by Barbara Vine
In October, Constance Batho writes to her friend Helen Milner,
Dr Nanther called this morning, his excuse being that he had come to enquire after Mama’s health, but Mama, as he as a doctor must know, has only a common or garden cold and has not even taken to her bed. His real reason was to see Olivia – who was not at home, if you please! So he is to return tomorrow, simply of course to see Mama, whose health concerns him, and to bring her some remedy for an inflamed throat.
Dr Nanther is very handsome, very proper, very clever and very old. Well, very old to our ‘young eyes’, Mama says. He must be forty-five. And Olivia is just twenty-two. The bother of it is that she has begun fretting about getting old and missing her chances. She has been out four years, you see, and no one she likes has offered for her. She does like the Doctor, was quite put out when she came home and heard that he had called but she had missed him. Mama and Papa would like them to make a match of it. Mama, being old herself, calls Dr Nanther a young man ‘in the prime of life’. Her only objection to him, as far as I can see, is that he lives in chambers above his consulting rooms in the unfashionable (in Mama’s eyes) neighbourhood of Wimpole Street.
But he was considering a move. An entry in the diary at the beginning of December, underneath a rather large carefully executed pentagram, notes that he has been to look at a house which is for sale in Green Street, Mayfair. This would probably have suited Lady Batho’s taste but Henry doesn’t buy it and in the following February is viewing another in Park Lane. Could he have afforded the upkeep of a house in Mayfair? True, the Godby woollen mill has come to him by inheritance, but it had long since ceased to do well. Long before his father’s death a manager had been put in to run it and it had declined pathetically under this man’s management, causing among other things by the depression which followed, great distress and poverty among the mill hands. Henry would be hard put to find a buyer for the house and it would have fetched very little. In fact, he kept it and eventually it became the Nanther family’s country home. It was my father who sold Godby Hall for a pittance in 1970.
So Henry had inadequate funds to think of setting up house in this desirable area. All that would change if he married Olivia Batho, who would bring with her the personal fortune of thirty thousand pounds, a vast sum in the 1880s. I am indebted (as they say in acknowledgements) to Stanley Farrow for most of what I know about the Batho family. My great-grandfather, as usual, tells his posterity so little and not a word of any of it appears in the diaries. Because it never touched his heart? Because he simply didn’t care enough? Or had Olivia never meant much to him and had disappeared altogether from his consciousness when he met the Hendersons?
Stanley Farrow came over to me in the Peers’ Guest Room where I was having a drink with a couple of other cross-benchers, and lent towards me rather diffidently, one hand on the red-leather back of the spare chair at my table. I thought he wanted the chair, the bar was very crowded, and I said, ‘Yes, of course,’ which rather puzzled him as well it might have.
Light dawned. ‘I don’t want the chair. I only wanted to say I’ve seen your ad in The Times and I think I can give you some info. Well, it may be all nonsense, of course.’
‘You do want the chair,’ I said and I held out my hand. ‘Martin Nanther. Sit down.’
‘Stanley Farrow.’
I shifted a little way along from the others who had embarked on a discussion about European Monetary Policy. ‘You’re a newish life peer,’ I said. ‘You came in last July. I was in the Chamber at your introduction. You’re Lord Farrow of Hampstead.’
‘Hammersmith. But you’re right about the rest of it. Can I buy you a drink?’
‘I’ve got a drink,’ I said, ‘but I’ll buy one for you,’ and I ordered the gin and tonic he asked for. ‘What sort of info?’
Stanley Farrow is a little old man, in his seventies, white-haired, with a sharp elfin face, very upright as small men often are. ‘It was my wife who actually saw your ad. She said I ought to speak to you. Does the name Caspar Raven mean anything to you?’
‘He was the man Olivia Batho married.’
‘Well, actually,’ said Farrow, as if apologizing, ‘they were my grandparents.’
