by Barbara Vine
By the time he was Sir Henry he was on the point of parting from Olivia Batho, but not yet from Jimmy Ashworth. After the three pentagrams in May there are three more in June but before that, he had had a heroic encounter. That is, Henry’s behaviour was heroic. The whole affair reminds me of a passage from one of Trollope’s novels. Someone (not Trollope) says somewhere that nothing ever happens to a man except that which is like him and this doesn’t seem to me much like Henry. But what do I know? With all my researches, I know so little of his true nature or his inner life.
A short while before these events he had returned from his walking holiday in the Lake District, where he seems to have caught a cold. His diary entry for 23 May, a Wednesday, is brief. Not so The Times for that day. Henry wrote: ‘Suffering from a cold in the head. Was able to give some assistance to a Mr Henderson who had been set upon by a ruffian in Gower Street.’ Modest Henry. The Times’ report is much fuller.
Mr Samuel Henderson, attorney-at-law, of Keppel Street, had a providential escape from injury or even death last night when he was set upon by a desperate villain in the neighbourhood of Gower Street, not far from the British Museum. We understand that Mr Henderson had just come from his business premises and was beginning the short walk to his home. Possibly in the belief that he was proceeding from the bank nearby and that he was in possession of a large sum of money, the miscreant attacked him, taking him unawares from behind and striking him with a cudgel.
Fortunately for him, help was at hand in the shape of none other than the distinguished Physician-in-Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen, Sir Henry Nanther, KCB, FRCP. Sir Henry, who was coming away from University College Hospital where he is Professor of Pathological Anatomy, witnessed the entire scene. A powerful and vigorous man in the prime of life, Sir Henry immediately set upon the ruffian with his stick and made short work of routing him. Next he turned his attention to the unfortunate victim of the attack and ascertained that Mr Henderson had sustained no worse effects than bruising and a severe abrasion to the right shoulder. An errand boy who happened to be passing was dispatched for help and Mr Henderson was later removed to University College Hospital where he is happily recovering.
On his way home after perhaps delivering a lecture to a class of medical students, Henry can hardly have foreseen what a life-changing encounter this would prove to be. I’m tempted to dwell on the operations of fate and chance. Remember the Tay Bridge and the train he nearly boarded? Suppose, in Gower Street, he’d been detained for five minutes by a student who dared put a private question to the great man. Or his voice had grown hoarse through this ‘cold in the head’ and he terminated the lecture five minutes early. Poor Mr Henderson (my great-great-grandfather) would perhaps have been killed or at any rate left bleeding on the pavement. Help, if help there was to be, would have come from some other source. In any case, Henry would never have met the Henderson family and I and my forebears never been born.
There are some, of course, who would say it was ‘meant’ but I’m not one of them. Not destiny and therefore inevitable. Not fate but chance. Chance that the telegram sent to him arrived in time to keep him off the train. Chance which decreed that he and Samuel Henderson and the ‘villain’ met and encountered each other in that momentous way. A strange force, but that which determines all our events and adventures. Henry saved Samuel Henderson from serious injury or even death, and the result? As a reward the solicitor gave him his daughter’s hand in marriage? That’s not how it was, of course not, that’s only the way it occurs in the romances read by Henry’s housemaid. Probably what happened was that when Samuel returned home Henry called to enquire after him. It would have been considered the most natural and courteous behaviour. It was what anyone would do in the circumstances. Nowadays we would phone; the Victorians were obliged to call at the house. The odd thing is that Henry doesn’t record such a visit in his diary. Perhaps he’s being modest. A man, if naturally humble and self-effacing, is so even in his private and personal jottings. Only Henry wasn’t humble and self-effacing. He was proud of himself, what some would call arrogant. He’d have considered calling in Keppel Street (birthplace, incidentally, of Anthony Trollope sixty-eight years before) an act of condescension on his part, a stooping. Or I think he would, but maybe I’m wrong.
It was very likely at this time that he composed the first essay in the notebook, the one on altruism. I’ve bought a more powerful magnifying glass to make his writing easier to read. It is tiny, apparently deliberately made so, and this first contribution is, frankly, rather dull. Not interesting enough to make me settle down and try to decipher the rest of the notebook with the new glass. Jude, who hasn’t read it either, calls the notebook Alternative Henry, though I can’t see anything in this first bit to justify that title.
It seems to refer to his ‘heroic act’ of a week before, or that act to have given rise to these reflections. Nothing in it is new or, I should think, original. Very little hadn’t been said before. Still, it does show what Henry thought about these things and perhaps the one interesting feature of it is the inevitable reference to blood.
Altruism [Henry writes], is there such a thing? Do we ever perform an action without thought of self? Is not everything we do done to aggrandize ourselves in the estimation of others or at least to leave them with an impression of our self-denying qualities? I believe it is. Sinful man is ruled by self in every aspect of his life. If women appear to be more altruistic this is only because they have been brought up from their earliest years to passivity, obedience, acquiescence and the placing of others first. God forbid that they should ever be removed from this sphere, but if they were and were encouraged into independence, self-determination and even dominance, their altruism would vanish and their nature come to resemble or even exceed man’s.
