangle to her front door.

  ‘Maroussia!’ yelled Jess. ‘Maroussia, help!’

  And Maroussia, busy making her mustard-and-ham sandwiches, came running down her garden path, and let Jess into her tiny kitchen to dial 999, while Anna continued to sit dutifully under her hawthorn tree, and Steve continued to loll heavily like a great doll in his deck-chair.

  The ambulance arrived in half an hour, by which time more of the picnic group had assembled and absorbed Anna into its care, releasing Jess to accompany Steve to hospital. She took it as her responsibility, and nobody disputed her dolorous claim. Anna wanted to go with her mother, but we insisted to Jess that she could safely be left with us.

  The ambulance crew had its instructions, and it promptly transported Steve and Jess to one of those grim nineteenth-century North London hospitals that cater for a large intake of patients from the Victorian gaols of the region. In its maternity ward, as Jess happened to know, pregnant women prisoners from Holloway gave birth, sometimes in shackles. Jess felt herself met with a wave of hostility and disapproval by the staff, but also, to her relief, with some sense of urgency. The overdose procedure was well rehearsed, and the nurses went into action with a stomach pump. Steve was moving around by this stage, and Jess could see him through the window of the door of the ward. It was a pitiable, a horrible sight. The obscene rubber tubing was thrust down his gullet with a degree of brutality that seemed, and probably was, vindictive. Luckily they did not know that Steve was a poet, thought Jess, or they might have been even harsher with him.

  It fell to Jess to attempt to give Steve’s details: she knew his name and his address, but not his age. (Was he thirty? Thirty-five? Forty? He he had always seemed ageless as well as sexless, an amorphous, absorbent being, a negative capability.) She knew he was single but she did not know the name of his GP or his next of kin. Should she give the name of his stepmother, a woman who was not without a certain public reputation, but whose care for Steve, if he told the truth about her, could not be considered admirable? What about his champion at the small distinguished publishing house, or the literary editor for whom he wrote occasional reviews? None of these characters seemed appropriate, so Jess settled for giving her own contact numbers and describing herself as a ‘personal friend’.

  She had landed herself with Steve, for better or worse. No, she did not know if he had ever attempted suicide before, or whether he was on any medication. No, she did not know how many pills he had taken. No, she did not know anything about his general health. Reluctantly, she admitted that he was a ‘freelance writer’.

  She was protective about his status as poet. She was sure that these starched young women disapproved of poetry, as they clearly disapproved of suicide, and would take it out on him when and if he came round.

  When pressed, they admitted that he probably would come round. He did not seem to have consumed an excessive amount of Veganin, and they did not think the pills had been in his system for very long. He would almost certainly recover. He might have done permanent damage to his liver (they announced this as though they rather hoped he had, and as though he would be last on the list for a transplant), but he would live through the episode. He was already beginning to respond to their unkindly attentions.

  Jess, at this point, was beginning to worry about Anna and the effect that this drama might have had on her, and decided she should try to get back to the garden party. She said she needed to return to her daughter, hoping that a mention of her maternal role might soften these hard hearts. It had no such effect, but it was agreed that Dr Speight could be released. (‘No, I’m not a medical doctor’: Jess had at once been made to regret trying to pull rank with her doctorate). Jess said as humbly as she could that she would ring later, and perhaps call round in the morning.

  What bus could she catch back towards Camden, she asked them? But if they knew, they were not going to tell her. Their care, they made it plain, ended at the ward door, where the unwelcome and unwanted Steve brea
thed noisily, high and heavy on a narrow railed bed, a giant cot.

  She went out on to the hot street and looked around for a bus stop or a taxi. This was not taxi land. A slight wave of nausea and panic attacked her as she set off down the hill, from which she was rescued by the sight of a red London bus labelled with a promising southward destination: she ran after it, jumped on at the lights, and was on her way to rejoin us, overcome with relief at her escape from overt institutional resentment. She wasn’t very pleased with Steve herself, but she didn’t see why she should be blamed for, or implicated in, his act. It wasn’t her fault. Was it?

