The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  The form of chemotherapy that Dr Newman has decreed is derived from the periwinkle flower, also known as the sorcerer’s violet. Jess finds this information surprising and comforting. Who would have thought that the little blue flowers could have such strong stuff in them?

  Bob is good. He latches on to the African myth, and leaves little phone messages of lions roaring and birds screeching. The sound of the lions is frightening, even on a mobile phone. Their roar has a deep, abstracted, yearning, devouring tone, from the deep throat and the whole body. The birds laugh and mourn and screech and peep and sing. Go away, go away, tin tin, tin tin, they cry. Nkoya, Nokoya, Nkoya Kupwa—I go, go, go to get married, they cry.

  Bob sits with Anna in the hospital, as the periwinkle drip feeds into her pink blue-veined arm, and he makes her laugh. He is the best of stepfathers. It is good that Jess and Bob have never bothered to divorce, as that makes his presence in the hospital more orthodox, more acceptable. Jess is able to refer to him as her ‘husband’, when it seems convenient. There is something childlike about Bob that bonds him to Anna. He cannot, surely, ever have molested Anna? No, surely not. The very thought is unworthy.

  Stepfathers are quite high on the kinship-access table, surprisingly high, and Bob had been party to the meetings that set up the original trust fund for Anna, into which Grandpa’s money had later been deposited.

  Dr Newman has driven Jess into unworthy thoughts.

  Jess did not tell Raoul much about Anna’s diagnosis and the chemotherapy, but she had to tell him something, in order to explain why she didn’t want to fix another lunch just yet, why she wasn’t up to helping him to seek out Ursula. They talked on the phone. They deferred meeting, but would meet. Jess has contacted the Approved Mental Health Practitioner and the community health trust and the local-authority housing department for the homeless. She had put about a few queries, but she does not tell Raoul that she has done this.

  Jess mentioned the story of Ursula to me, and I knew she was thinking of planning another Wibletts-style expedition. I was quite curious. The class of Halliday Hall had its fascination even at second hand. I was game to go, and would wait until she asked. I was a wanderer with not much aim in life. Although to others no doubt I appeared busy, with my part-time consultancy, my committee work, my friends, my scattered family, my grandchildren. I don’t know why life seems emptier when one is older, even when it is full. It thins out, like the hair of one’s head.

  I knew that those were tedious days for Jess and Anna, and I worried about them, but there wasn’t much I could do. And of course part of me was just glad it wasn’t me going through that process. I’d been through it with my husband, and I knew what it was like.

  It was just after the end of Anna’s chemotherapy that I had to go to France, and I thought I would call in while I was there on the Rodin Museum at the Hôtel Biron in Paris. I was going to a colloque at Toulouse, but I booked myself a couple of nights in Paris on the way, and went to have another look at the helmet-maker’s once beautiful wife, who had haunted me since I was seventeen. Mortality was much on my mind.

  The museum was even grander than I remembered, and I lingered in the garden, for this time the sun was shining. Maybe one notices gardens more as one ages. There were the burghers of Calais, there were the gates of hell, there above the tall trimmed hedges arose the beautiful gilded dome. And then I braced myself and went indoors to look for the old woman, but I couldn’t find her. Had I imagined her? Had I seen her in some other country? Was she avoiding me?

  I wandered from room to room, looking for her, but she wasn’t there. I asked a young attendant or two, but the attendants knew nothing of her, indeed knew nothing much of anything, they were just there to keep order. Eventually I went to the bookshop to see if there were any postcards of her (though who but me would want to buy her?) or any listings of the museum’s contents, and a very courteous middle-aged woman told me that she was away on loan. I should have known it. The object one goes to see is always away on loan. But, said the well-rounded and physically confident bookshop woman, had I taken time to look at the Camille Claudel room? If it were images of old age I was seeking, that was the room for me.

  I now think that the woman knew about the sculpture because she herself was not in her first youth. She saw the shape of things to come.

  I didn’t know who Camille Claudel was and hadn’t knowingly noticed that she had a room. The kindly woman persuaded me to buy a monograph about her, encouraging me by showing me that it had a picture of La Belle Heaulmière in it, and off I went, back up the wide marble staircase, and there indeed in Claudel’s room, in Rodin’s one-t ime student-mistress’s room, were age and youth together.

  Camille Claudel’s story was a terrible story, hers was a terrible life. But her work was good, and her old women are as fine, as terrible, as Rodin’s. Clotho, one of the Three Fates, in plaster not bronze, as white as old rope, as white as an old knitted dishcloth, heroic, erect, skinny, struggling, not bowed and subdued like the helmet-maker’s wife, but gauntly struggling with the twisted ropes and snakes of age, spinning her hair into the fatal yarn of destiny. The booklet suggested that Claudel had used the same model as Rodin, an 82-year-old Italian woman called Maria Caira. I hoped they had paid Maria Caira well, to sit, to stand, at that age, in the nude. I hope they kept her warm in her all too visible old age.

