The Pure Gold Baby (11 page)

Maroussia talked about the Secret Garden. She was involved in a community project in Camden, restoring a lost garden which had lain untended for many decades in a triangle between three residential roads. Her own garden backed on to it, and she and some neighbours had devoted time to discovering the lease and the deeds, and had embarked on clearing it. They had had a big bonfire of hacked elder and sycamore and bramble on Guy Fawkes’ Night, and some of us had attended, with our traditional offerings of sausages and baked potatoes and parkin. (Anna, away at Marsh Court, had missed this fun, but listened eagerly to the reports. She was always a good audience.)

Maroussia didn’t mind getting her hands dirty, she didn’t mind nagging the council for the public good. And she didn’t get herself televised while she was doing it, although she had a public face and could have tried to use it. That’s not how things worked, not in those days.

Steve the poet, Steve our own depressed poet, had thrown himself into the slashing and burning, finding company and an escape from his heavy habitual grief. He wasn’t very handy with an axe or a spade, but he made himself useful. He had written a poem about the reclaiming of the Secret Garden which was published in the
London Magazine
, and which he now read to us at our post-Christmas party. It was a good poem. He was a good, though not a prolific, poet, a well-published poet. And yet he exuded a terrible white sweat of failure. His large white face and his slack lips and his damp black hair and his home-knitted old blue jersey and his nervous stammer all spoke of invincible pursuant despair, of the furies that followed him. I didn’t think he looked at all well that Christmas. He was overweight, I saw that he couldn’t stop eating—he munched his way through half a dozen mince pies. I wondered if one day soon a neighbour or a rent collector would find him dead in his bed.

Steve read his poem, and we listened respectfully, because we felt we ought to. And it was a good poem, it was our poem.

Then we listened to Jim, because we had to.

Jim was working on a Granada documentary about colonial Africa and the newly independent states. The Gold Coast had long been remade and renamed as Ghana, and Nigeria had celebrated independence as Nigeria, but more recently Northern Rhodesia had become Zambia, Nyasaland had become Malawi, and Bechuanaland had become Botswana. Southern Rhodesia was the sticking point in the decolonisation of Africa. Jim tended to overwhelm us with tedious self-important inside information (in this instance from his Foreign Office contacts and a South African Afrikaans campaigner for civil rights), which made us all feel ignorant fools. And was meant so to do. We could see that Jim’s wife, Katie, was getting restive as Jim told us how Rhodesian premier Ian Smith had spoken to him personally on the phone only a week before, but Jess was intrigued by this story.

I think this may have been the moment when she first mentioned, at a seeming tangent, the secret children, the lobster-claw children, the Cleppie Bells of Zambia and Bangweulu. I don’t know how many of us picked it up, I’m not sure if anyone else was really listening, we were all a bit knocked out by lunch and leftovers and Jim’s discourse, but I listened and retained the reference. It’s the kind of thing I do tend to remember. (I didn’t know what the phrase ‘Cleppie Bells’ meant, at this stage, but I remembered it: it had a tragic ring to it.) She didn’t say much about them, just that most of us adjust to what we have or have not, we regress, we revert, we accommodate ourselves to our missing limbs, to our little stumps and stunted digits, to our deafnesses, our blindnesses, our incapacities. They had been very simple people, she said, the people of the lake. Pygmy hunter-gatherers and fisher folk. They wouldn’t like the new industrial prosperity of the copper mines.

This could have been a politically reactionary aside, in support of colonial oppression, but I didn’t think it was.

I don’t know why I remembered it so well, but I did, and do.

Katie was visibly and audibly about to get more than restive, and Jess broke off from her thoughts about normality and deviance to call the children back from the street and the backyard for the indoor fireworks display. Do you remember those indoor fireworks? They are illegal now. Health and Safety forbids them, though they seemed harmless enough, indeed touching in their humble harmlessness. The fireworks came in harshly tinted badly printed cheap oriental oblong cardboard packs, of acid reds and greens and yellows, and they displayed a mild variety of small activities: there was a little pyramid cone called Mount Fuji that smoked and puffed, a terrible grey worm of obscene ash called the Great Serpent that grew and grew, some little poppers, some paper flowers that expanded in a glass of water, a ball of hyperactive powder that whizzed and fizzed and then self-destructed, and a handful of stumpy sparklers.

