But there are one or two books left, and a few ancient brown and buff ledgers and concertina files, heaped haphazardly on the splintering floor and on the remaining shelving. They look unapproachably dirty and tattered and dismal.
Jess, who had fancied she might find a cache of scholarly treasure here, shudders. She cannot bear to touch this stuff. There might still be riches, but if so they are beyond her reach. She gives up on them. She is too old to cope with this unsorted lumber. Although in there may linger yet some saving grace, some precious witness to some long-ago kindness, some record of a forebear who had wished to disimprison the souls of the feeble-minded and the tormented. But she cannot rifle through the heaps of rubbish to find it. Let it go.
The little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.
Wordsworth had wished to remember the unremembered.
The Map Room at Wibletts had been gracious and elegant, the books and papers well catalogued, and Wordsworth’s letter to the unhappy Felix Holden carefully preserved.
Jess is saddened by the state of the ledgers, but Ursula seems indefatigable, as she directs them through the library and into what she says was the superintendent’s office. Signs of her derangement, at first concealed by the unexpected social normality of her manner, begin to manifest themselves. Her assumption of command is surely unnatural, and her possessiveness of Raoul out of place. Jess, increasingly, as they plod along another mile of corridor (and can that be an active red blinker watching them from an angle in the ceiling—was that the sound of feet scuffling through dead leaves?), Jess begins to wonder about those benefits that Lauren had mentioned. What is Ursula living on? Where does she collect her pension, has she got a bank account? On whom has she battened? Well, it is hardly Jess’s affair, is it?
(Kathleen, Raoul later discovers, is a fifty-year-old ex-drug-addict and ex-alcoholic who had been reclaimed, greatly to Ursula’s advantage, by an evangelical sect offering a Save Your Soul church programme, under the direction of a powerful black woman called Bonny Belle—a far cry from Dr Nicholls, but just as effective. Salvation moves in mysterious ways. The very name of Bonny Belle can save you from despair.)
Raoul allows Ursula’s appropriation of him, as we walk the corridors (surely that is rustling behind the partition, surely we are being covertly, unofficially observed?), but from time to time he exchanges glances with Jess, trying to establish another conspiracy, a conspiracy of the sane. Jess reminds herself (as do I) that Raoul is a neurologist of international distinction, although now lonely, divorced and semi-retired. Yet here he is, trudging through a long-abandoned asylum, in the thrall of an ex-primary-schoolteacher from Croydon, as though success had never visited him.
Maybe he is impelled in part by a still active professional curiosity. Ursula, after her vision of God above the pelmet, had heard voices. Raoul has always found auditory hallucinations interesting. Like phantom pain, these voices implicate our view of the brain. Does one hemisphere of the brain speak to the other? Whence come these echoes and instructions? From the past? From priests and kings and warlords? From religious texts, from internalised mythologies? From books unwisely read, from movies unwisely viewed? In her screeds of correspondence, much of which he did not read, Ursula had tried to describe the calls to action which she had been unable to answer. She had struggled against her hallucinations, never completely trusting them (she had, after all, been a competent teacher of primary schoolchildren for some years before the psychotic episodes that brought her to Halliday), but she had never been able to dispel them either. The letters lengthily, tediously, horribly, charted her struggle.
Ursula had come to believe that God had tested her faith by requiring her to slaughter her class of seven-year-olds, and that in obedience to his will she had done so. A terrible angel had appeared to her and ordered the massacre of the innocents, who would ascend instantly to heaven. She was torn in two by these instructions. The demonic angel, in her letters, appeared as a symbol, a four-stroke beak and wings. She believed she had stabbed them all to death, all those little children, and had hideous repeating hallucinations (hallucinations was too mild a word) of their bleeding bodies in the classroom. Halliday had released her from these visitations, but they had recurred, and it seems still recur.
Schoolroom massacres are not unknown. But Ursula had not perpetrated one.
