The Pure Gold Baby (16 page)

As it turned out, Zain knew quite a lot of people at SOAS, including Guy Brighouse, Jess’s one-time tutor and supervisor. Everybody, in all parts of the world, knew Guy. (It was said that if you came upon two men at an oasis in the desert, two men on an island in the Pacific, one of them would turn out to be Guy Brighouse.) Zain also knew Noah Trellisick, Steve’s editor, who had produced an erudite little series of World Service poetry programmes at Bush House. And he knew Jim’s wife, Katie, but made it clear that he didn’t wish to meet her out of hours, which suited Jess fine. The intellectual community was smaller in those days, or seemed smaller. And it needed a man like Zain, to represent its commitment to what we did not yet call multiculturalism. In those distant days, we still spoke quaintly of the ‘colour bar’, of ‘crossing the colour bar’. Zain was living proof that the Sudanese IQ was in no way inferior to the Caucasian IQ. Most people still secretly believed that blacks were mentally inferior to whites, but it was becoming more difficult to say so openly.

Those were the days of Hans Eysenck and fierce debates about racial intelligence and heritability. We needed Zain, even though we had driven him mad and egged him on to stab his wife.

We were casuists, fierce casuists in the cause of the equality of man. We ignored arguments from genes and nature and race. We were blind to so much. We ignored all those things that we did not want to know. We longed to alter destiny. Each child was born free, and born with all the possibility of the future stored up within it, packed within it. All we had to do was to release the future.

I suspect that Jess did not tell Zain much about Anna, whose IQ and good nature were immeasurable, and would not feature meaningfully on any chart or graph. Anna was absent, at Marsh Court.

Bob kept out of the way. He was said to have taken up with a pretty young zoologist in Cambridge.

We supposed that Zain and Jess would enjoy an intense affair, and that it would not last long. Jess let Zain into her bed but not into her home. We saw his arrivals and departures, we met him on the street corner, we smiled and said hello. But we did not get asked to supper.

Steve was still at Halliday Hall. He had managed to prolong his psychic convalescence for months. He would never be so happy again.

It was the illness at Marsh Court that ejected Zain.

That December, a severe attack of gastric flu had hit the school, and the director had decided it would have to close down early, as the sick bay was full and the bedrooms and classrooms had been turned into hospital wards, where feverstruck children were shitting and spewing into chamber pots. The director rang Jess and explained the situation. Anna was so far well, but should be removed from this epidemic as soon as possible.

He was trying to empty the school of all but the sick.

How very old-fashioned, how Victorian, all that sounds now. Like something out of
Jane Eyre
. But that’s how it was.

I volunteered to drive Jess to collect Anna. God knows why, there must have been some reason, but I can’t now remember what it was. Jess didn’t drive, had never learnt to drive. Maybe I was at a loose end. Maybe I was curious and hoped Jess would tell me more about Zain. My children were by then beginning to be self-sufficient, well able to fend for themselves: they could cook themselves meals and run around on public transport and gang up to play football and mooch around in one another’s bedrooms smoking secret cigarettes and talking about sex. (Cassie’s Janie and Cilla’s Chloe set the bedclothes on fire one night, on what we didn’t yet call a sleepover, but they managed to put it out very promptly and efficiently.) Anna could do none of these things. My heart ached for Anna and Jess, and yet pity seemed then and seems now an inappropriate emotion.

Maybe it was guilt, the guilt of the healthy, the guilt of the normal, the guilt of the free. And yet I do not think I was guilty. I tried to be a good friend.

I do not wish to privilege my friendship with Jess. She had many friends. I was only one of many. I claim no special knowledge, no special relationship.

I must sometimes have annoyed her, I know that. My children must have annoyed her. Jake and Ike were good with Anna when she was little, I’ve already made that claim for them, and they continued to be good with her as they became teenagers. I tried not to rejoice too evidently in their successes, their accomplishments. I tried not to make tactless remarks or comparisons. But I must have done. I know I must have done.

A proleptic flash. I think this happened about ten years ago, perhaps fifteen years ago, long after that visit to plague-stricken Marsh Court, but it comes back to me vividly now, and in that context, in the context of remembering the sick schoolchildren. I was sitting on the top of the No. 7 bus, on the front seat at the right, travelling along Oxford Street. We had just passed Selfridges, that’s when I saw him.

