Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

The House is packed. So were the bars and dining rooms, but everyone’s in here now. The new Lord Brewer sits rather self-consciously on the Opposition benches, hoping someone will tell him what to do. There are a number of amendments, all finally withdrawn, and then it’s time for compliments and regretful speeches. Lord Longford, who’s nearly ninety-four and has been in the House for fifty-four years, says there’s something about the culture of this place that people respond to, intellectual, moral and religious. He will vote in favour of the Bill because he shares my feeling that there must be reform, he won’t try to interfere with its passage. Lord Longford has a noble head still and the voice of an aristocrat but even he isn’t the oldest peer here. The reform measures recommended in the coming Wakeham report will probably advocate a maximum age for remaining in here and it’s more likely to be seventy-five than ninety-five. As more changes to the Bill are proposed only to collapse, I sense in the atmosphere a nearing of the end, the tide of power’s withdrawing roar. These are not the last days of the Bill but its last hours. After six hundred years those who up until 1958 were the Upper House are about to be expelled by those who came forty years ago. Within an hour or so the Bill will pass to the Commons and return here only to consider a group of Commons amendments, all probably unacceptable to the diehards. For all intents and purposes, in all reality, the deed is done.

Courtesies are being exchanged now as well as gratitude and admiration expressed to Lord Weatherill whose amendment it was to retain the 92. Lord Ferrers gets up.

‘At the end of all that,’ he says, ‘we must have a House which works and, for goodness’ sake, a House which is happy and content. Happy the Houses which smile at each other. Far too often there has been a tendency for vitriol to creep in.’

Of course, a good deal of the vitriol has come from him. He advises against voting against the Bill ‘in any great measure’ but for all that, when it comes to the final division, he doesn’t vote at all. Lady Jay has got up and begged to move that this Bill do now pass. I leave for the Content lobby, a departure for me, as my usual course is to vote Not Content, and in turning to the left and walking in the direction of the throne I fail to pass Jude below the bar, as I have always done in the past. Omens mean nothing to me, so why do I so much dislike this turning of my back on her, this walking away from her to take my place and vote for my own banishment?

The vote was won by 221 to 81. It’s all over. On the Opposition front bench Lady Miller of Hendon is in tears and Lord Kingsland holds his head back in a rictus of agony. Labour life peers aren’t cheering, just waving their order papers in triumph. I’m surprised there haven’t been more disturbances and more hooliganism during the passage of the Bill. Nothing much happened really and it passed faster than I expected. We’ve been dispossessed not with a bang but with a whimper, with tears and despair.

I say nothing about this feeling on the way home. I’d be ashamed, anyway, to voice these irrational fears. This is a bad sleep night for me and in the small hours I sit up and read. Nothing wakes Jude but even so I put the bedlamp on as dimly as I can and still see the print. But after a little while I put the book on the floor and look at her. Closed eyes can be as beautiful as eyes when they’re open, the lids as fragile as moths’ wings, the lashes lying in a dark delicate fringe on white pearly skin. Her lips are folded but not quite closed. I lay one finger an inch from them and feel the warm breath on my skin. In the dark once again, I can no longer see her, only the outline of her head and the darker mass of her hair. A surge of love for my wife doesn’t excite me at all but makes me want to hold her very tightly in my arms, only I know it can never be tightly enough. I turn over, trying to sleep, and eventually do.

The dream I have shows her to me as she was when she sat with Galahad in her arms. The child with her this time isn’t he but much older, maybe two or three years old, and he’s our child. No one speaks. The atmosphere isn’t pleasant, we’ve been quarrelling, we’ve said things that can’t be forgiven, yet I don’t know what those things were. The little boy looks at me with large reproachful eyes. Then Jude gets up and, taking him by the hand, goes to the front door and down the steps and out into the street. It’s summer and warm, the trees are in leaf and flowers are out. I stand there, holding the front door open and watching them walk down the street until they turn the corner and disappear. I know I have to follow but I’ve no shoes on and I can’t find the key or any money, and when I run down the steps barefoot I can’t get out of the front gate, it’s locked. The door slams behind me and I wake up.

It’s seven in the morning and Jude isn’t there. The dream still lingers with me and I’m absurdly frightened. I call her name and she comes at once out of the bathroom in a white towelling dressing gown. ‘I can tell you now,’ she says.

There’s only one thing it can be. A voice inside me is saying, O God, O God, O God…

‘I’m two months pregnant.’

I say stupid things, knowing as I say them they can’t be true. You had a period in September; you’re on the pill.

‘No, I’m not. I deceived you. It was bad enough me waiting to see, I couldn’t have you waiting too.’

I feel deceived, I feel I’ve been made a fool of and I don’t like it. Sally and I deceived each other all the time or tried to. No, I haven’t been spending money, I didn’t go to such-and-such with so-and-so, I wasn’t there, I wasn’t here, I didn’t hear the phone, I phoned but you didn’t answer, I never lie to you, you know that. For Jude and me things are different. Or so I thought. I thought we were open and honest with one another always.

‘Have you done a test?’ I say dully.

‘Three weeks ago.’

More deception, or am I making a ridiculous fuss? She hasn’t been unfaithful or lost a thousand pounds gambling or had liposuction. One thing, I’m only making the fuss inside and with myself. ‘You’ve seen the doctor?’ For some reason I can’t remember her obstetrician’s name.

‘When I’d done the test. I asked him if I ought to stay in bed for the whole pregnancy, I said I would if it would help but he says not.’ She looks at me almost fearfully. ‘You’re cross, aren’t you?’

I ought to say I’m not and I love her. I love the prospect of our son or daughter. But I can’t. Memories of the dream keep intruding and how mysterious she’s been lately and how excitable and ‘high’. ‘You should have told me a month ago.’ I say it like a sulky child.

‘Can’t you understand I didn’t want to disappoint you again?’

Could there be a less appropriate word? At the moment I mind more about the deception than the pregnancy but I know that will change and I’ll be back watching her and worrying and counting the days and the weeks. What was the longest time measured in days she carried a child? Ninety days, a hundred? And when and if the hundred’s past this time shall I be happy or dismayed?

It’s Saturday night and we’re at Ainsworth House, having pre-dinner drinks. The pre-dinner period has been going on since half-past seven when we arrived and it’s now nearly nine-thirty. Roma has only left for the kitchen within the past ten minutes ‘to do something about food’. The Dreadnoughts are the kind of people for whom the eating part of inviting guests for dinner is the least important. Every kind of alcoholic drink I’ve ever heard of is on offer from the bar in the drawing room, disguised on my previous visit as sideboard or cabinet in reproduction early Victorian mahogany. We are shown all over the house again, drinks in hand. I’m aware of something unusual to me in a private house. Background music is playing and it follows us as we move from room to room. It’s the kind of music that gets played in hotel lounges, always the same tunes, ‘La Vie en Rose’, ‘Never on Sunday’, ‘Un Homme et une Femme’. The conversation is on the subjects I feared it would be but I’d no conception of how much shopping people can do and how much they casually spend. Barry’s record is £30,000 in one evening at Harrods but Roma has come very close with a credit card bill for only £2,000 less after an afternoon’s wandering down Bond Street. Like Imelda Marcos, her passion is for shoes and she buys them at Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik.