The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  Jess put down her fork and looked at her grown-up daughter’s worried face. She couldn’t think what Anna was talking about.

  ‘What comes out?’ she was obliged to ask, as Anna could go no further.

  ‘I can’t stop it. And it’s red,’ said Anna. ‘It’s the wrong colour. It’s like blood.’

  At the heavy word ‘blood’ her face crumpled and tears filled her eyes, tears of sadness for her mother, of worry for herself.

  ‘Where from?’ asked Jess, putting her hand comfortingly on her daughter’s hand.

  ‘You know,’ said Anna apologetically, her face pink with shame. ‘When I go to the toilet.’

  Slowly, painfully, Anna disclosed that for some time now she had been mildly incontinent, needing to pee all the time, sometimes wetting her pants. And there had been blood in her urine. Pink urine had been trickling into the white lavatory bowl which Jimmy Parker had installed just after Christmas all those years ago. Yes, nearly every time she went to the toilet. And she had to go so often. No, it wasn’t anything to do with her monthlies, it wasn’t a Tampax thing. (Jess had taught Anna to use tampons; it had been hard to explain the procedure and hard for Anna to learn to do it, but she had learnt and coped with it well. A useful womanly skill.)

  How long had this been going on for? Anna couldn’t tell. She didn’t have a good grasp of the passing of weeks and months and years, although she could latch on to dates, birthdays, promised events. She knew they were going to meet Bob next Tuesday in Kilburn in an African restaurant. She knew it was her mother’s birthday in October and hers a month later. But she couldn’t tell when the bleeding had started.

  It had been going on quite a while, her mother guessed; she’d been hiding this for quite a while, hoping it would stop and go away.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Jess confidently. ‘It’s nothing. This kind of things often happens. It happened to me once. We’ll get it checked out, but we’ll find it’s nothing. You may have to have some antibiotics, we’ll find out.’

  ‘Did it really happen to you?’ asked Anna.

  ‘Yes,’ lied Jess.

  Well, in fact, she now remembered, she had once had some blood apparently coming from the wrong place, but she’d connected that with the irritation caused by an obsolete bit of invasive fish-hook contraception she’d used while sleeping with Zain. That could hardly be the cause of Anna’s bleeding.

  Jess thought the fish-hook had also given her cystitis.

  ‘Really?’ insisted Anna. ‘You had it too?’

  ‘Yes,’ repeated Jess. ‘It was nothing.’

  Anna brightened and reached for some more butter to liven up her cooling baked potato.

  ‘Hey, steady on,’ said Jess admiringly, as Anna helped herself to a thick slab of New Zealand Anchor. And they both laughed.

  Jess knew she shouldn’t look at the internet, and she didn’t. Self-diagnosing illnesses on the internet is not wise. She rang their GP and made an appointment for later in the week, she made Anna promise next time it happened not to flush the lavatory but to leave what was there for Jess to see. Anna promised.

  Anna was relieved, and that was the main thing.

  It hadn’t been possible to ascertain whether or not Anna was suffering any kind of pain. Looking back, Jess could see she had been unusually quiet for the past few days, but she couldn’t cast her mind back further than that. She didn’t want to suggest pain. Anna would always deny pain.

  The thought of her expert friend Sylvie occurred to Jess during the afternoon. We all hesitated to exploit Sylvie, now she was so busy and so important, but Jess didn’t think it would be wrong, in the circumstances, to consult her. She emailed her, giving a brief description of the problem (urine straw-coloured, bleeding pinkish and thin) and asked Sylvie, when she had time, to email or ring her back. She hoped for reassurance.

  Jess was more worried than she liked to let herself know.

  Anna had enjoyed good health, on the whole. She had been lucky that way. And so had Jess.

  Anna had not been told about Jess’s fainting fit at Wibletts. It would have worried her needlessly. Jess had blanked it out, ignored it, forgotten it. Raoul had never referred to it. I don’t know if Sylvie had ever mentioned it either. I had asked Jess if she had had a check-up, how was her blood pressure, that kind of general query. She’d said she was okay, she was fine, nothing wrong, it had just been the heat. And the stress of mad Victoria, who was enough to make anyone pass out.

