Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

I get on to the Government Chief Whip’s Office and say to his diary secretary that of the dates he’s offered me I’d like Tuesday 6 June. I’ve chosen this day with care. It’s the only one I was given that’s after the date Jude will know if the implants have taken or not. By then I will know. In the unlikely event of the Chief Whip offering me some sort of job – what sort I can’t imagine but it would bring in an income – I’ll be in a better position to accept or decline it. If we have to fork out another £2,500 I’ll have to accept it. And then I do what I’ve sworn to myself I never will. I start wondering how many attempts she’ll make before she stops. Five? Ten? Twenty? Twenty would amount to fifty thousand pounds. But I must stop, it’s useless going on like this…

*

Caroline Agnew is tall and big with it, a large heavy woman who must weigh fifteen stone, and looks every day, in fact more, of her forty-seven years. Her iron-grey hair is cut very short, but not fashionably, rather as if it’s just been trimmed by a very conservative barber giving a short back and sides. No make-up, of course, nothing in the least feminine. Grey flannel trousers, a jumper, a cotton jacket and shoes in the Doc Martens mode.

I expect my offer of tea to be refused but she accepts, takes neither milk nor sugar but helps herself to a chocolate chip cookie. She hasn’t asked me how I am, nor anything about myself, but after taking a sip of tea she looks round and says she supposes this was ‘the old man’s’ house.

‘Not the one your grandmother and my grandfather grew up in, no. That was sold and this one bought in the twenties.’

She doesn’t ask questions, just makes statements. ‘You live alone in this great place.’

‘I’m married. I’ve got a son at university.’

She nods, plainly not interested. I ask her about Clara.

She doesn’t seem to have kept in touch with anyone else in the family, so why Clara?

‘She was Mum’s godmother,’ she says, ‘for what that’s worth these days. Mum used to go to her place a lot, go to tea and all that with her and the other one.’

‘Helena.’

‘Right. I never did go, not then.’

‘It was this place, the house I mean. They lived here.’

She nods indifferently. ‘Mum died in a car crash. Dad was driving. He didn’t die but he lost a leg. He’s been living with me since then. I’ve got a flat, it’s little but it’s got two bedrooms. The woman next door keeps an eye on him while I’m not there. He’s had a stroke.’

I take all this in. She’s at least managed to tell me quite a lot. I ask, though prepared to be told it’s not my business, if she works, if she has a job.

‘I have to. I’ve no one to keep me.’ She doesn’t say what the job is.

We’ve come a long way from Clara. I ask when Caroline first went to see her and why, but I can already tell she’s one of those people, unattractive, brusque, graceless, who are yet the salt of the earth, who can’t be bothered with the Davids and Georginas of this world – nor come to that with the Martins and the Judes – but take for granted the need to visit and tend the aged and infirm. For them it’s as much a necessary part of life as taking a bath or eating a meal.

‘She was all alone,’ she says. ‘She was upset when Mum died. There was no one else but me.’

‘Diana,’ I say, ‘Diana and her girls.’

‘Diana never came near her until Lucy and Jennifer went away to some fancy boarding school.’ Her tone doesn’t change when she says this, she doesn’t sound resentful. ‘Then she started going and sometimes she brought the girls. I never saw them. Diana was OK, she hadn’t any side to her. I wrote to Jennifer when her mum died. I don’t know why Jennifer and not Lucy, she was the eldest, but I reckon I liked the sound of Jennifer better.’

‘Did Clara talk about the family?’

‘A bit. She’d nothing else to talk about really. Can I have another biscuit?’

‘Of course.’ I pour her a second cup of tea and one for myself and take a deep breath. Here it comes now. ‘Did she talk to you about the haemophilia?’

I expect her to say, ‘The what?’ But she’s unfazed, takes the question for granted. ‘She did a bit. She wanted to know if I knew. But Mum had told me when I was still a kid.’ For the first time she smiles. She laughs, a sound of repeated exhalations without humour. ‘She said I must tell my husband before I got married. I said I wouldn’t get married. Of course I wouldn’t. Who’d marry a person like me?’

How do you answer that? You don’t. You can’t. And I can’t now ask her if that knowledge stopped her marrying. I might if I were a doctor or an analyst but I’m only a distant cousin and biographer. ‘So you told Clara you already knew?’

She nods. It seems to be of no importance to her. She’d decided never to marry, no one would want her, so it hardly mattered. Born in 1953, she might have decided to have a child outside marriage but she evidently hadn’t. I’m stuck now, I don’t know what to ask, when she says, ‘Some of Clara’s stuff came to me when she died. Theo didn’t want it, they said, so I took it.’ She considers this. ‘Was that your dad?’

I nod. ‘Stuff?’

‘A couple of suitcases and a box with her clothes and some medical books and a lot of old photos.’

So that’s what a life comes to after it’s been lived for nearly a hundred years, a few clothes and books and photographs.

‘What sort of medical books?’

‘Not her dad’s. They were old but not that old. There was one about haemophilia and Queen Victoria and a medical dictionary. I don’t remember the others. I gave them to the church sale. Yes, and there were a couple of notebooks with black covers.’

My heart jumps. It isn’t possible, is it, that the missing notebook, the other one Henry wrote his essays in, the book that should naturally follow on from the one in my possession, that it should have turned up in these circumstances? I daren’t quite ask. I hedge. ‘They were Henry Nanther’s? Our great-grandfather’s?’

‘I reckon. I never read them. The writing was too small.’

I go into the study and take the one I have off the dining table. She nods. ‘I sent that one to Theo’s widow.’ It’s my mother she means. My father had died soon after Clara. ‘It was no use to me,’ she says. ‘I was going to send back the other one but it got mislaid and when I found it my dad was reading it. He had to use a magnifying glass but I let him get on with it. He doesn’t have much to amuse him. Well, interest him, I suppose. He’s eighty and he’s not a well man.’

‘It didn’t come back to my mother.’

‘No. I couldn’t find it. Dad may have put it out for the recycling, this is only a few months ago. I’m sure it’s not in the flat. Is it important?’

My jumping heart has sunk. I shrug. ‘It could be. Too late now.’

She looks at her watch. ‘I’d better go. My hospital appointment’s at five and it’s half-four now. I could forward you the photos if you like.’

Why am I convinced of something I certainly wasn’t before, that Henry confided things to that notebook that he told no one and wrote down nowhere else? I find I’m shaking my head, which she takes as saying no to her offer. Why, I wonder, did Clara take the notebooks? Because medicine interested her so much while it meant nothing to the others? Or was there something in it she liked reading and re-reading because it reminded her of her father? But she hadn’t much liked him, surely. I say in a rather pathetic feeble sort of voice, ‘Do you think your father would remember what he read?’

‘Not very likely. He’s got very forgetful of late. I put flowers on the grave because he nagged me to do it, he made my life a misery, and then when I said I had he’d forgotten he ever asked me.’