Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

In October, Constance Batho writes to her friend Helen Milner,

Dr Nanther called this morning, his excuse being that he had come to enquire after Mama’s health, but Mama, as he as a doctor must know, has only a common or garden cold and has not even taken to her bed. His real reason was to see Olivia – who was not at home, if you please! So he is to return tomorrow, simply of course to see Mama, whose health concerns him, and to bring her some remedy for an inflamed throat.

Dr Nanther is very handsome, very proper, very clever and very old . Well, very old to our ‘young eyes’, Mama says. He must be forty-five. And Olivia is just twenty-two. The bother of it is that she has begun fretting about getting old and missing her chances . She has been out four years, you see, and no one she likes has offered for her. She does like the Doctor, was quite put out when she came home and heard that he had called but she had missed him. Mama and Papa would like them to make a match of it. Mama, being old herself, calls Dr Nanther a young man ‘in the prime of life’. Her only objection to him, as far as I can see, is that he lives in chambers above his consulting rooms in the unfashionable (in Mama’s eyes) neighbourhood of Wimpole Street.

But he was considering a move. An entry in the diary at the beginning of December, underneath a rather large carefully executed pentagram, notes that he has been to look at a house which is for sale in Green Street, Mayfair. This would probably have suited Lady Batho’s taste but Henry doesn’t buy it and in the following February is viewing another in Park Lane. Could he have afforded the upkeep of a house in Mayfair? True, the Godby woollen mill has come to him by inheritance, but it had long since ceased to do well. Long before his father’s death a manager had been put in to run it and it had declined pathetically under this man’s management, causing among other things by the depression which followed, great distress and poverty among the mill hands. Henry would be hard put to find a buyer for the house and it would have fetched very little. In fact, he kept it and eventually it became the Nanther family’s country home. It was my father who sold Godby Hall for a pittance in 1970.

So Henry had inadequate funds to think of setting up house in this desirable area. All that would change if he married Olivia Batho, who would bring with her the personal fortune of thirty thousand pounds, a vast sum in the 1880s. I am indebted (as they say in acknowledgements) to Stanley Farrow for most of what I know about the Batho family. My great-grandfather, as usual, tells his posterity so little and not a word of any of it appears in the diaries. Because it never touched his heart? Because he simply didn’t care enough? Or had Olivia never meant much to him and had disappeared altogether from his consciousness when he met the Hendersons?

Stanley Farrow came over to me in the Peers’ Guest Room where I was having a drink with a couple of other cross-benchers, and lent towards me rather diffidently, one hand on the red-leather back of the spare chair at my table. I thought he wanted the chair, the bar was very crowded, and I said, ‘Yes, of course,’ which rather puzzled him as well it might have.

Light dawned. ‘I don’t want the chair. I only wanted to say I’ve seen your ad in The Times and I think I can give you some info. Well, it may be all nonsense, of course.’

‘You do want the chair,’ I said and I held out my hand. ‘Martin Nanther. Sit down.’

‘Stanley Farrow.’

I shifted a little way along from the others who had embarked on a discussion about European Monetary Policy. ‘You’re a newish life peer,’ I said. ‘You came in last July. I was in the Chamber at your introduction. You’re Lord Farrow of Hampstead.’

‘Hammersmith. But you’re right about the rest of it. Can I buy you a drink?’

‘I’ve got a drink,’ I said, ‘but I’ll buy one for you,’ and I ordered the gin and tonic he asked for. ‘What sort of info?’

Stanley Farrow is a little old man, in his seventies, white-haired, with a sharp elfin face, very upright as small men often are. ‘It was my wife who actually saw your ad. She said I ought to speak to you. Does the name Caspar Raven mean anything to you?’

‘He was the man Olivia Batho married.’

‘Well, actually,’ said Farrow, as if apologizing, ‘they were my grandparents.’

It’s hard to find anywhere in the House of Lords where you can be alone with someone. Meetings will be taking place round the clock in every committee room. Interview rooms are tiny and claustrophobic and viewers crowd the Television Room. The library is full of smokers. Few peers have an office to themselves and are lucky to have a fourth or sixth share in one. It was particularly busy on 20 January, because earlier in the afternoon Baroness Jay, the Leader of the House, had made a statement on the White Paper the Government were publishing that day about Lords Reform, the first positive intimation (after the announcement in the Queen’s Speech) that reform was definitely to happen.

I decide to take Stanley – we are soon on first-name terms – into the Royal Gallery. This is a vast and very grand hall with a towering ceiling, all ornamented in red and blue and gold, the floor cold marble, set about with darkly polished tables and leather chairs and sofas. It’s always cold in the Royal Gallery, the place being virtually unheatable, but at least it’s quiet and nearly deserted. The few who were in there that day were entirely uninterested in us and what we were saying. Stanley produced photographs from his briefcase and laid them on the table.

‘Her daughter was my mother,’ he said. ‘Olivia got married in 1888 and Mummy was born in ninety-one.’

One of the photographs was of Olivia in a simple Pre-Raphaelitish white gown, her dark hair loose, a sweet smile on her face. I’d like to use it in my biography, maybe on the page facing the one where Jimmy Ashworth will be, but all I could think of at that moment was that it might have been a photograph of Jude. For some reason the resemblance is far greater here than in the Sargent portrait. The poignancy comes from what Olivia’s doing; she’s holding her baby in her arms. I made a mental note that this is one Jude must never see – well, unless the impossible happens, she must never see it.

‘Your mother must be dead now, of course?’

‘She died fifteen years ago. I owe the fact that I’ve got all this stuff, these pictures and bits of jewellery and some letters’ – I pricked up my ears at that – ‘to my wife. Men aren’t much interested in genealogies, family history, that sort of thing, do you think? John Singer Sargent painted my grandmother and Vi – that’s my wife – saw it somewhere or a reproduction of it. When Mummy died she kept all this stuff, she said Olivia had been famous and you never knew who might want to know about her.’

‘Thoughtful woman,’ I said. ‘Someone does. Who are the letters from?’

‘Her sister Constance mainly. A couple from her husband – my grandfather, that is. I’m afraid that if you were hoping for any from Lord Nanther you’re in for a disappointment.’

‘Tell me something,’ I said. ‘If there are no letters from him and no photographs of them together’ – I’d made sure there weren’t, not at least among those on the table – ‘how do you know my great-grandfather was – well, keen on her?’

He’s a man who can’t keep his wife out of any conversation for long. It seems she dines with him at least once a week in here. ‘My mother told Vi. Vi was deeply devoted to Mummy, they were the closest of friends, for which of course I’ll always be eternally grateful. You see, my poor mother had a most unhappy childhood, she and her brother and sister all did, she never really got over it, she was always talking about it – to me, and just before she died to Vi – on the grounds that talking about something rids you of the burden of it. Only it never seemed to do that for her.’