It’s hard to find anywhere in the House of Lords where you can be alone with someone. Meetings will be taking place round the clock in every committee room. Interview rooms are tiny and claustrophobic and viewers crowd the Television Room. The library is full of smokers. Few peers have an office to themselves and are lucky to have a fourth or sixth share in one. It was particularly busy on 20 January, because earlier in the afternoon Baroness Jay, the Leader of the House, had made a statement on the White Paper the Government were publishing that day about Lords Reform, the first positive intimation (after the announcement in the Queen’s Speech) that reform was definitely to happen.
I decide to take Stanley – we are soon on first-name terms – into the Royal Gallery. This is a vast and very grand hall with a towering ceiling, all ornamented in red and blue and gold, the floor cold marble, set about with darkly polished tables and leather chairs and sofas. It’s always cold in the Royal Gallery, the place being virtually unheatable, but at least it’s quiet and nearly deserted. The few who were in there that day were entirely uninterested in us and what we were saying. Stanley produced photographs from his briefcase and laid them on the table.
‘Her daughter was my mother,’ he said. ‘Olivia got married in 1888 and Mummy was born in ninety-one.’
One of the photographs was of Olivia in a simple Pre-Raphaelitish white gown, her dark hair loose, a sweet smile on her face. I’d like to use it in my biography, maybe on the page facing the one where Jimmy Ashworth will be, but all I could think of at that moment was that it might have been a photograph of Jude. For some reason the resemblance is far greater here than in the Sargent portrait. The poignancy comes from what Olivia’s doing; she’s holding her baby in her arms. I made a mental note that this is one Jude must never see – well, unless the impossible happens, she must never see it.
‘Your mother must be dead now, of course?’
‘She died fifteen years ago. I owe the fact that I’ve got all this stuff, these pictures and bits of jewellery and some letters’ – I pricked up my ears at that – ‘to my wife. Men aren’t much interested in genealogies, family history, that sort of thing, do you think? John Singer Sargent painted my grandmother and Vi – that’s my wife – saw it somewhere or a reproduction of it. When Mummy died she kept all this stuff, she said Olivia had been famous and you never knew who might want to know about her.’
‘Thoughtful woman,’ I said. ‘Someone does. Who are the letters from?’
‘Her sister Constance mainly. A couple from her husband – my grandfather, that is. I’m afraid that if you were hoping for any from Lord Nanther you’re in for a disappointment.’
‘Tell me something,’ I said. ‘If there are no letters from him and no photographs of them together’ – I’d made sure there weren’t, not at least among those on the table – ‘how do you know my great-grandfather was – well, keen on her?’
He’s a man who can’t keep his wife out of any conversation for long. It seems she dines with him at least once a week in here. ‘My mother told Vi. Vi was deeply devoted to Mummy, they were the closest of friends, for which of course I’ll always be eternally grateful. You see, my poor mother had a most unhappy childhood, she and her brother and sister all did, she never really got over it, she was always talking about it – to me, and just before she died to Vi – on the grounds that talking about something rids you of the burden of it. Only it never seemed to do that for her.’
I was mystified. What could there be that was so unfortunate about being the daughter, or come to that the son, of the prosperous Caspar Raven of Raven’s Bank and his wife Olivia? Poor old Farrow’s eyes were suddenly very bright, as if full of unshed tears. But surely not. I saw him then, and I was right, as the devoted son of a possessive mother who, when the mother
grew old and perhaps senile, married a wife to be a mother substitute when the time came. The tears were held back but the voice faltered a little.
‘I see you don’t know,’ he said. ‘Olivia had a lover, they’d call him a boyfriend these days. She ran away from her husband and deserted her three children. She went off with a man whose name I can’t remember – Vi would know. My grandfather obtained a divorce, very difficult in those days but not so hard since the divorce law was passed a few years before, and of course there was no question of Olivia having the children. They had a sad time of it.’
‘When was that?’
