The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble Page B

Benthamite. On whether you are Mungo Park, essentially a Wordsworthian of the Enlightenment, or Dr Livingstone, an obsessed Darwinian Victorian.
    Both were Scots.
    Jess, collecting Anna to come home for the Christmas holidays, had brought a present for Hazel, nicely wrapped in gold paper and with a label on it saying ‘Happy Christmas from Jess and Anna’. It wasn’t a very daring or exciting present (of hazelnut chocolates, which they knew she liked, or said she liked), but Hazel greeted it with delight and an appearance of surprise, and gave both Jess and Anna a big hug. Hugging seemed to come so naturally to Hazel, why couldn’t everybody hug like that? Such simple things are so hard for so many.
    Maybe Hazel’s mother had hugged her a lot when she was a baby. Or maybe she hadn’t hugged her enough. Jess didn’t know and didn’t like to ask. She would never know Hazel well enough to ask. But she was able to respond to the hugging.
    Anna had made some presents in the Marsh Court prefab workshop to take home for her mum and her new step dad and her old schoolfriends. They were in a special silver carrier bag with butterflies and ladybirds and fishes gummed all over it, haphazardly but happily, by Anna.
     
    Christmas isn’t a good time for a lot of people. It’s worse, of course, for the single and the lonely, or so everyone always says, but it’s pretty bad for those with too much family, and most of us in our thirties fell into that category. Sometimes some of us longed to be single and lonely, as we tried to satisfy the claims of parents, children, ex-husbands, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, lame ducks, excommunicated alcoholics, lonely depressive poets and other riff raff. None of us had houses big enough to take in a tribe, or kitchens large enough to cook for a clan, yet somehow the tribal expectations of a large gathering had descended upon us. These were frenzied festivals of foregone failure.
    In view of all of that, Jess and Bob’s party could be counted a success.
    The Christmas tree was chastely decorated with dangling orange clementines and white candles, and the room with oiled paper wooden parasols, gummed paper chains made by Anna, gorilla masks made by Bob. The riot, the mayhem, the broken lavatory bowl, the singing! It was an all-age-group, day-after-Boxing-Day party, eating up everybody’s leftovers—we brought our plastic boxes of giblets and cold turkey and cold Christmas pudding and brandy butter with us at midday, and stayed on for hours. Jess and Bob and Anna had been up to Broughborough for a couple of days, to authenticate Bob as legitimate husband (the Speight parents hadn’t been to the wedding) and, according to Bob, had spent most of their time sitting round a giant jigsaw portraying ‘The Wreck of the
Medusa
’, avoiding eye contact. (We think he made that up.) Jess’s unmarried sister, Vee, had been there too, rather impatient with the whole thing, thought Bob. But Anna liked Auntie Vee, who had given her a beautiful tambourine with golden bells and scarlet ribbons, which she had purchased in Egypt, where she was working for the British Council—an imaginative, noisy and perhaps provocative present, which enlivened the party.
    (Vee spent most of her working life abroad, in flight from Jess, Anna and her parents.)
    Anna was happy. She loved parties. We were all happy. We were letting our hair down, congratulating ourselves on having once more got through the main event of Christmas Day, on having jumped the highest fence of the season. Children were marauding, running round the house and out into the street in little gangs, and we were lying back on Jess’s African cushions, smoking, chatting, drinking, comparing notes on the dying year. We were wearing long skirts, high leather boots, flared trousers, necklaces. (Some of the men wore necklaces too.) Jess looked good: her nut-brown hair was very long in those days, tied back with a yellow chiffon scarf, and her freckled