Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

Did they ever have that talk and did my grandfather learn what the monstrous things were? If he did he either didn’t pass them on to my father or my father didn’t pass them on to me. Before he could come home, he was dead. He died in June. But that letter was what fixed me. Sarah was right. I’ve been amassing Henry Nanther memorabilia ever since. Fortunately, he obviously wanted his ‘life’ to be written, and left behind him all the diaries, letters and works of his own he calculated would furnish suitable material. It’s apparent, though, that he took care it included nothing that might show him in any light but that which shines on paragons. And of course there’s not a sheet of paper, a photograph or a diary note among the lot to give a clue as to what Clara meant.

No one is at home but me. The house is empty, as it always is on weekdays at this time. Jude is at the publishing house in Fulham where she works and Lorraine, who cleans for us, left an hour ago. I am sitting in my study in Alma Square, working at what used to be our dining table: a large heavy mahogany affair, six feet long by three feet six wide, its surface marred by greyish blotches and black rings where Jude and I have put down hot plates, under the mistaken impression that the other one had put down the felt underlay before laying the table. Like most people we know, we have given up dinner parties, so I have ‘commandeered’ (Lorraine’s word) the dining table and brought it in here.

Desks are never big enough. Desks are for chief executives in offices who have secretaries. On the dining table, as well as the computer and printer, are: the Shorter Oxford Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus , a stack of (fairly useless) printouts from medical Web sites on the Internet, several mountain ranges of photocopied extracts from medical books, medical books themselves, Bulloch and Fildes’ A Treasury of Human Inheritance , Henry’s notebook, three box files of his correspondence, three books from the London Library, which, incidentally, I see are due back today, and a rather sketchy family tree, created by me and full of gaps. My own line, which begins with my grandfather Alexander and ends, for the time being, with my son Paul, is there in accurate detail. My grandfather’s small brother George, who died aged eleven, is there, and so are his four sisters, Elizabeth, Mary, Helena and Clara, but I don’t yet know the names of husbands, children and no doubt grandchildren, and I must hunt for them in the records.

As well as all this are the fifty-two leather-bound diaries, in various colours, designs and sizes, Henry kept from his twenty-first year until a year before his death, his own books, photograph albums and some loose photographs. Letters about him and letters which mention him are on the table too.

He was obsessed with blood. Why? He wrote books about it but he wrote private memoranda too; curious essays that, presumably, no one else ever read in his lifetime. These are contained in a notebook with a cover of black watered silk. One of them – I have it here, it’s the top one in the red box file but like all of them, undated – starts:

I have often asked myself why it should be red and I have asked others. Among the answers given to me has been, ‘Because God made it so.’ If I had never seen it but knew of its existence, its presence and function in the human body, I would have expected it to be brown, a light yellowish-brown. But it is red, the pure scarlet of the poppies that grow in the cornfields and which I remember from my boyhood. One of my children asked me, as children will, what might be my favourite colour. I had no hesitation in replying to her: red. I cannot recollect that I paused to cogitate, to give any consideration to the matter, though I had never previously thought about it. The word ‘red’ sprang naturally to my lips and, as I uttered it, I knew I was speaking perfect truth. Red is my favourite colour. No one knows why blood is red, although its composition is of course known and pigment of this colour is present in it. To me a splash of blood is beautiful and I profoundly lack understanding of those who flinch or even faint at the sight of it.

Not in any way incriminating, though, is it?

A royal doctor who happened to be given a barony would hardly be a suitable subject for a biography unless he was otherwise interesting. He made one important discovery in his own field and thus contributed to the sum of medical knowledge, but he seems to have cured no one; I doubt if he even alleviated pain or would have wished to do so . Is that where the interest lies? Perhaps, rather, what fascinates is not only this obsession with blood but the mysteries and anomalies the biographer comes upon in every decade of Henry Nanther’s life.

I make myself a cheese sandwich and eat a tomato with it. If I intend to have a look at the house in Hamilton Terrace and call in at the London Library on my way, I haven’t much time. The House sits at 2.30 and I remember as I’m finishing my sandwich that I have the third starred question to ask.

This house that Jude and I live in, though far from an ancestral home, was my father’s and my grandfather’s but never Henry’s. His was a huge stucco mansion on the other side of Abbey Road, next door but two or three to the much prettier house of Joseph Bazalgette who built London’s drains and river embankments and not far from Lawrence Alma Tadema’s studio. It’s a mild pleasant sort of day, though so early in the year. I come down into Hamilton Terrace by way of Circus Road and pause on the other side of the street to take a look at Ainsworth House, the name he gave it. Having at one time been divided into flats, it has returned to its single owner-occupier status, the owner-occupier being a multi-millionaire property developer called Barry Dreadnought. Since buying it for three million, he has had the front garden paved with two square boxes inserted as flowerbeds and two enormous white urns each containing one of those spiky red palms. A covered way with plain glass sides and a stained-glass peaked roof runs from the gates to the front door.

I have never been inside. I wrote to Dreadnought last year asking if I could have a look at the room I calculate was Henry’s study but he didn’t answer, even though my letter was written on House of Lords paper. Will we still be able to use the headed paper after they’ve abolished us? I suppose not. I’ve never thought of that before and it slightly depresses me. If they won’t let us keep club rights and computers they’re certainly not going to let us have our paper.

The two sash windows on the second floor on the left indicate Henry’s study. Or so I’ve guessed. There’s something about the house – there was long before Dreadnought came – that troubles me, something unpleasant, I don’t know what it is. Of course it’s ugly, the worst kind of Victorian, but it’s not that which makes me uneasy. I suppose it’s that I sense there was suffering and misery within those walls while Henry and his family inhabited it, though I’ve no real reason to think there was, only a suspicion. As far as I know, Henry was happily married and, in spite of what Clara says, a good father by Victorian standards. I suppose I’m seeking inspiration when I come here to look at Ainsworth House, as I do every so often. Seeking perhaps answers to questions I, as Henry’s biographer, ought to be able to answer but can’t yet. Just the same, I wouldn’t live in that house for all its owner’s cash.

A woman stares at me out of Henry’s study window. It’s the dark unhappy face of one of those domestic slaves who look after other people’s children and send money home for the care of their own. But no, I’m imagining that. Why should she be any different from Lorraine? The millionaire shouldn’t be condemned out of hand just because he didn’t answer my letter.