The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  This would always distress Anna, in the old days to the point of tears.

  ‘They don’t want to have tea with Polly and Sukie,’ she would sob, when she was very little. ‘Why don’t they want to stay for tea?’

  In vain had Jess tried to rewrite the lyric. ‘They go away because they’ve already had tea,’ Jess would explain. ‘They just don’t want a second cup. They’ve had tea, they’ve had a lovely time.’

  Anna did not accept this interpretation, and Ollie and Jess knew she never would. Her reaction to the ditty had become Pavlovian. Even a phrase of the nursery rhyme could upset her.

  We all suspected that Ollie was going to be the one who would go to the bad. One of them was sure to, statistically, and he seemed the most likely candidate. How wrong we were, how wrong.

  The encounter with Zain, preceded as it had been by an overt if easily deflected overture from Noah, guaranteed an uncomfortable homecoming for young Bob Bartlett. Bob’s new wife Jess had moved on in his absence, and she was not very welcoming when he reappeared, with only a few hours’ warning, carrying gifts of soapstone seals and feather head-dresses and miniature carved totem poles and turquoise necklaces. She had become accustomed to having her house and her daughter to herself again, and she and Anna would find it hard to make space for the Step Dad. He found Jess unresponsive, although she did consent to wear the turquoise jewellery.

  She did not really want to know him any more. She had cooled off in his absence.

  She had cooled off towards him, but something was burning away in her, something he sensed but could not reach.

  She did not even pretend to want him back. He was puzzled by this, and offended, and after a couple of weeks he illegally evicted his illegal tenant from his Camden flat and moved back into it by himself. ‘We’ll try living apart for a bit,’ he said; ‘maybe I’ll move back when Anna’s gone back to Marsh Court.’

  This wasn’t a very tactful remark, implying as it did that Anna was the obstacle to intercourse. He couldn’t of course have known that the obstacle was Zain, because at this point he didn’t know of Zain’s existence. Nor did any of us. Zain was the dark card.

  Most women used to feel a polite or submissive need to placate and satisfy their husband’s sexual demands, at least when there was no good reason not to do so. The accusation of being a castrating woman still had some force, and maybe for all I know still has, but this element in Jess’s emotional make-up seems to have been missing. If she didn’t want to, she didn’t want to, and that was that. She felt no obligation. Perhaps her obligations towards Anna swallowed up any other sense of duty: one woman can manage only so much personal commitment, and for Jess, this was embodied in her daughter. She didn’t think she owed much to Bob. She began, unfairly, to consider that her sexual relations with him had been almost as unsatisfactory as her relations with the Professor. The Professor had provided unfailing orgasms, and these had needed no aid from Viagra or any of those other products which had not yet become commercially available. (They probably had not even been invented. Oysters and monkey glands were all our predecessors knew of aphrodisiacs.) But the Professor had not been much fun. Bob had been fun, while he lasted, but he did not last as long, and there was something trivial, something superficial, about the level of his desire. It did not go deep enough. Or so Jess now considered.

  So she heaved Bob out of the brightly cushioned nest.

  Anna was sorry that Bob moved away, as she did not like the sense of uncertainty and discord that this rift represented, and she had enjoyed the sing-songs with Bob. She liked life to be safe, and people to be constant and kind to one another. The abrupt and (to her) unexpected phasing out of Bob made her very reluctant to go off to Marsh Court, a reaction Jess had not anticipated, although it was easy enough for us to speculate that Anna might feel her own return from school at the end of next term, like Bob’s from his short photographic foray to Canada, would be unwelcome. Going away was risky if you couldn’t be sure you’d be allowed back.

  What was her mother doing? Was she shutting herself, alone, into her little fortress in Kinderley Road? Was she repelling all outsiders? Was Anna to become an outsider, as well as Bob?

  Anna began to cry on the train from Liverpool Street to Enfield. She tried not to, but she couldn’t help it. Jess felt like a heel, watching her helpless stupid darling daughter sniffle, watching her eyes redden and her nose run. She kept offering her tissues, but Anna let the fluids drip. This made her look less than attractive. ‘Do wipe your nose,’ said Jess irritably, as the shabby vandalised little train made its way through Seven Sisters and Hackney Downs.

