by Barbara Vine
His admirers waited in vain; the magnum opus was never published. Did Henry begin to write it but gave it up or was it never started? Was this because his health began to fail or from some other cause? There are no manuscripts in the trunks, complete or unfinished, and only one more letter from Couch. He suffered a stroke the following year and remained incapacitated until his death. It was the time in Henry’s life that comes to all men who live long enough, when his friends and acquaintances are sick or dying, first Ernest Vickersley, an occasional dinner guest in Wimpole Street and Hamilton Terrace. Lewis Fetter and Sir Joseph Bazalgette had both died in 1891 and Huxley in 1895. His mother-in-law and his wife’s aunt Dorothea Vincent lived on. They were both of them his contemporaries but Louisa Henderson was younger than he. His brother-in-law Lionel with his growing family flourished, but Caroline Hamilton Seaton, who had perhaps been his first love, was dead of uterine cancer at the age of sixty-two. A letter from her husband informs Henry of her illness and her death, referring to their ‘long friendship’, so apparently the two families sometimes saw each other or at least corresponded. But no other letters from Cameron Seaton survive.
From 1903 onwards Henry’s diary entries grow briefer and more taciturn. Weeks go by without a single entry. Those events which are recorded are social engagements and various royal births, marriages and deaths. Henry never noted his children’s birthdays in the diary, nor, come to that, his wife’s. What he did write were more of those essays in the notebook. I’ve decided I’d better get around to reading them, in spite of having to use a magnifying glass, and that’s what I’m doing now.
It’s been a disappointment. They’re rather dull, typical Victorian (though actually Edwardian by now) disquisitions on the vanity of human wishes, the paths of glory leading but to the grave, the decline of religious faith. The abstract virtues appear often and in capital letters, Courage, Honesty, Determination, Humility. I am reminded of the Dyce frescoes in the Robing Room, which also depict these sort of things, and wonder if Henry was inspired by them. There’s nothing extraordinary about any of it. Or so I think until I’m about to close the notebook, feeling rather miffed. Tedious Henry. Then something strikes me as odd. You don’t, surely, buy yourself a notebook to write essays and reflections in, write until you get to the foot of the last page and then just stop. But that is what Henry seems to have done. The last line in the book comes at the very foot of the last page. It’s ‘A humble heart tends to worldly success more surely than arrogance ever does.’ And that’s it, there it stops.
Now this may be the last line of the Humility essay and it may be that Henry was such a neat orderly-minded man that when he got to the end of his notebook he made an end to this essay and never wrote another. The ‘humble heart’ sentence may be a final rounding off, an exit line. On the other hand, it may not. It’s hard to say. But doesn’t it seem far more likely that Henry continued into a second notebook? That he either wrote more on humility or else began another essay? Why would he have finished when he seems to be in full spate of writing just because he came to the end of a notebook? And in that case, where is the next one?
When I decided to write Henry’s life I emptied all the trunks he left behind him and Edith brought here with her. They weren’t the only contents of the attics, there were boxes and crates and other trunks of things obviously not his, women’s clothes, ornaments, discarded pictures, quantities of photographs. I went through these too but not very assiduously, there seemed no point. I’ve always meant to do so again, sort stuff out and give what’s worth saving to a charity shop.
Now is the time. Not in the interests of tidiness and not hoarding but to try to find that second (and maybe a third?) notebook.
18
The attics have disappointed me. Searching this time, I took everything out of the remaining packing cases and boxes, the stacks of Edith’s dresses, reeking of camphor, fur tippets, skirts, things I think may be called spencers, hats, their crowns stuffed with brown tissue paper. Do mothballs last a century, only shrinking a little? These have. Now I can’t get the smell out of my nostrils.
I was distracted from my task by the photographs, as one always is, even if they are of people one doesn’t know and has never heard of. Edith had labelled some or written names on their reverses: Quendons, a Dornford cousin, schoolfriends of her daughters, Kirkfords and Craddocks. The children’s school books were there, or some of them, and books of drawings made not by Edith herself but by people of no obvious talent. Was I going to keep all this?
Of course I didn’t find the missing notebook. If there was one. If Henry finished that essay. If he didn’t just stop when he came to the foot of the last page and, tired, old and disillusioned, decided that enough was enough. That’s what Jude believes. She’s sure that a second notebook, if there had been one, would have been with the first; maybe the two of them tied together with string. The clothes interest her more. Not because she’s dress-conscious in the way Georgie Croft-Jones is but because she says, when she’s had a look, that Edith’s are well-preserved and moth-free, probably quite valuable. Some museum might like them. Or we could sell them, I suggest, my mind as usual these days intent on getting money from somewhere.
