The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  Philip Speight was particularly tender towards the inept and the vulnerable, because he loved his daughter and his granddaughter. They had educated him.

  The asylum that had housed Halliday Hall, out in Essex beyond Marsh Court, has succumbed to time. It has been invaded by squatters and subjected to arson. Some of its buildings are listed and therefore cannot be demolished, but it cannot be developed either. It stands, a vast monument to institutional paralysis, to the inertia of mind and matter to which a campaigning and reforming minister of health called Enoch Powell had referred way back in 1962. It is a brownfield site awaiting a revelation, a new world order. All the optimism that built it has drained away. Someone has written in huge red dripping bleeding letters upon an inner corridor wall MY WOUNDS CRY 4 THE GRAVE. This is a fine biblical message of despair. Unplumbed sinks and baths and lavatories stand around, as though construction or renovation had been arbitrarily halted one day as funds ran out. Weeds push up through the broken tiles; brambles and roses nod in through the windows. It is Sleeping Beauty’s domain.

  Jess, disobeying warnings about ‘Private Land’ and CCTV, climbs over the perimeter fence, helping Anna over it after her, and they eat their tuna sandwiches and cherries in the long grass, in an ancient unpruned orchard of knotted apple trees and plum trees. The jagged initials and names of long-ago inmates are scarred into the trunks of the beech and oak trees. TOM, PK, JB, BOB. The grey bark has risen to enfold them, the sap has risen within them and swelled their lips, but still they speak.

  The oaks and the mulberry long predate the asylum. The trees live for centuries.

  There is a newish lavatory bowl, still swathed in its dirty builder’s-yard Lazarus bandages. It stands alone, like a throne, in a derelict courtyard. Could this have been the very courtyard where Jess visited Steven and first met Zain? This expensive ceramic object had never reached its destination. It reminds Jess of something she has seen, long ago, and it comes to her that in Africa, all those many years ago when she was young, the anthropologists had been shown just such a bowl, standing surreal and abandoned on a concrete platform on a little brownish grassy African slope by a giant anthill. It had never been, would never be, installed. There was no need for it, no call for it. It was a symbol. It was a wonder of the villages, it was a wonder that it had travelled so far. It was famous far and wide through the unplumbed swamps of Bangweulu. Graham Hayter had photographed Guy Brighouse sitting on it. The only lavatory in Bangweulu.

  She had forgotten it, and now it comes back to her.

  The anthropologists had crapped in earth latrines and behind thorn bushes, worrying about snakes.

  They were told, all those years ago, of a colonial administrator in Northern Rhodesia who’d had a lavatory installed inside an immense baobab tree, but they never got to see it.

  Jess reads the Gospels, contemplates the miracles of Jesus and the acts of the apostles. Jesus cured the halt and the lame and the bleeding. He cured the diseased womb. He cured the epileptic, a lunatick who fell often into the fire and often into the water. He made the blind to see and the deaf to hear.

  She cannot find much in the Gospels about the simple-minded. Are they the same category as the poor in heart?

  Icipuba, kapupushi, ukupena, icipumputu.

  Jess wrote a paper on Lionel Penrose’s work on Down’s syndrome at the Colchester asylum. Penrose’s law, which stated that the population of prisons and psychiatric hospitals is inversely related, is not of particular interest to her, nor is she strongly attracted to his mathematical fantasies—the impossible triangle, the endless staircase. No, she is more concerned with his attitudes to his patients—Quakerly, respectful, mildly optimistic. She wonders if there was some redistributive element for him in his field of research. From an extravagantly gifted family, with clear marks of an inherited mathematical genius, he chose to spend years with simpletons (a term he personally preferred to the word ‘feeble-minded’), worrying at causation and heredity. Penrose, like the Annual Reports of the Asylum for Idiots which he quotes so eloquently, wished to ‘disimprison the soul of the Idiot’.

  Disimprison is a good word, a surprising word to find in an official report. Soul is a good word also.

