Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

I’m not there to hear it, of course. Not at first. This is the first time I’ve been back since they chucked me out in November. I vowed then never to return, whatever the circumstances, but I’ve come back. I need a reason to get out of the house, Alma Villa I mean, to get away from the claustrophobic atmosphere of talk of eggs and implants and multiple births. I’m ashamed of thinking this way, of course I am, but I’m weary of being ashamed, weary of the self-reproach with which I lash myself when at home. Coming here is a change. And there’s another reason for it. I have to get back to Henry but I can no longer talk to Jude about him and the mysteries in his life. She doesn’t care, she doesn’t want to know. She pretends, she puts on a show of listening but it’s as if she says to herself, I’ll give him five minutes of this – I see her looking at her watch – and then we’ll return to the important thing, to reality . Her life now is the hugely wonderful crowning achievement she sees herself approaching, the giving of birth. What does it matter if everything is subsumed in this, career, home, me, sex, love, friends, conversation, fun? The purpose of woman’s existence is to give birth, carry on the race. And now she can do it. Thanks to the wonders of medical science she can have not just one healthy baby but two or even three. No wonder she thinks of nothing else.

So when Lachlan asked me to dinner I thought, I’ll try Henry out on him. He, at least, doesn’t want babies. He’s had six. First, though, I have the embarrassment I knew I’d have of sidling in at the Peers’ Entrance, uttering a greeting in response to the doorkeeper’s cheerful, ‘Good evening, my Lord,’ and sitting humbly down on the bench at the back where visitors wait. I’m too weary of self-reproach to remind myself that I voted for it, I approved it. Anyway, I don’t have to put up with it for long, as Lachlan appears on the stroke of six-thirty.

With his walrus face and landowner’s manner, he looks the last person to vote for the repeal of Section 28 but he’s going to. His appearance is deceptive. I recall our conversation about Richard Hamilton and Lachlan’s assertion that all men are a bit ‘queer’. Now he says homosexuality is inborn. You’re ‘that way’ or you’re not and no amount of promotion or encouragement will change you. I’m not in the mood for hearing any more about genetics just at the moment and I’m pretty sure I won’t be in the Chamber where crusty ancient hereditaries (some of the élite and elected ninety-two) are blithely confusing homosexuals and paedophiles. I’m allowed to sit on the steps of the throne where I haven’t sat since I was a boy of twelve. Someone next to me I’ve never seen before – he may be a young hereditary or a peer’s eldest son – whispers that he’s gay himself and that Earl Russell has just made the best speech he’s ever heard in the House in favour of repeal. Just my luck, I say aggrievedly, not to have been here to have heard it.

But I don’t like sitting here. It embarrasses me. Like one of those gay schoolboys Government speakers say suffer from bullying under Section 28, I feel everyone is singling me out and staring. It’s a relief when Lachlan gets up and goes out at the end by the throne and I can follow him.

It’s just like old times. The Opposition have mustered their troops, peers who never come in except when heavily whipped, and here they are hastening through the Prince’s Chamber with their wives that they’ve brought in to dinner. You’d have to be an expert to know the House had been reformed at all.

Lachlan buys me a glass of red wine and himself a whisky. I can’t reciprocate, of course. I can’t pay for dinner or share the cost. I’m no longer eligible to pay for anything in here and I ought to be pleased. Another forty or fifty quid will be saved towards anti-SMA procedures. I seriously think for a moment of telling Lachlan all about it but as quickly dismiss the idea. Instead I revert to Henry.

‘So what do you think? I mean, about the coincidence?’

He always speaks slowly and with steady precision, in the Chamber and out of it. ‘How common an affliction is haemophilia?’

I don’t know the answer. ‘The only figures I’ve got are for the United States.’ They’re the ones John Corrie gave me. ‘About fifteen thousand people out of whatever their population is – two hundred and fifty million? – are haemophiliacs.’

‘A rare disease then.’

‘The incidence has been much higher in communities largely cut off from the rest of the world, such as alpine valleys in Switzerland. And it seems to be more common among Teutonic people and Jewish people. There used to be a theory, which could be false, that haemophiliacs and carriers were more fertile than others.’

I tell him about Henry’s youngest child George, his mysterious illness, the references to his ill-health in his sisters’ letters, Alternative Henry’s cryptic allusions to it, the family’s conspiracy of silence. Why? Why?

‘He was a medico at University College Hospital? Could the lady he married have been his patient?’

‘Women don’t really have haemophilia,’ I say. ‘They have bleeding disorders but I can’t imagine a Victorian woman going to a doctor with something like that, a problem she’d just cope with at home. Besides, Henry didn’t meet the Hendersons by that route. He got to know them because he came to Samuel Henderson’s aid when he was attacked in the street.’

Suddenly I remember who Samuel’s attacker was. Jimmy Ashworth Dawson’s brother-in-law, someone Henry very likely paid to do the deed or else we’re up against another coincidence. But it’s time to go in for dinner where the talk buzzes with Section 28 and people keep coming up to our table to greet me, to ask how I’m getting on, some to say what a shame I can’t vote, they need me. The debate has been going on for more than four hours and they’re still slogging it out.

Lachlan’s been looking at some of the notes I’ve made. ‘He engages himself to Henderson’s elder daughter, the girl who bruises easily? You mention that here. Significant, is it?’

‘I don’t know. Some haemophilia carriers – they’re called symptomatic carriers – have mild bleeding problems, excessive bruising, nosebleeds, that sort of thing. The family seems to be aware of Eleanor’s propensity to bruising. If Henry knew of it he might have suspected she was a carrier. But on the other hand, she could have had a far commoner disorder like Von Willebrand’s disease or epistaxis. That he happened by chance to fall in love with a girl who was a haemophilia carrier would have struck him, as it does us, as too huge a coincidence to be viable.’

‘He didn’t marry her, did he?’

‘He would have done. She was murdered.’

There’s to be no more talk of this because a Tory pal of Lachlan’s comes to the table and sits down in the third chair, after only the most perfunctory request to ask if he may. The rest of the meal passes against a background of Lachlan and the pal arguing, not particularly amicably, as to whether homosexuals are born or made. ‘Did you hear the one,’ says the pal, ‘about the queer who went to a psychiatrist and said his mother made him a homosexual? The psychiatrist said, if I get her the wool will she make me one too?’

Nobody laughs. I think of Richard Hamilton and Henry and wonder. Can there be a gene of homosexuality, carried on one of a woman’s X chromosomes? If there is they haven’t found it yet. It’s nine o’clock and I see on the monitor that the minister Lord Whitty is on his feet.

Lachlan says, ‘Would you mind if we went back?’

I suppose I can get used to the steps of the throne. The discomfort ought to distract me from the humiliation and perhaps it will. As soon as I’ve sat down Lady Young, whose amendment this is, gets up, speaks for a few moments and says she’s going to divide the House. I hear what the Deputy Speaker says with new ears. I’ve never noticed what a resonant piece of prose it is.