The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘It looked real,’ said Anna.

  ‘Egyptian mummies have real people inside them,’ said Ollie.

  ‘Come along now,’ said Jess, as she set off towards the bus stop, dragging one infant in either hand. The good girl, the bad boy.

  ‘Pyramids have mummies inside them, and mummies have real people inside them,’ insisted Ollie obstinately, on top of the No. 24 bus.

  ‘Don’t keep kicking the seat in front like that, you’ll annoy the lady,’ said Jess.

  ‘Real dead people,’ insisted Ollie.

  Jess found the remains of a packet of dry old Rowntree’s fruit gums in the bottom of her bag. Ollie chose black, Anna orange. They sucked, exhausted, silenced, as the bus made its way past Nelson and the lions and round Trafalgar Square.

  Yes, we all thought Ollie was a handful. It was brave of Jess to undertake him. But he was a bright boy, and Anna liked him. He was Anna’s friend. Jess needed Anna to have a friend, even a bad friend. And Jess owed Ollie’s mother a favour or two.

  The groves of statuary, the petrified trees, the stony branching despairing and gesticulating dead.

  The helmet-maker’s once beautiful wife.

  Roubiliac’s famously macabre figure of Death in Westminster Abbey, the one that so captivated the naughty and precocious Ollie, portrays Death threatening Lady Elizabeth Nightingale with a thunderbolt. She died of a miscarriage. The mother died, but the child survived.

  Queen Philippa, the mother of the Black Prince, also lies in Westminster Abbey, and her effigy does not flatter her. Was she a Moor, an African, the black mother of a black prince? Today’s fashion says yes; history says no. Whatever her complexion, she spoke up for the burghers of Calais.

  The burghers of Calais, centuries later, notoriously attracted the attention of Rodin.

  Queen Philippa died of the dropsy in 1369, and her effigy in the abbey does not flatter her. Rodin did not flatter the burghers either, and his realism caused offence. We don’t know if the helmet-maker’s wife was offended by her representation.

  The lonely and the distressed and the ageing haunt the dead, and they become connoisseurs of epitaphs and funerary monuments. The dead speak to them, lure them, beseech their company.

  Uluntanshe. A wanderer with no aim in life.

  Christ cured an epileptic, but old age he cannot cure. He offered immortal life as a placebo, but few of us trust his promise these days. I went to a funeral a month or two ago and was surprised to find the service full of references to the resurrection and the life everlasting and to reunion beyond the grave. I had thought the gaunt proud old woman in the coffin under the lilies couldn’t possibly have believed in any of that stuff. But maybe that was what she wanted. It seemed very archaic to me.

  Jessica Speight, Sylvie Raven and I went to a fund-raising fête in Sussex together. We are old friends and old campaigners, and sometimes we join forces, we keep one another company in our latter days. Sylvie was due to speak on this occasion, and we to listen. Sylvie had been co-opted as a useful and willing baroness, though not a particularly relevant one, as the event had nothing to do with the bladder. We went as supporters, and I had offered to drive. I had a new car and was childishly and vainly eager to take it for a spin, hoping that this activity would take my mind off my low spirits. As, at first, it did.

  It was July, and the event was to be held in the grounds of a small country house, or perhaps I mean a large house in the country, converted into a residential home for children and young adults in need of special care. The fête had been organised to raise awareness and funds for medical research into acute behavioural problems, loosely grouped together under the controversial label of autism, although we were shortly to discover that the home also catered for a select group of young people with conditions not related to autism—dystonias, mobility malfunctions, self-harm. The word ‘autism’ has become a shortcut to describe other states, and not always a helpful one. That’s what Jess tells me. Jess is well up in all of this.

  Jess and I were not expected to make large donations, but we were good at being aware. Indeed, we were both experts in awareness. (My awareness is much influenced by, and dependent upon, Jess’s.) And of course we paid for our rather expensive tickets, which included tea, cakes and a glass of wine. Jess might write about her visit. And there would be one or two people there that we might know, and to whom we could try to make ourselves pleasant.