He was sitting on the opposite pavement, on a bench, holding a large placard, with homemade letters that were easy to read from the top deck where I sat. They said
MUM IS DEAD
.

He had a cap by him, for offerings.

The words rent my heart.

MUM IS DEAD
.

We are familiar with the concept that God is dead. We accepted it long, long ago. The message that mum is dead is more powerful.

The bus stopped long enough for me to observe something of the man’s age and features. Stoppages on Oxford Street are what one expects, and I was given time. He was middle aged, balding, in his forties, with large ears and a receding stubble-covered chin, and he was dressed in well-worn clothes that showed touching attempts at neatness.

Wordsworth, in London for the first time, saw on the street a blind beggar who appeared to him to be an emblematic figure. This beggar held
a written paper, to explain/ His story, whence he came, and who he was
. And so this man on Oxford Street appeared to me to be a portent, although his message was much briefer than the blind beggar’s.

MUM IS DEAD
.

I want to describe the man without the mother as a ‘boy’, but he was not a boy. He was a man. I have to keep reminding myself not to think of him as a boy.

The bench on which he sat was a grey concrete oval slab, without a back, standing on squat pedestal legs. Those benches are not designed for comfort. They are punitive, they are sacrificial.

On the way to Marsh Court that winter to collect Anna, as I negotiated the ill-planned nightmare traffic lanes of the North Circular and then the A10, once such a pleasant rural highway, we did not talk about Zain. I didn’t like to ask. There were things Jess and I talked about, and things we didn’t talk about. We talked about Sylvie, who had just embarked on her intensive study of the bladder. We admired her for committing herself to long and specialised study in early middle age. We wondered why she had chosen the bladder, instead of all the more glamorous body parts she might have favoured. Now that we have all reached the age where our bladders grow weak and treacherous, we can see that she chose wisely and for the common good.

Last month, lunching with a colleague in a Thai restaurant in Oxford, I was obliged to retire to the ladies’ room to remove my knickers to rinse them and dry them with the hand dryer. I had been caught short by a sudden burning spasm of cystitis and half a pint of Tiger beer. Bladders are important, but we took them for granted then, when we were young.

I was glad nobody caught me at it in the ladies’, but the smell of hot breathy urine and cheap soap must have lingered after me. I stuffed the pants into a small resealable plastic bag that I happened to have in my handbag, a tribute to modern air travel, and returned to finish my lunch knickerless.

Air terrorism has had some small beneficial side effects, and the habit of carrying resealable plastic bags on one’s person is one of them.

I told Jess this story the other day. She laughed.

No, we didn’t foresee such humiliations in those early days, when we and our children were young and our bladders were strong.

We talked in the car about Sylvie and her son Stuart, who was going through a difficult patch, a delinquent adolescent patch, bunking off school, catching the bus to town, playing the Soho arcades. Perhaps he resented his mother’s prolonged absences at UCH. That’s the kind of thing we parents worried about then. Sylvie had the two boys, Stuart and Josh. Pretty boy Josh was still a good lad, though less perfect of feature than he had been as an infant, but Stuart had always been a handful—secretive, a little morose.

As we drove along we also spoke, Jess and I, it comes back to me now, about town planning and Modernism, comments provoked by the 1890s and 1930s suburban ribbon developments through which we were driving, and by the narrowness of the A10 and its inability to cope with the buses and cars that clogged and clutched and braked their way along it. There were some truly grim façades and stretches of shop frontage then, and they are no better now. I don’t think the M25 existed then, or maybe we were avoiding it. Jess mentioned Keats and his long walks, and the yellow globe flowers in the River Lee, and the peaceful lock of old Enfield. I asked after Jess’s father, whom I liked and who had always been courteous and gallant to me whenever we met. He was well, Jess said, in good health, but still downcast by Brutalism.

Broughborough had just approved a Brutal new shopping centre, windowless, fortress-like, with car parks above and below, with arrow slits in its concrete walls from which to defend the shoppers against the enemy.

