The Pure Gold Baby. Margaret Drabble

calendar, and Anna was to come home for Christmas that year, the first of her years away, to find her lively new stepfather, Bob Bartlett, in residence. It had been evident from the beginning of Jess’s relationship with Bob that Jess would stay in her own house. Bob would join Jess there, and Jess would pay the bills. There was never any talk of moving out to Bob’s place, or into neutral ground. And Bob’s place would have been unsuitable for family life: he had lived in a damp and noisy semi-basement flat on a main bus route through Camden Town, which he wisely kept on and illegally sublet to a friend. Just in case.

      Jess, on the train on her way to collect Anna, gazed out of the window at the changing townscape of suburb and estate, and at the stark leafless trees, where, in the spring, ornamental cherry blossom had gaily pinked the avenues and hillsides. Now the sedge was withered by the lake, and no tree-frogs or gilded birds would sing in this season. She wondered if Anna had made any real friends at her new school, whether she would return there happily and willingly after the Christmas holidays, whether she would adjust to Bob’s at times noisy presence in the house. Her concern for Anna was a constant ache. Anna was the apple of her eye and the thorn in her heart.

      Jess had been to Marsh Court during the term, of course, but not too often. Those were the days when parents were not encouraged to hang around in hospital wards and at school gates. The phrases ‘clean break’ and ‘let her settle in’ were still employed, though not very consistently: change on this front was already on the way. Jess had made weekend visits, taken Anna out for a Wimpy or a bowl of spaghetti or some chop suey. (Anna loved Chinese food, but Jess was beginning to worry about the effects of monosodium glutamate. Some authorities now said it was bad for you, which was a pity, as it was so delicious.) They’d been to see a movie in the old 1920s cinema. They’d been for walks in the park and along the canal and to the lock, and had once visited the local municipal swimming pool. Anna had been eager to show that she enjoyed these outings, but just as eager to be brave at the partings. Jess on these occasions had met other mothers (and one lone father) and had become conscious that the disabilities from which Anna suffered were much less severe than those of some of her schoolmates.

      Jess had struck up a friendship with Susie from Southgate. She’d always assumed Southgate was in South London, but it wasn’t, it was near Enfield. Susie worked as a district nurse, and knew a lot about the system. Susie’s son Vincent was a handful. He was much less amenable than Anna, given to tantrums and some astonishing outbursts of bad language. Susie said she thought he had Tourette’s but the experts didn’t agree with her. Jess was impressed by Vincent’s vocabulary, but hoped Anna wouldn’t pick up too much of it. Sitting on a bench in the spacious square vestibule of Marsh Court (it had its original black-and-white marble tiles and a handsome fireplace with a well-polished brass fender, somehow recalling a past age of austere but progressive education), Jess listened to Susie’s views on the National Health Service, on Colney Hatch, on mental institutions in general, and on some of the hopeless fools and mean-spirited bastards she came across on her daily rounds.

      Jess was ignorant about these matters, and Susie filled her in. Jess hadn’t even known that ‘Colney Hatch’ was synonymous with ‘barmy’ in North London slang. The Friern Barnet asylum at Colney Hatch was vast, according to Susie – thousands of patients, literally miles of corridors, grounds you could get lost in, a city of the lost and the mad and the forgotten. It would take you five hours to do a round of all the wards, somebody had measured and timed it. It was being slowly, very slowly, decommissioned, said Susie.

      Colney Hatch had been purpose-built in 1850, to accommodate 1,220 of the lunatic poor, and was one of the largest of the expanding public asylums that nineteenth-century alienists and psychiatrists had gradually filled to overflowing with long-term patients.

