‘Come again,’ said Steve. ‘It’s jolly here, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, very jolly,’ said Jess. ‘I’m so pleased, I’m so pleased for all of you.’
She spoke primly, like a visiting social worker or a nun. Distancing herself, detaching herself.
She gave Steve a hug on parting, and shook hands all round with the other inmates. Zain’s hand grasped hers in a fierce electric grip.
‘Come again,’ he said. ‘Come again, before they kick us all out and send us back to where we came from.’
‘They won’t do that, will they?’ she asked, her eyes wide as he stared into them. His eyes were white and bloodshot. He was, or had been, a drinking man.
‘Not yet,’ said Steve. ‘Not yet.’
‘No,’ echoed the quiet, diffident Raoul, as he stood courteously by the courtyard door to usher her on her way. ‘No, I think we will have another few months, before we are evicted. They will let the experiment run for a few months more, I think. They are keeping notes on us, you know.’
And he smiled, to show that he was not suffering from paranoia, as she might reasonably have expected.
Jess retraced her way through the corridors, past the second-and third-class patients, some of them interned here for decades without trial or diagnosis, many of them to be released in a few years into care-i n-t he-community, into lonely bed-sits with gas rings and high windows and death at desolate weekends.
Sitting on the train to Liverpool Street, travelling westwards through the still visible bomb damage of East London, through the railway cuttings and the ragwort and the bindweed and the buddleia, she feared she would be late for Anna. Ollie’s mother Sarah would be getting impatient and anxious, Ollie would be growing bored and annoying. Anna loved Ollie, Ollie tolerated Anna.
Ollie could very easily make Anna cry. His worst trick was to recite a nursery rhyme that he knew would upset her. He’d found this out by accident, but, having discovered the game, he wouldn’t let it go. He would chant it at her:
Polly, put the kettle on,
Polly, put the kettle on
Polly, put the kettle on
We’ll all have tea.
Sukie, take it off again,
Sukie, take it off again,
Sukie, take it off again,
They’ve all gone away.
This would always distress Anna, in the old days to the point of tears.
‘They don’t want to have tea with Polly and Sukie,’ she would sob, when she was very little. ‘Why don’t they want to stay for tea?’
In vain had Jess tried to rewrite the lyric. ‘They go away because they’ve already
had
tea,’ Jess would explain. ‘They just don’t want a second cup. They’ve
had
tea, they’ve had a lovely time.’
Anna did not accept this interpretation, and Ollie and Jess knew she never would. Her reaction to the ditty had become Pavlovian. Even a phrase of the nursery rhyme could upset her.
We all suspected that Ollie was going to be the one who would go to the bad. One of them was sure to, statistically, and he seemed the most likely candidate. How wrong we were, how wrong.
The encounter with Zain, preceded as it had been by an overt if easily deflected overture from Noah, guaranteed an uncomfortable homecoming for young Bob Bartlett. Bob’s new wife Jess had moved on in his absence, and she was not very welcoming when he reappeared, with only a few hours’ warning, carrying gifts of soapstone seals and feather head-dresses and miniature carved totem poles and turquoise necklaces. She had become accustomed to having her house and her daughter to herself again, and she and Anna would find it hard to make space for the Step Dad. He found Jess unresponsive, although she did consent to wear the turquoise jewellery.
She did not really want to know him any more. She had cooled off in his absence.
She had cooled off towards him, but something was burning away in her, something he sensed but could not reach.
She did not even pretend to want him back. He was puzzled by this, and offended, and after a couple of weeks he illegally evicted his illegal tenant from his Camden flat and moved back into it by himself. ‘We’ll try living apart for a bit,’ he said; ‘maybe I’ll move back when Anna’s gone back to Marsh Court.’
This wasn’t a very tactful remark, implying as it did that Anna was the obstacle to intercourse. He couldn’t of course have known that the obstacle was Zain, because at this point he didn’t know of Zain’s existence. Nor did any of us. Zain was the dark card.
