The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  Also, said Raoul, who seems to enjoy telling this story, he had become unexpectedly, grossly fat. He had swollen up like a toad. Or like a Buddha. He had morphed into a middle-aged Buddha guru, a fat toad, with plump and swollen cheeks, wreathed in rounded layers of flesh.

  Jess finds this fascinating. The only photographs she had seen of Dr Nicholls had shown him as handsome, lean, big, energetic, athletic, a tennis-playing figure of a man. Self-regarding, perhaps, but self-regarding in a manner that should surely have prohibited such weight gain.

  Was it steroids, she suggested? As with Gore Vidal?

  Raoul thinks not.

  It was very odd, says Raoul; Dr Nicholls began to look quite Middle Eastern. Or oriental. As though he’d changed ethnicity and gender as well as body shape. Very odd.

  Rather like Peter Hall, I thought, but did not interrupt them to say so. They were probably not aware that I was eavesdropping. I couldn’t hear everything they said, but I could hear most of it. And if I had mentioned Peter Hall, that would have been name-dropping as well as eavesdropping.

  Steve also put on weight, Jess tells Raoul. Does Raoul remember Steve Carter? Of course he does, says Raoul. So she still sees Steve? They agree that they would have expected Steve to put on weight: he was by nature indolent, he never took any exercise, he ate for comfort, he needed to eat. To be fat was his destiny. A heavy baby that could never suck in enough, a heavy man who could never eat enough biscuits. A fat old man baby. An unappeasable, devouring baby.

  Raoul says he has often wondered about Steve, whose name seems to have faded from the literary record, his early promise unfulfilled. When he’d met him, he’d been a somebody, he’d been a published poet, the only poet Raoul had ever known. But he seems to have slipped away into obscurity, suggests Raoul. You can find his name through the web—you can find almost anyone’s name through the web—and there are some early poems there, someone had posted them, some of the best of his early poems, poems he used to read to the circle in Halliday, but nothing recent, nothing from his later years. There is no surrounding integument of critical discourse, there are no links feeding his poems out into a living network. His work is islanded in the recent past. It has not yet hooked up with the expanding interconnecting digital world. Minor Edwardian poets with their entourage of minor commentators and minor biographers and minor research scholars are better connected than he. He is in a limbo, in the land of the unreborn.

  Raoul suggests this (well, he suggested some of this, Jess and I looked up the Edwardian poets on the net later), and Jess is inclined to agree with his analysis.

  Does Steve still write, Raoul asks?

  Jess thinks not. His muse has abandoned him. Steve is all right, she insists, defensively, he’s okay, really, but even as she speaks she knows that he isn’t ‘okay, really’, he has suffered too much, his spirit has been too deeply damaged too early. By ‘all right’ and ‘okay, really’ she means he is still alive, he gets from day to day, he calls on her occasionally (but not too often, doubting his welcome), he gets up in the morning and passes the day and goes to bed at night and has not as far as she knows repeated his Wendy House suicide attempt in the Secret Garden. He has resigned himself to a life of unproductive daily anguish. Sometimes he thinks the gift will return, for there is no reason why he could not write a good poem even about being unable to write a poem (Coleridge did, others have done), he still has his fingers and his words and his pen and his paper, they are poor possessions but he has not physically lost them, his early poems were begotten of despair upon impossibility, so maybe the late poems will come, released by a final spasm of impossibility? At sixty-five, at seventy, at seventy- five?

  He hopes, maybe.

  Steve’s mantra, which he once repeated to Jess, goes:

  The day is agony

  The night brings no reprieve.

  She’s tried hard to forget it, but she can’t.

  It is hard for Steve: he was born to guiltless misery, and for a while it seemed he had outwitted it. Anna was born happy, a pure gold baby, but Steve was born into a white misery. In his crib he was deprived and wanting. The thought of Steve’s life sentence darkens Jess’s pleasure in her reunion with Raoul (the successful and competent survivor Raoul), and luckily at this lowering moment she is interrupted by a call from Anna, who wants to tell her that she is on the coach on her way home and it is raining very hard.

