Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

Luckily, Edith took a good many photographs of the exterior of her house as well as the interior. The door was painted panelled wood then with an etched glass pane in the centre of the upper half. And I’m sure her doorbell worked from an iron pull and rang rather than what this one does, twittering like a nest full of fledglings. Barry Dreadnought answers it himself and almost immediately. He’s a fat man but muscular and tough-looking, his face the kind that would be all right on a woman; as things are, the little nose, fleshy mouth and short upper lip give him a sinister air. His hair, though receding from a massive forehead, is rather long, dark brown and curly. He’s wearing jeans, belted in below his belly, and a bright-red polo shirt with a designer logo on the breast pocket. I realize that I, in my House of Lords uniform of dark grey suit, white shirt and discreet tie, must appear outrageously formal in his eyes. Maybe I’ll be expected to dress like him after the Bill of Banishment has gone through. Maybe I’ll want to.

He apologizes all over again for the mislaying of his letter, only this time it’s not the filing cabinet it’s fallen behind but the back of a drawer in his assistant’s desk. This assistant doesn’t seem to be in the house and nor does a wife, child or indeed anyone else at all. I am alone with Barry Dreadnought and if I wasn’t six inches taller than he and probably about five years younger, I wouldn’t much like it. His name isn’t exactly a misnomer. I daresay he isn’t afraid of anything much, but he instils fear into a companion. I couldn’t claim to dread nought in his company. If I were a woman I’d think him not the kind of person I’d like to meet in an alley on a dark night.

And the house, now I’m inside it, isn’t at all what I expected. It isn’t what Jude would call a friendly house, though it’s warm enough, far too warm for my taste. It was fairly new when bought by Henry, probably hadn’t been built more than twenty years, and the eighteen sixties weren’t good years for architecture. The rooms are large but still too small for the height of the ceilings. Dreadnought, or the interior designers he employed, have aimed at Victoriana seen through twenty-first century eyes rather than how it actually might have been, or that’s how it looks to me. And, worse, it’s almost a parody of eighteen sixties décor so that you feel those designers were laughing up their sleeves at him. Everything is too ornate; too bright and crude, even the ceiling mouldings picked out in pink and green and gilding. The drawing-room carpet is Stuart tartan, as if they’d had Balmoral in mind. There are wax fruit and stuffed tropical birds under glass domes, lengths of densely embroidered fabric hanging over cupboard doors, pelmets (I don’t know what else to call them) suspended from mantelpieces, busts of Roman emperors and busts of soulful maidens, masses of Venetian glass and more occasional tables than most people have teacups.

‘Pretty well in period,’ says Dreadnought. ‘Don’t you agree?’

I nod non-committally. If I told him what I really think he’d throw me out. Then he calls me ‘my Lord’, which would silence me if the décor hadn’t already done so.

‘This way, my Lord,’ he says, showing me to the kitchen, which I don’t much want to see, it being as different from how Edith’s cook’s kitchen would have been as laminated plastic is from cast iron. Only it isn’t laminated plastic. All the surfaces are highly polished pink granite. Burnished copper pans hang from the ceiling along with a couple of what look like hams. These are plastic, as Dreadnought explains after asking me to guess whether they’re real or not. I haven’t guessed. I’ve said I couldn’t give an opinion from this distance, but he rejoins with a smirk that that’s tantamount to saying they’re real.

‘No one ever guesses right,’ he says triumphantly. ‘The only way you could tell would be if you tried cutting them with a knife.’ He smiles craftily. ‘And I’d like to catch anyone doing that.’

Again I’m thankful for Edith’s photographic talents. Every room in this house has been photographed. I’m half wishing I’d brought her pictures with me, though showing them to Dreadnought would have been almost cruel, they’re so unlike what he’s achieved.

‘I’ll lead the way, shall I, my Lord?’ he says, and we go upstairs.

There is someone in the house, after all. It’s the dark-skinned woman I saw at the window of Henry’s study. She’s cleaning one of the bedrooms, or at any rate she’s dusting it, as there’s no vacuum cleaner in sight. When she sees Dreadnought she stands still with her head bowed. He knows what she expects from him and she gets it.

‘Run along now, scoot,’ he says. ‘Chop, chop.’

She does actually run. Dreadnought watches her departure with some satisfaction. We go into what Dreadnought calls the master bedroom. It’s at the front. In fact, it covers all the front and is obviously the old principal bedroom and another knocked into one. Here all Henry’s children were born. Whether Edith had difficult or easy labours isn’t recorded, nor is the number she failed to carry to term or were born dead, if any. One thing is for sure, they weren’t delivered in this vast fourposter, festooned in striped satin and pale pink lace. Dreadnought has an erotic picture of nymphs and satyrs on the inside of its tester but at least there are no mirrors on the ceiling. He is obviously awaiting admiration but all I can manage is to mutter, ‘Very nice.’

Who slept where I’ve no way of knowing. There seem to have been ten bedrooms if you include the servants’ rooms on the second floor, but one of the ten became Henry’s study and under the Dreadnought administration (or before) four turned into bathrooms. One of these bathrooms has peacocks on its window blinds and a bunch of green plastic bananas suspended over the handbasin. The study, which is really what I’ve wanted to see, overlooks the garden full of elaborate topiary-work animals at the back and the street at the front, for it covers the entire right-hand end of the first floor. It’s still a study – Barry Dreadnought’s. He has filled it with computers, printers, screens, photocopiers and other technological marvels so that it’s impossible to imagine it as it appears in Edith’s photograph. Where now is all that mahogany and brown velvet, ormolu and chinoiserie, leather and gilt inlay, pen holders and inkwells, the turkey carpet, the bearskin rug, the books and the crystal skull? Gone with the wind. Disappeared into other people’s homes, antique shops in Church Street and junk shops in Kensal Green, ground up in the mills of refuse disposal trucks.

Barry Dreadnought is describing to me – or I think he is – the vast quantities of software and CDs he possesses for doing almost everything possible ‘on line’. I haven’t heard of any of it but I nod and say it sounds very interesting, a comment my mother taught me to make when shown a work of art one can’t in honesty admire. Do I want to go on up to the top floor? I shake my head and say, I hope politely, that I’ve seen all I came to see.

‘You’re welcome any time, my Lord,’ he says. ‘Just give me a bell. Now you’ll want to go round on your own to take your photos.’

He’s astounded when I say I haven’t brought a camera and he gives me the kind of look you’d give Rip Van Winkle if you met him in the street. ‘You know your own business best. But I’m going to insist you bring your partner over to dinner in the very near future. You have got a partner?’

‘I’ve got a wife,’ I say, rapidly imagining Jude’s reaction to the idea of wasting an evening here.

Dreadnought repeats his offer and says his partner will contact my partner and fix a date. ‘That’s a promise, then.’