The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘Please do that,’ said Jess firmly.

  ‘I’ll get back to you,’ said Noah. ‘I’ll give you a ring. When does your very new husband get back?’

  ‘Any day now,’ said Jess.

  Noah smiled.

  ‘I’ll ring you,’ he said. He wasn’t going to be put off by the existence of Anna, to whom he had been courteous, and he seemed to welcome the challenge of a very new husband.

  ‘Please do,’ said Jess. ‘And now I’d better go, I promised Anna we’d go to look at the Egyptian mummies.’

  ‘And you said we could go to SOAS,’ said Anna, who remembered all promises. Anna had a very literal memory.

  ‘And SOAS,’ said Jess. ‘I said we’d call in there on the way home.’

  Anna liked the word ‘SOAS’, a friendly whispering bee-like word which she would sometimes murmur to herself as a reassurance. It was her mother’s mysterious cradle and school and workplace, peopled by important adult names, names prefaced by titles and initials, names which her mother always mentioned with respect. Anna liked to go there, and some of the important people would greet her as well as her mother by name and in a friendly manner.

  She also liked the idea of seeing the British Museum mummies, though when she visited them in their glass coffins, she was very disappointed. They were not as she had imagined them, at all. They were inert, and not at all maternal, and they were very dead.

  Anna had not really taken to Noah, despite the Danish pastries. He had eyed her mother in a manner that she had found disquieting. She had not found Steve a worry. He hadn’t, in her view, from her position, been a threat. There was room in Anna’s life for plenty of people like Steve.

  Jess, over the next few days, was to remember her Marsh Court friend Susie’s descriptions of the new forms of asylum, of the new communities of the mad where the sick were reborn or, as a phrase of the day had it, rebirthed. (Susie hadn’t used this phrase, but Jess had come across it in the articles and books she had been reading.) Even Friern Barnet at Colney Hatch, that bastion of the old schools of treatment (lobotomy, ECT, insulin, routine, regimentation, damp mattresses, prolonged neglect), now housed under its umbrella, according to Susie, an experimental rehabilitation unit where less punitive measures were being attempted. Maybe Steve could find a refuge there? She didn’t have Susie’s phone number, and anyway would have felt it intrusive to ring her, but when Noah telephoned (as she knew he would) she asked him to investigate. She declined an invitation to an open-air concert in Regent’s Park, but she delegated to Noah the task of finding out about the new unit. It was his turn to do something, she instructed.

  You will recall the movement towards redefining mental illness, towards creating safe houses for those in need of care but not necessarily of medication. Schizophrenia, rather than clinical depression, was the malady of that decade, but a label, after all, was only a label. Madness had become interesting to some very clever and articulate and innovative professionals and laymen, and big money was invested in it. The rich go off the rails quite frequently, and they can afford to pay well to be rehabilitated. Most of these ventures failed, some spectacularly, for they were, even for the rich, too expensive, they demanded too much from staff, too much from inmates, and were at high risk of scandal and exploitation, and of exposure by a hostile and mocking press. But, for a while, some of them flourished, providing a refuge for misfits and a home for the homeless. A few badly damaged people at this period experienced a happiness, a sense of belonging, that they were never to find again. Time has such patches, such pockets, and some unfortunates are fortunate enough to be reborn into one of them.

  Anna’s condition was not very interesting, except to Jess. It lacked drama and progress and the possibility of a surprising or successful outcome. Anna had her devoted mother Jess to care for her, and a local-authority-subsidised place at Marsh Court, and one set of well-off middle-class grandparents. What more could a girl want? She was a fortunate child. She did not need a fashionable mind doctor to peer into the still and slow-flowing rivers of her thought processes, seeking their headwaters. She was happy as she was.

  Whereas Steve was in need, and might respond to a cure, and, in a suitable haven, recover. Steve’s condition was not without interest, and his stepmother featured in gossip columns. He was not nearly as interesting as Sylvia Plath, a writer of genius whose tragic fate had been instantly recognised by Jess and many women of our generation as emblematic, but he had a minor talent, and a claim to human attention. There was material in Steve.