  Camille Claudel, like Rodin, also sculpted images of youth and beauty, but the process of ageing obsessed her when she was herself yet young. Her work was proleptic. She foresaw her fate. Her older lover thrust it on her, and she fought back, fiercely and at times obscenely. The ageing man in the centre of her massive three-figure sculpture of Maturity is Auguste Rodin, naked, grim, doomed and tragic, caught between his two mistresses, Youth and Age, torn from Youth’s imploring grasp and impelled ever and forcefully onwards into the swirling, grasping, enfolding bronze arms of Age. I don’t often like such crude and overt symbolism, but the power of this piece was overwhelming. It struck me as the Belle Heaulmière had struck me when I was seventeen. It had been waiting for me.

  It wouldn’t have been on show when I was seventeen. Women’s sculpture, women’s stories, were less valued then.

  Camille Claudel went mad, or so her family said. She sank into a life of squalor, amidst broken furniture and peeling wallpaper, growing fatter and fatter. I don’t know what Ronald Laing or Dr Nicholls would have made of her condition. She was salvaged from her dirty Paris apartment and her studio and incarcerated by her family from August 1914 to October 1943 in an asylum near Avignon. She was shut up in there for nearly thirty years, this gifted woman, from the beginning of one world war to the middle of another. I remember thinking that Jess would have been interested in this. Reading of her desolate fate in my narrow bed in my cheap, TV-free, antique and historic hotel in the rue de Seine, I thought of Jess’s descriptions of Ursula, and remembered Jess’s descriptions of Colney Hatch and Halliday Hall and the inmates of Wibletts. Ah, how we have moved on.

  Les Sources taries. The dried springs. A group with that name by Rodin was in the same Claudel room, the room of senescence. They grouped with wrinkled hands, with hanging breasts.

  Now they huddle not in the asylum but in the care home.

  Statuary speaks more to me as I age. It is a question of the ultimate fate of the flesh. The plaster, the terra-cotta, the marble, the bronze, the ebony, the bone. The effigy, the funerary monument.

  Maroussia defies time. Rodin would have done her proud. And proud Maroussia is, proud she remains. She is too proud to have had her portrait painted, her bust sculpted. She talked about this to me when we had supper at Chez Simone after Medea. Some people succumb to being painted through vanity, said Maroussia, they succumb through self-i mportance, but I am too vain and too proud to sit.

  I admire Maroussia, we all admire Maroussia, we are proud of Maroussia. Her Medea was classic, noble, grand, majestic, perhaps a little old-fashioned, a little Edwige Feuillère. Feuillère wa
s Paul Claudel’s Muse, as Camille Claudel was Auguste Rodin’s Muse. I saw Edwige Feuillère, in the flesh, an ageing beauty, at the Aldwych Theatre many years ago, in Paul Claudel’s Partage de midi. Paul Claudel and Camille Claudel, brother and sister.

  I went by TGV from Paris to Toulouse, and felt very modern, although the buffet car was disappointing. The conference in Toulouse was lively, and the participants were young. They were not fat or mad or withered. Our theme was sombre, but we made merry with our luncheon vouchers and our views. The young academics were gracious to me, they treated me with respect, and I was grateful to them for that. We laughed a lot and my French was adequate.

  Jess texted me in Toulouse. In these later years we texted one another frequently with small bits of news and mutual encouragement. As a senior participant, I had been treated to a pretty room in a pretty, very French hotel, with striped wallpaper and hard round striped pillows and green shutters and charming shepherdess china. I lay in bed, luxuriously, enjoying my Gallic holiday from North London, but of course could not resist switching on my mobile, and there was a message from Jess, and I worried if I would be wise to open it, but of course I did, and I was glad I did, because it was all good news. RESULTS GOOD EVEN NEWMAN PLEASED CELEBRATED WITH THAI PRAWNS ALL SET FOR AFRICA WHY DON’T YOU COME TOO BOB WILL FIX IT.

  And Bob did fix it. It took a bit of arranging, and the African seasons had to be taken into consideration, but he managed to fix it for the following spring. Anna’s health improved, she regained her appetite, and the dim distracting dream conceived in the hospital became a proper plan. I didn’t want to go with them, I couldn’t quite face it, I didn’t fancy Africa, and I didn’t think Jess’s suggestion had been serious. Victoria, unwisely apprised of the project, said she wished to go too, but Jess successfully and easily dissuaded her. ‘You’d hate it,’ said Jess forcefully, as she sipped a porcelain cup of Earl Grey in Chelsea. (Jess didn’t really like Earl Grey.) Victoria clearly saw Africa as a hotel swimming pool surrounded by palm trees and bougainvillea and flamboyants with an occasional outing in a Land-Rover to look at giraffe and zebra, followed by a stiff gin and tonic. Sundowners in the bush, in safari gear, watching the pink sky.

