The Pure Gold Baby (26 page)

Jess, hearing this, thinks fleetingly but intensely of Anna’s father, who has so completely vanished from the field of her knowing. Maybe he, like Zain, is dead. He had been twenty years older than she, so he is probably, though not necessarily, dead. He is frozen in time for her, for ever at the age at which she had known him, in the old days of sex and SOAS. It now strikes her that he must almost certainly be dead. She hears nothing of him, no echo from him reaches the network. His very name is dead. He cannot have published much, or she would have come across his references to his work. She has not looked for him on the internet, where we all have an afterlife, but maybe, as of course he must be dead, maybe, perhaps she could look.

Yes, she knows he must be dead, or, if not dead, moribund in Sweden. He cannot be in England, or she would have known. His tenure at SOAS had been limited; he had no right of return. Maybe he died long ago in the Chinese foothills. Maybe he was an anthropological martyr, murdered by tribesmen or eaten by ants.

It would be safe to look for him now. Her shame (and she has felt at times intolerable and inexplicable shame) has died with him.

The thought of seeing the Professor’s name again fills her with horror. She has been trying not to know this. For decades she has been, as we now say, in profound denial.

Maybe Raoul’s ex-wife knew him.

Jess banishes the thought of the Swedish professor and returns to the present.

‘Particle physics,’ repeats Jess to Raoul, admiringly and meaninglessly, playing for time to reorganise her thoughts, her flashbacks, the heaped and impacting flickering particles of recollection that no prose can ever reproduce, however fancy. The neurones are far too quick for us, proleptic, pre-emptive.

‘Particle physics!’ says Jess. ‘That’s amazing.’

There is no future in talking to Raoul about particle physics and his clever son.

She decides to risk betraying stupidity and ignorance by asking Raoul to tell her more about what kind of neurologist he is, and why he had found himself at the Open Day at Wibletts.

We are impressed by his Delphic answer, delivered just as Sylvie rouses herself from her exhausted slumber.

‘I specialise,’ said Raoul, as we entered the uninspired repetitive landscape of the South Circular, ‘in phantom pain.’

Phantom pain.

‘I feel anguish, and it is not of the body, so it must be of the spirit.’ So says a character in one of Strindberg’s tragedies. I forget which.

Neurology does not accept the disembodied notion of the disembodied spirit. Raoul has been working on this problem all his life. Well, for all his life since he left the Lebanon and Marxism, suffering from what he would have accepted as ‘anguish’.

I don’t know what the Swedish word for ‘anguish’ was, or who translated it as ‘anguish’. Maybe it was me.

Steve had used the word ‘agony’ in his mantra.

I don’t know if there is any difference between these two concepts, whether one is more embodied than the other.

Raoul and Jessica met for lunch in an old-fashioned little Italian restaurant in an alleyway just off Queen Square, which they had each visited severally over the years, but where their attendances had never until now coincided. An unpretentious little place, it is now more committed to the pizza than it used to be, but otherwise it is little changed. It is still a family business, although the waiters grow old and will soon die, and the patron will sell to a fast-food chain and return to his native village near Bardi in Emilia-Romagna.

The restaurant is quite near SOAS, and even nearer to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, where Raoul had worked. It is quite near the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, where I saw the stitched and smiling baby that I mentioned.

Raoul and Jessica were well within their comfort zone there, with ageing waiters and familiar food. They found themselves surprisingly comfortable with one another.

In the restaurant just off Queen Square, Raoul and Jessica talked about the Lebanon and the Sudan and Mongolia. (We don’t use those definite articles now.) They ate fusilli and farfalle and drank a bottle of San Pellegrino. They spoke of Steve Carter, who had retreated to the comfort of the Wendy House, but had found no comfort there, or thereafter. They spoke of Zain and his long heroic journey north from the oasis. They spoke of Dr Nicholls and R. D. Laing. They spoke of phantom pain in missing limbs, and of the neurology of the traumatised bladder. They spoke of Sylvie and her son Joshua. They had a lot to talk about.

Perhaps they spoke of me, their obliging facilitator, but if they did, Jess did not report it.

