Jess felt much better for this contact, and she would continue, in a long afterlife, long after she had lost touch with Hazel, to find the memory of it a comfort. Such small gestures are so much needed and not so often offered.
As she walked away from Marsh Court, on this her first of many visits, Jess looked back, calm enough to take in the school building and its immediate surroundings, which until now had appeared to her in a blur of anxiety and hope. The main house was an early-Victorian building, not unhandsome, built of reddish brick with stone facing, and surmounted with a couple of what Jess thought were Dutch gables. Despite efforts to make it cheerful and child-friendly – pots of geraniums outside its front door, bold blue-and-orange geometric-patterned curtains, fresh green paint – it had a melancholy air, pertaining less perhaps to its institutional function than to its architecture. It looked like the kind of house that might have been occupied by a lonely old woman, the last of her line, or by an embittered miser hiding from his heirs. It looked like the end of something, not the beginning.
It survived amidst a waste of random redevelopment, of housing estates and industrial parks, and was itself surrounded by little outcrops of prefabricated schoolrooms and workshops and allotments. But an older Enfield could still be traced in it, older by far than the little two-storey 1930s neat-shabby suburban homes that lined the road down which Jess now walked towards the River Lee and Enfield Lock.
Keats had been to school in Enfield. In a special school for the children of progressive tradesmen, not a special school for the educationally problematic. He and his friend, the schoolmaster’s son, used to walk the ten miles into town to go to the theatre to see Sarah Siddons and Edmund Keane. How high their hopes had been, how lofty their ambitions, those earnest talented young men.
Jess walked towards Enfield Lock and the canal and the River Lee, and then began to walk, thoughtfully, reflectively, receptively, along the tow path. Anna liked the water. Anna, Jess thought, would like the water walkway. The lock was old and quiet, with a stationed narrow boat and a cluster of old buildings from another age – the dark-brick lock-keeper’s cottage with white-fretted wooden gables, a row of tidy little houses, a pub called the Rifles. Jess sensed there was a historic arsenal connection here, as in Highbury, a military link, but the waterside this day was peaceful in the sun. The track was overgrown with elder and buddleia and nettles, with long greens and purples. Jess walked on and through a gate and over a wooden stile, and the water flowed strongly. She had left the placid canal bank and joined the path of the deep full river. A warning notice leaning rakishly on a rotting board told her the water was deep and dangerous. Small golden-winged birds flew in swift flurries in a light June breeze through tall willows and reeds. Dark dragonflies, blue-black, hovered and coupled over the rapidly moving surface.
Jess as she walks hears the high unearthly cry of the fish-eagle, calling from another world, calling from her youth and from Africa. She hears the honey-guide and the blacksmith plover and the go-away-bird and the boubou and the bird that cries Nkoya, Nokoya, Nkoya Kupwa … I go, go, go to get married . . . She hears the sad descending call of the emerald-spotted wood dove: I lost my mother, I lost my father, and I am alone, alone, alone … That, the tribesmen had told her, was the dove’s lament, the lament that Livingstone had heard as he was carried dying on his litter through the swamps and the rushes.
Great submerged intensely green plants with large leaves like the leaves of cabbages stream in the current of the River Lee, with tight golden balls of flowers on long snake stems, rooted, tugging, flowing, flowering under the water. A great force of water flows powerfully in this half-tamed landscape of Essex.
Jess sees the swamps and marshes and sedges of Lake Bangweulu, the green spikes of reed and papyrus, the rain tree, the tussocks and the clumps, the rising bubbles of marsh gas, the green tunnel of the waterway and the slow progress of the low canoe. The lechwe are as numerous as the stars in the sky, their herds cover the grasslands, but the shoebill is lonely.
When one of the lechwe is taken by a lion, the rest of the herd moves onwards, uncaring, indifferent. Not one breaks off or strays behind to grieve.
Primates are different. Primates linger with their dead.
On his death march, Livingstone heard a little tree-frog ‘tuning as loud as the birds and very sweet’. A luminous green-and-yellow tree-frog had perched on Jess’s bedside torch, in her tent, all those years ago, safe with her under the mosquito net.
Walking on through time by the strong, fast-flowing water, Jess hears Hazel singing with Anna and the group of simple children, the pure bronzed woman singing with the pure gold child. Hazel sings:
The river is flowing, growing and flowing,
The river is flowing down to the sea.
Mother Earth carry me,
Your child I shall always be,
Mother Earth carry me down to the sea …
The children join in the round, some tunefully, some at random, but all of them intent on Hazel’s divine face, her sweet rich heavenly voice, as she keeps them together, against the odds.
Hazel will be a friend, a saviour, a haven, for a short while. She has the heart and the skills. To know Hazel, even briefly, is lucky. Anna is a lucky girl.
Anna was apprehensive about the move, but Jess prepared her as best she could, persuading her Marsh Court was a grown-up school where she would make new friends and learn new skills to show off when she came home for holidays. Anna, always an obliging child, was extremely anxious to please and appease: if her mother thought it best that she should go to Marsh Court, she would try to enjoy Marsh Court. She struggled not to show her fear, and so did her mother.
‘You’ll like the music lady; she’s called Hazel,’ said Jess from time to time, to comfort herself as well as Anna.
Anna had missed Fanny Foy when she moved from Plimsoll Primary to Highbury Barn. There hadn’t been a good music teacher at Highbury. Fanny had been to tea once or twice in Kinderley Road, but it hadn’t been the same.
Jess tempted Anna with stories of the canal walks and the lock and the water gardens and the pond with white and pink lilies and the turquoise damsel flies.
Jess delivered Anna to Marsh Court in early September, for the beginning of the new school year. Anna’s face on parting showed a watery crumpled look of kindness and anxiety mixed, an expression far too mature for an abandoned child. Jess did not cry on the way home, but she felt like howling. She wanted to howl like a monkey or scream like an eagle.
That night Jess dreamt that Anna was drowning in the canal. She was slowly going under, her trusting face gazing upward for help, her clothes filling with water like Ophelia’s, as she made little paddling movements with her arms. (In fact, Anna could swim well, a competent dog-paddle, so why she wasn’t trying to swim in the dream was a mystery, though not the kind of mystery you notice when you’re dreaming.) And, as Jess gazed at her helplessly, from some out-of-frame vantage point, the green-brown weed-decked Essex canal grew and broadened and spread and swelled into a shining blue lake, and Anna drifted further and further away into its distant reaches, until she disappeared from sight.
Jess woke and lay there in the night on her old second-hand bed with its sagging mattress and tried to reassure herself that this dream meant nothing, nothing at all, that its sources were too obvious to be worthy of consideration. Anna would not fall into the canal, the school would look after her, and anyway she could swim, Jess had made sure of that. Jess lay awake, and thought of the little children in Africa with their dugout canoes. How many of them, in that watery landscape, died by drowning? Was drowning a common fate? Too late now to go back to ask. Could they swim, did they swim? Did anybody know, had anybody ever thought to ask? What were the statistics? Had anyone counted them? She hadn’t seen any of them playing in the water, but that was probably because of river blindness or leeches.
A leech had attached itself to Jess’s