The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  Jess was reading Proust with an incentive. She was reading him not competitively but companionably, in concert with an old schoolfriend from Broughborough with whom she had kept in touch. They met rarely, for her friend Vivien lived in Edinburgh, where she was the assistant curator of a gallery, but they had preserved their intimacy through Vivien’s occasional London visits and through sending one another postcards and letters. They had enjoyed their English and French classes at school together, and this was a way of perpetuating their pleasure into adult life, maybe old age. (The reading group had not yet become a nationwide phenomenon.) Jess and Vivien had already read their way through Ulysses, encouraging one another onwards by exchanging comments and moments of bewilderment and enlightenment, and now they were doing Proust. Would they reach the end? They were not sure. It wouldn’t matter if they didn’t; nobody was watching them, nobody was marking them, there were no exams to sit, no teachers to impress.

  Jess had made notes to herself on sentences she had particularly appreciated, thinking perhaps to share them with Viv, and now looked back at a passage that had curiously captivated her. The Marquis de Norpois, the sententious and elderly diplomat who persists in giving bad literary advice to Proust’s young narrator, is recommending as a model the career of a young friend of his who has quit the diplomatic service for the life of a man of letters. The titles of this novice littérateur’s works had filled Jess with inexplicable delight. He had written, claimed the marquis, a book dealing with the Sense of the Infinite on the Western Shore of Victoria Nyanza, and a monograph on the Repeating Rifle in the Bulgarian Army—the latter ‘not so important as the other, but very brightly, in places perhaps almost too pointedly written’, commented M. de Norpois, ‘and these have put him quite in a class by himself’.

  Jess knew that these subjects were ludicrous, and intended to be so, but nevertheless she liked this ageing novice littérateur with his random mind, for she too has a random mind, and the thought of the sense of the infinite on the shore of Lake Nyanza entrances her. Proust might make fun, but she can see it, the borderless lake extending to infinity, as she had seen Bangweulu and its swamps and marshes and ant hills and its low horizons, the land of the blue shoebill and the shy dark sitatunga.

  She sees also as she pauses from her reading the River Lee and the lilies and the flurries of little red and golden birds, she sees the canal and the moorhens, she sees the Hampstead Ladies’ Bathing Pond and Anna and the fringe of sallows and elders and the dark brown water lapping, as she now hears the slow strokes of an elderly stout swimmer, the ripple of the water, the faint hum of hover flies, the murmurs of conversations. The pond and the little lake stretch timelessly towards infinity, the river flows for ever and imperceptibly. Out of time, all is well for the ageing mother and the ageless daughter.

  There were, of course, many awkward moments for Jess and Anna during these years, small patches of crisis and anxiety in their conjoined lives, and the minor difficulties that arose foreshadowed more to come. Let us take one incident as an example, which Jess did not report until well after it was over. This was a worrying episode when Jess came down with a chest infection and had to take to her bed. I think Anna must have been in her late teens or early twenties—not long after the days of Marsh Court. A big girl, a grown woman. Jess was hardly ever ill, enjoying good health and a strong constitution, but that February she found she was running a temperature. Her breathing wheezed and her chest rattled and she felt very hot. She put herself to bed, with jugs of water and aspirin, and tried to keep Anna at a distance, for she did not want to communicate whatever it was that she had caught. It did not occur to her to get in touch with her doctor, even though in those days home visits were still a possibility, because she had little faith in the doctor, and anyway she reasoned that whatever she was suffering from would pass of its own accord. She did not hold with antibiotics.

  She was right: the infection did pass—but not before it had caused distress to Anna.

  Anna hated to see her mother lying in bed, so uncharacteristically inert and helpless, and she did her best to tend to her. She followed Jess’s instruction about food, bringing to the bedside the tins of baked beans and pineapple rings that Jess kept in store as emergency provisions, and running back downstairs for the tin opener and ‘one of those stripy blue-and-white bowls, you know where they are, they’re in the cupboard by the fridge’. Jess didn’t want to eat, she had lost her appetite, but she opened the tins (Anna couldn’t really manage that bit), and she watched Anna eating. So far, so good, and not unlike a treat or a picnic, but when Anna set off down the stairs with the bowl and the tins and the spoon and the tin opener she slipped and fell headlong quite heavily and gashed her inner forearm on one of the open lids which Jess had folded down, but not quite carefully enough.

