by Barbara Vine
Jude is nearly eight years younger than I am, which puts her still very much on the right side of forty. Those few years are precious to her because they mean she still has a chance of a baby. Unlike Amelia Nanther, Jude has no trouble conceiving. It’s carrying a child beyond two or three months that seems impossible for her. I’ve a son from my first marriage, Paul my heir, who in his turn has sat on the steps of the throne. If a child comes I’ll be happy for Jude’s sake. I’d like to see her joy and I do sometimes imagine the things she’d say and the plans she’d make and her face lit up with happiness. But I don’t long for a child in the way she does, and in my heart I don’t believe there’ll ever be one. Jude conceived three years ago but miscarried at eight weeks, conceived again and lost the baby at three months. She’s recently been trying a new treatment but it isn’t working or hasn’t worked yet, I can tell by her face. She’s sitting opposite me in the train, on the side where they have single seats with a table in between, and although she appears perfectly healthy and not pale or unwell, she has that set look about the mouth and misery in her eyes that indicate her period has come.
There’s a kind of parallel there with the way women behaved in the 1840s, menstruation being the forbidden subject. Presumably, Amelia had some form of words in which to tell Henry Thomas she’d be ‘unwell’ for the coming five or six days, but her diffidence came from prudishness and female delicacy. Jude doesn’t tell me because she can’t bear to mention it, she can’t use the word, any of those words that mean another month’s gone by and by the time one more has passed she’ll be thirty-seven. I think she believes I secretly mind but hide my disappointment for her sake. No amount of assuring her of my indifference helps. When we were first together and then when we were first married I’d see the box of Tampax lying about in the bathroom or the cardboard tube floating in the lavatory pan, but now she hides the evidence as if she really is living in some past time. The only sign of her period is in her unhappy eyes.
No one is looking at us and I don’t much care if they are, so I take her hand and lift it to my lips and kiss it. Jude has beautiful hands, long and slim, the joints not at all obvious, the nails almond-shaped and always unpainted. Kissing hands is an erotic thing for us – she kisses mine too – and sometimes it’s just a loving thing with a meaning of I’m here and all will be well. But will it? If all being well means a baby, I think it’s more likely to be all being ill.
We take a taxi at Huddersfield station, a rather magnificent Victorian building, and it gets us to Godby in twenty minutes. Rather to my relief – though from the messages and fervent apologies he left behind him not to his – the owner of Godby Hall, a computer tycoon named Brett, has been called away to Bradford for an urgent meeting. His wife, as the au pair who comes to the door tells us, is visiting her sick mother in Scarborough and has taken the baby with her. That, at any rate, pleases me. One of my missions in life is to hide babies from Jude, though I don’t really know whether the sight of one upsets her or if it’s just that I think it must.
Godby Hall is in serious need of painting outside, its white walls and columns streaked with blackish greenish trails where water has spilt down it from the gutters. In Henry Thomas’s day, I suppose it was blackened with soot from factory chimneys. Indoors it’s anaemic-looking, everything painted white, pale rugs lying about on pale woodblock floors, and it looks cold, though it doesn’t feel it with the central heating going full blast. The au pair, who’s German and speaks perfect but heavily accented English, takes us up to the second floor where the day and night nurseries were. I marvel, not for the first time, at the way the Victorians and pre-Victorians placed their children as far away from their own quarters as possible.
I start wishing Jude hadn’t come, it was she who insisted on coming, though there’s nothing in this room to show it was once a night nursery. It’s the au pair’s own room now, one end lopped off to make an en-suite bathroom, but, apart from being rather untidy, it’s as bleak as the rest of the house. The unmade bed has a pink and white duvet bunched up and flung across one end of it. There’s a built-in clothes cupboard and a built-in dressing table the au pair calls a vanitory, its top laden with cosmetics of all kinds, jars and bottles and tubes. I try to imagine where the two beds were and what else might have been in this room. Toys? Books? The equivalent of the ‘vanitory’, a washstand perhaps, would have held a great many medicaments for poor Billy. Were candles in use upstairs at Godby Hall or did they use colza lamps in which coleseed oil was burned? Downstairs, probably, but up here it would have been candles. And now I remember that Amelia refers in one of her letters to lighting the candle when she goes to attend to Billy in the night.
