The Pure Gold Baby (24 page)

It wouldn’t have been exhilarating if she hadn’t been so beautiful. But she was. She wouldn’t have tried it on if she hadn’t been so beautiful. But she was. We use our talents as we may.

So what had gone wrong, has anything
particular
gone wrong, why is she so animated, so angry? Is it with long-term fate itself that she quarrels, or has some recent incident outraged her? Has the executive’s accent tipped her over, or his pale blue sporting suit, or his smooth managerial language? Why does she insist that her son is so ‘brilliant’? She repeats the word remorselessly. ‘My
brilliant
boy!’ she cries. Is it the rage of disappointment, of love, of frustration, of despair? Jess is mesmerised, baffled. She recognises a highly tuned note of refusal, an exceptional cry. It is a spirited cry: it fills the grassy space beneath the canvas, embarrassing some of its auditors, but not the little group around the table.

I lost my mother, I lost my father, and I am alone, alone, alone
. So repetitively, so musically, cries the emerald dove. And so this mother-woman wails her fluent unstoppable garrulous articulate long-nurtured song of protest.

The mad mothers of the mad children. Why should they not cry out? Why should they politely accept their tragedies? Why should they subdue themselves?

Jess joined a therapy group once, for the parents of children in care, for the parents of children with special needs. She joined it out of need and humility, and to please Anna’s social worker Karen, to keep on the right side of ever optimistic Karen, but she had not stayed with it for long. It had bored her to tears and broken her heart.

(Anna sits quietly on a bench overlooking the Brighton shingle, with Rod and Isaac and Molly and coach driver Mr Greetham. Mr Greetham has tied knots in the corners of his big blue-spotted handkerchief and put it on his head, Brighton-style, to prevent sunstroke, because he has forgotten to bring his hat. They all find this very funny. Anna sits and smiles. Anna does not need to cry out.)

Twice her dear boy absconded, loudly claims the histrionically indignant blonde woman, twice they let him get out, once he was found wandering in the village trying to buy cigarettes with a plastic bag full of euros, God knows where he got the euros, then he got on to the verge of the dual carriageway, he was all scratched, must have climbed over the wire, over the perimeter fence, fucking Wibletts was supposed to be a fucking place of safety, that’s what we pay so much for, that’s
all
some of us pay for, it’s a miracle the poor darling wasn’t knocked down, anything could have happened to him, they should have watched him, they should have minded him, he was barefoot on the dual carriageway, they had let him wander out without his shoes, they had confiscated his mobile, they had lost his favourite green shirt in the laundry, a pig-faced fat girl called Marina had seduced him, he’d got an infection, a
venereal
infection, they had made him share a study room with
morons
,
they
are the morons, they are cretins, they are profiteers, they should be exposed in the press, it’s a scandal, and they’re trying to get additional NHS funding, it’s a disgrace!

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 was 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.