The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  A hippo slumps noisily up from the water, very close to them, and they hear it munch and graze. It is grey and dirty-pink and enormous.

  They sit round a wood fire, loosely built in the shape of a star. The logs and branches point inwards, and the charcoal core of the star glows a dull red. Occasionally Emmanuel replaces or moves a grey branch, and the sparks fly upwards, and little flames burst forth. This is the kind of fire they have been making here for many thousands of years. It has burnt through the stone age, through the iron age, through the advent of Speke and Livingstone and Stanley, and it burns on, through the Jet Age, through the age of KK and HIV and climate change and safari tourism. The light of the fire plays dully and dimly on the faces of the group: on Bob, still boyish though grey-bearded; on Anglo-Saxon Brewster, tanned and clean shaven in his khaki shorts; on the fabulously wealthy and stylish young Jewish Mexican with his ringlets; on the dark, taut and gleaming ebony skin of Emmanuel the guide and Isaac the cook; and on Anna’s pale, fair, attentive brow. Jess watches, and thinks of the People of Many Lands and of that Christmas when all the children were young. It is a comfort to be here, so peacefully, with this strange group, by this ancient fire.

  Emmanuel is appointed to take them to the Memorial and then onwards to the Livingstone river crossing and the Holden missionary settlement near the lake and the Saucepan Graves. The Mexican takes an interest in their project, and asks if he can come too, but is reminded that Brewster is due to fly him to the Shoebill Camp at the crack of dawn the next morning, where his strict and serious Zimbabwean bird guide will be waiting for him.

  As Jess and Bob and Anna and Emmanuel and a driver casually armed with a gun grind along in the Land-Rover, and clamber in and out of a dugout canoe, and admire the egrets and ibises and kingfishers and storks, Jess’s mind probes back to that earlier journey, so many decades ago, with Guy and Graham Slater and all those other chaps, some of whose names she has forgotten. Ghosts of memories of the landscape emerge, prompted by the cry of a bird, a footprint, a cemetery of grey tombstone anthills, the grey trunk and gaunt dead branches of an elephant-stripped tree, the red mud of a river crossing, the smiling eager schoolchildren with their bags of schoolbooks waving from the side of the road. But there is some other memory lying behind them all, something that had preceded them all. It will not come to her. She cannot get it back. It may be the cause of all things, or it may be an irrelevance, but she cannot return to it.

  The Livingstone Memorial she had misremembered, although she knows they had picnicked by it long ago, and she knows it cannot have changed much in forty-odd years. There it stood, and there it stands, a small plain blunt brick-and-cement obelisk in a woodland glade, erected more than a hundred years after Livingstone’s death, with its inscriptions commemorating him and his ‘faithful native followers’. The handsome young woman now in charge of it tells them that some people are agitating for a smarter, more modern monument, but she and the local people like it as it is. ‘People expect it to be like this,’ she says; ‘they don’t want a new one. This is the one they all remember. This is the one in all the photographs.’

  Jess hadn’t remembered it very well and had thought it much smaller, although she politely nods her agreement. But, as she climbs up into the back of the vehicle, another image does come back, an image almost as clear as that of the unplumbed lavatory. It is of a cement-block shed with a handwritten notice on it reading clinic. It had stood all alone, somewhere near here, and when they had looked inside it they had found nothing but a wooden bench and a small wooden cabinet, its door swinging open, empty save for a tube of antiseptic cream and a roll of doubtful bandage.

  Dr Livingstone had been highly valued for his carefully crafted wooden travelling medicine chest with its treasure of neatly stored and magical little glass bottles. His faith had sustained him, but his quinine, calomel, jalap and rhubarb had saved others.

  There is an undergrowth round here that looks like bracken, under the taller woodland trees. It has little curled fronds. But it isn’t bracken. It can’t be. The fronds are knee-high.

  In the rainy season, the high grasses of the marshland close over the watery pathways, forming deep-green arched canals. Through them the children punt their small canoes.

  The landscape is at once strange and familiar, unknown and always known. A group of hornbills scuttles past. Anna loves the strange turkey-like hornbills and the speckled guinea fowls. They are grounded, they are safe.

