The Pure Gold Baby (25 page)

He had lived and worked in the States for a while, but now was back in England, the country which had first taken him in.

Jess is delighted to see him, as he to see her. They are full of questions for one another. He looks so well, so complete, such a whole person, such a credit to the Halliday regime. And Jess appears to have completely recovered from her
petit mal
.

(I think it was Vicky who produced this sophisticated verbal diagnosis for Jess’s turn.
Petit mal
. A phrase in French, which dignifies so many neurological disorders. Words, words. Ugly illnesses, pretty illnesses, ugly words, pretty words.)

I am keeping an eye on my watch, and also on the weather, which seems to be about to fulfil its threat of a heavy downpour. I have to be back for supper with friends in Belsize Park, I need to get moving, and I can see Sylvie is keen to make a move too, her duties for the day being over. But Jess and Raoul are in the full flow of reminiscence, and it seems a pity to separate friends so recently reunited. So, impulsively, I offer Raoul a lift back to London, which he accepts. I think Jess is pleased, but, if she isn’t, there’s nothing I can do about it. We exchange mobile numbers and email addresses with Victoria, our comrade in disaster, our new best friend for life whom I (wrongly) suspect we will never see again. She embraces all of us effusively (including a benign and mildly blinking Raoul) and sets off once more towards the main house, to pursue her endless battle on behalf of her beautiful brilliant disconnected boy.

Sylvia dumps the flowers and her big hat in the boot and clambers into the front seat of my car. Her best summer suit has been ruined, it is streaked with greenish damp and sap, it is stained and spattered with orange-brown pollen, but she is too tired to care. She unbuttons her jacket, revealing a surprising stout turquoise brassière, reclines her seat forcefully backwards on to Raoul’s knees (luckily he is small and compact), shuts her eyes and leans back. She is asleep before we reach the turning to Midhurst, asleep and snoring slightly She has done her fundraising best. It hadn’t been easy, but she’d done her best.

The chestnut trees of Sussex are huge and in heavy leaf; they arch over the tunnel of the sunken road.

Jess and Raoul, in the back seat, catch up on thirty or forty years of news. They address an occasional remark to me, but I cannot hear them very clearly (it will all be relayed to me later) and I have to concentrate on the road, as now, at last, the driving rain starts to fall in slanting sheets. We have got away just in time: the deluge will turn the grassy car park into a muddy swamp, it will batter the herbaceous borders, it will bend and crush the erect sap-structured stems of the tall poppies. The rain is majestic, torrential, and even as we drive it begins to pour down the gullies by the roadside, carrying sticks and leaves—it is falling too heavily on the dry hard summer earth to be absorbed, I wonder if there will be floods in London, as there were a few years ago, when people drowned in underground car parks and public lavatories. My new car’s windscreen wipers go into frantic mode: they are self-regulating, they recognise the emergency of the storm, they respond with vigour. The air conditioning hums and sings. I am in control. Sylvie, Jess and Raoul are my passengers, my puppets, I can take them wherever I wish.

So this is the story that Raoul tells Jess, as I drive through the rain and Baroness Raven slumbers in her fascinating uplifting turquoise pearl-enhanced lace-edged well-boned vulgar vanity bra.

The first item of news is that Zain is dead. Jess had known this fact, but she had not known the circumstances of his death. He had died in Paris, two months ago, and she is now told that he had died alone. There was a long trail of wives and lovers, but the trail had gone cold, and he had died alone, in a large apartment in the rue de Vaugirard in the 15 th arrondissement, near the Luxembourg, surrounded by books, papers, heaps of dead technology, African carpets, badly carved wooden palm trees and chunks of Roman statuary from the old Roman Empire of North Africa. In a junk shop, a magnificent and baroque junk shop, amidst the spoils of empires. Raoul had seen him on a few occasions, over the years. They had met at a conference in Cairo, at a reception in Beirut, at a seminar in Strasbourg. Raoul had visited the Vaugirard apartment, once, a decade ago, and had been made welcome. Zain had offered Raoul red wine, but had been on the wagon himself. He’d stopped drinking years before. He’d retired from the bottle.