‘In eighteen ninety-six. My mother was five, her sister was seven but the little boy was only two. My grandfather, Caspar that is, had a very savage temper, though it really only came out after his wife left him. Before that he worshipped the ground she trod on, Mummy said, would have done anything for her. He took it out on the children later and, as I said, they had a sad time of it.’
I asked him what happened to Olivia. Did she marry the man? Instead of answering, he asked me if I was ‘familiar with the works of Oscar Wilde’. Pretty well, I said.
‘He’s supposed to have based his Lady Windermere on my grandmother, only my grandmother did run away with her man and Lady Windermere didn’t. As to what happened to her, she didn’t marry the man, I don’t know what he was called, but moved in with another one and another. This was in France, somewhere in the south of France. My grandfather knew, he told his children all about it, in the most savage way. Olivia came back here just before the Great War. My mother was grown up by then and she sometimes visited her, unbeknownst to her father of course. When Olivia died in nineteen twenty-four they found she had a heart defect you only get if you’ve contracted syphilis at some time or other.’
While I resolved to check up on Lady Windermere’s Fan because I’m not sure the dates tally, he was picking up the photographs and putting them back in his briefcase. ‘Look, I’m going home now. It’s only Hammersmith. Why don’t you come back with me and talk to my wife?’
7
Often ahead of his time with his discoveries, Henry had postulated in the early spring of 1882, in a paper he gave to the Royal Society, that two factors contribute to the clotting of blood. Calcium was one of them and what he called ‘thromboplastase’ the other. He was wrong but he was heading in the right direction. Twenty years were to pass before the four factors and two products theory came into being and many more before medical science understood that the factors concerned in the activation of prothrombin by thromboplastin were twelve in number, all finally to be designated by roman numerals.
None of this is the interesting stuff of biography but it will have to go in so that readers understand how Henry strove to be a pioneer in his field. The dull with the exciting, the rough with the smooth. He seems to have worked hard, to have put his whole heart and soul into his studies and his practical work, but to have known too that change and rest were essential for him. His walking holidays were a high point of his year. The trip abroad he took in the last week of April 1882 began in Chur, Cuera in Romansch, the oldest town in Switzerland, now a ski resort, in the southeast corner of the country. This may have been familiar territory to him, recalling his time at the University of Vienna when he first grew to love the Alps.
From Chur he seems to have set off to walk the mountain paths of the Hinterrein. There was no Richard Hamilton to accompany him and no Hamilton to write to now. Did he miss Hamilton, his companion on so many walking tours in the past? He must have, perhaps bitterly. From a village high up in the mountains, where he boarded at the home of the Schiele family, he wrote to that other medical friend he seems to have become acquainted with at Barts, Lewis Fetter:
My dear Fetter,
This is as remote a place as I was led to believe it would be, a mere scattering of houses on the south-eastern meadow slopes of the Graubünden. Very beautiful if one’s tastes tend to the picturesque. Communication between these houses and the outside world must be established over broken and dangerous tracts ofland. No driving roads exist. Fortunately, as you know, I have always been a walker and am undeterred by the prospect of covering several miles on foot. As it happened, I was obliged to make a journey of six hours to reach here from Versam, a distance I calculate as no less than twenty miles. You may believe me when I say I was heartily glad to reach the quaint and picturesque house inhabited by the good Schieles, to find a meal of roast meat, potatoes and a kind of fruit porridge awaiting me, its consumption followed by rest in a comfortable bed in a clean and airy room.
The snows are gone except from the highest peaks and the alpine meadows bursting into glorious bloom. This village is much exposed to the weather, but sunshine and a dry atmosphere render it a healthy place. Except, according to V and G, as you know, in one respect. Still, all that is in the past now. Presently, the population consists of about a hundred and fifty persons, healthy and sturdy people for the most part. Pleurisy, pneumonia and arthritis deformans are, however, common. Scurvy and purpura are unknown and phthisis rare…
The rest of the letter is concerned with compliments to Fetter’s family, enquiries after his own health and assurances that he, Henry, will be ‘back in Wimpole Street by the twelfth of May’. He heads his letter Safiental, Graubünden. Who are or were V and G? Friends Henry and Fetter had in common? Or could they be authorities on public health at the time? Could V be the Dr Vickersley who was one of the guests at Henry’s dinner party the following September?
