The Pure Gold Baby (20 page)

She had been expecting Livingstone’s monument to be vast and gesticulatory, like the Albert Memorial, with palm trees and crocodiles, with adoring natives in crouching postures. And there were plenty of memorials on a grand scale, most of them devoted to naval and military commanders, some famous, some forgotten. Charles James Fox reclining in a stout classical death pose was accompanied by a handsome kneeling African, representing (as she much later deduced) Fox’s commitment to the abolition of slavery, but Livingstone she could not find.

She had to ask a verger, who told her that Livingstone lay under a plain black slab on the floor of the nave.

She retraced her steps, and there he was. No mourning doves, no weepers, no palm trees, just a plain epitaph, recording in plain script that his body had been brought by faithful hands over land and sea, and concluding that we should pray ‘to heal this open sore of the world’, by which he had meant slavery.

He had not wanted to be buried in an English grave. He said that English graves lacked elbow room. He had become accustomed to the vast spaces of Africa. He had wished to be buried in a little forest grave, in a clearing, in a simple garden plot marked by blue stones. But he had ended up here, after a year’s jolting and journeying, having left his heart and innards behind him under a tree.

She remembered his last march, his broken sextant, his tree-frog.
I lost my mother, I lost my father, and I am alone, alone, alone
. She thought of the nine Nassick Boys, slaves plucked from an orphanage in Bombay to lead Livingstone through Africa. As we have seen, one of them (although she does not yet know this) had accompanied his corpse to England. He had been a pall bearer at the state funeral, and had thrown a palm branch into the open grave, this grave where she now stands.

Mum is dead.

Livingstone had unfortunately recorded that the ‘slave spirit’ in the Nassick boys went deepest in ‘those who have the darkest skins’. That remark has not been good for his posthumous reputation. He has been retrospectively cast as a racist, which Jess considers may or may not be fair.

There was not much in Livingstone’s austere slab to detain Jess, and after reading the inscription she looked up to locate Anna and Ollie, but they were not in sight. She could hardly shout or whistle for them in this sombre setting, and although she was sure they could have come to no harm here she set off briskly to search for them. It was a good building in which to play hide-and-seek. Chapels, cloisters, alcoves, crypts, and the great dark marble royal bedchambers of the dead offered many a Gothic hiding place for two small children. She could not see them anywhere, and began to wonder if she should approach a verger to ask for an announcement. Would there be a loudspeaker system available, as on a railway station? And if she asked for help, would she be publicly convicting herself of maternal neglect?

After some minutes of perambulation, up worn stone steps and over chequered slabs and uneven paving and along a dark transept, she heard promising sounds echoing from a side chapel. It was Ollie’s high-pitched childish voice, carrying clearly through the sepulchral gloom. ‘Go on, I dare you,’ he was saying, ‘I
dare
you’—or these were the words that Jess was to think that she remembered, when she told the story to me. Anna was clearly refusing to do whatever she was being dared to do, and Jess hastened towards them, to find Ollie trying to persuade Anna to climb over a low chain to enter the precinct of a Baroque monument portraying a life-sized skeleton emerging from what seemed to be a gardener’s hut. Death was poised to aim his deadly bolt upwards at the lovely bared bosom of a young woman swooning in her husband’s protective arms.

Jess was cross with Ollie and with herself. She snatched Anna away from the morbid monument and grabbed Ollie with her other hand and propelled them both not very gently away from the skeleton and the woman and the surrounding displays of ostentatious alabaster grief and self-congratulatory selfperpetuation.

The skeleton was horrifyingly realistic. Its lower jaw was missing, though whether this was by the sculptor’s design or by accident or through iconoclastic Cromwellian vandalism was not clear. Jess didn’t like it at all, but clearly both children had been strongly attracted to it. Ollie protested, as he was led away, that they had wanted to see what the skeleton had in his little shed. The door was half open, and they’d wanted to see inside. ‘There wouldn’t have been
anything
inside, you little stupids,’ said Jess, as she marched them down the wide nave and over Livingstone’s pickled remains towards the summer sunshine of Westminster Square.

‘There might have been bones, or anything,’ said Ollie defiantly.

‘There might have been bones,’ echoed Anna, a docile pupil.

