The Pure Gold Baby. Margaret Drabble

evidence for the condition there was none.

      Anna as a child and as a young person was not identifiable, visually, as in any way impaired. Her learning difficulties were not obvious to the eye. This was both a blessing and a curse. No leeway was given her, no tolerance extended to her by strangers. Jess, who quickly became expert in spotting the cognitive and behavioural problems of other young people, found this at times a difficulty. Should she smooth Anna’s way by excuses, or allow her to make her own way through the thicket of harsh judgements and impatient jostlings that lay before her through her life? She tried to stand back, to let Anna make her own forays, her own mistakes, but occasionally she felt compelled to intervene and explain.

      Anna loved her mother with an exemplary filial devotion, seeming to be aware from the earliest age of her own unusual dependence. As our children and the other children we knew came to defy us and to tug at our apron strings and to yearn for separation, Anna remained intimate with her mother, shadowing her closely, responding to every movement of her body and mind, approving her every act. Necessity was clothed with a friendly and benign garment, brightly patterned, soft to the touch, a nursery fabric that did not age with the years.

      In those first years, before the educational attainments of her peers began to demonstrate a noticeable discrepancy, Anna remained part of a ragged informal community of children which accepted her for what she was, prompted by the kind example of their parents. The parents admired Jess for several good reasons, and they liked little Anna, so smiling, so unthreatening in every way, so uncompetitive. Ollie, Nick, Harry, Chloe, Ben, Polly, Becky, Flora, Stuart, Josh, Jake, Ike, Tim and Tom tolerated Anna easily, willingly. They indulged her and let her join their games, according to her ability.

      But the games grew more complex, and Anna was left behind.

      Anna could not understand why she could not learn to read, as the other children did. What was this game called ‘reading’? Picture books and stories she loved, particularly repetitive stories and nursery rhymes with refrains, which she could memorise word for word, and repeat back, expressively, and with a fine grasp of content, to her mentors. ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’, ‘Polly, Put the Kettle On’, ‘Curly Locks’ and ‘Incey Wincey Spider’ were part of her considerable repertoire. But letters remained a mystery. She learnt to draw A for Anna, but produced it in a wobbly and uneven hand, and was slow to get to grips with n.

      Jess noticed that although Anna could sing her way through ‘One Two Buckle My Shoe’, ‘One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Once I Caught a Fish Alive’ and other counting rhymes, she could not count well without the aid of the rhyme. She needed the mnemonic. She found numbers on their own confusing. She would never, Jess suspected, Jess knew, become wholly numerate.

      Jess and I didn’t talk much in those early days about Anna’s condition, but of course I was well aware of it, as were we all. A kind of delicacy prevented me from asking direct questions, and I waited for whatever Jess wished to divulge. My children – but this story isn’t about my children, I haven’t the right to tell their stories – my children were friendly with Anna, and she spent quite a lot of time with me and my two boys. I was working part time then, and Jess and I looked after one another, covered one another. My boys had known Anna since she was born (one is two years older, one more or less exactly the same age), and for years they didn’t really notice there was anything different about her. And as they began to notice, so they gradually began to adjust their interactions with her, looking out for her when there were games she couldn’t manage, taking extra care crossing the road. They used to take her to the corner shop with them on Saturday mornings to spend their weekly pocket money in a binge on Refreshers and Spangles and Crunchy Bars and Smarties. They negotiated with the temperamental grey-faced heavy-smoking old man who kept the till, and made sure she got back the right change. I didn’t have to tell them to do this. They knew.

      Maybe we shouldn’t have let such little ones go along the road and over the zebra crossing together, but we did. They all learnt their Green Cross Code, but I think they used to go to Mr Moran’s even before the Green Cross Code was invented.

      They weren’t saints, my children, they weren’t angels, they weren’t always patient, and I remember one horrible afternoon when Ike lost his temper with Anna. It was teatime in our house, and she managed to break a limb off his little wooden puppet man. Ike was very attached to that little puppet man, whom he called Helsinki, and he’d sometimes let Anna play with him and twist him about, but that day she screwed his arm one notch too far in an attempt to make him wave, and it came off. Ike was very cross, and called her a clumsy stupid silly girl, and snatched Helsinki back and said she could never ever touch Helsinki again. Anna’s eyes grew large with tears, and she retreated behind the enormous mahogany veneer radiogram in the corner. I intervened and said I was sure I could fix Helsinki with a dab of Superglue and I put on a record to distract them (I think it was ‘Nellie the Elephant’) and opened another packet of chocolate fingers, but Anna wouldn’t come out from the corner for quite a long time.

      When Jess came to collect her, Anna was still quite subdued, and I felt miserably guilty. I didn’t know whether to explain what had happened or not. I didn’t want to betray Ike, who was such a good lad on the whole. So it wasn’t all easy, all the time. There were moments. And I never did manage to fix Helsinki properly. I couldn’t get the joint to articulate. He had a stiff arm for the rest of his short wooden life.

      But Anna and Ike got over this incident, and forgave one another. Neither bore a grudge.

      Ike’s name wasn’t really Ike: it was Ian, but Jake called him Ike when he was a baby, by analogy with his own name, and it stuck. He still calls himself Ike.

      Jake and Ike, my babies.

      Sometimes Jess and I would have a glass of wine, after these teatime child-minding sessions, and talk about grown-up matters. I would report on ethical dilemmas in the charity where I worked, or spill Whitehall secrets from my husband’s ascendant career at the Home Office, and she would tell me about whatever she was reading or reviewing, and about the thesis on which she was working. I learnt a lot of second-hand anthropology from Jess. She aired her ideas on me. I liked to hear her talk about the shining lake, the children and the shoebill, and about Dr Livingstone, whose grave she said she had visited. We were both mildly obsessed by Livingstone, then a deeply unfashionable and intellectually provocative figure. She knew far more about him than I did, but I had missionaries in my family background, and old missionary books on the family bookshelves, and as a child I had browsed through my great-grandfather’s school prize of Livingstone’s Travels, with its thrilling engravings of ‘The Missionary’s Escape from the Lion’ and ‘Natives Spearing an Elephant and Her Calf’. I was always interested in reports about Livingstone. We speculated about what he had really, truly believed.

      Jess and I talked a lot. We talked about everything.

      When the children got tired they would watch Blue Peter, or whatever came on after Blue Peter. Ike used to suck his thumb when he watched telly. I’m sorry to say I used to like to see him suck his thumb. It was strangely comforting. And he did grow out of it.

      Children’s television seemed very wholesome and educational in those days, although now we’re told it wasn’t all it seemed.

      Playgroup and nursery group were easy enough for Anna, surrounded by neighbourhood friends. Jess worried that when she went to primary school she would be exposed to potentially hostile strangers, even though she would still be in the company of Tim and Tom and Polly and Ollie and Ike. Jake and Stuart, two years older, had already gone ahead to defend her in the playground and taught her the ropes. And Anna’s skills sufficed in the first year of Plimsoll Road Primary, with the other five-year-olds and six-year-olds, under the benevolent and knowing eye of pretty, long-legged, mini-skirted Miss Laidman. Miss Laidman, who had studied pedagogy at an avant-garde teachers’ training college in Bristol, was well aware of Anna’s difficulties, and became expert at including her in group activities. Anna and Jess were lucky in Miss Laidman, and the school itself had a benevolent regime. Jess was grateful for this, but knew that such luck and such participation