  Minor talents or failing talents ask much of those who associate with them. They are parasitic. They suck, they cling, they sour, they devour, and they can kill their hosts. Disappointment is a deadly companion. We didn’t yet know how many of us would end up in its grip, because we were all still striving, and some of us thought we were thriving. Steve was our scapegoat, our loser, our sacrifice to ambition. We all thought we were more viable than Steve, although he had published some good poems in little magazines.

  In Halliday Hall, Steve ceased for a while to be disappointed.

  Halliday Hall in Essex was a new 1960s therapeutic unit housed in a refurbished wing of an old purpose-built mid-nineteenth-century institution which occupied the site of an eighteenth-century manor and farmhouse called Troutwell. There were still vestiges of the old farm buildings standing, though the manor house had long gone. (From potato farm to funny farm, that had been one of the old jokes.) Troutwell was more rural and further away from Central London than Enfield and Marsh Court, but it lay on the same eastward trajectory. Pioneering work into the causes of mental defect had been done there in the old asylum in the early twentieth century, in the days when politicians and statisticians and eugenicists had publicly worried that the swelling numbers of the mentally subnormal would overwhelm the normal population, and sought (though not through infanticide or Swedish programmes of compulsory sterilisation) to counter this falsely perceived tendency.

  By the second half of the twentieth century, inherited abnormality and excessive fertility were no longer the villains. Other culprits were sought.

  In Halliday Hall, Steve was happy. The transformation was remarkable. Jess, visiting him there for the first time (guiltily, for he had already, thanks to Noah’s intervention, been an inmate for three weeks), found him cheerful, outgoing, responsive, surrounded by new friends and filled with new hope. There was even a little colour in his large pale cheeks, as though he had been leading an outdoor life, as though he had been sitting more in the sun.

  Spacious grounds surrounded Halliday Hall, grounds handsomely planted with cedars and willows, grounds dating back to the days of Troutwell Hall and Troutwell Farm, around which had grown a vast old-fashioned complex of Victorian buildings. Within them nestled this new unit, like a cuckoo or a dove.

  On her way in, Jess had walked for more than half an hour along a mile or two of Victorian and Edwardian corridors, over the brown-and-yellow-and-turquoise-patterned tessellated ceramic tiles that paved the floors of late-nineteenth-century London and its surrounding towns and villages. She had made her way through heavy fire doors, past open doors and locked doors, past communal sitting rooms thick with cigarette smoke occupied by inert figures staring at flickering television screens, past wheelchairs pushed by fellow-inmates, past men in overalls carrying screwdrivers and planks of wood, past women pushing trolleys and carrying trays, past broken-paned conservatories where straggling plants fought for survival, and she had eventually arrived at Halliday, where Steve was holding his court.

  Halliday Hall was the sanctum, the shrine, where the crème de la crème, the star patients, assembled.

  Steve had a little room of his own, looking out through a French window on to a ground-floor brick-paved courtyard, sprouting pleasant little tufts of chickweed and groundsel. There he entertained Jess to tea and biscuits, and introduced her to his companions. There she met Simon and Patrick and Ursula and Raoul and Zain. They sat around in a circle, talking ea
gerly of poetry and politics, and of their guru, Dr Nicholls. As Steve said, it was for all the world like being back at university, like sitting in a college quadrangle. This was not a group of zombies, it was a seminar, a refresher course, a group of young people with a future. Steven and his friends were all in their thirties and forties, so they had regressed a decade or two, but not as far back as the cot or the Wendy House.

  Steve poured the tea from a big brown teapot. If the teapot was an accessory of Dr Nicholls’s therapy, as seemed probable, Jess saluted him.

  Jess did not think Steve had become manic. She had never seen him manic, and did not consider that this pleasant engagement with others and the outside world could be diagnosed as mania. He passed the wholesome Marie biscuits round in an attentive manner that he had never shown in Jess’s house. Dr Nicholls, whoever he was, had worked a miracle.

