Most missionaries went forth from oppressed lives, from lives without prospects, to better themselves as well as to improve those worse off than themselves—they were mill workers, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, the children of drunkards. Unlike Mary Slessor and David Livingstone, Felix Holden had left a life of comfort. He had relinquished more, for he had had more to relinquish.
Jess, turning away from the ghostly missive and the well-informed guide, and wandering over to the wall of photographs, remembered the impulses of her own youth. They had not taken a Christian colouring. Anthropology had not been her vocation. We do not speak so much of a sense of vocation now, although some in the caring professions, such as our guide that day, may be assumed to feel it. Anthropology, for Jess, had been a curiosity, an exploration, a way of seeing. She had not dignified her pursuit of it with any altruistic or sublime motives. The Family of Man, Jess whispered to herself aloud.
She does not give up.
And now, to her surprise, and yet she is not surprised, she finds herself standing in front of a large late-nineteenth-century photograph of an expanse of shining lake, which is captioned in twentieth-century script as ‘Lake Bangweulu’. Yes, there it is, the lake itself, or at least a stretch of it, with its fringe of reeds and little islands. And next to the landscape of the lake there is a photograph of a group of little children, sitting in a row on a muddy shore and solemnly facing the camera, displaying their misshapen feet. It is a later photograph, probably from the 1920s or 1930s, though Jess is not sure why she knows this, as the children are not wearing clothes of any particular period and the photograph is undated. Perhaps her sense of a date comes from her time with Bob, from whom she has unwittingly absorbed much useful information about ethnographic photography.
The children are captioned ‘Leper Children from the Holden Settlement’.
But the caption is wrong. They are not leper children. Jess recognises their condition. They are the lobster-claw children. They are the ancestors of the children that she saw, all those years ago. She had always known that she would find them again, that they would find her again, and there they are, and there she is.
They are not lepers. The label is wrong.
They are the Cleppie Bells of Africa.
Nobody else in our group spares them a glance. We are not interested in ancient deformities. But Jessica Speight sees them.
The group is ushered out again, politely, and led towards the walled garden.
And there was Sylvie Raven, the public woman, in her dark pink slightly car-crushed linen suit and her wide-brimmed public hat, at a garden fête in July in Sussex, in the courtyard of what had been a rich man’s mansion but was now an institution that houses and cares for the deeply disadvantaged, for those born to trouble and sorrow and pain. The eddies and currents and struggles of the hot day moved slowly round us in the summer air, currents of unspoken grief, inadmissible rancour, unacknowledged despair, hopeless parental love. You could feel them: they lay over the newly mown lawn and the pebbled paths like a low invisible mist, they clung to the tall red and purple plants of the herbaceous borders, to the deep bronze foliage of the crimson dahlias. Belladonna, delphinium, mandragora, poppy. It was headache weather, close and airless. We were all standing in a soup of grief, a psychic deposit of grief. That building housed too much of sorrow, and those gathered together in the courtyard were oppressed. The Map Room had been calm, spacious, historic, settled in the past, but here, outdoors, we were exposed once more to the unfinished present.
Jess was oppressed and confused and alert, as she stood to attention in her cornflower-blue ethnic frock and her Moroccan sandals, waiting for Sylvie’s address. She was the wise matron, with oil in her lamp. She had been waiting a long time. She was musing on the message from those lobster-claw children, so long for her a symbol, but of what she had never clearly known. This day seemed full of portent. It had been largely chance that had brought her here, but she felt herself to be on the edge of another threshold.
Lepers and lobster claws and the pure gold baby that was Anna: the mysteries of diagnosis turned in Jess’s mind, as she watched her old friend Sylvie gearing herself up to speak. We would rather blame genes than defective child-rearing, we would rather blame genes than the vengeance of the lord. We pass the buck. Pearl Buck’s daughter was diagnosed too late, far too late. Sylvie Raven could have put her right in half an hour.
The cluster of children with lobster-claw hands in Scotland, the Cleppie Bells, was held by folklore to have descended from a common ancestor. Their deformity was said to have been a vengeance on Constable Bell, a heartless officer who had presided at the drowning of the Wigtown Martyrs in the Solway Firth in 1685. Or so the unpleasant story went. ‘The bairn is clepped’ was a cry that mothers giving birth in that part of Scotland dreaded to hear. But the children had no difficulty in finding normal husbands and wives, suffered no reduced fertility, and were considered of average or even above-average intelligence. The gene had been handed on. Statistician and eugenicist Karl Pearson had done a good deal of work on the pattern of this cluster. He called it, possessively, ‘my family’.
