The Pure Gold Baby (37 page)

The camp by the river is more luxurious than the camp by the dambo and the tree camp. Jess washes her hair and sits on the river bank to let it dry in the sun. Tall birds wade in the water. The tallest is the Goliath crane, or so her bird book tells her, but she is not sure which he is. What does it matter? The river is yellow-grey and wide and full of living beings of ageless and unchanging forms. The carmine bee-eaters have their tenements in its yellow banks, brilliant in their dazzling plumage. Anna had liked the bee-eaters. She still has her bird’s nest, safe if squashed in her pocket.

Soon Jess and Bob and Anna will be in the Jacaranda Hotel, in reach of mobile-phone signals and texts and newspapers and news. What will have happened while they have been away? There has been time for births and deaths, scandals and revelations. The banks may have crashed, governments may have fallen. Emails and letters will be waiting for her.

Jess hopes that nothing much has happened in Kinderley Road. It is quite all right as it is. She is looking forward to being home. She is nearing the end of her journey. Soon she and Anna will again take up their unchanging daily life together.

Livingstone, not far from this spot, had written: ‘I am never to have a home again. All my hopes of doing good in my home among the outcasts of Africa have been dispelled.’

He had died in a posture of prayer.

Jess has not aspired to do good to others. Her hopes have been more limited.

Yes, she will be pleased to be home. It has been a good trip, but home, at her age, is better.

It was by the pool at the Jacaranda, Jess was to tell me, that she made a small new connection. It didn’t seem an appropriate place—it would have been more meaningful to have been enlightened at the shallow headwaters of the Congo or by the Saucepan Graves or on the banks of the ancient and mighty Luangwa—but we cannot choose where our memories may return to us or what may prompt them. We are at the mercy. We believe there is a thread, a story, but we are at the mercy.

Jess was sitting in a striped hammock by the pool in the Jacaranda Hotel, watching Anna swimming and sipping at a glass of beer, in the kind of idle safari scenario that Victoria would have imagined for her, and letting her mind wander over her adventures, over Africa and the children of the lake in their dugout canoes and the photograph of the children at Wibletts and Isaac’s little boy, gravely handing her the bread basket before slipping back into the shadows of the night.

Halfway home in spirit, she hadn’t been able to resist looking at yesterday’s copy of an English newspaper that had been lying in the hotel foyer, from which she had learnt that the FTSE was down by twenty points, that a government minister had resigned over a financial embarrassment, that Maroussia was to appear at the National in a new play by a young woman playwright, that disputes over a third runway at Heathrow were as ever ongoing, and that an anonymous burns victim had received a successful hand transplant with successfully moving fingers by a new technique pioneered in France. But she was trying to put these irrelevant updates on the world out of her mind and to let it drift back over Africa.

A wider view, an aerial view, an uplifting view, a view of the river, a view of time, a view of the shores of the infinite.

Jess’s mind wandered, and it wandered over the rift valley and the swamps and the miombo woodland to the burns victim and the transplanted hand, and the sun beat down through the striped turquoise Jacaranda parasol and through her raffia sunhat and on to her eyelids, and very slowly, or was it suddenly, for the apparition was mysteriously both slow and sudden, she began to see the little girl who had been her best friend at East Broughborough Kindergarten when she was five years old. The girl had had a hand with no fingers. She had fallen on to an electric fire as a baby and burnt her hand very badly. She had a little paw, with scarred stumps, a friendly little paw.

She’d been a lobster-claw child. Jess had loved her.

So perhaps that was it, perhaps that was why she had responded so warmly to the beautiful children of the lake? They had reminded her of Christine. Fair-haired, smiling, confident, very slightly damaged Christine Godley, who at the age of five had paid no attention to her disability whatsoever, and seemed to have suffered no trauma.

Jess had hardly thought about Christine in sixty-odd years, she was to tell me, but she’d been waiting there all the time, with her little pink hand and its smooth pinky-blue scar tissue, all laid down in Jess’s neurones. In her hippocampus, in her amygdala, whatever, wherever, she wasn’t very good at the names of brain parts. She would ask Raoul about it when she saw him next week. Raoul would know.

