As she sets off via the British Library to her third rendezvous with Raoul, thinking of horizons broad and narrow, she remembers the powerful and well-attended funeral that she and Anna had been to earlier in the week. It was the funeral of her plumber, whom she had known for nearly forty years. He had been the plumber of all the local families and he looked after much of our neighbourhood, as his father had before him. We knew him well, and he knew us. Jimmy Parker was of the old English white artisan class, and he had prospered way beyond his father’s expectations, as the gentrification of Canonbury and Highbury enriched his growing parish, as new bathrooms and showers were installed and penthouses and basements were added on and refurbished. He was reliable, and, although his prices went up and up as he acquired more vans and more employees and a new logo and extended his business to building and electrics, he was loyal to us, as we to him. He gave us reasonable rates. It was Jimmy who came round to Jess’s that Christmas to fix the broken lavatory bowl, it was Jimmy who rebuilt Maroussia’s top floor and created her smart new bathroom, it was Jimmy who fixed Sylvie’s new house in Canonbury Square, it was Jimmy who stepped in when a boiler cranked itself to death, it was Jimmy who knew which tree roots were throttling the drains or making their way into basements. He knew our infrastructure and our secrets underground.
Jess remembers very clearly the day, six months or so earlier, when she discovered that he was dying. She’d called him round to look at the shower attachment, which had finally resisted her attempts to stick it together with silver duct tape, a plumbing matter of no great moment, and she had been prepared to greet him with her usual neighbourly cheeriness and small talk. But when she saw him on her threshold, she knew at once. ‘How are you, Jimmy?’ she asked brightly, trying to conceal her shock at his appearance, for she knew the answer. He shook his head as he stepped indoors and wiped his shoes on the orange-brown whiskered doormat. He didn’t say anything. He had shrunk, his round and cheerful face had folded and sunken inwards, his pink complexion had yellowed, his whole body manifested mortality. He shook his head, and Jess, impulsively, put one arm around him, then quickly withdrew it for fear of offence or presumption. But he smiled wryly; he did not mind.
He was smaller than she was. He looked smaller than ever.
Together they went up to the bathroom and looked at the old shower head, and Jimmy confirmed that it wasn’t worth spending time messing about with it, he’d get her a new one.
‘It’s done you a good few years,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Jess.
At the bottom of the stairs, in the narrow London hallway, he said, ‘They say the chemo might work, but they don’t sound very cheery about it.’
Jess asked which hospital, and he told her.
‘I hope they’re looking after you properly,’ she said.
‘The wife and the boys have been very good,’ was his reply.
Then he said, with his hand on the latch, ‘I’ve not travelled far in my life, Jessica. I’ve not got far. All my life I’ve spent in these parts, as my dad did before me.’
He said these words seriously, as though he had been premeditating them.
‘You’re very well known here,’ said Jess. ‘You know us all. We all depend on you here. You’ve looked after us all for a long time.’
‘No,’ he repeated, ‘I’ve not been far away from where I began.’
He opened the door, and Jess once again patted him nervously on the shoulder, and then he brightened a little and said, standing there on the threshold, ‘I was born at home in Riversdale Road, you know, just off Clissold Park. No. 70. It’s still a nice road, Riversdale.’
‘Yes,’ said Jess, ‘it is.’
The thought of his birthplace comforted them both.
He came to fix the shower head, with his own hands, on what was clearly his last visit. Jess learnt that he was taken back into hospital, and expected bad news, but she met him once more, in the newsagent’s on the corner, looking as though he were at death’s door, which he was. He was chatting to the proprietor, but broke off when he saw Jess.
‘They’ve let me out,’ he said, with a certain bravado.
She knew that was not good, and didn’t pretend to think it was. She bought her newspaper and a box of eggs, and said goodbye, leaving him to his last neighbourhood round.