‘It wasn’t real,’ said Jess; ‘it was only a
statue
, it didn’t have a real indoors.’

‘It
looked
real,’ said Anna.

‘Egyptian mummies have real people inside them,’ said Ollie.

‘Come along now,’ said Jess, as she set off towards the bus stop, dragging one infant in either hand. The good girl, the bad boy.

‘Pyramids have mummies inside them, and mummies have real people inside them,’ insisted Ollie obstinately, on top of the No. 24 bus.

‘Don’t keep kicking the seat in front like that, you’ll annoy the lady,’ said Jess.

‘Real dead people,’ insisted Ollie.

Jess found the remains of a packet of dry old Rowntree’s fruit gums in the bottom of her bag. Ollie chose black, Anna orange. They sucked, exhausted, silenced, as the bus made its way past Nelson and the lions and round Trafalgar Square.

Yes, we all thought Ollie was a handful. It was brave of Jess to undertake him. But he was a bright boy, and Anna liked him. He was Anna’s friend. Jess needed Anna to have a friend, even a bad friend. And Jess owed Ollie’s mother a favour or two.

The groves of statuary, the petrified trees, the stony branching despairing and gesticulating dead.

The helmet-maker’s once beautiful wife.

Roubiliac’s famously macabre figure of Death in Westminster Abbey, the one that so captivated the naughty and precocious Ollie, portrays Death threatening Lady Elizabeth Nightingale with a thunderbolt. She died of a miscarriage. The mother died, but the child survived.

Queen Philippa, the mother of the Black Prince, also lies in Westminster Abbey, and her effigy does not flatter her. Was she a Moor, an African, the black mother of a black prince? Today’s fashion says yes; history says no. Whatever her complexion, she spoke up for the burghers of Calais.

The burghers of Calais, centuries later, notoriously attracted the attention of Rodin.

Queen Philippa died of the dropsy in 1369, and her effigy in the abbey does not flatter her. Rodin did not flatter the burghers either, and his realism caused offence. We don’t know if the helmet-maker’s wife was offended by her representation.

The lonely and the distressed and the ageing haunt the dead, and they become connoisseurs of epitaphs and funerary monuments. The dead speak to them, lure them, beseech their company.

Uluntanshe
. A wanderer with no aim in life.

Christ cured an epileptic, but old age he cannot cure. He offered immortal life as a placebo, but few of us trust his promise these days. I went to a funeral a month or two ago and was surprised to find the service full of references to the resurrection and the life everlasting and to reunion beyond the grave. I had thought the gaunt proud old woman in the coffin under the lilies couldn’t possibly have believed in any of that stuff. But maybe that was what she wanted. It seemed very archaic to me.

Jessica Speight, Sylvie Raven and I went to a fund-raising fête in Sussex together. We are old friends and old campaigners, and sometimes we join forces, we keep one another company in our latter days. Sylvie was due to speak on this occasion, and we to listen. Sylvie had been co-opted as a useful and willing baroness, though not a particularly relevant one, as the event had nothing to do with the bladder. We went as supporters, and I had offered to drive. I had a new car and was childishly and vainly eager to take it for a spin, hoping that this activity would take my mind off my low spirits. As, at first, it did.

It was July, and the event was to be held in the grounds of a small country house, or perhaps I mean a large house in the country, converted into a residential home for children and young adults in need of special care. The fête had been organised to raise awareness and funds for medical research into acute behavioural problems, loosely grouped together under the controversial label of autism, although we were shortly to discover that the home also catered for a select group of young people with conditions not related to autism—dystonias, mobility malfunctions, self-harm. The word ‘autism’ has become a shortcut to describe other states, and not always a helpful one. That’s what Jess tells me. Jess is well up in all of this.

Jess and I were not expected to make large donations, but we were good at being aware. Indeed, we were both experts in awareness. (My awareness is much influenced by, and dependent upon, Jess’s.) And of course we paid for our rather expensive tickets, which included tea, cakes and a glass of wine. Jess might write about her visit. And there would be one or two people there that we might know, and to whom we could try to make ourselves pleasant.

