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Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

The Pure Gold Baby

About the Author

First U. S. edition Copyright © 2013 by Margaret Drabble

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

Published in Great Britain in 2013 by Canongate Books Ltd.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Drabble, Margaret, date.

The pure gold baby / Margaret Drabble. pages cm ISBN 978-0-544-15890-0 (hardback) 1. Women anthropologists—Fiction. 2. Mothers of children with disabilities—Fiction. 3. Children with disabilities—Fiction. 4. Motherhood—Fiction. 5. London (England)—Fiction. 6. Domestic fiction. 7. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

PR6054. R25P87 2013 823'. 914—dc23 2013021736

eISBN 978-0-544-15776-7 v1. 1013

For Hilary and Ben

What she felt for those children, as she was to realise some years later, was a proleptic tenderness. When she saw their little bare bodies, their proud brown belly buttons, the flies clustering round their runny noses, their big eyes, their strangely fused and forked toes, she felt a simple sympathy. Where others might have felt pity or sorrow or revulsion, she felt a kind of joy, an inexplicable joy. Was this a premonition, an inoculation against grief and love to come?

How could it have been? What logic of chronology could have made sense of such a sequence? And yet she was to come to wonder if it had been so. Something had called upon her from those little ones, and woken in her a tender spirit of response. It had lain dormant in her for several seasons, this spirit, and, when called upon, it had come to her aid. The maternal spirit had brooded on the still and distant waters of that great and shining lake and all its bird-frequented swamps and spongy islands and reed-fringed inlets, and it had entered into her when she was young and it had taken possession of her. Was this the beginning, was this the true moment of conception? Was this the distant early meeting place that had engendered the pure gold baby? There, with the little naked children, amongst the grasses and the waters?

She had never heard of the rare condition which afflicted some of the members of this poor, peaceable and unaspiring tribe, and the sight of it took her by surprise, although Guy Brighouse, her sponsor and colleague on this expedition, claimed that it had been well documented and that he had seen photographs of it. (But Guy was a hard man who would never admit to anything as vulnerable as surprise. ) It was then popularly known as Lobster-Claw syndrome, a phrase which came to be considered incorrect. (It is now more widely known as ectrodactyly, or SHSF, but she did not then know that. She did not then know any of its names. The acronym SHSF discreetly encodes the words Split Hand Split Foot. ) In some parts of the world, with some peoples, in some gene pools, the fingers fuse. In others, it is the toes. In this part of Central Africa, it is the toes that form a simple divided stub or stump. A small group of forebears had produced and passed on this deviance.