The Pure Gold Baby (33 page)

She was Jess’s alter ego, her nomadic wandering alter ego. She could have been her sister. She looked far more like Jess than Vee ever did.

Some of the news stories mentioned her distinguished neurologist husband, but most did not. Increasingly, in more recent years, they did not.

All in all, Marie-Hélène was doing a lot better than the poor Swedish professor. She wasn’t exactly world-famous, but she had had, was continuing to enjoy, a satisfactory career.

She was ten years younger than Jess, and still active.

Jess, naturally, found this discovery fascinating, and she was glad she had not made it in the earlier days of her reacquaintance with Raoul. The chronological implications were manifold and intriguing. Had Raoul secretly fallen in love with her during those tea parties at Halliday Hall, when he was at his most vulnerable, and had he been disappointed when she made off with Zain? Had her image lingered in his memory subconsciously and been revived when he first met and wooed Marie-Hélène? Maybe she and Marie-Hélène were simply ‘his type’, and, if so, had there been other intervening or subsequent models? Was Raoul aware of this surprising resemblance? He must be. And was he now pursuing Jess because he had lost his wife?

He could not possibly have planned to encounter her at Wibletts, reasoned Jess, although the similarity of their interests had made it a not very unlikely coincidence that they should meet there. What had been surprising had been his persistence on that day: his determination, having found her, not to let go of her, even though she had not been at her best and the occasion in many ways inauspicious. He could have easily engineered a meeting without the Wibletts encounter, but by temperament, she now thought, he would have been too shy and unassuming to do so. It had taken the intervention of providence and Sylvie Raven and Victoria and my impetuous and self-serving offer of a lift back to London in my car to bring them together.

His pursuit of her since then had been a kind of courtship, she recognised. The little lunches, even the confidences about the Ursula dilemma. Jess was not quite sure what she felt about these developments.

As Anna’s health and confidence improved, and as Bob continued to be a regular visitor from over the river, Jess decided that it would be safe to invite Raoul to see her in Kinderley Road. He had several times hinted that he would like to see Steve again, and Jess was half pleased by the thought that somebody really wanted to see Steve. She organised a tea party, with small sandwiches and a special lemon cake from the shop at Highbury Barn. She even cut the sandwiches out in little shapes—stars, crescents, circles—an easy and pleasing trick she’d learnt from Victoria. Raoul and Steve and Anna ate the lot, while Raoul and Steve talked about Halliday and Dr Nicholls and, of course, Ursula. Jess presided, pleased with her little salon.

Steve was very interested in the story of Ursula’s religious afterlife. He quoted from Gerard Manley Hopkins.
I have desired to go/ Where springs not fail
 . . . It is a short poem, and he knew it by heart. Steve had found no such refuge, no heaven haven, and neither had the poor tormented Hopkins of the Terrible Sonnets.

There had been an ancient spring of fresh water at Troutwell Farm, and in the grounds of the asylum there was an old pump with a stone trough, long since disused, but never dismantled. The old spring was dry.
La Source tarie
. The 1910 Grade II-listed water tower surveyed the grounds like a watch tower in a war, in a war of mental strife.

But some, even in its bad years, had found Troutwell a haven.

Ursula hadn’t seemed to be at all religiously inclined at Halliday, Raoul and Steve agreed. Steve was distressed by Raoul’s account of Ursula’s wanderings and of her alleged return to their alma mater. Raoul gave less detail than he had given to Jess, but it was enough to cause distress. Steve leant forward, earnestly, attentively, solemnly, his large face soft and heavy with a weight of transferred sorrow. Poor woman, he repeated gravely, poor Ursula, poor woman. His voice was as full and gentle as ever, as receptive of grief. Jess remembered him reading the Wordsworth ballads aloud, sonorously, monotonously, all those years ago.

He is a kind man, Steve, she thinks. The pain of others compounds his own, extends his own, offers him some companionship.

Steve was also, of course, interested in Raoul’s speciality of phantom pain, and a career which he immediately recognised as a natural consequence of his apprenticeship under the care of Dr Nicholls. Steve wasn’t very well informed about mirror neurones and tended towards a metaphysical interpretation of the human condition, but he honoured Raoul’s sustained devotion to physical explanations and explorations of mental states as well as pseudo-physical sensations. Voices, visions, apparitions.

Jess wondered whether Ursula in her crazy old age was receiving any kind of medical attention, or whether she had dropped off the map of the social services. There were specialist nurses for the homeless, her Essex friend Lauren had told her, and indeed Jess had tried to contact them, but had drawn a blank. Maybe Ursula had carefully put herself beyond their reach.

