Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

I went into the House at about four, met Stanley and left again at five-thirty for his home in Queen Caroline Grove. Lady Farrow was very much what I had previously expected Laura Kimball to be, round, white-haired, maternal – perhaps I had her in mind? She helped Stanley out of his overcoat and would have helped me out of mine if I’d let her. We went into a living room whose decoration and furnishings spoke eloquently of the late Mrs Farrow. She, obviously, had been the first possessor of the limed-oak sideboard and dining table, the ‘fireside’ chairs, the table lamps on which attenuated marble maidens, naked but frigidly chaste, held up parchment shades on outstretched arms. Her invisible presence was palpable. I was reminded of something a well-intentioned friend said to my mother after my father died. ‘He hasn’t gone, Sonia. He’s here in this room with you.’ Mrs Farrow was here in this room with her son and daughter-in-law. Particularly her daughter-in-law. It was soon clear that Lady Farrow’s mental processes, her heart and soul if you like, were occupied not only by her mother-in-law but by that mother-in-law’s mother too, the pair of them curiously mingled, intertwined with each other, so as almost to form one matriarchal entity.

Stanley fetched sherry. It hadn’t been offered but simply appeared, that least acceptable sherry (to me) which is as pale as Sauvignon and which you expect to be dry but when you take your first sip gives you a shock because it’s sickly sweet. I tried not to show surprise. Photographs were produced along with the twiglets. A biographer, proceeding as I do, soliciting contributions from all possible sources, soon becomes inundated with photographs. But I’m not complaining. It helps very much to have a picture in your mind of the people you’re writing about, even more to have those faces on the working surface before you. I was presented once more with Olivia in the kind of gown classical statues wear, holding her infant daughter. The ones I hadn’t previously seen were of Olivia at her wedding, Olivia with her sons, Olivia with that same daughter five years on, the year of the Sargent portrait.

‘What was her name?’ I asked.

That opened the floodgates. ‘Violet,’ said Lady Farrow. ‘Violet – the same as mine. Sweetly pretty, don’t you think? And she was such a lovely woman. It was through her that Stanley and I met, I was her closest friend, so it seemed meant that we should come together.’

So they had been married only fifteen years, these two. Stanley never became an orphan, for his mother dying provided him with a mother to take her place. A wife who, by a stroke of luck and coincidence, shared her christian name.

She seemed to read my thoughts. ‘Oh, I wasn’t christened Violet. I was christened Jean. Jean Smith. But Stanley liked to think of me having his mother’s name and now it seems as if I’ve always had it. I’m much more Violet, as you might say, than Jean. The second Violet Farrow, I always say.’

Stanley seemed to approve. He smiled complacently. Lady Farrow picked up a photograph, sighed and put it down again. ‘She had a tragic life. First that dreadful deprived childhood, then a lonely youth. Caspar wouldn’t let her see her mother, you know. He was such a cruel man, so unforgiving. After all, what did he want? He had his children, he had his place in society. Everyone respected him . But she was condemned to utter loneliness…’

‘Excuse me a moment,’ I said. ‘But which one are we talking about, Olivia or Violet?’

Lady Farrow put one finger to her forehead as if pinpointing a pain there. ‘Violet. Yes, Violet. My friend . I tend to confuse them – can you understand that? Mother and daughter, both so unhappy, both victims of a man’s cruelty.’

‘Don’t upset yourself, darling.’ Stanley laid a hand over hers. ‘Let me give you some more sherry.’

‘Thank you. I will. She was only five, you know, when her mother fled. I say “fled” because, of course, Caspar drove her to the brink. And it was only necessary for someone just that little bit kinder to come along and pull her into the abyss…’ Lady Farrow continued in this way while I wondered how to stem the flow and pin her down to what I really wanted.

At last I said, ‘Lady Farrow, all this is most interesting.’

‘Violet. Call me Violet.’

‘Violet, all this is most interesting but it’s Olivia whose early life I’d really like to hear about.’ I decided to flatter her. ‘You’re unique in knowing first hand’ – more like third hand, really – ‘what that life was like. What she felt, what sort of a person she was.’

Luckily for me, Violet Farrow née Jean Smith wasn’t offended. She smiled reminiscently, shaking her head to mitigate the smile. The lights in the room were bright enough but she reached out and pressed the switch between the feet of a malachite lady holding up a lampshade with a green Greek key border. ‘There, that’s better. Now I can see you properly.’ Words always calculated to cause unease in their hearer. ‘Olivia was mistreated from the start. Some said there was a clash of temperaments but what they really meant was Caspar was a bully and Olivia wasn’t accustomed to bullying. Quite naturally in such a beautiful sheltered girl, she was used to having her own way. They say, marry in haste, repent at leisure and poor Olivia had married in haste.’

And Stanley and Violet the Second had certainly married at leisure, very likely taking twenty years or so to make up their minds – or get maternal permission. ‘Why in haste?’ I said.

‘There was nothing like that,’ said Lady Farrow, looking affronted. I nearly laughed. I’d never imagined there was, not among the upper class in 1888. It was a different matter for Jimmy Ashworth and Len Dawson. ‘Violet said Olivia wanted to be married. She was twenty-seven, you see. That was quite old to be still single. Caspar was the first man who had asked her who she felt she could stand, apart, that is, from your great-grandfather – it was your great-grandfather, wasn’t it? – that she felt she could bear near her. She told me Henry Nanther was the great love of her life.’

‘You mean Mrs Farrow told you?’

‘That’s right. Didn’t I say? Her mother told her she was deeply in love with Henry Nanther. It was a terrible disappointment when nothing came of it. He jilted her, you know. I’m sorry to have to tell you that about your great-grandfather, I really hope it doesn’t offend you. I’m sure he was a very great man and a good doctor and all that, but he jilted my – Olivia, that is.’

Stanley intervened. ‘They were never actually engaged, dear.’

‘That’s not what she said. She said there was an understanding between them. Her father and mother knew all about it and approved. Henry Nanther was looking for a house for them, he looked at several houses in Mayfair.’ That was true. And suddenly verisimilitude was given to what she was saying. It wasn’t all imagination and memory distorted by time. ‘Olivia wanted to live in Park Lane. You can’t imagine it today, can you, anyone thinking they could live in Park Lane? She’d have been near her family, you see. They were in Grosvenor Square. Violet liked to think they lived where the American Embassy now is but I don’t know if that’s true.’

I picked up a photograph of Olivia, her parents and her sister Constance, taken against the background of a sort of summer house, presumably in the Grosvenor Square garden. Did they have a private garden? Or was this the garden of the square itself?

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ she said with a sort of dismal triumph. ‘Nothing at all. He simply dropped out of the Bathos’ lives. It was the summer of eighty-three. Poor Olivia held the dates in her memory. June the fourteenth, it was a Thursday, he was invited to dine in Grosvenor Square, and he cancelled in the afternoon. No phones then, of course – well, they were just coming in. Henry Nanther, Doctor Nanther, I should say, I don’t mean to be offensive, and by then he was Sir Henry, anyway, he sent a message by hand that he couldn’t come, he was indisposed. That’s what he wrote. Olivia said that afterwards she could never see that word “indisposed” or hear anyone say it without experiencing the most dreadful pain.’