  Jess studies these documents, and has been studying them over the decades. She persists.

  Wordsworth, in his celebrated letter to his cocky young admirer John Wilson in defence of his ballad The Idiot Boy, accused Wilson of disliking and misinterpreting the poem because of the use of the word ‘idiot’. If there had been any such word in our language, to which we had attached passion, as lack-wit, half-wit, witless, etc., I should certainly have employed it in preference; but there is no such word.

  This is what Wordsworth wrote, in self-defence. Jess thinks about this a good deal.

  There is no such word.

  One of her old friends at SOAS, with whom she keeps in touch, had left academe and ethnography and anthropology and moved very profitably into advertising, into what we now call the creative industries. Many of the brightest and best in those days made this move, and he was one of them. He is good at brand names, at rebranding and re-creating concepts. Maybe she should ask him about the word ‘idiot’. ‘Special needs’ and ‘learning difficulties’ are good phrases, useful phrases, dignified phrases, but Jess thinks there must be something still better to be plucked from the circumambient twenty-first-century air. Something that would suit Anna even better. Anna, the pure gold baby.

  Les enfants du bon Dieu.

  Jess was right about Vincent’s prognosis: it was, in the long run, better than Anna’s. Years of intensive and expensive pharmaceutical research eventually produced medication that redressed whatever chemical imbalance or neurological disturbance had plagued him since birth, and he ceased to rage and swear and jerk and fret. He never became a model citizen, but he became independent, better-tempered, reasonably amenable. He got a job in a Turkish restaurant, married the boss’s daughter, got stuck into dubious wheelings and dealings on Green Lanes about which his mother Susie did not inquire too closely, had two children and went regularly to the Arsenal, where he could shout as loud as he wished. It was a good outcome. He had made good progress.

  Anna, as we have seen, made no progress at all. She was becalmed. There was no story to her life, no plot. The concept of progress did not apply to Anna. Events happened, but they did not impinge upon her. Unexpected crises occurred within her circle, like the melodramatic arrest and conviction of Joshua Raven, but they did not affect Anna, although they touched her. She listened to the Josh scandal with sympathy, with interest and concern, as she listened to the affairs of television stars and celebrities, as she followed the story lines of soap operas, but she did not see herself as a protagonist in the narrative of her own life.

  She was unhappy when she saw Josh’s photo in the press, after the conviction.

  Anna loved soap operas. She loved the small daily dramas, the ebb and flow of minimal fates, the lovable characters, the bad but well-intentioned villains, the lame ducks, the matriarchs, the emotional separations and reunions, the petty crimes. She became worried when the plot took an unexpectedly violent turn, but fortunately for her peace of mind so did most of the programme producers and the scriptwriters, and daily life on screen reverted readily to the norm. Things went on and on in soap opera, as they did in Anna’s life. People lived on, ageing only slowly, many of them ageing more slowly (as in Proust’s soap opera) than in real life, until external and arbitrary pressures such as a star actor’s desertion dictated sudden death. Anna knows all about the stars and their troubles and some of the reasons why they suddenly disappear. She is, in her way, a sophisticated viewer. She absorbs the information from the fan magazines.

  Jess, watching Anna watching the screen, would think back to the shining lake, and remember the days when she had had other, less domestic horizons. Occasionally, she wondered if she would ever go back to Africa. She still from time to time dreamt of the lake and the lobster-claw children
punting their little wooden barks. These dreams were, she decided, Jungian dreams of the collective unconscious, the dreams which had given birth to Anna. From that great lake all life forms had arisen, there they had all been engendered. All life came out of Africa, from the Sense of the Infinite on the Western Shore of Victoria Nyanza.

