by Barbara Vine
The final pentagram in the diary appears on 15 August 1883. That may be the last time Henry ever saw Jimmy Ashworth, but probably it wasn’t. It’s most likely he went back to Chalcot Road on several occasions: to present Len Dawson, to make arrangements for the wedding, to pay the lump sum. The date of his engagement to Eleanor, according to The Times in which the announcement appeared, was Thursday 23 August. I imagine prudent Henry, correct Henry, enjoying his final sexual relations with Jimmy Ashworth on a Wednesday, calling in at Keppel Street to continue his courtship on the Friday, returning to propose on the following Monday and receiving a favourable answer, asking Samuel Henderson for formal permission to marry his daughter on the Tuesday, and the announcement appearing on the Thursday. Not that there is any record of this in the diary up until then. On Friday 24 August the entry reads: ‘My forthcoming marriage to Miss Henderson noted in The Times yesterday.’ Cool Henry. On one hand he is organizing the future life and nuptials of the mother of his child to a hospital porter, on the other participating in arrangements for his own, not to mention doctoring the Queen and instructing his students. Busy Henry.
The question remains, though, and I need to find an answer to it. Why on earth did he want to marry the daughter of a not very prosperous solicitor, with no ‘real’ money and no prospects, when he could have had Olivia Batho? Olivia, who apparently loved him. Olivia, who was beautiful and rich and more his type? Whose father was a baronet with a country mansion and seven hundred acres and could give his daughter thirty thousand pounds on her marriage. It’s not enough to say he fell in love and there’s no accounting for love. Suggestions that Eleanor might have been charming or clever or funny as well as pretty – fairly pretty but ‘not a patch on’ her sister – won’t solve it, nor will saying that he fancied her and couldn’t have her any other way than by marriage. He was a middle-aged man, an experienced man who for nine years had kept a mistress. Yet his head was turned by a pretty little thing no man had wanted before?
And why did he, otherwise so reticent, mark his occasions of sexual intercourse with Jimmy Ashworth by a five-pointed star?
9
Jude is pregnant. She told me this morning, at ten.
She’s working at home today, the second Monday in May. This usually means she gets up a bit later in the morning but she didn’t. She was in the shower at seven-thirty, brought me a cup of tea before eight and said she had to go to the chemist.
‘You won’t find one open before nine-thirty,’ I said, and I asked her what she needed so urgently.
She didn’t answer but pretended to be looking for something in the bathroom. I know my wife so well, I know what she’s up to. If I ask her a question she doesn’t want to answer, rather than lie she’ll walk off quickly as if she’s just remembered something she’s got to do. But why should she want to lie? I was clearing away the breakfast things, hers and mine, when I heard her come back and go straight upstairs. It was about half an hour afterwards. David has sent me a bunch of letters from my great-aunt Elizabeth Kirkford that his mother found and I was in the study, arranging them in some sort of order, when Jude came in. Her face was brightly flushed. She looked enormously well. She said it.
‘I’m pregnant.’
The trip to the chemist was to buy a pregnancy testing kit. She was ten days’ overdue and she couldn’t bear to wait another day. I jumped up and threw my arms round her and we kissed and kissed. I was going to say I’ve never seen her so happy but I have – last time and the time before. Nothing was said of that, though, no caution, no dampening of joy. I forgot about work and so did she. We went back to bed, to make love and then to lie side by side, our arms loosely round each other, and I let her pour out her excitement while I listened and said it was wonderful and the best thing that’s ever happened, and we laughed for joy, and then we got up and I took her out for a celebratory lunch.
