Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

I agree, though I don’t know if this is true or not, and ask him why he thinks Henry got so passionate, he being such a cold fish normally.

‘He’d seen a lot of suffering,’ he says. ‘Bound to, being a doc. Didn’t you tell me he’d a small brother who died young?’ Lachlan has a wonderful memory. ‘And his own boy was delicate, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes, but he had tuberculosis.’

‘I daresay he thought it was just a damn’ shame. Alfonso getting wed willy-nilly, I mean. He probably liked kids. Some men do.’ He says this as if it’s a truth scarcely known to society. ‘I do myself. Don’t like to see ’em suffer. No doubt your great-grandpapa thought that poor bloody Alfonso a sort of murderer in advance, if you see what I mean.’ He glares at me. ‘He was under twenty at the time, you know.’

‘Who was?’

‘Alfonso. He was a posthumous child, born in 1886 after his father was dead, born king, in fact. His mama was Regent till he was sixteen. Dogged he was, poor devil, by attempts to assassinate him. They say he was brave. All these family defects lost him his throne.’

‘How do you know all this?’ I ask him.

He looks dour. ‘I just do. Still, he was lucky. It was only his throne, not his head.’

With that we both go back into the Chamber for the resumed House of Lords Bill and hear a newish Labour peer called Lord Randall propose that all hereditary peers should remain in the House until they die but not be succeeded by their heirs. I whisper to Lord Quirk that he’ll be in trouble with his whips for this and get a grin of complicity. We debate this for an hour or so. Then, after I’ve eaten a foul dinner in the Home Room, I phone Jude and go home.

She’s looking pale, a white and wan version of Olivia Batho, and I have the horrible idea I wish I didn’t have, that this is how Olivia may have looked when she was deserted and alone and ill. ‘I’m just tired,’ she says. ‘Would you mind if I gave up work sooner than I said?’

Of course I wouldn’t mind, I’d be glad of it. I sit beside her on the sofa and put my arm round her and she says, do I realize she’s been pregnant three times and she’s never yet felt the baby move . I forget how far she is, she tells me three months and one week and I say that as far as I remember it’s too early yet but it ought to be soon, within the next three or four weeks. She wants to know what it will feel like. She’s asking me, a man ? I tell her that so far as I know, at the beginning, it’s just a flutter, the kicks and punches come later.

‘I wouldn’t mind how much she kicked and punched me,’ she says.

So it’s to be a girl, is it?

I’m dreaming again. Not about Olivia or Jimmy Ashworth or Henry this time. And I’m not in a train about to cross the Tay Bridge. I’m in a house that I think is Grassingham Hall in Norfolk, country home of the Bathos. Someone has told me it’s Grassingham, though whoever that was has disappeared and I’m alone, walking along a gallery high up in the house and the wall to the right of me is hung with weaponry of a medieval kind, sabres and cutlasses and things I think are arquebuses and muzzleloaders. Over the gallery rail I can see down into misty depths but, through the cold haze, engines and instruments are visible, part of a great wheel, the top of what may be a guillotine, a section of some metal structure covered in spikes. It’s like one of those Piranesi prison pictures, grim and menacing.

I am looking for something and my unconscious mind knows what, but in some strange way I’m aware that my unconscious hasn’t told my consciousness what that something is. When I find it I will know, that at any rate is plain to me. The passage goes on after the gallery is passed and now there are doors on either side. I open one door and then another and look inside. It’s getting dark, it’s dusk, and there are no lights on. I look for electricity switches, gas brackets, oil lamps, candle sconces, but I don’t see any. If you want light in this place you have to bring your own.

The rooms I look into are bedrooms, full of dark furniture with white curtains and counterpanes. Outside their windows the sky is a clear blue-grey like the inside of a mussel shell. I open a third door. At first I think someone has drenched this room with water or rain has come in through a hole in the ceiling, for everything is soaking wet, the bed, a nightgown on the bed, the pillows and covers, the rug on the floor and the floor itself. I can see the wetness gleaming a little though the light is no longer strong enough to show me colours. I take a few steps into the room and touch with one finger the sodden nightgown, dipping it into a pool that lies in a fold and bringing the finger close to my eyes. The wetness is black. When I smell it I smell iron and when I taste it I taste blood. The room, the bed, the nightgown, the rug, are soaked in blood as if something has had its throat cut in here or the someone who wore the nightgown has…

I wake up soundlessly but with a violent jerk. Jude isn’t there but the bedlamp on her side is on. The bed isn’t soaked in blood but there’s a lot of it on the sheets and a big still damp stain where she’s been lying. I sit up and for about a minute I do absolutely nothing. I don’t even think. My mind is blank, a reddish-black screen. Then I get up and go into our bathroom. Jude’s lying on the floor, naked and bleeding and weeping, her nightgown, which looks quite a lot like the one in my dream, thrown into the bath.

I say, absurdly, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,’ and I go back into the bedroom and dial 999 for an ambulance.

She’s in the hospital overnight and for one day and another night. They don’t know why she lost the baby or why she always loses babies. They tell her there was probably some defect in the foetus to account for it, as if this is comforting. Her obstetrician says it certainly doesn’t mean she can’t conceive again and carry a child to term.

To me she says bitterly, ‘Funny, isn’t it, I’m actually using those words “my obstetrician” like other women do. As if I’d had a baby. I looked the word up in the dictionary and it comes from the Latin, obstetrix , a midwife. I looked it up at home when I thought I’d really have a baby this time. And I’ve never had a midwife, I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to one. I was happy when I looked the word up. I was starting to be happy.’

I can never think of anything to say to her but I say all sorts of things just the same. That I love her, that she’s all in all to me, that it hurts me to see her so unhappy. Then she starts apologizing to me for not giving me a child . I’d like to say I don’t give a toss about a bloody baby and I’d ten times rather not have one, but that wouldn’t help. I’m steeling myself to ask her if she wants to adopt, if she wants us to try for a child from Vietnam or Peru or whatever.

Once she’s home friends come and see her, her mother comes and her sister. Then the Croft-Joneses turn up. They’ve left the Holy Grail behind with David’s mother. He’s conspicuous by his absence, his parents’ tact sticks out a mile, it’s worse than if they’d brought him. I wish they’d just stayed away. Just as Georgie was the most pregnant woman I’ve ever seen, so she’s now the most obvious wet-nurse, her breasts huge bolsters on that thin frame. After a while these bulbous udders begin leaking milk and damp patches form on the bodice of her skimpy green dress. Her embarrassment is a pretence, she’s immensely proud of herself, and although she’s very obviously made a pact with David before they came not to mention babies or anything to do with them in front of ‘poor Judith’, she can’t resist murmuring with mock shame that she’s got enough milk for two.