Ollie’s little sister had been born with an extra digit. Not too few digits, but too many. The aberration had descended through the maternal line, as had Jane Austen’s brother’s. Families knew how to hand on blame before they knew that genes existed.
Jess, standing there feeling slightly overwhelmed by the summer heat, cast her mind back over all these blame games. Blaming parents for their children’s misbehaviour, blaming schools and teachers, blaming genes and illnesses, blaming doctors and politicians, blaming the ideologies of others, blaming fate, blaming God. See where the scarlet silken poppies flame in the borders, behind the purple-blue delphiniums. Blame the tall poppies. Blame the lawns, blame the courtyard, blame private philanthropy, blame private greed and public malice. Blame the sixties, blame the seventies, blame the eighties. Blame the Beatles, blame Mrs Thatcher. Blame the institutions, then blame the closing of the institutions. Blame R. D. Laing, blame Mary Warnock. Blame Modernism, blame Brutalism, blame Tesco, blame Prince Charles. The banner of blame flies high.
The blameless Anna sits by the sea on a bench eating a butterscotch ice-cream. It drips on to her blue cotton dress and seeps in dark yellow spots on to her uncorseted bosom. The blameless children with their fused toes play by the great lake, and do not blame their maker. The Scottish children with fused fingers do not blame old Constable Bell.
The blameless George Austen, too stupid to sin, lies safely at rest in the churchyard at Monk Sherborne.
Jess blinks in the harsh afternoon light, seeing the pale girl’s thin blue-white hand gripping the doorknob, seeing the red tag on her skinny wrist, seeing the knotted boy who cannot cross thresholds, seeing Harry in the lion’s den and Josh in Lewes Prison, seeing the children’s faces clustered round the indoor fireworks a hundred years ago. Clouds are gathering in the west, dark, sulphurous, with a bruised yellow tinge. Surely it will rain, but the sun still glares, hotly, without brightness, dully. She flicks to the thought of street-wise Vincent, surviving so much better than anyone had thought he might, and wonders if Susie or the greedy capitalist pharmaceutical company is to be praised for his survival. Praise or blame, wherefore and by whom should they be allocated?
Jess has worked so hard to protect and fortify Anna, but at times her courage fails her. Anna cannot be protected at all times. Anna is friendly and cheerful, but at times she stumbles into insults, rejections. She stumbles down the stairs. She stumbles as she boards the bus. She brushes against a stranger on the pavement and is reprimanded for her clumsiness. ‘Look where you’re going,’ she hears shouted at her. And she hears worse words than those. The angry words hurt her.
Pearl Buck had wished her daughter dead.
Somebody in the small crowd is staring intently at Jess, with curiosity and recognition. Jess is aware of attention, and feels she has half caught an inquiring eye, but cannot work her way back to the moment of fleeting contact. A parent, a social worker, a patron, a donor, a fellow-journalist? Her mind is full of a sudden wave of worry about Anna. Is there somebody here who knows Anna? There are faces here from familiar terrain, welfare terrain. Is it one of them?
Sylvie begins to speak. Sylvie speaks well, succinctly, generously, mentioning the absent but benign patron Bob Germen with affectionate respect. Sylvie is used to this kind of thing. On this occasion, nobody throws stones at Sylvie. Nobody shouts at her that her son is in jail, that she has mothered a public-school-educated delinquent. The group listens, politely. Sylvie introduces the recently appointed new executive manager (he is California-trained from a twinned institution; he has an American accent) and hands over to him.
The stones, it now appears, have been saved for the new chief executive, Jerry Panks. When smooth pink-baby-faced manager Jerry (it is all first names now) begins to praise the regime of his staff and to outline the year’s developmental programme, there is a disturbance. Somebody in the small and docile well-groomed crowd suddenly shouts, ‘That’s a fucking pack of fucking lies!’