  Jess said it would not be like that, and anyway, there would be Anna.

  The problem with Victoria was that she had nothing to do.

  Bob did the bookings, fixed the contacts, arranged to do a little business for a TV natural-history channel on the side. Jess found she was happy to travel with Bob, and Anna was delighted. She liked reconciliations, reparations, family life. She wouldn’t have minded now if Bob had moved back to North London from Herne Hill. She was happy to share her mother with Bob. He was no longer a threat. Bob was easy.

  Jess also arranged a commission for herself, though not so well paid, for the Social History section of a Sunday colour supplement whose editor had always liked her and indulged her work. Bob, she promised Jason Winter, would provide some photos free of charge, and she would write the text of the story of the Saucepan Graves. Jason liked the title, although he’d no idea what the Saucepan Graves were. He said it was a very Jess title, and he was willing to take a small gamble on them. Jess had a good record. Jess didn’t know much about the graves either, but she was eager to know more. And, she assured Jason, they would do the Livingstone Memorial and the moody many-wived Prince Chitombo of Chitombo as a more orthodox backup if the Saucepan Graves didn’t work out. You could always get some good copy out of Livingstone.

  She had spun him a line about the Saucepan Graves, as she really had very little idea about what they might be, and whether or not they might be of any serious anthropological interest. She’d heard about them from Gus Kovacovic, a SOAS contact who had been travelling in Zambia. He’d told her of a mystifying encounter a few years ago with a Bemba tribe living by a lake, who had yarned on to him about battles with crocodiles, infamous white land-grabbing settlers and a vast graveyard marked by saucepans in a woodland, the site of a massacre. ‘Are you sure, saucepans?’ Jess had asked this adventurer, over their canteen coffee, and he had sworn to the saucepans—ordinary, everyday-looking objects, just like his granny used to have. He hadn’t actually seen the site, but his hosts had showed him some pans, they were still using the same sort in the village, they said.

  When had all this happened, this massacre? Gus hadn’t been able to work it out. African time isn’t like European time, she must know that.

  He’d have pursued the story further, he assured her, but he had had to move on, to get ahead of the rainy season. But he could tell her how to get there, if she was interested. It wasn’t too far off the beaten track.

  She was interested. She took down the details and handed them over to Bob, who said he’d work them into their itinerary, if he could.

  She couldn’t find out anything more about the graves. The Nubians had buried their dead in what were called pan graves, but they were called that because they were the same shape as frying pans, not because they actually were frying pans.

  Saucepans were something else. She hoped they’d find them, although she knew already that even if she did she’d have no hope of interpreting them. She didn’t have the languages, she didn’t have the background. But she’d like to see them, with her own eyes. As she had seen the little children of the lake. They would have their own meaning, just for her.

  Margaret Murray, the legendary anthropologist and folklorist, had cast spells in a saucepan to thwart her enemies. Jess hoped she’d be able to get that into her article.

  Anthropology is full of strange spirit stories, about shamans and witchcraft and night ridings and animal shape-shiftings, stories which hover between myth and fairytale and religion and tribal memories of historical events, between belief and denial. Many of them feature dwelling places and domestic utensils, but none has ever, as far as Jess knows, named anything as banal, as friendly, as everyday, as a saucepan.

  Before they set off for Africa, there were one or two things to tidy up. One of the things that needed to be tidied up was the question of Ursula, and Jess’s relationship with Raoul.

  Raoul had been unsettled by Anna’s illness and Jess’s distraction. Jess now believed that he had been looking forward to a different kind of development, a different dénouement, as why should he not? No harm in looking forward. She had at one point during the dreary days of waiting for hospital appointments descended to the vulgar curiosity of googling Raoul’s ex-wife, a much less stressful inquiry than googling the Professor had been, and she had been at once astonished and not at all surprised by the curious results. Raoul’s wife, Marie-Hélène Tissot, of French-Algerian descent, looked exactly like Jessica Speight. Even to Jess, she looked like Jessica Speight. There were quite a few images of her available, some Facebook passport-sized snaps attached to her academic CV and to her publications, and some larger ones from French and Canadian magazines and newspapers illustrating news stories about trips into the interior. Most of the stories are in French, but Jess can read these easily. She has read quite a lot of French anthropology.

  Marie-Hélène had blue eyes, and reddish-brown hair, which was cut in an identical manner to Jess’s in these latter days—to just below the chin length, with a Julie Christie sixties fringe. Sometimes Marie-Hélène wore spectacles, of which the frames were exactly the same as those selected by Jess. Her body weight looked about the same, and in one of the photos she was standing in exactly the posture Jess always adopted for the camera—arms firmly folded, the right hand over the left elbow, shoulders back, slightly confrontational but at the same time friendly. A don’t-mess-with-me but here-I-am pose. Her smile, her dimpled chin, her cheekbones, were similar.

  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, Mari
e-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.