Those were early days for shopping centres, the early days of the Arndale vernacular, a Northern style which was to prove a popular target for the IRA in the seventies and for Al Qaeda in the next millennium. Those arrow slits provoked attack; they incited the enemy. Nobody loved the Arndales except their begetters, Sam Chippendale and Arnold Hagenbach. Philip Speight knew Sam Chippendale well, in the years of his ascendance, Jess told me. A bustling, dapper, confident chap, a property dealer, a first-class salesman who played the Yorkshire stereotype. He lived in style in a handsome old-fashioned house in the country near Harrogate and ran a silver Jag driven by a lady chauffeur. He didn’t live in a Brutalist home.

It all went wrong for him too. The property slump of the seventies got him. Now the Arndale Centres are being rebranded and their infamous names are being written out of planning history. The rebuilt IRA-damaged Manchester Arndale still defiantly keeps its title, but others are lowering their profiles.

‘Sweetness and light, that’s what Pa dreamt of,’ said Jess, watching the grubby ugly high-street façades as they passed us by. Sweetness and light. Modernism, not Brutalism. It had all gone wrong.

Anna, excited and animated, was overjoyed to see her mother, and full of stories of the sickness that had seized the school. She was delighted that term had come to an end early, and when she had finished telling us about the vomiting in the classrooms and the blocked toilets and the camp-beds in the corridors, she interrogated us about all her friends at home: Ollie and Polly, Chloe and Jane, Stuart and Josh and Becky and Nicky and Ben. I gave her the latest on Jake’s piano lessons and on Ike’s latest bicycling accident, about which she was very sympathetic. She asked, of course, after Bob, and was told he had gone back to live in Camden Town. This silenced her for a mile or two, but she seemed to absorb the information, and did not refer to it again. She was a sensitive child, a sensitive young woman, and her manners were always good. She had a natural tact.

As we approached home territory, she inquired after Steve. This subject was easier to address. Steve was much, much better. He was in a very nice place, not too far from Marsh Court, where he had a lot of new friends. What were they called? They were called Simon, Patrick, Ursula and Raoul. And Dr Nicholls. Jess hadn’t met Dr Nicholls, but she’d heard a lot about him. He was a very nice man, said Jess.

‘Raoul,’ repeated Anna. She liked the name. She made it sound like a friendly howl, a jackal laugh. Raoul. Raoul. It stayed in her memory, as odd words and phrases did, and she repeated it, occasionally, over the years. ‘Where is Raoul?’ she would ask. But over the years Jess did not know, did not expect she would ever know, although she sometimes thought of him.

Jess had never caught his surname, and maybe she never heard it.

Zain, of course, was not mentioned by Jess on this homeward journey. Zain’s days in Jess’s calendar, it was easy to tell, were numbered.

Jess was to look back on the Zain episode as a necessary passage, an encounter of its time and of her time. It had been intense and emblematic, at once physical and spiritual, she told herself, to still a slight sense of shame at her own too eager surrender. He had told her stories, as Othello had told Desdemona, and she had listened, for the time bewitched. He had appeased a longing in her, a longing for the faraway world she had been forbidden, just as the dean’s daughter had appeased through him a more fleshly and subversive longing.

Zain had indeed been married to a dean’s daughter, Jess established. That was no fairy-story. He had married her, and stabbed her, and although, unlike Othello, he had not killed his wife, he continued staunchly to maintain that it was largely her fault. She was a dean’s daughter, but (and) she was a heavy drinker who could not hold her liquor. Their brief marriage had been an alcoholic haze. They had been married by Special Licence, and both, as they swore their solemn vows, had been pissed out of their minds.

The BBC drank a lot in those days. Corporately and individually, it drank. It drank before the programme, it drank after the programme, and then it repaired to the pub. It is far more sober now. Other sections of society drink far more these days, but the BBC drinks much less.

According to Zain, he and the dean’s daughter had met at a garden party in a cathedral close. Imagine, Zain had said to Jess (and no doubt to many others), imagine, the slim cool young lady in the big wide-brimmed straw hat, the tasteless wet cucumber sandwiches, the sugary little iced cakes, the cathedral spire, the vestments, the distant music playing. A charming English scene, and the big black intruder. It was some kind of ecumenical fête, I’d been invited with my director, said Zain, they wanted a bit of colonial colour. I was the right colour, and I was cultured, I was a totem, I would do, I would dress the set, I would be allowed to walk on the green and pose for the photographs. She made straight for me, she hung on me, she flirted and played with me, she played the bad girl, she was wicked with me.