It wasn’t much of a revelation, it didn’t really explain anything. There would be no revelation.

Thinking all this over, as they queued at the airport and fastened their seat belts and took off towards the Equator through the night, Jess wondered if there was a Jungian archetype called the wounded child. She knew the Wounded Healer, but she didn’t think there was a Wounded Child. She would look into it when she got home. She closed her eyes and waited. In her hand, inside her pocket, she held the iron ingot. It might lead her safely onwards, to whatever still lay ahead.

Anna was happy with her headset. She was amazed by the choice of channels, up there in the sky. She had found an adaptation of
David Copperfield
. She had seen it before and knew the story well, and she’d settled down to the childhood sufferings, the Mum is Dead story, the horrible stepfather, and the sure expectation of a happy ending. Dickens and she were old friends. Her mother was asleep, so that was all right.

Bob, the good Step Dad, sat in the aisle seat, flicking through some of his photos. Jess by the graves presented a peculiarly haunting image—he knew he would do well with that. She was sitting on the shores of time, on the shores of the infinite. He had taken her there, and he had brought her safely home again. He could relax. He plugged his iPod into his ears and his brain, and soon began to snore. He was worn out by looking after his wife and his stepdaughter. He was really good at sleeping on aeroplanes. We don’t know what he was listening to while he slept.

So that is Jess’s story, and the story of Anna. I will leave them in mid-air, but you will know that they landed safely, or I wouldn’t have been able to tell their story so far.

I haven’t invented much. I’ve speculated, here and there, I’ve made up bits of dialogue, but you can tell when I’ve been doing that, because it shows. I’ve known Jess a long time, and I’ve known Anna all her life, but there will be things I have got wrong, things I have misinterpreted. Jess and I talk a lot, but we don’t tell each other everything. There are things in my life of which she knows nothing, and she has her secrets too.

I’ve tried to give a sense of what it was like, in our neighbourhood, in our time. Some of it survives. We are old now, and I heard this week from Maroussia that she has to have what she discreetly calls major surgery, and that the prognosis is not good. She has had to pull out from the National. This is very sad news. We are dying off, one by one.

But Sylvie Raven is in fine form, buoyed up by combat.

I don’t think Jess will marry Raoul. My guess is that they will continue to meet, once a month or so, without commitment. But I may be wrong about that. Marrying Raoul would certainly alter the plot. But it wouldn’t solve the problem of Anna’s future, would it?

Ollie’s mother has just remarried, aged seventy-five. She’s on her third husband now, and he’s ten years younger than she is. She’s had her hair dyed orange. It looks quite good, but not very good. She is tiny, even tinier than she was, and he’s six foot three. They make a striking couple.

I’m not very taken with Jess’s claim that the whole curve of her life was made clear to her when she was prompted to remember a fingerless child she’d known a hundred years ago. That sounds more like a false memory to me. I think Jess is looking for meaning where there isn’t any. She’s just a bit too inventive about causation. I’m more resigned to the random and the pointless than Jess.

I’m older now than I was when I started writing this record.

I worry about Anna’s future. I don’t like to bring up the subject with Jess. But I’ve resolved that I’ll be brave and have a go. I’m going to ask her to supper to talk about it, next week. Or maybe the week after next. I have a practical suggestion I could make. I’ll do lamb shank with chick peas, Jess likes lamb shank. And I’ll find a DVD for Anna—I don’t think she’s seen that animated Japanese ghost story Jake gave me for my birthday.

Maybe I’ll invite Raoul, one day? I’ll ask Jess if she’d like that. Or would that be presumptuous? I don’t want to presume.

Jess must have her own plans. It’s none of my business. I don’t like to meddle.

I shouldn’t have written any of this. I hadn’t the right.

Bob’s photo of Jess crouching by the Saucepan Graves is remarkable. She didn’t know he was taking it. She doesn’t know I’ve been writing this. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to tell her.

M
ARGARET
D
RABBLE
is the author of
The Sea Lady, The Seven Sisters, The Peppered Moth,
and
The Needle’s Eye,
among other novels. For her contributions to contemporary English literature, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2008.