Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

Yet, although I know and have known for the past hour, the full impact of it is only now hitting me as I revert in my mind to the events and the people in his life I feel I now know so well: Richard Hamilton, ‘the chap who drowned’, his mother, the women, Jimmy, Olivia, Eleanor, Edith. Queen Victoria and the royal family, his triumphs, his discoveries, his children. The calculated wickedness. Switzerland and the artless innocent walking tours in the Alps. Blood, blood, all that blood.

The train comes into Paddington and I go to join the inevitable taxi queue, thinking of Henry. Monstrous Henry.

36

I returned to the House nearly two months ago, at the end of July before it rose for the summer recess. No one was invited to watch my entry as Lord Nanther of Lilestone. As a hereditary peer made a life peer I was permitted to take my seat without formal introduction, but Jude was there and, strangely enough, Paul. He asked to come, invited himself. Apparently, he doesn’t object to appointed peers, only to hereditary ones, and he’d prefer what he calls ‘elected lords’ above all. He sat where I thought he’d never sit again, on the steps of the throne, and had quite abandoned that expression of supercilious boredom he wore when last there.

Lilestone because, as a life peer, I’m obliged to have a territory. Godby no longer belongs to the family, which wouldn’t matter, but I don’t like the idea of using it while other people live at Godby Hall. I thought of Alma. But the Battle of Alma, after which the square was named, was the first in the Crimean War, and Garter will only let you call yourself after a battle if you took part in it (like Montgomery of Alamein and Alexander of Tunis) or, better still for some sinister reason, sacked the place. So I’ve taken Lilestone, the manor of which St John’s Wood was once a part and which remains only in the name of the estate in Lisson Grove. I’ve had my lunch with the Chief Whip, I’ve joined the Party and taken my place on the Government benches, in the second row from the back.

All this is pleasurable – I remind myself daily of my nostalgia for the place during my banishment – and I’ve even better things to console me, yet life has its downside. What I’ve discovered about Henry hangs over me like a heavy cloud. I feel as I used to when I was younger and had read of some dreadful cruelty or seen some appalling photograph and it lingered in the back of my mind to return, somehow magnified and darkened, at times when I was alone in the day or wakeful at night. So it is now with Henry’s act. I’ve so far told no one about it. Perhaps I feel – foolishly, no doubt – that it’s unwise to tell such a terrible thing to a pregnant woman, that henceforward her life should be serene and untroubled. As I’m sure it is. As for me, it’s wonderful to see her so happy, so full of joy now she’s carrying two babies. And, strangely, after all my dread of renewed fatherhood, the twins’ coming is also consoling. When I experience Henry’s act of violence resurfacing before I sleep or in a dream, I remind myself of the two children I shall see grow up healthy and beautiful. Jude is nearly five months pregnant now, everything is fine, and all my dismay is gone. They will be born next January, and somehow I know they’ll be born safely.

We can afford to stay in this house, we shall manage. I look back and ask myself how I dared complain, even in my heart, about the £5,000 the twins cost to conceive. Jude will go back to work after they’re born, I shall have my expenses, stand for election if there’s ever a question of election, we’ll have a nanny and I shall try my hand at journalism while I’m baby-tending in the mornings. I’ll do all the reviewing I can get hold of. For I’ve published my last biography and my life of Henry Nanther will never be written. I’ve known that for months now, faced it perhaps in the hope that abandoning his biography and trying to put all my research behind me will exorcise the images and the infamy. It hasn’t happened that way.

Having told myself sparing Jude because she’s pregnant is positively Victorian and something Henry might have done – hypocritical Henry – I’ve nevertheless considered telling it all to Paul first. If he’d listen, and I think he would. There were other possibilities: Lachlan, for instance, but I feel sensitive about anyone outside the family knowing; David, except that I don’t think he’d much care, and I haven’t the nerve to tell John Corrie, even in a letter, he’s a bit too closely affected even if he is a scientist.

My relationship with my son has undergone many changes for the better in these past months. He says that as an only child himself, he wants a big family one day, but because he can’t seriously begin that yet, two little sisters will do very we’ll for a start. I could hardly believe my ears when he said that perhaps we’ll let him baby-sit sometimes or look after them in the daytime. I never dreamed he had these aspirations. But perhaps I never bothered to find out. Anyway, we’re moving towards a new closeness – Jude and he are already there – and I seriously thought of making him the recipient of – well, Henry’s retrospective confidence.

He’s in London this weekend and it’s likely he’ll look in. This evening perhaps. I’m half expecting him and waiting, not in our living room, but in my study where all the Henry memorabilia is spread or stacked on the dining table in front of me. And in the middle of it, on its stand, the red painted egg I was given when I went to Tenna. Jude has gone round to the Croft-Joneses, in the car because I don’t care for her walking home after dark, even in these safe streets. Georgie is over her pregnancy sickness, and is as mountainous as she was last time. If it’s a girl they’ve given up the idea of Yseult and intend to call her Brangaene, after Isolde’s attendant in the opera.

I’ve also set a tray on the table with a bottle of whisky on it, a jug of water and two glasses, though I don’t feel like drinking anything myself. Not for the first time since I talked to Tony Agnew I find myself holding the egg in my left hand, palpating it like worry beads, though I’ve no memory of how it got there. If I keep on with this, I’ll wear all the red paint off.

Even if he does come perhaps I won’t tell Paul. Perhaps I won’t tell anyone, ever.

Control circumstances and do not let circumstances control you . That’s what he thought he was doing, not understanding it’s impossible. Thomas à Kempis didn’t understand either and nor did all the people who remember Henry Nanther’s words and think them so clever. Circumstances are bigger than you are. They are more powerful and that’s all there is to it. He’s a midget, cowering under their crushing hand.

Who can tell when the idea first came to him? Or why? It’s possible, even likely, that he saw himself as the martyr. Wasn’t it Jenner half a century earlier who injected himself with smallpox, having first been immunized, or so he hoped, with matter taken from cowpox lesions? Henry, supremely egocentric, may well have seen his actions in the same light. Experiments undertaken for the benefit of mankind, for the greater glory of science, but involving the sacrifice of the scientist. Or, at any rate, the sacrifice of the scientist’s happiness.

It’s probable he knew of Tenna’s unique peculiarity from his time at the University of Vienna. There, with his developing interest in diseases of the blood, with his fascination for blood, he would have read the papers by Vieli and Grandidier published a few years earlier. Who knows but that his fondness for walking in the Alps sprang from these findings? It seems highly likely if not certain that his first visit to Tenna was made at that time. Believing, erroneously as it happens, that Romansch was spoken there, he may even have set about learning the language with further researches in mind.