The Pure Gold Baby. Margaret Drabble

this kinship, this moment of repose. In another photograph, we see his fellow-servants, Susi and Chuma, posing in the Gothic ruins of Newstead Abbey with Livingstone’s heavily bearded son and his black-beribboned and black-flounced daughter Agnes. Black Africans in the garden cloister of an English country house, an English country house full of zebra skins and elephant tusks and the horned and mounted heads of many beasts, the spoils of colonial sport. There they stand, Abdulah Susi and James Chuma, the orphaned Nassick boys. Their time would come, when Black History would rescue them from oblivion, and search for every priceless scrap of photographic evidence of their existence. Their stock would rise and rise.

      I remember the wedding in Islington, and I can remember what Jess wore. I don’t need photographs to remind me, and I don’t have any. I was one of the witnesses and I signed the book. She wore a long terra-cotta maxi-skirt, and shiny chestnut leather boots, and a fake-leather bright brown jacket, and a black felt hat with a brim, and a red rose stuck in her hatband. Bob wore a pale suit with girlish flared trousers, no tie, and a bold flowered shirt. We celebrated in the evening with a small party in Jess’s house, during which we drank a lot of cheap wine and ate some bizarre titbits which Bob and Jess had cooked up between them. Bob had by now latched on to Jess’s experimental culinary style and was trying to outdo her in effrontery. There was a row of long, black-baked, spiny, snakelike fishes from the fish shop in the Blackstock Road, a big bowl of pickled eggs, some very coarse sausages, some leathery, dark-green stuffed vine leaves, and a pyramid of triangular Turkish sweetmeats. A multicultural, multi-ethnic feast.

      We brought them gifts of a conventional nature – glasses, cutlery, cushions. We were still home-making, in our amateur improvised way; despising the domestic niceties of our parents’ generation, yet trying nevertheless to make ourselves comfortable. Jess liked strong colours and bold prints, but most of us went for cheap Victorian and Edwardian junk, for inlay and patterns and veneers. The little neighbourhood shops were full of bargains that had not yet made their way to the smarter markets of Camden Passage. We fancied ourselves; we thought we had style. We were eclectic, at home in the rag-and-bone shop of London.

      Bob was eager and intimate, wanting to be one of us, as well as to be one with Jess. We were flattered, as well as suspicious.

      Jess had of course told Anna that she was marrying Bob, and Anna had seemed to understand this. Anna was, in fact, exceptionally keen on the subject of kinship and relationships, and enjoyed repeated recitals of who was married to whom, who was whose mother, or baby, or brother, or cousin, or nephew, or niece. The word ‘partner’ was not yet in common usage, and I can’t remember how we described the couples who were not formally married. But in fact most of us were married, for better or worse. We were more conventional than we thought we were. ‘Jim is married to Katie, Jim is Katie’s husband, Katie is Jim’s wife, Becky is their daughter, Nicky is their daughter, Ben is their son, Ben is Becky and Nicky’s sister, Jane is Ben’s aunt. Sylvie’s sons are called Stuart and Josh. Tim’s dad is called Jeremy.’ Anna enjoyed these listings. And she was happy to add the name of Bob, a name which in itself appealed to her through its round simplicity. ‘Bob!’ she would say, proudly, making the twinned consonants bounce from her lips like balloons. ‘Bob is married to Mum. Bob is Mum’s husband, Bob is my Step Dad.’ The phrase ‘step dad’ also pleased her. Its monosyllables were cheerful, like coloured bricks.

      Did the word ‘step’ have a physical meaning for her? I have sometimes wondered. It was hard to know how she connected words and meanings. She had her own way of making connections, a way that was not ours, but none the worse for that.

      We were a verbal lot. Jess and I sometimes had the semi-treacherous thought that it might have been Anna’s misfortune to have been born into a social milieu and income bracket where articulate intelligence was so widely dispersed and highly prized. In some circles, in some cultures, maybe her condition would have been less conspicuous.

      On the other hand, in some circles she might have met with less kindness, less tolerance and less love.

      Jess has spent many years worrying about these matters and reading the academic authorities on IQ and mental ages and developmental skills. For better or worse, that is Jess’s way. She is a reader. She has read Binet and Cyril Burt and Piaget. Which societies support their weaker members best? The nomadic, the agricultural, the pre-literate, the enlightened, the modern, the post-modern? The ages of stone, or the ages of steel, or the new age of cybernetics?

      Anna could read the words ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ and ‘Bob’, and learnt to write them, in a wobbly wavering hand, a strangely tentative, undecided hand. She was not good at committing herself to straight lines. She enjoyed colours, and was bolder with them. Perhaps the words themselves frightened her. Perhaps the concept of words alarmed her. But it seems more likely that it was the connection between words and script, words and text, that worried her. Her vocabulary, as all those psychometric tests showed, was quite rich. But maybe they were just words she’d heard from Jess, from Katie, from Jim, from Maroussia, from me?

      As an infant, Anna had liked splashing poster paint on to sheets of paper, crayoning blocks and stripes and patches, sticking gummed shapes into patterns. Approaching adolescence at Marsh Court, she continued to do art work of a sort, though with less confidence and more deference. She became afraid to make a mess, and her natural clumsiness often involved mess. Jess rarely reprimanded her for this (not being herself a very tidy person) but more severe reprimands, despite Jess’s protection, had clearly come Anna’s way, and she lost the carefree pleasure of dabbling and splattering.

      The regime at Marsh Court would, Jess had hoped, allow for mess. But she recognised that in an institution, however benign, a conflict must arise between creative mess, squalor and order.

      Anna needed to please, and any hint of criticism caused her a visible distress. We sometimes wondered whether this characteristic was innate, or whether an over-protective Jess had implanted it. We worried about what we had done to our own children, of course, but the case of Anna seemed to give us a clear message about maternal need, maternal love. But, clear as it was, clear as it ought to have been, we could not read the message.

      Over the years Jess was to visit schools and institutions that looked after children with a very wide range of abilities and disabilities. She traced the curve of the bell. She followed with a more than academic interest the changing vocabulary that classified children such as Anna. Idiots and imbeciles and delinquents featured on a historical and linguistic spectrum that stretched on to the dull, the backward, the feeble-minded, the weak-minded, the unstable, the mentally deficient, the educationally subnormal, the children with special needs. ESN, SEN. None of these words or phrases or acronyms seemed to describe the pure gold baby that had been Anna, the trusting child sent off to Marsh Court, the child–woman–daughter that Anna was to become.

      The child that never grew.

       Icipuba, kapupushi, ukupena, icipumputu.

      These are words from the regions of the African lake where Jess saw the children, the children who coped so well in their frail barks. These words describe a range of mental deficiencies. Jess had learnt them for her thesis.

      Uluntanshe. A wanderer with no aim in life.

      These words describe those without the ability to clothe themselves, those who lack the sense to hold down a job, those who are violent and need restraint, those who have fits and fall into the fire. These are the distinctions that the tribes of the lake recognise.

      Anna never had a fit and she had been taught the dangers of fire.

      Andrew Barker had fits. As we have seen, his mother blamed herself for having had him vaccinated against polio. He didn’t get polio, but he did suffer permanent brain damage. Or so his mother to this day believes. She isn’t allowed to say so very often, because it’s an unpopular notion to hold these days, but nevertheless this is what she believes. Maybe medical opinion will vindicate her one day. But one day will always be more than one day too late for Andrew.