The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  As Raoul recites this story, Jess sees why he needs to enlist her interest. This is the kind of subject about which she knows more than most people. She is a good listener. She is usually a good listener, but this story is tailor-made for her. She is transfixed. She does not suspect that Raoul had planted himself at Wibletts, hijacked a lift back to London through a rainstorm in her friend Eleanor’s car and met with her thrice for lunch simply in order to offload responsibility for Ursula, but she can see Ursula may have figured in his otherwise somewhat surprising interest in Jess.

  She confesses to Raoul that she too had been drawn back to visit Halliday and Troutwell, that a summer or two ago she and her daughter Anna had trespassed over its barbed-wire boundaries and picnicked in the grounds. It had a powerful pull, that place, a scenic and a spiritual pull, as, in its more majestic Italianate urban way, did Colney Hatch, high on its North London ridge. But she and Anna had seen no sign of any residents at Troutwell, legal or illegal. No puffs of illicit smoke, no washing hung out dry, no Kentucky Fried Chicken cartons. They’d seen graffiti, and a lot of CCTV notices, but no people.

  ‘Well, she’s there now,’ says Raoul. ‘Or she says she is.’

  Has he been to see her? No, he hasn’t braved the journey; he wouldn’t know how get there. He hasn’t been near the place for decades. He had been in a bad way when he was first referred from UCH, and he was never quite sure exactly where he was throughout all of his stay. He says this apologetically. It had been an island for him, a refuge, an anchorage. He’d been a lost man from the Middle East.

  ‘I know it’s in Essex,’ he says, ‘but I don’t know Essex.’

  ‘How do you know she’s really there?’ asks Jess in a challenging tone. ‘I think it’s a very unlikely story.’

  ‘I did see her when once she was in Taunton,’ says Raoul, but he knows that’s not an answer. ‘She was living in a maisonette in an estate behind the station. It was quite pleasant in its way. Pleasant little houses with front gardens. But she had to leave. Or so she told me.’

  ‘It could be a fantasy,’ says Jess, her mind flashing back to Steve slumped in a deckchair in the dubious safety of the Wendy House. ‘It could all be a fantasy.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ says Raoul, and she is inclined to believe him.

  ‘She must be getting on by now,’ says Jess, still playing for time.

  ‘She’s very robust, physically,’ says Raoul. ‘She looked strong when I saw her in Somerset. She was’—he pauses, looking for a word—‘imposing?’

  (His English is subtle. French and Arabic were his first languages, but his use of English is precise and delicate. His accent is now mid-Atlantic, but a refined mid-Atlantic.)

  ‘Does she say she wants to see you?’ asks Jess.

  He nods his neat head primly.

  ‘Always, always,’ he says.

  ‘The postmarks,’ he says, ‘would fit with Halliday and Troutwell. Essex postmarks, an Essex postcode.’

  Jess wonders if Ursula remembers her. She doubts it. Ursula had visibly enjoyed being the only woman in a group of men, the queen of the little refuge. She had not welcomed Jessica’s visits. If she remembers Jess at all, it would probably be with resentment. Jess had stolen Zain.

  Ursula’s grey hair had been abundant, her complexion fair but her colour high, the naked nape of her neck proud. Ursula reassembles herself in Jess’s memory; she comes into focus.

  ‘Do you ever reply to her letters?’ asks Jess.

  ‘Not very often,’ he says. ‘She gives a PO box number. And she uses second-class stamps.’

  He offers this as though it were convincing circumstantial evidence of his tale.

  Ursula, it appears, had written to Raoul at great length about her religious or pseudo-religious revelations, about the demonic and angelic voices she has heard, some of them urging her to acts of violence. He did not read these letters scrupulously, and indeed much of their content was impenetrable, as she used cyphers and symbols for parts of her message, but he had got the gist of it. She was using him as a confessor, as once she had used the priest, and, after the priest, Dr Nicholl. She spoke, or she wrote, but it was not necessary to listen or to read.

  ‘She is,’ says Raoul, ‘in her own way, impressive. Not to say fascinating. Bi-polar, schizophrenic, hard to tell.’