  Anna was never very sure-footed, and had a tendency to fall, to trip and to walk into objects.

  Jess, from her bed, heard the crash, and heard Anna’s suppressed yelp of pain, and called anxiously, but the muffled tone of Anna’s answering shout ‘I’m all right, Mum, I’m all right’ was not reassuring. Jess heaved herself out of bed and to the landing, where she saw Anna trying to upright herself, while simultaneously trying to pick up the tins and the bowl and the cutlery and to dab at the stair carpet with her skirt.

  Jess saw the red blood from the shallow gash.

  The open edges of the gash needed stitches, really, but Jess was not up to organising stitches. She could not face the doctor, the hospital, the ambulance, the out-patients’ department, the confrontations with abusive or judgemental others. They sat together, mother and daughter, on the step, each assuring the other that no serious harm was done. Then Jess went up to the bathroom, and sat Anna down on the white-painted wooden bathroom stool with its old cork top. She found the TCP, washed the wound, pulled it together as best she could, bandaged it and tied up the bandage with Elastoplast strips. After a while the vivid scarlet blood stopped seeping through the white cocoon. The wound would leave a scar, but it would heal. Vanity might have dictated stitches, but survival did not.

  It didn’t hurt very much, Anna assured her mother. Jess told her she was a very brave and helpful girl. Jess reassured herself that at least her bathroom cabinet had been adequately supplied. How much worse things could have been. How very much worse.

  When I learnt, much later, about this episode, I told Jess she should have called me and I’d have gone to help. But of course she didn’t. She liked to be independent.

  When you are young, you do not think you will grow old. I remember my father saying that to me one morning, over breakfast, when I’d gone back home to Kent for a long weekend to help out with my mother, who’d just had a hip operation. They were wondering whether to sell the family home, to buy a bungalow. We call it downsizing now, but we didn’t then. We hadn’t yet coined that familiarising, patronising, dismissive, yet helpful term for decline and retrenchment, for the beginning of the flat, slow and then descending and accelerating march to death and the little, little room of the grave.

  ‘Nellie,’ he said, ‘you don’t know what it is to be old. I’ve only one piece of advice for you, Nellie. Don’t grow old.’ He was smiling gently, compassionately, as he spoke.

  I laughed, and ate my half-grapefruit. ‘I’ll try not to,’ I assured him. I was young, vigorous, immortal. I knew I and my children and my children’s children would never grow old, and we would never die.

  I knew I would never die, but I also knew that I would, in the event, when forced, grow old gracefully I would not complain, as my mother complained. I would not even joke about old age, as my father joked.

  And then, after that, I would die.

  I am not allowed to eat grapefruit now. It disagrees with my medication.

  It’s strange how old age creeps up, a process that is watched, with varying degrees of denial, by everyone in every generation throughout history. None escape, unless saved by sudden death. Some of us have aged well, some badly
I never see Jim now, since the separation and the divorce, but Katie looks good, her complexion unlined, a tribute to her genes or to HRT or to decades of Boots moisturiser, who can say She still lives round the corner, having won the battle over the marital home, and will have done very well out of that deal. Maroussia looks ‘wonderful’, unnaturally wonderful, and has probably had a facelift, as women in her profession are increasingly obliged to do. She has homes elsewhere, on at least three continents, but she still has the old house in Camden, and keeps in touch with us. Chloe’s father, Tim, has Parkinson’s and does not go out much, and Chloe’s mother accordingly looks lined, grey, hunched and worn out, as one would expect. Andrew’s parents have moved out of the neighbourhood and beyond our knowledge: I think they went to live in Dorset. Steve has put on weight and looks like a Michelin man. Bob, who has somewhat surprisingly come back into our lives, looks as boyish and buoyant as ever. He is a sweet-natured man, and his hair is still thick and curly.

  And Anna still looks girlish. Womanly, but girlish.

