The Pure Gold Baby (3 page)

She was, it is fair to say, a little uncoordinated, and was often clumsy. Sometimes she dropped things or knocked things over or spilt her juice. But what child does not? Her speech, perhaps, was a little simple, with a tendency towards a repetition of phrases, sometimes meaningless, that appealed to her. She never learnt to manage the dumpy little thick-wheeled red-and-yellow tricycle that the playgroup provided: she could not get the hang of pedalling. But she could walk, and she could speak, and she could play simple games, and assemble structures of wooden bricks and basic plastic parts, and draw patterns with crayons. She particularly liked water play, and was very happy when allowed to splash and scoop and fill little cans and beakers and sprinklers from the inflatable rubber pond in the yard. She fitted in, and was accepted by her peers. At eighteen months, at two years, even at three, her cognitive and developmental problems were not obvious, for her goodwill and eagerness to participate disguised and overcame her lack of skills. She never appeared frustrated by her failures, or angry with herself or others. She was no trouble to anyone. We all liked her. Nobody noticed how different she was.

Except her mother. Jess, of course, noticed. She checked Anna’s progress against the progress of the children of her friends, and saw that in comparison she was slow. For a while she kept her worries to herself, hoping that Anna was simply (whatever simply, in this context, might mean) a late developer. The Health Visitor and the nurses at the surgery and the doctor who administered vaccinations did not at first seem unduly anxious, charmed, as were we all, by the infant’s good looks and beguiling demeanour. Over those first years, we entered into a conspiracy of silence. Who wants to give bad news, who wishes to insist on hearing bad news? There are many subjects of which it is better not to speak, of which it is unwise to speak. The child was healthy enough. She ate well, she slept well, she was peaceable in all her ways. Would that all children were as well loved, as well clothed, as well cared for, as well disposed as she.

It was on a cold day in February that Jessica Speight set off, unobserved, with her daughter Anna, for the doctor’s morning surgery in Stirling New Park, the long, wide, late-Victorian residential street that curved between and linked the two main bus routes into town. She dressed her warmly, in her little red fleece-lined waterproof jacket, her black-and-white-striped bobble hat, her well-washed matted black woolly tights, her mittens on a string, her little black boots, and she strapped her into the pushchair, and set off towards her appointment with enlightenment. There had been snow, and a few thin grimy frozen traces of it lingered still in hedge bottoms and gutters, lace-edged, like frozen dirty clusters of elderflower, stained yellow by dog urine, scuffed by tyres and shoes.

On such a day, one sets forth bravely, or not at all.

Anna was content, as always, and pointed with her woollen fist at objects of interest on the route. A bicycle, a red car, an old man with a peeling plastic tartan shopping bag on wheels. She let out from time to time little cries of surprise, of approval. Jess, as she walked, thought of the child’s father, and of her extreme reluctance to share her full knowledge of Anna with him. She thought of the corner ahead around which happy mother and happy child were about to disappear for ever.

She thought also of her own father, to whom she had told some of the complicated story of her affair with Anna’s father, and of her unexpected pregnancy. (She had not yet disclosed to him her anxieties about Anna, fearing that to articulate them would be to confirm them.) Her father, a tolerant, affectionate and kind-hearted man, had listened with sympathy and interest to this tale, and had condoned and indeed approved her conduct. She had done the right thing. The circumstances were indeed unfortunate, but she had chosen the right path, and he would always stand by her. He respected her independence, but if in need, she could always turn to him. Her mother’s response had been more anxious and equivocal, but she too had refrained from overt criticism and condemnation.

If Anna’s condition was as compromised as Jess now feared, she would be able to tell her own father about it, if not Anna’s father. He would understand. That was a comfort.