  Anna sniffed, and obeyed, and dropped the tissue on the floor, and then had to bend down to pick it up again.

  ‘You’ll be seeing Hazel soon,’ said Jess bracingly; then, with less conviction, ‘and Vincent.’

  ‘I don’t really like Vincent,’ said Anna; adding boldly, ‘he’s a very rude boy.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose he is a bit rude,’ said Jess. ‘But he doesn’t mean to be, he really doesn’t.’

  ‘Yes, he does,’ said Anna.

  She very rarely contradicted her mother. Jess was taken aback.

  Now she’d heaved Bob out, Jess began to think as the train travelled haltingly northwards, maybe there was no need for Anna to go to Marsh Court after all. She could come back to North London and be found a schoolplace nearer home, a day schoolplace. There must be something that would serve, something better than the one they hadn’t liked at Highbury. Karen the social worker had mentioned a new Special Needs Unit at Woodberry Down; maybe she could try that. Anna hadn’t learnt anything much at Marsh Court anyway, except the words of a few stupid songs.

  Optional scenarios flitted through Jess’s imagination on the journey home. (The leave-taking had been painful, with Anna silent, confused, lost and distraught as Jess helped her to unpack her suitcase. Jess was annoyed with herself for having forgotten to pack Anna’s favourite blue sweatshirt, monogrammed in red with A for Anna, and that hadn’t helped.) None of Jess’s plans featured Bob in any starring role. It was as though the Bob-need in her had died. It had been satisfied, and then it had died. She didn’t think Bob would mind very much. She hoped he wouldn’t mind very much.

  She had expected this to happen sometime, but she hadn’t expected it to happen quite so soon. She was puzzled by her body’s messages.

  She had thought herself ‘madly in love’ with the Professor, and she had thought herself engaged in a cool mature friendly equally balanced sexual partnership with Bob Bartlett. Both conceptions had been mistaken. She had been sexually obsessed by the dominating Professor, and with Bob she had always had the upper hand.

  What next?

  Zain, of course, was next. Would this be ‘love’ or ‘illness’, and would she be able get it over with before Anna came home for the Christmas holidays?

  She never wanted to see that sad abandoned look on Anna’s face again. She never wanted to find herself speaking harshly to her daughter again. Anna was the apple of her eye. Even when her eyes were red and her nose running, she was the apple of her mother’s eye.

  We think Jess did have an affair with Zain, in fact we know she did, but at the time she didn’t much want us to know. She wasn’t wholly proud of it. She couldn’t keep it a secret, in our community, but she didn’t want us to appropriate him and domesticate him. She talked to me about most things, but she was silent about Zain.

  Zain was psychotic, we know that now. His story was extreme, and his arrival in Jess’s life predictable.

  I don’t mean his arrival, literally I mean the arrival of someone like him, someone from the Dark Continent, someone from the Book of the People of Many Lands. He was Africa, albeit North Africa, and he was North Africa driven mad by the journey from the village to the air waves, from the rote-recited Sunday School Bible lessons and the palm tree to Kant and Keynes and Malinowski.

  I was talking to Jess recently about her father’s little book about the Pe
ople of Many Lands. She had described it to me on several occasions as she and I discussed our differing vocations, as we used to do, and the other day I asked her if she’d ever been to see that famous exhibition called the Family of Man. She said she thought she had, though clearly she didn’t remember it as vividly as I did. I saw it sometime in the 1950s on the South Bank (the quaint and whimsical Hugh Casson/ Rowland Emett Festival of Britain South Bank, not today’s more austere Denys Lasdun-dominated South Bank), probably when I was in the Sixth Form at Orpington. I went by myself, on one of those outings to town which I took in the school holidays to escape from my mother, who was going through a passing phase of menopausal bad temper. It was an exhibition of photographs, a famous exhibition. I still have the catalogue, and I have just been leafing through it.

  Like Jess’s father’s book, the exhibition featured and documented the many peoples of the world. It was first shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, though I didn’t know that when I went as a girl. I was disappointed but not surprised to read recently an account of its alleged limitations—it has been deconstructed as racist and sexist, and images that had seemed beautiful and universal to me (as the pictures in Jess’s father’s book had appeared to Jess) were condemned as condescending and exploitative. I can see now what is meant by these strictures, but I didn’t think of them then.