The funeral was held in the Victorian church on the quadrant where Ollie and Josh used to be boy scouts, and Jess and Anna went, out of respect. So did Katie and Sylvie. There was a good turn-out. We didn’t think Jimmy had been a religious man, but he’d known the vicar for many years, and the vicar had known him, which came to the same thing. The few words spoken were appropriate. We were told that Jimmy had been loyal and faithful to the last, a reliable friend in times of trouble, a pillar of his community like his father before him, a rock of strength. We were told a funny story about the night the church was flooded by a burst main in the bitter winter of 1963, and how Jimmy came to the rescue in his pyjamas and macintosh and woolly hat. ‘God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform, and so did Jimmy,’ said the vicar. And then we sang the hymn.
We also sang ‘The Day Thou Gavest Lord is Ended’ and ‘He Who Would Valiant Be’ (Anna singing bravely and in tune), and the vicar read the familiar passage of the death of Mr Valiant-for-Truth from Pilgrim’s Progress. ‘So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.’ And one of the boys, now in his forties, who had learnt to play the trumpet at the primary school round the corner, valiantly drew a breathy gasping phrase or two from his old boyhood instrument to send his father on his way. Not quite the ‘Last Post’, but it brought tears to the eyes just the same.
Jess, when she got home that afternoon, had taken down her old Everyman copy of Pilgrim’s Progress to look up Mr Valiant-for-Truth and Mr Feeble-Mind, but found herself distracted by Mr Despondency and his daughter Much-Afraid. She had never noticed these minor characters before. They had been rescued, it seemed, by Greatheart from Doubting Castle and the clutches of Giant Despair. Mr Despondency, on the verge of crossing the river of death, apologised to his fellow-pilgrims on behalf of both of them for their having been ‘troublesome in every company’, with their desponds and fears, and as they went to the brink of the river his last words were ‘Farewell Night, Welcome Day’. His daughter, on the other hand, ‘went through the river singing, but none could understand what she said’.
What had happened to Mrs Despondency? Jess could not discover. Maybe she had been fallen by the wayside and been choked in the Slough of Despond.
She went through the river singing, but none could understand what she said.
Was Much-Afraid singing of the further bourne, the undiscovered country, the shore that Steve the Poet had tried but failed to reach? That bourne from which no traveller returns?
It is hard to know what Anna fears. She is too polite to reveal much. But fears she must have. She has been a little quiet of late, as though there was something on her mind. Maybe Jimmy’s funeral had upset her, but it had been right for them both to go.
Jimmy had lived in his patch of London, generation to generation, and now his sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren holidayed in Spain. Raoul was an exile, a man of the world.
His son worked at Cern in Switzerland, his ex-wife the anthropologist was, or had recently been, in Mongolia.
Jess and Raoul met for their third lunch in the Novotel on the Euston Road, next to the British Library, where Jess had been consulting books on the history of women’s sanitary protection, the changing names under which it had been known, its VAT status, and its provision in NHS hospitals and other selected public institutions. The lunch venue was her choice, the meeting his suggestion.
She likes the spacious women’s toilets in the BL. The sanitary-disposal system is labelled ‘Ultimate Hygiene Solutions’, which sounds more technological than it appears to be. It’s just a plastic bin.
Jess was beginning to speculate about the nature of Raoul
’s interest in her. It is true that they had a great deal to talk about, as they covered the years since Halliday Hall—the politics of the Middle East, the rise of Islam, the wane of Marxism, the London bombings, neurology, urology, phantom pain—but did he have any more personal motive in seeking these encounters? Was there something he needed to tell her? Was there something he wanted from her?
She considered herself long past the age of courtship and romance, and assumed that his courtly manners were habitual.
Perhaps he was sorry for her? Perhaps her frailty and uncharacteristic fainting fit on that hot Wibletts afternoon had given him the wrong impression, had given him the idea that she needed protection, had suggested to him an entrée into her life, had given him a hold over her? Surely not. She did not think she presented a pitiable spectacle, and, even if she did, she did not see why that would have appealed to him.
Unless, of course, he was very lonely. He was still a stranger in this land. That was a possibility.
He was a man who would always be a stranger.
