The Pure Gold Baby Read online

  These portraits were much more touchingly human than the photographs one could see in the National Geographic magazine at the dentist’s. Jess did not like those photographs: they seemed rude, intrusive and inauthentic. She did not like the way that the groups were lined up to grin: it reminded her of the procedure of official school photographs, always an ordeal, and menacing in its regimentation. But the artist’s work in her father’s booklets was delicate, attentive, admiring. The men and women and children were dignified, strange and independent. Maybe they were idealised: she did not at that time think to ask herself about this. She did not know what models were used. Were they drawn from life? Or copied from other books? She did not know. But she was captured as a child by the mystery and richness of human diversity.

  Each figure had a page to itself, and the colours were pure and clear. The scarlet of these people’s robes and adornments was as bright as blood, the green as fresh as a leaf in May, the turquoise new minted as from the Brazilian mine, the silver and gold as delicate and as shining as the finest filigree. The skin tones were shaded in pinks and ivories and browns and chocolate-mauves and ebony. None of the extreme body shapes repelled, for all were portrayed as beautiful. They came from an early world, these strangers, from a world of undimmed and unpolluted colour, a world as clear as the colours in a paintbox, and Jess longed to meet them, she longed to meet them all.

  These figures, these people from many lands, led her on eventually to SOAS, and thence to the children by the lake with lobster claws, and thence to the birth of the pure gold baby, whom she named Anna.

  Jess is ageing now, but she is still, to middle-aged young Anna, a young mother.

  Jess has not travelled much since Anna’s birth. She has left the field. As a student, she had pictured herself eagerly wandering the wide world. But she has been constrained by circumstance, like many women through the ages, constrained largely to an indoor terrain. Her daughter must come first, and for Jess maternity has no prospect of an ending.

  As an anthropologist, Jess is sensitive about public perceptions of her calling. Certain academic and intellectual disciplines, certain professional occupations, seem to be fair game for dismissive mirth: sociologists, social workers, psychoanalysts—all receive a share of public mockery and opprobrium, along with, for a different class of reasons, estate agents, dentists, politicians, bankers and what we have recently come to call financial advisers. When Jess was a student and a beginner, it did not occur to her that there was anything comic about her interests, and it came as a shock to her to discover later in life that anthropology was associated in the vulgar mind with prurience and pornography and penises. She was educated in what she believed to be a noble tradition. Flippant jokes about the sexual antics of savages were as irrelevant and incomprehensible to her as the double-entendres in the pantomimes she was taken to see in Derby as a small child. She could not see anything innately funny about the Trobriand islanders, or in young people coming of age in Samoa. Interest, yes; comedy, no.

  In her sixties, she was to become interested in popular conceptions of anthropology and in its use as a motif in fiction. She wrote a paper on the subject which you may have read. In fiction, she claimed that it was usually exploited by flip and smart intellectuals: Cyril Connolly, William Boyd, Hari Kunzru—writers to whom it seemed to invite parody. Margaret Mead herself was the butt of endless reductive and sexist jokes. Saul Bellow, in Jess’s view, offered an honourable exception to the tradition of anthropology-mockery, and his novel Henderson the Rain King, which she had read at an impressionable age, had a profound influence on her. It summoned up to her the mystery of the dignity of the tribe of the lobster-claw children, although they do not, of course, feature in Bellow’s novel, or, as far as she knows, in any novel. Bellow, she believes, knew even less of the physical continent of Africa than she, but he wrote about it well, and he would not have made fun of lobster feet.