  Jess rejoined us in Maroussia’s house, and told us the story. Anna listened, though what she took in we could not tell. Not even Jess could tell. The other children, bored with the gloomy adult drama, had gone upstairs to the bunk bedroom to play a very low-tech but gripping football game which involved moving little plastic men about on a green cloth. One or two of them who lived within easy walking distance had sloped off home, to join fathers watching real football on television, but Anna sat with us, listening.

  The fathers supported Arsenal or Tottenham Hotspur, and enjoyed comparing their merits and their style. None of the mothers, in those days, followed the game.

  Jess considered (as did we all) that Steve’s choice of a Wendy House as his potential deathbed was highly significant. Poor Steve, he had found in us (and in Jess in particular) a surrogate family, and had wished to become our child, as Anna was and would ever remain our child. He was a Peter Pan, a motherless lost boy. But clumsy, never airborne, except in words. His mother was dead, his father had disowned him.

  Steve had always exuded grief. He must, we thought, have been born sad and mewling and scowling. Anna was pure gold and eager to be happy, if occasionally over-anxious, but Steve was heavy cold wax, with no natural happiness accessible to him.

  So that’s what we do, we find a small dark cosy familiar corner of plot, and we curl up in it and die. Or try to die. We regress, we rock ourselves backwards and forwards, we climb back into the cot, the playpen, the Wendy House. We become as little children, and we try to crawl back to a safe place, to a familiar place that needs no exploring. We lose our adventurous spirit, we turn away in fear from the untracked forests and the shining waters, and we seek the comfort of a small known space, where we cling to our sucked blanket, to our worn woolly old knitted rabbit or piglet or bear. A comfort zone, we now call it.

  This may happen to us when we are very old. You have seen them, in the care homes, in their recliners, with their thin baby hair. We go back there. Steve had attempted to short-circuit the long and dreary circular journey, but he had failed.

  We unlatch and open the little gate, and we try to go back. But the place does not always admit us, it will not let us in.

  Steve had felt safe in our company, he had felt safe with Jess, he had been happy clearing the brambles and lighting the bonfire and attempting, ineffectually, to help with the construction effort. (We were all ineffectual, and that too was companionable.) We had given him somewhere to be. The sadness of our failing of him subdued us, for a while, that evening, but we were young and strong and healthy and resilient, and by the time we parted we had regained the rhythm of our selves and our selfishness, and were planning the busy week and the weeks and months and years ahead. We forgot about Steve, because thinking about him drained our energy, and we needed our energy for our own lives.

  Maroussia did not go into the Secret Garden that night to look at the large low full moon and the stars. She stayed indoors. She looked at the ceiling, and the walls, and then she went into the bathroom and looked at herself for a long time in the mirror.

  Jess did not forget Steve, although she tried to, because she found herself unwillingly placing herself in loco parentis, a default position to which she was beginning to recognise she might always tend to revert. As Steve reverted to infancy, she reverted to maternity. This is what Anna’s birth and the responsibility of Anna had done to her. Her holiday from her husband Bob Bartlett (Jess never took the name Bartlett and often forgot it was legally hers) transformed itself into a watch over Steve. She resented this, but it happened just the same.

  I’m afraid some of us were not very supportive. We couldn’t take the strain. We regarded Jess as our mental-health expert, as Sylvie was our medical expert, and we left it to her. She’d been through so much already, she could go on getting on with it.

  Steve was kept in hospital for a couple of days, and then discharged back to his dusty hole of a £6-a-week book-filled bed-sitter over a pawnshop in garbage-strewn Chalk Farm. No psychiatric after-care seemed to have been proposed. He was on his own again, written off with visible contempt. The prison hospital had a psychiatric wing, but Jess’s instinct (rightly) told her that this would not have provided a therapeutic environment, even if he had been admitted to it. When Steve turned up next time on her doorstep (and by now Jess could feel the approaching return of a Caravelle with Bob on it, although she did not have a precise date for his arrival), Jess was anxious to set up something, anything, that would divert Steve from his visits to her and his dependence on her.

  Steve, eating his bacon and eggs and fried bread with as hearty an appetite as ever, was a little sheepish about the trouble he had caused, but he remained deeply depressed. His gullet had recovered from the assault on it, but neither his mind nor his spirits had recovered. Jess was convinced he would have another go. She hoped it wouldn’t be in her house, or in front of Anna.

