The Pure Gold Baby (34 page)

‘And there have been squatters, of course there have.

‘Halliday Hall was still in use a few years ago, as a day clinic, but even that was boarded up now. Halliday had a good reputation,’ Lauren said.

It seemed to us that Lauren had a happy temperament, a sweetness and resilience of spirit that overrode the daily grind. She was one of those lucky people, a pure gold person, with her shining clear skin and her bright brown eyes and her ready laugh and her goodwill. Her black hair was cut in a dashingly short prickly style that cheered one to look at it. Her hands and feet and wrists and ankles were small, her body ample. She was a redistributive person, happy to share the good fortune of her nature with those less fortunate.

I liked her. I asked if she would come with us for the last stage of our journey, but she said she had to get back to work.

We hadn’t really counted on seeing Ursula. I certainly hadn’t. The outing hadn’t been a quest for Ursula; it had been a pilgrimage for Raoul, who had apologetically been twice to the gents’ in the Purple Boar. It’s not romantic, having to visit the gents’ so often. Jess and I were too old to mind, but I could tell he was embarrassed. He is a very polite man.

Lauren had told us that if we went to the East Gate, nobody would stop us going in. Most of the perimeter was electrified, but the contractors had given up with the wiring by the time they got to the East Gate, and there was still pedestrian access to the halted works. We’d see a row of conifers, and a reddish-coloured path, and if we followed that we’d reach the main buildings.

We parked discreetly, not too near the gate. The path was strewn with pine cones. I picked one up and put it in my jacket pocket. It smelled of resin. I’ve still got it. It’s in the car, the now not quite so new but still much loved car, sitting by the digital clock, waiting for time, our time, to end.

As we walked along the red path, we saw Ursula walking towards us. Maybe on one level we had known that we would.

Of course I had never set eyes on her in my life before, but there was no mistaking her. Who else could this person be? There was an inevitability about her apparition. She was walking towards us in a slow, stately and, I have to say, nun-like way, head bowed, contemplative, yet as though aware of our approach. She was wearing a long grey skirt and layers of dark coloured knitwear and jackets, and her abundant, long, steel-grey hair was held to her head and away from her face by a pale and childish Alice band. Maybe some bush telegraph had alerted her to our arrival, for she appeared to be expecting our little delegation.

We converged, I hanging back, for I was only the chauffeur.

Jess later said that she would have known her anywhere, as she had not changed at all. This, as she knew, was an extravagant exaggeration, yet Jess had indeed instantly recognised Ursula’s proud yet self-abasing bearing, the elevated way she held her neck and head, the theatrical pacing of her steps, the strange and deliberate drama of her presence and selfpresentation. She was distinctive. She was a woman who had missed her vocation, whatever it might have been, yet she walked proudly in those grounds where so many inmates over the years had suffered such a loss of self. She appeared now as the custodian of Troutwell, not as a squatter; nor indeed, it emerged, was she squatting there, although she haunted it. She had found herself a home with an easily manipulated and even more deeply vulnerable householder in the neighbouring council estate who had unwisely let her over her threshold, out of Christian charity. Ursula had settled in with Kathleen and Kathleen’s large threelegged dog in a flat on the Saint Osyth Estate. From this base she had posted her missives to Raoul, and there she had awaited his advent.

Jess saw that she had been wrong to think that Ursula had retreated to a little, little space. She was in command of these vast deserted grounds. She was their self-appointed warden.

She greeted us demurely, conventionally, shaking hands with me and Jess, and offering herself to a tentative hug from Raoul. There was no sign from her of any particularly forceful attachment to Raoul, but there was a sense of a proprietary claim on him, an assumed familiarity. Then we turned, and wandered back towards the old derelict buildings, accompanied by a commentary from Ursula on what had been happening with planning permission, contractors, demolition. Nothing much was happening now. The credit crunch had frozen everything.

Jess’s mind went back to the first tea party, when she had been so relieved to find Steve so much recovered, when she had first met Zain and brushed against Ursula. She remembered coming back here years later with Anna, with their picnic of tuna sandwiches and cherries, and finding the old fruit trees of the neglected orchard, and the unplumbed lavatory bowls standing in the courtyard. And here she is again, with Ursula and Raoul, the old inmates. It had been summer on her earlier visits, but now it is cold and wan and grey, and there is no light in the air. The light has been sucked out of the sky. Winter is ending, but there is no breath of spring. We have all aged.

