The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  It was quite easy to reassure Anna about her condition and her health, or at least it seemed to be so to Jess and to us, though who could tell what Anna’s underlying fears were? Confiding in her mother seemed to have satisfied Anna that her illness was not grave and that she would be cured.

  Her confidence in Jess was enormous. It had rarely had cause to falter, and it did not falter now. Anna approached the complicated sequence of hospital visits and scans patiently, even cheerfully, and opened her legs and submitted to the embarrassing examinations as bravely as she could. She did not like or understand what was happening, but she did not complain.

  Jess sits near by, behind the flimsy little curtain on its metal rail, twisting her silver rings round and round her fingers, helpless. She is too close to her daughter, she suffers in her body for her daughter.

  Anna, robed in the long pale hospital robe, a much laundered heavily ironed faded blue robe with a pattern of white daisies, looks angelic. With her fair hair and her timeless, ageless face, she looks like a girl in a fairytale, entranced, charmed, expectant, at the beginning of a story that has yet to unfold. She looks touchingly trusting, bewildered but trusting. The simple round neck of the robe make her look like a vulnerable child. Was it possible that anybody had abused her, and that Anna had never been able to tell, had been too ashamed or frightened to tell? Jess is sure this that could not be so. Anna would have spoken to her mother. She would have found the words. But of course Jess has not kept her under her eyes for every moment of her adolescent and adult life. She has been obliged to trust others.

  The tapes that tie the hospital robe across Anna’s smooth fair slightly freckled back are the apron strings.

  Anna is tied to her mother’s apron strings.

  Jess’s confidence in the hospital is not as strong as Anna’s confidence in Jess, although the hospital and the manner of its staff has improved since the days when it had pumped Steve Carter’s stomach in such an unforgiving manner. Jess has had little reason to visit it, except for routine blood tests and a mammogram (this was before the days when she found herself summoned to the supermarket mobile-van) and an abortive attempt at physiotherapy for a sprained ankle, but she can tell that it was now more efficient and more patient-friendly than it had been. When they see him next, the urologist/surgeon, Mr Savandra, tries hard to be reassuring as he explains the possible diagnoses and procedures ahead. Jess is in too much of a panic to listen very carefully, and Anna nods and smiles nervously and does not understand a word of what he says. How could she? Mr Savandra is small, dark and courteous, but withdrawn. He does not reach out. He seems to have taken on board Anna’s limited understanding, but prefers consulting the file of notes on his desk to attempting to engage in eye contact with either mother or daughter. He looks down at the notes through most of the consultation. But he is respectful and polite. He addresses Jessica as Dr Speight, which she finds comforting. We cling to status when in danger, when trapped at the mercy of an institution. Jess’s doctorate on the impact of missionaries on the practice of traditional remedies in Central Africa stands between her and the sucking gulf of non-being and nonentity and humiliation that hospitals represent.

  Mr Savandra is polite, but his sidekick the oncologist is not so friendly. Jess finds him inhuman and alarming, though she knows she may be projecting her fear on to him and turning him into another male ogre. His most human trait appears to be a desire to upstage Mr Savandra and to suggest that oncologists are more important than surgeons and urologists. He talks a great deal about the ever increasing importance of oncology, the decreasing value of surgery. He may be right about that, but why should Jess care? She is not here to support his sense of his status, which is not under attack. His manner towards Anna is an aggressive mix of the profoundly condescending and the jolly. Jess knows that some adults find it hard to talk naturally to Anna, being unsure of the level of her response and understanding, and are over-cautious in their efforts. Dr Newman has no such hesitations. He is, by nature, an overbearing bully. His complexion is a high dark red with a bluish tinge, his hair black and thick and neat and carefully combed, his eyes deep set, his eyebrows prominent and handsome, his square and manly chin aggressively smooth from hard close shaving. He is very pleased with himself. He asks Anna questions about her sexual history that Jess knows (or believes she knows) that Anna cannot understand, but the manner of his interrogation arouses in Jess the slightest faintest tremor of fear. The un-safety spreads, the anxiety of uncertainty spreads.