  ‘And,’ he repeats, ‘I have to say, manipulative.’

  Jess agrees that she will go with Raoul to Troutwell, to see if they can find Saint Ursula.

  ‘That would be very good of you,’ says Raoul.

  Jess suggests that if he is serious about this enterprise, as it seems he is, it might perhaps be wise to contact the local social services in advance to see if Ursula is known to the authorities.

  She can see from his holding expression that he does not wholly approve of this practical proposal. Might it not be compromising, might it not cause trouble, might it not suggest a degree of commitment and responsibility which he—they—would then be obliged to honour? She recognises that this may be what he thinks, although he does not articulate it. It hovers between them, over an unwise second double espresso.

  Jess thinks she has enough to worry about, with Anna.

  But maybe he hasn’t got enough to worry about.

  Maybe she ought to take on Ursula too.

  She says she’ll think about it, she’s got to go now, she looks at her watch, she’s got to get back to her desk in Humanities Two. (She hasn’t really got to get back to her desk—the Reading Rooms are very full, so she’s dutifully cleared her desk and left her laptop in a locker—but he won’t know that.)

  It is his turn to pay the bill, and she thanks him. She will get in touch, she promises. She might make one or two noncommittal and, as it were, semi-anonymous inquiries.

  He is right to think she has contacts in the social services in Essex. She could ring her young friend Lauren, who will tell her the name of somebody in the community mental health team, who may know of Ursula’s case. Somebody must.

  Jess saw Lauren quite recently, and appropriately, at Birkbeck at a seminar on the Death of the Asylum. Lively Lauren had updated her about Essex County matters, including one notorious and much misreported child-abuse case which had lingered in the headlines, and she had also described a rare sighting of Anna’s beloved Hazel, who had been seen teaching group singing on a holistic holiday course on an island in the Atlantic. Hazel had left Marsh Court for the sun, and the Essex canals for the ocean. Lauren, another member of the band of the warm and golden-hearted, is an Essex girl, and she sticks it out in Essex.

  One of the speakers at the Birkbeck seminar had given a vivid account of Friern Barnet in the old days. She had done her earliest psychiatric work there. She had slides of the curious egg-box motif that had decorated the ceilings: dirty cream when she had first observed it, and later what she called a surprising shade of pink. She also commented on the curious properties of the lava floors of some of the old wards, which were cold to the feet and had seemed specially designed to soak in and retain urine. When replaced by wooden flooring, bedwetting had diminished appreciably.

  Friern Barnet had left a deep impression on the speaker.

  Friern Barnet had been a vast institution. Arden Gate had been vast, and so had Severalls, and so had Troutwell. They had once housed multitudes, those old palaces.

  Ursula is sheltering fiercely in a little space, a little, little space, her last refuge. So thinks Jess, with pity.

  On the way to King’s Cross tube station, as Jess walks past the perpetual building site and Big Issue vendors of the façade of the St Pancras Hotel, she checks her mobile phone. On this stretch of beleaguered waif-tormented pavement she always checks her phone. There is a voice message from Anna at the day centre, describing her lunch (hamburger and chips, but, although Anna likes hamburgers more than she should, she sounds faintly disappointed, almost rather anxious?), and two texts, one from Victoria and one from Bob. Victoria’s text reads SPARE TICKET 4 WIG HALL FDY, CAN U CUM
? For some reason Victoria thinks Jess likes concerts, which are as little to her taste as the American Civil War. Victoria thinks she is doing Jess a favour by inviting her, and Jess cannot disabuse her. And Jess does not like Victoria’s abbreviation of ‘come’. It is louche. Victoria’s diction and spelling are louche. She reminds Jess very strongly of Virginia Woolf. Maybe she has consciously modelled herself on Woolf.

  Bob’s proposition is more attractive. She pauses to read it in the windy mouth of the tube station on the Euston Road. Bob writes: BOTSWANA KILBURN TUES 22? CAFÉ LAUNCH, GREAT AFRO FOOD, BRING ANNA?

  Bob knows her appetites. This might be shaming, was once, but is no longer. Great Afro food sounds good.

