The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  Jess is a good audience—she listens in open admiration to this tirade—and we take our cue from Jess and we listen with her. Jess is not necessarily sympathetic—she is reserving her judgement (and she can be judgemental)—but at this moment she is gripped by this extreme case, by this authentic specimen of maternal passion, so smart, so overt, so tanned and brazenly shining, so magnificently and so violently partisan.

  Victoria pauses for breath as she reaches the subject of the NHS, preparing perhaps for a new section of her diatribe, but Jess interrupts with a question.

  ‘Where is he now?’ asks Jess.

  Victoria stops in her tracks, looks wildly around her, outrageously giggles, and covers her mouth with her hand to stifle her laughter.

  ‘Where is he now?’ Victoria echoes.

  ‘Where is your son now?’ repeats Jess firmly. ‘Is he here?’

  ‘He’s locked up somewhere in this loony bin,’ says Victoria, gathering herself. ‘They’ve locked him up with a game of chess. He likes chess. I think he’s in the Games Room. Shall we go and look for him? Come on, come with me, let’s go and find him, you’ll see what I mean.’

  She lays her quivering bony ringed hand on her new friend Jess’s bare warm freckled arm, she grasps Jess’s upper arm fiercely, painfully, intimately. Jess acquiesces and allows herself to be led away.

  Raoul watches them go, the woman in bright blue and the woman in dull black, he watches them as they make their way over the lawn and vanish through a stone arch towards the spread of homemade huts and activity rooms that extend through what was once a field or a paddock towards the main driveway. The sky is by now very dark, but it is not yet raining.

  Raoul is biding his time to reintroduce himself. He wants to ask Jess about Steve Carter the poet, he wants to tell her about Zain and Ursula and Dr Nicholls. Zain’s story has come to an end, but the stories of Ursula and of Dr Nicholls continue. As does his own. He is living it now, here, and he is waiting for Jess to re-enter the unfolding of its plot. He wants to tell Jessica about his career and his son, to ask her about her career and her daughter.

  The Games Room, a low one-storey bungalow edifice, is identified by a green sign above its door. The door is locked, but there is a fortified glass panel in it, criss-crossed discreetly with wire, through which the two women peer. Inside, Jess can dimly see a ping-pong table, a pool table and a card table, at which a young man is seated. He is staring intently at a chessboard covered with chess pieces, but she cannot tell whether he is planning a move or whether he is in a vacant trance. He has long brown curving hair which falls to his shoulders, and, like his mother, he is handsome. Melancholy, Gothic, lost, imprisoned. A prince in a Renaissance tragedy, a prince hidden in a closet.

  Victoria raps on the glass panel, but he does not even look up.

  She yells at him, in her commanding, carrying, confident voice. ‘Marcus!’ she shouts. ‘Marcus!’

  Her son stares at his chess set.

  Victoria rattles the doorknob. She bangs on the door. She shouts again. The young man, very slowly, in slow motion, moves a piece. Jess cannot see what the piece is, or whether the move is meaningful or random. She doesn’t know much about chess anyway. She cannot tell whether or not he is aware of his mother at the door, and, if so, whether his indifference is natural or provocative.

  There is suddenly something terrible to Jess about this stasis, this barrier, this slow motion, this locked door, this new threshold, this incarceration. Inside her body, there is a collapse. She was to describe the sensation to us later, on the way home. She said it was as though all the strength and power and blood in her head and her shoulders and her upper body drained downwards, first towards where she believes she keeps her heart, and again down further into her bowels. Her strength, the strength that has kept her together for so many hard years, imploded and deserted her, it sank out of her and leaked away into liquid nothingness. Her cell walls collapsed and ceased to hold their place. As she stood there, leaning on the wooden door for support, the mobile phone in her handbag rang, and she knew it was Anna, or someone from Anna’s group, needing her, needing her, but she could not reach it, she was about to lose consciousness. She could no longer support herself. Her knees sank to the ground. She had time to wonder if she was having a stroke, or a panic attack, or a fit, or a revelation. Then she passed out.

  I think Jess fainted. I think it’s as simple as that. The weather was freakish that day, and the barometric pressure had been plunging rapidly (or do I mean rising rapidly?), and it made a lot of people feel quite faint. Also, one had to take into account the stress of the occasion and the poor young people and the craziness of Victoria’s outburst and the sight of that wretched young man at his chess set, sitting like a funerary monument. Or it could have been some form of migraine, but Jess swore she’d never in her life suffered from migraine, she hadn’t had time for headaches and migraines. Anyway, it was a warning, and when she had returned to her proper upright self she was eventually to heed it. But she continued to believe that she had been felled by the sudden invasion of suffering, by the spirits trapped in the building, alive and dead. The unhappy Holdens, the true lepers, the false lepers, the threshold children.

  Her mind and body had opened and let them in.

  Well, that’s one of her explanations.

  I think it was an epiphany of anxiety about Anna’s future.

  What happened was that Jess slumped forward and fainted on to the newly mown grass, in a modest kneeling position.