The children were innocent enough to watch quietly in the darkened room as the adults lit the touch-papers, their faces illuminated by the candles on the mantelpiece and the small glow of the Japanese illuminations. Some of us watched the light playing on the grave sweet attentive children’s faces instead of watching the small display. They composed a painting, a Joseph Wright, a de la Tour. Our children were so good, our hopes for them so high. Goodness seemed to be their birthright. How could any of them go astray?

The gap-t oothed boy, the pure gold baby, the freckled fox girl, the dusky little despot, the white-faced flower, the luminous lamb, the lion charmer. Naughty Ollie, mild-mannered Anna, silent Stuart, black-braided Polly, lisping Sam, choir-boy Joshua, beetle-browed Ben, birth-marked Harry, quick and clever Chloe, angular Andrew. They were all beautiful, all good, all in bud. Even Andrew, subject as he was to spasms and to fits of incoherent rage, was beautiful, and full of undisclosed personal promise.

Most beautiful of all, at that age, was Joshua. A light shone from him, a light shone upon him. Each of us favoured our own, but we all recognised that Joshua Raven, Sylvie’s younger boy, had an angelic perfection of feature. There are such children. Anna was the pure gold baby, the child without a shadow, but Joshua was the luminous lamb. He looked as pretty as a Christmas card, with his light auburn hair curling down to his shoulders, his perfect porcelain skin, his turquoise eyes. He was drawn in pencil and aquatint, a Renaissance boy. His delicate skin seemed translucent.

After the fireworks, we sang. Anna and Bob taught us ‘The River is Flowing, Flowing and Growing’ and we sang it as a round. Then we sang some carols, and some of the songs of the Beatles. But as the evening wore on, Jim grew more aggressive, and Katie more angry, and they began to shout at one another, and just before midnight Katie ran out into the street, screaming ‘That’s enough, I’m leaving, I’m leaving, I’m off to the airport!’ and her children ran after her crying and the neighbours started to peer through their curtains and Jim fell into the ill-placed Christmas tree. Steve kept trying to intervene, in his bumbling, good-hearted, counter-productive way, and Jim got very cross with him and called him a parasitic shit and a great lump of useless lard and a eunuch.

Jess intervened at this point, as she didn’t like to see Steven being abused, and said we’d all better go home and leave her to clear up.

That wasn’t the end of Jim and Katie’s marriage, but it was the beginning of the end.

Anna didn’t like it when people quarrelled. She seemed to take discord upon herself, to try to absorb it into herself. When Bob and Jess in the inevitable course of things started to cross each other, she was distressed. Bob was an intruder into her relationship with her mother, but she didn’t want him driven away. She would never have tried to make difficulties between her mother and her stepfather. She was an appeaser.

That first vacation from Marsh Court went well, warmed by the friction and activity of Christmas stress, but never bursting into angry flames, or at least not in Jess’s household. Anna did not seem reluctant to return to school, to Jess’s relief, but of course Anna always tried to be obliging, and was stoically adept at hiding distress. One of her characteristics was an ability to suffer minor physical pain without making a fuss: little injuries such as bruises and scratches which made our children yell for attention she would endure with the minimum of noise or complaint. ‘It’s nothing, it doesn’t hurt at all,’ she would assure us, smiling eagerly, as she dabbed at the blood on her knee with her hanky. And I don’t think that was anything to do with her pain threshold, as some observers might have thought. It was to do with her good manners.

(Jess once read out to me a phrase from an early anthropological textbook on the Negro, which had clearly lodged unpleasantly in her memory, as it then did in mine:
The nervous system of the Negro is not very sensitive, and the appreciation of pain is dull
. She had also discovered research that indicated that sensitivity to pain showed a positive correlation to intelligence. Of this, she had remarked, ‘It depends what you mean by pain.’ Measurement of pain is a dangerous business.)