Workers for campaigns and NGOs get to know one another. They inhabit the same world, breathe the same air. Some professionals move from one campaign to another with apparent nonchalance—from torture victims to threatened species, from organic farming in Scotland to women with fistulas in the Horn of Africa, from rescuing battery hens in Wiltshire to the removal of land mines in Cambodia, from anti-smoking to tree protection. The objectives differ, at times grotesquely, but the techniques of fund-raising and consciousness-raising are much the same. The missionary motive dies hard.

Anna didn’t go with us, which turned out to be a mercy. Jess had thought she might find the visit disturbing, so Anna went instead on a coach trip to Brighton with the staff and some of the clients of the Thelwell Day Centre, a support group which she had been attending for some years on the recommendation of the social worker’s successor. Anna loved an outing, and the Brighton trip offered a tour of the Pavilion, a walk along the pier and a pizza. (It didn’t offer a swim: Health and Safety forbade the sea.) Anna was a trusted member of the day centre, always welcomed by the staff, who could rely on her to help to shepherd some of the more obstructive or disoriented of the flock. Her day, we heard, was going well. At lunchtime she reported to us on her mobile that she was having a Pizza Margarita and a Diet Coke and was looking forward to a butterscotch ice-cream. She had the better part.

The mobile was a godsend to Jess and Anna. It saved Jess a lot of worry. Anna had a few saved numbers that she could ring by pressing two simple buttons: Mum, Bob, Katie, Gramps, me, a few others. Gramps is dead now, and much missed, but he lived long enough to own a mobile phone, he lived to join the age of the mobile.

Anna liked butterscotch. There used to be a dessert called Butterscotch Instant Whip to which we mothers often had resort in our frantic earlier days. It was much less artificial of flavour than the unpleasant synthetic pink varieties, though its texture was equally suspect. What can they have used to make the milk coagulate like that? It can’t have been good for the body or the brain. But it was a godsend.

The gods also sent us a canned dessert called Ambrosia Creamed Rice Pudding. But none of us liked that.

I mourn those days when the children were young. I miss them. Sometimes I look at the little drawer in my desk where I used to keep the Family Allowance book and my eyes fill with tears. A Freedom Pass is a comfort, but the Family Allowance book was more than a comfort. The woman in the Post Office on the corner used to stamp it, and hand over the cash, and I felt rich.

On the drive down to Sussex, Sylvie told us what she knew of the organisation, and of her contact with it through a fellowpeer with a problematic son. The peer wished to protect his troublesome and troubled son’s privacy, for the sake of the whole family, and didn’t want to exploit a personal tragedy, but he had allowed himself to become well known as a donor to mental health causes and as a patron of the home we were about to visit. He occasionally made enlightened speeches on mental-health issues in the House. Jess knew his name, and I let it be assumed that I too had heard of him, though I’m not sure if I had.

Sylvie was fond of fat bald baggy old Bob Germen, and thought he did his best. She wanted to oblige. He had promised her that Wibletts, despite its silly name, was a good cause. His son, now in his thirties, had spent a year at Wibletts. The son suffered from late-diagnosed PKU, or phenylketonuria, a recessive metabolic disorder associated, according to Sylvie, with seizures, mental retardation and rapid-t witching-finger movements. It was hitherto, Sylvie thought, unknown in the peerage, though many peers she knows are loony. But Bob was only a life peer, so, as she said, that didn’t mean anything. Nobody knew what trick nature’s germens had played on poor old Bob and his boy.

He wouldn’t be there at the fête himself, said Sylvie, he couldn’t face it. She was his envoy.

PKU is not wholly unconnected with the bladder, said Sylvie, the bladder queen. It’s caused by an acid that dyes the urine a spectacular dark blue-green. It’s amazing that nobody identified the condition until the 1930s. You don’t see it often, but you can’t miss it when you do.

Jess was very interested in the story of Bob Germen’s son, and Bob Germen’s ambivalent paternal behaviour. (I don’t think the mother was ever mentioned.) Jess knew many stories of parents who had distanced themselves from or disowned their problematic children in less enlightened days, and as we made our way past Guildford on the A3 she recited some of them to us. Jane Austen’s brother George, she now told us, had never learnt to read or write, and had been cared for quietly in a neighbouring village, not in the family home. There were few mentions of him in later family records, although his father had once, she thought, expressed the view that it was a comfort that he could not become a bad or wicked child.