  Looking through its crumpled pages all these decades later, I recognise that I must have been moved and stirred by some of the more erotic photographs. They are in black and white. There are couples kissing, embracing, dancing. A boy and a girl in the grass, by an abandoned bicycle. A couple on a park bench. I was of the age to respond to dreams of kisses and I longed to feel a man’s arms around me. I can feel the memory of that longing now. There is nothing pornographic in these portraits—how could there have been, at that period in time?—but to me as a teenager they were full of suggestions of passion and sexuality. I was particularly moved by the face of a woman crushed in ecstasy beneath a man’s naked body. Well, we assume he is naked, but because this was the 1950s, all we can see is his naked shoulder, and her face contorted, as it were, in orgasm.

  There is also (I have just been looking at it again, and am still in shock) the most astonishing photograph of a newborn baby boy, one foot held in the air by the gloved hand of a masked doctor. The still-attached umbilical cord glistens like a moist rope, and the baby’s genitals are held aloft, prominent, symmetrical, dark, enormous. The legs are puny and skinny like a rabbit’s legs, but the testes are large and contain, already, the germs and genes of the future. The treasury of Nature’s germens. The body of the mother is out of shot beneath a sheet, so I cannot tell whether this is a natural or an unnatural childbirth. The tenderness of the portrait suggests that it must be natural.

  The internet informs me that this is an image of the photographer’s father delivering the photographer’s son. It also informs me that the photographer, like me, is still alive. This is amazing information. I shall write him a fan letter.

  My firstborn was a boy. Unlike Jess, I have more than one child. I have not been called upon to invest all my love in a one and only child.

  Jess thinks that Steve must have given Zain her address. Having himself been deterred from turning up on Jess’s doorstep, Steve handed on the address of that doorstep to Zain, and, one day, there he was. Jess now saw that, having rejected Bob and hospitalised Steve and escorted Anna back to Enfield, she had deliberately made a void for the dark stranger to enter.

  As it turned out, Zain knew quite a lot of people at SOAS, including Guy Brighouse, Jess’s one-time tutor and supervisor. Everybody, in all parts of the world, knew Guy. (It was said that if you came upon two men at an oasis in the desert, two men on an island in the Pacific, one of them would turn out to be Guy Brighouse.) Zain also knew Noah Trellisick, Steve’s editor, who had produced an erudite little series of World Service poetry programmes at Bush House. And he knew Jim’s wife, Katie, but made it clear that he didn’t wish to meet her out of hours, which suited Jess fine. The intellectual community was smaller in those days, or seemed smaller. And it needed a man like Zain, to represent its commitment to what we did not yet call multiculturalism. In those distant days, we still spoke quaintly of the ‘colour bar’, of ‘crossing the colour bar’. Zain was living proof that the Sudanese IQ was in no way inferior to the Caucasian IQ. Most people still secretly believed that blacks were mentally inferior to whites, but it was becoming more difficult to say so openly.

  Those were the days of Hans Eysenck and fierce debates about racial intelligence and heritability. We needed Zain, even though we had driven him mad and egged him on to stab his wife.

  We were casuists, fierce casuists in the cause of the equality of man. We ignored arguments from genes and nature and race. We were blind to so much. We ignored all those things that we did not want to know. We longed to alter destiny. Each child was born free, and born with all the possibility of the future stored up within it, packed within it. All we had to do was to release the future.

  I suspect that Jess did not tell Zain much about Anna, whose IQ and good nature were immeasurable, and would not feature meaningfully on any chart or graph. Anna was absent, at Marsh Court.

  Bob kept out of the way. He was said to have taken up with a pretty young zoologist in Cambridge.

  We supposed that Zain and Jess would enjoy an intense affair, and that it would not last long. Jess let Zain into her bed but not into her home. We saw his arrivals and departures, we met him on the street corner, we smiled and said hello. But we did not get asked to supper.

  Steve was still at Halliday Hall. He had managed to prolong his psychic convalescence for months. He would never be so happy again.