Jude is looking out of one of the sash windows and I join her. We admire the view of green hills and dark woodland and in the foreground the village of Godby, cleaned of smoke deposits and spotless in the icy March sunshine. The wind is so strong that even from this distance we can see the weathervane on the church tower furiously spinning round. The houses that were built for the mill workers look from here as if each one of them has been radically converted into a dwelling for the young upwardly mobile, smartened with Sandtex and brightly re-roofed, a green strip of lawn with shrubs running between their backs. I imagine Henry kneeling up here on a window seat or ottoman, looking at the familiar view and then, perhaps, creeping back to relish the sight of blood splashes on his brother’s pillow.
‘The younger one, Billy, he died, didn’t he?’ It’s Jude asking and she looks sadly at the corner where I’ve suggested his bed might have been. ‘How old was he when he died?’
‘He was six.’
The au pair looks suitably aghast and asks why he wasn’t given antibiotics. To do her justice, she probably knows nothing of any of this and supposes Billy died twenty or thirty years ago.
‘This was a hundred and fifty years ago, more than a hundred and fifty,’ I tell her. ‘There wasn’t a cure for tuberculosis. He coughed and his lungs bled, he got thinner and weaker and in the winter of eighteen forty-four he died.’
‘There were two boys, I think?’ The au pair has picked up a bottle of something off the ‘vanitory’ and is spraying the inside of her wrist with whatever is inside it. ‘What happened to the other one?’
‘He grew up and became the Queen’s doctor – not this queen, her great-great-grandmother – and had six children and was made a lord.’
‘Why didn’t he et tuberculosis?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘If everyone in the nineteenth century who was exposed to it caught it,’ says Jude, ‘there wouldn’t have been any people left in England.’
This is an exaggeration but I know what she means. The au pair asks if any of Henry’s children died.
‘One of them did. His second son.’ I’m nervous of talking about all these children in front of Jude, those that lived and those that died young, but she seems quite tranquil and the sadness has gone out of her eyes. ‘His name was George and he died in nineteen hundred and eight, just a year before his father. But his father was seventy-two and he was eleven.’
The au pair is persistent. ‘Was that tuberculosis too?’
‘Perhaps, but I don’t think so,’ I say. ‘It sounds more likely to have been leukaemia, but it’s only guesswork on my part.’ I suddenly feel nauseated by it all, the room and the knowledge that the boys slept here, and Billy suffered here and died here, and I suggest we go outside and have a look round the garden.
It’s too cold to stay outdoors for long. Besides, everything has changed utterly in a century and a half, which is only what I’d expect. There’s a big oak that was probably a young tree when Henry was small, he may even have climbed it, but otherwise all the trees and shrubs are replacements, and second and third replacements, for the ones that were there in his day. We come indoors again and into Amelia’s drawing room, which she must have crowded with knickknacks and antimacassars and wax fruit under glass domes and gros point cushions, but has recently
been furnished by someone who prefers the stark look. The au pair says Mrs Brett has told her to give us a drink and offer us lunch but we’re both so eager to turn this down that we come out with a, ‘Oh, no, thank you very much,’ in unison and call for a taxi on Jude’s mobile.
We get lunch in Huddersfield very late, at nearly half-past two, and decide not to do as we’d planned and stay the night at a hotel in York but to go home on the next available train. We’re going to France for Easter so it’ll be nice to have a few days at home first. Jude takes my hand and says she supposes I’ve noticed she’s got her period. Like her, I count the days and become, for her sake, only for her sake, more and more strung up and alternately hopeful and despairing as the crucial day approaches. Maybe it’s fortunate for both of us that she’s absolutely regular, almost to the hour. Yet even if it hadn’t come, how many weeks this time would she have carried a child?