Dr Nicholls had been anti-medication. He took what we now call recreational drugs, but he was anti-medication, a not wholly consistent position, Jess had thought. Liberty Hall, that’s what Susie had called Halliday Hall. But Susie’s boy Vincent had improved beyond all recognition when the right medication had been prescribed for him, and he was now leading a ‘normal’ life.

Susie and Jess exchange Christmas cards, and keep one another updated on their Marsh Court children.

Anna does not suffer acute mental anguish, as Steve and Raoul and Ursula have so unjustly and unreasonably suffered it. As Hopkins suffered it. But Anna feels, perhaps excessively, for the pain of others. For Polly and Sukie and their unsuccessful tea party. For Joshua Raven in jail and the tears wept by his mother, Sylvie. For Harry Grigson in the lion’s den. For Maya at the day centre whose dog had been run over by a bus. Anna had not liked the dog, she had been frightened of it, but she was sorry for Maya.

An allocentric, not an egocentric, personality, that was Anna. Jess had come across that distinction in an article recently. It had seemed to fit Anna. The article had something to do with evolution, but Jess can’t remember what. Raoul seems to believe something not wholly materialistic about evolution, something about the free flow of empathetic neurones linking all human consciousness, all human development. Yet he denies the existence of the non-material world.

Jess rang me that evening to report on the success of her tea party. She described Steve’s reciting of the two stanzas of ‘A Nun Takes the Veil’. Too much of sharp and sided hail had Steve endured, and so it would seem had Ursula.

‘But,’ said Jess as an afterthought, ‘I really, really
didn’t
want to be out of the swing of the sea. I wanted to be out there, in the waves. That’s what I thought I wanted, when I was young. But here I am, becalmed in Kinderley Road.’

‘Nothing wrong with Kinderley Road,’ I said, from the nearby safety of Shawcross Street. And we both laughed.

Our outing to Troutwell was like a down-market reprise of our outing to Wibletts, though we didn’t take Sylvie. Sylvie was too busy being a baroness, and there was a new bill going through the House that was eating up a good deal of her time. She was much absorbed by its many clauses and amendments. She invited Jess and me to go to watch some of it from the Visitors’ Gallery, as we’d both taken an interest in it and signed a lot of probably pointless online petitions, but I think we were both overcome by a sense of our own impotence and declined. (Also, the Visitors’ Gallery, which I had visited once or twice before, gives me vertigo. It makes me feel as though I am about to hurl myself down into the Chamber. It makes my exposed knees tremble.)

Jess was very worried about the threat to Anna’s support structure and in particular to the funding of the day centre. They wouldn’t close it, but they would cut its hours, she guessed.

So off we went, Raoul, Jess and I, in my still new car, in search of Ursula, in search of the potent past.

We didn’t take Anna.

We had an appointment with Lauren in a new social services building in the business park that had sprung up and engulfed Troutwell. Lauren might or might not have some clues for us. I was aware by now that Ursula was something of a red herring, that this expedition had some other meaning for Raoul, and that Jess was anxious it should go well for him. Jess chatted along as we went round the M25 towards Essex, telling us we would like Lauren, she was a large, lively and amusing young woman with a colourful dress sense and Essex was lucky to have her, but as she chatted I think we both began to be aware that Raoul was very tense. He was sitting in the back, but I could see in the mirror that he was looking anxious and worried, I began to wonder if he was car sick, my car is very comfortable and not known for causing sickness, but he did look uneasy, and I wondered whether I should propose a coffee break, but that’s not easy on the M25. He did at one point say that he’d never been driven along this stretch of motorway, and it is peculiarly bleak and remorseless as it makes its way past exits to Enfield and Potters Bar and Waltham Abbey; wide lanes, grey-white-hard stretches of lanes, brutal surfaces, heavy lorries on their way to Felixstowe, bloody fools driving too fast on your bumper, gigantic guillotines with warnings about accidents and roadworks hanging over your head, but I knew the A12 was just as bad, a horrible unevenly surfaced road out towards Chelmsford and Colchester and drearily beyond, one of the least loved roads in England.

It was one of those grey monochrome February days when the roads and the skies flatten and join and spread to a discouraging infinity A wide, scoured, abraded, gritted roadway, very different from the deep rich English leafy sunken roads of Suffolk. I remembered the torrential summer rain, the exuberant flowerbeds, the tall poppies and the tall delphiniums of Wibletts, the expense.

