The Pure Gold Baby (17 page)

She had a half-bottle of gin in her handbag and behind the marquee she laced my juice, complained Zain. And then she married me, and then she provoked me, and then I attacked her with a kitchen knife, and here I am.

Jess believed most of this story Something along those lines had surely happened.

Zain had particularly loathed the cucumber sandwiches. He had not realised, he said, that in England they were a cultural marker, a sanctified repast, a literary reference. They were disgusting. They were limp and wet. They were like slime in the mouth.

Jess had listened to this diatribe with professional fascination. It had not occurred to her, even though she was an anthropologist, that anyone could take so strongly against a harmless cucumber sandwich. Zain liked the spiced and the fiery, the burnt and the grilled, the red and the black and the orange. She found it easy to understand his dislike, to savour the sandwiches with his Sudanese palate, and she says she has never felt quite the same about them since.

She learnt a lot from Zain, but, when Anna came home early from school, she dismissed him. He disappeared, without protest, as Bob before him had disappeared.

He went home to the Sudan, but later we learnt he was back in Europe. Civil war and drought and famine drove him back. He was a very gifted man. He wrote an important book on Sub-Saharan economics which has come to be cited as a classic. Halliday Hall and Dr Nicholls rescued Zain, although Zain did not manage to rescue the Sudan. The Sudan was too much for him, and he lives in exile. He’s not well. We expect to see his name in the obituary columns shortly. We think he’s living in Paris.

He was lucky to be ill at the right time, in the right place. Jess still thinks at times of the large brown teapot and the Marie biscuits. Those had been kindly days.

She sometimes wonders what happened to Raoul, to Simon, to Patrick, to Ursula. Zain had thought highly of Raoul. He had predicted a future for him. A clever man, Zain had said. ‘A clever man, washed up in the therapeutic wastes of Essex. Watch out for him,’ said Zain.

She sometimes wonders, as she continues perforce to consider the problems of mental-health care, whether or not Dr Nicholls had been an inspired healer, or whether, more probably, he had arbitrarily and somewhat improperly selected interesting cases for his particular attention. He and his little group had certainly profited from a golden moment in NHS theory and practice. She has seen Dr Nicholls’s name, occasionally, in the medical press. She thinks that he moved into private practice, not long after Halliday Hall was closed down on grounds of cost. Occasionally, sitting on a bus or watching telly with Anna, she thinks she will google him, out of curiosity, but she always forgets.

Jess was to enter, after Zain, into a long and stable period of celibacy, a lake with still waters. Some of us were not so lucky: divorce and desertion riddled our comfortable little encampments, adulteries laid siege to us, and disputes over property split us and scattered us. Jess had retired from the field. The strange trinity of the Professor, Bob and Zain had provided variety and conquest enough for her youth and middle years, and she and Anna settled into a calmer domestic rhythm.

After a few years Anna graduated from Marsh Court and came home to Jess. Her social worker Karen, looking ahead to the as yet unimaginable days of Jess’s old age, suggested a placement at a residential sheltered home near Taunton in Somerset (‘very nice’ she insisted), but Jess declined. She visited, and saw that it was indeed very nice, as far as niceness goes, but she declined. She could manage perfectly well as she was, she and Anna could manage together, she’d organised her bookish working life to accommodate Anna. Anna was safe to leave alone in the house for brief stretches of time (though never for the night) and, despite the divorces and desertions, there was still a neighbourhood network of friends to help out in need, and the Day Centre, and other voluntary support groups. I was still around, and so was Katie. Sylvie had moved up-market to an elegant Georgian house in Canonbury, and Ollie’s mother, Sarah, had moved too, not as smartly as Sylvie, but not very far, and still on the bus route. It seemed that Jess and Anna would continue together, companionably becalmed, through the next decades. It did not do to look too far ahead.

I saw somewhat less of Jess and Anna during these years. My boys were grown and had more or less left home, one for university and what was to be an academic career, the other for Bolivia. The after-school mothers’ gatherings in one another’s houses had come to a natural end. I had been promoted and the organisation which employed me was expanding rapidly, I thought too rapidly. I was now working longer hours, and so was my husband, who was wearing himself out in the service of the state. (Northern Ireland nearly killed him, and I mean that literally.) I still went round to Jess’s for supper by myself occasionally, and we would arrange to meet for a walk in the park. And once or twice—I am sorry it was not more often, but I plead that I was busy—I would step in to keep Anna company when Jess had an unavoidable engagement. Anna and I went to the theatre once to see Maroussia in
Twelfth Night
, and once, God knows why, we went on a coach ride to Windsor.

