Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

‘Flowers on whose grave?’

‘Great-grandfather Henry’s.’

I’m finding this bizarre. ‘Your father?’ I say, bewildered. ‘He couldn’t have known Henry. He was only his – what? Grandson-in-law born after he was dead?’

‘I know,’ she says with her usual indifference. ‘He said he felt sorry for him.’

‘How did you know where it was?’

‘My mum used to go there. She used to take flowers to Fulham for her mum and to Kensal Green for her grandma.’

After she’s gone there comes into my head something an authority on pre-Columbian Mexico once told me. When they conquered the country the Spanish Conquistadores destroyed almost everything the Aztecs had written or painted so that only the occasional rare codex was saved. A short time later they came to regret what they’d done and did their best to replace the lost texts by recreating them from memory and much of those recollections is what survives today.

Maybe I’m going to have to rely on what a senile old man can remember. A strange old man who so pities another long-dead old man that he asks his daughter to put flowers on his grave. Did that pity come out of what he’d read in the lost notebook?

34

I’ve been invited to go back as a life peer. The call came yesterday, from a Downing Street aide. ‘The Prime Minister has asked me to ask you if you will take the Government Whip in the House of Lords.’

I didn’t expect it. It never crossed my mind. And, of course, as is the way with anything like this, you can’t think, you can’t appreciate what’s been asked of you, you can’t consider anything. The shock stops all that. I’m silent, trying to digest it and not succeeding.

‘Perhaps you’d like a few days to think about it.’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘yes. Till the end of the week?’

The end of the week is only three days off and he agrees, obviously enjoying my stunned response. It must be a nice job, his, to be in the business of giving people delightful, or at least amazing, surprises. I put the receiver back and sit there, collecting my scattered feelings, attempting to recover from astonishment and finally, after staring out of the window for a long time and palpating in my hands the Tenna egg, ask myself, yes or no?

I miss the place, I want to go back. I like the freedom of not being there, having my evenings to myself and Jude and doing as I like. I’m flattered to be asked, yet I want to keep my liberty. It wouldn’t be the cross-benches any more, no more independence, but a seat on the Government benches and obedience to a whip. How I miss the library, the beautiful dining room and even the horrible bread. And I miss too playing my small part in the government of my country. But I will have to join the Labour Party. They won’t give the Government Whip to a non-party member. Yet wasn’t I always thinking about taking the Government Whip before I was banished?

Jude comes home and I don’t tell her. Not immediately. We have a drink, or I do. She’s back on her alcohol-free regime and she’s read somewhere that what a woman eats in the first few days of a pregnancy radically affects the unborn child for life. She’s back in the land of hope and the hideous stress of waiting and not knowing, unable to keep to the neutrality of neither hoping nor fearing. As for me, I don’t know what I want any longer, I only know how base I am. Because it’s the cost I think of. That inner voice that says things to us we wouldn’t tell a soul reminds me of the £5,000 so far expended, and I answer back in the other dreadful countering voice that at least if she’s pregnant there’ll be no more immediate outlay, while if not that’s another two and a half grand gone to kingdom come. How mad we are to try to compensate for things we’ve only thought about someone. I ‘make it up’ to Jude by cooking the dinner while she puts her feet up and reads a manuscript.

We’ve eaten and I’ve drunk more wine than I should have. Why don’t I want to tell her? Because I think she’ll try and stop me, because she won’t want me out late three nights a week? If that’s so I must be seriously considering saying yes. Well, of course I am. Jude wouldn’t try to make me do anything I didn’t want to, I ought to know that. But I must tell her tonight because to wait till tomorrow would be unforgivable. I pour myself another glass of wine and tell her, abruptly. Her reaction’s not at all what I might have expected.

She gets up and comes up to me, she puts her arms round me and says, ‘Congratulations. What an honour!’

‘So you think I should accept?’

‘You’re not thinking of refusing, surely?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say.

Now that she knows she’s quite excited and keeps on talking about it. She says it’s well-deserved and she’ll like coming back herself. Taking her seat below the bar with the other life peers’ wives and husbands. That’s why the Chief Whip’s asked me to lunch on Tuesday week. Didn’t I think of that? I know her so well that I see the change in her face when she talks of nine days hence. I hear the tiny faltering in her voice no one else would notice. By then, before then, she’ll know if it’s success or failure this time. Whether the blue line’s there or not.

If it’s not there now it surely will be next time or the next, another five grand later. That’s what I think of when I wake up in the night and Inner Voice, nasty, insidious and coldly practical, tells me I’ve got to take this life peerage because I need the money . It’s ten thousand a year expenses, twelve if I struggle, and it’s tax-free. Never mind idealism, high-mindedness, working for what I believe in. Think of the money. And if the final stage of the House of Lords reform leads to elected peers who get a salary I’ll have to stand for election. Because I need the money.

Georgie Croft-Jones is ill. She was perfectly fit all the time she was carrying Galahad, but this time she’s sick every day and all day. A piteous phone call came from her this morning. Would we come over? She’s so lonely and bored and low, she says. I’m not surprised she’s feeling low, for the home help David has fetched in to look after her and him and Galahad is none other than his mother Veronica. Jude suggests this evening and says we’ll eat before we come. We walk over to Lauderdale Road because it’s a fine warm evening and these streets are pretty in the spring, the gardens bright with blue flowering shrubs Jude says are tea bushes.

Veronica is in the kitchen, still in her impossibly high-heeled shoes to do her chores but makes the concession of wearing an apron over her short skirt and black and white jumper. She makes it plain when we shake hands that she expects me to kiss her; apparently we know each other well enough for that now, so I brush her scented powdery cheek with my lips.

‘Finished it yet?’ she says.

I’m at a loss. ‘Finished what?’

‘The book you’re writing about my grandfather of course.’

‘I haven’t even begun it,’ I say and then I excuse myself to go and talk to Georgie, a pathetic sight in her large white four-poster, a bowl on the bedside cabinet and another on the floor. The room smells of vomit, though the window is open and the meadow-fresh air freshener spray in evidence. I’ve never seen Georgie so thin or, come to that, Galahad so fat. He’s on the bed crawling all over her. The shape of things to come, I think to myself, and picture our inviolate bed invaded and plundered by a large vigorous baby.

Georgie knows all about the implants and exactly what stage Jude has reached. They’re talking about it and Jude’s being very frank about her hopes and fears, but I notice something new in Georgie, her marked lack of enthusiasm. Pregnancy isn’t the merry fun-ride it was the first time round. David comes in, looking equally worn out, carrying a bottle of wine and two glasses. Jude, of course, won’t have any and whatever Georgie drinks she sicks up. David and I have a glass each, nibble at small cheese biscuits which remind me of the ones they serve in the Peers’ Guest Room, and then he takes his son off to bed. Galahad yells and screams and pounds David’s head with his fists.