The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  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.

  There was a lot of money around, in the first decade of the third millennium, before the banks crashed.

  Jess had none of that at her wedding. We were young in the tatty, ad-hoc, do-it-yourself old days.

  As we grow older, our tenses and our sense of chronology blur. We can no longer remember the correct sequence of events. The river is flowing, but we don’t know on which bank we stand, or which way it flows. From birth, or from death. The water and the land merge. We lose our sextant, we follow the wrong compass. The trick of proleptic memory, towards the end of life, confuses us. The trope of déjà vu becomes indistinguishable from shock, sensation, revelation, epiphany, surprise. It is hard to live in, or even to recall, an unforeseen moment. Anna lived, and lives, in an eternal present, in the flowing river, but we live in a confused timeframe, where all seems fore-ordained and fore-suffered, and yet all is unfinished and unknown. Foresight and hindsight are one. The lake and the land are one.

  The end is predicated, and yet we do not know what it will be.

  I’m not talking about time’s arrow. I’m talking about something else, something that to me is stranger.

  So the two brothers and their murdered man

  Rode past fair Florence . . .

  That’s a famous example of prolepsis. It’s from John Keats, from Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil. There’s a bit of alliteration there too. They used to teach you that in school. Prolepsis and alliteration. Figures of speech.

  Keats died so young that he had to crush all his proleptic visions and all his poesy into a narrow space. He knew he was dying so he was obliged to make haste. He had to have been a great poet before he had time to become one. Time seized him and shook him and he died in its jaws. Nowadays we tend to linger on with time to kill. We plan our last journeys with care. Our exits, our funerals, our memorial services. Our string quartet, our readings from Ecclesiastes, our Ship of Death.

  Livingstone mischarted his last journey. He had lost his sextant, his maps were wrong, and he was carried, dying, through the swamp and the wetlands, by mosquito-tormented men with water up to their chests. Poor Nassick boys, rescued from the Indian Ocean, and now so far inland in the endless marshes, so very far from any home. Against the current they carried him, in the wrong direction, towards a lost horizon, sustained by his faith in a dying god. They would carry his sun-dried salt-preserved eviscerated and unrecognisable body home, and one of them would pose for a photograph at Southampton where the Malva had docked.

  We can see him clearly, Jacob Wainwright, the faithful black servant. He leans on Livingstone’s strapped coffin, which rests upon a cabin trunk. Wainwright leans with one elbow on the coffin, in a weary and intimate posture of possession, not a posture of servitude or subjection. He has been through much, he has earned this coffin, this kinship, this moment of repose. In another photograph, we see his fellow-servants, Susi and Chuma, posing in the Gothic ruins of Newstead Abbey with Livingstone’s heavily bearded son and his black-beribboned and black-flounced daughter Agnes. Black Africans in the garden cloister of an English country house, an English country house full of zebra skins and elephant tusks and the horned and mounted heads of many beasts, the spoils of colonial sport. There they stand, Abdulah Susi and James Chuma, the orphaned Nassick boys. Their time would come, when Black History would rescue them from oblivion, and search for every priceless scrap of photographic evidence of their existence. Their stock would rise and rise.

  I remember the wedding in Islington, and I can remember what Jess wore. I don’t need photographs to remind me, and I don’t have any. I was one of the witnesses and I signed the book. She wore a long terra-cotta maxi-skirt, and shiny chestnut leather boots, and a fake-leather bright brown jacket, and a black felt hat with a brim, and a red rose stuck in her hatband. Bob wore a pale suit with girlish flared trousers, no tie, and a bold flowered shirt. We celebrated in the evening with a small party in Jess’s house, during which we drank a lot of cheap wine and ate some bizarre titbits which Bob and Jess had cooked up between them. Bob had by now latched on to Jess’s experimental culinary style and was trying to outdo her in effrontery. There was a row of long, black-baked, spiny, snakelike fishes from the fish shop in the Blackstock Road, a big bowl of pickled eggs, some very coarse sausages, some leathery, dark-green stuffed vine leaves, and a pyramid of triangular Turkish sweetmeats. A multicultural, multi-ethnic feast.

  We brought them gifts of a conventional nature—glasses, cutlery, cushions. We were still home-making, in our amateur improvised way; despising the domestic niceties of our parents’ generation, yet trying nevertheless to make ourselves comfortable. Jess liked strong colours and
bold prints, but most of us went for cheap Victorian and Edwardian junk, for inlay and patterns and veneers. The little neighbourhood shops were full of bargains that had not yet made their way to the smarter markets of Camden Passage. We fancied ourselves; we thought we had style. We were eclectic, at home in the rag-and-bone shop of London.

