by Barbara Vine
Lamb wrote an essay called ‘Dream Children’ about the family he never had. It’s sentimental but it has its finer moments. Ghostly children gather round to listen to his tales of the people who might have been their ancestors if they’d ever been born. They want ‘stories about their pretty dead mother’ but at last they fade mournfully away saying, ‘We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name.’
I don’t know if Jude knows this essay. Of course, I’d rather she didn’t. There are no two ways about it for me; I must want her to have a child, I must stop it any longer waiting on the tedious shores of Lethe, I must teach myself to want it as much as she does, because that’s the only way we can survive together. I must stop being relieved when another day passes and she hasn’t used the dreaded four-letter word. More than that, I must begin using it myself, show enthusiasm for what dismays me, pretend a longing I don’t feel. Even that must change. The dismay must go and my whole attitude towards our life be altered. I must get myself into Henry-the-father mode, think of how he longed for a second son, though he had four daughters and a son already. It would be better too if I stopped telling myself it was easy for him, he had a wife at home and nannies for his children, and remembered his involvement with George the youngest, the sick boy, the child whose crying so distressed him.
But do I want that distress? Do I want someone to enter my life and bring me pain? Suddenly I remember Paul having croup at a year old and rushing him to hospital and the touch-and-go tracheotomy the surgeon carried out. That agony will be mine again, or something very like it, if Jude gets what she wants and I must teach myself to want. Because I shall love the child. I shall adore it and there’s the pity of it all. But if she doesn’t get what she wants, it will be worse.
*
It’s September now, a Sunday morning, and David and Georgie have called. They’ve brought the Holy Grail with them, having apparently decided tact can only be maintained so long. He’s the biggest ten-week-old I’ve ever seen, not that I’ve much experience in these matters, he’s the sort of baby Renaissance painters used as models for their putti, presumably because this was the ideal and few fifteenth-century Florentine infants actually packed this amount of fat on to their bones. I admire him so extravagantly that Jude, whom my transports are designed to. impress, gives me a suspicious look. While she and Georgie talk babies, feeding routines and the ever-absorbing subject of Georgie’s superabundance of milk, David tells me his mother is coming on the twentieth to stay for a week. Will we come to dinner while she’s with them? I can’t really turn this down, though I’d like to, but I stipulate that I also need to have the private interview with Veronica she suggested in her letter. I want to tape our conversation as I’ve a feeling it may be very useful. I consult Jude, interrupting a mini-lecture from Georgie on efficient methods of expressing milk, breast pumps, et cetera, and we fix on Saturday 25 September for the dinner. The Croft-Joneses are now established as our friends.
‘Our cousins who are also our friends,’ as David alarmingly puts it.
I’m tempted to put to him my problem about Henry’s motivation in introducing himself to the Hendersons. After all, he’s just as much his great-grandson as I am. But something stops me and I almost laugh out loud when I realize what it is. I’ve the same sort of inhibition as Laura Kimball has about Jimmy Ashworth. I don’t want it to get around that my celebrated and distinguished great-grandfather was party to a criminal conspiracy, that he paid a villain to attack an innocent and harmless man. It may have been a hundred and sixteen years ago, it was still my ancestor and a disgraceful thing to do. After the Croft-Joneses have gone Jude wants to know what I was ‘grinning about’. I tell her and she too laughs.
‘It’s called empathy,’ she says.
But what does it bode for my Henry biography? If I don’t want to tell my second or third cousin or whatever he is, I’m certainly not going to want to tell the world. Or those inhabitants of it that constitute my readership. It’s something I’ve never thought of before. I suppose I simply assumed Henry’s life would be blameless. In a way, of course, I’m presented with a choice: a dull (and untruthful) biography that few will want to read or an exciting truthful one that will sell. There isn’t really a choice, it has to be the latter – or not happen at all.
