by Barbara Vine
Will Jude have an amniocentesis? She’s thirty-seven now, so I suppose they’ll advise it. The trouble is that in women inclined to miscarry it’s not a very safe procedure. That woman’s letter has reminded me of Jude’s miscarriages, the first one at eight weeks, the second at three months. I’d so much rather not think about this and wipe it from my memory but the pictures come unbidden: the rush to hospital the second time, the first and somehow worse occasion, when Jude came back into our bedroom wrapped in bloody towels, holding in her hands, carrying it in her open hands, the little foetus, bird’s egg-sized in its net of white membrane. No. Stop. Take that image away.
At dinner in the House I find myself sitting at the long table next to Lord Hamilton of Luloch. We’ve never really met before, never spoken at any rate. He’ll lose his seat here just as I will, though his family have had their title for centuries longer, and now, holding out his hand across the soup and dreadful House of Lords bread, he says in a gloomy depressed voice, ‘Hamilton. How do you do? I know who you are.’
We talk for a bit about the reform bill. If everyone abides by Weatherill, and we get ninety-two hereditaries left in the interim house, he says he’ll stand for election and he’s thinking of writing a personal manifesto. All this positive forward thinking is delivered in the same low dismal tone, which is maybe habitual with him even when he’s happy. I tell him I’m not going to stand and he nods as if this is perfectly understandable. He’s about twenty years older than I am, short and stocky, with one of those walrus faces, big drooping moustache and bunchy jowls, a lot of white hair over his ears and down the back of his cranium but none on the top of his head. To my surprise he says he knows all about my writing a biography of my great-grandfather and am I going to put anything in it about Richard Hamilton?
Certainly, I say, he was an important influence in Henry’s life.
‘Queer as a coot,’ he says. ‘But of course you know that.’
I tell him I didn’t know it. How does he know? I’m sure Henry had no homosexual tendencies.
‘We all have ’em,’ says Hamilton in his gloomy voice. He asks me to call him Lachlan. Apparently all eldest sons of Hamilton of Luloch are called Lachlan. ‘We all have ’em if we’re honest. Most folk aren’t honest, I grant you that. My grandfather’s cousin Richard, your chap, he was engaged but he never married the girl, couldn’t face it, you see. That’s par for the course. Maybe it was as well he went down with that train. It was no joke being a queer in the 1870s. How old is this bread?’ This last to the waitress who says she’s sure it was fresh in the morning, my Lord. ‘It’s been submitted to an ageing process then,’ he says, and manages a laugh as dry as the bread.
I ask him if he has any evidence for Richard Hamilton’s alleged homosexuality and he says no, but it was common knowledge. He hasn’t got a diary either or any letters, and from the biographer’s point of view he’s a dead loss, but I like him. I like his dry rather hopeless manner and his occasional bursts of laughter. We finish our dinner, and Lachlan tells me about his grandfather being in here when the Liberals threatened that if the lords rejected a bill to reform their power they’d swamp the House with five hundred new peers. Herbert Asquith called the Lords ‘this ancient and picturesque structure’ and said it had been condemned to demolition by its own inmates.
‘However, we’re still here,’ he says in his lugubrious way, and we both go back into the Chamber, he to the Tory back benches, I to the cross-benches and my place behind the Labour Privy Counsellors. I go outside once to phone Jude but come back again and finally leave for home when the House rises at a quarter past midnight.
Edith Nanther, my great-grandmother, was a woman of mystery. She kept no diary, wrote no letters, and succeeded, though hardly deliberately, in keeping herself out of other people’s letters, diaries, memoirs. What records she kept were through photography and these of the most mundane kind. From them and from her silence we can infer that she was completely wrapped up in her husband and family, but there may be other explanations. For instance, I’ve no idea if she wanted to marry Henry or was coerced into this ‘good’ marriage by her parents. He wasn’t, as far as I can tell, a lovable man, but he was good looking and, for all I know, may have been sexy. We always think of Victorians as having undeveloped sexuality or none at all, but I’m sure we’re wrong there. Perhaps Edith married Henry because she longed to go to bed with him or for money and position and to be called Lady Nanther. Or because she thought life at home would be unbearable if she didn’t. As for the family, women in the 1880s had children because they came, not because they wanted them.