Jessica and Raoul met for their second lunch in a Lebanese restaurant near Victoria, where they ate a variety of challenging raw vegetables, some rice and some beans and some splayed grilled quails, and drank a glass of red wine. They talked about exile. They talked about Africa and the lake. Raoul asked Jessica why she had never been back to Africa, if it had meant so much to her, and her ready answer (Anna, Anna, money, Anna) died on her lips. She stared at Raoul as he tidily nibbled at a bone. He smiled, to indicate that there was no threat, no malice in his question.

Why had she never been back to Africa? She could have cajoled a friendly editor, in the days when there was easy money in print journalism. Someone would have commissioned her to write about lepers or lobster claw or ostrich foot, had she set her heart on it. She had been good at cajoling, when she was young. But she had never even tried. She could have gone while Anna was safe at Marsh Court. She could have sent Anna home for a couple of weeks to her Broughborough grandparents, while they were still alive and willing. But she had never even tried.

She had stayed within her comfort zone, with Anna.

That useful if vulgar and irritating little phrase, that journalistic, cheap-popular-psychology phrase ‘comfort zone’, hadn’t existed in those early days, when she had sought whatever it is that we now mean by it.

No, reflected Jess on her underground journey home to Finsbury Park tube station, she hadn’t travelled far. She had made an excuse of Anna. She had withdrawn to the life of the mind, to the idle life of the busy mind. The magpie mind. This was the accusation which, prompted by Raoul, she now drew up against herself.

She had made Anna dependent. She had been wrong to make her so dependent. She had permitted too great a closeness, in too small a space. She had made Anna safe and herself indispensable. This had been short-sighted. Few had dared to warn her, but some had tried. Maybe she should have listened to Karen, her social worker.

Karen tried to warn her, but I didn’t.
Par délicatesse
. I was a coward on this front.

Par délicatesse j’ai perdu ma vie
.

Before her next lunch engagement with Raoul, Jess found herself thinking about those large horizons. She thought about the thousands and thousands of air miles that so many of her friends and acquaintances had travelled over the last few decades. In her twenties she had been the adventurer, but now even the stay-at-homes had overtaken her. Travel had become commonplace. The upper air was thickly crowded with economic migrants and refugees, criss-crossing one another unhappily in mid-air; with pleasure-seekers and holiday-makers; with executives needlessly visiting foreign branches of their companies; with trustees of boards, with politicians and NGO employees on freebies; with bankers and engineers and salesmen; with grandmothers and bridegrooms; with party-goers and pilgrims; with jihadists and journalists and novelists and poets on their way to festivals or conferences or global summits. Global displacement, for reasons both trivial and profound, had accelerated and intensified, and not even major catastrophes—airplane-engine failures, terrorism, volcanoes, earthquakes, nuclear disasters—seemed likely to halt it. Only a few neurotics and ecology fanatics stayed at home.

All the impenetrable places of the earth have been documented and filmed and probed and contaminated. You can see them on television any night of the week in all their
National Geographic
banality. Jess has been told that in the United States whole television channels are devoted to travel and ethnography. Round and round they go on a loop, the simple peoples of the earth.

Jess hates the
National Geographic
shop on Regent Street. It is as false as false can be. It is a virtual world of almost indescribable ugliness.

People don’t need to travel to see other peoples. They can watch them on the loop from their beds. But people go just the same. To Africa, to Thailand, to Brazil, to Antarctica.

My Ike, always a wanderer, works for a backpacker’s guidebook, and has been to more uncomfortable places than most. In theory Jess ought to disprove of this, and so perhaps should I, but Ike is a charmer and an enthusiast and we love him, despite his massive carbon footprint.

Jess’s sister Vee has conspicuously avoided England. She returns once or twice a year, for funerals. She attended the funeral of their father, then that of their mother. Jess doesn’t like to ask her where she will live when, in a few years, she is obliged to retire. She and her sister are not close. Vee has no children, has never married, is secretive about her personal life.

A few eccentric, green-minded, middle-class intellectuals are now turning against foreign travel. Having been everywhere they could possibly have wanted to go, having tired of queues at airports and security procedures, they now make a virtue of refusing to fly. The fox and the grapes, thinks Jess, a little sourly.

