The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble Page A

of Broughborough, was proud of her. And he loved his special granddaughter, Anna, although he was shy about paying too many visits. He told me this one cold afternoon in Clissold Park, as we sat on a bench together, while the children watched the mynah birds and listened to them screech and chatter. One of them had been taught to scream ‘Arsenal! Arsenal!’ My children thought this was very funny No longer children, they still support the Arsenal through thick and thin. This weekend, as I write, it’s a bit thin.
    Philip Speight hoped Jess’s small and eccentric little family would prosper. Maybe, one day, Jess would find another man, a better man, a husband, a father for Anna.
    Anna loved her grandfather. She was lucky there. She was a lucky child. She called him Gramps, and he liked that.
    Anna’s grandfather was much more attentive to Anna than Anna’s grandmother. We speculated (but not in Jess’s hearing) that this was because Anna’s grandmother feared the suspicion of a hereditary taint. Women, irrationally but not surprisingly, tend to take the idea of genetic blame more seriously than men.
    And, in the cause of mitochondrial disorders, they are right to do so. Although we did not know that then. And it doesn’t do us much good to know it now.
    Jess’s sister Vee avoided Jess and Anna, possibly for the same reasons. Or maybe it was just common or garden sibling rivalry that kept them apart. Jess was, despite the difficulties, a formidable sister.
     
    The story of Anna unfolded peaceably and uneventfully over those early years of nursery school and primary school and caused, as such stories do, both happiness and anxiety in almost equal measure. Anna was a fact in all our lives, and a part of our mapping of the world.
    The birth of children such as Anna may become rarer year by year. And that would be a loss, though the nature of that loss is hard to describe. It is important to recognise it as loss, although we cannot describe it.
    An innocence, with children such as Anna, would be gone from the world. A possibility of another way of being human would be lost, with all that it signifies. They are God’s children,
les enfants du bon Dieu
, we used to say, but now we no longer believe in God. Their lives are hidden with God, as Wordsworth wrote in defence of his Idiot Boy, but God himself is now hidden. God has absconded, but he has left us his children.
    Anna had no father to miss or mourn, as she had never met him. But she had a loving grandfather and many willing surrogate-father figures in our little neighbourhood community. She knew what fathers were. There were several happy to take her on their knee with a storybook, to pick her up from school, to make sure she got her fair share of the sandwiches. Even the irresponsible and frequently absconding Rick Raven was respectful to Anna, when he was around. She provoked good behaviour.
    The Professor as father and, we may assume, as lover proved disposable, as his emotional and intellectual limitations became more and more obvious to Jess, and off he went, unregretted, with his professor wife, to a year’s fieldwork on the borders of Manchuria. He was something of a fellow-traveller, the Professor, but Jess was beginning to think he was also a bit of a fool. She began to wonder what she had ever seen in him, apart from the size of his penis, and it sometimes crossed her mind that he had behaved rather badly in seducing her when she was still a student in her early twenties, though she tried not to allow this suspicion to linger and fester. She brushed it away. Looking after Anna had enabled her to see the Professor as an undeveloped and childish person. She was well rid of him, and, after several years of him, she was ready to move on.
    The two professors went off to make a study of child rearing and infanticide in agrarian communities in a remote Chinese border community. The two professors were prepared to consider infanticide an appropriate response to