The Blood Doctor

by Barbara Vine

  We arrange to meet later on in her stay for the interview. Going home – we’re walking because it’s such a fine night – Jude says she doesn’t envy anyone who’s going to be alone with Veronica Croft-Jones, but I tell her one good thing is that after that neither of us will ever have to see her again.

  17

  I’ve been re-reading the letters Mary Craddock wrote to her sister Elizabeth Kirkford. Mary lived in the Fulham Vicarage while Elizabeth was far away in Yorkshire.

  The first one is dated 1923, a few months after Mary married her vicar. She writes about life in Fulham, still a place with a good many rustic open spaces, about her work in the parish and how she helps at the school. Visits to their mother are mentioned and to ‘the girls’, as she always calls her sisters, Helena and Clara. Towards them she has the typical disparaging attitude of the early twentieth-century married woman to spinsters. Plainly, in her eyes, they are ‘surplus women’, of no use in the world, and she wonders what they find to do all day.

  By the time she writes again she is pregnant or, as she puts it, ‘expecting’. She feels very well, unlike Elizabeth herself who apparently suffered from morning sickness for months on end. And she makes much of this in her sharp way. Women make too much fuss about what is ‘an absolutely natural event’. But she wishes she wasn’t so far away from Mother and the girls. Presumably, the other side of London feels a long way away to her.

  In April 1924 the baby is born. It is Patricia Agnew who, thirty-six years later, is to write the mystifying letter to Veronica. All the family have been to see the baby. Mary’s mother Edith stayed in the house for the confinement and was ‘a tower of strength’. In any case, she writes robustly, her labour was neither prolonged nor at all unbearable. Clara is still with her ‘to help out’. Mary thinks she and Helena will never marry. ‘They have got some nonsense into their heads about, among other things, not handing themselves body and soul over to a man.’ In any case, she goes on rather callously, it may be just as well to have come to a decision as all the suitable young men have been killed in the Great War. Clara reads their father’s books. It must be ‘showing off’ as Mary is quite sure she can’t understand them. Now, if you please, she’s saying she’d like to be a doctor herself, a notion to which no one gives serious consideration.

  Her next letter is mostly about their mother Edith, Lady Nanther, who, by 1925, was in her sixties. Mother, she writes, is wonderful, always so cheerful and practical. She, Mary, still thinks it was disgraceful of Alexander to sell Ainsworth House ‘absolutely over Mother’s head, with no compunction’. It’s no joke to be obliged to move at her age but she took it so well. Of course in Mother’s eyes Alexander can do no wrong. What does Elizabeth think of his marrying ‘this American woman’? Mary believes they have been living together, which is very wrong and shocking, but at least she has money, plenty of it, and money is what Alexander is in dire need of. Mother says she’s pleased he’s found someone at last, ‘though what she means by “at last” I don’t know. He’s not yet thirty.’

  The sisters’ father, dead for sixteen years, is only mentioned once more in this correspondence, and the reference comes as part of Mother-praise. ‘Of course it’s well known that only she could manage Father. He never listened to anyone else. I sometimes wonder what kind of a tyrant he would have become if he had been a less devoted husband and she not been there to teach him wisdom and tolerance.’ She adds, ‘Mother has taken up her brush again, is in fact having drawing lessons, and has produced a lovely study of little Patricia.’

  From all this a picture emerges of Edith and adds a little to the build-up of Henry’s character. According to his daughter, who would surely know, he was devoted to his wife, the woman he had come to prefer over her dead sister. There’s nothing very surprising in that. I feel I’m getting to know my great-grandmother; a sensible woman, brisk and practical, with a personality strong enough to keep Henry under control. Not in awe of him, not under his thumb. A good and affectionate mother, without strong passions, unemotional, yet with a decided feeling for artistic expression. She was a photographer from the start of cameras becoming available. She took hundreds of photographs, particularly of her children and her nephews and nieces, the children of her brother Lionel. One of the remarkable things about them is that they’re not sentimental. With a few exceptions, her subjects don’t look ‘soppy’, but natural and real. And somehow she’s managed to catch the cheerful niceness of Elizabeth, her mother’s daughter, the grandeur and sharp malice of Mary, her father’s child, and in Helena and Clara a kind of mutiny that was never to take positive form. The pictures of Alexander show simply a confident contented boy, his mother’s favourite, a preference I’m sure she strove earnestly to conceal from the others. Who included, of course, George, the baby, the semi-invalid. All that shows in her photographs of him is stoicism and pain.