  Workers for campaigns and NGOs get to know one another. They inhabit the same world, breathe the same air. Some professionals move from one campaign to another with apparent nonchalance—from torture victims to threatened species, from organic farming in Scotland to women with fistulas in the Horn of Africa, from rescuing battery hens in Wiltshire to the removal of land mines in Cambodia, from anti-smoking to tree protection. The objectives differ, at times grotesquely, but the techniques of fund-raising and consciousness-raising are much the same. The missionary motive dies hard.

  Anna didn’t go with us, which turned out to be a mercy. Jess had thought she might find the visit disturbing, so Anna went instead on a coach trip to Brighton with the staff and some of the clients of the Thelwell Day Centre, a support group which she had been attending for some years on the recommendation of the social worker’s successor. Anna loved an outing, and the Brighton trip offered a tour of the Pavilion, a walk along the pier and a pizza. (It didn’t offer a swim: Health and Safety forbade the sea.) Anna was a trusted member of the day centre, always welcomed by the staff, who could rely on her to help to shepherd some of the more obstructive or disoriented of the flock. Her day, we heard, was going well. At lunchtime she reported to us on her mobile that she was having a Pizza Margarita and a Diet Coke and was looking forward to a butterscotch ice-cream. She had the better part.

  The mobile was a godsend to Jess and Anna. It saved Jess a lot of worry. Anna had a few saved numbers that she could ring by pressing two simple buttons: Mum, Bob, Katie, Gramps, me, a few others. Gramps is dead now, and much missed, but he lived long enough to own a mobile phone, he lived to join the age of the mobile.

  Anna liked butterscotch. There used to be a dessert called Butterscotch Instant Whip to which we mothers often had resort in our frantic earlier days. It was much less artificial of flavour than the unpleasant synthetic pink varieties, though its texture was equally suspect. What can they have used to make the milk coagulate like that? It can’t have been good for the body or the brain. But it was a godsend.

  The gods also sent us a canned dessert called Ambrosia Creamed Rice Pudding. But none of us liked that.

  I mourn those days when the children were young. I miss them. Sometimes I look at the little drawer in my desk where I used to keep the Family Allowance book and my eyes fill with tears. A Freedom Pass is a comfort, but the Family Allowance book was more than a comfort. The woman in the Post Office on the corner used to stamp it, and hand over the cash, and I felt rich.

  On the drive down to Sussex, Sylvie told us what she knew of the organisation, and of her contact with it through a fellowpeer with a problematic son. The peer wished to protect his troublesome and troubled son’s privacy, for the sake of the whole family, and didn’t want to exploit a personal tragedy, but he had allowed himself to become well known as a donor to mental health causes and as a patron of the home we were about to visit. He occasionally made enlightened speeches on mental-health issues in the House. Jess knew his name, and I let it be assumed that I too had heard of him, though I’m not sure if I had.

  Sylvie was fond of fat bald baggy old Bob Germen, and thought he did his best. She wanted to oblige. He had promised her that Wibletts, despite its silly name, was a good cause. His son, now in his thirties, had spent a year at Wibletts. The son suffered from late-diagnosed PKU, or phenylketonuria, a recessive metabolic disorder associated, according to Sylvie, with seizures, mental retardation and rapid-t witching-finger movements. It was hitherto, Sylvie thought, unknown in the peerage, though many peers she knows are loony. But Bob was o
nly a life peer, so, as she said, that didn’t mean anything. Nobody knew what trick nature’s germens had played on poor old Bob and his boy.

  He wouldn’t be there at the fête himself, said Sylvie, he couldn’t face it. She was his envoy.

  PKU is not wholly unconnected with the bladder, said Sylvie, the bladder queen. It’s caused by an acid that dyes the urine a spectacular dark blue-green. It’s amazing that nobody identified the condition until the 1930s. You don’t see it often, but you can’t miss it when you do.

  Jess was very interested in the story of Bob Germen’s son, and Bob Germen’s ambivalent paternal behaviour. (I don’t think the mother was ever mentioned.) Jess knew many stories of parents who had distanced themselves from or disowned their problematic children in less enlightened days, and as we made our way past Guildford on the A3 she recited some of them to us. Jane Austen’s brother George, she now told us, had never learnt to read or write, and had been cared for quietly in a neighbouring village, not in the family home. There were few mentions of him in later family records, although his father had once, she thought, expressed the view that it was a comfort that he could not become a bad or wicked child.

