The Pure Gold Baby. Margaret Drabble

and sparrows and starlings. He liked, or he said he liked, the little jerry-built cosy Edwardian terrace where Jim and Katie and Jess lived, but Jess could tell that he found the surroundings depressing. It was not for this that he had fought in North Africa, and tried to rebuild a brave new Broughborough.

      Philip Speight was a disappointed man of strong opinions, who had held high hopes for post-war Labour Britain, for the new cities that would rise from the bomb sites. His visions had been frustrated, his plans sabotaged, and his name had become attached to some of what he considered the ugliest rebuilding in Europe. Corners had been cut, money both saved and wasted, councillors had grown rich, and he had been blamed for decisions not freely of his making. The Midlands had become the badlands, and were a mess, by which he felt himself condemned. His name would go down on the wrong side of progress. The ugliness of the new weighed on him, he told Jess. The failure of Modernism depressed him.

      But he was a good man, a generous man. He did not allow his depression and disappointment to infect others. He contained them.

      Jess had tried to reassure him that she was happy in this cheap rundown muddle of a once-more prosperous district, but now, as she walked along in her cheap smart sixties boots, wheeling and bumping her innocent charge along the uneven pavement, her courage faltered. Maybe it was all too much for her, her fate too hard to handle.

      She dreaded what the doctor would tell her.

      When we look back, we simplify, we forget the sloughs and doubts and backward motions, and see only the shining curve of the story we told ourselves in order to keep ourselves alive and hopeful, that bright curve that led us on to the future. The radiant way. But Jess, that cold morning, was near despair. She did not tell us about this then, but of course it must have been so. I picture her now, walking along the patched and pockmarked London pavement, with its manhole covers and broken paving stones, its runic symbols of water and electricity and gas, its thunderbolts and fag ends and sweet wrappings and spatters of chewed and hardened gum, and I know that she faltered.

      There were fag ends everywhere. Most of us smoked in those days. We knew better – we had the warnings – but we didn’t believe them. We didn’t think the warnings were for us. We didn’t chew gum, we’d been brought up not to chew gum, but we smoked, and, almost as soon as it became available, we took the pill.

      The doctor, middle-aged, grey-haired, round-shouldered, cardiganed, not the best of doctors, but kind-hearted and good-enough, listened to Jess’s story, took notes, asked questions about the baby’s delivery. Had it been prolonged, had forceps been used, had there been oxygen deficiency? She did some simple tests, asked Anna a few simple questions, then busied herself writing referrals to specialists and hospitals. It occurred to Jess that this doctor, who had seen Anna several times on routine occasions (vaccinations, a bout of acute ear ache, a scraped knee that might have needed a stitch), might feel remiss for not having noticed Anna’s developmental problems. Jess, in her place, would have felt remiss. Certainly the solemnity and the new and marked attentiveness of the doctor’s response were not reassuring. There was no suggestion, now, that Anna would be a normal child. She would be what she would be – a millstone, an everlasting burden, a pure gold baby, a precious cargo to carry all the slow way through life to its distant and as yet unimaginable bourne on the shores of the shining lake.

      Jess wept as she walked home, for the long-term implications of this visit, although as yet imprecise and unconfirmed, were very present to her. She was ashamed of the warm tears that rose in her eyes and spilled down her cold cheeks, of the water that dripped from her reddened nose. She wiped her face with the back of her woollen glove. Why should she weep? Her snivelling was treachery. She was weeping out of self-pity, not love. Anna smiled still, as gay as ever, wheeling royally along in her battered little second-hand pushchair. There was no difference for her, to her. There would never be any difference to her. For as long as Anna lived, provided good-enough care were taken, there would probably be no difference, thought Jess, vowed Jess.

      How long would she live? Who would outlive whom?

      This was also a question, and one that would become more urgent with the years. But it was far too soon to ask it yet.

      It would always be too soon. The moment to ask this question would never come.

      Jess decided that she would be better than good-enough. She would be the best of mothers. So she resolved, as she increased her speed and made her brisk, cold way home to a lunch of boiled egg and Marmite-and-butter toast, Anna’s healthy favourite.

      We didn’t know about cholesterol then. It hadn’t been invented.

      I don’t know which of us was the first to receive Jess’s confidence about Anna’s condition. Probably it was Katie, but it could have been Maroussia, or it could have been me. We were all good friends, good neighbourhood friends, with children of much the same age. I wouldn’t claim I had a particularly close relationship with Jess, in those early days, but it has endured for so long that maybe it has become particular with time.

      We didn’t know whether the child’s father knew anything about Anna at all. We weren’t sure who the child’s father was. Some of us gossiped about this, I am sorry to say, but we didn’t really know anything definite. We gossiped, but we weren’t nosy. We were well intentioned. And we didn’t gossip as much as you might think. There was something about Jess, some confidently brave aura, that repelled impertinent speculation.

      This is how it was. This is the version that we came to believe.

      Jess, it was eventually disclosed, used to spend her Thursday afternoons with Anna’s father in a small cheap hotel in Bloomsbury, making love. The regularity of this date did not detract from its vigour and its intensity. Anna’s father was, of course, a married man, who had no intention of leaving his professor wife. He too was a professor, he was Jess’s professor, whose lectures at SOAS she had attended.

      It is strange that Jess did not resent the structure of her relationship with the two professors, but it is a fact that she did not, or not very much. She accepted it, just as she had accepted the advances of her 44-year-old lover when he had propositioned her in a corridor, and led her into his study, and locked the door, and laid her upon the institutional professorial Turkey carpet.

      She not only accepted them, she welcomed them. She found him very attractive. Well, perhaps that is an understatement. She thought herself ‘madly in love’ with him, though in later years she came to see that this phrase (which she employed only in the schoolgirl privacy of her student mind) was merely a gloss on her finding him ‘very attractive’. Love excused and gave permission to adulterous sex, but really it was sexual desire and straightforward bodily lust that possessed her every Thursday afternoon in the modestly functional Marchmont Hotel. Desire was satisfied unfailingly, and that, at this stage in her life, was quite good-enough for Jess. Not many women get that much. She knew that, from the stories of her friends, from the New Wave women’s magazines, and from reading the new novels of the day, which were beginning to pay close if belated attention to the female orgasm.

      Jess and the Professor had no problems with orgasm.

      The arrangement they came to was, for its time and place, unorthodox, but, as anthropologists, they were familiar with the immense variety of human arrangements, and not inclined to pass temporal judgement upon them. In this, they were ahead of their time, or out of their time. It doesn’t matter which. Or it would not have mattered, had there not been consequences, in the form of Anna.

      It could have been Katie who was first to know about Anna, it could have been Maroussia, it could have been me, or it could have been the blond egocentric sexually athletic Professor Lindahl (a specialist, as it happened, in Chinese agrarian societies). A few months after the initial diagnosis, we all knew, and had progressed beyond the stage where we made comforting remarks like ‘I’m sure she’ll catch up soon’ or ‘She seems perfectly normal to me, my Tim (or Tom, or Polly, or Stuart, or Josh, or Ollie, or Nick, or Ben, or Jane, or Chloe) can’t do up his shoelaces/ write her name/ ride a bike/ count beyond twenty.’ Those were the days of tolerant, progressive, permissive