Most women used to feel a polite or submissive need to placate and satisfy their husband’s sexual demands, at least when there was no good reason not to do so. The accusation of being a castrating woman still had some force, and maybe for all I know still has, but this element in Jess’s emotional make-up seems to have been missing. If she didn’t want to, she didn’t want to, and that was that. She felt no obligation. Perhaps her obligations towards Anna swallowed up any other sense of duty: one woman can manage only so much personal commitment, and for Jess, this was embodied in her daughter. She didn’t think she owed much to Bob. She began, unfairly, to consider that her sexual relations with him had been almost as unsatisfactory as her relations with the Professor. The Professor had provided unfailing orgasms, and these had needed no aid from Viagra or any of those other products which had not yet become commercially available. (They probably had not even been invented. Oysters and monkey glands were all our predecessors knew of aphrodisiacs.) But the Professor had not been much fun. Bob had been fun, while he lasted, but he did not last as long, and there was something trivial, something superficial, about the level of his desire. It did not go deep enough. Or so Jess now considered.
So she heaved Bob out of the brightly cushioned nest.
Anna was sorry that Bob moved away, as she did not like the sense of uncertainty and discord that this rift represented, and she had enjoyed the sing-songs with Bob. She liked life to be safe, and people to be constant and kind to one another. The abrupt and (to her) unexpected phasing out of Bob made her very reluctant to go off to Marsh Court, a reaction Jess had not anticipated, although it was easy enough for us to speculate that Anna might feel her own return from school at the end of next term, like Bob’s from his short photographic foray to Canada, would be unwelcome. Going away was risky if you couldn’t be sure you’d be allowed back.
What was her mother doing? Was she shutting herself, alone, into her little fortress in Kinderley Road? Was she repelling all outsiders? Was Anna to become an outsider, as well as Bob?
Anna began to cry on the train from Liverpool Street to Enfield. She tried not to, but she couldn’t help it. Jess felt like a heel, watching her helpless stupid darling daughter sniffle, watching her eyes redden and her nose run. She kept offering her tissues, but Anna let the fluids drip. This made her look less than attractive.
‘Do
wipe your nose,’ said Jess irritably, as the shabby vandalised little train made its way through Seven Sisters and Hackney Downs.
Anna sniffed, and obeyed, and dropped the tissue on the floor, and then had to bend down to pick it up again.
‘You’ll be seeing Hazel soon,’ said Jess bracingly; then, with less conviction, ‘and Vincent.’
‘I don’t really like Vincent,’ said Anna; adding boldly, ‘he’s a very rude boy.’
‘Yes, I suppose he is a bit rude,’ said Jess. ‘But he doesn’t mean to be, he really doesn’t.’
‘Yes, he does,’ said Anna.
She very rarely contradicted her mother. Jess was taken aback.
Now she’d heaved Bob out, Jess began to think as the train travelled haltingly northwards, maybe there was no need for Anna to go to Marsh Court after all. She could come back to North London and be found a schoolplace nearer home, a day schoolplace. There must be something that would serve, something better than the one they hadn’t liked at Highbury. Karen the social worker had mentioned a new Special Needs Unit at Woodberry Down; maybe she could try that. Anna hadn’t learnt anything much at Marsh Court anyway, except the words of a few stupid songs.
Optional scenarios flitted through Jess’s imagination on the journey home. (The leave-taking had been painful, with Anna silent, confused, lost and distraught as Jess helped her to unpack her suitcase. Jess was annoyed with herself for having forgotten to pack Anna’s favourite blue sweatshirt, monogrammed in red with A for Anna, and that hadn’t helped.) None of Jess’s plans featured Bob in any starring role. It was as though the Bob-need in her had died. It had been satisfied, and then it had died. She didn’t think Bob would mind very much. She hoped he wouldn’t mind very much.
She had expected this to happen sometime, but she hadn’t expected it to happen quite so soon. She was puzzled by her body’s messages.
She had thought herself ‘madly in love’ with the Professor, and she had thought herself engaged in a cool mature friendly equally balanced sexual partnership with Bob Bartlett. Both conceptions had been mistaken. She had been sexually obsessed by the dominating Professor, and with Bob she had always had the upper hand.
What next?
Zain, of course, was next. Would this be ‘love’ or ‘illness’, and would she be able get it over with before Anna came home for the Christmas holidays?
