‘He gave me some money,’ said Jess. ‘I made him cancel the abortion and the clinic, but he insisted on giving me some money when he left. He gave me
£
1,325 precisely, he paid me off with
£
1,325. That was a lot of money in those days. I was going to invest it for Anna. He called himself a Marxist, you know, but I think he came from quite a grand family. I did invest it at first, but then I thought it was more sensible to use it as a deposit to buy this house, so I did. I had some from my father too, but it was his money that made me think of it, that made it possible.’
She sighed, then shook her head and smiled, in a weary, good-mannered elderly way.
‘You know what I paid for this house? I paid
£
6,000 freehold. I got a good mortgage. And you know what it’s valued at now?’
I could guess, but I waited for her to say.
‘It’s valued at
£
800,000 . . .
£
800,000.’
Despite the drug dealers at Finsbury Park and the ricin men of the mosque, Kinderley Road was valued at
£
800,000. I knew that, because so was my house in Shawcross Street. In fact, mine was worth more. It was worth more than a million pounds. My husband and I had been joint owners, we had paid off the mortgage jointly, and now he was dead and it was mine. Through no fault or virtue of our own, Jess and I had appreciated. By sticking it out in our everyday way, we had become rich.
‘I’ve often thought,’ said Jess ‘that it would look after Anna when I’m gone. She could be comfortable, even when I had gone.’
This was the unmentionable subject, which Anna’s illness had brought to the surface.
The confused tenses of Jess’s statement were indicative of her dilemma.
‘Comfortable’ is good. But it is not best.
We were both silent for a while. Then Jess began to talk about Anna’s prognosis, and the suggested surgery or treatments, and how frightened she (Jess, not Anna) was of the surgeon and the oncologist, and how Anna would have to give consent. But Anna would give consent to whatever Jess advised. Her trust in her mother was absolute.
This was part of the dilemma.
Jess did not know what to think of the new would-be enlightened ‘consent’ legislation. It could make things very difficult for parents and carers. But she knew that not all parents were loving, not all carers caring.
Jess knew that she and Anna would never be able to cope with dialysis, and that Anna would never be high on the waiting list for a transplant. But of course it might not come to that. Her imagination had leapt to the worst, but the worst might not come. It might be a small problem, an infection, a benign growth.
Fear of the surgeon overcame Jess’s fear of the Professor and the internet. She realised that it did not matter when he had died, what he had died of, whether he had had other children. It did not matter whether or not he had suffered from any form of kidney or bladder disease. It did not matter whether he had ever felt bad about what he had done to Jessica Speight. Maybe he had followed her career guiltily, checking online her articles on the language of the male orgasm and Pearl Buck’s daughter and Mungo Park’s adventures and Lionel Penrose’s chromosomes and the luxury flats of Colney Hatch. Maybe he had forgotten her altogether. Maybe she had been one of many seduced maidens, a forgotten statistic.
Or maybe she and Anna had been a trauma to him, a guilty trauma from which he had fled to the uttermost parts of the earth.
Zain, she knew, had remembered her. And Bob still loved her. And Raoul had sought her out. She comforted herself with these thoughts.
It is surprising, but she is beginning to think that Raoul’s interest in her is sexual. It’s a bit late in the day for that kind of thing, but nevertheless she thinks it may be so. And she had put on lipstick for him. She doesn’t often do that these days. She must have been responding to something in the quality of his interest in her.
Maybe the Professor had loved her? No, she thought not, she knew not. He had desired her, and had taken some small professional risks to possess her, but he had not loved her.
Grimly, bracing herself, clenching her teeth, she sat down one evening during the days of waiting for Anna’s biopsy results and fed the Professor’s name into the search engine. She tried Google first, not thinking anything would pop up and that she would resort to Google Scholar, but to her astonishment she achieved an immediate hit. There were dozens of links to somebody called Bernt Gunnar Lindahl. They did not look like good news. Bernt Gunnar Lindahl, it appeared, had murdered his wife in a small town in Scotland. This seemed too good, too bad, to be true, and indeed it was, because as soon as she clicked on the first of the links a photograph of the murderer appeared, and he was of the wrong age group, although the fairly unusual combination of his three Swedish names matched. He was a plump pink smiling man in his fifties with a moustache and spectacles. He was much younger than Jess, not older. She flitted through the murder reports rapidly, discovering that he had stabbed his wife, not in a fit of jealous rage but because of something to do with insurance.