The first of these arrived in August 1885 and was born, like all babies at the time, at home. No doubt Edith was delivered of the child in the principal bedroom, its handsome window just above the pediment of the covered way whose etched-glass roof protected visitors arriving in a carriage from the weather. One of the first of these would have been Edith’s mother Louisa Henderson who, unless she came in a cab, may have used the newly built Metropolitan Railway from Baker Street, and walked from Lords station or Marlborough Road. It’s possible, of course, that she was staying at Ainsworth House for the birth.
The child was a girl. If he was characteristic of his time, Henry would have preferred his first child to be a son. In his diary he records the event: ‘E. delivered of a daughter.’ That’s all. No further comment. Nothing about Edith’s health, his delight, if he felt any, or his disappointment if he didn’t. The baby was baptized in October with the names Elizabeth Louisa but Henry has nothing to say about that either. In the letter he wrote to Barnabus Couch in December, a routine Christmas good wishes letter, it seems, he had more to say about the royal family than his own, and there everything he wrote was in the most discreet of terms. Princess Beatrice had been married in the past summer to Prince Henry of Battenberg. Henry writes of the Queen’s pleasure at the match to a man many thought unsatisfactory because he was aristocratic but not truly royal, the child of a morganatic marriage. The Queen believed in the infusion of new blood into her family, a subject that Henry with his fondness for anything to do with blood, dwells on. As to his own affairs, he describes Elizabeth as his wife’s child, following the fashion of the time, as if there was something not quite manly, something of the milksop or the effeminate, in acknowledging the presence of a baby in the house. ‘My wife and her daughter are well.’
The Princess and her husband lived at Court. It seems to have been a condition Queen Victoria imposed in consenting to the marriage. She couldn’t do without ‘Baby’ or ‘Benjamina’ as she called the Princess, and Henry, as Victoria’s Physician-in-Ordinary, was in attendance on Beatrice as well. Although he never says so, he must have been on the alert when a son was born to the Battenbergs in November 1886, for he knew of the gene – though not to call it that – which Victoria and her second daughter Alice carried, which her daughters the Crown Princess Frederick of Prussia and the Princess Helena did not, but which Beatrice, the youngest, well might. A phenomenon of haemophilia, according to Henry and other authorities, is that only rarely do boy babies who have it suffer abnormal bleeding from the umbilicus at birth. So he may have had to wait some time before he knew whether the little boy was affected or not. But ‘Drino’ as the baby Alexander was called – he later became the Marquess of Carisbrooke with a seat in the Lords – was not a haemophiliac, and since the Princess’s next child, born a year later, was a girl, he was still as far off knowing.
His own second child came along in the same month and within two weeks of Drino. ‘Another daughter’ is how he records the event in his diary. Mary Edith was born in November 1887 and merits a brief mention in Henry’s Christmas letter to Couch.
Jude comes in while I’m mulling over all this to say she’s going to the doctor to have her pregnancy confirmed and then on to work. She reads the line in the diary and asks if I want a boy or a girl.
Neither, though I’m desperately hoping that will change as the birth approaches. ‘I
’ve got a boy.’ I can say things like that now. ‘I’d like a girl.’
‘Didn’t Victorian people ever want children just for the sake of children? Why did this heir business always have to come into it?’
I tell her that I expect there were some who preferred girls to boys. It’s just that Henry wasn’t one of them. And what Edith thought we don’t know.
‘But he wasn’t a lord then. He didn’t have any land or a big country house or anything.’
‘He had Godby Hall, for what that was worth. Men used to want a son. There are a good many people now who’d rather have a son first and a daughter second.’
Jude starts speculating about that so that I wish I hadn’t said it. Maybe, now she’s managed to get pregnant, she has time to have two children. I don’t answer, I’ve nothing to say, and at the moment I feel I couldn’t speak on that subject if I tried. Instead I tell her to give me a ring when she’s seen the doctor – or would she like me to come with her?