Jess, as she walked, found herself thinking of her father’s response to this London neighbourhood in which she was now living. He had visited it only briefly, on a couple of occasions, and had admitted that he was bewildered by its resolute shabbiness, its many-layered decay, its strange population of indigenous old Londoners, incomers from the West Indies and Cyprus and Turkey, and young married couples with professional aspirations. He had gazed quizzically at the cheap Chinese take-aways, the old-fashioned Co-ops and rustic-picture-tiled Edwardian dairies, the cobbled alleys, the junk shops full of worthless Victoriana, the make-shift garages and lean-tos, the dumped cars, the small council blocks, the large old multi-occupancy houses belonging to absentee landlords. He took in the dogs and sparrows and starlings. He liked, or he said he liked, the little jerry-built cosy Edwardian terrace where Jim and Katie and Jess lived, but Jess could tell that he found the surroundings depressing. It was not for this that he had fought in North Africa, and tried to rebuild a brave new Broughborough.

Philip Speight was a disappointed man of strong opinions, who had held high hopes for post-war Labour Britain, for the new cities that would rise from the bomb sites. His visions had been frustrated, his plans sabotaged, and his name had become attached to some of what he considered the ugliest rebuilding in Europe. Corners had been cut, money both saved and wasted, councillors had grown rich, and he had been blamed for decisions not freely of his making. The Midlands had become the badlands, and were a mess, by which he felt himself condemned. His name would go down on the wrong side of progress. The ugliness of the new weighed on him, he told Jess. The failure of Modernism depressed him.

But he was a good man, a generous man. He did not allow his depression and disappointment to infect others. He contained them.

Jess had tried to reassure him that she was happy in this cheap rundown muddle of a once-more prosperous district, but now, as she walked along in her cheap smart sixties boots, wheeling and bumping her innocent charge along the uneven pavement, her courage faltered. Maybe it was all too much for her, her fate too hard to handle.

She dreaded what the doctor would tell her.

When we look back, we simplify, we forget the sloughs and doubts and backward motions, and see only the shining curve of the story we told ourselves in order to keep ourselves alive and hopeful, that bright curve that led us on to the future. The radiant way. But Jess, that cold morning, was near despair. She did not tell us about this then, but of course it must have been so. I picture her now, walking along the patched and pockmarked London pavement, with its manhole covers and broken paving stones, its runic symbols of water and electricity and gas, its thunderbolts and fag ends and sweet wrappings and spatters of chewed and hardened gum, and I know that she faltered.

There were fag ends everywhere. Most of us smoked in those days. We knew better—we had the warnings—but we didn’t believe them. We didn’t think the warnings were for us. We didn’t chew gum, we’d been brought up not to chew gum, but we smoked, and, almost as soon as it became available, we took the pill.

The doctor, middle-aged, grey-haired, round-shouldered, cardiganed, not the best of doctors, but kind-hearted and good-enough, listened to Jess’s story, took notes, asked questions about the baby’s delivery. Had it been prolonged, had forceps been used, had there been oxygen deficiency? She did some simple tests, asked Anna a few simple questions, then busied herself writing referrals to specialists and hospitals. It occurred to Jess that this doctor, who had seen Anna several times on routine occasions (vaccinations, a bout of acute ear ache, a scraped knee that might have needed a stitch), might feel remiss for not having noticed Anna’s developmental problems. Jess, in her place, would have felt remiss. Certainly the solemnity and the new and marked attentiveness of the doctor’s response were not reassuring. There was no suggestion, now, that Anna would be a normal child. She would be what she would be—a millstone, an everlasting burden, a pure gold baby, a precious cargo to carry all the slow way through life to its distant and as yet unimaginable bourne on the shores of the shining lake.

Jess wept as she walked home, for the long-term implications of this visit, although as yet imprecise and unconfirmed, were very present to her. She was ashamed of the warm tears that rose in her eyes and spilled down her cold cheeks, of the water that dripped from her reddened nose. She wiped her face with the back of her woollen glove. Why should she weep? Her snivelling was treachery. She was weeping out of self-pity, not love. Anna smiled still, as gay as ever, wheeling royally along in her battered little second-hand pushchair. There was no difference for her, to her. There would never be any difference to her. For as long as Anna lived, provided good-enough care were taken, there would probably be no difference, thought Jess, vowed Jess.

How long would she live? Who would outlive whom?

This was also a question, and one that would become more urgent with the years. But it was far too soon to ask it yet.

It would always be too soon. The moment to ask this question would never come.