  The portrait she made so long before of her sister I thought the only one of her drawings to survive. But I’m wondering now if the two pretty watercolours which hang in our dining room and which hung there when I inherited the house are her work. It never occurred to me before, I’ve hardly glanced at them. I go into the dining room and look at a study of what may be the Yorkshire dales near Godby and another that’s plainly Hampstead Heath. They don’t seem to be signed, or so I think at first, and then I look more closely and see a tiny E.N. in the lower right-hand corner of each. What did Edith think of her husband falling in love with her sister at first sight and when that sister died turning to her? And taking her to the same honeymoon destination as he’d planned for her sister? Perhaps she didn’t mind. She wanted a husband, she wanted children, and a wealthy successful eminent husband was on offer. I’m sure she came to love him. And he came to love her deeply, as we do when we depend on someone for comfort and peace of mind and security and a safe haven. She had given him too the two sons he wanted. We can be sure she never learned the story of the hit man and the set-up that led to Henry’s first calling at Keppel Street.

  When I ask Veronica Croft-Jones if she minds my recording our conversation she gives me a strange suspicious look as if I’d suggested bugging her phone. ‘It seems so businesslike,’ she says. ‘So official. You’ll have to let me see what you intend to put down in this book of yours. I mean, the actual words.’

  I promise to do this. She is wearing a white suit today made out of a sort of nubbly material and with a very short skirt. Her legs are crossed at the knee and she has an irritating habit of swinging the dangling foot. I start the recording device, test it and ask her about her parents. Who was James Bartlett Kirkford and where did Elizabeth Nanther meet him? She knows their history and doesn’t mind talking about it. Have I ever heard of her great-aunt Dorothea Vincent? Trains come to mind and poor Eleanor’s death and I tell her, yes, she was the one who lived in Manaton, Samuel Henderson’s sister. Well, she says, Kirkford was a friend of her daughter Laetitia’s husband, though much younger than he. They met at Laetitia’s house in Wimbledon. ‘Daddy’, as Veronica still calls him, was in the Customs and Excise but ‘he had private means’.

  I ask her about her brother Kenneth. Her foot starts swinging again. She can’t remember Kenneth at all, she says, she was very young when he died.

  ‘It was diphtheria,’ she says. ‘A lot of children died of it in those days. Poor Daddy couldn’t fight in the war, you know, the Great War, but he longed to be at the front. He had a bad leg but people didn’t know that and someone sent him a white feather. It was all quite ghastly.’

  Veronica married in 1946 at the age of twenty-nine but her son David wasn’t born till fourteen years later. I point out – daringly – that this is a coincidence as it is precisely the length of time that elapsed between Henry’s parents’ marriage and his birth. The foot swings slowly, the way an angry cat’s tail does. ‘One has nothing to do with the other,’ she says. ‘My husband and I were all in all to one another. We were perfectly indifferent as to whether children came along or not.’


  I tell her I’d like to show her a letter and produce the one Patricia Agnew wrote to her soon after David was born. The foot stops swinging and is positively stamped on the floor, her knees drawn up close together. ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘From David. It was among a lot of family letters.’

  ‘I suppose you mean you got it from Georgina. That would be typical. One simply has no privacy left in the modern world. I gave those letters to my son purely for his family tree.’

  I ask her if she’d mind answering one question about it. She looks mutinous and her white papery face has gone quite red. ‘Go ahead,’ she says. ‘If I don’t like it I shan’t answer.’

  She reads the letter as if she’s never seen it before. ‘What did your cousin think might be wrong with David? Down’s Syndrome?’