Jess hasn’t been listening to the smooth manager’s smooth words very carefully; she has been thinking about Anna and simultaneously about Sylvie and poor Josh, and she cannot tell whether this sudden, aggressive and sweeping objection relates to a change of policy, or to hopes for future progress, or to Jerry’s account of the past year’s success, or perhaps to all of these. Jerry Panks has mentioned new research into causation, for which funds are urgently needed. Causation is always a dangerous topic, connected as it so closely is with blame. Maybe he has used the word ‘cure’, which to some in these circles is taboo. Whatever he said, this woman didn’t like it, and she has been rude enough to shout her protest, in a high-pitched but musical upper-class tone.
Maybe the heat is overwhelming her, maybe she had been drinking, maybe she is an intruder or a terrorist. It is not acceptable to shout out like that, at this kind of private gathering. At a political rally, perhaps, but not at a fund-raising garden party in private grounds.
Chief executive Jerry attempts to carry on with his address, but the woman with long blonde hair continues to protest. ‘You don’t understand anything about it!’ she confidently yells, her voice gathering volume. ‘You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!’
It is as though all the pain and guilt and sorrow and effort of the day have come together in one woman (unlike the clouds overhead, which have not yet fully massed and broken), as though all the currents in that well-manicured and expensively gardened place have accumulated in that cry. All the disparate stories have become one story and found one voice. Sympathy and embarrassment mingle as kind bystanders and staff members so accustomed
oh so well accustomed
to uncomfortable and unpredictable outbursts attempt to calm and defuse, to restore the peace of a Sussex summer afternoon.
Twenty minutes later a kind of calm has been restored, and the air seems a little lighter for the outbreak, although it is still close, hot and heavy. Jess and the tall woman with long blonde hair and one or two more of us gather in a corner of the marquee, where we are being placated and are placating one another with cups of tea and glasses of pressed elderflower.
It is a strange little knot of people, tightly bonded by instant and spontaneously overflowing emotion. Managerial Jerry has been moved discreetly out of sight, and public representative Sylvie Raven has vanished with him, but sitting in the little ad hoc group of comforters is a slightly built, sharp-featured, hawk-nosed, dark-complexioned, dapper, grey-bearded man who has been watching Jess for some time. He has recognised Jessica Speight as the long-ago visitor to the tea parties in Halliday Hall. She has not yet recognised him, although she has become aware of his scrutiny, but he has recognised her, and that is why he has joined the group. Jessica Speight has not changed much. He would have known her anywhere, from those long-ago meetings, in that charmed courtyard with Zain and Ursula and Patrick and Steve and the brown teapot. Time has failed to disguise Jessica Speight.
Moreover, of late he has tracked her name on the internet, as now we all so easily may. He has read her articles and papers, he has followed her patched-up improvised wide-ranging diversified career.
The mad woman tells her story to her new circle of friends. She is a slender handsome woman, a confidently handsome woman, overwrought, highly strung, unapologetic. She is called Victoria.
Jess finds Victoria fascinating. She must, Jess thinks, be in her fifties, but she is well preserved, and her low-cut black linen dress reveals firm well-tanned breasts, worthy of display. A loop of large false pearls dips from her elegant throat towards the shadowy, alluring gulf between them. Her fingers glitter with a variety of rings, her large hazel eyes are long-lashed, her oval face is long and thin, her cheek bones are high and her cheeks are concave, her lips glisten pink-brushed and animate. She is emphatic, mannered, expensive. A long-legged thoroughbred, a handful, not the victim that Jess had at that first instant of disruption supposed her to be.
No, she is a trouble-maker, and she is accustomed to making herself heard. And out from her swooping nicotine-cadenced throat her story pours, like a recitative, like an aria: her son, the most wonderful boy, the most darling boy in the world, so brilliant, so gifted, so beautiful, the pride of her life, but
impossible
, impossible to manage at home, so here he is, at Wibletts, where she had been promised
round-the-clock care, one-on-one attention
, remedial activity, IT training, he is a genius on the computer, horse-riding, swimming, everything that money could buy and more, but it was all going to the dogs, that prat couldn’t run a pet’s beauty parlour, centre of excellence, what a joke, the fucking staff were fucking demoralised, the fucking hedges needed clipping, the sash cord in the bedroom was broken, her boy was out of control, he wouldn’t speak to his own mother, wouldn’t recognise his own mother, what can they have done to him to turn him away from his
own mother
? Out it pours, sense and nonsense intermingling in a torrent, in an outpouring of free association, an outpouring decorated with intermittent obscenities, which against all probability have an almost exhilarating effect.