  Over supper in the tree camp that night, Jess asks Emmanuel about the Holden Missionary Settlement, which they will see the next day. At Wibletts, the brochure had said it was well preserved, but Emmanuel says this is no longer so. The brochure needs updating. There is a building, and there were some graves, but the community has gone, and the villages around it have been abandoned. The illnesses of the past have been replaced by new illnesses, requiring new clinics, new drugs. There are rural health centres now instead of leper colonies.

  And Felix Holden himself, as Jess knows, had never penetrated as far inland as this: he had died of malaria way to the east, not far from where he had disembarked after his long journey to Zanzibar. His heirs and followers had founded the settlement in his name, with the legacies that had unexpectedly come his way, but he had never seen the swamps and the lake and the shoebill.

  Jess thinks of Mungo Park, who had shown such faith in human nature, but was nevertheless speared to death by a stranger. The needle of his compass had steadfastly pointed to his mother, who outlived him.

  Bob had once said to her, decades ago, as they talked about Africa and human nature over a nourishing pig-trotter supper in Kinderley Road, that Jess only saw what she wanted to see, she read into stories what she wanted to read into stories. Africa’s full of violence, young Bob had said, of stupid barbaric rituals, of endemic brutality, black on black, Arab on black, white on black, black on white, Arab on white, white on white, war lords, mercenaries, slave traders, colonial exploiters . . . it’s the heart of darkness, Conrad got it right, but you won’t see that, Bob had said. You don’t like photos of animals killing one another and eating one another, you don’t like people killing one another and eating one another, you don’t like skull- and bone-heap stories, you just look the other way and refuse to listen. Any research denying historical evidence for cannibalism, you jump at it. You don’t like to think about all those cannibals. You’d domesticate cannibalism, Jess. If you were forced to accept its existence, you’d provide a recipe book.

  Jess had laughed, they had both laughed, all those years ago when they were not quite but nearly ‘madly in love’.

  It’s because I’m a woman, Jess had then said. I see the world like that because I’m a woman. She was, then as now, content to be a woman.

  And that, she now thinks, is why she is in pursuit of the Saucepan Graves.

  She asks Emmanuel about the graves, but he looks shifty and does not want to talk about them, although he doesn’t deny them. They are not a subject he wishes to discuss. She has a sense that he is reluctant to go near them.

  To lighten the conversation, Bob reminds them that when he’d been checking the possibilities of their itinerary and working out how much he’d have to pay Brewster, he’d hit on a website that said FUN THINGS TO DO IN MALAWI: VISIT THE MISSIONARY GRAVES. Emmanuel doesn’t find this funny, although Jess does. Emmanuel may be a Jehovah’s Witness. The woman in charge of Livingstone’s obelisk is a Jehovah’s Witness.

  Jess and Bob and Anna miss their worldly Jewish Mexican billionaire, and they can hear a lion roaring, a little too near. They haven’t seen a lion yet, and Jess and Anna don’t really want to, or not at night, in an encampment made of straw. Mungo Park had many encounters with lions. And he was alone, sometimes on his poor horse, which he greatly pitied, and sometimes, often, on foot.

  They feel better in the morning, as they hurtle bumpily along the unmade red road. They have a new driver, called Stephen, who keeps stopping to try to get a signal on his mobile. Em
manuel and he talk in their own languages, one of the languages of the lake. Bob cannot resist trying his own mobile to see if he can get in touch with the Luangwa crew filming the hyenas and vultures eating the dead hippo (he fails), and even Jess is tempted to switch hers on. But what would be the point?

  She could have texted me on her progress, but she didn’t. She didn’t text me until she reached the Jacaranda Hotel. But she was saving up her stories for me, as she’d promised.

  Anna is here, and safe, and with her mother, and she is enjoying the ride. Anna learns to duck when branches hang low over the track, and sips her bottle of tepid water and gazes around at this new but ancient world. She likes the sausage trees, and she even likes the circling vultures. As Jess had hoped, she seems to have forgotten about her illness. She does not have a brooding memory. She has regained health, appetite, confidence. She is comfortable that Bob is here, looking after her mother.