‘You thought it upset me,’ she says, ‘all that talk about the children and children dying, but it didn’t, not really. It was all so long ago.’
‘A lost world where they order things differently?’
‘Something like that,’ she says as we get into the train.
Henry’s elder son Alexander, the one who didn’t die, was my grandfather. I remember him well and visiting him in Venice. And now, back in my study at the scarred dining table, I think about the two dead boys: Billy, who succumbed to tuberculosis in 1844, and George, who died of some incurable illness in 1908. How did Henry feel when his younger son died? He was an old man, the boy more like a grandson surely than a son. Clara implies that George was fond of his father, at any rate that he didn’t dislike him as the rest of them did, but this may only be a case of the Youngest Child Syndrome, according to which even unaffectionate parents lavish love on the last to come into the family. Henry wrote many learned works on diseases and deficiencies of the blood but, perhaps naturally, never refers among the cases he mentions to his son’s condition. He kept a diary of a sort, that is he kept a bald record of what he had done, read, written and where he had been each day, but there is very little in the entries about his feelings, nothing at all in the later ones. His peculiar writings on blood, the notebook essays, are an almost metaphysical jotting down of his innermost responses to aspects of blood and disease and pain. They remind me in a way of Sir Thomas Browne and Religio Medici.
I haven’t been able to identify any of the cases he mentions or people he refers to. His children are cited but as ‘one of my daughters’ or ‘my elder son’, seldom by name. Even in the notebook with the black watered-silk cover his brother never appears. He seems to have forgotten he ever had a brother and once or twice refers to himself as his parents’ only child.
That he hoped to be the subject of a biography is clear from the orderly way in which he kept every significant (in his view) letter he received and often made copies of his own letters to other people. Very little that is personal can be found in any of them; that, no doubt, is the way he wanted it. Everything he calculated would be of help in the writing of that biography he kept and packed into three large wooden chests. These he left to his elder son Alexander, his only surviving son, my grandfather, making clear in his will what they contained. Probably he thought a Life of Henry Nanther would be written within a few years of his death. Scientists often think differently from the rest of us as to what constitutes a good biography; a dry as dust account of the subject’s work and a few bald details as to dates of birth, marriage and death, suits them best. That this was Henry’s opinion soon emerges from an examination of those chests’ contents. They include a published copy of each one of his learned tomes, as well as papers from other haematologists, some of them very old, which he presumably believed contributed to his own findings.
Alexander was not quite fifteen when his father died. He was at Harrow. The chests remained in Ainsworth House where his mother continued to live with her daughters, or with three of her daughters, the eldest, Elizabeth, having married in 1906. The house was also Alexander’s but Lady Nanther had a life interest and there she stayed until Alexander sold it and bought Alma Villa where I’m sitting now and writing this.
The Great War came while Alexander was at Oxford. A bright boy, he had gone up at seventeen, but a year later he enlisted and within days was in France. Wounded in the first battle of the Somme and again at Mons, he returned again and again to his regiment, miraculously escaping death a dozen times, and came out of the army in 1918 as Major the Lord Nanther and with the Military Cross. He was twenty-three.
A few years later he sold Ainsworth House. His mother moved to Alma Square and the chests went with her. Though never an intellectual, Alexander had worked reasonably hard at school. Now he was utterly changed. Were the things he saw in France responsible? The dreadful sights have been so well-documented, particularly recently, that there’s no need for me to go into them here. Whatever it was that changed him, it was plain to see, plain at any rate for his mother and sisters to see, that Alexander had no intention of returning to the university or pursuing a career or even of taking a job. His father had left him a modest amount of money which, invested, brought in an income rather more than adequate to live on. He went off to live on it in the South of France.