  Yes, she and Anna will probably go to the Kilburn party Bob and Anna enjoy a party. Bob is thoughtful about suggesting occasional outings that can include Anna.

  Maybe at this point Jess was already asking herself if she could ask me to drive her and Raoul to Troutwell, if it should come to that. As I had driven her and Sylvie to Wibletts. I was a useful friend, an old friend with a new car, and she’d already softened me up for future requests by her entertaining descriptions of Raoul’s gallant lunches and menu preferences. (I was particularly gripped by his views of the superiority of meat-on-the-bone, and have found myself becoming phobic in sympathy about anything skinned, boned or filleted.) She gossiped freely about Raoul, in a way that she had never gossiped about Zain or even about Bob. That’s how I knew she hadn’t been to bed with him, as, I suppose, even at her age, even at our age, she might have done.

  Standing on the Piccadilly Line platform, Jess gazes at the advertisements on the hoarding opposite, with their disparate sales pitches: an ancient brand of whisky matured in charred oak barrels, a sober black-and-white poster in a serious font announcing a course on Meditation and Spirituality, a dating agency for the colourful and nubile, and cut-price air fares to Africa offered by a safari company. It says it costs under £300 to fly to Cape Town or Namibia or Kenya and back again. Once you could live in London on £300 for months, but now it doesn’t seem a lot of money. Would Anna like to go on safari? Would an insurance company cover Anna and Jess to go on a safari?

  Kenya is represented by a zebra. X is for Xylophone, Z is for Zebra. Anna knows that. Anna knows her alphabet by heart, and can recite it as correctly as Jess, but its higher uses still remain largely mysterious to her.

  A little dark black-brown dusty velvet mouse is scuttling busily between the tracks over the nuggets of spent coke and clinker in the gulf below her. It is spotted by a lank young man with a scruffy red beard and a blue rucksack, and other passengers including Jess spot him spotting it, and a row of newly arrived foreigners, indigenous commuters, multi-ethnic students and bag-burdened shoppers lines up to gaze down with interest at the lively indifferent little creature going about its own business. They all seem well disposed towards it, and most of them are smiling. Perhaps that is because it is safe down there, safe in its own subterranean dominion. It will not climb up on to the platform and attack skirts and trousers. It has its own world, where it does no harm. The travellers can afford to smile. They admire its survival instincts.

  The lions had roared in the darkness round the camp.

  Tourists are occasionally killed on safari in Africa. Jess always registers reports of these incidents with a slightly sardonic interest. Not many lions and leopards kill tourists, but elephant, buffalo, hippopotamus and crocodile often feature as agents of death.

  Her supervisor Guy Brighouse had died in the field, some time ago, while still in his sixties. Well, not quite in the field, but near enough. He had not been killed by wild animals, nor had he succumbed to malaria, as so many missionaries and anthropologists have done. His death had been human, mysterious and violent. He had been killed in a street incident in Harare. It was said that he had been involved in some political protest and had been gunned down by the police, but the facts were never established. There were witnesses, but they told different stories. It was known that in the old Chatham House pre-independence days in London he had been well acquainted with both Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo.

  His body was found dumped in a hotel car park.

  Guy was the kind of man about whom people told that kind of story. The stories became true because he invoked them. They clustered round him like bees or birds. He drew the gunfire, the flame-thrower. He became his own legend, he made up his own myth, and it ended in a bin bag behind the Brontë Hotel in Harare. Jess believes he experienced a final rush of triumph as he met his death more than halfway. It had all gone according to plan. Wiry, small, tough, provocative, he had provoked his ending.

  His memorial service had been very different from Jimmy’s Highbury funeral. Camp, baroque, outré. She strings together these words and tests them as she sits on the rattling tube on its way to Finsbury Park.

