The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  Last month, lunching with a colleague in a Thai restaurant in Oxford, I was obliged to retire to the ladies’ room to remove my knickers to rinse them and dry them with the hand dryer. I had been caught short by a sudden burning spasm of cystitis and half a pint of Tiger beer. Bladders are important, but we took them for granted then, when we were young.

  I was glad nobody caught me at it in the ladies’, but the smell of hot breathy urine and cheap soap must have lingered after me. I stuffed the pants into a small resealable plastic bag that I happened to have in my handbag, a tribute to modern air travel, and returned to finish my lunch knickerless.

  Air terrorism has had some small beneficial side effects, and the habit of carrying resealable plastic bags on one’s person is one of them.

  I told Jess this story the other day. She laughed.

  No, we didn’t foresee such humiliations in those early days, when we and our children were young and our bladders were strong.

  We talked in the car about Sylvie and her son Stuart, who was going through a difficult patch, a delinquent adolescent patch, bunking off school, catching the bus to town, playing the Soho arcades. Perhaps he resented his mother’s prolonged absences at UCH. That’s the kind of thing we parents worried about then. Sylvie had the two boys, Stuart and Josh. Pretty boy Josh was still a good lad, though less perfect of feature than he had been as an infant, but Stuart had always been a handful—secretive, a little morose.

  As we drove along we also spoke, Jess and I, it comes back to me now, about town planning and Modernism, comments provoked by the 1890s and 1930s suburban ribbon developments through which we were driving, and by the narrowness of the A10 and its inability to cope with the buses and cars that clogged and clutched and braked their way along it. There were some truly grim façades and stretches of shop frontage then, and they are no better now. I don’t think the M25 existed then, or maybe we were avoiding it. Jess mentioned Keats and his long walks, and the yellow globe flowers in the River Lee, and the peaceful lock of old Enfield. I asked after Jess’s father, whom I liked and who had always been courteous and gallant to me whenever we met. He was well, Jess said, in good health, but still downcast by Brutalism.

  Broughborough had just approved a Brutal new shopping centre, windowless, fortress-like, with car parks above and below, with arrow slits in its concrete walls from which to defend the shoppers against the enemy.

  Those were early days for shopping centres, the early days of the Arndale vernacular, a Northern style which was to prove a popular target for the IRA in the seventies and for Al Qaeda in the next millennium. Those arrow slits provoked attack; they incited the enemy. Nobody loved the Arndales except their begetters, Sam Chippendale and Arnold Hagenbach. Philip Speight knew Sam Chippendale well, in the years of his ascendance, Jess told me. A bustling, dapper, confident chap, a property dealer, a first-class salesman who played the Yorkshire stereotype. He lived in style in a handsome old-fashioned house in the country near Harrogate and ran a silver Jag driven by a lady chauffeur. He didn’t live in a Brutalist home.

  It all went wrong for him too. The property slump of the seventies got him. Now the Arndale Centres are being rebranded and their infamous names are being written out of planning history. The rebuilt IRA-damaged Manchester Arndale still defiantly keeps its title, but others are lowering their profiles.

  ‘Sweetness and light, that’s what Pa dreamt of,’ said Jess, watching the grubby ugly high-street façades as they passed us by. Sweetness and light. Modernism, not Brutalism. It had all gone wrong.

  Anna, excited and animated, was overjoyed to see her mother, and full of stories of the sickness that had seized the school. She was delighted that term had come to an end early, and when she had finished telling us about the vomiting in the classrooms and the blocked toilets and the camp-beds in the corridors, she interrogated us about all her friends at home: Ollie and Polly, Chloe and Jane, Stuart and Josh and Becky and Nicky and Ben. I gave her the latest on Jake’s piano lessons and on Ike’s latest bicycling accident, about which she was very sympathetic. She asked, of course, after Bob, and was told he had gone back to live in Camden Town. This silenced her for a mile or two, but she seemed to absorb the information, and did not refer to it again. She was a sensitive child, a sensitive young woman, and her manners were always good. She had a natural tact.