  No connection with Anna’s illness. No proleptic connection. How could there be?

  Anna was unwell.

  An infection? Kidney stones? Cancer of the bladder? Cancer of the kidneys?

  Jess didn’t know what to think.

  Jess didn’t call me until after she’d spoken to Sylvie, and until after Anna had seen the doctor and had some tests. It wasn’t very good news, and the diagnosis was not facilitated by Jess’s inability to answer any questions about her daughter’s paternal genetic inheritance. A lot of kidney and some bladder ailments are hereditary. More ailments than we ever thought possible are hereditary. Not, as Jess said to herself, that it would make much difference, would it, at this stage? But it wasn’t good to be so unhelpful, to sound so uncertain.

  Jess’s first guess had been that kidneys were the problem, but it seemed that the bladder was also suspect. Haematuria (a new and unwelcome word in Jess’s vocabulary) could suggest either. There would have to be a cystoscopy and a biopsy. Poor Anna was a modest girl. She would not like these procedures.

  Jess had never spoken to me so openly about the Professor. We sat there, in that front room I’d known for so many years, on the soft old cushions on the old settee, with our mugs of coffee, as Jess went back over some of the old ground. She told me that she’d no idea what had happened to him, had not wanted to know. I could understand this, up to a point: in the distant past I’d had a few affairs that I would never have wished to own up to, I’d slept with one or two men whom I wouldn’t recognise if I sat next to them tomorrow on the bus. But these affairs had had no consequences. They had been light-weight, passing. Anna was a consequence, and the Professor had not been light-weight.

  ‘He took advantage of me,’ said Jess, smiling wryly as she clasped her ‘Present from Southend’ mug. ‘I didn’t think that at the time, but I suppose I do now. I thought I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t. And then there was Anna, and everything changed.’

  He’d wanted her to have an abortion, he’d set it all up, with a recuperative week in an expensive, discreet clinic in Hampshire thrown in, but she had refused. And their sexual relationship had lingered on, had been picked up after Anna’s birth, had renewed itself, and then had worn itself out slowly. It had come to an end before Jess had learnt of Anna’s condition, in the early days when all with Anna was still golden. The ending of the affair had been sealed by his trip to Manchuria, which he and his wife had been planning for a long time. Jess had known he was leaving SOAS, but not that he would be travelling so far afield, for so long, and with his wife. It was a great undertaking, a serious career move that was meant to propel him and his wife into another higher realm of research and fieldwork.

  She was relieved, she told me, by the dramatic finality of his departure, by the sense of complete rupture, by his unfeeling demeanour. She had begun to feel shamed by the shabbiness of their hole-in-the corner relationship, their cheap Thursday-afternoon hotel, their inability to greet one another openly in corridors and lecture theatres and on street corners. What had seemed glamorously adult and pleasantly secretive had come to feel inadequate, embarrassing, unnatural.

  ‘I was glad when he disappeared,’ said Jess. ‘I was all right with Anna, my life was fine. You remember, we were all fine, we were all fine in those days, I knew someone else would turn up, someone less unreal. Because the Prof was unreal, he was really out of touch. I could see that the thought of having a child horrified him. He didn’t think much of human beings. He inspected them as though they were
insects. I don’t think he ran away from me because of Anna—he’d been plotting the move for a long time—but his reaction to the birth of Anna was—well, it was unacceptable.’

  I wanted to ask if he had ever seen his daughter, but I didn’t dare. We were in dangerous territory, walking on eggshells, I didn’t want to interrupt.

  ‘So,’ said Jess, bold, brave, independent, proud, self-sufficient Jess, ‘I’ve never dared to try to find out what happened to him. I haven’t dared to ask anyone who might know. At Guy’s funeral, I nearly spoke to somebody there who would have almost certainly known, but I didn’t dare. And since then I’ve done nothing. I was such a coward. I’ve been such a coward.’

  We both sat silently for a while, contemplating the nature of cowardice.