  Jess knows that Anna does not smoke, although she herself smoked when young, but she cannot be certain about everything that has happened to her.

  Anna disapproves of smoking, as most young people do. She was taught to disapprove at Marsh Court, and Jessica’s generation has long abandoned the habit.

  (Except for me. I still smoke, when I am alone, in my own home, once or twice a week. A cigarette comforts me. I am sometimes indeed quite often lonely now, and a cigarette keeps me company, offers me a small act of defiance. I smoked as an undergraduate, and I took it up again when Tom was dying.)

  Dr Newman tells Jess that the problem is not with the kidney but with the bladder. Anna has a small tumour, located in what Jess thinks of as Sylvie Raven’s domain. With Mr Savandra’s approval, he will attempt to shrink it with medication and then they will all see what to do next. He will send the results to Mr Savandra, the surgeon with the knife, and Anna will be summoned back.

  Anna’s blood pressure is slightly high, she must take medication for that too. How long has her blood pressure been up? Jess shakes her head, she has no idea.

  She has neglected her daughter and failed to recognise her symptoms.

  What else do we need to do, asks Jess. Has he any dietary advice, what about fluid intake, what about exercise? What about going on living?

  Dr Newman has no interest in such questions. He brushes them away. They are beyond his remit. Living is not his specialty.

  Sylvie had warned Jess that Dr Newman was not a congenial man, that he was brusque and vain and self-important, but, she had insisted, he was good at his job. He was really good at prescribing the correct dose of toxic pills, and that takes nerve as well as judgement, said Sylvie. The staff disliked him, but they trusted him. His patients were frightened of him, but he cured a lot of them. ‘You have to remember,’ said Sylvie, ‘he spends a lot of time dealing with people with ghastly afflictions.’

  But she agrees that his manner is not good.

  Sylvie is kind and reassuring to Jess. She thinks Anna will be fine. Bladder cancer very rarely spreads, she says. ‘From bladder to bone has never been known’ was one of the old saws of the profession. (Sylvie doesn’t mention the possibility of a brain tumour; ‘From bladder to brain and you go insane?’) And it has been caught early, it won’t have had time to metastasize, says Sylvie.

  Jess doesn’t like that word ‘metastasize’. Haematuria, metastasis. IVP, CT, MRI. She doesn’t like this new vocabulary, with which Sylvie has been familiar for so long.

  She doesn’t know whether Sylvie is offering comforting platitudes, as an old friend should and would, or whether what she says is to be trusted. How does Sylvie know it has been ‘caught early’? What does ‘early’ mean?

  Jess has friends, and her nature is such that she can share her worries. Some cannot, but Jess can. It is a gift, this ability to tell. And during this period of uncertainty and waiting for results, she told us. She told Sylvie, she told me, she told Bob, she told Maroussia.

  Maroussia is in a play at the Donmar, she is playing Medea, she offers Jess and Anna tickets, the tickets for the short run are like gold dust, star dust, but Jess hadn’t the heart to go. Anna would have liked to have gone, she likes seeing Maroussia on screen and on stage, but Jess can’t face it.

  We listened to Jess, we offered comfort, but we could not share her grief. It was hers alone. We can feel for one another, but we cannot partake. One of the melancholy Wordsworth poems that Steve used to read
to Jess and Anna and anyone who would listen comes back to Jess now, and she recites it to herself as she goes through the terrible countdown of the days of waiting for the next medical event, the next hospital appointment, the next result:

  Beyond participation lie

  My troubles, and beyond relief:

  If any chance to heave a sigh

  They pity me, and not my grief . . .

  It is a fine distinction, a profound distinction.

  Jess told us, and she even told the mad Victoria.