  As we approached home territory, she inquired after Steve. This subject was easier to address. Steve was much, much better. He was in a very nice place, not too far from Marsh Court, where he had a lot of new friends. What were they called? They were called Simon, Patrick, Ursula and Raoul. And Dr Nicholls. Jess hadn’t met Dr Nicholls, but she’d heard a lot about him. He was a very nice man, said Jess.

  ‘Raoul,’ repeated Anna. She liked the name. She made it sound like a friendly howl, a jackal laugh. Raoul. Raoul. It stayed in her memory, as odd words and phrases did, and she repeated it, occasionally, over the years. ‘Where is Raoul?’ she would ask. But over the years Jess did not know, did not expect she would ever know, although she sometimes thought of him.

  Jess had never caught his surname, and maybe she never heard it.

  Zain, of course, was not mentioned by Jess on this homeward journey. Zain’s days in Jess’s calendar, it was easy to tell, were numbered.

  Jess was to look back on the Zain episode as a necessary passage, an encounter of its time and of her time. It had been intense and emblematic, at once physical and spiritual, she told herself, to still a slight sense of shame at her own too eager surrender. He had told her stories, as Othello had told Desdemona, and she had listened, for the time bewitched. He had appeased a longing in her, a longing for the faraway world she had been forbidden, just as the dean’s daughter had appeased through him a more fleshly and subversive longing.

  Zain had indeed been married to a dean’s daughter, Jess established. That was no fairy-story. He had married her, and stabbed her, and although, unlike Othello, he had not killed his wife, he continued staunchly to maintain that it was largely her fault. She was a dean’s daughter, but (and) she was a heavy drinker who could not hold her liquor. Their brief marriage had been an alcoholic haze. They had been married by Special Licence, and both, as they swore their solemn vows, had been pissed out of their minds.

  The BBC drank a lot in those days. Corporately and individually, it drank. It drank before the programme, it drank after the programme, and then it repaired to the pub. It is far more sober now. Other sections of society drink far more these days, but the BBC drinks much less.

  According to Zain, he and the dean’s daughter had met at a garden party in a cathedral close. Imagine, Zain had said to Jess (and no doubt to many others), imagine, the slim cool young lady in the big wide-brimmed straw hat, the tasteless wet cucumber sandwiches, the sugary little iced cakes, the cathedral spire, the vestments, the distant music playing. A charming English scene, and the big black intruder. It was some kind of ecumenical fête, I’d been invited with my director, said Zain, they wanted a bit of colonial colour. I was the right colour, and I was cultured, I was a totem, I would do, I would dress the set, I would be allowed to walk on the green and pose for the photographs. She made straight for me, she hung on me, she flirted and played with me, she played the bad girl, she was wicked with me.

  She had a half-bottle of gin in her handbag and behind the marquee she laced my juice, complained Zain. And then she married me, and then she provoked me, and then I attacked her with a kitchen knife, and here I am.

  Jess believed most of this story Something along those lines had surely happened.

  Zain had particularly loathed the cucumber sandwiches. He had not realised, he said, that in England they were a cultural marker, a sanctified repast, a literary reference. They were disgusting. They were limp and wet. They were like slime in the mouth.

  Jess had listened to this diatribe with professional fascination. It had not occurred to her, even though she was an anthropologist, that anyone could take so strongly ag
ainst a harmless cucumber sandwich. Zain liked the spiced and the fiery, the burnt and the grilled, the red and the black and the orange. She found it easy to understand his dislike, to savour the sandwiches with his Sudanese palate, and she says she has never felt quite the same about them since.

  She learnt a lot from Zain, but, when Anna came home early from school, she dismissed him. He disappeared, without protest, as Bob before him had disappeared.

  He went home to the Sudan, but later we learnt he was back in Europe. Civil war and drought and famine drove him back. He was a very gifted man. He wrote an important book on Sub-Saharan economics which has come to be cited as a classic. Halliday Hall and Dr Nicholls rescued Zain, although Zain did not manage to rescue the Sudan. The Sudan was too much for him, and he lives in exile. He’s not well. We expect to see his name in the obituary columns shortly. We think he’s living in Paris.