If I hasten to the aid of some unfortunate passer-by whose pocket has been picked, perhaps by supplying him with the few coins necessary to assure his safe arrival at his home, or enquiring after his injuries, I am merely attempting to impress him in two ways. By offering him money I demonstrate my wealth and, by ascertaining the extent if any of the wounds he has sustained, reveal my skill as a medical man. Altruism does not enter into it, for I place myself in no danger, suffer no noticeable diminution of income and, since the entire exercise takes no more than five minutes, endure no appreciable loss of time.
Indeed, it might be that I even benefit from my act. Suppose the wounded man were by some chance a ‘bleeder’? It is not likely but not impossible either. Let us at any rate postulate such a case. I should witness what I seldom have the good fortune to see elsewhere, the unstemmed and very probably unstemmable flow of blood from a wound deliberately inflicted in malice a mere few moments before. I should of course attempt to stem it, I am a physician, I should try the various methods at my disposal, but the interest to me would lie in being there on the spot, as one might say, to see the immediate reaction of subject and subject’s mental processes to his misfortune. This would be an example of direct self-benefit combined with apparent self-denial. And as I hold the wound closed – I recollect a case recorded by Grandidier of a sister holding her finger against her brother’s bleeding gum for three days to prevent the excessive and perhaps total loss of blood which might have ensued – I would reflect with undoubted pleasure on how this adventure contributed to the sum of knowledge on the ever-fascinating study of haemophilia.
Samuel Henderson didn’t have his pocket picked. He certainly wasn’t wounded in the sense Henry writes of. The ‘case’ is hypothetical, something we can be sure never happened and never would. The odds against it are too great. But if the allusion to blood is typical, there is one strange thing here. Why should this example come into Henry’s mind just at this point? Samuel wasn’t a haemophiliac and he wasn’t bleeding. A bludgeon had been used, not a knife or some other sharp instrument. Or was Henry so obsessed with his particular specialization that he applied possible instances of it to all sorts of situations? I suppose that’
s the answer.
Returning to what did happen, there’s nothing to indicate the time at which the attack took place. Not late, I suppose. If Samuel was leaving the chambers of Flinders, Henderson and Cox, and Henry coming away from delivering a lecture, it was very likely no later than six in the evening. Not dark then, not on 23 May, but broad daylight. Were there no other people about? The newspaper doesn’t say and Henry doesn’t. Still, we know that for every Samaritan there are a dozen priests and Levites. Passers-by notoriously do ignore the victims of an attack or a robbery. Isn’t it true that we constantly read in the papers of tube-train passengers sitting indifferently by while one of their number is the subject of brutal assault?
At the beginning of last year I was approached by a relative I didn’t know I had with a request to supply information for a genealogical table. This craze for making family trees seems to have reached gigantic proportions. Everyone is doing it, though no one in my family seems to have done it before.
David Croft-Jones is my second cousin. His mother is Veronica Croft-Jones, née Kirkford, daughter of Elizabeth and James Kirkford, he tells me, and Elizabeth of course was my great-aunt and Henry’s eldest daughter. He seems to have begun his family tree through acquiring a new computer with a new programme that particularly lends itself to columns and tabulations. Or so I think, reading between the lines, though that’s not what he says. He says he wants to do it ‘for the record’ and so that his children won’t reproach him. As yet he hasn’t any children, he’s only been married about five minutes, but he takes his responsibility to a future generation very seriously.
I’d probably passed him round and about Westminster a good many times without knowing who he was. He’s a civil servant at the Home Office and I walk past it when I make my way to the House by way of St James’s Park. I’ve met him now, he and his wife came over for a drink last week and he brought with him the first draft of his table. It’s an ambitious project and puts my own efforts to shame. He’s not really aiming at tracing Henderson connections but concentrating on Nanthers and going back a couple of centuries. I was able to give him the names of the three wives of my grandfather Alexander (Pamela Goldrad, Deirdre Park and Elizabeth Pollock), my first wife Sally, and my sister Sarah’s husband, John Stonor.
From his tree I found his aunt Vanessa and some second cousins of mine, Craddocks, Bells and an Agnew, descended from Henry through his second daughter Mary Craddock. In due course I shall be in touch with all these people in my quest for family letters. David Croft-Jones says that great-grandmother Edith seems not to have written a single letter in her entire life or, if she did, none has survived. If any of Henry’s four daughters kept a diary it’s been lost. David has lent me a bunch of letters from Mary to her married sister, his grandmother Elizabeth, given to him by his mother when he started the tree, but they are much more to my purpose than his. They have survived largely, I think, because Elizabeth and her daughters were the kind of people who never threw anything away. These hoarders are the biographer’s friends, but only if what they haven’t thrown away is worth keeping.