  ‘Is that being mongoloid? They have such ridiculous names for everything nowadays. Yes, that’s what she did suspect. Or I suppose so. She was a very silly hysterical woman, I must say, though she was my own cousin.’ Veronica has completely forgotten this conversation is being recorded. ‘I mean, how absurd can you get? David, who’s simply the most intelligent man in London.’

  I manoeuvre her back to her grandparents and she reminds me that Henry was dead long before she was born. Her grandmother Edith she was fond of, chiefly it seems because she allowed her to play the piano in the drawing room at Alma Villa while her grandmother Kirkford expected children to be seen and not heard. She remembers Edith painting, ‘Not with an easel and a palette and all that, you know. With a paintbox.’ She, Veronica, refused to sit for her grandmother and made a scene about it. Edith only laughed and said to leave the child alone but Veronica’s mother was cross. Edith sometimes spoke about Henry, she remembers she always called him ‘your dear grandpapa’. Her mother Elizabeth didn’t recall him as a tyrant and she can’t imagine what Mary means by suggesting he would have been but for Edith’s intervention. Elizabeth said her father spent more time with his daughters than was usual with a Victorian paterfamilias and often told them stories. One was about a drop of blood travelling around the human body and the obstacles it encountered on its journey from the heart and back again.

  This is the kind of story that makes me feel squeamish. Still, I ask for more details. But of course Veronica can’t remember. Her mother tried to tell her this story but admitted failing to give it the vitality Henry had, she couldn’t give the blood drop life and personality as he had, and she lacked the anatomical knowledge. All this interests me quite a lot because it sheds new light on Henry. I’d never have suspected him of wanting to be with his children.

  When we’re finished and I’m on my way home, something occurs to me. Veronica never once mentioned her elder sister Vanessa. Didn’t they get on? I take another look at David’s tree and see that though Vanessa’s recorded as having married in 1945, a year before Veronica, her husband isn’t named and no children are listed. I have three second cousins as well as David on the Nanther side, all more or less my contemporaries, Patricia’s daughter Caroline as well as Lucy and Jennifer, the two daughters of Patricia’s sister Diana. If Vanessa had children there would be more. How far down the line into the subject’s descendants does a biography have to extend? All the way, I suppose, so I shall have to find out what these people do for a living and whom they’ve married, if they have. That latter detail will no doubt be in the next stage of David’s tree.

  By a coincidence that’s explicable as just a coincidence I hear about one of those second cousins on my third day back in the House. We return on 11 October, a Monday, and on the Wednesday I encounter Lachlan Hamilton sitting by himself in the Peers’ Guest Room with a pile of books and papers on the other chair at his table which happens to be the only available one in the place. He greets me with a lugubrious nod, picks up the pile of stuff and deposits it on the floor. The room is crowded as it always is these days, people propping up the bar, ‘the last days of the Raj,’ as Lachlan puts it.

  ‘I don’t know why they come in,’ he says. ‘It’s pure masochism.’

  ‘They hope for a last-minute miracle,’ I say. ‘Come to that, why do you come in?’

  ‘I’m a masochist.’

  ‘I don’t think I am. I’m interested.’

  Lachlan is silent. He smiles very slightly, an unusual event with him. I ask him why he’s not drinking and when he shrugs I order whisky for him and a beer for me. The drinks are a long time coming and when she brings them Evelina looks harassed, but polite as always. Lachlan raises his glass a couple of inches and nods, the nearest he ever gets to a toast, and says he met a cousin of mine the other day. It was in Vermont. Somehow I’ve never imagined him going out of the United Kingdom and it seems even odder when he says he and his wife went to see the autumn colours.

  ‘Who was this cousin?’ I ask him.

  ‘Chap called Corrie. Dr Corrie. A PhD and a medico.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of him.’