A squalid and uninteresting little murder, but it was recent and it had excited the press, and it was difficult to get beyond it to any other namesakes. The murderer had clogged the net. So she made her way slowly to Google Scholar, where she discovered a Swedish author called Gunnar Lindahl and a crosscountry skier of the same name, but they were not very helpful. She trawled and trawled, more and more impatiently, but she couldn’t understand the Swedish websites, and eventually was driven back to trying SOAS staff and alumni. But SOAS seemed to have disowned or forgotten the Professor, or tucked him away in a digital corner so obscure she could not find it.
Eventually, after stabbing and jabbing and clicking in an increasingly random manner, she found him. When she typed in the title in English of his doctorate at Uppsala, up it popped, with a link.
The link was an obituary. It was in Swedish, and it appeared to be from some old university listing. The print itself was old, the typeface was old. There was nothing new here.
He had been dead for years, for decades. All the time she’d carefully not been thinking about him, he’d been dead. That was why he had vanished from the academic world and sent no messages from Manchuria. He had published nothing since the doctorate, except for a few papers and a contribution to a book published in Korea on agrarian policy and population control. He’d not left much of a mark.
The Professor, in fact, had not even been a professor. She’d given him that title, in her dialogue with herself and eventually with us, as a joke. He’d been Dr Lindahl, not the Professor. He’d never become Professor Lindahl.
It was late, Dr Speight’s eyes ached, the screen quivered and swam, her new varifocals had had enough, and she couldn’t be bothered to google the wife.
She went to bed, feeling curiously relieved by this outcome. She was pleased to have extracted a reply from the web, she was pleased not to have to worry about him any more, she was pleased still to be alive. She and Anna were both still alive. They would both move on, as modern jargon has it, they would both go forward together. Anna would be okay. Irrationally, she suddenly felt sure that Anna would be okay. The ogre was dead, poor old ghost, but she and Anna were alive.
She felt sorry for the poor old ghost of the waste lands of Manchuria and Uppsala. He had been driven out of Bloomsbury and his lovenest in the Marchmont Hotel by the unexpected birth of the pure gold baby. A sense of generous sorrow for his disappointing life and long-ago death flowed through her, as she stretched her legs, and then curled herself up in her warm and comfortable bed, and turned the pillow over so that the cool fresh side of it met her cheek. How good it was to sleep alone, in her own house, which was worth
£
800,000. The Professor, unwittingly, had invested his
£
1,325 well.
The curious sum that made up the dowry represents, Jess has always suspected, the sale of some asset. A small house on an island in the archipelago, a Sèvres dining set, a ruby necklace. She may never be able to verify this, but it is what she suspects. He had, after all, been a Marxist, of a sort, with a morality, of a sort.
It was quite easy to reassure Anna about her condition and her health, or at least it seemed to be so to Jess and to us, though who could tell what Anna’s underlying fears were? Confiding in her mother seemed to have satisfied Anna that her illness was not grave and that she would be cured.
Her confidence in Jess was enormous. It had rarely had cause to falter, and it did not falter now. Anna approached the complicated sequence of hospital visits and scans patiently, even cheerfully, and opened her legs and submitted to the embarrassing examinations as bravely as she could. She did not like or understand what was happening, but she did not complain.
Jess sits near by, behind the flimsy little curtain on its metal rail, twisting her silver rings round and round her fingers, helpless. She is too close to her daughter, she suffers in her body for her daughter.