  It was the illness at Marsh Court that ejected Zain.

  That December, a severe attack of gastric flu had hit the school, and the director had decided it would have to close down early, as the sick bay was full and the bedrooms and classrooms had been turned into hospital wards, where feverstruck children were shitting and spewing into chamber pots. The director rang Jess and explained the situation. Anna was so far well, but should be removed from this epidemic as soon as possible.

  He was trying to empty the school of all but the sick.

  How very old-fashioned, how Victorian, all that sounds now. Like something out of Jane Eyre. But that’s how it was.

  I volunteered to drive Jess to collect Anna. God knows why, there must have been some reason, but I can’t now remember what it was. Jess didn’t drive, had never learnt to drive. Maybe I was at a loose end. Maybe I was curious and hoped Jess would tell me more about Zain. My children were by then beginning to be self-sufficient, well able to fend for themselves: they could cook themselves meals and run around on public transport and gang up to play football and mooch around in one another’s bedrooms smoking secret cigarettes and talking about sex. (Cassie’s Janie and Cilla’s Chloe set the bedclothes on fire one night, on what we didn’t yet call a sleepover, but they managed to put it out very promptly and efficiently.) Anna could do none of these things. My heart ached for Anna and Jess, and yet pity seemed then and seems now an inappropriate emotion.

  Maybe it was guilt, the guilt of the healthy, the guilt of the normal, the guilt of the free. And yet I do not think I was guilty. I tried to be a good friend.

  I do not wish to privilege my friendship with Jess. She had many friends. I was only one of many. I claim no special knowledge, no special relationship.

  I must sometimes have annoyed her, I know that. My children must have annoyed her. Jake and Ike were good with Anna when she was little, I’ve already made that claim for them, and they continued to be good with her as they became teenagers. I tried not to rejoice too evidently in their successes, their accomplishments. I tried not to make tactless remarks or comparisons. But I must have done. I know I must have done.

  A proleptic flash. I think this happened about ten years ago, perhaps fifteen years ago, long after that visit to plagu
e-stricken Marsh Court, but it comes back to me vividly now, and in that context, in the context of remembering the sick schoolchildren. I was sitting on the top of the No. 7 bus, on the front seat at the right, travelling along Oxford Street. We had just passed Selfridges, that’s when I saw him.

  He was sitting on the opposite pavement, on a bench, holding a large placard, with homemade letters that were easy to read from the top deck where I sat. They said MUM IS DEAD.

  He had a cap by him, for offerings.

  The words rent my heart.

  MUM IS DEAD.

  We are familiar with the concept that God is dead. We accepted it long, long ago. The message that mum is dead is more powerful.

  The bus stopped long enough for me to observe something of the man’s age and features. Stoppages on Oxford Street are what one expects, and I was given time. He was middle aged, balding, in his forties, with large ears and a receding stubble-covered chin, and he was dressed in well-worn clothes that showed touching attempts at neatness.

  Wordsworth, in London for the first time, saw on the street a blind beggar who appeared to him to be an emblematic figure. This beggar held a written paper, to explain/ His story, whence he came, and who he was. And so this man on Oxford Street appeared to me to be a portent, although his message was much briefer than the blind beggar’s.

  MUM IS DEAD.

  I want to describe the man without the mother as a ‘boy’, but he was not a boy. He was a man. I have to keep reminding myself not to think of him as a boy.

  The bench on which he sat was a grey concrete oval slab, without a back, standing on squat pedestal legs. Those benches are not designed for comfort. They are punitive, they are sacrificial.

  On the way to Marsh Court that winter to collect Anna, as I negotiated the ill-planned nightmare traffic lanes of the North Circular and then the A10, once such a pleasant rural highway, we did not talk about Zain. I didn’t like to ask. There were things Jess and I talked about, and things we didn’t talk about. We talked about Sylvie, who had just embarked on her intensive study of the bladder. We admired her for committing herself to long and specialised study in early middle age. We wondered why she had chosen the bladder, instead of all the more glamorous body parts she might have favoured. Now that we have all reached the age where our bladders grow weak and treacherous, we can see that she chose wisely and for the common good.