  Bob was eager and intimate, wanting to be one of us, as well as to be one with Jess. We were flattered, as well as suspicious.

  Jess had of course told Anna that she was marrying Bob, and Anna had seemed to understand this. Anna was, in fact, exceptionally keen on the subject of kinship and relationships, and enjoyed repeated recitals of who was married to whom, who was whose mother, or baby, or brother, or cousin, or nephew, or niece. The word ‘partner’ was not yet in common usage, and I can’t remember how we described the couples who were not formally married. But in fact most of us were married, for better or worse. We were more conventional than we thought we were. ‘Jim is married to Katie, Jim is Katie’s husband, Katie is Jim’s wife, Becky is their daughter, Nicky is their daughter, Ben is their son, Ben is Becky and Nicky’s sister, Jane is Ben’s aunt. Sylvie’s sons are called Stuart and Josh. Tim’s dad is called Jeremy.’ Anna enjoyed these listings. And she was happy to add the name of Bob, a name which in itself appealed to her through its round simplicity. ‘Bob!’ she would say, proudly, making the twinned consonants bounce from her lips like balloons. ‘Bob is married to Mum. Bob is Mum’s husband, Bob is my Step Dad.’ The phrase ‘step dad’ also pleased her. Its monosyllables were cheerful, like coloured bricks.

  Did the word ‘step’ have a physical meaning for her? I have sometimes wondered. It was hard to know how she connected words and meanings. She had her own way of making connections, a way that was not ours, but none the worse for that.

  We were a verbal lot. Jess and I sometimes had the semi-treacherous thought that it might have been Anna’s misfortune to have been born into a social milieu and income bracket where articulate intelligence was so widely dispersed and highly prized. In some circles, in some cultures, maybe her condition would have been less conspicuous.

  On the other hand, in some circles she might have met with less kindness, less tolerance and less love.

  Jess has spent many years worrying about these matters and reading the academic authorities on IQ and mental ages and developmental skills. For better or worse, that is Jess’s way. She is a reader. She has read Binet and Cyril Burt and Piaget. Which societies support their weaker members best? The nomadic, the agricultural, the pre-literate, the enlightened, the modern, the post-modern? The ages of stone, or the ages of steel, or the new age of cybernetics?

  Anna could read the words ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ and ‘Bob’, and learnt to write them, in a wobbly wavering hand, a strangely tentative, undecided hand. She was not good at committing herself to straight lines. She enjoyed colours, and was bolder with them. Perhaps the words themselves frightened her. Perhaps the concept of words alarmed her. But it seems more likely that it was the connection between words and script, words and text, that worried her. Her vocabulary, as all those psychometric tests showed, was quite rich. But maybe they were just words she’d heard from Jess, from Katie, from Jim, from Maroussia, from me?

  As an infant, Anna had liked splashing poster paint on to sheets of paper, crayoning blocks and stripes and patches, sticking gummed shapes into patterns. Approaching adolescence at Marsh Court, she continued to do art work of a sort, though with less confidence and more deference. She became afraid to make a mess, and her natural clumsiness often involved mess. Jess rarely reprimanded her for this (not being herself a very tidy person) but more severe reprimands, despite Jess’s protection, had clearly come Anna’s way, and she lost the carefree pleasure of dabbling and splattering.

  The regime at Marsh Court would, Jess had hoped, allow for mess. But she recognised that in an institution, however benign, a conflict must arise between creative mess, squalor and order.

  Anna needed to please, and any hint of criticism caused her a visible distress. We sometimes wondered whether this characteristic was innate, or whether an over-protective Jess had implanted it. We worried about what we had done to our own children, of course, but the case of Anna seemed to give us a clear message about maternal need, maternal love. But, clear as it was, clear as it ought to have been, we could not read the message.

  Over the years Jess was to visit schools and institutions that looked after children with a very wide range of abilities and disabilities. She traced the curve of the bell. She followed with a more than academic interest the changing vocabulary that classified children such as Anna. Idiots and imbeciles and delinquents featured on a historical and linguistic spectrum that stretched on to the dull, the backward, the feeble-minded, the weak-minded, the unstable, the mentally deficient, the educationally subnormal, the children with special needs. ESN, SEN. None of these words or phrases or acronyms seemed to describe the pure gold baby that had been Anna, the trusting child sent off to Marsh Court, the child-woman-daughter that Anna was to become.