  Raoul was a Lebanese, she learnt, a Marxist refugee, a medical student and a political activist who had left his homeland pursued, or so he believed, by death threats. An intellectual. He was a small, slightly built, pleasant-l ooking, bird-featured young man of diffidence and charm. Ursula was a grey-haired, Roman-nosed, Roman Catholic, young-middle-aged primary-schoolteacher from Croydon, and Simon was, or had been, a monk from a closed order in West Sussex. Patrick was an axe man, a tree man, whose job it had been to pollard the municipal planes and limes of Barnet and Harrow. Zain was a Sudanese, who had been referred to Halliday Hall from Bush House, where he had been working for the BBC World Service.

  Jess, basking relieved in the remission of guilt and the success of Steve’s new placement, liked them all, but she found it hard to take her eyes off Zain. He was a stunner. Intellectual energy and a dangerous sexual radiance poured from him. The other participants at this mad hatter’s tea party seemed pale in comparison, although none was unattractive.

  Zain disclosed a little of his history, with encouragement from Jess: born in a Sudanese village, he had been hand-picked by an itinerant schools inspector as a promising lad worthy of higher education, and had travelled through the network of high school and scholarships and prizes to a degree at the London School of Economics and a job with the African World Service and a disastrous marriage to a white virgin of the Anglican Church, a marriage which had ended in violent affray, criminal charges, psychiatric treatment and Halliday Hall.

  That was his brief summary of his dazzling meteoric career. He had clearly told it many times, to many listeners, but it had not lost its force. Here he sat, still burning.

  ‘They are holding my job for me,’ said Zain. ‘They have treated me very well. Like a prince.’

  Zain’s English was impeccable. He had adopted the very accents and intonations of the LSE and the BBC.

  ‘Too rapid a journey from too far away,’ hazarded Jess sympathetically, bending upon Zain the full intensity of her shortsighted, cornflower-blue gaze.

  Zain nodded, and sat back forcefully on the fragile seat of his small grey plastic-framed hospital chair, making it tremble.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘The migration to the north has destroyed many. But I am set now on a survival course, I shall survive.’

  Steve looked on benignly like a successful pander.

  ‘Jess is an anthropologist,’ Steve contributed.

  ‘Ah,’ said Zain, leaning forward to offer Jess a cigarette from his soft pack. ‘And what field of anthropology has been your chosen domain? Do you know the Sudan? It has attracted many students from England. It has a long history with the English. It retains much of the primitive to study. Your colleagues appreciate the primitive. My own village would be worthy of your attention. It has not yet been documented, except by me. Our palm trees, our mission church, our preacher, our oasis.’

  Jess accepted the cigarette, although she rarely smoked. Zain leant further forward to light it for her, cupping and enfolding her white hand and the little flame of his Swan Vestas match together inside his black and larger hand.

  ‘I have become a North London anthropologist,’ said Jess modestly, after her first inexpert draw on the unfiltered Camel. She had never smoked an unfiltered cigarette. She picked a surprisingly adhesive shred of tobacco from her reluctant lip, and continued. ‘I have become an anthropologist of the interior world. I do not travel far. Although I did go to Africa, once. I went to Central Africa. I have seen Lake Bangweulu and I have seen the Zambezi. I saw the lake and the swamps. I saw where Livingstone died. I saw where his heart was buried.’

  ‘So you have seen my continent,’ said Zain.

  ‘Yes, I have. But it was a long way west of the Sudan.’

  ‘This is the continent of Dr Nicholls,’ said Zain. ‘We are in his protectorate.’

  Jess liked his florid English speech.

  ‘Dr Nicholls,’ contributed Ursula, who was also smoking a Camel, rather more competently and more provocatively than Jess, ‘is our chieftain.’

  Ursula may once have worn her long grey hair tethered and pinned into a neat schoolmistress’s coil, but here she had released it. She still wore a knot of it on top of her head, skewered with a plastic mother-of-pearl dagger, but thick strands escaped from bondage and fell dramatically, purposefully, suggestively down to brush her bare brown shoulders. She was wearing a strapless pink-and-white sundress and, like Steve, had been sitting in the sun, perhaps too much in the sun. She had a fine neck, a long and haughty neck, and the escaping locks enhanced its swanlike curve. Her nape was proud and bare. She wore a silver cross on a silver chain around her throat.