  Towards the end of Lolita, arch-parodist Vladimir Nabokov produces a classic example of anthropology-mockery, admittedly put into the mouth of a sexual pervert pleading for his life at gunpoint, but nevertheless a vulgar and sexist passage, for all that: the novel’s pervert-villain-victim, bleating drop that gun as a refrain, tries to buy off anti-hero Humbert Humbert’s vengeance with increasingly desperate offers, including access to his ‘unique collection of erotica’, which includes the folio de-luxe edition of Bagration Island by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss, ‘with photographs of eight hundred and something male organs she examined and measured in 1932 on Bagration, in the Barda Sea, very illuminating graphs, plotted with love under pleasant skies’. Jess was horrified by a late rereading of this classic novel. She had disliked it in her twenties, when she was too young and innocent to understand it, but in her sixties she understood it and she was appalled by it.

  You may assume from that that Jess was by nature prudish, but we didn’t think she was.

  There are penises and penis-enhancement remedies advertised all over the internet now, where you might expect to find them, and Jess has written a paper on them too, in which she wittily analyses the bizarre vocabulary of commercial erections and sperm volume: the lingo of the solid high-performance-dick-enlarged-joystick-loveknob-supersized-shlong-cockrock. Jess has made a decision to find this sales patter entertaining rather than offensive, and to admire the ingenuity with which salesmen repeatedly penetrate her battered spam filter. She has even decided, paradoxically, to detect a male respect for the female orgasm in all the sales talk. Decency is an artefact, and has failed to save our culture or centre our sexuality, so maybe, she speculates, an overflowing flood of what used to be called obscenity will. Battered and drenched by massive earth-shattering orgasms, we will all be purified.

  Initially, she had been rereading Lolita in search of representations of unqualified and obsessive and exclusive love, which she refound there too, as she had dimly remembered them—but tarnished, perverted, tarnished. There is genius, but there is coldness. Jess’s heart cannot afford to give space to coldness. She cannot afford to allow herself to cool and freeze.

  Jess has given the large part of her life to exclusive and unconditional and necessary love. That is her story, which I have presumptuously taken it upon myself to attempt to tell. But her love takes a socially more acceptable form than that of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, the tragic lover of a nymphet. Jess has had her less reputable adventures, but she has so far remained true to her maternal calling through all vicissitudes.

  I have taken it upon myself to tell this story, but it is her story, not mine, and I am ashamed of my temerity.

  The playgroup and corner-shop mothers did not notice what was wrong with Anna for a long time, not for many months. Nor did Jim and Katie downstairs, although they saw more of her, and babysat for her reciprocally when Jess wanted to go out for an evening to have supper with friends. And as regularly as they could, they would look after Anna on Jess’s working Thursdays. We all saw Anna as a pretty, friendly, good-natured, smiling little thing, with a touching spirit of sharing and helpfulness. At an age when most small children become violently possessive and acquisitive she was always ready to hand over her toys or share her Dolly Mixtures. She did not seem to resent being pushed or tumbled, and she hardly ever cried. She laughed a lot, and sang along with the jingles and nursery rhymes; she knew a lot of the words of a lot of the verses. She had a special friend, a small mischievous imp boy called Ollie, with gap teeth and corkscrew ringlets, who exploited her generosity and used her as a decoy. Ollie seemed fond of her, even though he stole the best bits of her packed lunch. (He had a yearning for those triangular foil-wrapped portions of processed cheese, regularly supplied by Jess, which Anna would trustingly offer in exchange for a crust or a broken piece of biscuit.) The two downstairs children also made a pet of her, and played hide-and-seek and run-around-the-house and den-under-the-table with her.

  So it came as a shock to be told that she had problems.

  She was, i
t is fair to say, a little uncoordinated, and was often clumsy. Sometimes she dropped things or knocked things over or spilt her juice. But what child does not? Her speech, perhaps, was a little simple, with a tendency towards a repetition of phrases, sometimes meaningless, that appealed to her. She never learnt to manage the dumpy little thick-wheeled red-and-yellow tricycle that the playgroup provided: she could not get the hang of pedalling. But she could walk, and she could speak, and she could play simple games, and assemble structures of wooden bricks and basic plastic parts, and draw patterns with crayons. She particularly liked water play, and was very happy when allowed to splash and scoop and fill little cans and beakers and sprinklers from the inflatable rubber pond in the yard. She fitted in, and was accepted by her peers. At eighteen months, at two years, even at three, her cognitive and developmental problems were not obvious, for her goodwill and eagerness to participate disguised and overcame her lack of skills. She never appeared frustrated by her failures, or angry with herself or others. She was no trouble to anyone. We all liked her. Nobody noticed how different she was.

