Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

‘It’s positive,’ she says. ‘The blue line was dazzling.’

I kiss her and hold her. I tell her it’s the most wonderful day of my life because this time I know things are going to be fine. This is a designer baby and, in spite of last time, that sort don’t abort themselves. They’ve no defects, they’re perfect, they live serenely inside there and when they come out they’re – well, designer. They’re the Versaces and the Diors of the baby world and they prove it by costing a lot more than your ordinary off-the-peg infant.

I pick up the phone and dial the magic number, the witching number, and when he comes on ask him to tell the Prime Minister I shall be happy to accept. I shall go back and be thankful.

35

He’s a tall thin old man. If he’s shrunk he must have been very tall indeed to start with but I don’t think he’s shrunk. He’s very upright and the only evidence that he has an artificial leg is in a limp which isn’t always noticeable. It’s a funny thing but a man may be very good looking with a daughter who’s exactly like him yet ugly. We have different standards of beauty for the sexes. Caroline’s rugged face looks good on Tony Agnew, it still looks good, although he’s eighty and can’t have had an easy life. He has answered the door himself, perhaps to show me he’s far from decrepit. Caroline’s there, of course she is, and she’s hovering, in attendance perhaps to see that I ask no questions too painful for her father to answer.

Why did she want to give me the impression he was a broken old man, scarcely in his right mind? Needing the neighbour to keep an eye on him. Needing her . To justify her existence perhaps. To show me she’s given up her life to a worthy cause. ‘Yes, all right,’ she’d said at last when I’d asked her what time to come. ‘Monday afternoon about three. He’ll be awake by then. He’ll have taken his second lot of tablets. There’s a bus from the station passes this place.’

I didn’t ask about cabs, I knew there’d be some. She’d been at the window when I got there, watching for me, noting the taxi. There’s something disconcerting about meeting a watcher’s eyes, that watcher known to you, your cousin , and see her turn away without a smile, let alone a wave. Now she wears a resigned expression. It’s out of her hands and she’s powerless to do anything about it. I wish she’d go away and leave us alone, I and this intelligent-looking old man in his tweed suit and waistcoat, but I know there’s no hope of that. Not even when he asks her, very sweetly, if she’ll make us a cup of tea, please, darling girl. She’ll be back and soon.

Meanwhile, he’s talking about his mother-in-law, Mary Craddock, born Nanther. She always called herself ‘the Honourable’, he recalls. Even in the parish magazine her name appeared as the Hon. Mrs Craddock. She was fanatical about her faith, went to church every day, she could always find Morning Service or Holy Communion somewhere, if not in her husband’s parish. This devotion turned her daughter, his wife, against religion and their wedding was the last time she went to church. He speaks of his wife in a lower tone, almost with reverence. His voice is plummy, very much the army officer’s and, probably, the twenties prep school, and it’s quite different from Caroline’s. She comes back with a tray on which china and spoons have been ungracefully piled, goes out again, returns with another on which are milk in a carton and biscuits in a packet. The sugar, however, is in a bowl but the kind that looks as if it’s made for some other purpose, perhaps for mixing cake ingredients.

To my surprise she begins talking about her morning at work. The fact that it’s a public holiday makes no difference to her because she’s employed five mornings a week in an old people’s home. The anecdote she tells is concerned with what someone said to someone else about a grave in a cemetery. It could be my cue to ask Tony Agnew about the flowers he wanted put on Henry’s but I can’t get a word in edgeways. It will have to wait. Tony – he asks me to call him this – laughs dutifully, though it was remarkably unfunny, and I take my chance to ask if we can talk about the notebook.

‘The notebook?’

He’s looking at me uncomprehendingly and for a split second I feel a kind of impatient rage. If he’s forgotten its existence I may as well get out of here, go back to the station and home. But he hasn’t, though I can see, as one sometimes notices in very old people, that it’s just slipped out of his mind and he has to make an effort of will to find it and bring it back again. The struggle is made, he sighs and says, ‘You mean Lord Nanther’s book he wrote all those things in?’

‘Yes.’

I take a biscuit. I’m suddenly very hungry, though the biscuits are the kind very young children like, crumbly sandwiches with red jam inside. Caroline is watching me, perhaps expecting praise for the morsel I’ve put in my mouth as if she’d made it herself. ‘Very nice,’ I mumble.

‘He wants to know about it, Dad,’ she says. ‘That’s why he’s here.’

‘What happened to it?’ I ask.

Frustration and perplexity mingle in his expression. ‘I don’t know. I’ve been trying to remember but I can’t. I don’t know. I put it with some papers, newspapers. I mean I put it down on this table. On something.’ He screws up his eyes in an effort to remember. I am beginning to see Caroline wasn’t exaggerating. The first impression one gets of this old man is deceptive. He struggles hard to appear well, fit, in control, but after a time he fails. His voice has become fretful. ‘On some magazines,’ he says. ‘That’s where I put it. Then my – my daughter gave me the daily paper. I looked at it, I think, I put it down…’

‘Dad, we’ve been through all this.’ She isn’t in the least impatient. ‘You put it down on the book that was on the magazines and I put the lot out for the recycling. I never even saw the notebook, it was hidden by the paper.’

‘If you say so, darling girl.’

‘Papers are so thick these days, aren’t they?’ she says conversationally. ‘There are so many bits to them.’

It’s irretrievably lost, I know it is. I can picture it, see it in the recycling box, nestling there and concealed between section one of the Daily Telegraph – I am certain Tony, like Veronica, would be a Telegraph reader – and Woman’s Own, with the sport section and Travel and Appointments all piled on top. And I see it standing on the forecourt of these flats and the dustmen, or whatever they call them these days, lifting it with a grunt at its weight, tipping the lot into one of those trucks they have with latticework sides. The notebook slides out and slips in among newspapers and magazines and biscuit packaging and cornflake packets and e-mail print-outs. It all goes off to recycling heaven where good papers go these days when they die. To be resurrected as dove-grey envelopes with ‘Made from reconstituted paper’ stamped on their flaps.

‘Well, it’s too late now,’ I say.

Tony shakes his head sadly. ‘I’m frightfully sorry. I’m not safe to be let out alone.’

He’s not safe to be left in alone. Of course I don’t say this. I make the best of things. I have no choice. It’s not exactly Mill’s housemaid putting the only manuscript of Carlyle’s French Revolution in the fire, is it? Just an old man’s jottings, only the key to a mysterious volte-face of character not otherwise to be resolved.

‘You read it?’ I say.

‘Oh, yes.’ Tony looks troubled. ‘I rather wish I hadn’t.

You’d think I could forget, wouldn’t you, when I forget everything else?’