The Pure Gold Baby (7 page)

Both their lives are very different now.

Jess’s one and only African journey was to the shining lake, where Livingstone died. She remained pure gold and told no lies. She never pretended to have been where she hadn’t been. She never made up anthropological stories.

That is how we like to see her, our Jess, the shining one who did not lie and did not falter.

So Jess moved on, liberating herself from the irresponsible, emotionally arrested, possibly mythical, possibly mythologised Professor, and when she was well settled into her life with Anna in her own new home in Kinderley Road she began to look around for somebody more her own age, as her father had hoped she would. Or that’s what I thought she was doing. And I was proved to be right.

We talked about men, Jess and I, as well as about more intellectual concerns, in those early feminist days of the sixties. We laughed a lot and complained and made fun of men and marriage. But we weren’t ideologically separatist, as some women at that time were. I was married, and was to remain married until widowhood, despite some scary passages, and I did not tell tales about my husband, nor would Jess have wished to hear them. But we gossiped remorselessly about our neighbours, particularly about Jim and Katie, and about Rick Raven, whose departure from our lives and Sylvie’s life we had correctly predicted. I remember one evening at my house, while Anna and the boys and Ollie were making a racket up in the attic playroom with a horrible and wholly incorrect new toy called a Johnny Seven Gun, Jess and I discovered that Rick had made a pass at each of us, and maybe in the same week.

We didn’t use the word ‘incorrect’ then, but we were well familiar with the concept.

We were drinking whisky that evening, not very much of it, not a John Updike evening, but enough to make us mildly indiscreet. I’d been given a bottle of Laphroaig for my birthday the day before—I loved a good malt in those days though I rarely risk it now—and we were sipping in a ladylike way out of two darling little matching engraved souvenir glasses, one called ‘Loch Lomond’ and the other ‘The Road to the Isles’. I liked water with my Scotch, but Jess preferred hers neat.

Jess told me that Rick had given Jess and Anna a lift home when they’d been to tea with Sylvie and her boys, and he’d put his hand on her thigh and propositioned her. He said he’d always fancied her and could he call round later. She’d said no, certainly not, but thank you for asking.

Rick was a smooth customer, a Fleet Street man who wrote about culture and society; he fancied his own heterodox and slightly right-wing views, and we didn’t think he was very bright. But he was a good-looker, and he thought he could get away with it.

He hadn’t asked me if he could call round later, for obvious reasons, but he had suggested a rendezvous in town for lunch one day, and he’d squeezed my thigh in what I imagine was much the same manner. Skirts were very short then, and I can remember to this day the one I was wearing: it was grey but it had a gold thread in the weave. I suppose we were asking for it, showing all that leg and accepting lifts from other people’s husbands.

Jess told me she gave him the brush-off because he wasn’t her type, and anyway she didn’t want to annoy the neighbourhood with unnecessary adultery. He wasn’t my type either, but I did agree to have a discreet lunch with him in Soho, and a very good lunch it was too.

I didn’t tell Jess about that at the time. I didn’t confess to that lunch until several decades later, at Rick Raven’s funeral in St Bride’s.

I was sorry when the little glass called Loch Lomond broke in the dishwasher. I’ve still got the Road to the Isles.

Jess didn’t say that she was ready for a fling, but maybe Rick Raven had sensed it, and that’s why he’d grabbed her knee. It’s just that he didn’t fill the bill. The chap she found, without too much difficulty and after one or two more unsatisfactory overtures and experiments, wasn’t a neighbourhood man at all. There was nothing incestuous or even adulterous about him. He was new blood. He was half American, and he had long black curly hair, a hairy chest, and very smooth gleaming brown shoulders. He beautifully combined the hairy and the smooth. He had a child of his own from a previous marriage, but he’d left his wife and child behind in Chicago. He was divorced, and seemed keen to marry Jess. He was exactly the same age as Jess, take a couple of months. He was an ethnologist and a photographer, quite successful, and he took life lightly. He was a populist, and he made Jess laugh. Jess found his eagerness in itself seductive. Why not? He was an American citizen and he didn’t need a passport to settle in England. He didn’t try to borrow money from her. He wasn’t serious, but that seemed to Jess at that stage in her life to be an advantage. She was prepared to give him a try, to have a marital fling, and see how it worked out. Anna was for life, but Bob needn’t be. If it didn’t work out, never mind.