The unplumbed sanitaryware is still there in the courtyard. Time has stood still. We gaze at it, perplexed.

Jess mentions the library of which Lauren had spoken, and Ursula leads them along a corridor, where shabby brown leafless weed stalks and seed heads push through the cracked tiles, and brambles and ivy prise their way through broken windows. Jess had seen this corridor in vandal images on the internet, though when she came with Anna she had not dared to penetrate so far. The library door hangs loosely open on its hinges, and there are some shelves and the charred ruins of desks. A lot of it’s been burnt, said Ursula. For firewood, said Ursula, last winter, in that cold snap.

But there are one or two books left, and a few ancient brown and buff ledgers and concertina files, heaped haphazardly on the splintering floor and on the remaining shelving. They look unapproachably dirty and tattered and dismal.

Jess, who had fancied she might find a cache of scholarly treasure here, shudders. She cannot bear to touch this stuff. There might still be riches, but if so they are beyond her reach. She gives up on them. She is too old to cope with this unsorted lumber. Although in there may linger yet some saving grace, some precious witness to some long-ago kindness, some record of a forebear who had wished to disimprison the souls of the feeble-minded and the tormented. But she cannot rifle through the heaps of rubbish to find it. Let it go.

The little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love
.

Wordsworth had wished to remember the unremembered.

The Map Room at Wibletts had been gracious and elegant, the books and papers well catalogued, and Wordsworth’s letter to the unhappy Felix Holden carefully preserved.

Jess is saddened by the state of the ledgers, but Ursula seems indefatigable, as she directs them through the library and into what she says was the superintendent’s office. Signs of her derangement, at first concealed by the unexpected social normality of her manner, begin to manifest themselves. Her assumption of command is surely unnatural, and her possessiveness of Raoul out of place. Jess, increasingly, as they plod along another mile of corridor (and can that be an active red blinker watching them from an angle in the ceiling—was that the sound of feet scuffling through dead leaves?), Jess begins to wonder about those benefits that Lauren had mentioned. What is Ursula living on? Where does she collect her pension, has she got a bank account? On whom has she battened? Well, it is hardly Jess’s affair, is it?

(Kathleen, Raoul later discovers, is a fifty-year-old ex-drug-addict and ex-alcoholic who had been reclaimed, greatly to Ursula’s advantage, by an evangelical sect offering a Save Your Soul church programme, under the direction of a powerful black woman called Bonny Belle—a far cry from Dr Nicholls, but just as effective. Salvation moves in mysterious ways. The very name of Bonny Belle can save you from despair.)

Raoul allows Ursula’s appropriation of him, as we walk the corridors (surely that is rustling behind the partition, surely we are being covertly, unofficially observed?), but from time to time he exchanges glances with Jess, trying to establish another conspiracy, a conspiracy of the sane. Jess reminds herself (as do I) that Raoul is a neurologist of international distinction, although now lonely, divorced and semi-retired. Yet here he is, trudging through a long-abandoned asylum, in the thrall of an ex-primary-schoolteacher from Croydon, as though success had never visited him.

Maybe he is impelled in part by a still active professional curiosity. Ursula, after her vision of God above the pelmet, had heard voices. Raoul has always found auditory hallucinations interesting. Like phantom pain, these voices implicate our view of the brain. Does one hemisphere of the brain speak to the other? Whence come these echoes and instructions? From the past? From priests and kings and warlords? From religious texts, from internalised mythologies? From books unwisely read, from movies unwisely viewed? In her screeds of correspondence, much of which he did not read, Ursula had tried to describe the calls to action which she had been unable to answer. She had struggled against her hallucinations, never completely trusting them (she had, after all, been a competent teacher of primary schoolchildren for some years before the psychotic episodes that brought her to Halliday), but she had never been able to dispel them either. The letters lengthily, tediously, horribly, charted her struggle.