  I think nuns used to look like that, in the old days. Clear skin, soft curves, uncorseted bodies. Anna never wears a bra. Her body is soft and yielding. I think she has no sexual interests, no libido, or very little libido, which is fortunate. Jess mentioned at one point that Anna’s menstruation came late, and lightly. This again seemed fortunate. She would have been vulnerable, with her trusting nature, had she needed to go out with the boys. She talks sometimes of ‘boy friends’, but I don’t think the phrase has a sexual meaning for her.

  Some of us, on rejuvenating HRT, bled like stuck pigs. And on our skirts and knickers gouts of blood. As Lady Macbeth might have observed. It was one of the side effects.

  Sylvie Raven’s appearance does not at first glance betray the ordeals she has suffered. It is a tribute to the success she has achieved, the official eminence she has acquired. If you did not know her history (but alas many people do, or at one time did, as the press at the time did not respect her privacy), you would not know from her well-tailored, well-coiffed, confident demeanour that her life had been marked by family disgrace. Baroness Raven of Riversdale looks impregnable. Her hair is a well-cut, dyed, golden helmet, with not a strand straying. She has left the operating theatre and the hospital board for the theatre of the House of Lords, where her token female medical presence is as necessary and as useful as Zain’s was at the dean’s tea party in the cathedral close.

  Public life suits Sylvie. Private life let her down, but public life has given her a patina, a posture and a confidently loud voice. She can be heard from the other end of the street, across a crowded room, in any public arena.

  She is eminent, but simultaneously obscure. There are many such people in public life. You can read their obituaries in the press any day of the week, and wonder why you have never heard of them before. They are the honoured of the nation who have lived diligently and served their country well. They take their place in the obituary columns along with the celebrities, who usually die younger. You have never heard of most of those either. I still know Sylvie because we were neighbours in the old days, and still are, and because my children knew her children. I’ve followed her career with admiration.

  My son Ike stuck by her son and his schoolmate Joshua, and went to visit him in his open prison near Grantham. He took him a few books and a lemon cake from the shop at Highbury Barn. I was proud of him for that.

  Yes, Sylvie has weathered well. She has faced them out.

  As for me, I look in the mirror, and I remember my aunt saying staunchly, aged ninety, ‘I don’t like to look in the mirror any more, so I don’t.’

  I think sometimes, indeed quite often, of that Sixth Form school trip to Paris from Orpington. We went to Folkestone and caught the ferry to Calais. Most of us had never been abroad before. We were sixteen, seventeen. It was very exciting, and we were full of hope for our future. The ferry ploughed its noisy way across the Channel, accompanied by seagulls, and we rejoiced in the salt wind, and some of us were sick.

  In Paris, we went to some talks at the Sorbonne, and to a performance at the Comédie-Française, and visited Notre-Dame, and bought postcards and posters at the stalls along the embankment. And we went to the Rodin Museum near the Invalides. I remember the postcards of Monet and Manet and Renoir and Van Gogh and Picasso, but I remember best of all the Rodin.

  The sculptures of Rodin were already familiar to us in postcard format. He was in those days popular with schoolgirls but also acceptable to schoolteachers, because his works were sensuous yet chaste. Most of us hated Renoir. His women were so fat and so pink. They threatened us. But Rodin offered us a body image to which we could more happily if fruitlessly aspire. The doubly colourless medium of marble and of print had introduced us to his elegantly severed hands, to the eternally arrested lovers of Le Baiser, to the voluptuously curved spine of his mourning Danaïd. The women crouched and curled within the bronze and the marble, and their embryo forms as they emerged from the matrix, were pleasing to us. No skin, no pores, no misplaced hairs. We knew quite a few of those images, and we thought we admired them. We had no training in art history and very little knowledge of what we were looking at, but we walked, we paused, we admired.

  It was there, in the Musée Rodin, that I came across the bronze of the old woman. This was not a smooth picture-postcard image. I was unprepared for the shock of the woman’s naked body. That old woman of Rodin lacks all dignity. Her image wounds, insults, reduces. I stood, transfixed, appalled and undefended.

  How did I know then what she meant? Why did I not calmly turn away, in my healthy seventeen-year-old arrogance? What was she to me? What kinship with me did she claim? Why did I fear her withered arms? Why did I even notice her? I have as yet no answers to these questions.