I found the phenomenon of Ursula interesting, but not so interesting that I wasn’t very relieved to get back to my car at the East Gate. It was getting dark, I wanted to set off and get away from these ruins, this parkland, before the whisperers came out from the leafless bushes, before night fell. There is nothing more pleasing than getting in one’s own car after a difficult social passage: shutting the doors, turning on the radio and putting one’s foot down on the accelerator, what joy So I was not pleased when I heard Jess offer Ursula a lift back to the Saint Osyth housing estate. I had visions of driving aimlessly and lost round the outskirts of the business park, or of hearing Ursula demand a lift back to London and moving in with one of us for ever. She accepted the lift, but to my surprise gave me perfectly clear instructions of how to drop her off at her borrowed home. Dear God, what an estate. We do not know, we cannot see, the lives of our fellow-citizens. They live behind a curtain of unknowing, a cloud of unknowing.
I drew the line at going in for a cup of tea to meet the kindly Kathleen. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve got to get back.’ I really could not face a three-l egged dog. They couldn’t argue with me. I had the wheels. They didn’t want to get stranded either. They’d done their duty. They were reassured.
The thought of Shawcross Street was comforting.
I put the radio on, on the way home. I was worn out. Raoul and Jess were silent. They decided to sit in the back together, and I could see that Jess squeezed Raoul’s hand as they settled. He didn’t need to stop for a pee on the way home: he’d got over his anxious bladder syndrome. I tried Radio 4 and listened for a while to a soothing, well-balanced programme about solar energy and wind farms, then moved to Radio 3 and wintry Sibelius. The natural world would survive us whatever we did to it. We could cement and tarmac it over and turn it into a motorway a mile wide, but it would break through in the end. That’s what Sibelius was telling us.
It’s not a good message, for us. But I’ve ceased to care about us.
The simple round clay-and-straw hut has a little wooden veranda platform overlooking the waters of the dambo. The hut is earth-coloured, a terra-cotta earth-red, with a cream-and-brown design of zigzags and a conical roof. They sit there together, Jess and her daughter, as the evening sun declines. It has been a long journey, and both are tired, but they have been made welcome. Bob is in the next hut, only a few yards away, shacked up arbitrarily with a young Mexican adventurer with long black ringlets and some very fancy cameras. Jess can hear them laughing. Bob will join them soon for a beer, and maybe the Mexican will come too. Jess and Anna are both well anointed with Jungle Formula against mosquitoes, and neither has been bitten so far, although the mosquito nets over their twin beds are hard to arrange and Anna keeps tripping over hers. They have swathed them round their narrow beds for the night, and will creep in later by lamplight.
All four of them, Bob, Jess, Anna and the Mexican, flew in from the airport of the capital on a little single-propeller plane, the taxi of the skies, and were landed by pilot Brewster on a small runway in the bush. Here they are, not far from the swamps and floating islands of Bangweulu, not far as the crow or the Cessna flies, and in similar, though not quite so watery, terrain. There, a lifetime ago, Jess had seen the shoebill and the lobster-claw children. Time has come full circle, and the river flows with time.
The small flat lake shines calm and blue and silver and pink, reflecting the clouds. Mosquitoes hum, and they hear a pod (Anna reminds Jess that this is the right word; it is a word she likes) of hippos humphing and snorting and laughing in the mud at the margins in the reeds, only fifty yards away. A kite circles overhead. Jess’s
expectations of an ultimate revelation are moderately high, but for the moment she is content that Anna seems so pleased with the expedition, and that she has survived the journey so well. She has made a remarkable recovery.
A jaçana stalks and picks its way over the marshland, elegant, colourful, the chestnut-fronted lily-trotter bird which seems to walk upon the water. Anna is not very good at using the binoculars (and neither is Jess, who has astigmatic vision), but she is content with what she seems to see through them. Light-heeled little fawn antelope graze and scatter on what may or may not be a wooded island just over the water. Jess thinks they are puku, but she isn’t sure.
Jess is thinking, peaceably, of Raoul. Shortly before the African departure, he had invited her to his apartment, in an act of return hospitality for her tea party with Steve. This had been a bold initiative on his part, and she had hesitated about accepting, but she had been touched by his confidence, and had made her way one spring evening to Regent’s Park and to his mansion flat.