  Victoria, who is not as barmy as she looks and sounds, took the situation in hand. She pulled Jess up into a more upright position (she began to come round almost at once, Vicky told us) and simultaneously got on her mobile and summoned help.

  Jess, as she surfaced, heard Victoria saying ‘Come on, send a medic, you must have got a few to spare round here, we need a doctor here right now’—and as she peremptorily shouted this command Jess’s own phone began to ring again. Again, Jess didn’t get to it in time (it would later reveal itself as a voice message from Anna about the Wild River Ride on Brighton Pier, a message to which Jess listened on the way home), but the sound of the needy ring tone brought her round, and by the time the medic (an eager untrained minder aged about sixteen) arrived on the scene, Jess was sitting on the front step of the Games Room and apologising for being a nuisance.

  ‘The heat,’ said Victoria, ‘the heat, it’s just the heat,’ which is what any sensible person would have said. The minder fetched a glass of water from the marquee, and Jess obediently sipped, and dabbed her forehead with a few drops, and it began at last to rain. Heavy spots of rain began at last to fall.

  Throughout this little drama Vicky’s son sat in the gloom and stared at his plastic chess men without raising his eyes to look at the would-be intruders. He did not acknowledge his mother’s presence. Maybe he did not hear her, maybe he did not know she was there.

  We have since discovered that Marcus can play chess, and he can play, as his mother rightly claims, ‘brilliantly’, but he can also sit for many hours as though locked into himself, staring at the board, without making a move of any sort. That’s part of his condition. Not many people are up to playing with him. They haven’t the patience.

  Jess and I have never been able to play chess. I learnt the moves once, my father taught me long ago, but I couldn’t be bothered to learn to play properly. I didn’t have the brain or the will for that kind of activity. It’s a man’s game, an autistic game.

  Don’t say I said that.

  Vicky at this point in the drama gave up on her son Marcus and his game of chess and escorted Jess back to the marquee, where I was still sitting, having been joined by now by Sylvie, who, her duty done, was eager to get home and was looking for her lift. Sylvie had been burdened with an inconvenient bouquet which was leaking on to her pink suit from its large water-filled cellophane stem-pouch. Raindrops pocked and spattered on the canvas of the marquee and dank-smelling water leaked on to Sylvie. Raoul w
as also still there, and had in Jess’s absence introduced himself to me by name as an old acquaintance of Jess from years ago. I didn’t disbelieve him, and indeed I thought I had heard Anna invoke the name of Raoul. He seemed the kind of person Jess might well know, from SOAS, from her life as a scholar and medical journalist, from her life as a mother of a child with special needs. I didn’t at once guess that they had met through Steve the Poet at Halliday Hall, although I did of course remember Jess’s stories of Halliday Hall.

  As Jess and Victoria rejoined us, we saw that their roles had been reversed: Victoria was now supporting Jess, who sat down and started to fan herself demonstratively with the glossy Wibletts fund-raising brochure.

  ‘I had a bit of a turn,’ she said. ‘Sorry, I had a bit of a turn.’

  It’s the heat, we all agreed. It’s very close today, we all said wisely, a chorus of wise old women.

  I expected Raoul to make himself scarce at this point, but he wasn’t going to back out, despite the strong indications that Jess was not feeling her best and was maybe not up to a potentially challenging reunion. But he held his ground. He was determined to effect an introduction. Having found her, he wasn’t going to lose her again. And, when he diffidently but inexorably named himself, and asked her if by any chance she remembered him, she instantly rallied.

  ‘Raoul! Good God!’ she cried. ‘Of course I remember you! Good God! What on earth are you doing here?’

  She had wondered about his fate, she told him. She had wondered about the afterlife of all the Halliday comrades, encountered at a time of such vivid and clear intensity. So Raoul had survived, and here he was! She would never have recognised him after all these years, but she could see the shy young man in this respectably dressed elderly man with his neat little grey beard, with his slightly hooded brown eyes, his urbane and confiding smile, his sharp nose, his courteous insistence, his assumption of an old intimacy.

  What had been wrong with him, all those decades ago? She had never known what his passport to Halliday had been. Had he been bi-polar, schizoid, psychotic, paranoid or a simple victim of exile?

  ‘What are you doing here?’ cried Jess.

  Raoul, it appears, is now a distinguished neurologist. If he is disappointed that Jess does not know this already, he conceals his regret. Sylvie Raven, unlike Jess, recognises his name as soon as she hears it. Neurology and urology have some close connections. The neurogenic bladder was one of Sylvie’s specialities. And he, of course, knows Sylvie’s name, because she is a public person, and he has just heard her speaking in public in her public manner.

  He tells us that he graduated from Halliday to UCL, where he took up the medical studies forcibly abandoned in the Lebanon, and moved on to graduate research at the National Hospital for Neurology in Queen Square in Bloomsbury. So near to SOAS, a stone’s throw from SOAS. He says he thought he saw Jess once, crossing the wide green civil lawns of Russell Square, but that he had been too shy to speak. He wanted to speak, but he had not dared to call out to her.

  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.