Anna was easy company, always appreciative, and always very keen to say thank you for everything. But she was a worry. I worried about losing her when she was in my charge, as I grew older I began to worry more about road accidents, and I worried about strangers being rude to her. It wasn’t good when she stepped on that woman’s handbag on the Windsor coach. I can see that woman’s ugly angry broad red pig face, her thick neck, her angry grey curls to this day. And I suspect Anna can too.

But Jess and Anna, during these years, had many happy times. Our children were changing almost beyond recognition, as they emerged from adolescence and embarked on gap years, degree courses, ambitions, careers and disappointments, as they discovered whether they were gay or straight and had tragic love affairs and, eventually, some of them, babies. It was not like that for Jess and Anna, for whom the concept of progress was in perpetual abeyance. But there were many things that they liked to do together. They liked walking, and they explored the London parks and galleries. Anna was surprisingly tolerant of, indeed keen on, exhibitions, and they visited the traditional and the avant-garde. Anna had a good eye, and could sometimes make sense of paintings that baffled us and Jess. ‘Look,’ she’d say, ‘it’s a boat’- and when you looked, you could see that it was.

They enjoyed some of the same movies. When Anna was little, they used to go to shows in the extraordinary and fantastic world of the Finsbury Park Astoria, then a twinkling oriental fairyland of fun, with a fountain full of goldfish, and balconies and cupolas and shining stars, suggesting a vast hinterland of wonder behind its stucco façades. It was a real treat and we all missed it when it closed down. (The Finsbury Park Astoria belongs to some kind of extreme religious sect these days, it’s far more way out than the Finsbury Park mosque.) I can’t remember which cinemas took over as the children grew up—did we have to go down to Upper Street and the Angel? I can’t remember.

Anna loved Hollywood musicals,
Star Wars
, Shakespeare and Jane Austen adaptations. One of her favourite movies was a bizarre and innocent fantasia featuring a Hollywood bathing belle performing aquatic wonders under water in a great blue shining lake full of lilies and fish and mermaids and swaying greenery. She saw this one Sunday afternoon on television at Marsh Court and described it to Jess, who tracked it down on video and bought a copy. Anna played it again and again. (They weren’t supposed to watch daytime TV at Marsh Court, but of course they did.) Anna admired her heroine’s muscular but well-curved physique, her turquoise bathing suit with its stylish sparkling silver trim, her old-fashioned flower-petalled bathing cap, and the way, on shore, she released and shook out her long blonde hair.

Jess enjoyed this video too. It was much pleasanter than James Bond. When DVDs became available, she bought Anna a DVD of the underwater Venus. Anna never tired of it, and Jess enjoyed glimpses of it for the pleasure it gave her daughter. And they found other swimming movies, with Esther Williams, Glynis Johns, Annette Kellerman. Mermaid movies, Neptune’s daughters, synchronised swimming—all these delighted them.

But best of all Anna liked, herself, to swim. She was happy to swim in chlorinated water, in ionised water, in sea water, in fresh water, in brooks, in waves, in rivers and in standing ponds. She loved the water. She was not an elegant swimmer, though she had by now graduated from dog-paddle to what Dr Livingstone called frog-fashion, but she was strong, and bolder in the water than on land. She had been awarded swimming badges by the club at the sports centre where she used to swim. Jess had sewn them on to her bathing suit, and Anna was always pleased when people asked her what they were for: for swimming ten lengths, for diving for a brick, for jumping off the springboard, for good attendance.

In the summer, Anna and Jess would take a day trip to the seaside, to Brighton or Hastings or Seaford, and occasionally a group of us would go on an outing. Nearer home, Jess and Anna liked the Hampstead Ladies’ Bathing Pond, and would catch the Northern Line to Belsize Park and walk over the Heath with their swimming things and a picnic and a book to read. Jess was to remember one sunny day in late July, when for a while the world stood still and all was well. Anna was lying sunning herself on one of the creaking dank wooden landing stages (these were the days before we were told to fear the sun), and Jess was reading Proust.