She never wanted to see that sad abandoned look on Anna’s face again. She never wanted to find herself speaking harshly to her daughter again. Anna was the apple of her eye. Even when her eyes were red and her nose running, she was the apple of her mother’s eye.
We think Jess did have an affair with Zain, in fact we know she did, but at the time she didn’t much want us to know. She wasn’t wholly proud of it. She couldn’t keep it a secret, in our community, but she didn’t want us to appropriate him and domesticate him. She talked to me about most things, but she was silent about Zain.
Zain was psychotic, we know that now. His story was extreme, and his arrival in Jess’s life predictable.
I don’t mean
his
arrival, literally I mean the arrival of someone like him, someone from the Dark Continent, someone from the Book of the People of Many Lands. He was Africa, albeit North Africa, and he was North Africa driven mad by the journey from the village to the air waves, from the rote-recited Sunday School Bible lessons and the palm tree to Kant and Keynes and Malinowski.
I was talking to Jess recently about her father’s little book about the People of Many Lands. She had described it to me on several occasions as she and I discussed our differing vocations, as we used to do, and the other day I asked her if she’d ever been to see that famous exhibition called the
Family of Man
. She said she thought she had, though clearly she didn’t remember it as vividly as I did. I saw it sometime in the 1950s on the South Bank (the quaint and whimsical Hugh Casson/ Rowland Emett Festival of Britain South Bank, not today’s more austere Denys Lasdun-dominated South Bank), probably when I was in the Sixth Form at Orpington. I went by myself, on one of those outings to town which I took in the school holidays to escape from my mother, who was going through a passing phase of menopausal bad temper. It was an exhibition of photographs, a famous exhibition. I still have the catalogue, and I have just been leafing through it.
Like Jess’s father’s book, the exhibition featured and documented the many peoples of the world. It was first shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, though I didn’t know that when I went as a girl. I was disappointed but not surprised to read recently an account of its alleged limitations—it has been deconstructed as racist and sexist, and images that had seemed beautiful and universal to me (as the pictures in Jess’s father’s book had appeared to Jess) were condemned as condescending and exploitative. I can see now what is meant by these strictures, but I didn’t think of them then.
Looking through its crumpled pages all these decades later, I recognise that I must have been moved and stirred by some of the more erotic photographs. They are in black and white. There are couples kissing, embracing, dancing. A boy and a girl in the grass, by an abandoned bicycle. A couple on a park bench. I was of the age to respond to dreams of kisses and I longed to feel a man’s arms around me. I can feel the memory of that longing now. There is nothing pornographic in these portraits—how could there have been, at that period in time?—but to me as a teenager they were full of suggestions of passion and sexuality. I was particularly moved by the face of a woman crushed in ecstasy beneath a man’s naked body. Well, we assume he is naked, but because this was the 1950s, all we can see is his naked shoulder, and her face contorted, as it were, in orgasm.
There is also (I have just been looking at it again, and am still in shock) the most astonishing photograph of a newborn baby boy, one foot held in the air by the gloved hand of a masked doctor. The still-attached umbilical cord glistens like a moist rope, and the baby’s genitals are held aloft, prominent, symmetrical, dark, enormous. The legs are puny and skinny like a rabbit’s legs, but the testes are large and contain, already, the germs and genes of the future. The treasury of Nature’s germens. The body of the mother is out of shot beneath a sheet, so I cannot tell whether this is a natural or an unnatural childbirth. The tenderness of the portrait suggests that it must be natural.
The internet informs me that this is an image of the photographer’s father delivering the photographer’s son. It also informs me that the photographer, like me, is still alive. This is amazing information. I shall write him a fan letter.
My firstborn was a boy. Unlike Jess, I have more than one child. I have not been called upon to invest all my love in a one and only child.
Jess thinks that Steve must have given Zain her address. Having himself been deterred from turning up on Jess’s doorstep, Steve handed on the address of that doorstep to Zain, and, one day, there he was. Jess now saw that, having rejected Bob and hospitalised Steve and escorted Anna back to Enfield, she had deliberately made a void for the dark stranger to enter.