by Barbara Vine
‘Who was?’
‘Alfonso. He was a posthumous child, born in 1886 after his father was dead, born king, in fact. His mama was Regent till he was sixteen. Dogged he was, poor devil, by attempts to assassinate him. They say he was brave. All these family defects lost him his throne.’
‘How do you know all this?’ I ask him.
He looks dour. ‘I just do. Still, he was lucky. It was only his throne, not his head.’
With that we both go back into the Chamber for the resumed House of Lords Bill and hear a newish Labour peer called Lord Randall propose that all hereditary peers should remain in the House until they die but not be succeeded by their heirs. I whisper to Lord Quirk that he’ll be in trouble with his whips for this and get a grin of complicity. We debate this for an hour or so. Then, after I’ve eaten a foul dinner in the Home Room, I phone Jude and go home.
She’s looking pale, a white and wan version of Olivia Batho, and I have the horrible idea I wish I didn’t have, that this is how Olivia may have looked when she was deserted and alone and ill. ‘I’m just tired,’ she says. ‘Would you mind if I gave up work sooner than I said?’
Of course I wouldn’t mind, I’d be glad of it. I sit beside her on the sofa and put my arm round her and she says, do I realize she’s been pregnant three times and she’s never yet felt the baby move. I forget how far she is, she tells me three months and one week and I say that as far as I remember it’s too early yet but it ought to be soon, within the next three or four weeks. She wants to know what it will feel like. She’s asking me, a man? I tell her that so far as I know, at the beginning, it’s just a flutter, the kicks and punches come later.
‘I wouldn’t mind how much she kicked and punched me,’ she says.
So it’s to be a girl, is it?
I’m dreaming again. Not about Olivia or Jimmy Ashworth or Henry this time. And I’m not in a train about to cross the Tay Bridge. I’m in a house that I think is Grassingham Hall in Norfolk, country home of the Bathos. Someone has told me it’s Grassingham, though whoever that was has disappeared and I’m alone, walking along a gallery high up in the house and the wall to the right of me is hung with weaponry of a medieval kind, sabres and cutlasses and things I think are arquebuses and muzzleloaders. Over the gallery rail I can see down into misty depths but, through the cold haze, engines and instruments are visible, part of a great wheel, the top of what may be a guillotine, a section of some metal structure covered in spikes. It’s like one of those Piranesi prison pictures, grim and menacing.
I am looking for something and my unconscious mind knows what, but in some strange way I’m aware that my unconscious hasn’t told my consciousness what that something is. When I find it I will know, that at any rate is plain to me. The passage goes on after the gallery is passed and now there are doors on either side. I open one door and then another and look inside. It’s getting dark, it’s dusk, and there are no lights on. I look for electricity switches, gas brackets, oil lamps, candle sconces, but I don’t see any. If you want light in this place you have to bring your own.
The rooms I look into are bedrooms, full of dark furniture with white curtains and counterpanes. Outside their windows the sky is a clear blue-grey like the inside of a mussel shell. I open a third door. At first I think someone has drenched this room with water or rain has come in through a hole in the ceiling, for everything is soaking wet, the bed, a nightgown on the bed, the pillows and covers, the rug on the floor and the floor itself. I can see the wetness gleaming a little though the light is no longer strong enough to show me colours. I take a few steps into the room and touch with one finger the sodden nightgown, dipping it into a pool that lies in a fold and bringing the finger close to my eyes. The wetness is black. When I smell it I smell iron and when I taste it I taste blood. The room, the bed, the nightgown, the rug, are soaked in blood as if something has had its throat cut in here or the someone who wore the nightgown has…
I wake up soundlessly but with a violent jerk. Jude isn’t there but the bedlamp on her side is on. The bed isn’t soaked in blood but there’s a lot of it on the sheets and a big still damp stain where she’s been lying. I sit up and for about a minute I do absolutely nothing. I don’t even think. My mind is blank, a reddish-black screen. Then I get up and go into our bathroom. Jude’s lying on the floor, naked and bleeding and weeping, her nightgown, which looks quite a lot like the one in my dream, thrown into the bath.