Jess does not ask if Zain had remembered her. She knows that he did. He would have kept a tally, and she, Jessica Speight, urban anthropologist and haunter of asylums, would have been inscribed on it. Had she not kept her own tally, as women may do, as well as men? The Professor, Bob, Zain, and one or two minor episodes that had left less of a mark on her. She recalls them all. Sitting there, in the back seat of my Honda, with the rain beating violently on the windscreen as we join the motorway, she remembers Zain with interest, with admiration, with a recollection of intense physical pleasure and no regrets at all. She had done well with Zain.

She knows that Raoul knows that Zain remembered her as well as she remembers Zain, but he will be far too polite to allude to this knowledge. Raoul struck her then and strikes her now as a modest and fastidious man, who would keep his erotic secrets to himself.

Dr Nicholls, in contrast to Zain, is still alive, but he has been crossed off the medical register by the GMC. Jess has missed this bit of gossip, or has forgotten that she ever knew it. (This kind of forgetfulness recurs increasingly, as we grow older; surprises cease to surprise us, or surprise us twice or thrice over, as our memory confuses and entangles events and disclosures, as déjà vu merges with memory loss. I think I may have made this point before.)

Jess presses Raoul for details. Although she had never met Dr Nicholls, she had been curious about him. What sins had he committed, she wants to know? Jess does not have a very high regard for the ethics of the self-protecting GMC, and is willing in principle to take the side of Dr Nicholls.

It had been a matter of betrayal of patient confidentiality, says Raoul, a sin of publication. An eminent and clearly ungrateful client, a newspaper article, a fictionalised case history with not enough details changed, a law suit. Things hadn’t gone well for Dr Nicholls after Halliday closed, says Raoul; he had gone private and public at the same time, he had started writing pseudonymous and highly paid articles on mental health for a tabloid and had been shopped by a colleague. He was hated as well as loved. He had carried too far his disapproval of medication, his faith in the restorative powers of a benign environment and laissez-faire, his belief in the psyche’s powers of spontaneous recovery. One of his patients had assaulted him and he had hit back. That had been a mistake.

Also, said Raoul, who seems to enjoy telling this story, he had become unexpectedly, grossly fat. He had swollen up like a toad. Or like a Buddha. He had morphed into a middle-aged Buddha guru, a fat toad, with plump and swollen cheeks, wreathed in rounded layers of flesh.

Jess finds this fascinating. The only photographs she had seen of Dr Nicholls had shown him as handsome, lean, big, energetic, athletic, a tennis-playing figure of a man. Self-regarding, perhaps, but self-regarding in a manner that should surely have prohibited such weight gain.

Was it steroids, she suggested? As with Gore Vidal?

Raoul thinks not.

It was very odd, says Raoul; Dr Nicholls began to look quite Middle Eastern. Or oriental. As though he’d changed ethnicity and gender as well as body shape. Very odd.

Rather like Peter Hall, I thought, but did not interrupt them to say so. They were probably not aware that I was eavesdropping. I couldn’t hear everything they said, but I could hear most of it. And if I had mentioned Peter Hall, that would have been name-dropping as well as eavesdropping.

Steve also put on weight, Jess tells Raoul. Does Raoul remember Steve Carter? Of course he does, says Raoul. So she still sees Steve? They agree that they would have expected Steve to put on weight: he was by nature indolent, he never took any exercise, he ate for comfort, he needed to eat. To be fat was his destiny. A heavy baby that could never suck in enough, a heavy man who could never eat enough biscuits. A fat old man baby. An unappeasable, devouring baby.

Raoul says he has often wondered about Steve, whose name seems to have faded from the literary record, his early promise unfulfilled. When he’d met him, he’d been a somebody, he’d been a published poet, the only poet Raoul had ever known. But he seems to have slipped away into obscurity, suggests Raoul. You can find his name through the web—you can find almost anyone’s name through the web—and there are some early poems there, someone had posted them, some of the best of his early poems, poems he used to read to the circle in Halliday, but nothing recent, nothing from his later years. There is no surrounding integument of critical discourse, there are no links feeding his poems out into a living network. His work is islanded in the recent past. It has not yet hooked up with the expanding interconnecting digital world. Minor Edwardian poets with their entourage of minor commentators and minor biographers and minor research scholars are better connected than he. He is in a limbo, in the land of the unreborn.