  ‘It’s raining here too!’ says Jess.

  This pleases them both. It is reassuring to them to know they are in the same weather system. Their intimacy is terrible.

  Anna wants to know where Jess is, and who is in the car, and when will she be home. Jess tells Anna that she is with Sylvie and Eleanor, yes, Eleanor is driving, Eleanor’s new car is very smart and silver, and guess what, Jess has met her old friend Raoul, and Eleanor is very kindly giving him a lift back to town.

  Anna is pleased with this news, because her mother cannot have enough friends. She rejoices in her mother’s friends; the more she has, the happier Anna is. She is never jealous of her mother’s friends, although she had been a little jealous, long ago, of Bob.

  She has no idea who Raoul is, but she remembers his name. ‘Give my love to Raoul,’ says Anna, as is her generous way.

  ‘My daughter Anna,’ says Jess, as she disconnects. And yes, she is well. Raoul has never met her, Anna had never been taken to Halliday, but he asks after her, politely. Jess briefly describes the coach trip with the Thelwell Day Centre to Brighton, an explanation that explains all. She can see Raoul quickly decoding the story of Anna. He is very quick.

  And you, Raoul, she risks, did you have children?

  She has declared herself and so can he.

  Raoul, who becomes tense as I try to get into the right lane to leave the A3 for the M25, says that he has a son. One son. An ex-wife, and one son.

  He relaxes as I make it safely from the slip road into the mainstream. The windscreen is misting slightly; the new car is perhaps, for all its up-to-the-minute technology, not perfectly adjusted to this wet English summer weather, and I have to lean forward from time to time to wipe the screen with my naked knuckles. Sylvia is still asleep; I do not want to rouse her but I wish she would wake up. The poor new car is not accustomed to so many passengers, to so much breathing and condensation. Neither am I. Driving conditions are not good, and the traffic is heavy, and I can’t get the air conditioning to adjust as it should.

  Raoul says he has one son, who works in Geneva on particle physics and black holes and dark matter. This son is, it would appear, a multilingual stateless scholar of the universe. I cannot understand his work, says Raoul; it is too hard for me, it is all a mystery to me.

  He is proud of his son, of course. His voice is full of a pride which he cannot dissimulate, cannot conceal, even though he wishes to defer to Jess, the rediscovered and long-admired Jessica. So transparent we are, so helpless, so vulnerable, as we lay bare our pride and our affections. His son is called Rachid. His ex-wife is a French-Algerian anthropologist, now connected with McGill University. She specialises in nomadic peoples, and is currently on a field trip in Mongolia.

  Jess, hearing this, thinks fleetingly but intensely of Anna’s father, who has so completely vanished from the field of her knowing. Maybe he, like Zain, is dead. He had been twenty years older than she, so he is probably, though not necessarily, dead. He is frozen in time for her, for ever at the age at which she had known him, in the old days of sex and SOAS. It now strikes her that he must almost certainly be dead. She hears nothing of him, no echo from him reaches the network. His very name is dead. He cannot have published much, or she would have come across his references to his work. She has not looked for him on the internet, where we all have an afterlife, but maybe, as of course he must be dead, maybe, perhaps she could look.

  Yes, she knows he must be dead, or, if not dead, moribund in Sweden. He cannot be in England, or she would have known. His tenure at SOAS had been limited; he had no right of return
. Maybe he died long ago in the Chinese foothills. Maybe he was an anthropological martyr, murdered by tribesmen or eaten by ants.

  It would be safe to look for him now. Her shame (and she has felt at times intolerable and inexplicable shame) has died with him.

  The thought of seeing the Professor’s name again fills her with horror. She has been trying not to know this. For decades she has been, as we now say, in profound denial.

  Maybe Raoul’s ex-wife knew him.

  Jess banishes the thought of the Swedish professor and returns to the present.

  ‘Particle physics,’ repeats Jess to Raoul, admiringly and meaninglessly, playing for time to reorganise her thoughts, her flashbacks, the heaped and impacting flickering particles of recollection that no prose can ever reproduce, however fancy. The neurones are far too quick for us, proleptic, pre-emptive.