I’ve made a table for myself, rather like the details of evidence compiled by investigating officers in old-fashioned detective stories. On one side I’ve listed everything I knew about the Hendersons as they were in 1883 and on the other the known facts about Henry’s involvement with the Dawson-Brewer family. I’ve been looking at it every day since we got back from Greece and still I can’t see why Henry wanted to know the Hendersons and what they had that he couldn’t find elsewhere. I’ve concentrated on the son Lionel and even wondered if Henry was homosexual, if that was what his friendship with Richard Hamilton was really about, and having seen Lionel he’d fallen in love. But considering the broods of children both he and Lionel later had and the lack of any evidence for homosexuality in either of them, not to mention Jimmy Ashworth, I’ve abandoned that. I’ve even asked myself if there could have been something in the house in Keppel Street Henry wanted, if there was something hidden there known to him but not them. This again is the stuff of old-fashioned (very old-fashioned) detective stories. Was the old man William Quendon in possession of some information Henry needed? That really comes into the same category as the last supposition.
I’m looking at the two detective story columns again today. We’re going out for lunch, to find somewhere we can eat outside, and I’m sitting at my desk staring at the table while Jude gets ready. And suddenly I see. It’s so simple and so obvious when you know that I’m ashamed of myself for not cottoning on before. He’d seen Eleanor somewhere, fallen in love and decided he wanted to marry her.
‘At his age?’ says Jude as we’re walking up to Blenheim Terrace.
‘I fell in love with you at first sight,’ I say, and it’s true. I saw her across the room at a publisher’s party.
‘You weren’t forty-seven,’ she says.
‘No, I was ten years younger. But old enough to know better, only it wouldn’t have been better any more than it would have been for Henry.’
This muddled thinking and confused phrasing she rightly receives in silence. But when I take her hand she gives mine a squeeze. ‘I can’t see you getting a hit man to bang my father over the head in order to meet me.’
I say we don’t have to do things like that these days. I went up to Jude at that party, I didn’t even find anyone to introduce us, I just asked if I could fetch her another drink and we talked and when it got to eight I asked her if she’d have dinner with me. ‘You couldn’t do that in 1883,’ I tell her. ‘Girls didn’t go to parties on their own, they had chaperones, and, anyway, she and Henry wouldn’t have gone to the same parties. He couldn’t have gone up to her in the street. He couldn’t have knocked on the front door and asked to talk to her. I can see he’d have thought this the only way.’
She nods, but abstractedly. I know I haven’t gone far enough to convince her. But I’ve almost convinced myself. Henry was tired of Jimmy Ashworth and bored with Olivia. Why not? One day, making his way to the hospital in Gower Street, he sees a pretty girl with a mass of beautiful blonde hair, a girl with a fine figure and the air of a lady. He can’t get her out of his mind and he employs a private detective – he may even have employed Brewer – to find out who she is and where she comes from.
‘If what you say is true,’ says Jude as we go up the steps of the restaurant, ‘how did it happen that once Eleanor was dead he transferred his affections to Edith?’
‘For the reasons we’ve been into before. They had their love of the dead in common, they talked, they were often alone together. Besides, by this time Henry was set on marriage. He was forty-seven going on forty-eight, he’d no time t
o waste and I don’t suppose he met many young women.’
‘No, and he couldn’t keep on knocking old men down in the street in order to meet them.’
We’re shown to our table, outside, as we’d requested, and the waitress has brought us each a glass of unexpectedly well-chilled white wine. It pleases me to see Jude drinking it, not adhering to this dreary healthy eating regime she started on before we went away. ‘Why not go back to Olivia?’ she says. ‘If he wanted a wife, that is. According to her sister, she’d have had him. Why did. he have to have a Henderson?’
I say that this is a strange way of putting it.
‘Is it? It seems reasonable to me. I’ve been reading these memoirs – in manuscript I mean, at work – they’re about a bunch of aristocrats who were all friends of Edward the Seventh. His eldest son, he was called Albert Victor – there was a tale went the rounds that he was actually Jack the Ripper, but that’s another story. Anyway, he was engaged to Princess Mary of Teck, always called May, but he died and Princess May transferred her affections to his brother. They married and turned into King George the Fifth and Queen Mary.’