As she saluted him at the table by the glass window overlooking the harsh pavement and the brutal wide and unattractive street, she caught sight of herself reflected in the pane and thought she looked fine. A handsome woman, for her age. An independent woman. She was still confident in her physical presence. She was wearing a jaunty red beret and, for the benefit of Raoul, had applied a gloss of scarlet lipstick.
As she pulled out her chair and seated herself, smiling, and arranged her bag on the floor by her side, and shook out her napkin independently over her knee, the image of Noah Trelissick, poet and editor, swooped unbidden into the picture gallery of her memory, to be followed almost instantly by a more faded shot of the Professor on the carpet in his SOAS study. A momentary spasm of archaic sexual vanity and the unusual application of lipstick had summoned these shades.
She shakes them away. She has hardly thought of Noah in years, and his random and pointless intrusion is not welcome now.
The Professor is another matter. Maybe he reappears with a purpose. She does not think of him often either, but she is very slowly beginning to admit to herself that this is because she dare not think of him.
She is, after all, getting old. She is beginning to have a sense of an ending.
She returns to the present, intensifies her womanly but unseductive gaze at Raoul, picks up the menu, warns him off the buffet, asks him about the exhibition over the road at the Wellcome Institute. It is about surgery during the American Civil War (it must be some anniversary of something?), and he has had a hand in it. It connects with the discovery of the phenomenon of phantom pain, he says. She says she will visit it but knows she won’t. (The subject does not wholly appeal. She is interested in surgery, but not in war.) She listens politely and orders slow-cooked belly of pork. Belly of pork is the fashionable dish of the autumn, and it reminds Jess of happy days shopping in the Blackstock Road for pigs’ feet and pigs’ tails. Raoul draws the line at belly of pork, although he insists that he will be happy, indeed delighted and curious, to watch her eat it. He chooses lamb cutlets.
Jess confesses that she seems irresistibly drawn to ordering taboo meals when invited out to lunch or dinner in restaurants, meals that are chosen as though on purpose to offend her hosts, or, on other occasions, her guests. Pork, hare, shellfish, nettle soup, gulls’ eggs. Raoul articulates his preference for meat on the bone (which she had not yet quite consciously registered, but now recognises); he prefers it, he says, because you can see where it has come from. He is very suspicious of reconstituted meat. They discuss, briefly, forbidden foods, and Zain’s strong views on the cucumber sandwich. Her mind still full of menstruation and the Ultimate Hygiene Solutions of the British Library, Jess almost introduces the subject of menstrual taboos, but decides she should not. Raoul is a fastidious man, even though his ex-wife is an anthropologist, and she does not want to put him off his cutlets.
She has not invited Raoul to her home. She has not asked him over the threshold. She has kept him out in the public conversational domain, in the detached domain of topics. She is wary of letting people get too close. He has not been introduced to Anna, although he knows about her, and always asks after her.
Raoul lives in an apartment block in St John’s Wood. He hasn’t exactly told her this, but he has intimated it. Men are not required to reveal or betray their domestic details or habits, and she imagines him impersonally tended by cleaners and guarded by a concierge, in a bachelor way of life embraced with relief after the defection of his nomadic French wife. She knows he likes to walk through Regent’s Park, to glimpse the long necks of the tall giraffes in the Giraffe House and the birds in Lord Snowden’s aviary. He is a man at home in the landscape of his adopted city.
But maybe he is lonely. She cannot tell.
She had not seen giraffe in Africa, but she had seen wildebeest and lechwe and marsh-dwelling sitatunga and plump-bellied zebra and fish-eagle and the rare shoebill. The rounded bellies of the zebra were as tight as drums. There had been a balding zebra-skin rug on the floor by the bed in the little hotel where they had stayed on their first night in Lusaka, before setting off towards the swamps. She had not liked it at all, and is surprised she can remember it. It was far too realistic. It was all too easy to see where it had come from, what it had once been. She did not like its legs.
As he neatly aligns his knife and fork over the curved picked neck bones of the cutlets, Raoul comes up with his proposition. She had sensed he had one, but she had had no idea of what it would be.