No, darling, she says, kissing the top of my head and promising to phone. After she’s gone I get out a book I’ve got on Queen Victoria and haemophilia, published ten years ago, and browse through it. Henry would probably have loved to write such a book himself but it was impossible. Even if any company had been prepared to publish it, it was more than his job was worth. I don’t suppose he even stuck his neck out so far as to tell Princess Beatrice of the risks she ran in having children, though he’d have been quite justified in telling her and Prince Henry to stop now they had their son and daughter, for the next Battenberg children were both boys and both haemophiliacs.
Jude phones at midday and tells me the pregnancy’s been confirmed. The baby’s quite likely to be born on Christmas Day. At any rate that’s the due date. The doctor has told her of the importance of pre-natal screening. She can have chorionic villus sampling, whatever that is, or an amniocentesis and something called an alpha-fetoprotein test. A Bart’s test will also be done but I’ve already forgotten what that’s for. The risk to the pregnancy of the chorionic thing is greater than amniocentesis, so she’s opting for the latter. Oh, and there’ll be an ultrasound too. I can’t think of anything to say so I tell her I’ll take her somewhere nice for dinner. I’ll call for her as I’m not going into the House today.
Victorian women had nothing of that. They concealed their pregnancies from almost everyone, even to the extent of not going out of doors in the final months. I start thinking about Princess Beatrice, wondering if she ever averted to her brother Leopold’s sickness and death when she was pregnant for the third time? Or thought of her nephew Frittie, Prince Frederick of Hesse? The pattern of transmission of haemophilia was known. Although there were a good many fallacies and old wives’ tales about, that a haemophiliac’s son could inherit his father’s condition, that haemophilia and scurvy were identical, for instance, there was also sound medical knowledge, much of it still accepted today. And the widely held view that women can be haemophiliacs, denied for decades, is now known to be true. Perhaps Henry’s books were too abstruse for Beatrice or else her mother stopped her reading anything of that nature. And the babies just came, there being no reliable contraception till well into the twentieth century.
Henry’s babies went on coming too. And they went on being girls. The two my father referred to as his ‘maiden aunts’ arrived in 1888 and 1891, Helena Dorothea first, then Clara. Helena may have been named after the Princess Helena, Victoria’s third daughter, whom Henry seems to have liked, and also after her great-aunt Dorothea Vincent. Clara was given the second name of May. Henry’s choice probably, for the future Queen Mary was known as Princess May. After that fourth birth comes a gap of four years. Because Henry and Edith, after the births of four children, no longer slept together, the surest form of contraception there is? Or Edith did conceive but miscarried? Or children just failed to come, always one of the possibilities in this mystifying area.
Queen Victoria, long mourning the Prince Consort, lived mostly at Osborne in the Isle of Wight at this period of her reign. Henry was often there, though not as chief physician. James Reid had succeeded Sir William Jenner to that post in 1889. The Queen particularly liked Henry. In letters to the Princess Frederick, by now the Empress Frederick, she refers to him as ‘my dear Sir Henry’ and even as ‘my favourite among my doctors’. Is it too much to infer that, although she would never admit to haemophilia being in the royal family, still less that it came in through her, she valued Henry’s expertise in this particular field? That, notwithstanding Prince Leopold’s death, she trusted him to be able to deal with it if it occurred again? Henry, as we know, could be charming to women when he chose, and in the case of his sovereign and golden goose he certainly would have chosen.
I’ve turned my attention back to Alternative Henry, the notebook with its essays in tiny handwriting. This one, from which I quote, is the third and of course undated. It touches on frustrated ambition and on the last thing one would expect from its author, sex.