‘Yes, but that was dynastic,’ I say. ‘She was probably told it was her destiny not to marry the individual man but to marry the future king. It was her duty.’
‘It certainly wasn’t Henry’s duty,’ says Jude. For one so slim, she has an inordinate passion for pizza and has enthusiastically begun on a margarita. I’m more austerely getting to work on a Caesar salad. ‘It was his choice,’ she says. ‘He had to have a Henderson just like Princess May had to have a future king. I bet it was her choice too. Imagine ifyou’re the daughter of the Duke of a little German duchy, even if your great-grandfather was a king, and your fiancé who’s going to be King of England dies of pneumonia – think of the disappointment even if you didn’t love him. You’d jump at the chance of marrying the next one in line.’
I tell her she’s losing her parallel, it’s getting less and less like Henry’s case every minute. George the Fifth was a great catch for anyone. Edith wasn’t. All she seems to have had going for her was that she was slightly prettier than her sister. Jude says she doesn’t know, she can’t fathom Henry but she’s willing to bet he was up to no good. We sit about in the sunshine, drinking rather a lot of wine, and feeling as if we’re in some Mediterranean place. Jude says she knows it’s not considered the thing to say but if this is global warming, she’s all for it. At home, in a somewhat fuddled state, I take another look at Henry’s diary for the year 1883, specifically at those entries for the late summer when he became engaged to Eleanor, and for the autumn, made after her death.
There’s no mystery about any of them. All they show is a callous and relentless nature as well as a determination to reveal nothing in a diary someone else might find and read. On Thursday 14 June he breaks with the Bathos. ‘Feeling unwell, I cancelled my evening engagement.’ Two days later comes, ‘Called to enquire after Mr Henderson’s health,’ and on the 20th, ‘Dined with Mr and Mrs Henderson.’ Then come more visits to Keppel Street but the only entry that arouses the slightest curiosity is for 27 July, ‘Consultation with Mrs Henderson.’ What was she consulting him about? All the family seem to have been healthy. I suppose it must have been about Samuel Henderson, who perhaps suffered headaches and dizziness as a result of Joseph Brewer’s attack on him, and Louisa Henderson, like a good wife, was worried about him. I seem to have answered all my own questions and I ought to be satisfied, but somehow I’m not.
Later on, Jude asks the question I was afraid Georgie Croft-Jones would ask that evening we had dinner together in the House. ‘Now you’ve found Henry was capable of criminal conspiracy and fixed up the assault on poor old Samuel, has it occurred to you he might also have engineered Eleanor’s murder?’
‘You mean, paid Bightford to do it and later on let Bightford be hanged?’
‘Well, yes. Bightford would have been hanged anyway, he did the deed, but I suppose Henry would have been hanged along with him.’
I say that if our theory that Henry fell in love with Eleanor after seeing her in the street is correct, he’d have wanted to marry her, he wouldn’t want her dead. Besides, there’s no discernible connection between Bightford and Henry.
‘There was no discernible connection between Brewer and Henry until you discovered it.’
Bightford would have told the police, I tell her. He’d nothing to lose. While in police custody at Exeter he’d have come out with the whole story, if story there was. I can’t believe it, it doesn’t ring true. Henry wasn’t married to Eleanor, he wasn’t irrevocably bound to her. If he wanted to be rid of her he could have jilted her. After all, he’d more or less done it before with Olivia.
‘It was just an idea,’ she says.
While she watches her favourite Sunday night television serial I give her theory a bit more thought. Suppose the mysterious ‘consultation’ wasn’t about Samuel and his headaches at all. Suppose Louisa Henderson had confided in Henry that her daughter Eleanor had some disease or disability. She’d been injured as a child, for instance, and would never have children. But that won’t work because Henry wasn’t engaged to Eleanor on 27 July when the consultation took place, he didn’t propose until quite late on in August. If Louisa Henderson had told him Eleanor was incapable of having children or was malformed in some way – for instance, lacking a vagina, which happens sometimes though very rarely – Henry would surely just have abandoned her, as was his habit. He’d dumped two women so why not a third? In any case, why would Louisa say such a thing to an eminent medical expert she’d only known for about six weeks? She’d have had no reason then to believe Henry was contemplating marriage.