Ursula had come to believe that God had tested her faith by requiring her to slaughter her class of seven-year-olds, and that in obedience to his will
she had done so
. A terrible angel had appeared to her and ordered the massacre of the innocents, who would ascend instantly to heaven. She was torn in two by these instructions. The demonic angel, in her letters, appeared as a symbol, a four-stroke beak and wings. She believed she had stabbed them all to death, all those little children, and had hideous repeating hallucinations (hallucinations was too mild a word) of their bleeding bodies in the classroom. Halliday had released her from these visitations, but they had recurred, and it seems still recur.

Schoolroom massacres are not unknown. But Ursula had not perpetrated one.

I found the phenomenon of Ursula interesting, but not so interesting that I wasn’t very relieved to get back to my car at the East Gate. It was getting dark, I wanted to set off and get away from these ruins, this parkland, before the whisperers came out from the leafless bushes, before night fell. There is nothing more pleasing than getting in one’s own car after a difficult social passage: shutting the doors, turning on the radio and putting one’s foot down on the accelerator, what joy So I was not pleased when I heard Jess offer Ursula a lift back to the Saint Osyth housing estate. I had visions of driving aimlessly and lost round the outskirts of the business park, or of hearing Ursula demand a lift back to London and moving in with one of us for ever. She accepted the lift, but to my surprise gave me perfectly clear instructions of how to drop her off at her borrowed home. Dear God, what an estate. We do not know, we cannot see, the lives of our fellow-citizens. They live behind a curtain of unknowing, a cloud of unknowing.

I drew the line at going in for a cup of tea to meet the kindly Kathleen. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve got to get back.’ I really could not face a three-l egged dog. They couldn’t argue with me. I had the wheels. They didn’t want to get stranded either. They’d done their duty. They were reassured.

The thought of Shawcross Street was comforting.

I put the radio on, on the way home. I was worn out. Raoul and Jess were silent. They decided to sit in the back together, and I could see that Jess squeezed Raoul’s hand as they settled. He didn’t need to stop for a pee on the way home: he’d got over his anxious bladder syndrome. I tried Radio 4 and listened for a while to a soothing, well-balanced programme about solar energy and wind farms, then moved to Radio 3 and wintry Sibelius. The natural world would survive us whatever we did to it. We could cement and tarmac it over and turn it into a motorway a mile wide, but it would break through in the end. That’s what Sibelius was telling us.

It’s not a good message, for us. But I’ve ceased to care about us.

The simple round clay-and-straw hut has a little wooden veranda platform overlooking the waters of the dambo. The hut is earth-coloured, a terra-cotta earth-red, with a cream-and-brown design of zigzags and a conical roof. They sit there together, Jess and her daughter, as the evening sun declines. It has been a long journey, and both are tired, but they have been made welcome. Bob is in the next hut, only a few yards away, shacked up arbitrarily with a young Mexican adventurer with long black ringlets and some very fancy cameras. Jess can hear them laughing. Bob will join them soon for a beer, and maybe the Mexican will come too. Jess and Anna are both well anointed with Jungle Formula against mosquitoes, and neither has been bitten so far, although the mosquito nets over their twin beds are hard to arrange and Anna keeps tripping over hers. They have swathed them round their narrow beds for the night, and will creep in later by lamplight.

All four of them, Bob, Jess, Anna and the Mexican, flew in from the airport of the capital on a little single-propeller plane, the taxi of the skies, and were landed by pilot Brewster on a small runway in the bush. Here they are, not far from the swamps and floating islands of Bangweulu, not far as the crow or the Cessna flies, and in similar, though not quite so watery, terrain. There, a lifetime ago, Jess had seen the shoebill and the lobster-claw children. Time has come full circle, and the river flows with time.

The small flat lake shines calm and blue and silver and pink, reflecting the clouds. Mosquitoes hum, and they hear a pod (Anna reminds Jess that this is the right word; it is a word she likes) of hippos humphing and snorting and laughing in the mud at the margins in the reeds, only fifty yards away. A kite circles overhead. Jess’s expectations of an ultimate revelation are moderately high, but for the moment she is content that Anna seems so pleased with the expedition, and that she has survived the journey so well. She has made a remarkable recovery.