I say, absurdly, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,’ and I go back into the bedroom and dial 999 for an ambulance.
She’s in the hospital overnight and for one day and another night. They don’t know why she lost the baby or why she always loses babies. They tell her there was probably some defect in the foetus to account for it, as if this is comforting. Her obstetrician says it certainly doesn’t mean she can’t conceive again and carry a child to term.
To me she says bitterly, ‘Funny, isn’t it, I’m actually using those words “my obstetrician” like other women do. As if I’d had a baby. I looked the word up in the dictionary and it comes from the Latin, obstetrix, a midwife. I looked it up at home when I thought I’d really have a baby this time. And I’ve never had a midwife, I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to one. I was happy when I looked the word up. I was starting to be happy.’
I can never think of anything to say to her but I say all sorts of things just the same. That I love her, that she’s all in all to me, that it hurts me to see her so unhappy. Then she starts apologizing to me for not giving me a child. I’d like to say I don’t give a toss about a bloody baby and I’d ten times rather not have one, but that wouldn’t help. I’m steeling myself to ask her if she wants to adopt, if she wants us to try for a child from Vietnam or Peru or whatever.
Once she’s home friends come and see her, her mother comes and her sister. Then the Croft-Joneses turn up. They’ve left the Holy Grail behind with David’s mother. He’s conspicuous by his absence, his parents’ tact sticks out a mile, it’s worse than if they’d brought him. I wish they’d just stayed away. Just as Georgie was the most pregnant woman I’ve ever seen, so she’s now the most obvious wet-nurse, her breasts huge bolsters on that thin frame. After a while these bulbous udders begin leaking milk and damp patches form on the bodice of her skimpy green dress. Her embarrassment is a pretence, she’s immensely proud of herself, and although she’s very obviously made a pact with David before they came not to mention babies or anything to do with them in front of ‘poor Judith’, she can’t resist murmuring with mock shame that she’s got enough milk for two.
I want to kill her, I want to throw them both out. I’m so anxious to get rid of them that I forget all about telling David I’d like to meet his mother before she goes back, I’d like to have a talk with her about her mother, Henry’s eldest daughter, see if she has any stories about Henry and Edith and their other children. But I forget this in my desire to say goodbye and don’t hurry back. Of course I don’t say this. I thank them for coming and say we must meet again soon and when I’ve closed the door behind them and it’s too late I remember about wanting to talk to Veronica Croft-Jones.
Jude’s miscarriage put an end to all Henry research for a time. Nor did I go into the House. I missed the further consideration of the House of Lords Bill on Report but read the debate in Hansard. A letter has come from Stanley Farrow, saying he missed seeing me in the House and he’d heard my wife was ill. I ought to reply but I don’t because I don’t know what to say. Jude doesn’t want anyone ‘outside our immediate circle’ to know about her miscarriage, only those who knew she was pregnant in the first place. Someone she didn’t tell was Paul. He called round without warning and knew at once, she says, from her face and from her thinness. She has discovered unexpected depths of tenderness in my son who, now the possible half-brother or sister has vanished, claims to have been looking forward to ‘taking it out in its buggy’.
I sit with Jude, I hold her hand. We sleep with our arms round each o
ther as if we’re afraid something will come in in the night and prise us apart. But we have no sex. It seems an indelicate idea. Besides, I don’t know if I ought to use a condom or if she ought to go on the pill or what, and I’m afraid to ask. I take her out to her favourite restaurants and pay black market prices to get into plays we haven’t seen. I’ve joined Blockbuster Video and we watch old and new films night after night. Our childless friends are assiduous in asking us to drinks or dinner. The fecund ones maintain a tactful silence. After a month of this she doesn’t do what I’d like and what I’ve started waiting for, that is make a sexual advance on the sofa where we sit side by side watching Casablanca, but as we’re putting out the lights and starting up the stairs, she says in the sort of voice she’d use to suggest we book ahead for our Christmas holiday, that it’s time to try again for a baby.
I ought to be impotent, I ought to be a candidate for Viagra, and I don’t know why I’m not because I thought I would be. I anticipated total failure, but I didn’t fail. I suppose I simply find my wife the most attractive and desirable woman I’ve ever known and that’s that. Good. Three loud cheers from all and sundry.
