The Pure Gold Baby Read Online Free PDF Page B

disconnect him from the story, and she appeared to succeed in doing so. It is more often men that wish to disconnect sex from procreation. Jess was a female pioneer in this field, although maybe she did not regard herself in that light.
    It was easier to ignore the consideration of paternal genes then than it would be now. We did not then consider ourselves held in the genetic trap. We thought each infant was born pure and new and holy: a gold baby, a luminous lamb. We did not know that certain forms of breast cancer were programmed and almost ineluctable, and we would not have believed you if you had told us that in our lifetime young women would be subjecting themselves to preventative mastectomies. This would have seemed to us a horrifying misapplication of medical insight, but we would of course have been wrong. We had heard of Huntington’s chorea (‘chorea’ isn’t a word you can use now) and cystic fibrosis, but we thought of them as rare and deviant afflictions. Most genes, we thought, were normal. We did not believe in biological destiny. We thought we and our children were born free.
    You may pity us for our ignorance, or envy us for our faith.
    So Jess did not closely pursue genealogical explanations for Anna’s state. Her investigations were desultory. In her own heritage she traced a distant case of cerebral palsy, a couple of suicides and, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a child with Down’s syndrome (then called Mongolism, a term, like lobster claw and chorea, now obsolete). The condition of this child was easily explained by the advanced age of his mother at conception, a factor discovered by Jess on one of her covert visits to Somerset House. (The story of the Down’s syndrome boy had been handed on through family lore, through the paternal line in Lincolnshire, and reinterpreted by Jess: Jack Speight had been ‘a bit simple’, ‘a backward boy’, a young man ‘who couldn’t do much for himself’, and he had died in his thirties.) Anna’s condition did show some behavioural affinity with that of many Down’s syndrome children—an innate happiness of temperament, an at times overtrusting nature, a love of singing, a lack of the finer motor skills. But of chromosomal evidence for the condition there was none.
    Anna as a child and as a young person was not identifiable, visually, as in any way impaired. Her learning difficulties were not obvious to the eye. This was both a blessing and a curse. No leeway was given her, no tolerance extended to her by strangers. Jess, who quickly became expert in spotting the cognitive and behavioural problems of other young people, found this at times a difficulty. Should she smooth Anna’s way by excuses, or allow her to make her own way through the thicket of harsh judgements and impatient jostlings that lay before her through her life? She tried to stand back, to let Anna make her own forays, her own mistakes, but occasionally she felt compelled to intervene and explain.
    Anna loved her mother with an exemplary filial devotion, seeming to be aware from the earliest age of her own unusual dependence. As our children and the other children we knew came to defy us and to tug at our apron strings and to yearn for separation, Anna remained intimate with her mother, shadowing her closely, responding to every movement of her body and mind, approving her every act. Necessity was clothed with a friendly and benign garment, brightly patterned, soft to the touch, a nursery fabric that did not age with the years.
    In those first years, before the educational attainments of her peers began to demonstrate a noticeable discrepancy, Anna remained part of a ragged informal community of children which accepted her for what she was, prompted by the kind example of their parents. The parents admired Jess for several good reasons, and they liked little Anna, so smiling, so unthreatening in every way, so uncompetitive. Ollie, Nick, Harry, Chloe, Ben, Polly, Becky,