The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble

Author:Margaret Drabble
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 9781782111092
Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Jess was right about Vincent’s prognosis: it was, in the long run, better than Anna’s. Years of intensive and expensive pharmaceutical research eventually produced medication that redressed whatever chemical imbalance or neurological disturbance had plagued him since birth, and he ceased to rage and swear and jerk and fret. He never became a model citizen, but he became independent, better-tempered, reasonably amenable. He got a job in a Turkish restaurant, married the boss’s daughter, got stuck into dubious wheelings and dealings on Green Lanes about which his mother Susie did not inquire too closely, had two children and went regularly to the Arsenal, where he could shout as loud as he wished. It was a good outcome. He had made good progress.

Anna, as we have seen, made no progress at all. She was becalmed. There was no story to her life, no plot. The concept of progress did not apply to Anna. Events happened, but they did not impinge upon her. Unexpected crises occurred within her circle, like the melodramatic arrest and conviction of Joshua Raven, but they did not affect Anna, although they touched her. She listened to the Josh scandal with sympathy, with interest and concern, as she listened to the affairs of television stars and celebrities, as she followed the story lines of soap operas, but she did not see herself as a protagonist in the narrative of her own life.

She was unhappy when she saw Josh’s photo in the press, after the conviction.

Anna loved soap operas. She loved the small daily dramas, the ebb and flow of minimal fates, the lovable characters, the bad but well-intentioned villains, the lame ducks, the matriarchs, the emotional separations and reunions, the petty crimes. She became worried when the plot took an unexpectedly violent turn, but fortunately for her peace of mind so did most of the programme producers and the scriptwriters, and daily life on screen reverted readily to the norm. Things went on and on in soap opera, as they did in Anna’s life. People lived on, ageing only slowly, many of them ageing more slowly (as in Proust’s soap opera) than in real life, until external and arbitrary pressures such as a star actor’s desertion dictated sudden death. Anna knows all about the stars and their troubles and some of the reasons why they suddenly disappear. She is, in her way, a sophisticated viewer. She absorbs the information from the fan magazines.

Jess, watching Anna watching the screen, would think back to the shining lake, and remember the days when she had had other, less domestic horizons. Occasionally, she wondered if she would ever go back to Africa. She still from time to time dreamt of the lake and the lobster-claw children punting their little wooden barks. These dreams were, she decided, Jungian dreams of the collective unconscious, the dreams which had given birth to Anna. From that great lake all life forms had arisen, there they had all been engendered. All life came out of Africa, from the Sense of the Infinite on the Western Shore of Victoria Nyanza.

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