English people reading Proust often manifest a degree of self-consciousness, and Jess was no exception. She felt a sense of solid and almost visible virtue as she lay in her stalwart royal-blue bathing suit on her yellow towel on the grass, making her way through the
Jeunes Filles en fleurs
, which she was reading in the Scott Moncrieff translation. It was a good summer read, a seaside holiday bathing pool read, and it took her back to her childhood holidays with her parents and Vee in North Wales. North Wales was not very like Proust’s Balbec, but she had been a
jeune fille en fleur
at the time, and had courted and caught the eye of many a fellow-bather and promenader. She had even made an assignation behind the ice-cream hut, and exchanged a ridiculous kiss with a boy from Liverpool.

Jess was reading Proust with an incentive. She was reading him not competitively but companionably, in concert with an old schoolfriend from Broughborough with whom she had kept in touch. They met rarely, for her friend Vivien lived in Edinburgh, where she was the assistant curator of a gallery, but they had preserved their intimacy through Vivien’s occasional London visits and through sending one another postcards and letters. They had enjoyed their English and French classes at school together, and this was a way of perpetuating their pleasure into adult life, maybe old age. (The reading group had not yet become a nationwide phenomenon.) Jess and Vivien had already read their way through
Ulysses
, encouraging one another onwards by exchanging comments and moments of bewilderment and enlightenment, and now they were doing Proust. Would they reach the end? They were not sure. It wouldn’t matter if they didn’t; nobody was watching them, nobody was marking them, there were no exams to sit, no teachers to impress.

Jess had made notes to herself on sentences she had particularly appreciated, thinking perhaps to share them with Viv, and now looked back at a passage that had curiously captivated her. The Marquis de Norpois, the sententious and elderly diplomat who persists in giving bad literary advice to Proust’s young narrator, is recommending as a model the career of a young friend of his who has quit the diplomatic service for the life of a man of letters. The titles of this novice littérateur’s works had filled Jess with inexplicable delight. He had written, claimed the marquis, a book dealing with the Sense of the Infinite on the Western Shore of Victoria Nyanza, and a monograph on the Repeating Rifle in the Bulgarian Army—the latter ‘not so important as the other, but very brightly, in places perhaps almost too pointedly written’, commented M. de Norpois, ‘and these have put him quite in a class by himself’.

Jess knew that these subjects were ludicrous, and intended to be so, but nevertheless she liked this ageing novice littérateur with his random mind, for she too has a random mind, and the thought of the sense of the infinite on the shore of Lake Nyanza entrances her. Proust might make fun, but she can see it, the borderless lake extending to infinity, as she had seen Bangweulu and its swamps and marshes and ant hills and its low horizons, the land of the blue shoebill and the shy dark sitatunga.

She sees also as she pauses from her reading the River Lee and the lilies and the flurries of little red and golden birds, she sees the canal and the moorhens, she sees the Hampstead Ladies’ Bathing Pond and Anna and the fringe of sallows and elders and the dark brown water lapping, as she now hears the slow strokes of an elderly stout swimmer, the ripple of the water, the faint hum of hover flies, the murmurs of conversations. The pond and the little lake stretch timelessly towards infinity, the river flows for ever and imperceptibly. Out of time, all is well for the ageing mother and the ageless daughter.

There were, of course, many awkward moments for Jess and Anna during these years, small patches of crisis and anxiety in their conjoined lives, and the minor difficulties that arose foreshadowed more to come. Let us take one incident as an example, which Jess did not report until well after it was over. This was a worrying episode when Jess came down with a chest infection and had to take to her bed. I think Anna must have been in her late teens or early twenties—not long after the days of Marsh Court. A big girl, a grown woman. Jess was hardly ever ill, enjoying good health and a strong constitution, but that February she found she was running a temperature. Her breathing wheezed and her chest rattled and she felt very hot. She put herself to bed, with jugs of water and aspirin, and tried to keep Anna at a distance, for she did not want to communicate whatever it was that she had caught. It did not occur to her to get in touch with her doctor, even though in those days home visits were still a possibility, because she had little faith in the doctor, and anyway she reasoned that whatever she was suffering from would pass of its own accord. She did not hold with antibiotics.