Nambikwara, we can never read them. Are they human? Are they of the same human species as ourselves, are they of the same branch of the family of man? What did these people make of Lévi-Strauss and his low-profile but attendant wife? We stare at them as adolescents in a more sheltered age used to stare at photographs suggesting or partially disclosing nudity: hungry for knowledge, hungry for revelation. As Jess as a child stared at her father’s kid-bound booklet, as Jess as a mother stares at the photographs in Lionel Penrose’s classic books on Mental Defect. She gazes at the High-Grade Feeble-Minded Girl, so demure and pretty with her dark dress and wide lace collar, at the physically less appealing Laurence-Moon syndrome man with retinitis pigmentosa and six toes on his right foot. But you can never penetrate the photograph. They do not reveal more, however long you stare at them. They remain static, frozen, sealed. They do not, cannot move. They cannot speak to us.
On the new medium of television, to which we were all beginning to succumb, the images moved. They seemed to tell us more. They seemed to be three-dimensional, those animals in the savannah, those tribesmen in their shacks and huts, those patients with rare diseases, those travellers in the outback. But you can’t believe anything you see on television, ever. You seem to see more than you see in an old-fashioned ethnological photograph, but you don’t. We all know that now. Look for the shadow of the cameraman. Look for the footprint of the cameraman.
It wasn’t quite as bad as that in those early days. Television wasn’t either as smart or as stupid as it is now. It was simpler.
Katie’s Jim in the sixties and seventies worked in television for Granada. He directed a current-affairs programme. He worked very hard. Those were the heroic days of Granada, when it was inventive, investigative, radical. Katie worked part time at Bush House for the BBC World Service, reviewing new poetry from the Commonwealth and chairing a poetry quiz. This was a characteristically gendered division of labour in those days.
Both their lives are very different now.
Jess’s one and only African journey was to the shining lake, where Livingstone died. She remained 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 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-looking. I think we may have been jealous. But Jess deserved a bit of luck, or that’s what we generously decided to think.