  Jess did not like to see Africa on television. She disliked wildlife programmes, and not only because some of them were made by Bob Bartlett. She had forgiven herself for her bad treatment of him, and allowed him over her doorstep from time to time for a meal and a chat. But she didn’t like his programmes, because they tended, although obliquely, to anthropomorphise. She didn’t even like David Attenborough’s programmes. She didn’t like watching antelope running free on the savannah, or crocodiles lugging wounded buffalo into the Zambezi, or leopards hanging in trees like strange and lazy fruit, posing smugly for the camera. Still less did she like programmes about the Masai or starving children in the Sudan.

  Programmes about deformity weren’t as popular then as they have since become, but programmes about famine were ubiquitous.

  I worked in those early days for a charity, once small but now of international repute, which placed teachers and student teachers in schools in what we still called the Third World. Missionary work has been taken over by NGOs, most of them secular. There are missionaries in my ancestry a long way back, as I’ve mentioned, lower-middle-class upwardly aspiring Methodists, but I don’t think that affected my motivation, though I think Jess thinks it did. In the early years I worked part time and for very little pay, because this fitted my childcare arrangements better than the full-t ime post for which I was qualified. I still work for the same charity, but it is more professional now. I became one of their full-time highly paid legal advisers, and worked long hours for twenty years or so, before going back to part-time consultancy and semi-retirement when my husband first became ill. I am not sure its work is as useful as once I thought it was, and I dislike the new management style. Success has not been good for the cause. It has attracted some unpleasant characters of late. I think of retiring altogether, but I don’t. I will be obliged to retire soon, but not just yet. They would like me to retire, they can’t really afford me, even though they’ve successfully juggled my pay scale to their own advantage. I don’t know whether I want to leave or not.

  Unlike Jess, I have never been to Africa. Not even once. I have not been to most of the countries to which I have sent hopeful or hopeless volunteers. Some of these countries were poor and relatively safe, but others have been ravaged by famine and civil war. A few of my volunteers have come to bad ends and died on the job. I have felt small twinges of guilt. Maybe they had a death wish. Jack from Leuchars, Serena from Carstairs, Bobbie from Southport. Sometimes I think we should leave other countries to perish. My optimism has perished. When I hear rock stars and pop stars allegedly raising funds for Africa, I want to scream and tear my hair and weep. I have no personal memory of a shining lake or a powder-blue shoebill. I never visited the village where Livingstone died, or saw the old men reading the large black Bible by the fire at night. I have never heard the mourning cry of the emerald dove, although Jess has imitated it for me on several occasions. It is one of her party pieces.

  She does it very well.

  This is a story that Jess told me not so long ago. In its way, it’s about Livingstone.

  Jess’s stories have become my stories and some of mine have become hers.

  Once, when they were still small, Jess told me, she had taken Anna and Ollie on a summer-holiday trip on the river. They set off from the Festival Pier on the South Bank and sailed westwards to Westminster Pier and Westminster Abbey, where Jess had a secret intention of visiting Livingstone’s tomb. She had never seen it, although she had seen the mpundo tree where his heart was buried. The children were too young to object to the cultural aspect of this outing, or even to know that it was part of the plan. They had enjoyed the boat trip, and had been indulged with ice-creams with Cadbury’s chocolate flakes stuck jauntily into their soft mounds, a messy treat which had left them a little smeared and sticky. Jess, at the imposing entrance to the Abbey, had dabbed at them both with the damp flannel she kept for such occasions in a wash bag in her handbag, and then she shepherded them in. There was no entrance fee in those days: you could just walk in. The children were at first slightly subdued by the height and solemnity of the building, but soon regained their spirits and curiosity and began to wander, even to scamper, as Jess gazed at the soaring statuary.

  She had been expecting Livingstone’s monument to be vast and gesticulatory, like the Albert Memorial, with palm trees and crocodiles, with adoring natives in crouching postures. And there were plenty of memorials on a grand scale, most of them devoted to naval and military commanders, some famous, some forgotten. Charles James Fox reclining in a stout classical death pose was accompanied by a handsome kneeling African, representing (as she much later deduced) Fox’s commitment to the abolition of slavery, but Livingstone she could not find.