  Except her mother. Jess, of course, noticed. She checked Anna’s progress against the progress of the children of her friends, and saw that in comparison she was slow. For a while she kept her worries to herself, hoping that Anna was simply (whatever simply, in this context, might mean) a late developer. The Health Visitor and the nurses at the surgery and the doctor who administered vaccinations did not at first seem unduly anxious, charmed, as were we all, by the infant’s good looks and beguiling demeanour. Over those first years, we entered into a conspiracy of silence. Who wants to give bad news, who wishes to insist on hearing bad news? There are many subjects of which it is better not to speak, of which it is unwise to speak. The child was healthy enough. She ate well, she slept well, she was peaceable in all her ways. Would that all children were as well loved, as well clothed, as well cared for, as well disposed as she.

  It was on a cold day in February that Jessica Speight set off, unobserved, with her daughter Anna, for the doctor’s morning surgery in Stirling New Park, the long, wide, late-Victorian residential street that curved between and linked the two main bus routes into town. She dressed her warmly, in her little red fleece-lined waterproof jacket, her black-and-white-striped bobble hat, her well-washed matted black woolly tights, her mittens on a string, her little black boots, and she strapped her into the pushchair, and set off towards her appointment with enlightenment. There had been snow, and a few thin grimy frozen traces of it lingered still in hedge bottoms and gutters, lace-edged, like frozen dirty clusters of elderflower, stained yellow by dog urine, scuffed by tyres and shoes.

  On such a day, one sets forth bravely, or not at all.

  Anna was content, as always, and pointed with her woollen fist at objects of interest on the route. A bicycle, a red car, an old man with a peeling plastic tartan shopping bag on wheels. She let out from time to time little cries of surprise, of approval. Jess, as she walked, thought of the child’s father, and of her extreme reluctance to share her full knowledge of Anna with him. She thought of the corner ahead around which happy mother and happy child were about to disappear for ever.

  She thought also of her own father, to whom she had told some of the complicated story of her affair with Anna’s father, and of her unexpected pregnancy. (She had not yet disclosed to him her anxieties about Anna, fearing that to articulate them would be to confirm them.) Her father, a tolerant, affectionate and kind-hearted man, had listened with sympathy and interest to this tale, and had condoned and indeed approved her conduct. She had done the right thing. The circumstances were indeed unfortunate, but she had chosen the right path, and he would always stand by her. He respected her independence, but if in need, she could always turn to him. Her mother’s response had been more anxious and equivocal, but she too had refrained from overt criticism and condemnation.

  If Anna’s condition was as compromised as Jess now feared, she would be able to tell her own father about it, if not Anna’s father. He would understand. That was a comfort.

  Jess, as she walked, found herself thinking of her father’s response to this London neighbourhood in which she was now living. He had visited it only briefly, on a couple of occasions, and had admitted that he was bewildered by its resolute shabbiness, its many-layered decay, its strange population of indigenous old Londoners, incomers from the West Indies and Cyprus and Turkey, and young married couples with professional aspirations. He had gazed quizzically at the cheap Chinese take-aways, the old-fashioned Co-ops and rustic-picture-tiled Edwardian dairies, the cobbled alleys, the junk shops full of worthless Victoriana, the make-shift garages and lean-tos, the dumped cars, the small council blocks, the large old multi-occupancy houses belonging to absentee landlords. He took in the dogs and sparrows and starlings. He liked, or he said he liked, the little jerry-built cosy Edwardian terrace where Jim and Katie and Jess lived, but Jess could tell that he found the surroundings depressing. It was not for this that he had fought in North Africa, and tried to rebuild a brave new Broughborough.