Does she remember Ursula, he asks. He expects the answer yes, because he has mentioned her before, but not in this newly meaningful way. He has bided his time with his update on Ursula.
‘Yes, of course,’ replies Jess cautiously.
He wants her to go with him to see Ursula Strawson.
She still takes some responsibility for Steve Carter, and Raoul has kept in touch, albeit anxiously and reluctantly, with Ursula. Or she, it now appears, has kept in touch with him.
‘I got to know her well in Halliday,’ he says. ‘It was a place where we all got to know one another well. And she wrote to me. She wrote many letters.’ He pauses, smiles sadly. ‘Many hundreds of letters. Hundreds of letters and thousands and thousands of words.’
‘Oh dear,’ says Jess inadequately.
She toys with the remains of her bread roll.
‘I thought she was in love with Zain,’ Jess proffers tentatively.
‘She was. But she transferred.’
‘Oh dear,’ says Jess again.
‘At first she transferred to me, and then she gave up on me and transferred back to God.’
Over a double espresso, Raoul tells Jess the story of Ursula.
Ursula, he relates, had seen God when young. God had visited her in a shining light, from somewhere above the pelmet of her bedroom curtains (she was very precise about his location), and she had been converted. God had appeared to her in her bedroom in Redhill, and the glory of the Lord had shone about her, and she had risen from her bed a believer. She was sure she had not been asleep. It had been a waking vision. And, thus awakened, she had joined the Roman Catholic Church.
It was a Roman Catholic god, the God of the saints and the martyrs, who had appeared to her. She wished to be a martyr, to embrace the plague-ridden and the lepers, of whom there were few in Redhill. Her lower-middle-class, non-practising, disbelieving Church of England family had been appalled by this rebellious move. (Jess fills in some of this background detail for herself, from clues in Raoul’s speech, for, although he is very quick, some of the very English social detail was meaningless or puzzling to him, although he reported it as faithfully as he could.) Ursula had flounced off, left her mother and father as Christ had commanded, changed her first name from Liz to Ursula (she had been christened Elizabeth, as were so many, in the wake of the birth of the princess) and had after much persistence been admitted to undertake a novitiate in a Cistercian convent in Hampshire
. But this novitiate had gone badly, setting the pattern for a series of future evictions and rejections, and she had been politely but firmly discouraged from pursuing her dramatic sense of religious vocation.
She had been persuaded by the nuns that she was needed for service in the community, had resumed the teacher training that God had interrupted, and then had worked quietly for some years at a Catholic primary school in Croydon, until a series of spectacular psychotic breakdowns had precipitated her into ECT at an NHS psychiatrist hospital. She had been miraculously rescued from the hospital by the intervention of her concerned and conscientious GP, who happened to have heard of Dr Nicholls’s outfit at Halliday.
‘It’s surprising,’ says Raoul, ‘the number of people who have taken up Ursula’s cause.’
‘Including you,’ says Jess.
‘Yes,’ admits Raoul. ‘She is very manipulative.’
‘But,’ he says, ‘also she has suffered very greatly. Her episodes were very serious. They were horrifying.’
He is not making fun of Ursula’s story.
Some years ago, Raoul continues, long after Ursula had been expelled from Halliday by Dr Nicholls, long after the general dispersal of NHS patients into the community, she had taken sanctuary in another nunnery, this time in a lay community attached to an abbey in Somerset, but had been evicted for bad behaviour. The nuns had not been able to put up with her any longer. Their patience ran out. She had taken to practising selfdenial and austerity, and had visions of martyrdom that were very irritating to her less ambitious co-believers, whose aim was to keep going as best they could in an age of dwindling faith and finance. She was given to violent bouts of abuse and recrimination. She had been given notice and had been moved out to sheltered accommodation in Taunton, but something had gone wrong with her local-authority funding there, and she’d been turned out of that too. So she had made her way back eastwards to Essex, where she had once been happy, and claims that she is now living in a squat at Troutwell Farm, near the old site of abandoned Halliday, with a collection of tramps and vandals.
The Pure Gold Baby Page 21