Bob still flits about a lot. He doesn’t tire. He doesn’t mind aeroplanes, he doesn’t give a damn about global warming, in fact he says he thinks its dangers are much exaggerated. He’s still based in England, but he takes off for China, for Australia, for the Solomon Islands, for Alaska, whenever a commission comes up. He can still get work. He’s still restless. He hasn’t finished yet. She doesn’t think she envies him, because she thinks his work is shallow. But maybe she does envy him. She envies his freedom, his temperament, his weightlessness. She now thinks she was lucky to have had a happy couple of years with her surprising husband Bob.

They still haven’t divorced, and when he is in London he lives happily alone in a large flat in Herne Hill, south of the river, a long way from Camden, in an area that Jess found surprisingly genteel and leafy when she first visited him. She’s been over there a couple of times with Anna. It is very different from the urban North London in which she is so deeply embedded. It has large trees, green space, wide roads, tall wide houses, deep gardens.

Statistically, a high proportion of marriages that produce children with learning difficulties or disabilities founder, for obvious reasons. Jess hasn’t had to worry about that. Bob hadn’t really been part of that plot.

As she sets off via the British Library to her third rendezvous with Raoul, thinking of horizons broad and narrow, she remembers the powerful and well-attended funeral that she and Anna had been to earlier in the week. It was the funeral of her plumber, whom she had known for nearly forty years. He had been the plumber of all the local families and he looked after much of our neighbourhood, as his father had before him. We knew him well, and he knew us. Jimmy Parker was of the old English white artisan class, and he had prospered way beyond his father’s expectations, as the gentrification of Canonbury and Highbury enriched his growing parish, as new bathrooms and showers were installed and penthouses and basements were added on and refurbished. He was reliable, and, although his prices went up and up as he acquired more vans and more employees and a new logo and extended his business to building and electrics, he was loyal to us, as we to him. He gave us reasonable rates. It was Jimmy who came round to Jess’s that Christmas to fix the broken lavatory bowl, it was Jimmy who rebuilt Maroussia’s top floor and created her smart new bathroom, it was Jimmy who fixed Sylvie’s new house in Canonbury Square, it was Jimmy who stepped in when a boiler cranked itself to death, it was Jimmy who knew which tree roots were throttling the drains or making their way into basements. He knew our infrastructure and our secrets underground.

Jess remembers very clearly the day, six months or so earlier, when she discovered that he was dying. She’d called him round to look at the shower attachment, which had finally resisted her attempts to stick it together with silver duct tape, a plumbing matter of no great moment, and she had been prepared to greet him with her usual neighbourly cheeriness and small talk. But when she saw him on her threshold, she knew at once. ‘How are you, Jimmy?’ she asked brightly, trying to conceal her shock at his appearance, for she knew the answer. He shook his head as he stepped indoors and wiped his shoes on the orange-brown whiskered doormat. He didn’t say anything. He had shrunk, his round and cheerful face had folded and sunken inwards, his pink complexion had yellowed, his whole body manifested mortality. He shook his head, and Jess, impulsively, put one arm around him, then quickly withdrew it for fear of offence or presumption. But he smiled wryly; he did not mind.

He was smaller than she was. He looked smaller than ever.

Together they went up to the bathroom and looked at the old shower head, and Jimmy confirmed that it wasn’t worth spending time messing about with it, he’d get her a new one.

‘It’s done you a good few years,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Jess.

At the bottom of the stairs, in the narrow London hallway, he said, ‘They say the chemo might work, but they don’t sound very cheery about it.’

Jess asked which hospital, and he told her.

‘I hope they’re looking after you properly,’ she said.

‘The wife and the boys have been very good,’ was his reply.

Then he said, with his hand on the latch, ‘I’ve not travelled far in my life, Jessica. I’ve not got far. All my life I’ve spent in these parts, as my dad did before me.’

He said these words seriously, as though he had been premeditating them.

‘You’re very well known here,’ said Jess. ‘You know us all. We all depend on you here. You’ve looked after us all for a long time.’