  He was lucky to be ill at the right time, in the right place. Jess still thinks at times of the large brown teapot and the Marie biscuits. Those had been kindly days.

  She sometimes wonders what happened to Raoul, to Simon, to Patrick, to Ursula. Zain had thought highly of Raoul. He had predicted a future for him. A clever man, Zain had said. ‘A clever man, washed up in the therapeutic wastes of Essex. Watch out for him,’ said Zain.

  She sometimes wonders, as she continues perforce to consider the problems of mental-health care, whether or not Dr Nicholls had been an inspired healer, or whether, more probably, he had arbitrarily and somewhat improperly selected interesting cases for his particular attention. He and his little group had certainly profited from a golden moment in NHS theory and practice. She has seen Dr Nicholls’s name, occasionally, in the medical press. She thinks that he moved into private practice, not long after Halliday Hall was closed down on grounds of cost. Occasionally, sitting on a bus or watching telly with Anna, she thinks she will google him, out of curiosity, but she always forgets.

  Jess was to enter, after Zain, into a long and stable period of celibacy, a lake with still waters. Some of us were not so lucky: divorce and desertion riddled our comfortable little encampments, adulteries laid siege to us, and disputes over property split us and scattered us. Jess had retired from the field. The strange trinity of the Professor, Bob and Zain had provided variety and conquest enough for her youth and middle years, and she and Anna settled into a calmer domestic rhythm.

  After a few years Anna graduated from Marsh Court and came home to Jess. Her social worker Karen, looking ahead to the as yet unimaginable days of Jess’s old age, suggested a placement at a residential sheltered home near Taunton in Somerset (‘very nice’ she insisted), but Jess declined. She visited, and saw that it was indeed very nice, as far as niceness goes, but she declined. She could manage perfectly well as she was, she and Anna could manage together, she’d organised her bookish working life to accommodate Anna. Anna was safe to leave alone in the house for brief stretches of time (though never for the night) and, despite the divorces and desertions, there was still a neighbourhood network of friends to help out in need, and the Day Centre, and other voluntary support groups. I was still around, and so was Katie. Sylvie had moved up-market to an elegant Georgian house in Canonbury, and Ollie’s mother, Sarah, had moved too, not as smartly as Sylvie, but not very far, and still on the bus route. It seemed that Jess and Anna would continue together, companionably becalmed, through the next decades. It did not do to look too far ahead.

  I saw somewhat less of Jess and Anna during these years. My boys were grown and had more or less left home, one for university and what was to be an academic career, the other for Bolivia. The after-school mothers’ gatherings in one another’s houses had come to a natural end. I had been promoted and the organisation which employed me was expanding rapidly, I thought too rapidly. I was now working longer hours, and so was my husband, who was wearing himself out in the service of the state. (Northern Ireland nearly killed him, and I mean that literally.) I still went round to Jess’s for supper by myself occasionally, and we would arrange to meet for a walk in the park. And once or twice—I am sorry it was not more often, but I plead that I was busy—I would step in to keep Anna company when Jess had an unavoidable engagement. Anna and I went to the theatre once to see Maroussia in Twelfth Night, and once, God knows why, we went on a coach ride to Windsor.

  Anna was easy company, always appreciative, and always very keen to say thank you for everything. But she was a worry. I worried about losing her when she was in my charge, as I grew older I began to worry more about road accidents, and I worried about strangers being rude to her. It wasn’t good when she stepped on that woman’s handbag on the Windsor coach. I can see that woman’s ugly angry broad red pig face, her thick neck, her angry grey curls to this day. And I suspect Anna can too.