  SOAS had done Guy proud and turned out in force, the peoples of many lands. Americans, Canadians, Africans, Brazilians, Samoans. A bizarre late-twentieth-century international ceremonial had seen Brighouse on his way. Unlike Jimmy Parker, who had known a few square miles of the foundations of North London as though they were the grounds of his own garden and his own estate, and had not strayed far beyond them, Guy had attempted to traverse and interpret the globe. Restless, footloose, he had never stayed anywhere very long—a year or two here, a year or two there. Superficial, his colleagues enviously judged him. He was a natural linguist, famed, like Richard Burton, for being able to pick up a working relationship with any language he encountered, in any part of the world. He hadn’t published very much: as one of his eulogists commented, he preferred talking and walking to writing. His flamboyant reputation would not long outlive him. A grasshopper, not an ant.

  Jess had seen Guy from time to time, over the years. He cherished a soft spot for her, from those early Bangweulu days. She had been his poppet, his protegée. He had hardened and shrivelled like a nut, a brown dry nut. A dry little hopper, with a sharp jaw.

  The memorial had included a reading from the ancestor poetry of the perished tribe of the clay mansions, in its original language, with some presumably freely inventive phrases of translation from Guy. The ancestors are dying, their houses are in ruins, the living have abandoned them, the living have gone to the cities and sold their souls.

  There had also been songs, some of them outrageous.

  Guy and the Professor had known each other quite well. Guy had warned her off the Professor and his habits, but she had taken no heed.

  The Professor had been, in his way, generous about Anna. He had settled money on her. Jess does not like to remember this fact, and has almost managed to forget it.

  Jess now knows that she ought to google the Professor, to see if he is alive or dead. The depth of her terror at the thought of initiating this act, this investigation, scares her, and interests her. It reveals to her that she is more fragile than she likes to think she is. She has procrastinated for so many years, and during these years technology has altered beyond any possible expectations. All she needs to do is to type in his name. It will be there, somewhere. An obituary, a final publication, a footnote, a cross-reference on Google Scholar. She is waiting, she thinks, for something to propel her into action. It will come.

  Yes, it will come.

  When she gets home after her third lunch with Raoul, Anna is not yet back from the day centre, so Jess rings her and Anna says she will be on her way home with one of the minders who is passing the end of their street. Anna sounds subdued, and remains subdued on her return. Jess probes a little but cannot discover any cause for the shadow that lies over her. Anna’s emotional landscape is rarely tempestuous, though sometimes dull, and this cloud will surely pass, but it saddens Jess. Is Anna annoyed that her mother broke off her studies on sanitary protection to take lunch with Raoul? Is she jealous of this word called ‘Raoul’? Maybe, if Jess is to continue to see Raoul, she should invite him to her home and introduce him to Anna, but this is a step she does not
feel ready to take. Her life with Anna is so composed, so settled. To cheer Anna, Jess irresponsibly suggests that next year they might take a trip to Africa, to see the animals.

  Anna does not respond to this idea very warmly, and why should she? She has no sense of the old depths, the hinterland from which it proceeds.

  She doesn’t seem interested in Jess’s radical proposal.

  Jess is shocked by her own suggestion. It is not like her to be so random. But she is beginning to think that she could perhaps take Anna to Africa. Why not? It wouldn’t kill them, would it? It would be an adventure. And they could afford it. According to that poster, it wasn’t very expensive.

  Anna, the next morning, seemed still to be subdued. Jess decided they should both stay at home for the day, and whiled away some time by emailing her friend Lauren in Colchester. Did Lauren know anything about alleged squatters at Troutwell? Whom should Jess contact in the CMHT? She googled Troutwell, and saw that since she had last looked at the site there were some new photographs which did indeed suggest recent habitation, as well as a greater degree of vandalism than she and Anna had encountered. Breaking into and photographing large derelict listed buildings seemed a not uncommon hobby, according to this website. Jess had not known that and was slightly worried to think of herself as belonging to such a strange and deviant fraternity. She had thought her interests special, but clearly they weren’t.

  Was Ursula in there somewhere? It seemed neither probable nor improbable. It was a worry to her, but not a very serious worry. It was Raoul’s adopted problem, not hers.

  Serious worry hit her at lunchtime. Anna, toying halfheartedly with her baked potato and mushrooms, looked up at her mother and said in a solemn, anxious, embarrassed voice, ‘Mum, it keeps on coming out.’