The summer of 1883, when Henry made the acquaintance of the Hendersons, was long before Edith, the second daughter, discovered her passion for photography. But among her ‘accomplishments’ was a small skill at drawing. She was the daughter who drew and painted, Eleanor the musical one. Thanks to Elizabeth Kirkford’s hoarding everything and her daughter Veronica following in her footsteps, the drawing Edith made of her sister has survived. Apparently, Veronica wants it back but I shall only keep it long enough to photocopy it. It isn’t dated but Eleanor is a grown woman, not a child; she’s somewhere between seventeen and the age she was when her life was brought to a violent end.
My great-grandmother Edith used a soft smudgy pencil on thick paper which must once have been white and now is ochre yellow. Her subject is a pretty girl. Of course Edith may have beautified her sister and drawn a flattering portrait, but I’ll credit her with sticking to Eleanor’s regular features and copious hair. Blonde hair, as it happens. For, although Eleanor Henderson had a face not too unlike Olivia Batho’s, her hair was light-coloured and her eyes too. Yet if I compare her with her sister in her wedding photograph, Edith has the advantage in looks in almost every respect. Her forehead is higher, her nose tip-tilted and her chin recedes less than Eleanor’s.
‘She’s pretty but nothing out of the way,’ Jude says, looking over my shoulder. ‘Not a patch on her sister. What did your Henry see in her?’
‘Charm, perhaps. Or she had a beautiful speaking voice or she made him laugh.’
‘It’s women who like men that make them laugh,’ says Jude, ‘not the other way about.’
She’s looking very well, better than she usually does when she’s got her period. If she’s got it, I can’t ask, but she will have. It comes as regularly as the sun rises. Instead I ask her if it’s all right to ask David Croft-Jones and his wife to have dinner with us in the House, it’s time I did that, he sent me the second draft of the family tree this morning, and she smiles and says of course.
‘How old was she?’
I ask her if she means in the picture or when she died.
‘When she died.’
‘Twenty-four.’
‘Poor thing,’ Jude says. ‘What was she like?’
I don’t know. I know what she looked like but nothing much else about her. Only one letter from her to Edith has survived and there are none from Edith to her or from their mother or father. There’s a difficulty of identification, or perhaps I should say specification, when writing about middle- and upper-class women of the nineteenth century. Most of them had a very limited education, no professions, they led sheltered lives, were kept ignorant, lived under the protection first of a father, then of a husband. They can’t be differentiated as women could later, by their tastes, their travels, their activities outside the home, even their politics. They weren’t ‘all the same’ as it’s tempting to categorize them, but it’s much harder to make a picture of an individual woman, to bring her out of the shadows into a hard outline and a clear light.
The diary entries don’t help. Henry writes, ‘Dined with Mr and Mrs Henderson’ and ‘Escorted Mrs Henderson and the two Misses Henderson to the theatre.’ On one occasion, in July, the entry reads, ‘Consultation with Mrs Henderson.’ So, apparently, his new-found friends were availing themselves of his medical skills as well. Eleanor is never mentioned by name at this time. From her mother’s letters to Dorothea Vincent, her sister-in-law, we know she was ‘musical’, whatever that meant, probably that she played the piano. She lived at home with her parents like most unmarried girls. No doubt she sewed, helped with domestic tasks, for the Hendersons were comfortable but not well-off, went shopping with her mother or her sister, occasionally attended a concert and performed at a ‘musical evening’. She may sometimes have gone to meetings for the promoting of women’s rights but if she did there is no evidence of it I’ve so far found. There is no evidence either that any man courted her before Henry.
There was a son too, the eldest of the three. Lionel Henderson was twenty-seven and a clerk in his father’s practice. He too lived at home. According to David Croft-Jone’s mother, the family was happy, the parents easy-going and tolerant for the age they lived in, the grown-up children very attached to one another. With them, also, lived William Quendon, Samuel’s father-in-law, aged eighty-three, who had made his home in Keppel Street since the death of his wife some years before. The house is still there, four floors high with a basement, the rooms rather small and poky, the kitchen regions and servants’ bedrooms below ground. The present occupants or perhaps those before them had the two ground-floor reception rooms turned into one and even so the resulting room isn’t large. It’s all bedrooms above now but probably, in the Hendersons’ day, the entire first floor was given over to the drawing room. Old William Quendon, my great-great-great-grandfather, must have had a weary climb of it to his bedroom unless they managed to accommo
date him in the basement.
This, then, was the household, grandfather, father and mother, son and two daughters, who no doubt welcomed Henry with open arms when he first began calling in June 1883.
In July, Jimmy Ashworth was two months pregnant. If Henry hadn’t known before he would know by then. Did he see this coming event as a joy, a gratification, a nuisance, a threat, or was he not much affected by it? The last, I believe. There’s no reason to think Jimmy was anything but compliant, subservient, grateful. An assertive woman wouldn’t have held Henry for nine years. She was a convenience to him. No doubt he found her very attractive and still did. No doubt she brought him solace, comfort, relaxation and a total contrast to the rest of his life, the Palace, the hospital, his work. But in love with her he never would have been. By then, presumably, he was in love with Eleanor Henderson. Now he had to pension Jimmy off and find a father for her child. While he had Olivia he could keep Jimmy on. Eleanor was different and his relationship with her serious.