Raoul suggests this (well, he suggested some of this, Jess and I looked up the Edwardian poets on the net later), and Jess is inclined to agree with his analysis.

Does Steve still write, Raoul asks?

Jess thinks not. His muse has abandoned him. Steve is all right, she insists, defensively, he’s okay, really, but even as she speaks she knows that he isn’t ‘okay, really’, he has suffered too much, his spirit has been too deeply damaged too early. By ‘all right’ and ‘okay, really’ she means he is still alive, he gets from day to day, he calls on her occasionally (but not too often, doubting his welcome), he gets up in the morning and passes the day and goes to bed at night and has not as far as she knows repeated his Wendy House suicide attempt in the Secret Garden. He has resigned himself to a life of unproductive daily anguish. Sometimes he thinks the gift will return, for there is no reason why he could not write a good poem even about being unable to write a poem (Coleridge did, others have done), he still has his fingers and his words and his pen and his paper, they are poor possessions but he has not physically lost them, his early poems were begotten of despair upon impossibility, so maybe the late poems will come, released by a final spasm of impossibility? At sixty-five, at seventy, at seventy- five?

He hopes, maybe.

Steve’s mantra, which he once repeated to Jess, goes:

The day is agony

The night brings no reprieve
.

She’s tried hard to forget it, but she can’t.

It is hard for Steve: he was born to guiltless misery, and for a while it seemed he had outwitted it. Anna was born happy, a pure gold baby, but Steve was born into a white misery. In his crib he was deprived and wanting. The thought of Steve’s life sentence darkens Jess’s pleasure in her reunion with Raoul (the successful and competent survivor Raoul), and luckily at this lowering moment she is interrupted by a call from Anna, who wants to tell her that she is on the coach on her way home and it is raining very hard.

‘It’s raining here too!’ says Jess.

This pleases them both. It is reassuring to them to know they are in the same weather system. Their intimacy is terrible.

Anna wants to know where Jess is, and who is in the car, and when will she be home. Jess tells Anna that she is with Sylvie and Eleanor, yes, Eleanor is driving, Eleanor’s new car is very smart and silver, and guess what, Jess has met her old friend Raoul, and Eleanor is very kindly giving him a lift back to town.

Anna is pleased with this news, because her mother cannot have enough friends. She rejoices in her mother’s friends; the more she has, the happier Anna is. She is never jealous of her mother’s friends, although she had been a little jealous, long ago, of Bob.

She has no idea who Raoul is, but she remembers his name. ‘Give my love to Raoul,’ says Anna, as is her generous way.

‘My daughter Anna,’ says Jess, as she disconnects. And yes, she is well. Raoul has never met her, Anna had never been taken to Halliday, but he asks after her, politely. Jess briefly describes the coach trip with the Thelwell Day Centre to Brighton, an explanation that explains all. She can see Raoul quickly decoding the story of Anna. He is very quick.

And you, Raoul, she risks, did you have children?

She has declared herself and so can he.

Raoul, who becomes tense as I try to get into the right lane to leave the A3 for the M25, says that he has a son. One son. An ex-wife, and one son.

He relaxes as I make it safely from the slip road into the mainstream. The windscreen is misting slightly; the new car is perhaps, for all its up-to-the-minute technology, not perfectly adjusted to this wet English summer weather, and I have to lean forward from time to time to wipe the screen with my naked knuckles. Sylvia is still asleep; I do not want to rouse her but I wish she would wake up. The poor new car is not accustomed to so many passengers, to so much breathing and condensation. Neither am I. Driving conditions are not good, and the traffic is heavy, and I can’t get the air conditioning to adjust as it should.

Raoul says he has one son, who works in Geneva on particle physics and black holes and dark matter. This son is, it would appear, a multilingual stateless scholar of the universe. I cannot understand his work, says Raoul; it is too hard for me, it is all a mystery to me.

He is proud of his son, of course. His voice is full of a pride which he cannot dissimulate, cannot conceal, even though he wishes to defer to Jess, the rediscovered and long-admired Jessica. So transparent we are, so helpless, so vulnerable, as we lay bare our pride and our affections. His son is called Rachid. His ex-wife is a French-Algerian anthropologist, now connected with McGill University. She specialises in nomadic peoples, and is currently on a field trip in Mongolia.