  George had lived until his seventies, presumably neither bad nor wicked.

  The reverence for those whose lives were hidden with God had not, Jess thought, touched the Austen family in the way that it had touched Wordsworth. The fashionable and benign late-eighteenth-century affection for idiocy had escaped them. Jane Austen had little time for idiocy. She set a high value on rational intelligence, which George had clearly lacked.

  Jane Austen’s fellow-novelist Pearl Buck, on the other hand, had gone to very great lengths and much expense to support her brain-damaged daughter, whom she memorably described as ‘the child who never grew’. Jess hadn’t read any of Buck’s many one-time bestselling Nobel-Prize-winning novels, and neither had we, but Jess had read Buck’s brief account of her daughter Carol, who, like Bob Germen’s boy, had suffered from phenylketonuria, although she had been born a decade or so before this label existed, and for years nobody knew what was the matter with her. According to her mother, Carol had been, said Jess, a charming blonde baby and (like Anna) a happy and pretty child, but as she grew older she was afflicted with physical restlessness and meaningless outbursts of dancing and clapping. Her mental capacities failed to develop, despite her mother’s love and care and persistent efforts to educate her, and she was never to learn to read or write. The extreme conditions in China in the 1920s might have been thought to explain some of the child’s maladjustment, but apparently had no connection with it. Buck travelled widely for years in search of a cure, and at last in the United States a truth-telling ‘expert’ had warned Buck that she should give up hope. She should find her a place where the child could be safe and happy, and leave her there. She should not waste time and grief on her. Carol was unedu-cable and beyond help.

  Buck was not wholly able to follow this practical advice. She was a mother, and a missionary’s child, and she could not forget her one and only daughter. She did her best.

  As she grew richer and more and more famous, she adopted other daughters in an effort to heal the maternal wound, and founded homes and institutions (not unlike Wibletts) to care for children marginalised by poverty or hereditary abnormality. Some of them are still functioning, in the twenty-first century, commemorating Carol Buck. So Jess told us.

  There is a story, and usually a sad story, behind every private care home, every institution, every act of charity. Wibletts had originally belonged to a wealthy and worldly vicar, the Reverend Edgar Holden, an old-school, Jane-Austen-style, younger-son-of-landed-gentry vicar. His son Felix, less worldly, more evangelical, had gone to Africa as a missionary to save the lepers, where he had died, as did so many, of malaria. He had saved some lepers, but he had died of malaria. The house had been gifted for the care of unfortunate young people by a later generation. A sequence of Holden deaths in the male line (as in a Jane Austen plot) had ensured that Wibletts itself, and a missionary settlement in Northern Rhodesia, had remained very well endowed.

  You can read all this in the brochure. Jess will add it to her list. Jess has become an encyclopaedia, a compendium of case histories, and she was now on her way to a hothouse of such histories, a concentration of parental anxiety, a communion of distressed mothers.

  Arthur Miller, Jess now reminded us, has been blamed of late for ignoring the existence of his Down’s syndrome son. He placed his baby boy in a home and tried to forget about him. He didn’t do as well by his son as bumbling embarrassed old Bob Germen. Despite his reputation for high ethical thinking, despite his attraction to the dramatic possibilities of the ethical conundrum, despite his having written a play called All My Sons, Arthur Miller hadn’t been a good father to all his sons. He’d ducked the issue, he’d edited it out of the script. In his autobiography, Jess claims, he never even mentions his unwanted boy.

  Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe made his reputation and won the Nobel Prize by writing painfully, brutally, repetitively, obsessively about his grossly abnormal son, his son whose brain oozed horribly out of a hole in his head.

  Nobel-Prize-winning Doris Lessing (who does not like Oe’s work) was locked for more than sixty years into a mother-son embrace of peculiar intensity, married to a son whose strangeness, whose incapacities, whose gifts, like those of Anna Speight, remained undiagnosed, indefinable. He too is one of his kind. He is much cleverer than Anna Speight, but not as simple and not as golden.