He had offered her a drink in No. 24A on the fourth floor, and dinner in a slightly up-market bistro in Baker Street. The lift up to 24A was old-fashioned but well appointed, its brass gleaming, its woodwork polished. She had been unaccountably nervous as he opened the door, smiling, blinking through his rimless glasses, but when she saw the rooms within she calmed down. She had been fearing bachelor squalor or anonymous clinical tidiness, but the flat is habitable, even cosy, with book shelves and paintings and photographs, with comfortable chairs and oriental rugs, and a large vase of lilac blooms (how did he get hold of those?) scenting the air. It looks well settled: not as deeply settled as Kinderley Road and Shawcross Street, but lived in, cared for. The walls are papered with a warm red paisley print, the curtains are buff and gold. Jess sits, with a glass of white wine, and admires. She has never been to the Middle East, but she fancies there is a touch of the Lebanon here, a touch of ancestral taste in the furnishings, although all of them could easily have been purchased in John Lewis on Oxford Street.
She is looking, covertly, for a photograph of Marie-Hélène, but pretends to be inspecting the paintings. There is a small oil of a Mediterranean harbour scene, and a sand-coloured gouache of a pale house in an oasis beneath a turquoise sky, and a drawing of bomb damage that looks like a Graham Sutherland. She can’t see Marie-Hélène, but that must be the clever son, the one and only son, in a proud and ornate silver frame on the drinks cabinet.
The drinks cabinet is almost certainly John Lewis, and it is quite well stocked for a man who seems to drink only wine, and not very much of that. She wonders if he entertains frequently. He is retired, but she knows he still sees colleagues from overseas, associates from the hospital and the university where he taught, publishers and postgraduate students.
They talk of Ursula, and Africa, and Anna. Raoul now knows the full story of Anna’s recent illness and her life’s condition, and, now he has met Anna, he talks about her in a friendly way, entering into Jess’s world of concern. They have spoken several times of Wibletts, of Victoria and her son Marcus, of the gross Dr Nicholls. As they prepare to set off for their dinner, Jess gestures towards the photograph and ventures ‘That must be your son?’ and Raoul is delighted to admit to him. Yes, that is he. That is the young man who understands subatomic particles, neutrinos and the speed of light.
The son looks more like Raoul than like Marie-Hélène.
They enjoy their dinner, and Jess teases Raoul that he has yet again chosen lamb cutlets. They come adorned with a little paper frill. She likes to watch him nibble. She has Coquilles Saint-Jacques, an old-fashioned dish, which is served, as it should be, in its pilgrims’ scallop shell. Over coffee, Raoul reaches for her hand and briefly holds it, then pats it as he relinquishes it. ‘You must take care in Africa,’ he says; ‘you must remember to take all your pills.’
She had been pleased to have her hand patted. She has led a celibate life for years now, and has considered her body a burnt-out case, long past the need for any physical intimacy, but Raoul’s mild attentions had been acceptable, indeed welcome. She had wondered if he had been about to make any further move or declaration, but he had left it at that, embracing her warmly but politely as she paused on the steps of the Baker Street tube. He is exactly the same height as she is.
Bob is taller than Raoul and Jess. She can hear his loud and happy voice in the next hut. He has recently made one or two friendly attempts to suggest reclaiming his marital rights, but hadn’t seemed put out when she declined. He had loved her once, and is fond of her now, but he can take her or leave her.
And now here he is, advancing, carrying a couple of bottles of beer by the neck, with two glasses hooked on his fingers. He pulls up a chair, pours a beer for Anna and Jess (he drinks from the bottle, but knows they don’t like to) and settles back creakily to gaze over the lake. All three are recovering from the long flight and the short flight and the jolting of the Land-Rover on the dirt track through the straggling spreading utterly African miombo woodland. (Jess has at least temporarily memorised the word ‘miombo’, but Anna doesn’t like it. Anna has strong views on new words.) Jess is thinking that Bob has organised this camp well: it is remote, but not alarmingly, frighteningly remote. It is well within Anna’s comfort range. Tomorrow they will pursue Livingstone and, after that, the missionary settlement and the saucepans, and then they will join Bob’s TV people. She tries to remember how much she had told Bob about the BaTwa lobster-claw fisher children. Will any of them be alive today?