I can’t sleep and I lie beside the sleeping Jude, thinking about Henry and Victorian men in general. Impotence is mostly supposed to be psychologically rather than physically caused. So if it’s true nineteenth-century women were without sexual feelings they would have presented a man with no challenge, nothing for him to rise to, ifyou’ll excuse the pun, and therefore he’d never have been incapable. But I don’t suppose it is true, it’s just what nineteenth-century men preferred to believe. For most of this past century men have been expected to be ‘good at it’. I wonder if Henry was, if he tried, if he ever thought about it. Did Jimmy Ashworth teach him? You can only teach if you have a receptive pupil and somehow I don’t think Henry would have submitted to being taught. Edith, presumably, would have accepted what she was offered, and if she expected great things, was perhaps disappointed. Marriage, as someone said in Henry’s day, is the price men pay for sex and sex is the price women pay for marriage. It sounds grim.
It’s the middle of July and I’ve begun going into the House again. Since I’d told no one I expected to become a father in December, there’s no one to commiserate with me. Stanley Farrow comes up to me at the long table at teatime and asks after Jude – he thinks she’s had a bad go of summer flu – and I tell him she’s better. I sit in the Chamber for a couple of hours, listening to the progress of the Greater London Authority Bill, listening at any rate with half an ear, while I contemplate various of my fellow hereditaries and wonder which of them will be elected to stay and which will go. And I ask myself, suppose a banned hereditary came back, came to the Peers’ Entrance and walked in and hung his coat up on his old peg, what would the doorkeepers do? Would they, respectfully, stop him? Or try to stop him? But suppose he resisted, refused, walked on and turned to the left and went up the red-carpeted staircase, would they – unthinkable, surely – manhandle him? Or call the police? I wonder if the promoters of this bill have thought of that.
Henry seldom came into the House. These days new peers are encouraged to make their maiden speech as soon as conveniently possible, to find a bill entering its second reading or a Wednesday afternoon debate and put their names down on the speakers’ list with an ‘M’ after it in brackets. The debate in question should be on a subject the new peer knows something about or can mug up and the maiden speech should be non-controversial, not lasting more than ten minutes. Henry made his in July, exactly one hundred and two years ago. His theme was, appropriately enough, public health: the improved health of British city-dwellers as a result of efficient drainage. By this time Sir Joseph Bazalgette was dead. He had died in 1891. But he had been the great engineer of London’s sewers and embankments and Henry’s neighbour in Hamilton Terrace and they’d very likely often talked on this subject. Reading the maiden speech today, you can find evidence in it of technical knowledge that may have been acquired through conversations with Sir Joseph.
He spoke again a year later on new discoveries in biochemical research, then in its early stages, on the coagulation of blood, and three years afterwards on Mendelian laws of heredity, which had apparently been ignored for thirty-five years but in 1900 were rediscovered. It was in this, extremely long, speech, that Henry made his notorious remark, for which he’s since been ridiculed: ‘What is the answer? That is the question.’ After that, he seldom spoke in the House.
He seems never to have written another book either, though there is evidence that he started one and that he regarded it as a highly significant work. The diary entry for 2 March 1900 reads, ‘Began my magnum opus this morning.’ Some months later he is writing in Alternative Henry,
I am agnostic, not a believer, though I pay lip service to religion, but certain sayings of Jesus Christ I recognize as words of great wisdom. For instance, one that springs constantly to mind is one of the last phrases He is alleged to have uttered; Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. I knew not what I was doing when I did what I did, though I believed I knew only too well.
I shall never be a pioneer now, a great discoverer. My ambition has come to nothing. I cannot write. I can carry out no experiments. The child’s crying is a constant disturbance to me. It rings and echoes through this house, it penetrates the thick walls. No matter where I go I cannot escape from it. Sometimes I think I shall lose my mind. Oh, how I am punished!