  ‘Particle physics!’ says Jess. ‘That’s amazing.’

  There is no future in talking to Raoul about particle physics and his clever son.

  She decides to risk betraying stupidity and ignorance by asking Raoul to tell her more about what kind of neurologist he is, and why he had found himself at the Open Day at Wibletts.

  We are impressed by his Delphic answer, delivered just as Sylvie rouses herself from her exhausted slumber.

  ‘I specialise,’ said Raoul, as we entered the uninspired repetitive landscape of the South Circular, ‘in phantom pain.’

  Phantom pain.

  ‘I feel anguish, and it is not of the body, so it must be of the spirit.’ So says a character in one of Strindberg’s tragedies. I forget which.

  Neurology does not accept the disembodied notion of the disembodied spirit. Raoul has been working on this problem all his life. Well, for all his life since he left the Lebanon and Marxism, suffering from what he would have accepted as ‘anguish’.

  I don’t know what the Swedish word for ‘anguish’ was, or who translated it as ‘anguish’. Maybe it was me.

  Steve had used the word ‘agony’ in his mantra.

  I don’t know if there is any difference between these two concepts, whether one is more embodied than the other.

  Raoul and Jessica met for lunch in an old-fashioned little Italian restaurant in an alleyway just off Queen Square, which they had each visited severally over the years, but where their attendances had never until now coincided. An unpretentious little place, it is now more committed to the pizza than it used to be, but otherwise it is little changed. It is still a family business, although the waiters grow old and will soon die, and the patron will sell to a fast-food chain and return to his native village near Bardi in Emilia-Romagna.

  The restaurant is quite near SOAS, and even nearer to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, where Raoul had worked. It is quite near the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, where I saw the stitched and smiling baby that I mentioned.

  Raoul and Jessica were well within their comfort zone there, with ageing waiters and familiar food. They found themselves surprisingly comfortable with one another.

  In the restaurant just off Queen Square, Raoul and Jessica talked about the Lebanon and the Sudan and Mongolia. (We don’t use those definite articles now.) They ate fusilli and farfalle and drank a bottle of San Pellegrino. They spoke of Steve Carter, who had retreated to the comfort of the Wendy House, but had found no comfort there, or thereafter. They spoke of Zain and his long heroic journey north from the oasis. They spoke of Dr Nicholls and R. D. Laing. They spoke of phantom pain in missing limbs, and of the neurology of the traumatised bladder. They spoke of Sylvie and her son Joshua. They had a lot to talk about.

  Perhaps they spoke of me, their obliging facilitator, but if they did, Jess did not report it.

  Jessica and Raoul met for their second lunch in a Lebanese restaurant near Victoria, where they ate a variety of challenging raw vegetables, some rice and some beans and some splayed grilled quails, and drank a glass of red wine. They talked about exile. They talked about Africa and the lake. Raoul asked Jessica why she had never been back to Africa, if it had meant so much to her, and her ready answer (Anna, Anna, money, Anna) died on her lips. She stared at Raoul as he tidily nibbled at a bone. He smiled, to indicate that there was no threat, no malice in his question.

  Why had she never been back to Africa? She could have cajoled a friendly editor, in the days when there was easy money in print journalism. Someone would have commissioned her to write about lepers or lobster claw or ostrich foot, had she set her heart on it. She had been good at cajoling, when she was young. But she had never even tried. She could have gone while Anna was safe at Marsh Court. She could have sent Anna home for a couple of weeks to her Broughborough grandparents, while they were still alive and willing. But she had never even tried.

  She had stayed within her comfort zone, with Anna.

  That useful if vulgar and irritating little phrase, that journalistic, cheap-popular-psychology phrase ‘comfort zone’, hadn’t existed in those early days, when she had sought whatever it is that we now mean by it.