There are seventy-three different ethnic groups in modern Zambia, and the BaTwa are considered one of the most ‘primitive’.
Bob is more interested in animals than in people. He has already spotted a sitatunga browsing over the lake. He tells Anna that it has webbed feet, which isn’t quite true, but it is more or less amphibious.
The hippos make their massive bubbling watery noises, a strange mixture of mirth and menace, and Bob, raising his glass to happy and unworried Anna, says, ‘You’d better not go for a plunge here, babe. There’s crocs in there too.’
‘I’ve brought my swimming suit,’ says Anna in response.
‘Seriously,’ says Bob, ‘you save that for the pool on the way back. They’d snap you up here for a snack at any time of day.’
Anna laughs, but Jess is curiously relieved that Bob has given this ridiculous and surely unnecessary warning. She’s already explained the obvious dangers to Anna, that you have to be really careful about a lot of things in Africa, but she hadn’t wanted to scare her, and Bob’s casual reminder comes in well. Bob is as kind-hearted a man as he was when she first knew him. Indeed he has become more kind-hearted and more understanding. He is on good terms with his daughter and his ex-wife, and he has been more than good with stepdaughter Anna. And Jess knows that, however brief their life together had been, in his way he loves her.
She wonders if he and Raoul would like one another. Raoul is ten times cleverer than Bob and Jess and the Professor and anyone Jess has ever known, but that’s just a fluke. It’s just a matter of neurones and dendrites and synapses. His are better connected than theirs. Is she, Jess, now upgrading herself intellectually by having a flirtation with Raoul? This very quick thought, flitting through her, makes her laugh and snort into her beer. She makes a note to herself to tell me about it, as she knows it will be right up my street.
Bob laughs too, though he doesn’t know what the joke is, and then the Mexican adventurer waves from the men’s hut, and they make their way with him by the thin blue light of their clockwork torches (for the sun has now sunk) along the dark path to their supper. The chorus of the frogs grows louder and louder, and the snorting of the hippos fades away, and Venus and Jupiter as clear as wild diamonds ride through the black enormous African sky.
Over their fritters and fried tomatoes and sweetcorn they are joined by their pilot and the Zambian guide Emmanuel, and, when the meal is served, by the cook, whose name is Isaac. Isaac has a small son, who watches the party i
ntently from the kitchen doorway; he was allowed to bring them a plastic basket of bread, but backed away shyly when Jess thanked him. Jess suspects the Zambians may have other names, which they do not choose to use in mixed company.
The three white men compete, as men do, with tales of adventure. Jess and Anna and the Zambians listen, an appreciative and tolerant audience, and behind their narratives Jess listens to the sounds of the bush—a roaring, a rustling, an occasional baboon screech. She knows all Bob’s stories, some of them too well, but Brewster’s accounts of hopping round the country in his little taxi plane are new to her, and not too scary. This is a safe country, unlike the Congo, just over the border. They had flown over a bit of the Congo on their way here—Brewster had pointed down to the Congo Pedicle, thrusting its mineral-rich foot rudely down into Zambia.
The Mexican’s tales, in contrast to Brewster’s and Bob’s, are horrifying. He tells them about his brother, who was kidnapped and held hostage in a sealed room for a hundred days in Mexico City. None of the family dares to live in Mexico now. He is here to relax, to escape, in the deep peace of Africa. Nothing can harm him here. Nobody will kidnap him here.
The Zambians shake their heads and make sympathetic noises as he tells this story. They know life is grim and lawless over the border in the Congo, but they hadn’t expected to hear such horrors of a great and civilised city.
The Mexican is sweet and quick-witted with Anna. He gives her a little present, in the form of a nest of a paradise flycatcher. It is tiny, intricately made of feathers and moss, and he had found it that afternoon on the forest floor beneath a mpundu tree. The paradise flycatcher, Emmanuel tells them, is a very small bird with a very long tail. He shows them its picture, in his bird book. Anna holds the nest on her knees proudly, tenderly.
The Pure Gold Baby Page 27