Anna went mildly and obediently back to school in January, and Bob and Jess resumed their domestic life together, in a rhythm that was to last for a year or so. Jess says she thinks it was only a year, and she should know, but I think she and Bob cohabited for at least two years. At my age my sense of time is notional, whole decades blur and elide, let alone the years and the months, but I think I’m right about this bit of Jess’s chronology.
To outsiders, Jess’s arrangements for Anna and Bob seemed to be working adequately, but it was also clear that this marriage was not destined or even very seriously intended to last. Marriages were splintering all around them, and Bob and Jess had no common bond, no mutual concern, apart from sex, ethnography and anthropology. Children were the problem for most of us when we ran on the rocks. Children sometimes kept us together, sometimes forced us apart. But it was clear that Jess and Anna formed a unit that would survive and eventually exclude Bob. It was only a matter of time. We watched, we waited, I would like to think without too much malice or
Schadenfreude
, although of course none of us are malice-free.
Jess had the upper hand in the relationship. She had the house, she had the confidence, she had a network of her friends around her. It was the time of the women. She had her niche at SOAS, whereas Bob was somewhat stranded and
dépaysé
, and in that first year or two remained on his best behaviour. But there was something of the cuckoo-in-the-nest about Bob. He’d displaced Anna, and now he opened his mouth and expected to be fed. Chitterlings, locusts, honey, little cakes. He did prepare a meal, occasionally, but Jess did most of the cooking.
Also, he stuck around more than perhaps might have been expected. He was supposed to be an adventurer, but he seemed more than happy to hang out in North London. He took shots of swinging seventies London which he sold to magazines in the States. Hampstead Heath, the King’s Road, the Post Office Tower, the Commonwealth Institute, the London Zoo, the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury, even the then deeply unfashionable ponds and lawns and aviaries of Clissold Park. Miniskirts, maxi-skirts. He was digging himself in, appropriating our city. He did ‘city-scapes’: people behaving in an urban environment, crowd responses to new buildings, patterns of occupation. He wanted to photograph Maroussia and the children in the Secret Garden, but she wouldn’t let him. She was an actress and she didn’t want publicity.
Jess was relieved when eventually he said he was going off to film fishing communities for a month in British Colombia with an old pal of his from the University of Chicago. That was more like the sort of work she thought he ought to be doing. (‘Ought’ was a not uncommon word in her vocabulary) She didn’t know she was relieved, but she was. She encouraged him to time his absence so that she could have Anna to herself during what I think was the second long Marsh Court summer holiday. The first summer had been a bit of a strain. She looked forward to a time with Anna during which she didn’t have to worry about entertaining Bob. They’d be fine on their own, she and Anna. They were a self-contained little duo. Jess was getting tired of trying to please two incompatible sets of interests, two incompatible temperaments. She didn’t know it, but she was.
Bob flew off with Jerry to Vancouver on a French Caravelle and Jess and Anna did their own things, as they’d done in the happy old days before Bob had popped up. They went out for cheap high street meals, they went to the park and to the cinema, they joined in and helped with the street parties which were a feature of that time.
Jess didn’t have to worry about Bob, but a rival worry almost immediately presented itself, in the form of Steve. Our latent and long-standing apprehensions about our neighbourhood poet proved well founded. As soon as Bob took himself off to Canada, Steve saw his opportunity and attempted to move in with Jess. Jess didn’t let him, but that summer she allowed him to hang around and cadge meals off her and read his poems to her. Steve was good with Anna, as Bob had been, and Jess found it hard to close the door on him. Anna had prised the door of Jess’s heart open, and Steve got his foot in quickly when Bob left. The greedy presence of his misery, like a third party in the room, afflicted her, and she could not resist trying to feed it and soothe it and make it grow strong enough to go away.