  The child that never grew.

  Icipuba, kapupushi, ukupena, icipumputu.

  These are words from the regions of the African lake where Jess saw the children, the children who coped so well in their frail barks. These words describe a range of mental deficiencies. Jess had learnt them for her thesis.

  Uluntanshe. A wanderer with no aim in life.

  These words describe those without the ability to clothe themselves, those who lack the sense to hold down a job, those who are violent and need restraint, those who have fits and fall into the fire. These are the distinctions that the tribes of the lake recognise.

  Anna never had a fit and she had been taught the dangers of fire.

  Andrew Barker had fits. As we have seen, his mother blamed herself for having had him vaccinated against polio. He didn’t get polio, but he did suffer permanent brain damage. Or so his mother to this day believes. She isn’t allowed to say so very often, because it’s an unpopular notion to hold these days, but nevertheless this is what she believes. Maybe medical opinion will vindicate her one day. But one day will always be more than one day too late for Andrew.

  Marsh Court observed the state-school and the local-authority calendar, and Anna was to come home for Christmas that year, the first of her years away, to find her lively new stepfather, Bob Bartlett, in residence. It had been evident from the beginning of Jess’s relationship with Bob that Jess would stay in her own house. Bob would join Jess there, and Jess would pay the bills. There was never any talk of moving out to Bob’s place, or into neutral ground. And Bob’s place would have been unsuitable for family life: he had lived in a damp and noisy semi-basement flat on a main bus route through Camden Town, which he wisely kept on and illegally sublet to a friend. Just in case.

  Jess, on the train on her way to collect Anna, gazed out of the window at the changing townscape of suburb and estate, and at the stark leafless trees, where, in the spring, ornamental cherry blossom had gaily pinked the avenues and hillsides. Now the sedge was withered by the lake, and no tree-frogs or gilded birds would sing in this season. She wondered if Anna had made any real friends at her new school, whether she would return there happily and willingly after the Christmas holidays, whether she would adjust to Bob’s at times noisy presence in the house. Her concern for Anna was a constant ache. Anna was the apple of her eye and the thorn in her heart.

  Jess had been to Marsh Court during the term, of course, but not too often. Those were the days when parents were not encouraged to hang around in hospital wards and at school gates. The phrases ‘clean break’ and ‘let her settle in’ were still employed, though not very consistently: change on this front was already on the way. Jess had made weekend visits, taken Anna out for a Wimpy or a bowl of spaghetti or some chop suey. (Anna loved Chinese food, but Jess was beginning to worry about the effects of monosodium glutamate. Some authorities now said it was bad for you, which was a pity, as it was so delicio
us.) They’d been to see a movie in the old 1920s cinema. They’d been for walks in the park and along the canal and to the lock, and had once visited the local municipal swimming pool. Anna had been eager to show that she enjoyed these outings, but just as eager to be brave at the partings. Jess on these occasions had met other mothers (and one lone father) and had become conscious that the disabilities from which Anna suffered were much less severe than those of some of her schoolmates.

  Jess had struck up a friendship with Susie from Southgate. She’d always assumed Southgate was in South London, but it wasn’t, it was near Enfield. Susie worked as a district nurse, and knew a lot about the system. Susie’s son Vincent was a handful. He was much less amenable than Anna, given to tantrums and some astonishing outbursts of bad language. Susie said she thought he had Tourette’s but the experts didn’t agree with her. Jess was impressed by Vincent’s vocabulary, but hoped Anna wouldn’t pick up too much of it. Sitting on a bench in the spacious square vestibule of Marsh Court (it had its original black-and-white marble tiles and a handsome fireplace with a well-polished brass fender, somehow recalling a past age of austere but progressive education), Jess listened to Susie’s views on the National Health Service, on Colney Hatch, on mental institutions in general, and on some of the hopeless fools and mean-spirited bastards she came across on her daily rounds.

  Jess was ignorant about these matters, and Susie filled her in. Jess hadn’t even known that ‘Colney Hatch’ was synonymous with ‘barmy’ in North London slang. The Friern Barnet asylum at Colney Hatch was vast, according to Susie—thousands of patients, literally miles of corridors, grounds you could get lost in, a city of the lost and the mad and the forgotten. It would take you five hours to do a round of all the wards, somebody had measured and timed it. It was being slowly, very slowly, decommissioned, said Susie.