The Pure Gold Baby (29 page)

The memorial had included a reading from the ancestor poetry of the perished tribe of the clay mansions, in its original language, with some presumably freely inventive phrases of translation from Guy. The ancestors are dying, their houses are in ruins, the living have abandoned them, the living have gone to the cities and sold their souls.

There had also been songs, some of them outrageous.

Guy and the Professor had known each other quite well. Guy had warned her off the Professor and his habits, but she had taken no heed.

The Professor had been, in his way, generous about Anna. He had settled money on her. Jess does not like to remember this fact, and has almost managed to forget it.

Jess now knows that she ought to google the Professor, to see if he is alive or dead. The depth of her terror at the thought of initiating this act, this investigation, scares her, and interests her. It reveals to her that she is more fragile than she likes to think she is. She has procrastinated for so many years, and during these years technology has altered beyond any possible expectations. All she needs to do is to type in his name. It will be there, somewhere. An obituary, a final publication, a footnote, a cross-reference on Google Scholar. She is waiting, she thinks, for something to propel her into action. It will come.

Yes, it will come.

When she gets home after her third lunch with Raoul, Anna is not yet back from the day centre, so Jess rings her and Anna says she will be on her way home with one of the minders who is passing the end of their street. Anna sounds subdued, and remains subdued on her return. Jess probes a little but cannot discover any cause for the shadow that lies over her. Anna’s emotional landscape is rarely tempestuous, though sometimes dull, and this cloud will surely pass, but it saddens Jess. Is Anna annoyed that her mother broke off her studies on sanitary protection to take lunch with Raoul? Is she jealous of this word called ‘Raoul’? Maybe, if Jess is to continue to see Raoul, she should invite him to her home and introduce him to Anna, but this is a step she does not feel ready to take. Her life with Anna is so composed, so settled. To cheer Anna, Jess irresponsibly suggests that next year they might take a trip to Africa, to see the animals.

Anna does not respond to this idea very warmly, and why should she? She has no sense of the old depths, the hinterland from which it proceeds.

She doesn’t seem interested in Jess’s radical proposal.

Jess is shocked by her own suggestion. It is not like her to be so random. But she is beginning to think that she could perhaps take Anna to Africa. Why not? It wouldn’t kill them, would it? It would be an adventure. And they could afford it. According to that poster, it wasn’t very expensive.

Anna, the next morning, seemed still to be subdued. Jess decided they should both stay at home for the day, and whiled away some time by emailing her friend Lauren in Colchester. Did Lauren know anything about alleged squatters at Troutwell? Whom should Jess contact in the CMHT? She googled Troutwell, and saw that since she had last looked at the site there were some new photographs which did indeed suggest recent habitation, as well as a greater degree of vandalism than she and Anna had encountered. Breaking into and photographing large derelict listed buildings seemed a not uncommon hobby, according to this website. Jess had not known that and was slightly worried to think of herself as belonging to such a strange and deviant fraternity. She had thought her interests special, but clearly they weren’t.

Was Ursula in there somewhere? It seemed neither probable nor improbable. It was a worry to her, but not a very serious worry. It was Raoul’s adopted problem, not hers.

Serious worry hit her at lunchtime. Anna, toying halfheartedly with her baked potato and mushrooms, looked up at her mother and said in a solemn, anxious, embarrassed voice, ‘Mum, it keeps on coming out.’

Jess put down her fork and looked at her grown-up daughter’s worried face. She couldn’t think what Anna was talking about.

‘What comes out?’ she was obliged to ask, as Anna could go no further.

‘I can’t stop it. And it’s red,’ said Anna. ‘It’s the wrong colour. It’s like blood.’

At the heavy word ‘blood’ her face crumpled and tears filled her eyes, tears of sadness for her mother, of worry for herself.

‘Where from?’ asked Jess, putting her hand comfortingly on her daughter’s hand.

‘You know,’ said Anna apologetically, her face pink with shame. ‘When I go to the toilet.’