If Henry also wrote to Olivia Batho or Jimmy Ashworth, his letters haven’t turned up but, knowing his character as I’m starting to, I’m inclined to think he didn’t write to either of them. Henry was a disciple of the Byron School and would have agreed that ‘man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart’.
I didn’t go home to Hammersmith with Stanley Farrow that evening. I was taking Jude out to dinner. I stopped on the way home and bought red roses, for no reason except that she likes them. Stanley eventually renewed his invitation. He seems to take his role and function as a working peer for the Government lightly as some of them do, coming in for questions and disappearing before the ordeal of staying behind to vote, and often not coming in at all. Of course he may have been there on the few days I wasn’t. It was well into February before we encountered each other again. I was having a cup of tea in the Bishops’ Bar, when he came over to me, said Vi was ‘dying’ to meet me and would I like to bring my wife for dinner? I made such a mess of refusing that he must have been left with the impression my marriage was unhappy and that Jude and I led completely separate lives. In the end I said I’d come on my own, but for a drink, not dinner.
The day I went I’d received in a parcel the letters Henry wrote to Barnabus Couch. It rather shocked me, that their possessor risked sending them by post, even though by recorded delivery. The sender, a Mrs Deborah Couch, widow of Henry’s friend’s great-grandson, was not to know that Henry made copies of every letter he ever wrote. After her husband’s death, she’d found the letters neatly packed, wrapped in sheets of newspaper (The Times, of a date some time in August 1906) when she was turning out the attics of the old rectory where they’d lived. They were a dozen among hundreds. Couch had had a voluminous correspondence and apparently kept every letter he’d received, instructing his unmarried daughter, according to Mrs Couch, just prior to his death, to ‘preserve them all or, by God, I’ll come back and haunt you’. It’s a strange thing but I’ve often noticed how upset otherwise quite rational people can be by this threat.
I went into the House at about four, met Stanley and left again at five-thirty for his home in Queen Caroline Grove. Lady Farrow was very much what I had previously expected Laura Kimball to be, round, white-haired, maternal – perhaps I had her in mind? She helped Stanley out of his overcoat and would have helped me out of mine if I’d let her. We went into a living room whose decoration and furnishings spoke eloquently of the late Mrs Farrow. She, obviously, had been the firs
t possessor of the limed-oak sideboard and dining table, the ‘fireside’ chairs, the table lamps on which attenuated marble maidens, naked but frigidly chaste, held up parchment shades on outstretched arms. Her invisible presence was palpable. I was reminded of something a well-intentioned friend said to my mother after my father died. ‘He hasn’t gone, Sonia. He’s here in this room with you.’ Mrs Farrow was here in this room with her son and daughter-in-law. Particularly her daughter-in-law. It was soon clear that Lady Farrow’s mental processes, her heart and soul if you like, were occupied not only by her mother-in-law but by that mother-in-law’s mother too, the pair of them curiously mingled, intertwined with each other, so as almost to form one matriarchal entity.
Stanley fetched sherry. It hadn’t been offered but simply appeared, that least acceptable sherry (to me) which is as pale as Sauvignon and which you expect to be dry but when you take your first sip gives you a shock because it’s sickly sweet. I tried not to show surprise. Photographs were produced along with the twiglets. A biographer, proceeding as I do, soliciting contributions from all possible sources, soon becomes inundated with photographs. But I’m not complaining. It helps very much to have a picture in your mind of the people you’re writing about, even more to have those faces on the working surface before you. I was presented once more with Olivia in the kind of gown classical statues wear, holding her infant daughter. The ones I hadn’t previously seen were of Olivia at her wedding, Olivia with her sons, Olivia with that same daughter five years on, the year of the Sargent portrait.