Why? How? What has he done? I don’t know, and the rest of the Alternative Henry papers, only two of them, give no clue. Those last lines sound like the witness of someone in the ghost stories of M. R. James, some wretched haunted creature who has seen the demon yet again and seen it come closer. Or is he only saying, as a thoroughly selfish man might, albeit with unusual near-hysteria, that his three-year-old son’s crying is a nuisance and a hindrance to his work? Perhaps. Still, the terms he uses are extreme. By the standards of the time, he was an old man. It may be that he was on the verge of making some new discovery and the presence of two small boys in the house interrupted the process. Even with a staff of servants, it’s no joke to be a father of a five-year-old and a three-year-old when you’re sixty-four. This makes me think of myself and my own situation and what I now know to be Jude’s aims, to have a child whenever and by whatever means she can. I know I’m getting things out of proportion but I can’t help thinking that if she finally succeeds when she’s forty-seven, I’ll be fifty-five, and not far short of Henry’s age when it’s five.
A package has come from Janet Forsythe, containing a wad of smudged photocopies, a photograph and a covering letter. I’ve forgotten who she is and the address at the top of the letter means nothing. But the first sentence tells me how much she and her mother enjoyed tea in the House of Lords and she apologizes for not having thanked me before. And of course I remember she’s Laura Kimball’s daughter and Jimmy Ashworth was her great-grandmother. She’s a sort of cousin of mine, a fact she’s unaware of, or so I think. But when I read the letter I find this isn’t so. She says she’s always suspected Henry was her great-grandfather but she’s never liked to mention this to her mother who has an ‘exalted idea’ of Jimmy. For her part, she’d be proud to be descended from ‘the distinguished doctor’. The photocopies, she writes, are from The Times of various dates in 1883 and she goes into a long explanation of being interested in some other aspect of family history – she is another of these amateur genealogists, apparently – of investigating newspaper accounts and of coming on pieces I might ‘find fascinating’. In due course she’ll send me a draft copy of the family tree she’s making because she’s sure I’ll be interested.
Before I go through these copies I look at the photograph. It’s of Janet when young – or is it of her mother? For a moment I can’t tell but I think it’s Laura by the clothes which are unmistakably 1930s. But what grabs my attention is the brooch this woman, mother or daughter, is wearing on her dark dress. It’s a five-pointed star in b
rilliants, almost certainly not diamonds, and Janet has written on the back: ‘This is Jimmy’s brooch Sir Henry gave her and which came to my mother when her mother died.’ So now I know where the idea of marking his dates with Jimmy came from, a brooch he gave her. Or did the pentagrams come first and he chose the brooch to match them? Perhaps it was a joke between him and her. And it opens up the idea of tenderness and affection in Henry’s attitude to Jimmy. Jokes, a pretty gift, drawing the five-pointed star in his diary at appropriate times, maybe even a secret sign between them, the present bestowed and Henry saying: ‘I bought this for you because it reminded me of our special sign and now when you wear it you can think of me making the sign of love in my diary…’ All imagination on my part, of course, all a romancing worthy of Laura herself.
I go through the copies, finding it necessary once more to use a magnifying glass. Many of the paragraphs are concerned with Henry, lectures he’s given, announcements of new books he’s published, the notice in the Court Circular of his knighthood. There’s nothing new for me in any of this. The last cutting is about the appearance in the magistrates’ court of a man called Joseph Edward Heyford Brewer, aged twenty-six, of Palmerston Buildings, Euston, on a charge of assaulting Mr Samuel Henderson in Gower Street. Brewer was found guilty and sent to prison, but not for long. No doubt he’d have got years if he’d committed robbery at the same time, the English always valuing property above human life and wellbeing.
This is quite useful to me, I’d have had to find it for myself sooner or later, and I write back to Janet Forsythe immediately, thanking her for the cuttings, agreeing with her about her grandmother’s paternity but saying nothing about the pentagram brooch or how thrilled I’d be to see her family tree. I put her photocopies in one of the Henry box files. These are five now, variously labelled Work, Royal Family, Personal History, Children and Descendants, and Miscellaneous and Marriage. Janet’s stuff goes into Personal History, though I hesitate as to whether the last wouldn’t be a better home for it, the heroic rescue of poor Samuel being the trigger which set off Henry’s marriage.