The Pure Gold Baby (8 page)

After her interview with the director, Jess was shown round by a well-built, golden-skinned, broad-featured, crinkle-haired handsome middle-aged woman called Hazel, with a rich contralto voice and a beautiful carriage, who said she was in charge of music: was Anna musical, Hazel wanted to know? Yes, said Jess. She liked to sing. She knew a lot of songs.

We love to sing here, said Hazel, and grasped Jess’s hand warmly in hers, and held her arm, hands linked, arms linked, as they walked down the corridors. Jess felt much better for this contact, and she would continue, in a long afterlife, long after she had lost touch with Hazel, to find the memory of it a comfort. Such small gestures are so much needed and not so often offered.

As she walked away from Marsh Court, on this her first of many visits, Jess looked back, calm enough to take in the school building and its immediate surroundings, which until now had appeared to her in a blur of anxiety and hope. The main house was an early-Victorian building, not unhandsome, built of reddish brick with stone facing, and surmounted with a couple of what Jess thought were Dutch gables. Despite efforts to make it cheerful and child-friendly—pots of geraniums outside its front door, bold blue-and-orange geometric-patterned curtains, fresh green paint—it had a melancholy air, pertaining less perhaps to its institutional function than to its architecture. It looked like the kind of house that might have been occupied by a lonely old woman, the last of her line, or by an embittered miser hiding from his heirs. It looked like the end of something, not the beginning.

It survived amidst a waste of random redevelopment, of housing estates and industrial parks, and was itself surrounded by little outcrops of prefabricated schoolrooms and workshops and allotments. But an older Enfield could still be traced in it, older by far than the little two-storey 1930s neat-shabby suburban homes that lined the road down which Jess now walked towards the River Lee and Enfield Lock.

Keats had been to school in Enfield. In a special school for the children of progressive tradesmen, not a special school for the educationally problematic. He and his friend, the schoolmaster’s son, used to walk the ten miles into town to go to the theatre to see Sarah Siddons and Edmund Keane. How high their hopes had been, how lofty their ambitions, those earnest talented young men.

Jess walked towards Enfield Lock and the canal and the River Lee, and then began to walk, thoughtfully, reflectively, receptively, along the tow path. Anna liked the water. Anna, Jess thought, would like the water walkway. The lock was old and quiet, with a stationed narrow boat and a cluster of old buildings from another age—the dark-brick lock-keeper’s cottage with white-fretted wooden gables, a row of tidy little houses, a pub called the Rifles. Jess sensed there was a historic arsenal connection here, as in Highbury, a military link, but the waterside this day was peaceful in the sun. The track was overgrown with elder and buddleia and nettles, with long greens and purples. Jess walked on and through a gate and over a wooden stile, and the water flowed strongly. She had left the placid canal bank and joined the path of the deep full river. A warning notice leaning rakishly on a rotting board told her the water was deep and dangerous. Small golden-winged birds flew in swift flurries in a light June breeze through tall willows and reeds. Dark dragonflies, blue-black, hovered and coupled over the rapidly moving surface.

Jess as she walks hears the high unearthly cry of the fish-eagle, calling from another world, calling from her youth and from Africa. She hears the honey-guide and the blacksmith plover and the go-away-bird and the boubou and the bird that cries
Nkoya, Nokoya, Nkoya Kupwa . . . I go, go, go to get married
 . . . She hears the sad descending call of the emerald-spotted wood dove:
I lost my mother, I lost my father, and I am alone, alone, alone
 . . . That, the tribesmen had told her, was the dove’s lament, the lament that Livingstone had heard as he was carried dying on his litter through the swamps and the rushes.

Great submerged intensely green plants with large leaves like the leaves of cabbages stream in the current of the River Lee, with tight golden balls of flowers on long snake stems, rooted, tugging, flowing, flowering under the water. A great force of water flows powerfully in this half-tamed landscape of Essex.

Jess sees the swamps and marshes and sedges of Lake Bangweulu, the green spikes of reed and papyrus, the rain tree, the tussocks and the clumps, the rising bubbles of marsh gas, the green tunnel of the waterway and the slow progress of the low canoe. The lechwe are as numerous as the stars in the sky, their herds cover the grasslands, but the shoebill is lonely.