  Philip Speight was a disappointed man of strong opinions, who had held high hopes for post-war Labour Britain, for the new cities that would rise from the bomb sites. His visions had been frustrated, his plans sabotaged, and his name had become attached to some of what he considered the ugliest rebuilding in Europe. Corners had been cut, money both saved and wasted, councillors had grown rich, and he had been blamed for decisions not freely of his making. The Midlands had become the badlands, and were a mess, by which he felt himself condemned. His name would go down on the wrong side of progress. The ugliness of the new weighed on him, he told Jess. The failure of Modernism depressed him.

  But he was a good man, a generous man. He did not allow his depression and disappointment to infect others. He contained them.

  Jess had tried to reassure him that she was happy in this cheap rundown muddle of a once-more prosperous district, but now, as she walked along in her cheap smart sixties boots, wheeling and bumping her innocent charge along the uneven pavement, her courage faltered. Maybe it was all too much for her, her fate too hard to handle.

  She dreaded what the doctor would tell her.

  When we look back, we simplify, we forget the sloughs and doubts and backward motions, and see only the shining curve of the story we told ourselves in order to keep ourselves alive and hopeful, that bright curve that led us on to the future. The radiant way. But Jess, that cold morning, was near despair. She did not tell us about this then, but of course it must have been so. I picture her now, walking along the patched and pockmarked London pavement, with its manhole covers and broken paving stones, its runic symbols of water and electricity and gas, its thunderbolts and fag ends and sweet wrappings and spatters of chewed and hardened gum, and I know that she faltered.

  There were fag ends everywhere. Most of us smoked in those days. We knew better—we had the warnings—but we didn’t believe them. We didn’t think the warnings were for us. We didn’t chew gum, we’d been brought up not to chew gum, but we smoked, and, almost as soon as it became available, we took the pill.

  The doctor, middle-aged, grey-haired, round-shouldered, cardiganed, not the best of doctors, but kind-hearted and good-enough, listened to Jess’s story, took notes, asked questions about the baby’s delivery. Had it been prolonged, had forceps been used, had there been oxygen deficiency? She did some simple tests, asked Anna a few simple questions, then busied herself writing referrals to specialists and hospitals. It occurred to Jess that this doctor, who had seen Anna several times on routine occasions (vaccinations, a bout of acute ear ache, a scraped knee that might have needed a stitch), might feel remiss for not having noticed Anna’s developmental problems. Jess, in her place, would have felt remiss. Certainly the solemnity and the new and marked attentiveness of the doctor’s response were not reassuring. There was no suggestion, now, that Anna would be a normal child. She would be what she would be—a millstone, an everlasting burden, a
pure gold baby, a precious cargo to carry all the slow way through life to its distant and as yet unimaginable bourne on the shores of the shining lake.

  Jess wept as she walked home, for the long-term implications of this visit, although as yet imprecise and unconfirmed, were very present to her. She was ashamed of the warm tears that rose in her eyes and spilled down her cold cheeks, of the water that dripped from her reddened nose. She wiped her face with the back of her woollen glove. Why should she weep? Her snivelling was treachery. She was weeping out of self-pity, not love. Anna smiled still, as gay as ever, wheeling royally along in her battered little second-hand pushchair. There was no difference for her, to her. There would never be any difference to her. For as long as Anna lived, provided good-enough care were taken, there would probably be no difference, thought Jess, vowed Jess.

  How long would she live? Who would outlive whom?

  This was also a question, and one that would become more urgent with the years. But it was far too soon to ask it yet.

  It would always be too soon. The moment to ask this question would never come.

  Jess decided that she would be better than good-enough. She would be the best of mothers. So she resolved, as she increased her speed and made her brisk, cold way home to a lunch of boiled egg and Marmite-and-butter toast, Anna’s healthy favourite.