Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

‘Now, Dad,’ says Caroline, ‘you don’t forget everything , you know you don’t.’

‘Thank goodness you’re my memory, darling girl.’

I ask him what was in the book that’s so unforgettable, so apparently painful. ‘I know about remorse,’ he says. ‘I know all about it.’ He’s silent.

‘He means Mum,’ says Caroline as if I’m a particularly slow child. ‘He means Mum and the accident. He blames himself, don’t you, Dad?’

‘Who else can I blame, my sweet? It was my fault. I killed her, as sure as if I’d put arsenic in her tea.’

She shrugs. She’s been through all this before. Many times, probably. Maybe she agrees with him. She was twenty-two at the time, so it’s unlikely she was with them in the car. But she knows the facts. There must have been an inquest, even a prosecution, in spite of what Veronica says. Perhaps he had been drinking or he fell asleep at the wheel. To my dismay I see a tear come into each of his eyes and begin a slow trickling progress down his cheeks. She gets up and wipes them away with a tissue she pulls out of a box on the table and says as if he’s deaf or otherwise insensible, ‘He cries. You don’t want to take any notice. Old people do, I see it all the time in the home, especially the ones that have had strokes. I suppose it’s what they mean by second childhood.’

She’s one of the most insensitive people I’ve come across for a long time – no, Veronica is worse – but Tony doesn’t seem to mind. He smiles waterily. He even thanks her. I’m so disconcerted by all this I wonder if I should go on, and if she’d stayed there, sitting between us, perhaps I wouldn’t have. But something I hadn’t anticipated and wouldn’t have dared hope for happens. The doorbell rings and Caroline goes to answer it. ‘I won’t be a minute,’ she says, and this is true but not, as is often the case with this ambiguous remark, in the way she means. Whoever is at the door is invited in and because Tony and I are in occupation of the living room, taken elsewhere. The kitchen? Her bedroom? I don’t know, but I hear doors shutting and I offer to pour Tony another cup of tea. Remorse, I’m thinking, why remorse? Whose remorse?

He accepts the tea, smiles again. ‘Tell me about the notebook,’ I say, trying not to let urgency sound in my voice. ‘Tell me what you read.’

‘They were sort of articles, pieces like you read in a – well, like in the paper. No, not quite like that.’ He wrinkles his forehead, striving to find the words. ‘Like a confession . But a confession he was making to himself. I felt bad reading them. I felt no one was meant to read them.’

‘His daughter Clara read them. She got hold of the notebook after he was dead and kept it all those years.’

‘Oh, yes, Clara,’ he says, and he’s deflected. Very willingly deflected, I think. ‘I remember her. Nice old girl. Very clever too, used to be always reading highbrow stuff. She forgave me, not like some of that lot. Vindictive they were. She said no one ought to be blamed for what they didn’t mean to do.’

I have to get him back to the notebook, tempting as it is to ask who was vindictive. Diana? Veronica? ‘Did Henry Nanther blame himself for what he didn’t mean to do?’

It’s an inspired guess, for Tony wants to reply and with some vigour. ‘He blamed himself all right, that was the point, that was all over those pieces, in practically every line, but he did mean to do it. That was the bad part, the awful part. He meant to do everything.’

‘But do what?’

‘I don’t know.’ He looks downcast. ‘Maybe I’m just not bright enough. I never was all that bright, dear boy. Good soldier, says he modestly, but that’s about it. There was a lot in those bits your great-grandfather wrote down I just didn’t understand. Couldn’t follow, if you get my meaning. What came through was – well, like I said, remorse. I can remember one bit he repeated a few times. It went something like this, “I blighted my posterity in advance.” I remember it because I had to look up some of the words in the dictionary. Not that it made me understand what he was saying.’

At this point I start hearing voices from the next room and then someone crying. A door opens and closes, a tap is running in kitchen or bathroom. Tony says, ‘That woman at the door Caroline let in, she lives next door, her husband beats her. She always comes here, telling Caroline her troubles but will she go to the police? Will she heck.’

Can it be the neighbour who sometimes looks after him? The crying continues and a radio is put on in the next room, presumably to deaden the sound of sobbing. I ask Tony what else he can remember. Of course the notebook has slipped from his mind and thinking I’m talking about the domestic violence next door, he launches into a rambling description of the damage done to his unfortunate neighbour. ‘Henry Nanther’s notebook,’ I say to him.

‘Oh, yes. Yes. He’d done something a long time ago. I don’t know what. Caroline would have known, she’s got her mother’s brains, but she never had time to read it. He’d fixed something, done it on purpose, for medical reasons, he said. Well, what he said was, “for the future of medical science”. I remember that phrase. It’s stuck in my mind. But it wasn’t that upset me so much. It was the poor old chap’s remorse and something he said about – well, above love.’

‘Love?’

‘My God, I wish I’d never put the damn thing down on those magazines, books, whatever they were. I’ve kicked myself a good many times for that. How did I know you’d turn up and be so keen on seeing what was in it?’

‘Love,’ I say. ‘What did he say about love?’

He’s going to cry again, but I can’t help that. ‘He said – he said he’d never known what real love was. He thought he had, he mentioned some chap, I can’t recall the name, some chap who drowned, but that was nothing, he said, to what he felt now, what it was to love someone more than yourself, to wish you could die in their place. He’d never felt like that before, he said, not even over the drowned chap.’ The tears are flowing and the old voice is breaking. ‘And the bad thing was, the awful thing was, that it was him had made sure the one he loved would die while he would go on living… Oh, God, the poor chap, the poor chap…’

And now because the radio’s been turned off the flat is full of the sound of weeping and sobbing, in here and in the other room. It’s as if the whole world is in tears. I produce tissues for poor old Tony and mop up his face for him. There’s no doubt I have to give up, I can’t ask him any more, I can’t subject him to cruel and unusual punishment. I feel like crying myself. What I do is find a bit of paper in the briefcase I’ve brought with me and make myself write down the things he’s said, or the salient things. Gradually he stops crying, says he’s a fool. What must I think of him? The sounds from the next room have stopped, the front door opens and closes and Caroline comes back.

‘You’ve been upsetting him,’ she says like a nanny to the bully of the family. ‘I knew that would happen once my back was turned.’

But Tony’s no longer upset. He’s probably forgotten what distressed him in the first place and wants to know what brought the neighbour to the door this time.

‘He’s blacked her eye. I wanted to call an ambulance but she’ll never let me do anything. She says he really loves her and he’s promised not to do it again. That’s a really nasty eye she’s got.’

I don’t suppose I shall ever see either of them again. I’m sitting in the train, looking at the notes I made, but I already know the answers to everything. I know what Henry did and why he did it, I think I knew that as soon as Tony talked about blighting his posterity in advance.