It’s not really like that for me, but I know the only hope for our marriage is that we have a child. And I know that if she doesn’t have one her whole life will be blighted, she’ll be embittered and unhappy, yearning for ever after for children and always feeling that if she’s not a mother she’s not a real woman. But in my heart I don’t want a child. My selfishness is enormous, though harmless if I keep it to myself, and that’s what I’m striving to do. I’m base. I don’t want a baby that cries in the night and demands attention in the day. I know all about that (and she doesn’t), I’ve been through it with Paul. Because I’m the one of us that’s at home I’ll be saddled with looking after it, or if we have a nanny and we’ll have to have one, I’ll be responsible. I don’t want the napkins and the bottles and the sick and the sleepless nights and the awful mysterious illnesses small children get so that you’re out of your mind with worry, tearing about in the night to Accident and Emergency. Because you love it, of course you do, you can’t help it. It will put its fingers in the electricity sockets and pull pans of hot water off the stove and fall out of its high chair. It will have to be taken to school and fetched back for thirteen years. By the time it’s sixteen. I’ll be past sixty, wanting a rest and a bit of hush.
But while I was pretending to rejoice – and I was rejoicing, I was, for my dear wife’s sake – I was also resolving that she shall never know, never be given the slightest tiny adumbration, that I am not as exultant as she is. I will be happy, I will be triumphant, I will play the foolish expectant father who boasts to his friends of his coming child. I will be as anxious as she that she carry it to full term, as watchful that she takes her folic acid, abstains from alcohol, takes exercise, rests, has the right diet. And I will instigate, even at the risk of being boring or when she’s tired of the subject, conversations about names, decorating the nursery, christening robes, to pram or not to pram, and the inadvisability of ever allowing a small baby to sleep face downwards. I’ll be even sillier than she is about all these things and when the time comes, like Jemima Puddleduck, I’ll be an anxious parent. And maybe, as the months pass, the power of thought and determination will change me and make me look forward to our son or our daughter as much as she does.
I wish.
Today, 11 May, is the fourth day of the Committee Stage of the House of Lords Bill and we are due to debate the Weatherill Amendment. That’s the one that seeks to keep 92 of the 750 hereditary peers in the House. The suggestion is that the Labour Party elect 2, the Conservative Party 42, the Liberal Democrats 3 and the Cross-benchers 28. It is also proposed to elect 15 hereditary peers ready to serve as deputy speakers – that is, to deputize for the Lord Chancellor on the Woolsack. With the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain the number comes to 92.
No doubt I shall be stuck in here all evening so it’s as well I’ve got the Croft-Joneses coming in for dinner. Georgina Croft-Jones is in the seventh month of her pregnancy. I tell myself I’ve had a lucky escape and reflect on how I’d feel if Jude hadn’t told me her news yesterday. Both women make a point of not drinking alcohol but Georgina has the House’s peculiar homemade tomato juice mixed with horseradish and Jude has austere sparkling water. Jude looks well and years younger and altogether a great beauty, very like in fact Sargent’s version of Olivia Batho Raven, her skin glowing with the same luminosity, only with more rosy pink about it, and her dark eyes shining. An elderly peer – one, incidentally, who forty-two years ago voted against admitting women to the House – lays his hand on her shoulder and tells her the sight of her does his old eyes good.
David isn’t, in looks at any rate, a Nanther. He is small and neat and fair, with very blue eyes. Georgie, as we’re to call her, is a bit taller than her husband, dark and very slim apart from the bump. Only on her it’s not a bump, it’s more like a sack of flour she’s chosen to hang across her thin hips and cover up with a diaphanous clingy dark-green dress. Jude tells me afterwards that it’s by a designer called Ghost. Her face is white and sharp-featured, her mouth wide and very nice when she smiles, as she does a lot. Jude looks like a famous painter’s portrait and Geor
gie looks like a film actress, like Julia Roberts.
She holds one end of the now very lengthy family tree as David spreads it out and holds the other. Being insatiably inquisitive, as always, everyone else in the Peers’ Guest Room turns to stare at us. I take Georgie’s end from her and David and I study the Quendon-Henderson section of it. The women seem relieved we’re occupied and turn to discussing pregnancy and babies. I’ve quickly shifted from dismay at this baby to straight horror but I’m happy for Jude just the same, filled with joy for her and very nearly moved to tears by the look on her face. I give a sort of gasp and gulp and expect David to look at me in wonder but he doesn’t. No doubt he’s been through it himself – but with somewhat different feelings, I hope.
