Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

Now is the time. Not in the interests of tidiness and not hoarding but to try to find that second (and maybe a third?) notebook.

18

The attics have disappointed me. Searching this time, I took everything out of the remaining packing cases and boxes, the stacks of Edith’s dresses, reeking of camphor, fur tippets, skirts, things I think may be called spencers, hats, their crowns stuffed with brown tissue paper. Do mothballs last a century, only shrinking a little? These have. Now I can’t get the smell out of my nostrils.

I was distracted from my task by the photographs, as one always is, even if they are of people one doesn’t know and has never heard of. Edith had labelled some or written names on their reverses: Quendons, a Dornford cousin, schoolfriends of her daughters, Kirkfords and Craddocks. The children’s school books were there, or some of them, and books of drawings made not by Edith herself but by people of no obvious talent. Was I going to keep all this?

Of course I didn’t find the missing notebook. If there was one. If Henry finished that essay. If he didn’t just stop when he came to the foot of the last page and, tired, old and disillusioned, decided that enough was enough. That’s what Jude believes. She’s sure that a second notebook, if there had been one, would have been with the first; maybe the two of them tied together with string. The clothes interest her more. Not because she’s dress-conscious in the way Georgie Croft-Jones is but because she says, when she’s had a look, that Edith’s are well-preserved and moth-free, probably quite valuable. Some museum might like them. Or we could sell them, I suggest, my mind as usual these days intent on getting money from somewhere.

Another letter has come from Janet Forsythe with a photograph enclosed. It’s of Len Dawson and Jimmy Ashworth Dawson, taken in middle age. She is seated, he standing behind her and slightly to the right. Her dress is black silk, stiff and shiny and uncomfortable-looking, but she is still handsome, her mass of hair still dark. Len hasn’t a mole on his face or a birthmark. He’s a squat rotund man with a head rather large for his body. Not hideous but no great catch either. A substitute, a compensation of a kind. Above all, a father for a child. She must sometimes have looked back to her Henry days and thought, or in words to that effect, that compared to her husband her old lover was Hyperion to a Satyr.

Question time starts a bit late today as two new peers have been introduced, one of them that Julian Brewer I met in Greece. I’m sitting in my usual place in the Chamber, half-listening to Lord McNally on the LibDem benches ask about football hooliganism while I read a letter I received yesterday. It’s from Barry Dreadnought, the millionaire, and I’ve already answered it. In fact I’ve made an appointment with him for 5.30 this afternoon, by which time I calculate we’ll have done with the House of Lords Bill for today.

He says he answered the letter I wrote him more than a year ago, but his reply in its envelope fell down behind a filing cabinet in his office. For which offence, he adds rather pompously, his assistant has been ‘admonished’. What must I think of him in failing to reply to my perfectly reasonable request to visit his home, formerly the property of my great-grandfather? What I think of him is, vulgarly, that we’ve got a right one here. He’s happy to get my phone call and will be delighted to show me round the house this afternoon. Fortunately, he’ll be at home himself, ‘pressure of business being slightly relaxed at this moment in time’. I put the letter back in my pocket and hear Lord Bassam, the Under-Secretary at the Home Office, say he’s beginning to feel like a referee. Then he says his ten-year-old son reminds him every week of the stupidity of hooliganism, a statement which is met with muffled murmurs of approval from all sides.

Now we’re on to the House of Lords Bill and the two motions which are before the House. The Duke of Montrose gets up and says in spite of the so-called simplicity of the bill of which ‘the Government were so proud’, it’s not really simple at all. He looks every inch a duke, which is more than you can say for most of them, a tall handsome man with a fine figure (according to Jude) and whenever I see him I think of his ancestor who was loyal to Charles I, called him ‘Great, good, and just’ and died horribly for his pains. The present Duke, speaking mellifluously, is suggesting that this is a hybrid bill and therefore should be referred to examiners. The bewigged clerks at the table get out their Erskine May (the great authority on parliamentary procedure) and leaf through it. The Duke moves his motion and Lord Clifford of Chudleigh gets to his feet. Lord Clifford, ancestor was the first of Charles II’s first ministers – Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale – whose surnames’ initial letters spelt the word CABAL. Lord Macaulay wrote of them that they ‘soon made that appellation so infamous that it has never since their time been used except as a term of reproach’. Lord Clifford, very different from his forebear, says it’s a pleasure to follow the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose. We’re excessively polite in here, something that causes mirth in the Commons. Among those who admit to knowing we exist, that is.

Lord Clifford defines a hybrid bill, which is a relief to most of us who still don’t know what it means. He says that hybridity is concerned with making, in a public Bill, a distinction between the manner in which the Bill affects the private interests of one or more members of a class and the manner in which it affects the private interests of other persons in the same class. In other words, it applies different treatment to some peers from that which it applies to others. The woman next to me, a Baroness who’s teetering on the edge of taking the Government whip, whispers that anyone can see with half an eye these motions are just further time-wasting moves designed to hold up the progress of House of Lords reform.

Sleep threatens and I go outside to wake myself up. If I can’t make myself stay awake at forty-four, what am I going to be like at sixty-four? Will you still feed me, will you still need me, as the Beatles said, but of course they won’t need me, I’ll have been banished twenty years earlier. Like in three weeks’ time. I return in time to hear the always witty Earl Ferrers being wittier than ever. Like Bennett’s The Card he is here in the ‘great cause of cheering us all up’ and I hope that, at least over the interim, he’ll still be here as one of the remnant while I’m gone. He’s now involved in a much funnier explanation of hybridity than Lord Clifford’s, with a long account of what might happen if he were invited to stay with the Attorney General in Wales and they both went to Paddington and bought first-class tickets for Cardiff. If the Attorney General went on to Cardiff while he was turfed off at Swindon it would be quite wrong, but that is exactly the same as what is happening to hereditary peers. All peers have a Writ of Summons, their equivalent of a first-class ticket, and therefore none of them should be thrown off halfway through their journey. After Lord Onslow, another wit always worth listening to, has said he’s supposed to be doing his duty to the nation and he’s not a corner shop in Scunthorpe (a place he often mentions with unholy glee), and Lord Pearson has pointed out that the very word ‘peer’ means ‘equal’, we vote and the motion is rejected by an enormous majority.

It’s nearly five, so I slip away and take the tube up to St John’s Wood, noting of course that the Jubilee Line still isn’t open to Westminster and I still have to change. By the time it’s open I’ll never need to go on it. The day is damp and grey, but still light. The clocks will go back in ten days’ time. But the leaves are still on the plane trees of Hamilton Terrace, still a tired-looking dark green, flapping with a leathery slapping sound in the wind. In the front garden of Ainsworth House or Horizon View two big clear plastic bags cover the palm trees against the frost which has been threatened but never comes. The outer gate in the wall has already been unlocked for me. I go up the steps under the red-and-blue glass canopy and at the unsuitable door, more like the barred and studded entrance to a medieval fortress after the drawbridge has been crossed, I pause and ring the bell.