For such a strong and independent woman, she was curiously vulnerable to the claims of others. She must have known that looking after Steve was an unrewarding and probably hopeless task, but she listened to him for hour after hour, as he told her of his damaged childhood and his ambiguous sexuality and his troubled spiritual journey. Steve, like many birth-damaged people, was at once extremely interesting and hypnotically dull, and some of the most cynical literary editors and hardened publishers of the day succumbed from time to time to his Ancient Mariner grasp. A volume of his poems called
The Dance of the Grieving Child
, after a painting by Paul Klee, was published by a distinguished publishing house with the Klee image on the jacket, a breach of copyright that brought the poems some notoriety if not many sales. Steve was somebody, he had made himself into somebody, and that long summer he presented that person to Jess and Anna, in hope of its salvation.
Anna didn’t mind Steve. She didn’t mind anybody who even appeared to be friendly. But Jess grew impatient. Too many improvised meals of scrambled eggs on toast (preferably with bacon), too many take-aways of chicken korma and chicken Madras from the Taj Mahal along the high street, too much mango chutney, too many packets of chocolate digestive biscuits. Steve devoured. He was insatiable. He devoured curry, he devoured Jess. Anna listened to his tales of wicked stepmothers and Eastern sages and his dramatic renderings of Wordsworth’s ballads (
The Idiot Boy, The White Doe of Rylstone, The Affliction of Margaret
) until late into the evening, her eyelids drooping slightly with sleepiness. She loved the simple rhymes and rhythms of
The Idiot Boy
, and seemed to understand this tale of motherly pride and devotion, but it did go on a bit, and Anna could not help but yawn. Steve was not good at knowing when to stop.
Jess would make an excuse of Anna, one night too abruptly. ‘You must go home now, Steve, I need to put Anna to bed.’
‘I can go to bed by myself,’ said Anna plaintively, to which Jess snapped ‘Well, go on, then,
go
’—words meant for Steve but directed at Anna, who took herself off promptly and went upstairs in some embarrassment.
Jess was so ashamed of this tiny volcanic outburst, this little home firework, that she resolved to be sterner with Steve next time. And, disastrously, was. No, she said to Steve on her doorstep, no, you can’t come in, not even for a moment, I’m writing a long review for the
New Anthropological Journal
. No, you really can’t.
She said this more harshly and abruptly than she had intended, because saying it was so difficult, and she saw his long large face freeze and then flinch in response, as he bumbled an apology. As soon as he had gone, she regretted her tone if not her words, although she did settle down at once at her typewriter to bash out 2,000 ill-paid words on kinship, totemism and bark painting in a small tribe inhabiting the north coast of Australia, a topic about which she knew hardly anything, although as ever she was glad to learn. She soon lost herself in her unfamiliar subject, and forgot Steve. Anna was watching an episode of a very basic science-fiction series on television, as absorbed in its incomprehensible plot as Jess was in the domestic taboos and artistic impulses of a primitive people she would never encounter, in a land she would never visit.
One was allowed to use the word ‘primitive’ then.
At that time, it was still believed by some that Down’s syndrome children encapsulated an early phase of the evolution of the human race, and that in their very features lingered a racial imprint of an earlier age, a long-ago migration from the East. As the developing human embryo lives through evolutionary time from primitive cell to tadpole to gilled fish to mammal, so the Down’s child bears witness to a moment of past time, when the mind and the brain were simpler. This hypothesis was long ago dismissed as ludicrous in scientific terms, but clung on in the popular imagination because it had a certain poetry. It may be pleasant to believe that the world was once peopled by men and women without guile.
The skills required by survival are not always attractive.
Steve did not appear at first or third or fiftieth encounter to be a survivor, but he had learnt to manipulate others, and Jess, up to a point, had allowed herself to be manipulated. And Anna liked him.
His suicide attempt, which followed closely on his doorstep rejection by Jess, was easily interpreted as another manipulative move, but it could as easily have ended in his death, in which case it would perforce have had to have been interpreted quite differently.
It was a coincidence that Jess and Anna discovered him, but not a very extreme coincidence.