  It is all a success, so far, this expedition.

  The Holden Settlement, as Emmanuel had advised them, is no longer functional. There are no more lepers in this region; instead, there is a new clinic in the chief’s village with visiting doctors and vaccinations and a maternity unit and condoms as well as quinine. But they pass the scorched circles of dead and abandoned villages, and vestiges of some of the mission buildings remain. They see the walls of a small brick structure which was once the chapel, built on higher ground that does not flood even in the rainy season. A recent undistinguished twentieth-century plaque set on the ground on a raised cement base states that it marks the settlement dedicated to the memory of the Reverend Felix Holden, 1785–1830. It is not a place of pilgrimage—it is too far from the Livingstone tourist route—but it is there, and not utterly forgotten. It is a far cry from Wibletts, or from Livingstone’s polished plaque in Westminster Abbey.

  It is sad. It is not really very interesting. There is not much to see, and the immediate landscape lacks charm. It is neither one thing nor the other. Anna and Bob are visibly bored and restless and wanting their lunch of tomato and processed cheese and salami sandwiches, and even Jess finds it hard to summon up much interpretative enthusiasm. Subdued, they hoist themselves back into the Land-Rover. Anna and Bob leap up into the vehicle with energy, but Jess finds it an effort. Her left knee has started, uncharacteristically, to protest. She almost accepts the strong helping hand of Emmanuel. She is not as young as she had been on her first visit.

  Ursula had wanted to be a martyr and to save the lepers, or so Raoul had reported, but there weren’t any lepers in Sussex or Essex or Somerset. It’s odd that she had suffered from such archetypal Roman Catholic aspirations and delusions, when she had been brought up, like Felix Holden, in the Church of England, and in a Low Anglican branch of it at that. Jess, who had hardly ever been taken to church as a child, had once happened to hear a sermon when she was about eight years old on the life of Father Damien and his lepers, which had made an uneasy and confusing but lasting impression on her, but she had not been converted by it to a desire for martyrdom.

  Jess hopes for something more elevating from the saucepans in the wood or from the lake’s immensity.

  The Land-Rover judders to a halt on the verge of a stretch of watery terrain from which a sluggishly small but clear rivulet rises and meanders away to the west. They will have to walk from here up the slope and past the termite mounds to the woodland and the graves.

  Emmanuel says that they are standing at the headwaters of the Congo. From here, the water rises and flows for many many hundreds of miles, for a thousand miles and more, treacherously, destructively, deceptively, tortuously westward to the Atlantic, gathering strength as it goes. Or so Emmanuel says.

  This does not look very likely. It is not an impressive site. Like the Holden Settlement, it lacks significance. The words Emmanuel used are grand, but the place is not. Maybe, thinks Jess, the mighty Congo has many headwaters, and this is just one of them. Yes, of course that must be so. Livingstone had wandered from headwater to headwater and gave up even trying to chart them. And then he got lost and died. He was wrong about the Nile. This was the Congo, not the Nile. He died in a false belief. In good faith, but false belief.

  She gazes around her. It is unsatisfactory. Maybe all revelation, all discovery, is unsatisfactory. Many explorers have come to this conclusion. She stands and stares. The water bubbles. A tall yellow-billed marabou stork flaps a little way along the bank, and contemptuously settles again. Has she come all this way for this? This soggy stretch of marsh? It reminds her of a bog on Exmoor. She thinks of taking off a sandal and sock and dipping one of her itching heat-bumped feet into the Congo, but decides Emmanuel would think this form of baptism too eccentric.

