Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

Hardly ‘little’ today. Considering the ‘establishment’ she kept up, I’d be surprised if my great-great-grandmother knew much about choosing suitable servants, but Henry seems besotted with the Henderson. They can do no wrong. He records dining alone with Lionel Henderson in a hotel, escorting Mrs Henderson and Edith to a dance given by Dorothea Vincent, and, more significantly, transferring all his legal business to Samuel’s firm. One of them he obviously valued above the others. In August he proposed to Edith and was accepted; this almost exactly one year after proposing to Eleanor, probably in the same room.

Did he place that ring on her finger, the one taken from her dead sister’s hand? He must have done. Did she ask if she was second-best, if it was only that she reminded him of the woman who was gone? I don’t know. No one knows. There seems to have been general rejoicing in the family. Louisa Henderson wrote to her sister-in-law, now returned home to Manaton, that ‘Providence’ – my great-great-grandmother was devoted to Providence – sent Henry to them in their trial and has now ‘set the seal on our satisfaction’ by wishing to ‘ally himself more closely with our family’. Eleanor doesn’t go unmentioned. She would have ‘rejoiced to see her beloved Henry comforted and destined for a happy future with our dear Edith. Don’t think me foolish, dear, if I say she knows.’

Why did Henry propose? There are a number of possible reasons. He liked the Hendersons. No doubt he’d sat many evenings alone or almost alone with Edith, talking about the dead girl. The two young women were quite a lot alike to look at, both fair and well-built, but Edith was prettier and had the large, if not the dark eyes, of Olivia Batho and Jimmy Ashworth. She may, too, have been ‘gentle, quiet and charming’. Henry had a house, he needed a wife, and here was a compliant, trouble-free woman, who would cause him no more problems than her sister would have done. It was time he married, more than time. In two years he’d be fifty.

‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ says Jude. Her dislike of Henry seems to grow every time we discuss him. ‘He was up to something. He’d probably found out in some underhand way that she was likely to inherit her aunt Dorothea’s money. And there’d be more of it now her sister was dead.’

11

I am alone in Alma Villa, looking at a bunch of letters sent to me by David Croft-Jones. The address on his covering letter, thanking me for dinner at the House, isn’t far from here, a garden flat in Maida Vale. For some reason I thought he lived in Westminster. Jude wasn’t surprised, she’d found out while I was off to the division lobby, and is over in Lauderdale Road now, having coffee with Georgie. She’s gone on foot. Someone or some newspaper has told her walking is the best form of exercise and it’s all part of her new health regimen.

We’re very happy. We haven’t been as honeymoon-happy as this for at least four years. I ought to be thankful and not bother with analysing it. And I am thankful, but… All the unhappiness we’ve had, all the rifts between us and all the silences, have been due to Jude’s passion for a child. There, I’ve put it into words. It’s true but not entirely true. I’ll rephrase it. All our unhappiness is due to my not being able to cope with Jude’s passion for a child. I suppose I feel that if two people love each other and live together and marry they ought to go on loving each other through adversity. Adversity ought to strengthen their feelings, it’s the old marriage service stuff about better and worse and richer and poorer. It doesn’t work for us. Am I really saying we can only be happy when things are going well? Or we can only be happy when things are going well for her ? The truth, and I’m ashamed to confess it even to myself, is that I think I ought to be enough for Jude, just as she’s enough for me.

*

Today is the fifth day of the Committee Stage of the House of Lords Bill and we’ll probably be late, later than we were on Tuesday, but I’ll not go in until Jude’s come back from Georgie’s and we’ve had lunch together. Meanwhile I read the not apparently very interesting letters David has sent me. They were sent to Veronica from her first cousins, the Craddock women, Patricia and Diana, the daughters of Henry’s second daughter Mary. I’m now in possession of a great many letters Veronica received from her mother Elizabeth Kirkford, her aunt Mary Craddock and these first cousins. That makes me wonder why there don’t appear to be any from Veronica’s sister Vanessa. Did the two women live so near each other letters weren’t necessary or was Vanessa like her grandmother and never wrote letters? That Veronica didn’t keep them isn’t the answer. It looks as if she hoarded everything that came to her through the post. Of course the existence or non-existence of these letters is irrelevant to Henry’s life, I’m sure. It’s just that when you’re researching for a biography all kinds of odd little questions keep coming up and, if you’re like me, you want to solve them even if they’re only distractions.

David has also enclosed the latest version of the family tree and two photographs. These have the relevant details written on the backs of them in his neat civil servant’s hand. One is of Patricia Agnew and her daughter Caroline and the other of her sister Diana Bell with her husband and their two little girls, Lucy and Jennifer, born in the sixties. It may be a bad photograph but Patricia looks heavy-faced and with an outsize chin while the child is plain, more like a boy than a girl. The Bell family are all handsome, their good looks not of the Nanther type, and the little girls are very fair. These people, my cousins, are rather too far removed not only from me but from Henry to be of much interest – not a question that must be solved. Not one of his grandchildren was born in his lifetime, the result of marrying so late. All there is to be said of the people in the photographs is that they are healthy looking and apparently prosperous. There’s nothing astonishing in the letters, but in one from Patricia Agnew a small query arises. I must ask David about it.

Dear Veronica,

I didn’t write to you when your baby was born. Frankly, I was just so afraid that all might not be well and I might put my foot in it. Now Diana tells me David Roger is quite all right and I am so happy for you. I know that things aren’t what they were and all sorts of things can be done to help these people lead normal lives but it would still be a grave handicap.

Tony and I couldn’t be happier for you now that things have turned out all right. I’m sorry if I’ve said too much but perhaps that’s not important in a private letter. You’ll burn it, I’m sure.

I do hope to have the chance to see young David one day. How sad it is we live so far apart. Give my best to Roger and my fondest

love to yourself,

Pat

I check on the tree and find that Veronica was forty-three when she gave birth to David in 1960. Patricia Agnew had presumably been afraid of Down’s Syndrome, knowing that older women are many times more likely than younger ones to give birth to affected children. Did they know that in 1960? Did they have amniocentesis by then to discover it in the foetus? Patricia Agnew sounds like a pessimist to me or maybe just a very nervous woman if she was so confident her cousin would have a Down’s Syndrome child without any evidence for it. But wait a minute, there was evidence for it, or evidence perhaps in Patricia’s eyes. There was Billy, Henry’s young brother, the little boy who spat blood on to his pillow. If he didn’t have Down’s he had something Patricia must have believed – her mother must have told her – David could have inherited. Anyway, it’s probably quite unimportant.