Or would she? Mightn’t it be the case that, even so early on, Henry had asked both parents for consent to pay his addresses (or however those Victorians put it) to their daughter? It was only afterwards that Mrs Henderson asked to speak to him in private and to lay the unpalatable truth before him. Even if that were the case he could still get out of it. That would have been the point of telling him. So I don’t know and it may be that I’ll never know.
Veronica Croft-Jones is the kind of woman of whom people say that she’s wonderful for her age. She’s tall and upright and her trimly cut hair is tinted a uniform pale blonde, fitting round her head like a golden velvet cloche hat. Her skin is like crumpled tissue paper and she wears very dark red lipstick which has ‘bled’ into the lines round her mouth. She’s evidently proud of her legs, which are very good still, and she sits at angles to show them off, crossing her legs and letting her foot, in an absurdly high-heeled shoe, swing provocatively. Her voice is very upper class, plummy yet fluting.
None of those directives for mothers-in-law, specifically those about not interfering or criticizing, have reached her. She tells Georgie she hopes she’s feeding David the food he likes and not neglecting him now she’s got Galahad. Then she wants to know why the vegetables in this household are boiled and not steamed. What has become of the Chinese steamer she gave Georgie last Christmas? Galahad’s name, and no wonder, has evidently never gone down well and when she pronounces it you can detect the quotation marks hanging in the air. He’s too fat, something Veronica can’t understand because breast-fed babies don’t get overweight. Georgie must be supplementing his feeds with something.
To my surprise, Georgie takes all this very well, answering enquiries either with a ‘I suppose you’re right’ or ‘I shall have to do something about that’. David is an only child, born late and fourteen years after his parents’ marriage, and plainly, as Veronica points out to me, as if I couldn’t see it for myself, they ‘adore’ each other. From time to time they exchange conspiratorial smiles. And if David doesn’t exactly side with his mother he doesn’t stick up for Georgie either. Jude and I watch it all avidly, knowing what fun we’ll have dissecting it later.
Veronica dampens my spirits somewhat by telling me that when we have our tête-à-tête she hopes I’m not expecting any family secr
ets because there aren’t any. However, I can think of one and shall confront her with Patricia Agnew’s letter when the time comes. We eat. Georgie’s a good cook and the food is delicious. The meal is marred only by Veronica asking if her daughter-in-law has forgotten she’s allergic to asparagus and never touches butter anyway. She drinks a great deal. Not just for a woman of her age, but for anyone. Lots of gin and tonic before the meal, wine all the way through, liqueur brandy afterwards and whisky and water just for passing the evening.
When she’s settled with her drink I expect her to light a cigarette and wonder what Georgie’s reaction will be, but she doesn’t. She announces to anyone who may be interested that she gave up smoking three years ago, not for the sake of her lungs or her heart, but because she’s read that cigarette smoke wrinkles the skin. Then she says to me, ‘I never knew my grandfather, you know. He died ages before I was born.’
Eight years, I tell her. I know that.
‘By all accounts he was a frightful bore. I can’t think why you want to write his life.’
‘I don’t think he was boring,’ I say. ‘He was peculiar, an extraordinary man.’
‘Oh, well, chacun à son goût,’ she says, and then Georgie brings in the Holy Grail. I’m more favourably disposed to Georgie than I’ve ever been, it must be sympathy with the underdog that has got to me, and I tell her how beautiful the baby is and how proud she must be of him.
‘I hope you’re not going to do that in public,’ says Veronica, presumably referring to an imminent suckling session. But Georgie says meekly that she’s done it already, it’s the reason for her absenting herself, feeding Galahad is what she’s been doing for the past half-hour.
Veronica says with a rudeness that takes my breath away, ‘People don’t always notice your absence, you know. You can’t be the centre of attention all the time.’