  Jess broods on these examples, and wonders whether she had been wise to undertake this journey to Wibletts, which will remind her of so many unanswerable questions. She does not anticipate that the visit will lead to any new departure. She is too old for new departures. It will be, she thinks, just one more round of the familiar track, a few incremental details, a few new observations to add to the map she has been forming over the years. A new creek, a new inlet, a new promontory.

  Maybe she will write a paper on the Nobel Prize for Literature and the representation (or lack of representation) of brain damage in works of literature by Nobel laureates. Saul Bellow’s portrait of Augie March’s simple-minded brother Georgie March is masterly and charged with loving sympathy. Georgie March loved his mother. On the first page of this epic and picaresque novel Bellow records the idiot brother’s love in a little rhyme that Jessica knows by heart. It goes:

  Georgie Mahchy, Augie, Simey

  Winnie Mahchy, evwy, evwy love Mama.

  For a long time now in times of stress Jess has repeated to herself this little rhyme, this little mantra, as a comfort.

  (Winnie March was an overfed poodle and, according to Augie March, did not love Mama, although all her boys, all her sons, the good and not-so-good Jewish boys, certainly did.)

  People who knew Saul Bellow tell Jessica that he wasn’t exactly a role model for parenthood. Not an attentive father to his four children, all of them born to different mothers. But Jess isn’t going to blame him for that. She might, if she were one of those mothers, but she isn’t.

  Jess knows how lucky she is in Anna. Anna lives safely at home with her mother. Anna has not been exiled to a care home, or treated as a leper. She does not have seizures or assault strangers. Unlike Carol Buck, she does not even dance in the street. Anna has been on many pleasant excursions, both with her mother, and on organised outings with the Thelwell Day Centre and other support groups. Anna has been to France, and Italy, and Holland, and, once, as far as Turkey. But she has never been to any country where she might catch malaria or be exposed to danger. She has been well protected.

  The word ‘over-protected’ sneaks into Jess’s mind, unbidden. Maybe it is, after all, through selfishness that she has kept Anna at home. Through selfishness, through pride.

  As we drive onwards, Jess’s anxiety inexplicably mounts, and my spirits sink. I keep thinking of that man in Oxford Street, with his handwritten placard announcing mum is dead. I do not think I have ever com
municated this vision to Jess, but I know that she can read my mind.

  Pearl Buck had worried that her daughter Carol would outlive her. She had longed, guiltily, rationally, for her daughter’s death. I would have welcomed death for my child and would still welcome it, for then she would be finally safe.

  So she wrote, in cold blood, during Carol’s lifetime, knowing that her child would never be able to read these words.

  Jane Austen’s brother George had lived a life without incident, without complications, without any plot, for seventy years in a village called Monk Sherborne near Basingstoke. He was boarded out with a village family, who also looked after his maternal uncle Thomas Leigh. Thomas Leigh, like George, was mentally impaired. It was the Leigh gene that was defective, not the Austen gene. The Leighs were to blame. Unlike Johnny Foy, Wordsworth’s idiot boy, George had no moonlit adventures, or none that we know of, none that were thought worthy to relate. Unlike Johnny, unlike Augie March’s brother Georgie, George Austen was not, it would seem, loved by his mother.

  Maybe the village woman had loved him, as Betty Foy had loved her boy Johnny.

  Obsessive Jess has been to look for George Austen’s grave in Monk Sherborne, to see if it would speak to her, as he could not. Would it cry out in grief? She had caught the bus from Basingstoke on a sunny day in April years ago. She took Anna with her but did not tell her what she was looking for. It was just a day out in the country. She could not find the grave because it was unmarked. He did not call to her from his resting place. She had known it was unmarked, so there had been no point in trying to find it. But it had made a pleasant outing.

  Jess thinks of the churchyard. All Saints Church is simple, rustic, humble, the wooden beams of its porch are ancient and rough hewn, its brickwork and masonry are crumbling and patchy. Few of its tombstones have names that can be deciphered. The names are lost in time, obliterated by the unimaginable touch of time. The stones are white and grey and ochre and pale green, encrusted with sun-bleached lichen. They lean and slope. There are gaudy plastic flowers on one or two of the more recent graves. The grass is studded with daisies and dandelions and buttercups, and there are a few clumps of cowslips which the mower has left to stand.