Anna didn’t really know how to be bad. We were all, in our ways, bad—motivated by ambition, or rivalry, or envy, or lust, or spite, or sloth, and observing the seeds of these passions even in our beloved born-i nnocent children. But Anna didn’t know these emotions. The only one of the traditional seven deadly sins with which she had the slightest acquaintance was gluttony, for she did enjoy her food, and was fond of talking about what she might be going to have for her supper, but she would never grab at table. She did sometimes launch into her plateful without waiting for others to be served, but if Jess caught her eye she would put her knife and fork down, guiltily.

Let you that is without sin among you cast the first stone, Jesus said. Anna wouldn’t have thrown a stone at anyone or anything, not even at a gate-post. She lacked aggression.

It’s hard to survive without aggression. Her old schoolfriend Ollie concealed his attacks and predations by a winning charm and a wide smile, but her new schoolfriend Vincent was openly strung with aggression. His little wiry body and his language and his gestures were charged with attacking energy. He was fierce and insistent. He was a handful. His jaw worked with fury, his eyes shot bolts. He was full of knots. He threw stones, and other things, at people and at birds. When walking by the canal, he would stone the moorhens. Susie reprimanded him, but not very forcefully, as he wasn’t a very good shot, and he never managed to hit a moorhen.

Susie was a wiry person too, her face sharp and angular, her body scrawny, her legs and sinews toughened by her bicycle round, her opinions made fierce by the frequent sight of pain and distress, her hair frizzled by a violent perm and dyed an aggressive and defiant red. She too was full of knots.

Whereas Anna was a smooth, mild, benevolent person, with mild and rounded features.

Unlike her mother, Jess, Anna was not highly strung.

Jess registered the hints that Susie had let drop about the new views of the anti-psychiatrists and the regime at Kingsley Hall. They didn’t really apply to Anna, or to her inexplicably becalmed condition, but they were interesting to Jess. She read a book or two, attended a talk or two, about the knotted regions of the mind. She did not think that Anna would ever be awakened into a more adult state of stress and conflict. Undreaming, not knowing what dreams were, Anna lived in a dream, in an innocent charmed world without progress, without a goal, without an aim. If you measure your pain or hope or despair on a scale of ten, ten being anguish, Anna’s measurement was near to zero.

Sometimes Jess dreamt of going back to the shining lake. Sometimes she dreamt of the field trips she might have taken, had she not been burdened with the sole care of an ever dependent child. Maternity had become by chance her destiny.

Had Livingstone truly believed in the afterlife, believed in it as securely as he claimed? Believed in it as he believed in the existence of the maggots that burrowed into his limbs and popped their heads in and out of his flesh at him in those weary latter days? As he believed in the army of red ants that swarmed over him and devoured his foot like smallpox, and in the dark-grey swarming cannibal caterpillars that wormed their way through the waters of the lake? Did he know the afterlife of heaven as he knew the call of the tree-frog, the cry of the fish-eagle?

He said the natives of some tribes did not like to talk to him about death, or even to consider it, and he thought this a clear sign of their lost and miserable pagan state, in which only wooden charms and idols could comfort them.

He noted that birds of his domestic flock did not seem to recognise death either, for when the cock died the hens continued to try to feed him.

Two very fine young men, of a ‘superior’ tribe, with well-developed ‘organs of intelligence’, once asked him
whether people died with us, and where they went to after death. Have you no charm against death?
they wanted to know. He seems to have thought this a highly intelligent question, presumably because, as a missionary, albeit a very unpersuasive and unsuccessful missionary, he thought he had an answer to it. But of course we don’t agree with his answer, so need not regard the question as an intelligent question. Although it was a natural question to put to a visitor so clearly confident that he had all the answers.

Adolescent Anna occasionally asked Jess, ‘What is death?’ or ‘What is sex?’ These metaphysical questions were difficult for Jess. She did not know how, or on what level, to attempt to reply to them.

The Africans whom Livingstone encountered were not converted, but they enjoyed watching magic lantern shows of Bible stories. Moses in the bulrushes reminded them of the shores of Bangweulu, and they liked the baby in the manger with the ox and the ass. But they did not care at all for the crucifix. They expressed the view that crucifixion was cruel, and that not even the cruel Moors went in for it. Livingstone was not sure that they fully understood that crucifixion was not being recommended by the Gospels. Teaching the heathen was not an easy task. Nor was discovering the source of the Nile. But he persevered.