  Victoria, since the summer meeting, had been persistent in pursuit of Jess, drawn to her, or so we supposed, by some need for absolution, by the need for a new listener. She had poured out her anxieties about Marcus and Wibletts for hour after hour on the phone, in email after email, and over lunch in her Chelsea apartment. Jess knows all about Victoria’s love affairs with famous folk, about her first and second husbands, about her other children, about her very famous psychoanalyst, about her aborted career as an opera singer, about the class in needlework that she attends at the V&A. Victoria’s need for attention is extreme, her neurosis disabling. She occupies a glittering point on the spectrum of craziness. Her large high-ceilinged apartment off Cadogan Square is far grander than the homes of any of Jess’s friends, and it is furnished with the kind of opulent slightly faded luxury that Jess recognises as belonging to the very rich, the long-term rich. The red and bronze curtains are massy and heavily textured and fringed, and they hang from great poles, looped back by stiff encrusted golden tassels. Marble plinths support huge Art Nouveau pots of lilies, the chaises-longues are heaped with tapestry cushions, and books of art history and photography lie on coffee tables. It is sumptuous, decadent, worn, taken for granted.

  Victoria is not wholly part of her background, Jess suspects; she has been transplanted into it by beauty and by marriage, she is restless and profane in it. Her language is extreme.

  Victoria is highly tuned to her own disasters, but just as eagerly tunes in to Jess’s anxiety about Anna, and recommends various specialists of her acquaintance, urging Jess not to rely on the NHS. The prince’s own surgeon, the man who operated on the prime minister, the gynaecologist who looked after half of Notting Hill and Hollywood—she knows them all by name and by repute. They are the leaders in the field. Mr Dalrymple, Mr Brathwayte, Sonia Everett, Sir Michael Rajah. Jess listens fascinated, over the phone from her small North London kitchen in Kinderley Road, to the names and the dropping of names. Princess Alicia, the Marquis of Aran, the Baron of Bute, the Prince of Wales’s cousin’s sister-in-law, the half-sister of the governor of the Bank of England. Victoria sounds like a character out of Woolf or Proust, both arch-neurasthenics who distrusted and disliked their doctors and their exorbitant fees, and both of whom died before their time. Jess had thought that old world dead and buried, buried beneath a shattering splintering heap of progress and vulgarity, but it lingers on, entrenched, indestructible. It is the bedrock; its sloping slabs of subservience and sycophancy project solidly upwards like tombstones through the splintering rubble of modernity.

  Jess has to remind Victoria that Baroness Raven, whom they had both heard speak in the summer at Wibletts, is one of Jess’s best friends. She pulls rank with Sylvie. Sylvie, she reminds Victoria, is a bladder expert, and will give Jess all the advice she needs. (She doesn’t put it as rudely as that, as she is touched by Victoria’s effusive concern.)

  Victoria cedes Sylvie to Jess, a point scored, but is reluctant to relinquish the expertise of Sonia Everett.

  ‘Come round for a drink!’ cries Victoria, from time to time.

  She never asks Jess to take Anna round for a drink.

  Victoria’s youngest son, Marcus, sits frozen at his chess set or raves round the subtly (and in her view inadequately) wired and hedged perimeters of his expensive prison. Her other children (all are from her first husband, a theatrical impresario relocated in New York) lead ‘normal’ lives, one married to an American hedge fund manager, the other writing speeches for the president. (The president of what? Jess is not sure. The United States? A university? An international court? A supermarket chain? Victoria’s narratives take a lot for granted, they are full of ellipses, and it is too late to ask.)

  Victoria has made it clear that there is an impressive inheritance of lunacy on both sides of the family, with ancestors flamboyantly deranged and eccentric, jumping from high windows, eloping with heiresses, shooting butlers and racehorses, starving to death in bothies. She seems proud of the legacy. Well, pride is a brave option, and Jess salutes it. She finds Victoria exotic, exhilarating, a change from our bourgeois ways. Jess often thinks of that strange tableau of Marcus and his chess set. It reminds her of a scene from a late Shakespeare play. The Renaissance prince in prison on the island, playing chess. Her own family is humdrum, ordinary, with only Jack Speight, the simple young man with Down’s syndrome, the backward boy from Lincolnshire, to mark a known and not very unusual departure from the norm.

