Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

Jude is home before me. It’s her turn to cook and she’s in the kitchen doing something with chicken breasts and mushrooms. I bring her a glass of wine and one for myself. She looks younger and happier than she has for a week. Hope has returned. Her cycle has begun again, this is another new beginning, and she’s off on her regimen of folic acid, ginseng, echinacea, the gynaecologist’s medication and the rest of it. When I think like this I stop laughing because I hate hope. I don’t think it should count among the virtues, it’s not in the same league as charity and faith. Whoever it was said that hope deferred makes the heart sick, is my hero.

Jude turns the gas down under the pan and sits down with her wine. She hasn’t drunk any of it and she says that perhaps she shouldn’t drink it. Somewhere or other she’s read that alcohol provokes miscarriages. That makes me angry, though I don’t think I show my anger. I see her spoiling her life for the sake of a dream child I don’t believe she’ll ever have. I tell her gently that a couple of glasses of red wine is recommended by doctors but she shakes her head.

‘If I drink wine,’ she says, ‘and I never do manage to – well, you know’ – it’s always ‘well, you know’ these days – ‘I’ll look back and think if only I hadn’t been so weak maybe I’d have…’

‘You must do whatever you think best,’ I tell her, and then she starts talking about some new manuscript she’s reading. Not that she doesn’t want to talk about conception and babies but that she’s afraid of boring me, of making me impatient. I think – I’ m almost certain – the existence of my son Paul weighs heavily on her. She likes him, she always makes him welcome when he comes here, but he’s an ever-present reminder to her that I don’t need any more children. If I never have another it won’t make me unhappy, it won’t be the end of the title, for what that’s worth, and I’ll never repine. This is what she intuits and she intuits right, though I put up some sort of a show. But a difficulty lies here too. If I seem to yearn as much as she does and no child ever comes she’s going to feel she’s let me down, she’s disappointed me as well as herself.

She asks about my Henry research and I pass her a sheaf of handwritten papers of his I’ve had blown up to readable size. She leafs through them, stops about halfway in and reads part of a lecture Henry gave to some august body, as much because she’s intrigued by what he writes as I am.

These diseases are carried by the blood. Of that we must be certain. But what is it in the blood that affects some people with haemophilia and others with purpura? A substance, of course, that is passed by way of the blood from a parent to its offspring. It is very hard to see, therefore, how a father’s blood can enter and affect the foetus in the mother’s uterus, when what he has contributed to conception is semen or seed. But it must be so. All blood looks the same but it is not the same. Medical men have been attempting to transfuse blood from one human being to another or from one animal to another since 1665. Pepys mentions such an experiment, using dogs, in his diary. In France Jean-Baptiste Denis transfused lamb’s blood into patients until a fatality occurred and he was arrested. Since then very little progress has been made, though James Blundell recorded successful tranfusions five years ago. Mostly, what occurs when red blood cells from one individual are mixed with serum from another is clumping of the red cells or in some cases bursting of the cells. Will we ever know why?

‘Yes, we will,’ Jude says. ‘We do. When did this Blundell record successful transfusions? Once you know that you can date this paper to five years later.’

I said I’d check and Jude lays down the paper, saying dinner’s probably ready by now and would I like to drink her wine? While we’re eating we talk about this amazing novel she’s publishing by a man from what we’re now supposed to call ‘the Asian subcontinent’ and which she thinks is a front runner for the Booker Prize. It’s about marriage in India and the five big events in it are weddings. This leads her to ask me if I’ve yet done any research into Henry’s marriage, when it happened and why.

I ask her who can tell why anyone gets married and she says she knows why she did. We smile at each other across the chicken and mushrooms and I say that of course one knows oneself but can others ever know?

‘You told me he was keen on Caroline Hamilton.’

‘It looks like it, but she married someone else.’

‘And there was that woman Sargent painted,’ she says. ‘We’ve got the picture on the kitchen calendar.’

‘He didn’t marry her, either. She married someone called Caspar Raven.’

‘And Henry?’

‘He married Louisa Edith Henderson, always called Edith, who was my great-grandmother. He was Sir Henry by then, a distinguished and famous physician. It was eighteen eighty-four and Henry was forty-eight.’

‘How old was she?’

I tell her Edith was born in 1861 so she must have been twenty-three. Quite a gap, says Jude, but not unusual in the nineteenth century, and she wonders what he did for sex all those years. She’s heard London was full of prostitutes, so did he use them? Or did he visit brothels?

‘He kept a woman in a house in Primrose Hill.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Through that letter from Clara and then the woman’s granddaughter. I’m planning to meet the granddaughter in a couple of weeks’ time. At the moment I don’t know any more than that her name was Jemima Ashworth, though she was known as Jimmy. She lived in a little house in Chalcot Road which he bought for her or more likely rented for her.’

Jude asks if Henry left any indication of Jimmy Ashworth’s existence in his diary or letters, and I tell her about the pentagrams.

‘I’m not sure if I know what pentagrams are.’

‘Sort of stars, asterisks. You take a pen or pencil and draw a diagonal going upwards, then another going downwards to make an angle of forty-five degrees, another up to cut halfway across the first one, then across, down and up, until you’ve made a five-pointed star.’ I show her on the sheet of paper we keep for shopping lists pinned to a cork board. ‘Henry has pentagrams in his diary more or less twice a week for nine years, starting in autumn 1874.’ Immediately there comes into my mind the memory of hearing about women doing this to mark the days their periods are due or actually taking place and I feel the blood mount into my face. Jude doesn’t seem to notice. It suddenly occurs to me that the date the first of those pentagrams appears coincides with Caroline Hamilton’s marriage in Aberdeen. Is it only coincidence or something more deliberate? Is Henry saying, ‘I can’t have her, that’s all over, so I may as well forget morality and get myself a mistress’?

We’ve carried the dishes into the kitchen and it’s my turn to clear up. With a dishwasher there’s not much clearing up necessary, especially if you’re lazy and put the saucepans in as I do. Jude’s looking at the calendar and has turned its pages back to February and there is Mrs Caspar Raven. Underneath the reproduced portrait is the legend saying Sargent painted it in 1894. She’d have been thirty-four or thirty-five by then and she’s a stunningly beautiful woman of the same type as Jude (a fact I point out to her) but of course not as slim as Jude is. Olivia Raven is fashionably plump with large full breasts and rounded arms and soft snowy shoulders, dressed in oyster-coloured satin, low-cut and with a collar of pearls at her white throat. Her waist is tiny, a narrow column, encircled by a lilac sash. Her hair is Jude’s, chestnut going on black, copious and wavy, piled up with a stray curly tress pendent over one shoulder. Sargent has done wonderful things with her luminous skin and her moist red lips. She looks wealthy, spoilt, cosseted and, not surprisingly, loved.