He’s not interested in Olivia Batho but when I tell him about Jimmy Ashworth and that her child Mary Dawson was almost certainly Henry’s he perks up quite a lot. Do I think Laura Kimball would consent to a DNA test? I tell him he can ask her if he likes, I’m not going to. These genealogists, amateur or otherwise, become so obsessed with their branchings and linkings and twigs going this way and offshoots that way, that they lose all sensitivity as to how family members actually feel. I can see from the look on his face that he wonders if he ought to add to his table a kind of bend sinister jutting out from Henry and culminating in Janet’s grandson Damon, but would rather not. It’s messy, and what about all the other ancestors who might have had ‘entanglements’? He wants to know if I think it would be in bad taste but I absolve myself from involvement in this question.
Everyone orders more drinks but before they come the division bell rings. So I make my way to the Content lobby because we’re voting on the Weatherill Amendment to retain ninety-two hereditary peers, and I’m more content with it than with its alternative which would mean curtains for all of us. A lot of chat usually goes on as we’re passing through to be counted but no one is very talkative today. I’m silent too, lost in thought, and suddenly I understand something. Our child was most probably conceived that night Jude was acquiescent and I, for once in our recent mode of living, positively desirous. And my desire had been stimulated by that erotic dream of the Henry-me character watching the tableau vivant of the Three Graces. Ah well, I say to myself, they all looked like Jude and, anyway, it can’t be helped now. Back in the Peers’ Guest Room Georgie is asking why everyone is allowed to smoke in here. Haven’t they heard of passive smoking and its effect on the unborn child? I think of telling her that my mother smoked forty cigarettes a day all the time she was carrying me, but I don’t. That would be comparable to the tales I often hear in this room of some peer’s noble grandfather, a heavy smoker who died in his sleep at the age of ninety. Someone says over my shoulder that we won the vote by an enormous majority, one of the biggest the Government have had, though in fact it was a cross-bench amendment, supported by the Government.
Jude has, of course, told Georgie and David about her pregnancy. She’ll tell everyone, I know that. Lorraine will get to know the minute she sets foot in our house tomorrow morning. And why not? Part of one’s joy in success, in something achieved, is telling other people. I’m fearful because I remember, though I can never speak of it now, the last time. She carried the foetus for two months and a week and then, one midnight, it bled away from her. Blood – if anyone asked me what I see when I hear or read the word I’d have to say I think of the blood in our bed, all over both of us, and Jude’s tears, her dry sobs and then her tempests of tears.
But no one is going to ask me. Henry might, but he is present at this table (and in David’s table, the genealogical one) only as descendant and ancestor, offspring and progenitor. David cares nothing for him as a man or a doctor. Now he has decided against DNA testing attempts, he dismisses the long liaison between Henry and Jimmy Ashworth as ‘the way those Victorians went on’. But Georgie, who is naturally I suppose interested in these things at the moment, says how happy Henry must have been to know his first child was on the way and looks indignant when I say it’s unlikely.
‘I’d have thought he’d be happy,’ she says. ‘I mean, thrilled. He’s forty-seven, didn’t you say? Forty-seven and this is his first child. He must have been happy.’ This is approaching too closely my own case for comfort. I contrive a smile.
‘He could have married her. She wasn’t a low sort of person, was she? She wasn’t a prostitute.’
‘She probably had been,’ I say.
‘Well, she was no worse than him. He’s a real example of someone with a double standard isn’t he?’
We go into dinner then. Useless to tell the Georgies of this world that it’s impossible to judge the morals and manners of a hundred and twenty years ago by those which prevail today. Henry’s attitude was time specific and that’s all there is to it. David has unfolded his tree and folded it up again mapwise so as to expose only the relevant section. ‘Henry, the one who became Lord Nanther,’ he says, ‘got married the following year. In the October.’ Rather impatiently he goes on, ‘I don’t see there’s anything mysterious about it. He announces his engagement in The Times in August 1883 and gets married in October 1884.’
‘It would have been a very long engagement for the time,’ I say. ‘Long engagements were supposed to be bad for the girl. People thought the man was keeping her hanging on and that was bad for her reputation. But all that’s beside the point because it was Eleanor he got engaged to and her sister Edith he married.’