  Grandpa Speight had left some money in trust for Anna, his only grandchild, his simple grandchild, whom he had simply loved. There had been no barriers between Anna and her grandpa. He had found Anna easy company. They would chat for hours about her favourite television programmes, her swimming badges, his entertainingly exaggerated dislike of most vegetables, his little dog Phoebus, which he usually left at home with Grandma. They even chatted about architecture. Grandpa would ask her what she thought of this building, what of that, and listen to her opinions gravely. Anna liked the redbrick Victorian church and the double-fronted house with the monkey-puzzle tree and the library and Islington Town Hall.

  Anna misses her grandpa. Jess can picture them when Anna was little, hand in hand, walking down Stirling New Park through the autumn leaves. She has one very clear sequence of them, emblematic, receding, as they walked confidentially together towards the bus stop on the corner. They were catching a bus to Highbury Barn, to the cake shop, to buy a lemon cake for tea. Jess would put the kettle on, they’d all have tea.

  Jess wonders if she should follow Victoria’s advice and find a private urologist, a private oncologist, but she suspects that were she to try to do so she would find herself in exactly the same position, miserable and tongue-tied in front of the same Dr Newman, nervously awaiting an appointment with the same Mr Savandra, but in a different hospital with more sprightly foreign receptionists wearing more lipstick. It hardly seems worth it. Sylvie reassures her that the NHS is quite capable of coping with Anna; she promises to alert Jess if she suspects any neglect, if she can see any better option.

  Sylvie is a friend in need. Jess would never have known she would need expert advice on diseases of the bladder, and Sylvie did not train in adult life in order to be there at the right moment to advise Jess. That’s not how life arranges itself. But so it happened.

  During the long anxious hours of waiting, during the hospital visits and the intravenous chemotherapy, Jess plays little countdown games to pass the time. She recites poems to herself silently, she does the Short Crossword, she embarks on a blue-and-yellow tapestry in Bargello stitch, she counts backwards from 500 to nought, she recites nursery rhymes. She cannot concentrate on the book on homelessness and dementia that she is meant to be reviewing, although her thoughts do turn to Raoul and Ursula from time to time. It was in their interests she offered to take on the book, but their interests will have to wait a while.

  She shuts her eyes and summons up a vision of herself and Anna sitting by an African lake. It is a picture that develops in strength and in detail like a photographic plate. When Anna is cured, they will go to Africa and sit by the lake. They should have gone earlier. Anna had not at first shown much interest in Africa, but Jess has managed to impart to her some eagerness, some mercifully distracting curiosity. Z is for Zebra comes to their aid. She tells Anna the story of Mungo Park, the poor Scotsman who was so brave and so lonely and so well meaning. Anna likes this story. She particularly likes the bit about the black woman who ta
kes pity on Mungo and sings the song about the poor white man who has no mother.

  Pity the poor white man, no mother has he . . .

  The bereavement journey, the consolation cruise, the anniversary celebration, the fatal illness adventure. The lifetime trip to the Galapagos, for which one can ignore one’s anxieties about carbon miles and footprints. One will so very soon be dead, and returning in the body to carbon inert, carbon reclaimed, so why worry?

  The month in a palazzo in Venice, the trip to the Great Barrier Reef, the island in the Seychelles.

  Angkor Wat, the Taj Mahal.

  The price of an easy divorce.

  Guy Brighouse, one of whose many dubious mates ran adventure safaris in East Africa, had told Jess the story of a woman who, believing herself to be dying of ovarian cancer, had embarked on the riskiest safari of all, exposing herself to rogue elephants, lions and hippopotami, but, despite having to swim from a capsized dugout through crocodile-infested waters and being charged by a rogue buffalo, she seemed unable to die or to get herself killed. She emerged unshaken from a singlepropeller aeroplane that had to make a forced landing in the bush, and she allowed mosquitoes and tsetse flies to feast freely on her flesh. She was indestructible. One of the guides of the party died protecting his flock, but Elissa Freegard survived whatever came her way.

  It’s a pity that Anna has lost her appetite. She tries, gamely, to pretend to continue to enjoy her food, but Jess can tell she’s not hungry Enjoying their simple meals together had meant a lot to Jess and Anna.