Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

At some point after my great-grandmother Edith died (she was never called Louisa, and was always known by her second name), the three chests had found their way up into the attics. No one had ever drawn my attention to them, for in most people’s eyes they had lost their importance. No biographer had suggested writing Henry’s life, but I knew the chests were there and if I ever thought about them it was only to wonder how anyone ever succeeded in carrying them up fifty-six stairs. I even thought they might have been drawn up to the attic window on a pulley from outside. Perhaps they were. Five years ago I lifted the lid of one of them and saw the sombre dark-green and navy-blue bindings of several of Henry’s works, Diseases of the Blood , Haemorrhagic Disposition in Families , Epistaxis and Haemorrhagic Diathesis . We had copies of these works downstairs along with several others and at that time I had read none of them. Quite naturally, it had never occurred to me to read them, believing they’d be beyond my comprehension as, when the time came, they almost were.

I’m running down the stone staircase at St John’s Wood tube station carrying a briefcase weighed down with my great-grandmother’s photograph album: the one I believe is particularly relevant. It’s for passing the time while I’m in the House but not in the Chamber. The down escalator at this station has been out of use for months and no doubt will be for months to come. It’s something to do with the extension of the Jubilee Line which I asked my question about on Monday. Waiting on the platform, I think how good it will be when the line goes all the way through to Westminster. I’ll be able to go to the House without changing. And then I tell myself what a fool I am. I shan’t be there when the line goes through, they’ll have got rid of me.

Today the House rises for Easter and I’m only going in because I want a couple of books from the library but I may as well go into the Chamber and collect the expenses to which I’m entitled once I pass the bar. The debate isn’t very interesting and I’ve nothing to contribute, so I sit there in front of Lord Weatherill, Convenor of the Cross-bench Peers and former Speaker of the House of Commons, and behind Lord Annan and listen for half an hour. The television cameras move from right to left and left to right with their slow steady rhythm, come to the left again and linger on the minister while she’s speaking. Cameras are always on us while we’re in here but you’re only conscious of them for about five minutes on your first day. After that you take them for granted.

When I’ve done my duty I leave the Chamber and go to the library, encountering outside the Bishops’ Bar a very old Conservative hereditary, well-known for voting against women being admitted to the House in 1957. He tells me, sure he’s being very risqué, laughing so much at his own wit that he can hardly get the words out, that since the rise of feminism women no longer menstruate, they ‘femstruate’. I can’t bring myself to join in his laughter or even produce a smile. Jude has come into my mind and I’m suddenly filled with love and pity for her. The old anti-feminist tells me I’ve no sense of humour. I shake my head, collect my books and sit at one of the tables. The smell of the place reminds me of my grandfather Alexander. Peers come in here to smoke and read the papers as much as to work or study something. Visitors aren’t allowed but when they find out about all the smoking that goes on in these rooms they’re amazed it’s permitted in a library. Doesn’t it damage the books? they ask. I don’t know whether it does or not and I don’t mind the smell, though I broke that vow I made in Venice to follow in Alexander’s footsteps and I suppose I’ve had no more than a couple of cigarettes in my whole life.

Great-grandmother Edith, whose elder son he was, recorded a good deal of her life in photographs. Sepia ones up to about 1920 and black and white after that. The first photograph made in a camera was as early as 1826 but amateur photography really became possible in the 1880s with the introduction of roll-film cameras. Henry and Edith were married in 1884 and it appears that she first began taking photographs five years later, using the newly introduced Eastman Kodak box camera with its handy roll of negative paper. One of her first photographs was of her third child Helena at the age of three months in her christening robe. Did she buy the camera here? It seems unlikely. Her cousin Isobel Vincent had married an American in 1886 and gone to live in Chicago, so perhaps the Kodak was a present from her.

That picture is in another album. The one I’ve brought with me contains interior shots of Ainsworth House. A favoured hobby of Edwardians was taking photographs of the insides of their houses, over-furnished rooms kept in immaculate condition by housemaids, and these are mostly of that kind. But several of them are roomscapes with figures and the one I’m looking at is of all Edith’s children clustered together on a sofa in the drawing room. It’s a big squashy sort of sofa, covered in velvet or plush, and the children have been arranged in a human pyramid in the middle of it.

The two eldest girls, Elizabeth and Mary, aged in their late teens, lean over the back, smiling down at their younger sisters Helena and Clara who, though sitting quite far apart, are leaning the upper part of their bodies close together with their arms round each other’s necks. Between them, so that their shoulders and arms and faces make an arch above his head, sits Alexander, grinning artificially. He seems to be about ten and is obviously not enjoying this at all. All the girls have long curls and hair ribbons and wear versions suitable to their ages of pinafores over dark or striped dresses. Alexander is in a Norfolk jacket and bow tie. In front of him, on a low stool, sits George, the youngest child, the sick child. He is in a sailor suit which does nothing to make him look healthier or more robust. He leans against his brother’s knees, one arm along the sofa, the other bent into his lap, his legs tucked under him, and he is smiling a gentle, rather sad smile. There they all are, the six children, preserved for ever (or for as long as the album lasts) by their mother’s Kodak.

I turn the page and there it is, Edith’s photograph I knew was in the album but which I haven’t looked at for years. It’s of Henry in his study, seated at his desk but looking at the camera, and, in front of him, on the desk, is his celebrated work, Epistaxis and Haemorrhagic Diathesis . Possibly it has just been published and this copy has been sent or given to him. Possibly it is to record the arrival in the house of this book that Edith has taken the photograph. If this is so the date of this photograph will be sometime in 1896, and there will have been other events for Lord and Lady Nanther to celebrate, for it was in that year that Henry received his peerage and his younger son was born. He looks pleased with himself, a still handsome man of sixty who has just published another book. It’s hard to tell from the front but it seems he has all his hair, though it has become quite white. He seems proud, self-satisfied, but pleasant enough; and in the curve of his mouth and his interested eyes are hints of the famous charm. There is absolutely nothing in this picture to give a clue as to why his youngest daughter referred to him baldly as ‘Henry Nanther’.

After we moved into Alma Villa with our parents, Sarah and I found the trunks in one of the attics. No one else ever went up there. We only opened one of them. Inside we found things which weren’t of much interest to young people: diaries, bundles of papers and letters, brown, faded photographs and photographs in thick albums with cracked, padded leather covers and brass clasps, certificates and diplomas in manila envelopes and books of which we had copies downstairs. Disappointed, we got no further than the top few layers. Almost three decades went by before Sarah sent me Clara’s letter and I investigated the trunks again.