  She asked Steve about his doctor, she mentioned his stepmother, but made little progress on either front. She didn’t know where to turn. Steve needed somewhere with company, a refuge to contain and surround him, not a lonely third-floor bed-sit with a dangerous gas ring up steep uncarpeted wooden stairs. Could you kill yourself with a gas ring? Probably not.

  Sylvia Plath had put her head in the oven, not so very long ago, and not very far from the pawnshop where Steve lived, but a gas ring wasn’t as powerful as an oven, and anyway, weren’t most of us on natural gas by now? You can’t kill yourself with natural gas, or that’s what we believed. But there was the high window over the hard street, and there was the unprotected gas fire. Jess had visions of Steve drinking a bottle of Teacher’s whisky and clambering on to his window ledge and letting himself fall drunkenly on to the pavement, of Steve setting his ill-hung curtains ablaze and dying of smoke inhalation. She hoped such images did not occupy the screen of his imagination too.

  But she knew they did.

  After a week of hesitation and another exhausting visit from Steve, Jess rang the editor at his publishing house, hoping his literary patronage could be extended to pastoral care. It seemed that it could not. Noah invited Jess (and perforce Anna) to have coffee and a Danish pastry with him in the café in the British Museum, a neutral and inexpensive venue, and he listened to Jess’s story with interest. He volunteered some colourful information about Steve’s stepmother (a titled society beauty with a penchant for ageing homosexual actors and theatrical impresarios, whom she would escort to dubious nightspots and country houses), and he expressed concern for Steve, but said: ‘Frankly, I can’t cope with him, he’s a nightmare, he’s a vampire, no, not a vampire, he’s a leech, keep away, he’ll suck your blood.’

  Had the stepmother seduced Steve? Probably, thought Noah. She seduced anything that moved.

  ‘Not that Steve,’ said Noah, ‘moves very much.’

  At this point I think they both laughed.

  ‘You should just see her,’ said Noah. ‘The lips, the old-fashioned hair-style, the slinky hips. The Nightmare Life-in-Death is she.’

  Was the phrase ‘fag hag’ current in those pre-gay-lib days? I think not.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Noah, as though the thought had just struck him, ‘she’s a transvestite.’

  Noah, also a poet, had a style more animated than Steve’s: angular, skinny, sharp, caustic. Manic, not depressive.

  Anna ate two Danish pastries, Noah ate
one, Jess ate none.

  Jess hated Danish pastries.

  Jess batted on: did Noah know any kind and obliging analysts or therapists or psychiatrists who could advise Steve? There must be somebody who could help?

  ‘You don’t want his blood on your hands, do you?’ said Jess provocatively, who thought she was getting on rather well with Noah by this stage, and sensed that before their elevenses were over he would make a pass at her.

  ‘I know a woman at the Tavistock,’ said Noah doubtfully, ‘but I wouldn’t recommend her to my worst enemy. And she’s a Kleinian.’

  ‘I don’t think Steve needs a Kleinian,’ said Jess. ‘What he needs is company. Ordinary physical daily company. I can’t provide it, I’ve got work to do, I’ve got Anna to look after. And my very new husband’s just about to get back from British Columbia.’

  ‘Pity, that,’ said Noah.

  Jess smiled at Noah, her intense and intimate and dazzling smile.

  ‘Bob won’t want to find Steve in residence, or even in attendance,’ continued Jess, after a significant pause.

  ‘Psychiatry’s out of fashion,’ volunteered Noah, trying now to be helpful. ‘It’s all anti-psychiatry at the moment. We’re publishing a brilliant new book on the killer family and the throttling umbilical cord.’

  ‘Steve hasn’t got a family or an umbilical cord,’ repeated Jess. ‘He’s all alone. That’s his problem.’

  Noah, at last, appeared to be trying to think.

  ‘He needs a commune,’ said Noah. ‘There are some. But what kind of commune would want Steve as a member?’

  ‘He’s quite interesting,’ said Jess. ‘He’s a good poet. That’s something, isn’t it?’

  ‘A therapeutic community,’ said Noah. ‘We need a therapeutic community, and preferably on the National Health Service. I’ll look into it.’