When one of the lechwe is taken by a lion, the rest of the herd moves onwards, uncaring, indifferent. Not one breaks off or strays behind to grieve.

Primates are different. Primates linger with their dead.

On his death march, Livingstone heard a little tree-frog ‘tuning as loud as the birds and very sweet’. A luminous green-and-yellow tree-frog had perched on Jess’s bedside torch, in her tent, all those years ago, safe with her under the mosquito net.

Walking on through time by the strong, fast-flowing water, Jess hears Hazel singing with Anna and the group of simple children, the pure bronzed woman singing with the pure gold child. Hazel sings:

The river is flowing, growing and flowing,

The river is flowing down to the sea.

Mother Earth carry me,

Your child I shall always be,

Mother Earth carry me down to the sea . . . 

The children join in the round, some tunefully, some at random, but all of them intent on Hazel’s divine face, her sweet rich heavenly voice, as she keeps them together, against the odds.

Hazel will be a friend, a saviour, a haven, for a short while. She has the heart and the skills. To know Hazel, even briefly, is lucky. Anna is a lucky girl.

Anna was apprehensive about the move, but Jess prepared her as best she could, persuading her Marsh Court was a grown-up school where she would make new friends and learn new skills to show off when she came home for holidays. Anna, always an obliging child, was extremely anxious to please and appease: if her mother thought it best that she should go to Marsh Court, she would try to enjoy Marsh Court. She struggled not to show her fear, and so did her mother.

‘You’ll like the music lady; she’s called Hazel,’ said Jess from time to time, to comfort herself as well as Anna.

Anna had missed Fanny Foy when she moved from Plimsoll Primary to Highbury Barn. There hadn’t been a good music teacher at Highbury. Fanny had been to tea once or twice in Kinderley Road, but it hadn’t been the same.

Jess tempted Anna with stories of the canal walks and the lock and the water gardens and the pond with white and pink lilies and the turquoise damsel flies.

Jess delivered Anna to Marsh Court in early September, for the beginning of the new school year. Anna’s face on parting showed a watery crumpled look of kindness and anxiety mixed, an expression far too mature for an abandoned child. Jess did not cry on the way home, but she felt like howling. She wanted to howl like a monkey or scream like an eagle.

That night Jess dreamt that Anna was drowning in the canal. She was slowly going under, her trusting face gazing upward for help, her clothes filling with water like Ophelia’s, as she made little paddling movements with her arms. (In fact, Anna could swim well, a competent dog-paddle, so why she wasn’t trying to swim in the dream was a mystery, though not the kind of mystery you notice when you’re dreaming.) And, as Jess gazed at her helplessly, from some out-of-frame vantage point, the green-brown weed-decked Essex canal grew and broadened and spread and swelled into a shining blue lake, and Anna drifted further and further away into its distant reaches, until she disappeared from sight.

Jess woke and lay there in the night on her old second-hand bed with its sagging mattress and tried to reassure herself that this dream meant nothing, nothing at all, that its sources were too obvious to be worthy of consideration. Anna would not fall into the canal, the school would look after her, and anyway she could swim, Jess had made sure of that. Jess lay awake, and thought of the little children in Africa with their dugout canoes. How many of them, in that watery landscape, died by drowning? Was drowning a common fate? Too late now to go back to ask. Could they swim, did they swim? Did anybody know, had anybody ever thought to ask? What were the statistics? Had anyone counted them? She hadn’t seen any of them playing in the water, but that was probably because of river blindness or leeches.

A leech had attached itself to Jess’s firm brown ankle on that long ago trip, and they had all laughed as group leader Guy Brighouse burnt it off with his cigarette. It had winced and puckered, poor leech. Jess had almost felt sorry for it.

Anna never had any dreams, or so she told Jess. Anna said she didn’t know what dreams were. When Jess tried to describe the act and process of dreaming to Anna, Anna was uncomprehending. That layer of her consciousness seemed to be missing. Jess didn’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe it was a semantic problem, maybe Anna could not explain in words about her dreams, just as she could not remember the letters of her name.

Not even Jess always understood Anna.