Slowly, painfully, Anna disclosed that for some time now she had been mildly incontinent, needing to pee all the time, sometimes wetting her pants. And there had been blood in her urine. Pink urine had been trickling into the white lavatory bowl which Jimmy Parker had installed just after Christmas all those years ago. Yes, nearly every time she went to the toilet. And she had to go so often. No, it wasn’t anything to do with her monthlies, it wasn’t a Tampax thing. (Jess had taught Anna to use tampons; it had been hard to explain the procedure and hard for Anna to learn to do it, but she had learnt and coped with it well. A useful womanly skill.)

How long had this been going on for? Anna couldn’t tell. She didn’t have a good grasp of the passing of weeks and months and years, although she could latch on to dates, birthdays, promised events. She knew they were going to meet Bob next Tuesday in Kilburn in an African restaurant. She knew it was her mother’s birthday in October and hers a month later. But she couldn’t tell when the bleeding had started.

It had been going on quite a while, her mother guessed; she’d been hiding this for quite a while, hoping it would stop and go away.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Jess confidently. ‘It’s nothing. This kind of things often happens. It happened to me once. We’ll get it checked out, but we’ll find it’s nothing. You may have to have some antibiotics, we’ll find out.’

‘Did it really happen to you?’ asked Anna.

‘Yes,’ lied Jess.

Well, in fact, she now remembered, she had once had some blood apparently coming from the wrong place, but she’d connected that with the irritation caused by an obsolete bit of invasive fish-hook contraception she’d used while sleeping with Zain. That could hardly be the cause of Anna’s bleeding.

Jess thought the fish-hook had also given her cystitis.

‘Really?’ insisted Anna. ‘You had it too?’

‘Yes,’ repeated Jess. ‘It was nothing.’

Anna brightened and reached for some more butter to liven up her cooling baked potato.

‘Hey, steady on,’ said Jess admiringly, as Anna helped herself to a thick slab of New Zealand Anchor. And they both laughed.

Jess knew she shouldn’t look at the internet, and she didn’t. Self-diagnosing illnesses on the internet is not wise. She rang their GP and made an appointment for later in the week, she made Anna promise next time it happened not to flush the lavatory but to leave what was there for Jess to see. Anna promised.

Anna was relieved, and that was the main thing.

It hadn’t been possible to ascertain whether or not Anna was suffering any kind of pain. Looking back, Jess could see she had been unusually quiet for the past few days, but she couldn’t cast her mind back further than that. She didn’t want to suggest pain. Anna would always deny pain.

The thought of her expert friend Sylvie occurred to Jess during the afternoon. We all hesitated to exploit Sylvie, now she was so busy and so important, but Jess didn’t think it would be wrong, in the circumstances, to consult her. She emailed her, giving a brief description of the problem (urine straw-coloured, bleeding pinkish and thin) and asked Sylvie, when she had time, to email or ring her back. She hoped for reassurance.

Jess was more worried than she liked to let herself know.

Anna had enjoyed good health, on the whole. She had been lucky that way. And so had Jess.

Anna had not been told about Jess’s fainting fit at Wibletts. It would have worried her needlessly. Jess had blanked it out, ignored it, forgotten it. Raoul had never referred to it. I don’t know if Sylvie had ever mentioned it either. I had asked Jess if she had had a check-up, how was her blood pressure, that kind of general query. She’d said she was okay, she was fine, nothing wrong, it had just been the heat. And the stress of mad Victoria, who was enough to make anyone pass out.

No connection with Anna’s illness. No proleptic connection. How could there be?

Anna was unwell.

An infection? Kidney stones? Cancer of the bladder? Cancer of the kidneys?

Jess didn’t know what to think.

Jess didn’t call me until after she’d spoken to Sylvie, and until after Anna had seen the doctor and had some tests. It wasn’t very good news, and the diagnosis was not facilitated by Jess’s inability to answer any questions about her daughter’s paternal genetic inheritance. A lot of kidney and some bladder ailments are hereditary. More ailments than we ever thought possible are hereditary. Not, as Jess said to herself, that it would make much difference, would it, at this stage? But it wasn’t good to be so unhelpful, to sound so uncertain.

Jess’s first guess had been that kidneys were the problem, but it seemed that the bladder was also suspect. Haematuria (a new and unwelcome word in Jess’s vocabulary) could suggest either. There would have to be a cystoscopy and a biopsy. Poor Anna was a modest girl. She would not like these procedures.