Anna, robed in the long pale hospital robe, a much laundered heavily ironed faded blue robe with a pattern of white daisies, looks angelic. With her fair hair and her timeless, ageless face, she looks like a girl in a fairytale, entranced, charmed, expectant, at the beginning of a story that has yet to unfold. She looks touchingly trusting, bewildered but trusting. The simple round neck of the robe make her look like a vulnerable child. Was it possible that anybody had abused her, and that Anna had never been able to tell, had been too ashamed or frightened to tell? Jess is sure this that could not be so. Anna would have spoken to her mother. She would have found the words. But of course Jess has not kept her under her eyes for every moment of her adolescent and adult life. She has been obliged to trust others.
The tapes that tie the hospital robe across Anna’s smooth fair slightly freckled back are the apron strings.
Anna is tied to her mother’s apron strings.
Jess’s confidence in the hospital is not as strong as Anna’s confidence in Jess, although the hospital and the manner of its staff has improved since the days when it had pumped Steve Carter’s stomach in such an unforgiving manner. Jess has had little reason to visit it, except for routine blood tests and a mammogram (this was before the days when she found herself summoned to the supermarket mobile-van) and an abortive attempt at physiotherapy for a sprained ankle, but she can tell that it was now more efficient and more patient-friendly than it had been. When they see him next, the urologist/surgeon, Mr Savandra, tries hard to be reassuring as he explains the possible diagnoses and procedures ahead. Jess is in too much of a panic to listen very carefully, and Anna nods and smiles nervously and does not understand a word of what he says. How could she? Mr Savandra is small, dark and courteous, but withdrawn. He does not reach out. He seems to have taken on board Anna’s limited understanding, but prefers consulting the file of notes on his desk to attempting to engage in eye contact with either mother or daughter. He looks down at the notes through most of the consultation. But he is respectful and polite. He addresses Jessica as Dr Speight, which she finds comforting. We cling to status when in danger, when trapped at the mercy of an institution. Jess’s doctorate on the impact of missionaries on the practice of traditional remedies in Central Africa stands between her and the sucking gulf of non-being and nonentity and humiliation that hospitals represent.
Mr Savandra is polite, but his sidekick the oncologist is not so friendly. Jess finds him inhuman and alarming, though she knows she may be projecting her fear on to him and turning him into another male ogre. His most human trait appears to be a desire to upstage Mr Savandra and to suggest that oncologists are more important than surgeons and urologists. He talks a great deal about the ever increasing importance of oncology, the decreasing value of surgery. He may be right about that, but why should Jess care? She is not here to support his sense of his status, which is not under attack. His manner towards Anna is an aggressive mix of the profoundly condescending and the jolly. Jess knows that some adults find it hard to talk naturally to Anna, being unsure of the level of her response and understanding, and are over-cautious in their efforts. Dr Newman has no such hesitations. He is, by nature, an overbearing bully. His complexion is a high dark red with a bluish tinge, his hair black and thick and neat and carefully combed, his eyes deep set, his eyebrows prominent and handsome, his square and manly chin aggressively smooth from hard close shaving. He is very pleased with himself. He asks Anna questions about her sexual history that Jess knows (or believes she knows) that Anna cannot understand, but the manner of his interrogation arouses in Jess the slightest faintest tremor of fear. The un-safety spreads, the anxiety of uncertainty spreads.
Jess knows that Anna does not smoke, although she herself smoked when young, but she cannot be certain about everything that has happened to her.
Anna disapproves of smoking, as most young people do. She was taught to disapprove at Marsh Court, and Jessica’s generation has long abandoned the habit.
(Except for me. I still smoke, when I am alone, in my own home, once or twice a week. A cigarette comforts me. I am sometimes indeed quite often lonely now, and a cigarette keeps me company, offers me a small act of defiance. I smoked as an undergraduate, and I took it up again when Tom was dying.)
Dr Newman tells Jess that the problem is not with the kidney but with the bladder. Anna has a small tumour, located in what Jess thinks of as Sylvie Raven’s domain. With Mr Savandra’s approval, he will attempt to shrink it with medication and then they will all see what to do next. He will send the results to Mr Savandra, the surgeon with the knife, and Anna will be summoned back.
Anna’s blood pressure is slightly high, she must take medication for that too. How long has her blood pressure been up? Jess shakes her head, she has no idea.