  She is called by several names, although when I was seventeen I took in only that she was an old woman. Now I know that she is La Belle Heaulmière, or The Helmet-Maker’s Once Beautiful Wife. She is also Winter. She is also The Old Courtesan. Literary prototypes from the works of Villon and Dante have been proposed for her, of which the Villon seems to me much the most plausible, though what I think is neither here nor there. She is old, and scraggy, and ugly. She is a memento mori. She is worse than a memento mori, for in comparison with this condition, death were welcome. She is, I suppose, witchlike, but she lacks the malevolence and the energy of the three weird sisters from Macbeth, the play we were then studying back in Orpington for our A-Level English examinations. She is drooped, sagged, imploded. She is passive. She is a passive recipient of the battery, the assault of time, and of the contempt of men. Her breasts are dry and dangle, her ribs stand out, her skin hangs in folds from her withering frame, her back is bowed in submission.

  One of Rodin’s titles for her was Vanitas. I suppose we were all full of vanitas when we were seventeen. Vanity is natural, it is normal, it is not to be punished by sculptors.

  Who sat for this piece of scrag? What unfortunate creature achieved this dubious form of immortality? It’s fashionable to inquire about artists’ models these days, it’s an aspect of modern feminist scholarship. I’m sure someone will have written about her.

  Quand je pense, lasse! au bon temps,

  Quelle fus, quelle devenue,

  Quand me regarde toute nue,

  Et je me voy si très changée,

  Pauvre, sèche, maigre, menue,

  Je suis presque toute enragée . . .

  Standing in front of that sculpture, aged seventeen, I travelled, fast-forward, towards the end of my life, and to a condition which I have not yet reached, for there is still flesh on my ribs. My skin, although unaided by Botox, does not hang. It is still firm, at least in places. It is not as unnaturally firm as Maroussia’s, but it is firm.

  What shall I be, in another decade? If I am spared for, or condemned to, another decade?

  Nellie, don’t grow old. That’s what my father was to say.

  She hit me in the stomach, La Belle Heaulmière, the hel
met-maker’s wife. The helmet-maker’s once beautiful wife.

  I would go to look at her once more before I died.

  Marsh Court, Troutwell, Halliday Hall, Colney Hatch, Kingsley Hall, the old Priory at Roehampton, the new Priory at Southgate, the vast ruins of Lionel Penrose’s Severalls asylum at Colchester, Graylingwell at Chichester—Jess got to know about them all, and some she visited, pursuing her own agenda, her own obsessions, her own long journey.

  Friern Barnet at Colney Hatch in North London has been translated and renovated, and its imposing palatial Italianate Gothic façade now fronts ‘luxury’ flats and a health club with a gym and a deep blue steaming tropical basement swimming pool. In the gym muscular and threatening and probably unemployed and unemployable men work out grimly hour after hour, but the general atmosphere of the club is playful and cosmetic. The cupola and the gatehouse are still for sale, for a few millions. The whole of the hilltop estate has been renamed Princess Park Manor, and its driveways are now known as Regal Drive, Balmoral Avenue, Hampton Close, Duchess Close, Baron Close, Viscount Close, Kensington Close, Earl Close and Highgrove, as shameless an attempt at rebranding as Jess has ever encountered. She rather fancied the Gatehouse. She has often thought it would be pleasant to live in a gatehouse, on a border between two domains, on a threshold.

  The new Manor is a gated community, possibly even more heavily gated and patrolled and spied upon than it was in its asylum days. The extensive grounds where the trusted inmates tended their horses and cows, their pigs and sheep, their fowl and ferrets and their mangold-wurzels, are now a planted urban landscape, little patronised, it seemed to Jess, by the busy flat-dwellers.

  Up near Broughborough the asylum of Arden Gate still stands, and still shelters a few inmates who have been there for decades. It would be unkind to move them now, and the authorities have turned a blind eye and left them alone. A small staff of ageing carers tends them. They will all die soon, the carers and the cared-for alike. Philip Speight had a hand in their protection. He was on the hospital board at the time when decisions were made. It was hard to decide what to do with so many acres. The water tower and one or two of the Queen Anne-style buildings (another style curiously popular with architects for the lunatic poor) were listed, and some of the ancient trees from the days of the old parkland, oaks and cedars and sweet chestnuts and a mulberry, had protection orders on them.