There’s a mistake in the tree here and David seems suitably chastened. Jude and Georgie want to know why the marriage didn’t take place, though this must be politeness on Jude’s part because she knows already. Our wine and our first course arrive and a waitress with a basketful of the awful bread you get here. Stanley Farrow, passing, pauses at our table and whispers to me what I already know, that we won the vote. David, tucking in to smoked salmon, says, ‘I don’t see how I can get an engagement into my tree. I’d better just forget it, hadn’t I?’
‘You’d better if you’re not going to include Jimmy Ashworth. He wouldn’t have had sexual relations with Eleanor, you can be sure of that.’
This is something else Georgie finds hard to believe. All engaged people do. Everyone she knows moved in to live with the person they were engaged to. I shrug my shoulders and mutter something about times changing. Georgie must have had some sort of answer to her question from Jude because she says, ‘Jude said she died. Eleanor, I mean.’
‘Yes, she died.’
Georgie says people often died young in those days. They got tuberculosis or something you’d have an operation for today or in childbirth. The faintest shadow passes across Jude’s lovely face and I’d like to stick my steak knife into that silly woman’s neck. ‘They got pneumonia,’ Georgie says, ‘and took three weeks to die and knew they were going to die, they knew there was no help for them. You can’t imagine, can you?’ I see she’s an inveterate reader of historical novels of the sensational kind. ‘And then they sort of wasted away, they had something called the green sickness.’
‘Eleanor died a violent death,’ I tell her. ‘The way she died wasn’t just typical of her time. It’s the kind of thing that happens today. She was murdered.’
‘Oh, do tell!’
But I don’t tell. I shake my head and smile. Perhaps because I know Georgie Croft-Jones would get excited and say Henry must have done it or otherwise speculate in wild and inaccurate ways. I say instead that I’m still researching that bit, which isn’t true, I’ve researched as far as I think necessary. But I’m not so circumspect as Jude, I don’t mind white lies in a good cause. And keeping me from losing my temper is a very good cause.
We have coffee. At last the Croft-Joneses want to know what’s happening in the Chamber. It’s the House of Lords Bill, I tell them, what we in here call the Reform Bill. Georgie thinks this means everyone with a title is going to lose it, eldest sons are no longer to inherit and the aristocracy will lose their property. No one’s going to be called ‘Lord’ and ‘Lady’ an
y more, the whole aristocracy will be swept away in a kind of bloodless French Revolution. As I set her to rights I think to myself that this will very likely be what the whole country thinks before we’re finished with the Bill.
She doesn’t seem at all tired and wants to know where we’re going next as if I had a nightclub in view. But I take them round a bit, show them the House’s treasures, Charles I’s death warrant that we keep in a glass case in the Royal Gallery, the Dyce frescoes, tell a few anecdotes and ask them if they’d like to go into the Chamber. Georgie is keen to go in but loses her enthusiasm when I tell her she and David will have to sit on the right below the bar and Jude on the left in the peers’ spouses’ seats. Rules of the House, I’m afraid. She seems to have taken a shine to Jude and says that rules are made to be broken. I tell her that if we break this rule a doorkeeper will come and either move them or move Jude, and we go downstairs to say our goodbyes in the Peers’ Entrance, David promising to send me the tree when it reaches its next stage.
The House is very quiet now and there’s a tense feeling in the air, everyone having either gone home or disappeared into the Chamber. I tell Jude I’ll go in myself for a bit, see what happens, and would she like to go home? She says she’ll stay with me, she’s not tired, she’s so happy she doesn’t want to waste her time sleeping. Walking slowly up that august red-carpeted staircase, I take her hand and say very quietly, ‘I love you. I’m so happy for you.’
‘I hope you’re happy for yourself too,’ she says shrewdly, too shrewdly, but I tell her I am, I am.
10
This story has been as famous in the family as Henry’s heroic rescue of Samuel Henderson. My father told it to me when I was thought old enough not to be given nightmares and I’m afraid he told it with Gothic relish, in which mode – probably – his father had told it to him. You could call it a very Victorian murder.