The other day I heard a man describe another as being ‘on the wrong side of fifty’ so I may say of myself that I am on the right side of sixty. Men say I have achieved much and it is true that, like the unhappy Macbeth, I receive ‘golden opinions from all sorts of people’, but I ask myself what I have truly achieved. Success, elevation to the top of my profession, which it cannot be denied is a noble one, a substantial body of work, the valued favour of Her Majesty, a satisfactory domestic situation and a family of four children. Notwithstanding all this, I have scarcely made any new discovery, have merely recorded, albeit meticulously and in scholarly fashion, discoveries made by others. To use a metaphor that, I suppose, derives from the peasant at the plough, I have broken no new ground. There have been anomalies and phenomena of disease I have guessed at but been unable to verify scientifically. Providence has denied me the opportunity I hoped for. It has been the fault of no one but I feel it as a chronically bitter blow.
When I was young I was already irresistibly drawn to blood. For me it possessed mysterious connotations with the act of generation. I believed with the ignorance of youth and lacking any experience de sexu that the generative fluid which passed from male to female in the act was none other than blood itself, that it was the crimson ichor which flowed from the male member in uterum and that if conception failed to occur, it was this male blood which was shed in menstruation. A more logical procedure, is it not, than that which in truth occurs?
This belief I held until my medical studies commenced. I look back on it now with the weary amusement of age. Many years have passed since then. Others have made the discoveries: evolution, the source of embryonic eggs, types of parthenogenesis, Lister’s revolutionary advances in surgery. It sometimes seems to me that only I have lagged behind, yet few could do more than I have done to make some momentous advance possible. Age has brought to me no diminution of ambition, but I am aware of a weakening of my vitality.
The words ‘elevation’ and ‘noble’ lead me to think that Henry had his sights on a peerage. Perhaps the Queen had dropped hints, unlikely though this seems. His extraordinary notion about blood as against semen made me feel queasy the first time I read it and Jude, who was horrified by the idea of blood gushing from the penis at the moment of ejaculation, says it could put her off sex and she wishes I hadn’t told her. Henry seems to have picked up the habit from his mother-in-law of referring to Providence, but what does he mean about his being denied the opportunity he hoped for? And what is this bitter blow? The last line puzzles me too. If someone had written that today we’d think only that he was tired and age was telling on him. When Victorians wrote about ‘weakening of vitality’ they often meant something rather different. It sounds as if Henry is afraid of becoming impotent.
Next day Paul is at Alma Villa when I get home from the House. He’s staying the weekend with his friend in Ladbroke Grove and has phoned to ask one of us to post him a bunch of CDs he left here at Christmas. Jude, who’s powerless to be discreet about her pregnanc
y, said she’d something to tell him and if he wanted to hear it he’d better come up to St John’s Wood. Like most of his contemporaries, Paul conducts his life on the phone, talks into his mobile as he walks along the street and all the time he’s driving – which, thank God, happens seldom as he hasn’t a car and I won’t lend him mine – and wanted to know why she couldn’t tell him there and then. She said no, and curiosity drew him.
He’s in our living room, sitting opposite Jude, and instead of the sparkling water he lives on, he’s drinking whisky. When I come in he gets up, which is far from habitual with him, and says he thinks we’re mad. Jude has told him and he says he’s horrified. Well, what he actually says is that he thinks it’s ‘horrendous’.
‘I’m nearly nineteen,’ he says, ‘or hadn’t you noticed?’
That’s unfair because I’ve never forgotten his birthday and never would and he knows it. I fetch myself a whisky, though I never drink the stuff.
‘Jude wants children,’ I say, almost wincing at my own use of the plural. ‘Why not? She’s young enough. When she married me I don’t suppose she thought your existence disqualified me from having any more.’
‘I want them,’ says Jude in a strained voice. She’s addressing me. ‘What you’ve said sounds as if you don’t.’
Paul ignores her. He’s staring at me. ‘And what about when your marriage breaks up?’ He takes no notice of Jude’s smothered gasp. ‘What’s the kid going to suffer? Have you thought of that?’
There are all sorts of things I could say, such as that I didn’t leave Sally, she left me, that any sufferings he had weren’t my fault, but I’m too angry to be coherent. I shout at him to get out of the house if he’s going to talk like that. I don’t want him, I didn’t invite him here, and God knows what Jude was thinking about even to tell her news to a little shit like him.