  I had brought Jess some flowers, a little bunch of anemones, and she’d put them in the little green-and-white-striped jug on the mantelpiece, which stood amongst the African rain-maker’s stones and the figurines and birds’ eggs and tarnished silver candlesticks from Broughborough. They’d been crumpled and drooping when I arrived, the little pink and red and white ones, but now they were beginning to straighten themselves, to stand up and open their bright faces and their mascara-black eyes. You could almost see the water rise through the sap of the pale hairy stems.

  I love that little jug on Jess’s mantelpiece. I have known it for many years. It’s hand-painted, clay, irregularly striped in a soft mossy-yellowy-green and off-white cream with a coarse cracked glaze. It has a deep, high-waisted rim and a soft little lip. A springtime jug, a primavera jug, but lovely with autumn flowers, or with a sprig or two of red winter berries. Jess says you can stick a handful of anything in there and it will fall of its own accord into a perfect shape: weeds or flowers or a bunch of parsley or little twigs will arrange themselves as though nature herself had taken a hand to show them at their best. It had been given to her as a wedding present by Maroussia, and it had been broken once, it had been knocked over by Anna and broken, but Jess had glued it together again with Araldite—not very invisibly but competently, and it was still water-tight. It was the more beautiful for the cracks and the chips and the patching and the marks of age. The brown-pink clay spoke through the gentle pattern. The anemones opened as we watched.

  ‘He gave me some money,’ said Jess. ‘I made him cancel the abortion and the clinic, but he insisted on giving me some money when he left. He gave me £1,325 precisely, he paid me off with £1,325. That was a lot of money in those days. I was going to invest it for Anna. He called himself a Marxist, you know, but I think he came from quite a grand family. I did invest it at first, but then I thought it was more sensible to use it as a deposit to buy this house, so I did. I had some from my father too, but it was his money that made me think of it, that made it possible.’

  She sighed, then shook her head and smiled, in a weary, good-mannered elderly way.

  ‘You know what I paid for this house? I paid £6,000 freehold. I got a good mortgage. And you know what it’s valued at now?’

  I could guess, but I waited for her to say.

  ‘It’s valued at £800,000 . . . £800,000.’

  Despite the drug dealers at Finsbury Park and the ricin men of the mosque, Kinderley Road was valued at £800,000. I knew that, because so was my house in Shawcross Street. In fact, mine was worth more. It was worth more than a million pounds. My husband and I had been joint owners, we had paid off the mortgage jointly, and now he was dead and it was mine. Through no fault or virtue of our own, Jess and I had appreciated. By sticking it out in our everyday way, we had become rich.

  ‘I’ve often thought,’ said Jess ‘that it would look after Anna when I’m gone. She could be comfortable, even when I had gone.’

  This was the unmentionable subject, which Anna’s illness had brought to the surface.

  The confused tenses of Jess’s statement were indicative of her dilemma.

  ‘Comfortable’ is good. But it is not best.

  We were both silent for a while. Then Jess began to talk about Anna’s prognosis, and the suggested surgery or treatments, and how frightened she (Jess, not Anna) was of the surgeon and the oncologist, and how Anna would have to give consent. But Anna would give consent to whatever Jess advised. Her trust in her mother was absolute.

  This was part of the dilemma.

  Jess did not know what to think of the new would-be enlightened ‘consent’ legislation. It could make things very difficult for parents and carers. But she knew that not all parents were loving, not all carers caring.

  Jess knew that she and Anna would never be able to cope with dialysis, and that Anna would never be high on the waiting list for a transplant. But of course it might not come to that. Her imagination had leapt to the worst, but the worst might not come. It might be a small problem, an infection, a benign growth.

  Fear of the surgeon overcame Jess’s fear of the Professor and the internet. She realised that it did not matter when he had died, what he had died of, whether he had had other children. It did not matter whether or not he had suffered from any form of kidney or bladder disease. It did not matter whether he had ever felt bad about what he had done to Jessica Speight. Maybe he had followed her career guiltily, checking online her articles on the language of the male orgasm and Pearl Buck’s daughter and Mungo Park’s adventures and Lionel Penrose’s chromosomes and the luxury flats of Colney Hatch. Maybe he had forgotten her altogether. Maybe she had been one of many seduced maidens, a forgotten statistic.

  Or maybe she and Anna had been a trauma to him, a guilty trauma from which he had fled to the uttermost parts of the earth.

