Read Online The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble - Free Book Online

pure gold and told no lies. She never pretended to have been where she hadn’t been. She never made up anthropological stories.
    That is how we like to see her, our Jess, the shining one who did not lie and did not falter.
     
    So Jess moved on, liberating herself from the irresponsible, emotionally arrested, possibly mythical, possibly mythologised Professor, and when she was well settled into her life with Anna in her own new home in Kinderley Road she began to look around for somebody more her own age, as her father had hoped she would. Or that’s what I thought she was doing. And I was proved to be right.
    We talked about men, Jess and I, as well as about more intellectual concerns, in those early feminist days of the sixties. We laughed a lot and complained and made fun of men and marriage. But we weren’t ideologically separatist, as some women at that time were. I was married, and was to remain married until widowhood, despite some scary passages, and I did not tell tales about my husband, nor would Jess have wished to hear them. But we gossiped remorselessly about our neighbours, particularly about Jim and Katie, and about Rick Raven, whose departure from our lives and Sylvie’s life we had correctly predicted. I remember one evening at my house, while Anna and the boys and Ollie were making a racket up in the attic playroom with a horrible and wholly incorrect new toy called a Johnny Seven Gun, Jess and I discovered that Rick had made a pass at each of us, and maybe in the same week.
    We didn’t use the word ‘incorrect’ then, but we were well familiar with the concept.
    We were drinking whisky that evening, not very much of it, not a John Updike evening, but enough to make us mildly indiscreet. I’d been given a bottle of Laphroaig for my birthday the day before—I loved a good malt in those days though I rarely risk it now—and we were sipping in a ladylike way out of two darling little matching engraved souvenir glasses, one called ‘Loch Lomond’ and the other ‘The Road to the Isles’. I liked water with my Scotch, but Jess preferred hers neat.
    Jess told me that Rick had given Jess and Anna a lift home when they’d been to tea with Sylvie and her boys, and he’d put his hand on her thigh and propositioned her. He said he’d always fancied her and could he call round later. She’d said no, certainly not, but thank you for asking.
    Rick was a smooth customer, a Fleet Street man who wrote about culture and society; he fancied his own heterodox and slightly right-wing views, and we didn’t think he was very bright. But he was a good-looker, and he thought he could get away with it.
    He hadn’t asked me if he could call round later, for obvious reasons, but he had suggested a rendezvous in town for lunch one day, and he’d squeezed my thigh in what I imagine was much the same manner. Skirts were very short then, and I can remember to this day the one I was wearing: it was grey but it had a gold thread in the weave. I suppose we were asking for it, showing all that leg and accepting lifts from other people’s husbands.
    Jess told me she gave him the brush-off because he wasn’t her type, and anyway she didn’t want to annoy the neighbourhood with unnecessary adultery. He wasn’t my type either, but I did agree to have a discreet lunch with him in Soho, and a very good lunch it was too.
    I didn’t tell Jess about that at the time. I didn’t confess to that lunch until several decades later, at Rick Raven’s funeral in St Bride’s.
    I was sorry when the little glass called Loch Lomond broke in the dishwasher. I’ve still got the Road to the Isles.
    Jess didn’t say that she was ready for a fling, but maybe Rick Raven had sensed it, and that’s why he’d grabbed her knee. It’s just that he didn’t fill the bill. The chap she found, without too much difficulty and after one or two more unsatisfactory overtures and experiments, wasn’t a neighbourhood man at all. There was nothing