  But Jess and Anna, during these years, had many happy times. Our children were changing almost beyond recognition, as they emerged from adolescence and embarked on gap years, degree courses, ambitions, careers and disappointments, as they discovered whether they were gay or straight and had tragic love affairs and, eventually, some of them, babies. It was not like that for Jess and Anna, for whom the concept of progress was in perpetual abeyance. But there were many things that they liked to do together. They liked walking, and they explored the London parks and galleries. Anna was surprisingly tolerant of, indeed keen on, exhibitions, and they visited the traditional and the avant-garde. Anna had a good eye, and could sometimes make sense of paintings that baffled us and Jess. ‘Look,’ she’d say, ‘it’s a boat’- and when you looked, you could see that it was.

  They enjoyed some of the same movies. When Anna was little, they used to go to shows in the extraordinary and fantastic world of the Finsbury Park Astoria, then a twinkling oriental fairyland of fun, with a fountain full of goldfish, and balconies and cupolas and shining stars, suggesting a vast hinterland of wonder behind its stucco façades. It was a real treat and we all missed it when it closed down. (The Finsbury Park Astoria belongs to some kind of extreme religious sect these days, it’s far more way out than the Finsbury Park mosque.) I can’t remember which cinemas took over as the children grew up—did we have to go down to Upper Street and the Angel? I can’t remember.

  Anna loved Hollywood musicals, Star Wars, Shakespeare and Jane Austen adaptations. One of her favourite movies was a bizarre and innocent fantasia featuring a Hollywood bathing belle performing aquatic wonders under water in a great blue shining lake full of lilies and fish and mermaids and swaying greenery. She saw this one Sunday afternoon on television at Marsh Court and described it to Jess, who tracked it down on video and bought a copy. Anna played it again and again. (They weren’t supposed to watch daytime TV at Marsh Court, but of course they did.) Anna admired her heroine’s muscular but well-curved physique, her turquoise bathing suit with its stylish sparkling silver trim, her old-fashioned flower-petalled bathing cap, and the way, on shore, she released and shook out her long blonde hair.

  Jess enjoyed this video too. It was much pleasanter than James Bond. When DVDs became available, she bought Anna a DVD of the underwater Venus. Anna never tired of it, and Jess enjoyed glimpses of it for the pleasure it gave her daughter. And they found other swimming movies, with Esther Williams, Glynis Johns, Annette Kellerman. Mermaid movies, Neptune’s daughters, synchronised swimming—all these delighted them.

  But best of all Anna liked, herself, to swim. She was happy to swim in chlorinated water, in ionised water, in sea water, in fresh water, in brooks, in waves, in rivers and in standing ponds. She loved the water. She was not an elegant swimmer, though she had by now graduated from dog-paddle to what Dr Livingstone called frog-fashion, but she was strong, and bolder in the water than on land. She had been awarded swimming badges by the club at the sports centre where she used to swim. Jess had sewn them on to her bathing suit, and Anna was always pleased when people asked her what they were for: for swimming ten lengths, for diving for a brick, for jumping off the springboard, for good attenda
nce.

  In the summer, Anna and Jess would take a day trip to the seaside, to Brighton or Hastings or Seaford, and occasionally a group of us would go on an outing. Nearer home, Jess and Anna liked the Hampstead Ladies’ Bathing Pond, and would catch the Northern Line to Belsize Park and walk over the Heath with their swimming things and a picnic and a book to read. Jess was to remember one sunny day in late July, when for a while the world stood still and all was well. Anna was lying sunning herself on one of the creaking dank wooden landing stages (these were the days before we were told to fear the sun), and Jess was reading Proust.

  English people reading Proust often manifest a degree of self-consciousness, and Jess was no exception. She felt a sense of solid and almost visible virtue as she lay in her stalwart royal-blue bathing suit on her yellow towel on the grass, making her way through the Jeunes Filles en fleurs, which she was reading in the Scott Moncrieff translation. It was a good summer read, a seaside holiday bathing pool read, and it took her back to her childhood holidays with her parents and Vee in North Wales. North Wales was not very like Proust’s Balbec, but she had been a jeune fille en fleur at the time, and had courted and caught the eye of many a fellow-bather and promenader. She had even made an assignation behind the ice-cream hut, and exchanged a ridiculous kiss with a boy from Liverpool.