Alexander’s lines, as his parents’ contemporaries used to say, lay in pleasant places. Fate smiled on him. In Mentone he met an American heiress, the only daughter of a pastrami millionaire. The story goes that it was Wrenbury Goldrad who first described pastrami as the New York Jew’s answer to ham. He was only too delighted for his daughter to ally herself with an English lord and winner of a distinguished decoration, and Alexander Nanther and Pamela Goldrad were married in Cannes. They had a villa on Cap Ferrat and became well-known as a fashionable host and hostess, long before such people as Somerset Maugham and various deposed crowned heads of Europe discovered the place.
She must have been a nice woman, Pamela Nanther. I would have liked for her to have been my grandmother, but she wasn’t. She divorced Alexander in 1929 round about the time of the New York market crash. By careful management she and her father were unaffected by the fall and she was able, though under no obligation, to settle a large sum of money on the husband she had divorced for continual flagrant infidelity and desertion. In the divorce court she said she still loved him and wished him well. These statements caused more shock and horror than any of the revelations about Alexander’s other women.
He married one of them, Deirdre Park, and married her just in time. My father was born three months later, in the spring of 1930, the Hon. Theo Serge Nanther. None of your dreary Victorian names for Alexander and Deirdre. They came back to England and lived in this house for a while, presumably because Henry’s widow, my great-grandmother Edith, was dying. After her death there was nothing to keep them in England and they set up house, with the heir, for some unknown reason in Geneva. The chests of Henry’s papers and the rest of the furniture from Ainsworth House remained in Alma Villa, watched over by my great-aunts Helena and Clara. Mary, two years Helena’s senior, had married a clergyman with a parish in Fulham, the Revd Matthew Craddock, in 1922.
Alexander and Deirdre came back to England a few months before the Second World War started and three years later my father began attending St Paul’s School. When he was fourteen his mother ran off with an American serviceman. Hoist with his own petard, Alexander divorced her, married for the third time and he and his new wife departed for Venice. There they lived for the next twenty years on the third floor of a dirty old palazzo on what would have been a back street if it hadn’t been a canal. I stayed there with my parents for a week in 1965. In the following year my father became Lord Nanther when Alexander died of lung cancer. I remember being fascinated, as a boy of ten, by the amount he smoked. I calculated that in order to get through eighty cigarettes a day at five an hour, which is good going, he would have had to start at 8 a.m. and have the last one at midnight. I admired his relentlessness enormously and vowed to do the sa
me myself.
Meanwhile Helena and Clara lived on in Alma Villa, two old ladies who’d missed the chance of marriage because the men who might have married them had been killed in the 1914 war. Occasionally, on a Sunday, I and my sister Sarah and our parents would drop in on them while out for our afternoon walk and they’d give us tea, chocolate cake, Maryland cookies, meringues and no bread and butter. My father was a solicitor, comfortably off but not rich, and we lived in a big flat in Maida Vale. I was grown up before I had any idea that Alma Villa belonged to him, had been left to him by his father and would most likely one day be mine. It was just a house full of old people’s clutter where my great-aunts lived and where one got a better tea than anywhere else.
My parents, my sister and I moved into the house ourselves when Helena died and Clara asked if my father would mind if she left and went into sheltered housing. She lived on for a considerable number of years and died when she was just a few months short of her hundredth birthday. Her nephew, my father, died soon afterwards. By this time, my mother had bought herself a small house in Derbyshire close to Sarah; and Sally and I and our son were living at Alma Villa – with the three chests of documents, copies of learned works and diaries.
Sally despised ‘family’ while being careful to ensure everyone addressed her on envelopes as the Hon. Mrs Martin Nanther. What she would have been like if I had inherited the title while she was still with me I’d rather not imagine. Long before my father died she had left. She was a committed member of CND, went briefly to prison for cutting the wire on the perimeter of a Suffolk missile base, and in the mid-eighties departed to live on Greenham Common and never came back. I haven’t seen her since 1989 but I understand from what I hear about her that in whatever commune or collective she happens to find herself she insists, despite our divorce, on being called Lady Nanther.