Jess did not tell Bob about her bad dreams. Bob was her fair-weather lover, her lightweight boy He was so much younger than the Professor, so very much younger. There was no point in worrying him with her anxieties.

Jess cooked Bob eccentric little meals of offal, snails and fishtails, chicken’s feet, pigs’ ears, tripe and bits of webbing. This was the frustrated anthropologist in her coming out, she claimed. She enjoyed hunting around in the strong-smelling sawdust-sprinkled local shops for unexpected morsels, some of them, in those days, stored in old-fashioned wooden casks and barrels of brine that might have come over on the
Windrush
. The courteous withered old Jamaican gentleman who ran the large open-fronted corner grocery store admired her initiative and smiled toothlessly with his hard gums at her purchases. Bob gobbled up the results of her forays, and traded them for dubious memories of dubious bushmeat from his African journeys. Ants also and caterpillars he had devoured, he assured her. Lévi-Strauss had nothing on him and his adventures.

He had photographed great apes and aardvarks and small children in Senegal and the Cameroons, but he had never been to the Shining Lake of Northern Rhodesia, with its strange and special children.

Bob was jealous of the sighting of the shoebill, and interested to learn that Jess had never even thought of taking a camera with her on her African journey.

Jess said she didn’t want to take photographs. Snapping birds and people wasn’t scholarly; it was
National Geographic
. She was happy to be confrontational about this issue. Bob lectured her on the great photographs of the great ethnographer von Fürer-Haimendorf, and on the importance of keeping and preserving a visual documentary record of anthropological journeys, and Jess replied with a defence of the superior reliability of the written record. The camera, said Jess, always lies. And colour photography cannot choose but to lie. Words work harder than pictures; reading is harder than looking.

She had to think this, and so she thought it.

Jess drew on her store of imagery of the lake. It swelled and spread and covered the banks and promontories. The wind in the rushes made a sound like the waves of the sea. It was hard to tell the water from the land. Its name, Bangweulu, means the lake that has no shores, or so the books tell her.

Anna would never learn to read with ease. There would be times, at Marsh Court, and at later establishments with other tutors and other methods, when it looked as though she was about to make a breakthrough, but it never happened.

Jess didn’t need a picture of the children’s feet. She could remember them. She didn’t mention the webbed and clubbed feet to Bob. They were a private emblem. She knew she would never forget them.

Oh, yes, they had a lot to talk about, Jess and Bob, as well as things they didn’t talk about, and they seemed to us to get on surprisingly well. It’s just that we didn’t trust Bob. This was a time when it was fashionable not to trust men, and there was quite a lot about Bob, apart from his charm and his being half American, that might be construed by us as untrustworthy We didn’t think he would go on being so patient with Anna.

Anna didn’t go to the wedding, and perhaps that was a mistake. She was tucked safely out of the way at Marsh Court in Enfield when it took place. It was, for us, a jolly adult affair, sealed on a sunny Saturday morning in October in Islington Town Hall. This prominent Neoclassical edifice on Upper Street was not then the fashionable and well-restored New Labour venue that it was to become: it was a hotbed of revolt, with radical slogans from Tom Paine and William Blake scrawled in bloody paint and strung in homemade banners across its pillared façade.

Or were those banners hung a little later than Jess’s wedding? I forget the sequence. When you live an area for many decades, the dates blur and merge; it’s hard to remember precise dates. You remember the feel of ebb and flow, but it’s easy to get the dates wrong.

I do remember that Jess’s wedding was of its time, low-key, informal, secular, amateur.

Weddings are very different now, in the new millennium. I went to a grand civil partnership ceremony in Islington Town Hall not so long ago at which two young men were taking their oaths of loyalty: how changed that building now looks, how carefully restored, with its imposing staircase, its marble plaques and polished wood, its leather-topped tables, its civic grandeur, its handsome dignitaries! There were songs and singers and flowers and printed programmes and confetti and photography and smart hats and a glamorous black woman registrar dressed in a canary-yellow Chanel suit with navy trim. Everybody was photographing everybody else with mobile phones, in the bizarre self-referential mode of the third millennium, but there were professional photographers in attendance too, formally recording the occasion.