The Pure Gold Baby. Margaret Drabble

they fancied. They could paint the walls with shit if they wanted. I daresay that works out well for some. There’s no two alike, after all. I’ve a friend who works in the psychiatric ward in St Anne’s. Grim, she says. Hard cases. Screaming and yelling, and trying to slash their wrists and hang themselves all day and all night. It’s nice at Marsh Court. Don’t you think it’s nice at Marsh Court?’

      Jess didn’t know. She hadn’t anywhere to compare it with.

      They were comforting one another, that much she did know.

      There are no two alike.

      Ahead walked Anna, unique Anna, in her warm brown jacket and her long dark red wool skirt with orange amoeba-shaped blobs on it, with her scarlet crocheted beret on her head. She wore short black rubber boots. She still couldn’t do laces. Well, she could do them, if you stood over her and reminded her of the process, step by step, loop by loop, but it seemed simpler to buy her shoes without laces, jackets without too many buttons. The propagation of Velcro had been a blessing to Jess and Anna.

      It was autumn, but the sun shone on them that day.

      Anna was like nobody else on earth. She was Little Stupid, the Simple Sister, the Dumb One, the Idiot Girl, the Pure Gold Baby.

      She wasn’t dumb, of course. She was sociable, she liked company, she liked talking. But she had loved the film Dumbo. Most children love that film. Most children instinctively sympathise with the Dumbo character in any narrative, if the tale is rightly told. Much depends on the teller, and on the naming of names. Dumbo’s mother, Mrs Jumbo, had been certified as mad when she lost her temper with the other elephant children for mocking her son. Jess had cried when she had seen this movie, and so had Anna. Jess hates Disney (to this day), but Anna is in tune with Disney, and, in the company of Anna, Jess forgets her superior and snobbish understanding and enters the world of innocents and sobs with the rest of us. Through Anna, Jess had joined a new sorority.

      Jess did not take Anna to see Bambi. No doubt she would find it for herself in years to come, but Jess did not think it a good idea to expose Anna to the death of Bambi’s mother.

      Anna was by now a pretty girl on the verge of puberty. She had lost the golden-baby smile, the round confident trusting sunny face of playgroup infancy, but, with her clear fair skin and head of fair short-cut curly springing hair, she was still a pleasure to the eye, and not only to Jess’s eye. She was perhaps on the rounded side, but attractively so. If she was a little gauche and awkward in her movements, this only made her seem pleasantly shy, though at times overeager to help.

      Anna loved to help. This was her nature, her innate nature.

      Vincent, in contrast, was not a helpful boy. He was small and fierce and wiry and often angry. On the other hand, his reading age was much higher than Anna’s, and he was basically more dexterous, despite the tics that attacked him as it seemed randomly. His prognosis, Jess suspected, was better than Anna’s, whatever ‘better’ might mean.

      Treatment of, and attitudes to, the mentally ill had deteriorated in parts of Africa after the advent of Christianity. As we have seen, Jess had attempted to deal with this in her thesis. Christianity had proposed a different, an unattainable norm. Christianity was unfashionable in the 1960s and 1970s. We thought then that it explained nothing. We didn’t believe in drugs either, as psychiatrists do now. We didn’t talk about serotonin and prozac and lithium. We were not of the chemical generation.

      We knew people who had experimented with LSD, we knew quite a few people who smoked hash and ate hash brownies. Some of us smoked the stuff ourselves. But we didn’t see our planet as a chemical material world, made up of particles from the Big Bang. We tried to look through the doors of perception. We thought there was something to see, on the other side.

      As Jess and Susie walked along the towpath that October, and that November, and that December, and through the flow of a year to the next year and the next, the euphemism ‘care in the community’ hadn’t yet been coined. The Community Care Act didn’t come in until 1990. In the sixties and seventies, there were no beggars squatting in doorways on Oxford Street or nesting in pigeon-fouled sleeping bags under the motorways with hungry verminous dogs. The vulnerable were looked after/ swept away/ brushed aside/ immured in cold malevolent institutions/ allowed to lie in bed all day at Kingsley Hall. The Community Care Act was created as the community fragmented, possibly for ever.