The Pure Gold Baby. Margaret Drabble

laughed as group leader Guy Brighouse burnt it off with his cigarette. It had winced and puckered, poor leech. Jess had almost felt sorry for it.

      Anna never had any dreams, or so she told Jess. Anna said she didn’t know what dreams were. When Jess tried to describe the act and process of dreaming to Anna, Anna was uncomprehending. That layer of her consciousness seemed to be missing. Jess didn’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe it was a semantic problem, maybe Anna could not explain in words about her dreams, just as she could not remember the letters of her name.

      Not even Jess always understood Anna.

      Jess did not tell Bob about her bad dreams. Bob was her fair-weather lover, her lightweight boy He was so much younger than the Professor, so very much younger. There was no point in worrying him with her anxieties.

      Jess cooked Bob eccentric little meals of offal, snails and fish-tails, chicken’s feet, pigs’ ears, tripe and bits of webbing. This was the frustrated anthropologist in her coming out, she claimed. She enjoyed hunting around in the strong-smelling sawdust-sprinkled local shops for unexpected morsels, some of them, in those days, stored in old-fashioned wooden casks and barrels of brine that might have come over on the Windrush. The courteous withered old Jamaican gentleman who ran the large open-fronted corner grocery store admired her initiative and smiled toothlessly with his hard gums at her purchases. Bob gobbled up the results of her forays, and traded them for dubious memories of dubious bushmeat from his African journeys. Ants also and caterpillars he had devoured, he assured her. Lévi-Strauss had nothing on him and his adventures.

      He had photographed great apes and aardvarks and small children in Senegal and the Cameroons, but he had never been to the Shining Lake of Northern Rhodesia, with its strange and special children.

      Bob was jealous of the sighting of the shoebill, and interested to learn that Jess had never even thought of taking a camera with her on her African journey.

      Jess said she didn’t want to take photographs. Snapping birds and people wasn’t scholarly; it was National Geographic. She was happy to be confrontational about this issue. Bob lectured her on the great photographs of the great ethnographer von Fürer-Haimendorf, and on the importance of keeping and preserving a visual documentary record of anthropological journeys, and Jess replied with a defence of the superior reliability of the written record. The camera, said Jess, always lies. And colour photography cannot choose but to lie. Words work harder than pictures; reading is harder than looking.

      She had to think this, and so she thought it.

      Jess drew on her store of imagery of the lake. It swelled and spread and covered the banks and promontories. The wind in the rushes made a sound like the waves of the sea. It was hard to tell the water from the land. Its name, Bangweulu, means the lake that has no shores, or so the books tell her.

      Anna would never learn to read with ease. There would be times, at Marsh Court, and at later establishments with other tutors and other methods, when it looked as though she was about to make a breakthrough, but it never happened.

      Jess didn’t need a picture of the children’s feet. She could remember them. She didn’t mention the webbed and clubbed feet to Bob. They were a private emblem. She knew she would never forget them.

      Oh, yes, they had a lot to talk about, Jess and Bob, as well as things they didn’t talk about, and they seemed to us to get on surprisingly well. It’s just that we didn’t trust Bob. This was a time when it was fashionable not to trust men, and there was quite a lot about Bob, apart from his charm and his being half American, that might be construed by us as untrustworthy. We didn’t think he would go on being so patient with Anna.

      Anna didn’t go to the wedding, and perhaps that was a mistake. She was tucked safely out of the way at Marsh Court in Enfield when it took place. It was, for us, a jolly adult affair, sealed on a sunny Saturday morning in October in Islington Town Hall. This prominent Neoclassical edifice on Upper Street was not then the fashionable and well-restored New Labour venue that it was to become: it was a hotbed of revolt, with radical slogans from Tom Paine and William Blake scrawled in bloody paint and strung in homemade banners across its pillared façade.

      Or were those banners hung a little later than Jess’s wedding? I forget the sequence. When you live an area for many decades, the dates blur and merge; it’s hard to remember precise dates. You remember the feel of ebb and flow, but it’s easy to get the dates wrong.

      I do remember that Jess’s wedding was of its time, low-key, informal, secular, amateur.

      Weddings are very different now, in the new millennium. I went to a grand civil partnership ceremony in Islington Town Hall not so long ago at which two young men were taking their oaths of loyalty: how changed that building now looks, how carefully restored, with its imposing staircase, its marble plaques and polished wood, its leather-topped tables, its civic grandeur, its handsome dignitaries! There were songs and singers and flowers and printed programmes and confetti and photography and smart hats and a glamorous black woman registrar dressed in a canary-yellow Chanel suit with navy trim. Everybody was photographing everybody else with mobile phones, in the bizarre self-referential mode of the third millennium, but there were professional photographers in attendance too, formally recording the occasion.

      There was a lot of money around, in the first decade of the third millennium, before the banks crashed.

      Jess had none of that at her wedding. We were young in the tatty, ad-hoc, do-it-yourself old days.

      As we grow older, our tenses and our sense of chronology blur. We can no longer remember the correct sequence of events. The river is flowing, but we don’t know on which bank we stand, or which way it flows. From birth, or from death. The water and the land merge. We lose our sextant, we follow the wrong compass. The trick of proleptic memory, towards the end of life, confuses us. The trope of déjà vu becomes indistinguishable from shock, sensation, revelation, epiphany, surprise. It is hard to live in, or even to recall, an unforeseen moment. Anna lived, and lives, in an eternal present, in the flowing river, but we live in a confused timeframe, where all seems fore-ordained and fore-suffered, and yet all is unfinished and unknown. Foresight and hindsight are one. The lake and the land are one.

      The end is predicated, and yet we do not know what it will be.

      I’m not talking about time’s arrow. I’m talking about something else, something that to me is stranger.

      So the two brothers and their murdered man

      Rode past fair Florence …

      That’s a famous example of prolepsis. It’s from John Keats, from Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil. There’s a bit of alliteration there too. They used to teach you that in school. Prolepsis and alliteration. Figures of speech.

      Keats died so young that he had to crush all his proleptic visions and all his poesy into a narrow space. He knew he was dying so he was obliged to make haste. He had to have been a great poet before he had time to become one. Time seized him and shook him and he died in its jaws. Nowadays we tend to linger on with time to kill. We plan our last journeys with care. Our exits, our funerals, our memorial services. Our string quartet, our readings from Ecclesiastes, our Ship of Death.

      Livingstone mischarted his last journey. He had lost his sextant, his maps were wrong, and he was carried, dying, through the swamp and the wetlands, by mosquito-tormented men with water up to their chests. Poor Nassick boys, rescued from the Indian Ocean, and now so far inland in the endless marshes, so very far from any home. Against the current they carried him, in the wrong direction, towards a lost horizon, sustained by his faith in a dying god. They would carry his sun-dried salt-preserved eviscerated and unrecognisable body home, and one of them would pose for a photograph at Southampton where the Malva had docked.

      We can see him clearly, Jacob Wainwright, the faithful black servant. He leans on Livingstone’s strapped coffin, which rests upon a cabin trunk. Wainwright leans with one elbow on the coffin, in a weary and intimate posture of possession, not