      The Colney Hatch of Jess’s hometown Broughborough was called Arden Gate, and it too was purpose-built, covering acres of land on the outskirts of the industrial city. It was more rural than Colney Hatch, its late-Victorian and Edwardian redbrick buildings landscaped into what had been handsome parkland belonging to a long-demolished Jacobean stately home. Its owners had fallen on hard times and disappeared from Debrett’s. It had an ancient well-spring and cedars and a lake with water lilies and a water tower. Jessica Speight’s father, Philip Speight, had designed the small new Modernist therapy clinic by the gatehouse, and he sat on the NHS board.

      (In what had been Susie’s Southgate, in the twenty-first century, a new branch of an extremely expensive private psychiatric institution called the Priory would open its doors to the rich. It took in those suffering from drug addiction, alcohol addiction, gambling addiction, depression, bipolar disorder, OCD and other mental afflictions, and charged them several thousand pounds a week – a far cry from Colney Hatch and Arden Gate. Psychotherapy for the Rich, not Psychiatry for the Poor. Some of the clients’ fees were paid by their insurance policies. Some of them were paid by their parents or spouses. A very few of them paid for themselves. Many, including Susie and Jess, would think it all a bit of a racket.)

      Susie had told Jess that even some of the really old-fashioned asylums were now being infiltrated by psychiatrists with modern views, who didn’t believe in mental illness. She had expounded this theory as they walked side by side on one of their many strolls along the canal, through the changing seasons and past the eternal unchanging anglers with their bags of maggots and their old bicycles and their patient tethered dogs.

      Anna had gone ahead on the towpath, looking back from time to time to check that the mothers were still following, while Vincent lagged behind.

      Susie was in two minds about it. Of course some of the wrong people got locked up and certified, everybody knew that. But, then again, some people certainly couldn’t cope on their own, could they? They needed somewhere safe to be.

      She could have managed Vincent at home, perhaps, but her husband, Trevor, wouldn’t have it. It wasn’t fair on the other kids, said Trevor.

      ‘I’m lucky that I’ve only Anna to worry about,’ said Jess, wondering as she said it how Bob and Anna would get on during the coming weeks, months, years.

      ‘Yes,’ said Susie, watching Anna as Anna watched the jerking progress of the moorhens. ‘Yes, I can see she’s the apple of your eye.’

      Jess found Susie comforting. Her dry, matter-of-fact descriptions of what Jess very soon discovered to be the experimental programmes of R. D. Laing and his colleagues were calm, fair-minded, not what you might have expected from a woman of her background and her 1950s NHS training. The anomalous and erratic behaviour of her son Vincent had softened and broadened her attitudes to others. Susie had widened her categories of the almost-normal (although clearly husband Trevor hadn’t) to take in Vincent and Anna, some of the long-term patients at Colney Hatch, the schizophrenics at Kingsley Hall, and the adult Down’s syndrome son of one of her regular patients in Arnos Grove.

      This young man, Eddie, exercised Susie’s sympathies a great deal. His mother was either recovering or more probably not recovering from a major operation for bowel cancer (Susie was on a rota to visit to help with the colostomy bag) and what would happen to Eddie if the mother died? It didn’t bear thinking about. It was a lot to ask of Eddie’s sister, she’d got children enough of her own. The mother had expected Eddie would go first, but it looked as though he wasn’t going to. You didn’t know what to hope for. Life expectation for Down’s isn’t all that long, said Susie, but they do need their mum.

      Jess could listen to this kind of conversation for hours, engrossed.

      In the summer, the moorhen chicks had scooted around on the surface of the water randomly like balls of mercury, with ugly little pink and yellow necks and greedy beaks. Jess had read somewhere that the chicks had a high mortality rate, because the parents built their nests of twigs and flotsam so badly that they were always collapsing and going under. Half of the eggs would drown. She wondered what percentage of that summer’s chicks had survived, and if that bird pecking stupidly at a plastic bag near Anna’s feet was from one of the broods they had seen in September.

      Some species produce good mothers; others, not so good. Very few species produce what women call ‘good’ fathers. Feminists were at this time busily espousing the bits of sociobiology that suited them, and ignoring