  ‘He’s heard of you. Or rather, he knows he has a cousin who’s a lord. It’s because I’m one he happened to mention it to me. This pal of mine introduced us. It was at a party on what they call a campus, I daresay you know what that is, and my pal said, “This is Dr Corrie. John, this is Lord Hamilton,” and this chap Corrie said, “I’ve a cousin who’s a lord, maybe you’ve met him. He’s called Nanther.” ’

  I ask if he’s American, this cousin, and Lachlan says he must be, he was born there, his mother was a GI bride. John Corrie looks to be on the right side of fifty. He doesn’t know what kind of a cousin he is, second or third perhaps. It means nothing to me, as far as I know there’s no one on the Nanther side he could be, so I suppose he’s some connection of my mother’s.

  ‘He’s a scientist,’ says Lachlan. ‘Something to do with gene therapy, whatever that is.’

  We talk a bit more about the twilight of the gods and speculate about what all these bar-proppers will do when they’ve lost their seats in the House and have to go home and live on their estates. If they have estates. It worries me a bit that for some it will mean real financial hardship, me among them. Thoughts of dwindling resources cause me to walk to Charing Cross and take the tube home rather than a taxi. Jude’s in the Alma Villa kitchen, drinking wine and cooking risotto from a recipe in the Evening Standard. Few women realize (and would be furious if they did realize) how sexy men find them wearing an apron and standing at the stove cooking. Knowing one ought not to feel like this, that it’s anti-feminist and actually against one’s principles, a nasty identification of ‘real’ women with domestic tasks, makes no difference. I put my arms round Jude from behind and kiss her neck and she nearly overturns the risotto pan. Of course all this has made John Corrie slip my mind and I don’t remember him again until hours later, after some highly satisfactory lovemaking and while Jude is sleeping the sleep of the just. I creep downstairs and find David’s family tree among the stuff on the dining-table desk.

  I know John Corrie isn’t there. I’ve come down here to see who he could possibly be, where he could fit in. I’ve half decided he must be a Rowland from my mother’s side, there are dozens of them, most unknown to me. I unroll the tree and see he could be a son of Vanessa’s. If Vanessa married a man called Corrie and had a son. The last chapter of my biography ought to deal with the lives of Henry’s descendants and if this scientist, this John Corrie, is following in his great-grandfather’s footsteps, he’d make an interesting footnote. After all, gene therapy is just a few logical steps on from what Henry himself was doing when he examined heredity and factors he believed were carried in the blood.

  Do I need to meet John Corrie? Probably not. Certainly not if it means travelling to the United States expressly for that purpose. I can’t afford it.

  Henry lived for nine years into the new century and they seem to have been years of semi-retirement. All his life he’d been a strong healthy man. At least, no illness more serious than a cold is ever mentioned in the diaries, his letters or letters he received. The s
ingle cold that he seems to have had on the day he ‘rescued’ Samuel Henderson may only have been an excuse for leaving early, as may his ‘feeling unwell’ when he was supposed to dine with the Bathos.

  Edith took a photograph of him with Alexander and Elizabeth in the garden at Ainsworth House and though it’s not dated it’s possible to guess the approximate date by assessing the ages of his son and daughter. Elizabeth is tall and handsome, dark with her father’s strong features, a grown woman of eighteen or nineteen, while Alexander is about eight, a big healthy-looking boy in a sailor suit. Since she was born in 1885 and he ten years later, this makes the date of the photograph 1903. Henry has aged. He isn’t yet seventy but he seems to have shrunk from his former superior height, his hair is thinning and his face pinched. He still holds his chair of pathological anatomy at University College Hospital but very likely seldom lectures. It is seven years since he published his third book, but there is evidence that he intended to publish again.

  Two letters from Barnabus Couch refer to this book. In one, dated May 1901, he asks how Henry is progressing. ‘Knowing your prolificity as I do,’ he writes, ‘I have no doubt that if you are not yet nearing completion, an unlikely event in the light of the magnitude of your task, you have, if you will forgive the slang, “broken the back of it”.’ Couch must have received a denial, and perhaps in sharp terms, for in the following year he’s writing, ‘You may reprimand me again, old fellow, but I cannot resist enquiring as to the progress of the Great Work. Admirers among your readers – and this means all your readers – avidly await its publication and the revelations contained in its scholarly pages.’ Couch certainly knew how to lay it on with a trowel but whether Henry liked flattery or merely bore it we’ll never know.