Jess had never spoken to me so openly about the Professor. We sat there, in that front room I’d known for so many years, on the soft old cushions on the old settee, with our mugs of coffee, as Jess went back over some of the old ground. She told me that she’d no idea what had happened to him, had not wanted to know. I could understand this, up to a point: in the distant past I’d had a few affairs that I would never have wished to own up to, I’d slept with one or two men whom I wouldn’t recognise if I sat next to them tomorrow on the bus. But these affairs had had no consequences. They had been light-weight, passing. Anna was a consequence, and the Professor had not been light-weight.

‘He took advantage of me,’ said Jess, smiling wryly as she clasped her ‘Present from Southend’ mug. ‘I didn’t think that at the time, but I suppose I do now. I thought I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t. And then there was Anna, and everything changed.’

He’d wanted her to have an abortion, he’d set it all up, with a recuperative week in an expensive, discreet clinic in Hampshire thrown in, but she had refused. And their sexual relationship had lingered on, had been picked up after Anna’s birth, had renewed itself, and then had worn itself out slowly. It had come to an end before Jess had learnt of Anna’s condition, in the early days when all with Anna was still golden. The ending of the affair had been sealed by his trip to Manchuria, which he and his wife had been planning for a long time. Jess had known he was leaving SOAS, but not that he would be travelling so far afield, for so long, and with his wife. It was a great undertaking, a serious career move that was meant to propel him and his wife into another higher realm of research and fieldwork.

She was relieved, she told me, by the dramatic finality of his departure, by the sense of complete rupture, by his unfeeling demeanour. She had begun to feel shamed by the shabbiness of their hole-in-the corner relationship, their cheap Thursday-afternoon hotel, their inability to greet one another openly in corridors and lecture theatres and on street corners. What had seemed glamorously adult and pleasantly secretive had come to feel inadequate, embarrassing, unnatural.

‘I was glad when he disappeared,’ said Jess. ‘I was all right with Anna, my life was fine. You remember, we were all fine, we were all fine in those days, I knew someone else would turn up, someone less unreal. Because the Prof was unreal, he was really out of touch. I could see that the thought of having a child horrified him. He didn’t think much of human beings. He inspected them as though they were insects. I don’t think he ran away from me because of Anna—he’d been plotting the move for a long time—but his reaction to the birth of Anna was—well, it was unacceptable.’

I wanted to ask if he had ever seen his daughter, but I didn’t dare. We were in dangerous territory, walking on eggshells, I didn’t want to interrupt.

‘So,’ said Jess, bold, brave, independent, proud, self-sufficient Jess, ‘I’ve never dared to try to find out what happened to him. I haven’t dared to ask anyone who might know. At Guy’s funeral, I nearly spoke to somebody there who would have almost certainly known, but I didn’t dare. And since then I’ve done nothing. I was such a coward. I’ve been such a coward.’

We both sat silently for a while, contemplating the nature of cowardice.

I had brought Jess some flowers, a little bunch of anemones, and she’d put them in the little green-and-white-striped jug on the mantelpiece, which stood amongst the African rain-maker’s stones and the figurines and birds’ eggs and tarnished silver candlesticks from Broughborough. They’d been crumpled and drooping when I arrived, the little pink and red and white ones, but now they were beginning to straighten themselves, to stand up and open their bright faces and their mascara-black eyes. You could almost see the water rise through the sap of the pale hairy stems.

I love that little jug on Jess’s mantelpiece. I have known it for many years. It’s hand-painted, clay, irregularly striped in a soft mossy-yellowy-green and off-white cream with a coarse cracked glaze. It has a deep, high-waisted rim and a soft little lip. A springtime jug, a primavera jug, but lovely with autumn flowers, or with a sprig or two of red winter berries. Jess says you can stick a handful of anything in there and it will fall of its own accord into a perfect shape: weeds or flowers or a bunch of parsley or little twigs will arrange themselves as though nature herself had taken a hand to show them at their best. It had been given to her as a wedding present by Maroussia, and it had been broken once, it had been knocked over by Anna and broken, but Jess had glued it together again with Araldite—not very invisibly but competently, and it was still water-tight. It was the more beautiful for the cracks and the chips and the patching and the marks of age. The brown-pink clay spoke through the gentle pattern. The anemones opened as we watched.