  They walk onwards and uphill a little way towards the woodland grove, the cursed but sacred grove where the Saucepan Graves are to be found. Emmanuel, pressed for exegesis, has told them some hopelessly confusing and unconvincing rigmarole about the graves. His version is a tale of warring tribes and clans, of migrations of peoples from east and west, of battles with the massed crocodile enemy, of massacre and flight, of a white colonial invader. The clan of the Royal Crocodile had fought the clan of the Mushroom, and the crocodiles from the lake had taken their vengeance. Real crocodiles, or human crocodiles, or spirit crocodiles? Jess cannot follow or decode it, and Bob and Anna do not even try. Of what century does he speak? Of our own, or of centuries long ago? Time here, as her SOAS friend Gus had reminded her, is not as it is in Western Europe. There have been travellers’ accounts, even photographs, of the tribes from the west, but nobody knows the true story. It could have been the BaTwa, it could have been the Unga or the Soli or the Lala or the Bisa, migrating from the west, from the lands of the Congo. Jess can make it all up if she wants. One version is as good as another. The colour supplement will believe her story, whatever she says. They will know no better. It is up to her to find it interesting, to make it interesting.

  Emmanuel says the local people will not touch the saucepans. They lie where they lie.

  The saucepans are interesting. To Jess, all saucepans are interesting, and these are particularly so. They are of chipped white and blue and dark green enamel, and there are enamel mugs and saucepan lids too, lying, it would seem, haphazardly in the tree roots and leaf mould, some on slightly raised mounds of earth. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of them. Beneath the mounds, she assumes, lie the victims of a tribal massacre, but she is not very clear even about that. The pans do not look very old. They look post-Livingstone. They look like the pans of a 1950s childhood, but they could be a lot older than that. Enamel kitchenware has a long history. Jess has done some research. Holloware, it used to be called, and most of it was made in the Black Country, in Birmingham and Bilston and in Lye—Lye, known as the Bucket Capital of England. From the foundries of the Black Country kettles and pans and stoves and ovens were exported, and there was a steady trade in large cooking pots with legs known as ‘Negro pots’. These are the ones that feature in cartoons of stewing missionaries. They are not indigenous; they come from Lye.

  These are not historic Negro pots towards which Emmanuel has reluctantly led them. They look just like the kitchenware still on sale in the Blackstock Road.

  And they do mark graves, these pans. They signify a burial rite. Many bodies are here returned to earth.

  Jess squats to contemplate the pans. Bob takes Anna off to look at a termite mound and a thorn tree and the neat little spiral earth-holes of the ant lion, leaving Jess to think. She does not like to touch the saucepans, but she picks up a dark blue-brown lump of iron, an iron ingot, lying in the leaf mould, and holds it in her hand. It is warm and shapely and smoothly polished, but it is not an artefact. It is natural. It is the size of a netsuke. She looks at it through her little hand lens.

  It is emergent form.

  Livingstone had noted burial places, large mounds ‘with drinking vessels of rude pottery on them, arranged in circular form like a haycock, with no vestige of any inscription
’. The people who left these memorials had not striven to perpetuate their names. Livingstone had attempted to convey the Christian notion of personal immortality and bodily resurrection to those he met on his long, hard, missionary’s way, to cheer those who gave him hospitality in his wanderings, but he had failed. And he had come to respect, or at least to acknowledge, the rites of the pagans. He recorded, tenderly, a meeting with a bereaved woman who had walked many miles to build a little miniature replica hut in the burnt-out ruins of her dead mother’s house, where she had left offerings of milk and grain. No doubt, he said, this ‘comforted the poor mourner’s heart’.

  Polly, put the kettle on.

  The starry fire beneath the stars.

  Steve in his Wendy House.

  The little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love.

  Jess feels some communal memory, some folk memory, some memory from her earliest childhood about to well up, some memory that enfolds the swamp children and the pure gold baby that is Anna and Steve in the Secret Garden and the dead of the Saucepan Graves. Something was laid down long ago in the pathways, something that links her to her own story, something that brought her here.

  She holds the warm ingot in her hand. It will join the rain stone on the mantelpiece at Kinderley Road.

  Stumbling blindly with its pots and pans, the human race. She sees it stumble on.

  Bob takes a photograph of Jess and the saucepans. She does not know he is taking it. He photographs the graves, of course, for the colour supplement, but he also photographs his wife, Jess, crouching with her arms around her knees, wrapt. She is dissolving into time, she is old now, and she is in the process of transfiguration.