We didn’t trust him.

We could see that Jess needed some light relief, but Bob didn’t seem quite the ticket. But who were we to warn her? We were all busy making new mistakes, or learning how to live with our old ones. And he made us laugh too. There was something a little scandalous and subversive about his attitudes to the animals and the people that he photographed: something dodgy, something exhibitionistic, something self-regarding and possessive. Like the Professor, he was another bad lot, but of a less sinister, more manageable, more entertaining species. Jess, like her father, was a purist, and happy to confront disappointment that way. But Bob was a bit of a vulgarian—a bit too interested in the naked ape. (Desmond Morris’s book of this title had appeared in 1967: it was a key title of the next decade, and, although we laughed at it, we were also rather taken with it. Morris was much given to jokes about the penis.) We should have known that Bob would go into television in his forties, for a time quite successfully, but I don’t think we foresaw this. We hadn’t really foreseen television itself, except for
The Magic Roundabout
and
Blue Peter
and
Top of the Pops
and the BBC news and the sort of high-minded current-affairs documentary programmes that Jim made.

Bob seemed to expect to be taken seriously as an ethnologist, and he was certainly very clever. And he was good-l ooking. I think we may have been jealous. But Jess deserved a bit of luck, or that’s what we generously decided to think. Not that it would have made much difference if we hadn’t.

I liked Bob. I didn’t take him very seriously, but I liked him. I’m not sure if he liked me, in those days, but he didn’t need to, did he?

The Professor was a wedge, a prow, a beak. Austere, determined, rock hard and unrelenting. Bob, as his name happily suggests, was a rounder chap, with animal spirits and a good deal of energy. He was a seal, a bear, a handsome beast with fur on his chest, a healthy mammal. He tumbled and laughed and talked smartly. He seemed to take stepdaughter Anna as part of the deal: Jess, North London, SOAS, a Bohemian intelligentsia, an inner ring, swinging London, long hair, impromptu street parties, a little hash. Jess didn’t smoke hash—she was too responsible in her maternal role to take any small risks—but she didn’t mind when other people did. She wasn’t the kind of woman who said ‘not in my house’.

I think Bob first came on the scene in the early seventies, but I couldn’t swear to it. Anna would have been about eleven, I suppose.

Bob was friendly and at first ingratiating towards Anna, making her laugh, teaching her the words of some American summer-camp songs he’d sung as a teenager in Vermont, helping her to join in the conversation, not minding when she spilt her orange juice on his trousers. But it soon became clear that Bob felt she’d be better off at a residential boarding school for children with special needs, financed by the local authority. An offer of a place in Enfield had come up, and Jess had been worrying herself about whether or not to accept it. Anna was growing up. Anna had left our local primary school in Plimsoll Road when she could no longer cope with the lessons, even with Miss Laidman’s special attention—I think she was about nine when she moved on—and she was already outgrowing the special class that she’d been attending, one attached to a larger state primary up in Highbury that gathered together most of the special-needs children of several North London boroughs. I think she was already at the Highbury school when Bob arrived in our lives.

Secondary school, Jess knew, would be a tougher proposition than primary school, and the local options for special needs weren’t immediately attractive. Maybe Anna would be happy at a boarding school, where she would benefit from expert professional attention. (So, plausibly, reasoned Bob.) She could learn to be a little more independent, learn skills that would help her to survive better, in the long run, without Jess. The local authority agreed to fund her transfer to Enfield at this stage, and was committed to funding her until the age when she became the concern of the social services rather than of the education department. All in all, it seemed a sensible move to make.

Bob didn’t press it, but it was clear that he was in favour of this move. We didn’t quite know what to think. Most of us sent our children to the local state schools, although one or two of the more privileged and better-off amongst us had reverted to their ancestral type and opted to pay fees. My Jake went to the local comp, and Ike would soon follow him. I reasoned that Jake was such a bright lad that he’d do well wherever he went. Bright Tim Bowles had become a weekly boarder at Harrow; his father took the opposite line from me and thought he was too clever for a comprehensive. We didn’t approve of that. Stuart and Josh Raven would also be sent to public school, and we wouldn’t approve of that either. We were good at disapproval.