  No, reflected Jess on her underground journey home to Finsbury Park tube station, she hadn’t travelled far. She had made an excuse of Anna. She had withdrawn to the life of the mind, to the idle life of the busy mind. The magpie mind. This was the accusation which, prompted by Raoul, she now drew up against herself.

  She had made Anna dependent. She had been wrong to make her so dependent. She had permitted too great a closeness, in too small a space. She had made Anna safe and herself indispensable. This had been short-sighted. Few had dared to warn her, but some had tried. Maybe she should have listened to Karen, her social worker.

  Karen tried to warn her, but I didn’t. Par délicatesse. I was a coward on this front.

  Par délicatesse j’ai perdu ma vie.

  Before her next lunch engagement with Raoul, Jess found herself thinking about those large horizons. She thought about the thousands and thousands of air miles that so many of her friends and acquaintances had travelled over the last few decades. In her twenties she had been the adventurer, but now even the stay-at-homes had overtaken her. Travel had become commonplace. The upper air was thickly crowded with economic migrants and refugees, criss-crossing one another unhappily in mid-air; with pleasure-seekers and holiday-makers; with executives needlessly visiting foreign branches of their companies; with trustees of boards, with politicians and NGO employees on freebies; with bankers and engineers and salesmen; with grandmothers and bridegrooms; with party-goers and pilgrims; with jihadists and journalists and novelists and poets on their way to festivals or conferences or global summits. Global displacement, for reasons both trivial and profound, had accelerated and intensified, and not even major catastrophes—airplane-engine failures, terrorism, volcanoes, earthquakes, nuclear disasters—seemed likely to halt it. Only a few neurotics and ecology fanatics stayed at home.

  All the impenetrable places of the earth have been documented and filmed and probed and contaminated. You can see them on television any night of the week in all their National Geographic banality. Jess has been told that in the United States whole television channels are devoted to travel and ethnography. Round and round they go on a loop, the simple peoples of the earth.

  Jess hates the National Geographic shop on Regent Street. It is as false as false can be. It is a virtual world of almost indescribable ugliness.

  People don’t need to travel to see other peoples. They can watch them on the loop from their beds. But people go just the same. To Africa, to Thailand, to Brazil, to Antarctica.

  My Ike, always a wanderer, works for a backpacker’s guidebook, and has been to more uncomfortable places than most. In theory Jess ought to disprove of this, and so perhaps should I, but Ike is a charmer and an enthusiast and we love him, despite his massive carbon footprint.

  Jess’s sister Vee has conspicuously avoided England. She returns once or twice a year, for funerals. She attended the funeral of their father, then that of their mother. J
ess doesn’t like to ask her where she will live when, in a few years, she is obliged to retire. She and her sister are not close. Vee has no children, has never married, is secretive about her personal life.

  A few eccentric, green-minded, middle-class intellectuals are now turning against foreign travel. Having been everywhere they could possibly have wanted to go, having tired of queues at airports and security procedures, they now make a virtue of refusing to fly. The fox and the grapes, thinks Jess, a little sourly.

  Bob still flits about a lot. He doesn’t tire. He doesn’t mind aeroplanes, he doesn’t give a damn about global warming, in fact he says he thinks its dangers are much exaggerated. He’s still based in England, but he takes off for China, for Australia, for the Solomon Islands, for Alaska, whenever a commission comes up. He can still get work. He’s still restless. He hasn’t finished yet. She doesn’t think she envies him, because she thinks his work is shallow. But maybe she does envy him. She envies his freedom, his temperament, his weightlessness. She now thinks she was lucky to have had a happy couple of years with her surprising husband Bob.

  They still haven’t divorced, and when he is in London he lives happily alone in a large flat in Herne Hill, south of the river, a long way from Camden, in an area that Jess found surprisingly genteel and leafy when she first visited him. She’s been over there a couple of times with Anna. It is very different from the urban North London in which she is so deeply embedded. It has large trees, green space, wide roads, tall wide houses, deep gardens.

  Statistically, a high proportion of marriages that produce children with learning difficulties or disabilities founder, for obvious reasons. Jess hasn’t had to worry about that. Bob hadn’t really been part of that plot.