  She had to ask a verger, who told her that Livingstone lay under a plain black slab on the floor of the nave.

  She retraced her steps, and there he was. No mourning doves, no weepers, no palm trees, just a plain epitaph, recording in plain script that his body had been brought by faithful hands over land and sea, and concluding that we should pray ‘to heal this open sore of the world’, by which he had meant slavery.

  He had not wanted to be buried in an English grave. He said that English graves lacked elbow room. He had become accustomed to the vast spaces of Africa. He had wished to be buried in a little forest grave, in a clearing, in a simple garden plot marked by blue stones. But he had ended up here, after a year’s jolting and journeying, having left his heart and innards behind him under a tree.

  She remembered his last march, his broken sextant, his tree-frog. I lost my mother, I lost my father, and I am alone, alone, alone. She thought of the nine Nassick Boys, slaves plucked from an orphanage in Bombay to lead Livingstone through Africa. As we have seen, one of them (although she does not yet know this) had accompanied his corpse to England. He had been a pall bearer at the state funeral, and had thrown a palm branch into the open grave, this grave where she now stands.

  Mum is dead.

  Livingstone had unfortunately recorded that the ‘slave spirit’ in the Nassick boys went deepest in ‘those who have the darkest skins’. That remark has not been good for his posthumous reputation. He has been retrospectively cast as a racist, which Jess considers may or may not be fair.

  There was not much in Livingstone’s austere slab to detain Jess, and after reading the inscription she looked up to locate Anna and Ollie, but they were not in sight. She could hardly shout or whistle for them in this sombre setting, and although she was sure they could have come to no harm here she set off briskly to search for them. It was a good building in which to play hide-and-seek. Chapels, cloisters, alcoves, crypts, and the great dark marble royal bedchambers of the dead offered many a Gothic hiding place for two small children. She could not see them anywhere, and began to wonder if she should approach a verger to ask for an announcement. Would there be a loudspeaker system available, as on a railway station? And if she asked for help, would she be publicly convicting herself of maternal neglect?

  After some minutes of perambulation, up worn stone steps and over chequered slabs and uneven paving and along a dark transept, she heard promising sounds echoing from a side chapel. It was Ollie’s high-pitched childish voice, carrying clearly through the sepulchral gloom. ‘Go on, I dare you,’ he was saying, ‘I dare you’—or these were the words that Jess was to think that she remembered, when she told the story to me. Anna was clearly refusing to do whatever she was being dared to do, and Jess hastened towards them, to find Ollie trying to persuade Anna to climb over a low chain to enter the precinct of a Baroque monument portraying a life-sized skeleton emerging from what seemed to be a gardener’s hut. Death was poised to aim his
deadly bolt upwards at the lovely bared bosom of a young woman swooning in her husband’s protective arms.

  Jess was cross with Ollie and with herself. She snatched Anna away from the morbid monument and grabbed Ollie with her other hand and propelled them both not very gently away from the skeleton and the woman and the surrounding displays of ostentatious alabaster grief and self-congratulatory selfperpetuation.

  The skeleton was horrifyingly realistic. Its lower jaw was missing, though whether this was by the sculptor’s design or by accident or through iconoclastic Cromwellian vandalism was not clear. Jess didn’t like it at all, but clearly both children had been strongly attracted to it. Ollie protested, as he was led away, that they had wanted to see what the skeleton had in his little shed. The door was half open, and they’d wanted to see inside. ‘There wouldn’t have been anything inside, you little stupids,’ said Jess, as she marched them down the wide nave and over Livingstone’s pickled remains towards the summer sunshine of Westminster Square.

  ‘There might have been bones, or anything,’ said Ollie defiantly.

  ‘There might have been bones,’ echoed Anna, a docile pupil.

  ‘It wasn’t real,’ said Jess; ‘it was only a statue, it didn’t have a real indoors.’