Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

I haven’t been able to identify any of the cases he mentions or people he refers to. His children are cited but as ‘one of my daughters’ or ‘my elder son’, seldom by name. Even in the notebook with the black watered-silk cover his brother never appears. He seems to have forgotten he ever had a brother and once or twice refers to himself as his parents’ only child.

That he hoped to be the subject of a biography is clear from the orderly way in which he kept every significant (in his view) letter he received and often made copies of his own letters to other people. Very little that is personal can be found in any of them; that, no doubt, is the way he wanted it. Everything he calculated would be of help in the writing of that biography he kept and packed into three large wooden chests. These he left to his elder son Alexander, his only surviving son, my grandfather, making clear in his will what they contained. Probably he thought a Life of Henry Nanther would be written within a few years of his death. Scientists often think differently from the rest of us as to what constitutes a good biography; a dry as dust account of the subject’s work and a few bald details as to dates of birth, marriage and death, suits them best. That this was Henry’s opinion soon emerges from an examination of those chests’ contents. They include a published copy of each one of his learned tomes, as well as papers from other haematologists, some of them very old, which he presumably believed contributed to his own findings.

Alexander was not quite fifteen when his father died. He was at Harrow. The chests remained in Ainsworth House where his mother continued to live with her daughters, or with three of her daughters, the eldest, Elizabeth, having married in 1906. The house was also Alexander’s but Lady Nanther had a life interest and there she stayed until Alexander sold it and bought Alma Villa where I’m sitting now and writing this.

The Great War came while Alexander was at Oxford. A bright boy, he had gone up at seventeen, but a year later he enlisted and within days was in France. Wounded in the first battle of the Somme and again at Mons, he returned again and again to his regiment, miraculously escaping death a dozen times, and came out of the army in 1918 as Major the Lord Nanther and with the Military Cross. He was twenty-three.

A few years later he sold Ainsworth House. His mother moved to Alma Square and the chests went with her. Though never an intellectual, Alexander had worked reasonably hard at school. Now he was utterly changed. Were the things he saw in France responsible? The dreadful sights have been so well-documented, particularly recently, that there’s no need for me to go into them here. Whatever it was that changed him, it was plain to see, plain at any rate for his mother and sisters to see, that Alexander had no intention of returning to the university or pursuing a career or even of taking a job. His father had left him a modest amount of money which, invested, brought in an income rather more than adequate to live on. He went off to live on it in the South of France.

Alexander’s lines, as his parents’ contemporaries used to say, lay in pleasant places. Fate smiled on him. In Mentone he met an American heiress, the only daughter of a pastrami millionaire. The story goes that it was Wrenbury Goldrad who first described pastrami as the New York Jew’s answer to ham. He was only too delighted for his daughter to ally herself with an English lord and winner of a distinguished decoration, and Alexander Nanther and Pamela Goldrad were married in Cannes. They had a villa on Cap Ferrat and became well-known as a fashionable host and hostess, long before such people as Somerset Maugham and various deposed crowned heads of Europe discovered the place.

She must have been a nice woman, Pamela Nanther. I would have liked for her to have been my grandmother, but she wasn’t. She divorced Alexander in 1929 round about the time of the New York market crash. By careful management she and her father were unaffected by the fall and she was able, though under no obligation, to settle a large sum of money on the husband she had divorced for continual flagrant infidelity and desertion. In the divorce court she said she still loved him and wished him well. These statements caused more shock and horror than any of the revelations about Alexander’s other women.

He married one of them, Deirdre Park, and married her just in time. My father was born three months later, in the spring of 1930, the Hon. Theo Serge Nanther. None of your dreary Victorian names for Alexander and Deirdre. They came back to England and lived in this house for a while, presumably because Henry’s widow, my great-grandmother Edith, was dying. After her death there was nothing to keep them in England and they set up house, with the heir, for some unknown reason in Geneva. The chests of Henry’s papers and the rest of the furniture from Ainsworth House remained in Alma Villa, watched over by my great-aunts Helena and Clara. Mary, two years Helena’s senior, had married a clergyman with a parish in Fulham, the Revd Matthew Craddock, in 1922.

Alexander and Deirdre came back to England a few months before the Second World War started and three years later my father began attending St Paul’s School. When he was fourteen his mother ran off with an American serviceman. Hoist with his own petard, Alexander divorced her, married for the third time and he and his new wife departed for Venice. There they lived for the next twenty years on the third floor of a dirty old palazzo on what would have been a back street if it hadn’t been a canal. I stayed there with my parents for a week in 1965. In the following year my father became Lord Nanther when Alexander died of lung cancer. I remember being fascinated, as a boy of ten, by the amount he smoked. I calculated that in order to get through eighty cigarettes a day at five an hour, which is good going, he would have had to start at 8 a.m. and have the last one at midnight. I admired his relentlessness enormously and vowed to do the same myself.

Meanwhile Helena and Clara lived on in Alma Villa, two old ladies who’d missed the chance of marriage because the men who might have married them had been killed in the 1914 war. Occasionally, on a Sunday, I and my sister Sarah and our parents would drop in on them while out for our afternoon walk and they’d give us tea, chocolate cake, Maryland cookies, meringues and no bread and butter. My father was a solicitor, comfortably off but not rich, and we lived in a big flat in Maida Vale. I was grown up before I had any idea that Alma Villa belonged to him, had been left to him by his father and would most likely one day be mine. It was just a house full of old people’s clutter where my great-aunts lived and where one got a better tea than anywhere else.

My parents, my sister and I moved into the house ourselves when Helena died and Clara asked if my father would mind if she left and went into sheltered housing. She lived on for a considerable number of years and died when she was just a few months short of her hundredth birthday. Her nephew, my father, died soon afterwards. By this time, my mother had bought herself a small house in Derbyshire close to Sarah; and Sally and I and our son were living at Alma Villa – with the three chests of documents, copies of learned works and diaries.

Sally despised ‘family’ while being careful to ensure everyone addressed her on envelopes as the Hon. Mrs Martin Nanther. What she would have been like if I had inherited the title while she was still with me I’d rather not imagine. Long before my father died she had left. She was a committed member of CND, went briefly to prison for cutting the wire on the perimeter of a Suffolk missile base, and in the mid-eighties departed to live on Greenham Common and never came back. I haven’t seen her since 1989 but I understand from what I hear about her that in whatever commune or collective she happens to find herself she insists, despite our divorce, on being called Lady Nanther.