  Ursula tapped the ash from her cigarette into an ashtray extended to her in a large cupped hand by Zain, and smiled a complicit private smile at him. Jess could see that she too found Zain irresistible, and had not resisted him. Jess wondered whether Dr Nicholls encouraged that kind of thing, whether he was one of the new men who saw all sexual activity as therapeutic. She would be interested to meet Dr Nicholls. Halliday Hall was clearly a place without conventional frontiers. Maybe even Steve would find a loving partner here.

  (Susie, over a gristled Wimpy, ketchup and soft limp chips in Enfield Church Street, had told Jess about a young woman who had been deliberately impregnated by one of the so-called doctors at Kingsley Hall. Responsible state-registered Susie from suburban Southgate had not approved of this, but had admitted that it was said not to have done much harm to the young woman in question, and the baby was really very sweet. ‘A lovely little boy,’ said Susie, with surprising warmth.)

  ‘Zain’s wife,’ proffered Ursula provocatively, ‘is from Durham. She is the daughter of a man of the cloth.’

  Ursula stared boldly at Jess and helped herself to a biscuit.

  She had called upon Zain to offer his apologia. He offered it, on cue.

  ‘It was an unwise marriage,’ said Zain. ‘But she insisted.’

  Jess felt she should have found this remark offensive, but failed to do so. She was too far in.

  Bob should never have left Jess, not even for a month, if he had wanted to keep her. Bob appeared like a tiny figurine in her memory, very small and boyish and far away. Zain loomed large and present and overpowering. He was the enterprise, the journey, the adventure. And she wouldn’t even have to catch an aeroplane or cross the ocean to find him. He had come her way.

  ‘Another cup of tea?’ urged Steve. ‘I’ll go and put the kettle on, make another pot.’

  ‘I must be going,’ said Jess, snapping out of her brief trance. ‘I’ve left Anna with Sarah and Ollie, and Ollie starts to tease her if they’re together for too long. I have to pick her up.’

  ‘Come again,’ said Steve. ‘It’s jolly here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, very jolly,’ said Jess. ‘I’m so pleased, I’m so pleased for all of you.’

  She spoke primly, like a visiting social worker or a nun. Distancing herself, detaching herself.

  She gave Steve a hug on parting, and shook hands all round with the other inmates. Zain’s hand grasped hers in a fierce electric grip.

  ‘Come again
,’ he said. ‘Come again, before they kick us all out and send us back to where we came from.’

  ‘They won’t do that, will they?’ she asked, her eyes wide as he stared into them. His eyes were white and bloodshot. He was, or had been, a drinking man.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Steve. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘No,’ echoed the quiet, diffident Raoul, as he stood courteously by the courtyard door to usher her on her way. ‘No, I think we will have another few months, before we are evicted. They will let the experiment run for a few months more, I think. They are keeping notes on us, you know.’

  And he smiled, to show that he was not suffering from paranoia, as she might reasonably have expected.

  Jess retraced her way through the corridors, past the second-and third-class patients, some of them interned here for decades without trial or diagnosis, many of them to be released in a few years into care-i n-t he-community, into lonely bed-sits with gas rings and high windows and death at desolate weekends.

  Sitting on the train to Liverpool Street, travelling westwards through the still visible bomb damage of East London, through the railway cuttings and the ragwort and the bindweed and the buddleia, she feared she would be late for Anna. Ollie’s mother Sarah would be getting impatient and anxious, Ollie would be growing bored and annoying. Anna loved Ollie, Ollie tolerated Anna.

  Ollie could very easily make Anna cry. His worst trick was to recite a nursery rhyme that he knew would upset her. He’d found this out by accident, but, having discovered the game, he wouldn’t let it go. He would chant it at her:

  Polly, put the kettle on,

  Polly, put the kettle on

  Polly, put the kettle on

  We’ll all have tea.

  Sukie, take it off again,

  Sukie, take it off again,

  Sukie, take it off again,

  They’ve all gone away.