  Zain, she knew, had remembered her. And Bob still loved her. And Raoul had sought her out. She comforted herself with these thoughts.

  It is surprising, but she is beginning to think that Raoul’s interest in her is sexual. It’s a bit late in the day for that kind of thing, but nevertheless she thinks it may be so. And she had put on lipstick for him. She doesn’t often do that these days. She must have been responding to something in the quality of his interest in her.

  Maybe the Professor had loved her? No, she thought not, she knew not. He had desired her, and had taken some small professional risks to possess her, but he had not loved her.

  Grimly, bracing herself, clenching her teeth, she sat down one evening during the days of waiting for Anna’s biopsy results and fed the Professor’s name into the search engine. She tried Google first, not thinking anything would pop up and that she would resort to Google Scholar, but to her astonishment she achieved an immediate hit. There were dozens of links to somebody called Bernt Gunnar Lindahl. They did not look like good news. Bernt Gunnar Lindahl, it appeared, had murdered his wife in a small town in Scotland. This seemed too good, too bad, to be true, and indeed it was, because as soon as she clicked on the first of the links a photograph of the murderer appeared, and he was of the wrong age group, although the fairly unusual combination of his three Swedish names matched. He was a plump pink smiling man in his fifties with a moustache and spectacles. He was much younger than Jess, not older. She flitted through the murder reports rapidly, discovering that he had stabbed his wife, not in a fit of jealous rage but because of something to do with insurance.

  A squalid and uninteresting little murder, but it was recent and it had excited the press, and it was difficult to get beyond it to any other namesakes. The murderer had clogged the net. So she made her way slowly to Google Scholar, where she discovered a Swedish author called Gunnar Lindahl and a crosscountry skier of the same name, but they were not very helpful. She trawled and trawled, more and more impatiently, but she couldn’t understand the Swedish websites, and eventually was driven back to trying SOAS staff and alumni. But SOAS seemed to have disowned or forgotten the Professor, or tucked him away in a digital corner so obscure she could not find it.

  Eventually, after stabbing and jabbing and clicking in an increasingly random manner, she found him. When she typed in the title in English of his doctorat
e at Uppsala, up it popped, with a link.

  The link was an obituary. It was in Swedish, and it appeared to be from some old university listing. The print itself was old, the typeface was old. There was nothing new here.

  He had been dead for years, for decades. All the time she’d carefully not been thinking about him, he’d been dead. That was why he had vanished from the academic world and sent no messages from Manchuria. He had published nothing since the doctorate, except for a few papers and a contribution to a book published in Korea on agrarian policy and population control. He’d not left much of a mark.

  The Professor, in fact, had not even been a professor. She’d given him that title, in her dialogue with herself and eventually with us, as a joke. He’d been Dr Lindahl, not the Professor. He’d never become Professor Lindahl.

  It was late, Dr Speight’s eyes ached, the screen quivered and swam, her new varifocals had had enough, and she couldn’t be bothered to google the wife.

  She went to bed, feeling curiously relieved by this outcome. She was pleased to have extracted a reply from the web, she was pleased not to have to worry about him any more, she was pleased still to be alive. She and Anna were both still alive. They would both move on, as modern jargon has it, they would both go forward together. Anna would be okay. Irrationally, she suddenly felt sure that Anna would be okay. The ogre was dead, poor old ghost, but she and Anna were alive.

  She felt sorry for the poor old ghost of the waste lands of Manchuria and Uppsala. He had been driven out of Bloomsbury and his lovenest in the Marchmont Hotel by the unexpected birth of the pure gold baby. A sense of generous sorrow for his disappointing life and long-ago death flowed through her, as she stretched her legs, and then curled herself up in her warm and comfortable bed, and turned the pillow over so that the cool fresh side of it met her cheek. How good it was to sleep alone, in her own house, which was worth £800,000. The Professor, unwittingly, had invested his £1,325 well.

  The curious sum that made up the dowry represents, Jess has always suspected, the sale of some asset. A small house on an island in the archipelago, a Sèvres dining set, a ruby necklace. She may never be able to verify this, but it is what she suspects. He had, after all, been a Marxist, of a sort, with a morality, of a sort.