I thought there was a Little Chef coming up soon, and planned to take a break, but before I suggested it Raoul with some embarrassment leant forward and said, ‘Eleanor, do you mind if we stop soon, I need the bathroom.’ ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘of course’, sorry I hadn’t been able to pre-empt this declaration, and I pulled in at the first Little Chef we came across and we ordered coffee while he disappeared to the gents’. While he was gone Jess said, ‘It’s nerves, he’s worried about seeing the old place again’—and she was right, for when he came back he said so. He had recovered his composure but warned us it might happen again. ‘When I get anxious . . . ’ he said. He didn’t need to finish the sentence, we understood all too well.

For him, it was like revisiting an old school, an old prison, after many years. Apart from the Ursula problem, which also loomed.

Raoul said he’d never seen anywhere quite like the Little Chef. Jess and I were well used to them (I, as a committed driver, more accustomed to them than Jess), and we were familiar with their strange mixture of uniformity and individual local eccentricity, but Raoul was more accustomed to the North American chains. The Little Chef is deeply English, a weird offshoot of the old roadhouse and the old tea room, with its bacon and eggs, its scampi and chips and peas, its buttered scones. It’s Americanised, in its way, but it’s still recognisably English. Old ways linger.

Finding Lauren and Satis House in the business park was hell. I don’t have a satnav, but I did have maps and two willing and intelligent map readers, and we still couldn’t find it. Jess had warned me about the geography of those parts, but I hadn’t quite believed her. I might have got irritated with this wild-goose chase had I not been worried about further worrying Raoul, for there was something about the post-urban landscape that was profoundly depressing—it was a self-repeating maze of leisure centres and municipal offices and car showrooms and windowless storerooms and hospitals, in a nightmare of jaunty red and steel and glass, and not a tree or a blade of grass to be seen. Eventually, as we circled, Raoul spotted the name of the road we were looking for, Mayhew Circus, and there at last was a modest yellow brick office block called Satis House.

Plump Lauren was a relief. She was one of those large young women whose fine complexion glows with health, and she was all smiles and laughter and welcome. She wore blue tracksuit bottoms and stylish silver trainers and a gay pink-and-white-striped jumper and pearl earrings. How she kept her spirits up was a wonder, as her job entailed grim matter.

She hadn’t drawn a total blank with Elizabeth Ursula Strawson: she’d found a bit of a paper trail, though not Ursula herself, and she thanked Raoul for bringing her back to official attention. The community mental health team had received a report two summers ago of an elderly woman answering to his description who was sleeping rough, and it had kept an eye on her for a while, but she had disappeared in the autumn, presumably having found some kind of accommodation or left the neighbourhood. She had never applied to the local-authority housing department, or registered herself as homeless, though she might well have qualified for accommodation as a vulnerable person in priority need, so the matter had rested there. She might still be living in the area, and nobody of her name had died in the area, for Lauren had checked. She might be drawing benefits locally, but Lauren hadn’t tracked down a likely claimant.

‘As you know,’ said Lauren robustly, ‘in this country we have the right to be as mad as we like, provided we aren’t a risk to ourselves or others.’

Raoul took this point, and assured Lauren that he wasn’t interfering. He was just responding to all those letters. He offered to show them to Lauren and got a packet of them out of his bag, but Lauren shook her head: she’d seen enough crazy letters. She suggested we all go and have an early lunch instead, so we’d have time to look at Troutwell before it got dark.

Over our cheese-and-ham toasties in the newbuild fakewood royal-purple psychedelic pseudo-pub at the end of the Circus, Lauren told us about cuts in the social services and updated herself on Anna’s local-authority funding. (Anna’s old social worker Karen was long retired, and had been succeeded by an over-anxious anorexic young woman called Carol, who, according to Jess, was too fond of trying to teach grandmothers to suck eggs.) Then Lauren told us all she knew about the status of the buildings at Troutwell. The stories about old Troutwell died hard. Even the old-fashioned pre-Dr Nicholls pre-Halliday Troutwell was well remembered: it had been one of the biggest employers in that part of the county, and she knew lots of people whose parents had worked there, whose grandparents had been inmates there, and some of them had happy memories of it. It wasn’t the prison it was painted as being. ‘It was like a world of its own, it was a community,’ said young 48-year-old Lauren. ‘There was something to be said for places like that, and now they don’t know what to do with the buildings—the site was bought up by something called Pipex Properties, but they can’t afford to develop it, it just stands there. I think the library is still in there,’ said Lauren, as she passed us the dessert menu; ‘there was said to have been some interesting stuff in there. Some valuable books and records.