Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

‘She could do with losing a couple of stone,’ says Jude, ‘but I suppose they liked women like that. She is lovely. Why didn’t Henry marry her?’

‘Who knows?’ I say. ‘She had a lot of money as well as looks. He wasn’t rich by the Bathos’ standards – her father was Sir John Batho – but he was good looking and a knight and a physician to the royal family.’

‘Have you got a photograph of him when he was young?’

‘There’s his wedding photograph. Is forty-eight young?’

Jude grins and says it’ll do. ‘What did Jimmy Ashworth look like?’

I’ve no idea. Will this granddaughter of hers know? At the moment I know practically nothing about this side of Henry’s life. The granddaughter isn’t called Ashworth but Kimball, Mrs Laura Kimball, so she may be Jimmy’s son’s daughter or her daughter’s daughter, and that son or daughter may have been born pre-Henry or post-Henry. In a fortnight’s time I hope to find out, while being rather afraid Mrs Kimball may by now be a very old lady indeed. The handwriting on her letter was shaky and spidery. Her daughter I spoke to on the phone said Mother was wonderful for her age, which I heard as a warning of what to expect.

I go into my study and fetch Henry’s diary and his wedding photograph, this last never framed but still in its pristine cover of embossed cream-coloured card, threaded through with white satin ribbon and with a silver curlicue design on its corners. It wasn’t in one of the chests but among Great-aunt Clara’s possessions that came to my father when she died. Jude and I sit down on the sofa and I show her the diary with its pentagrams and together we look at the photograph. The date is October 1884. They were married in Bloomsbury, Edith’s parents lived in Bloomsbury, in Keppel Street, a pleasant enough district but still a far cry from Grosvenor Square where Sir John Batho’s home was.

Henry looks very handsome in his morning coat, tall and thin, clean-shaven then. The moustache came later. His hair is plentiful and still dark, though there may be grey which doesn’t show in the photograph. Jude says his face reminds her of the first President Bush and I can see what she means. If I didn’t know how old he was I’d guess him to be ten years younger, but I expect they touched up photographs in those days just as they do now. His bride is overdressed in quantities of white satin embroidered with pearls and her veil is held in place on an elaborate structure of blonde curls by a pearl tiara. She carries what I suppose is a Prayer Book bound in white velvet with a long ribbon marker hanging down against her crinoline and a spray of white roses somehow fastened to it. Her mouth is full-lipped, her nose retroussé, her chin rather too small but she has fine eyes, large and dark.

Henry and Edith, my great-grandparents. Blood-obsessed Henry, the haematologist, and his bride less than half his age. After the pictures are taken, after he has changed into whatever travelling costume middle-aged men wore in 1884 (I shall have to find out) and she into her ‘going away’ dress with bonnet and gloves, they are off to Rome and Naples on their honeymoon. The same destinations, incidentally, as he had planned for his honeymoon with Edith’s dead sister. Presumably, in those pre-winter sports days, Austria and Switzerland would have been too cold in February.

‘What happened to Jimmy Ashworth?’ Jude wants to know.

‘Discarded,’ I say. ‘Sadly, that’s what happened to kept women. It’s very unlikely Edith ever knew of her existence.’

‘I’m getting to dislike Henry.’

I smile and say that though he may have been charming, he wasn’t a likeable man. But he was nicer once, before the events of 1879. These were both terrible and wonderful. We’ve all heard stories of people who’ve missed a flight by getting to the airport two minutes late and an hour later the plane’s crashed, with no survivors. Something like that had happened to Henry when he was in Scotland with Hamilton for hogmanay five years before he was married.

4

No one shall be a member of the House of Lords, says the Bill, by virtue of a hereditary peerage. The holder of such a peerage shall not be disqualified by virtue of that peerage from voting at elections to the House of Commons, or being elected as a member of that House. When the Bill becomes an Act it shall come into force at the end of the Session of Parliament at which it is passed and it’s to be called the House of Lords Act, 1999. And that’s all, a very simple Bill. Getting it through, though, will be far from simple.

Some peers, and not necessarily those with peerages dating back many hundreds of years, see themselves as having a God-given right to rule. Not that they can do much ruling in there, not that any of us can. With the Government having such a huge majority in the Commons almost anything we decide on can be overturned. What we can do is delay and revise. No doubt, it’s fine to be a life peer. As yet it’s the media alone, muttering and growling about appointees and prime minister’s cronies, who feebly question their right to be where they are. That may change when the militant hereditaries sharpen their weapons. It’s still something to be a hereditary whose ancestor was a pal of Charles I or married to a mistress of Charles II, but it’s all so long ago everyone’s forgotten how it came about in the first place. We, the hereditaries whose peerages have come to us through great-grandfathers and grandfathers being ambassadors, colonial governors, field marshals, admirals, cabinet ministers and, as in my case, a royal doctor, we are the ones who fall between two stools, our peerages neither hallowed by time nor redeemed by the knowledge that we were personally chosen.

I say all this to Paul over lunch in the Peers’ Guest Dining Room. I wouldn’t have dreamt of holding forth on the subject if he hadn’t asked me. He seems not to like what he’s heard, a reaction I’ve often noticed in him when he’s been insistent about getting information. It’s as if he expects the narrator to improve unpalatable facts for his sake. Someone – was it T. S. Eliot? – said that human beings can’t stand too much reality. Paul can’t and, as always, I wonder if it’s because Sally and I split up when he was only six and if that was the first reality he taught himself not to face.

‘I shall never call myself Lord Nanther,’ he says.

I tell him with a facetiousness he brings out in me that he may change his mind about that, he’s got a long time to wait as I’m only forty-four.

‘Titles will go,’ he says. ‘That’ll be the logical next step. You’ll get what happens in Europe where lots of people are counts or whatever but everyone else has forgotten it and only snobs call them by their titles.’

‘You may be right.’

‘Yes, well, I’m right in two senses. I’m right when I say you shouldn’t have a voice in here just because your great-grandfather wrote out a few prescriptions for a royal highness and it’s right that this year will see an end to it.’

‘You have a harsh way of putting it.’

Paul smiles rather grimly. He has a harsh way of putting most things, he enjoys reproof, even mild reproof, and seems to flourish on it. He loves being told off. I dare say I’m quite wrong in saying his skin is as thick as a rhinoceros’s, psychologists would tell me that’s only a carapace over his sensitivity, to which I’d reply that he could fool me. Paul is nearly nineteen and clever, a student at the University of Bristol, and with his armoured outside, quick grasp, it seems to me, of everything he turns his mind to and readiness for the fray, he’ll make an ideal politician one day. By then, to get into the House of Commons, he won’t even have to renounce a peerage.