My husband and I didn’t really see eye to eye about education, but he allowed me to make the decisions. He was, I sometimes thought, too busy with his work, his stressful decision-making work, to notice much of what was happening on the domestic front, and that suited me quite well. But happily that is not part of this narrative.

Anna, we all realised, was in a category of her own. Her needs were different. Her needs were special. The comfortable new phrase ‘special needs’ was to fit her like a nice warm woollen glove. She didn’t have Down’s syndrome, she wasn’t a cretin or a moron or an idiot or an imbecile or even a High-Grade FeebleMinded Girl, but she did have special needs.

Well, perhaps that’s exactly what she was, in the language of that earlier day. A High-Grade Feeble-Minded Girl. Lionel Penrose at Colchester would have recognised her, would have liked her. He liked most of his patients.

The debate about whether to educate special children in integrated classes within the mainstream system or by themselves in separate institutions is an old one, and, despite waves of reform and new education acts, it is never finally or satisfactorily resolved, because there is no final or satisfactory solution. There is no solution that fits all, as that warm-glove-word ‘special’ fitted Anna.

It was in 1913 that the Mental Deficiency Act was passed, which required ‘defective’ children to be taken out of elementary schools and placed in schools for the ‘feeble-minded’: a decision that was reversed by the Warnock Report of 1978, although that reversal is under constant review. No need to try to spell out this long, ongoing debate or to dramatise it here, although the
dramatis personae
are an interesting bunch of characters. The medical experts, the geneticists, the psychiatrists, the educationalists, the psychometric testers, the Mendelian mathematicians, the frauds and the faithful and the fanatics, the sociologists and the philosophers—they did their best and their worst. The story goes back a long way: to statistician Karl Pearson, who incidentally (entirely incidentally) computed the incidence and heritability of lobster claw in Scotland; to loveless tyrant Cyril Burt and his juvenile delinquents and his dubious twin studies; to gallant Lionel Penrose in the old Royal Eastern Counties Institution at Colchester, where he observed with affection the loving Down’s children and what he called their ‘secret source of joy’; then on to R. D. Laing, the liberator who redefined madness; and to Mary Warnock, the steel-haired, hooded-eyed, clear-sighted, no-nonsense wise old woman of the Warnock Report.

Penrose saw the secret source of joy of the pure gold babies.

There are schools now, as Jess will tell you, that specialise in many subdivisions of special needs and learning difficulties (Down’s syndrome, autism, hearing difficulties) and apply many differing pedagogic theories to the education of their charges. There are schools with spiritual or religious foundations, schools with large endowments from concerned and wealthy parents, schools with cranky dietary beliefs and schools with regimes that veer towards the rigour of the boot camp. All over Britain, there are little communities and care homes, some open, some heavily gated, where the able and the fairly able look after the less able, with varying degrees of compassion and success. Some hope to cure; some are content to manage. Some of these care homes have ageing populations, as some of the needy live longer, and their carers age too. This is a worry, as our demographic curve changes. There are new needy being born every day, as we strive to keep alive premature babies that are not really viable, but Jess says we haven’t even begun to worry about that yet.

There was not so much choice of special-needs schooling then, when Anna was a child, or, if there was, Jess didn’t know where to look for it. Jess and Bob, during their courtship, thought they were lucky when a place for Anna was made available at Marsh Court. Anna’s social worker had made inquiries and discovered it. Anna was a lucky girl. Anna would like Marsh Court.

Jess went to visit the school on her own, with a predisposition to find it suitable. She needed a safe stretch of time for Anna, she needed to marry Bob and have a year or two of quasi-normal life, she needed to like Marsh Court.

Marsh Court was within easy reach of North London, and it seemed to Jess to be a pleasant enough place, with caring staff and good facilities. The director and the staff were out to make a good impression. Jess was too nervous to ask them any searching questions, but she felt that the atmosphere of the classes, the smiles of some of the young people she met, were a recommendation. She did not hear any wailing from locked rooms or see any pale faces peering through barred upper windows. No mad children in the attics, no orphans strapped into their cribs.