Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

I can understand people putting the best possible construction, for the ears of outsiders, on the behaviour of their husbands or wives or children or even parents. It’s natural not to want to be closely associated with cheating or lying or even with failure and thriftlessness. But a grandmother? Does it really matter how one’s grandmother behaved? Is it of any account, at the end of the twentieth century, that one’s grandmother in the nineteenth was less chaste than she might have been? That she was a gold digger? A kept woman? Some people would be proud of it, seeing it as an interesting feature of their ancestry. Not Laura Kimball, who begins by telling me Henry was taken to Jimmy’s ‘apartments’ by a friend who introduced them. Could Henry have seen the Famous Beauties postcard? This was some time in 1874 when Jimmy was nineteen. I ask where the apartments were but Laura doesn’t know. All this, she explains, was told her by her own mother, whom I at once suspect of doing a good deal of doctoring of the facts on her own account. What very likely happened was that the friend had originally ‘kept’ Jimmy, had possibly taken her off the streets, and when he grew tired of her – or planned to marry? – passed her on to Henry.

Henry was ‘madly in love’ with Jimmy and, of course, she with him. ‘They were made for each other,’ says Laura. ‘Dr Nanther desperately wanted to marry her, he proposed over and over, but she always said no.’

I asked why this was, considering they were in love.

‘Dr Nanther’s father was against it. He absolutely forbade his son to have anything to do with my grandmother. That was why they had to meet in secret. That was why he took that little house in the back of beyond – well, it was then – so that it wouldn’t get back to his father.’

I nod sympathetically. There is no point at all in telling her that by 1874 Henry was thirty-eight years old, hadn’t received an allowance from his father for more than a decade and, most significantly, the old mill-owner who was bedbound and paralysed through stroke two years before, had died in 1873. Henry’s reason for not marrying Jimmy Ashworth was that men of his standing didn’t marry women in her position in the 1870s. In their eyes there were three sexes in the world, men, good women and fallen women. The good woman in his life was Olivia Batho, she was up on a pedestal, while Jimmy, if she’d ever been on one, had fallen off it long ago.

If she thought she could get away with it, Laura would probably try to persuade me that relations between Jimmy and Henry were entirely chaste, a matter of Henry occasionally coming to tea with the great love of his life but never laying a finger on her. Perhaps she knows that would be too much even for me to swallow. She gives me a searching look as she admits she has no photograph of her grandmother with my great-grandfather. Henry, of course, took good care none was taken. In those days photography was a long and involved process, very different from today, and easily avoided. She tells me about the jewellery Henry gave Jimmy, some of which is in her possession. Would I like to see a photograph of her daughter wearing ‘a beautiful star brooch of real diamonds’? I say I would, though I doubt the diamonds. A man who gave his first fiancée’s engagement ring to his second wouldn’t give diamonds to a mistress.

‘They fixed up a marriage for him with a Miss Eleanor Henderson,’ Laura says. ‘He was heartbroken and many an evening him and my grandmother spent desperately thinking of ways to get him out of it, but they’d tied him up too tightly for that.’ I ask her who ‘they’ were and she says Henry’s father and Mr Henderson, who were ‘business associates’. ‘His engagement to this Eleanor was announced in the August and him and Jimmy were forced to part.’

That last bit sounds pretty accurate. As far as I can recall, the pentagrams come to an end at about that time. Janet chips in now to remind me that Jimmy got married two months later. Leonard Dawson, she says, had been her faithful swain for more years than she’d known Henry, but obliged to worship from afar.

‘They’d call him a stalker these days,’ says Laura, ‘always hanging around her, following her about, standing on the street where she lived, gazing up at her windows.’ Alarmingly, she sings a couple of appropriate lines from My Fair Lady in a cracked soprano. ‘Well, when Dr Nanther – he was Sir Henry by then – when he had to give her up and she had to give him up, she naturally turned to Len. I suppose you could say she took him on the rebound.’

‘What happened to the house?’

‘The house?’

‘In Chalcot Road, Primrose Hill. What happened to it?’

‘It was hers, wasn’t it? Her and Len stayed there, they started their married life there, my mother was born there. Then they sold it and moved to King’s Cross.’

Relief is what I feel. I don’t know why I should, why I should care. Perhaps it’s because there’s something gloomy about having to set Henry down as a complete out and out bastard, without as far as I could see a redeeming feature. But here, now, was one. When he left her he gave her the house. More probably he continued to pay the rent of it. Did he give her the husband as well? Maybe. Leonard Dawson is described as a porter on the marriage certificate. Is that a railway porter or a hospital porter? A house, a husband and a lump sum? Five hundred pounds? Henry wasn’t quite as black as I’ve been painting him.

‘You could say she pipped Dr Nanther – that is, Sir Henry, I should say – to the post. He didn’t get married to that Eleanor till eighteen eighty-four. She’d have been your great-grandma.’

I let it pass. Pointless to engage in long explanations. Eleanor might have been my great-grandmother if she hadn’t met a horrible death and if Henry had married her, but she did and he didn’t. He married her sister. I say nothing to Laura and Janet about this. A waiter comes with the tray of pastries and they help themselves. The screen clears and gives the result of the division: Contents, 66, Not Contents, 82. So we defeated the amendment. Laura begins to talk about her mother, born in 1884, the idyllic childhood she had gambolling on Primrose Hill, being taken for walks by her nurse in Regent’s Park.

All this time I’ve been asking myself who they remind me of but I still haven’t come up with the answer. Laura hasn’t told me when in 1884 her mother was born and I’m not going to ask. I can easily find out for myself from the records. Len Dawson and his wife, it appears, had five more children, all happy, successful and well off, according to Laura. Janet says they were a long-lived family and she’s proud to tell me her mother’s aunt Elizabeth, Jimmy’s daughter born in 1891 (the same year, incidentally, as Clara Nanther) lived on till well into the nineteen eighties.

Tea is over and we walk back the way we came. I ask if I may borrow the Famous Beauties postcard as an illustration for my biography when the time comes and Laura grudgingly agrees. ‘You wouldn’t want the postcard yet, would you?’ Janet asks.

‘Probably not for two or three years,’ I tell her, and then wonder if that’s a tactful thing to say to someone who can’t have been born later than 1923.

Janet evidently feels the same. She says quickly that the picture will be quite safe with her and she’ll see that I get it when the time comes. She also tells me about a genealogical table she’s made, which shows how philoprogenitive Mary Dawson was. Twelve children were born to her between 1903 and 1918.

‘They all grew up healthy and all had children,’ Laura says proudly.

We approach the Prince’s Chamber and Janet wants to know what that woman’s doing sitting on a chair in front of the fireplace. I explain that she’s a Labour whip and that she’s there to make sure her ‘flock’ vote, and to catch back benchers if they try to escape and go home. Neither of them believes me, though it’s true.