Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

In his absence, as if a child of his age could understand, Georgie plunges into an account of her symptoms, the opinions of several doctors and various peculiarities of her reproductive organs. Jude seems fascinated. I creep away and find Veronica in the living room, now divested of her apron, drinking gin and reading the Spectator.

‘That child needs a firm hand,’ she says, for Galahad’s screaming surely fills every corner of this not very large flat. ‘Imagine two of them here. They’ll have to get a house before the new one comes. You and your wife have the right idea.’

I eye her enquiringly.

‘Not having children. Each generation seems more trouble and expense than the last.’

I’ve no comment to make. I decide to turn the couple of hours we’re here to my advantage. ‘I’ve recently met your cousin’s daughter Caroline.’

She raises her eyebrows, says nothing.

‘Her father is still alive. Did you ever know him?’

‘Of course I did. I was a bridesmaid at their wedding – well, a matron of honour. I was married myself by then. Very good looking which is more than Patricia was, big gawky creature with a small head.’

‘Her daughter’s a bit like that.’

‘I haven’t seen her since she was six.’ Veronica evidently has no interest in Caroline, what has become of her, where she lives. Malicious scandalmongering is more in her line. ‘Tony,’ she says, and I have to think whom she means – of course, Anthony Agnew, Caroline’s father. ‘Tony had been drinking when he crashed that car. I know that for a fact, though it never came out. He wasn’t the one to get killed, oh no.’

‘He lost a leg,’ I say.

‘Well, he was asking for it, wasn’t he? Of course he was one of those who had a good war.’ I’ve never actually heard anyone say that before, only read it. ‘Major Agnew, which he never would have been otherwise. He was a car salesman but he lost his job after the accident.’ She takes a big swig of her gin and I wonder if I should take to it. It seems to preserve people wonderfully. ‘Patricia’s father conducted the service at their wedding, and her mother was there too, my aunt Mary. My own mother was dead by then. Aunt Mary was a funny old bat, a religious maniac.’ She preens herself, passing a red-nailed hand across her golden cap of hair. ‘Women aged so quickly in those days. Bobbing and crossing herself at the wedding she was, on her knees when everyone else was up singing hymns.’

‘I’m going to meet Anthony Agnew,’ I say, though it’s only this minute that I’ve thought of doing that. ‘I’m going to have a talk with him.’

‘Whatever for?’ Veronica sounds quite annoyed.

‘I think he may have something to tell me about Henry Nanther.’

‘Why on earth? He died years before Tony was born.’

I am saved from answering by David’s coming into the room with the wine bottle. Galahad is still crying. ‘That’s right, darling,’ says Veronica. ‘Shut the door on him and let him get on with it. It’s the only way.’

It’s extraordinary the smug satisfaction people like her derive from being unkind to babies. I ask her about her aunt Clara. Was she at that wedding?

‘She may have been. I don’t remember. She certainly wasn’t asked to mine and nor was Helena. We’d quite enough family, Roger and I, without asking those two funny old things.’

‘I gather Clara wanted to be a doctor.’

Veronica laughs. ‘Then want must have been her master. Goodness me, women didn’t do that in those days.’

‘Do you know if she was particularly interested in her father’s work? Maybe even in her father himself? Would she have taken away some of his – writings, after she was dead?’

‘Are you asking me? I haven’t the faintest idea. Would you get me another gin, David? It will help me to sleep if the child keeps up that racket.’

The racket is still going on when we leave. David says he’s not sure if fetching his mother over was the best thing, but what was he to do? Jude promises to ask Lorraine if she will help out temporarily until Georgie gets better, something that everyone says will happen when the pregnancy’s three months old.

Next morning I phone Caroline. She’s there to answer, as I suppose she mostly is, but she doesn’t sound pleased to hear from me. ‘Meet my dad?’ she says, and then, as if their home is in Tasmania or the Urals, ‘You’d have to come all the way out here. He couldn’t come to you.’

‘When?’

She’s taken aback by this simple direct question. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Monday?’

‘Monday’s the spring bank holiday,’ she says.

‘Would that matter? Are you going out somewhere?’

‘We don’t go out unless it’s to the doctor’s or the hospital. I go to work mornings.’

Her father is old, she tells me again. He’s had a stroke and he’s only got one leg and he ought not to be upset. But at last she gives in and I make a date for Monday afternoon. Jude has her own hospital appointment on Tuesday and of course I’ll go with her. Meanwhile, now, today, I have to phone the aide and tell him – what? Yes or no? It’s almost certainly yes, isn’t it?

I really want more time, but of course I can’t expect that. I said by the end of the week and it’s Friday now. How much easier writing Henry’s biography would be, how much better in every respect, if I had quiet and peace and leisure to do it in. If I could take time to find precisely the right word and phrase, the original metaphor, if I could stare at the page for long minutes, for half an hour, then get up and walk around the house, thinking. But I shan’t be able to do these things if I say yes today, I shall restrict myself to three or at most four hours in the mornings, and if the House sits, not on Fridays at all. And the galloping of tiny feet and yells from tiny lungs may be around too…

But I need the money. I need the seventy odd pounds a day four or five times a week. It sounds pathetic, doesn’t it, when you consider some people’s salaries. I push all this out of my mind, it’s still only eleven in the morning. I think about Tony Agnew, the ex-major who had a good war from which he came out intact, and a bad peace when he lost a leg. What sort of a man is this one-time soldier and vendor of cars who feels so sorry for a dead man he never knew that he gets his daughter to put flowers on that man’s grave? And why do it then and not years before when he might have done it himself? I’d like to have some idea, some workable theory, before I get to Reading on Monday afternoon. But everything that presents itself to me is not like Henry . Confident Henry. Tyrannical Henry. Henry, who deserted one woman after another in order to marry a third he happened to like the look of, and when she died married her sister. Henry, who refused to discuss her brother’s condition with his grown-up daughter and who would have been so adamant in his refusal to let her study medicine that she knew it would be useless to ask him. But, on the other hand, Henry whose wife was the only person who ‘could do anything with him’ and whose son described him as the kindest sweetest father in the world. Paradoxical Henry. Henry the enigma.

Jude’s working at home today. She’s in the living room with a manuscript she doesn’t want to read but has to. I shall take her out somewhere for lunch and then, when we get back, I’ll phone that aide. I’ll tell him no. I’ll refuse the offered peerage and then I can write my book in peace and hope that this one, for once, will sell. But while I’m thinking in this way, while I’m making up my mind, Jude comes in, flushed in the face, her eyes very bright, and says she’s just done a pregnancy test. She shouldn’t, they told her to wait till next week, but she’s done it.