Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

There are some, of course, who would say it was ‘meant’ but I’m not one of them. Not destiny and therefore inevitable. Not fate but chance. Chance that the telegram sent to him arrived in time to keep him off the train. Chance which decreed that he and Samuel Henderson and the ‘villain’ met and encountered each other in that momentous way. A strange force, but that which determines all our events and adventures. Henry saved Samuel Henderson from serious injury or even death, and the result? As a reward the solicitor gave him his daughter’s hand in marriage? That’s not how it was, of course not, that’s only the way it occurs in the romances read by Henry’s housemaid. Probably what happened was that when Samuel returned home Henry called to enquire after him. It would have been considered the most natural and courteous behaviour. It was what anyone would do in the circumstances. Nowadays we would phone; the Victorians were obliged to call at the house. The odd thing is that Henry doesn’t record such a visit in his diary. Perhaps he’s being modest. A man, if naturally humble and self-effacing, is so even in his private and personal jottings. Only Henry wasn’t humble and self-effacing. He was proud of himself, what some would call arrogant. He’d have considered calling in Keppel Street (birthplace, incidentally, of Anthony Trollope sixty-eight years before) an act of condescension on his part, a stooping. Or I think he would, but maybe I’m wrong.

It was very likely at this time that he composed the first essay in the notebook, the one on altruism. I’ve bought a more powerful magnifying glass to make his writing easier to read. It is tiny, apparently deliberately made so, and this first contribution is, frankly, rather dull. Not interesting enough to make me settle down and try to decipher the rest of the notebook with the new glass. Jude, who hasn’t read it either, calls the notebook Alternative Henry, though I can’t see anything in this first bit to justify that title.

It seems to refer to his ‘heroic act’ of a week before, or that act to have given rise to these reflections. Nothing in it is new or, I should think, original. Very little hadn’t been said before. Still, it does show what Henry thought about these things and perhaps the one interesting feature of it is the inevitable reference to blood.

Altruism [Henry writes], is there such a thing? Do we ever perform an action without thought of self? Is not everything we do done to aggrandize ourselves in the estimation of others or at least to leave them with an impression of our self-denying qualities? I believe it is. Sinful man is ruled by self in every aspect of his life. If women appear to be more altruistic this is only because they have been brought up from their earliest years to passivity, obedience, acquiescence and the placing of others first. God forbid that they should ever be removed from this sphere, but if they were and were encouraged into independence, self-determination and even dominance, their altruism would vanish and their nature come to resemble or even exceed man’s.

If I hasten to the aid of some unfortunate passer-by whose pocket has been picked, perhaps by supplying him with the few coins necessary to assure his safe arrival at his home, or enquiring after his injuries, I am merely attempting to impress him in two ways. By offering him money I demonstrate my wealth and, by ascertaining the extent if any of the wounds he has sustained, reveal my skill as a medical man. Altruism does not enter into it, for I place myself in no danger, suffer no noticeable diminution of income and, since the entire exercise takes no more than five minutes, endure no appreciable loss of time.

Indeed, it might be that I even benefit from my act. Suppose the wounded man were by some chance a ‘bleeder’? It is not likely but not impossible either. Let us at any rate postulate such a case. I should witness what I seldom have the good fortune to see elsewhere, the unstemmed and very probably unstemmable flow of blood from a wound deliberately inflicted in malice a mere few moments before. I should of course attempt to stem it, I am a physician, I should try the various methods at my disposal, but the interest to me would lie in being there on the spot, as one might say, to see the immediate reaction of subject and subject’s mental processes to his misfortune. This would be an example of direct self-benefit combined with apparent self-denial. And as I hold the wound closed – I recollect a case recorded by Grandidier of a sister holding her finger against her brother’s bleeding gum for three days to prevent the excessive and perhaps total loss of blood which might have ensued – I would reflect with undoubted pleasure on how this adventure contributed to the sum of knowledge on the ever-fascinating study of haemophilia.

Samuel Henderson didn’t have his pocket picked. He certainly wasn’t wounded in the sense Henry writes of. The ‘case’ is hypothetical, something we can be sure never happened and never would. The odds against it are too great. But if the allusion to blood is typical, there is one strange thing here. Why should this example come into Henry’s mind just at this point? Samuel wasn’t a haemophiliac and he wasn’t bleeding. A bludgeon had been used, not a knife or some other sharp instrument. Or was Henry so obsessed with his particular specialization that he applied possible instances of it to all sorts of situations? I suppose that’s the answer.

Returning to what did happen, there’s nothing to indicate the time at which the attack took place. Not late, I suppose. If Samuel was leaving the chambers of Flinders, Henderson and Cox, and Henry coming away from delivering a lecture, it was very likely no later than six in the evening. Not dark then, not on 23 May, but broad daylight. Were there no other people about? The newspaper doesn’t say and Henry doesn’t. Still, we know that for every Samaritan there are a dozen priests and Levites. Passers-by notoriously do ignore the victims of an attack or a robbery. Isn’t it true that we constantly read in the papers of tube-train passengers sitting indifferently by while one of their number is the subject of brutal assault?

At the beginning of last year I was approached by a relative I didn’t know I had with a request to supply information for a genealogical table. This craze for making family trees seems to have reached gigantic proportions. Everyone is doing it, though no one in my family seems to have done it before.

David Croft-Jones is my second cousin. His mother is Veronica Croft-Jones, née Kirkford, daughter of Elizabeth and James Kirkford, he tells me, and Elizabeth of course was my great-aunt and Henry’s eldest daughter. He seems to have begun his family tree through acquiring a new computer with a new programme that particularly lends itself to columns and tabulations. Or so I think, reading between the lines, though that’s not what he says. He says he wants to do it ‘for the record’ and so that his children won’t reproach him. As yet he hasn’t any children, he’s only been married about five minutes, but he takes his responsibility to a future generation very seriously.

I’d probably passed him round and about Westminster a good many times without knowing who he was. He’s a civil servant at the Home Office and I walk past it when I make my way to the House by way of St James’s Park. I’ve met him now, he and his wife came over for a drink last week and he brought with him the first draft of his table. It’s an ambitious project and puts my own efforts to shame. He’s not really aiming at tracing Henderson connections but concentrating on Nanthers and going back a couple of centuries. I was able to give him the names of the three wives of my grandfather Alexander (Pamela Goldrad, Deirdre Park and Elizabeth Pollock), my first wife Sally, and my sister Sarah’s husband, John Stonor.