Jess decided that she would be better than good-enough. She would be the best of mothers. So she resolved, as she increased her speed and made her brisk, cold way home to a lunch of boiled egg and Marmite-and-butter toast, Anna’s healthy favourite.

We didn’t know about cholesterol then. It hadn’t been invented.

I don’t know which of us was the first to receive Jess’s confidence about Anna’s condition. Probably it was Katie, but it could have been Maroussia, or it could have been me. We were all good friends, good neighbourhood friends, with children of much the same age. I wouldn’t claim I had a particularly close relationship with Jess, in those early days, but it has endured for so long that maybe it has become particular with time.

We didn’t know whether the child’s father knew anything about Anna at all. We weren’t sure who the child’s father was. Some of us gossiped about this, I am sorry to say, but we didn’t really know anything definite. We gossiped, but we weren’t nosy. We were well intentioned. And we didn’t gossip as much as you might think. There was something about Jess, some confidently brave aura, that repelled impertinent speculation.

This is how it was. This is the version that we came to believe.

Jess, it was eventually disclosed, used to spend her Thursday afternoons with Anna’s father in a small cheap hotel in Bloomsbury, making love. The regularity of this date did not detract from its vigour and its intensity. Anna’s father was, of course, a married man, who had no intention of leaving his professor wife. He too was a professor, he was Anna’s professor, whose lectures at SOAS she had attended.

It is strange that Jess did not resent the structure of her relationship with the two professors, but it is a fact that she did not, or not very much. She accepted it, just as she had accepted the advances of her 44-year-old lover when he had propositioned her in a corridor, and led her into his study, and locked the door, and laid her upon the institutional professorial Turkey carpet.

She not only accepted them, she welcomed them. She found him very attractive. Well, perhaps that is an understatement. She thought herself ‘madly in love’ with him, though in later years she came to see that this phrase (which she employed only in the schoolgirl privacy of her student mind) was merely a gloss on her finding him ‘very attractive’. Love excused and gave permission to adulterous sex, but really it was sexual desire and straightforward bodily lust that possessed her every Thursday afternoon in the modestly functional Marchmont Hotel. Desire was satisfied unfailingly, and that, at this stage in her life, was quite good-enough for Jess. Not many women get that much. She knew that, from the stories of her friends, from the New Wave women’s magazines, and from reading the new novels of the day, which were beginning to pay close if belated attention to the female orgasm.

Jess and the Professor had no problems with orgasm.

The arrangement they came to was, for its time and place, unorthodox, but, as anthropologists, they were familiar with the immense variety of human arrangements, and not inclined to pass temporal judgement upon them. In this, they were ahead of their time, or out of their time. It doesn’t matter which. Or it would not have mattered, had there not been consequences, in the form of Anna.

It could have been Katie who was first to know about Anna, it could have been Maroussia, it could have been me, or it could have been the blond egocentric sexually athletic Professor Lindahl (a specialist, as it happened, in Chinese agrarian societies). A few months after the initial diagnosis, we all knew, and had progressed beyond the stage where we made comforting remarks like ‘I’m sure she’ll catch up soon’ or ‘She seems perfectly normal to me, my Tim (or Tom, or Polly, or Stuart, or Josh, or Ollie, or Nick, or Ben, or Jane, or Chloe) can’t do up his shoelaces/ write her name/ ride a bike/ count beyond twenty.’ Those were the days of tolerant, progressive, permissive parenting, when it was not the fashion to impose great expectations or much discipline upon one’s offspring. The prevailing philosophy was of laissez-faire, and we believed in the noble savage, the blank slate. Original Sin had been banished, and we held that, if nurtured by kindness, natural goodness would always prevail. Our chief pedagogue Dr Spock told us that babies usually knew best, and that mothers should trust them, even if they wanted to live on a diet of beetroot or burnt toast.

Motherhood was being deprofessionalised, but not deskilled. Trained nannies were out of fashion, because they were too expensive for the new generation of struggling working mothers. Trained nannies were for unemployed rich mothers, in those days. Improvisation was in favour with the middle classes: au pair girls, amateur and cheap nursery groups, reciprocal child-minding.