It was a Saturday, a beautiful golden late-August urban day, and Jess had arranged to meet Maroussia and Katie and one or two more of us in the Secret Garden for a lunchtime picnic. Some of the children were getting too old and sullen to want to come to a family event, but there was still a critical mass of little ones, large enough to turn a picnic into a party. It was by chance that Jess got there first. She had her own key, and she arrived on the bus with her plastic box of egg and cress sandwiches, her bottle of wine, her bottle of juice, and she let herself in. She left Anna sitting in the sun with the basket under the shade of a little red-hipped hawthorn tree which had survived the clearance, and went over to the Wendy House to get out some deckchairs and some of the plastic beakers and bits of rush matting that were stored there. We’d assembled the Wendy House ourselves from lot of awkward, obstinate and confusing wooden parts that had arrived in a large cardboard box (what we’d now call, apprehensively, a flat-pack), and we were very proud of it: our combined manual skills were not great, but the little shed was a small and suitable monument to our cooperative effort. One of us (a lawyer) had wondered if we’d had the legal right to erect a structure on this bit of waste land, to which we had responded: who cares?
Steve was sitting slumped in a striped deck-chair, just inside the hut, of which the door was ajar. He looked, said Jess later, rather like a younger John Betjeman, stranded in a beach hut on a desolate seaside promenade. (Steve did not admire the work of Betjeman.) Steve’s eyes were closed, the pouches under them grey and more than ever drooping. His jaw was slack, and he was breathing noisily through his mouth. Steve never looked healthy or well, but that noon he looked peculiarly unwell. Indeed, he looked as though he were dying.
Jess, reading the scenario guiltily and self-referentially, her heart instantly pierced with remorse and self-blame, invoked his name.
‘Steve,’ she said urgently, ‘Steve.’
Steve did not react, so she approached him more closely and nervously patted, then increasingly fiercely, shook his arm. He did not much stir, although he made a gurgling, moaning sound from his throat that could have been either a good or a very bad sign. Jess looked around for tablets or a note, and found evidence of the former on the Wendy House floor, by his dangling arm: an empty tube of Veganin, as clear a message as one might wish to receive. Jess did not dare to feel his pulse, and anyway she had no idea what constituted a normal pulse rate. She knew she must get help, and she ran back to Anna, who was sitting quietly under the tree with the picnic basket, looking like a child in a nursery rhyme.
Polly, put the kettle on
Polly, put the kettle on
We’ll all have tea.
‘Anna, it’s Steve, he’s poorly, we need an ambulance,’ said Jess. ‘You just wait here, don’t move, don’t do anything, just wait, and I’ll go and get Maroussia to phone.’
Maroussia lived on one of the three streets that backed on to the Bermuda Triangle of the Secret Garden, and her house had a little gate through which she could come and go. (Maroussia sometimes went into the garden at dead of night, and just stood there, on her own, breathing in the London air, as her two children slept safely in their bunk beds.) The gate would be locked, but Maroussia would be expecting them, and Jess could shout for her, or try to climb over: it would be quicker than going down the little countrified elder- sprouting urban lane and round the sides of the triangle to her front door.
‘Maroussia!’ yelled Jess. ‘Maroussia, help!’
And Maroussia, busy making her mustard-and-ham sandwiches, came running down her garden path, and let Jess into her tiny kitchen to dial 999, while Anna continued to sit dutifully under her hawthorn tree, and Steve continued to loll heavily like a great doll in his deck-chair.
The ambulance arrived in half an hour, by which time more of the picnic group had assembled and absorbed Anna into its care, releasing Jess to accompany Steve to hospital. She took it as her responsibility, and nobody disputed her dolorous claim. Anna wanted to go with her mother, but we insisted to Jess that she could safely be left with us.
The ambulance crew had its instructions, and it promptly transported Steve and Jess to one of those grim nineteenth-century North London hospitals that cater for a large intake of patients from the Victorian gaols of the region. In its maternity ward, as Jess happened to know, pregnant women prisoners from Holloway gave birth, sometimes in shackles. Jess felt herself met with a wave of hostility and disapproval by the staff, but also, to her relief, with some sense of urgency. The overdose procedure was well rehearsed, and the nurses went into action with a stomach pump. Steve was moving around by this stage, and Jess could see him through the window of the door of the ward. It was a pitiable, a horrible sight. The obscene rubber tubing was thrust down his gullet with a degree of brutality that seemed, and probably was, vindictive. Luckily they did not know that Steve was a poet, thought Jess, or they might have been even harsher with him.