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

incestuous or even adulterous about him. He was new blood. He was half American, and he had long black curly hair, a hairy chest, and very smooth gleaming brown shoulders. He beautifully combined the hairy and the smooth. He had a child of his own from a previous marriage, but he’d left his wife and child behind in Chicago. He was divorced, and seemed keen to marry Jess. He was exactly the same age as Jess, take a couple of months. He was an ethnologist and a photographer, quite successful, and he took life lightly. He was a populist, and he made Jess laugh. Jess found his eagerness in itself seductive. Why not? He was an American citizen and he didn’t need a passport to settle in England. He didn’t try to borrow money from her. He wasn’t serious, but that seemed to Jess at that stage in her life to be an advantage. She was prepared to give him a try, to have a marital fling, and see how it worked out. Anna was for life, but Bob needn’t be. If it didn’t work out, never mind.
    We didn’t trust him.
    We could see that Jess needed some light relief, but Bob didn’t seem quite the ticket. But who were we to warn her? We were all busy making new mistakes, or learning how to live with our old ones. And he made us laugh too. There was something a little scandalous and subversive about his attitudes to the animals and the people that he photographed: something dodgy, something exhibitionistic, something self-regarding and possessive. Like the Professor, he was another bad lot, but of a less sinister, more manageable, more entertaining species. Jess, like her father, was a purist, and happy to confront disappointment that way. But Bob was a bit of a vulgarian—a bit too interested in the naked ape. (Desmond Morris’s book of this title had appeared in 1967: it was a key title of the next decade, and, although we laughed at it, we were also rather taken with it. Morris was much given to jokes about the penis.) We should have known that Bob would go into television in his forties, for a time quite successfully, but I don’t think we foresaw this. We hadn’t really foreseen television itself, except for
The Magic Roundabout
and
Blue Peter
and
Top of the Pops
and the BBC news and the sort of high-minded current-affairs documentary programmes that Jim made.
    Bob seemed to expect to be taken seriously as an ethnologist, and he was certainly very clever. And he was good-l ooking. I think we may have been jealous. But Jess deserved a bit of luck, or that’s what we generously decided to think. Not that it would have made much difference if we hadn’t.
    I liked Bob. I didn’t take him very seriously, but I liked him. I’m not sure if he liked me, in those days, but he didn’t need to, did he?
    The Professor was a wedge, a prow, a beak. Austere, determined, rock hard and unrelenting. Bob, as his name happily suggests, was a rounder chap, with animal spirits and a good deal of energy. He was a seal, a bear, a handsome beast with fur on his chest, a healthy mammal. He tumbled and laughed and talked smartly. He seemed to take stepdaughter Anna as part of the deal: Jess, North London, SOAS, a Bohemian intelligentsia, an inner ring, swinging London, long hair, impromptu street parties, a little hash. Jess didn’t smoke hash—she was too responsible in her maternal role to take any small risks—but she didn’t mind when other people did. She wasn’t the kind of woman who said ‘not in my house’.
    I think Bob first came on the scene in the early seventies, but I couldn’t swear to it. Anna would have been about eleven, I suppose.
    Bob was friendly and at first ingratiating towards Anna, making her laugh, teaching her the words of some American summer-camp songs he’d sung as a teenager in Vermont, helping her to join in the conversation, not minding when she spilt her orange juice on his trousers. But it soon became clear that Bob felt she’d be better off at a residential boarding school for children with special