Another letter has come from Janet Forsythe with a photograph enclosed. It’s of Len Dawson and Jimmy Ashworth Dawson, taken in middle age. She is seated, he standing behind her and slightly to the right. Her dress is black silk, stiff and shiny and uncomfortable-looking, but she is still handsome, her mass of hair still dark. Len hasn’t a mole on his face or a birthmark. He’s a squat rotund man with a head rather large for his body. Not hideous but no great catch either. A substitute, a compensation of a kind. Above all, a father for a child. She must sometimes have looked back to her Henry days and thought, or in words to that effect, that compared to her husband her old lover was Hyperion to a Satyr.
Question time starts a bit late today as two new peers have been introduced, one of them that Julian Brewer I met in Greece. I’m sitting in my usual place in the Chamber, half-listening to Lord McNally on the LibDem benches ask about football hooliganism while I read a letter I received yesterday. It’s from Barry Dreadnought, the millionaire, and I’ve already answered it. In fact I’ve made an appointment with him for 5.30 this afternoon, by which time I calculate we’ll have done with the House of Lords Bill for today.
He says he answered the letter I wrote him more than a year ago, but his reply in its envelope fell down behind a filing cabinet in his office. For which offence, he adds rather pompously, his assistant has been ‘admonished’. What must I think of him in failing to reply to my perfectly reasonable request to visit his home, formerly the property of my great-grandfather? What I think of him is, vulgarly, that we’ve got a right one here. He’s happy to get my phone call and will be delighted to show me round the house this afternoon. Fortunately, he’ll be at home himself, ‘pressure of business being slightly relaxed at this moment in time’. I put the letter back in my pocket and hear Lord Bassam, the Under-Secretary at the Home Office, say he’s beginning to feel like a referee. Then he says his ten-year-old son reminds him every week of the stupidity of hooliganism, a statement which is met with muffled murmurs of approval from all sides.
Now we’re on to the House of Lords Bill and the two motions which are before the House. The Duke of Montrose gets up and says in spite of the so-called simplicity of the bill of which ‘the Government were so proud’, it’s not really simple at all. He looks every inch a duke, which is more than you can say for most of them, a tall handsome man with a fine figure (according to Jude) and whenever I see him I think of his ancestor who was loyal to Charles I, called him ‘Great, good, and just’ and died horribly for his pains. The present Duke, speaking mellifluously, is suggesting that this is a hybrid bill and therefore should be referred to examiners. The bewigged clerks at the table get out their Erskine May (the great authority on parliamentary procedure) and leaf through it. The Duke moves his motion and Lord Clifford of
Chudleigh gets to his feet. Lord Clifford, ancestor was the first of Charles II’s first ministers – Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale – whose surnames’ initial letters spelt the word CABAL. Lord Macaulay wrote of them that they ‘soon made that appellation so infamous that it has never since their time been used except as a term of reproach’. Lord Clifford, very different from his forebear, says it’s a pleasure to follow the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose. We’re excessively polite in here, something that causes mirth in the Commons. Among those who admit to knowing we exist, that is.
Lord Clifford defines a hybrid bill, which is a relief to most of us who still don’t know what it means. He says that hybridity is concerned with making, in a public Bill, a distinction between the manner in which the Bill affects the private interests of one or more members of a class and the manner in which it affects the private interests of other persons in the same class. In other words, it applies different treatment to some peers from that which it applies to others. The woman next to me, a Baroness who’s teetering on the edge of taking the Government whip, whispers that anyone can see with half an eye these motions are just further time-wasting moves designed to hold up the progress of House of Lords reform.
Sleep threatens and I go outside to wake myself up. If I can’t make myself stay awake at forty-four, what am I going to be like at sixty-four? Will you still feed me, will you still need me, as the Beatles said, but of course they won’t need me, I’ll have been banished twenty years earlier. Like in three weeks’ time. I return in time to hear the always witty Earl Ferrers being wittier than ever. Like Bennett’s The Card he is here in the ‘great cause of cheering us all up’ and I hope that, at least over the interim, he’ll still be here as one of the remnant while I’m gone. He’s now involved in a much funnier explanation of hybridity than Lord Clifford’s, with a long account of what might happen if he were invited to stay with the Attorney General in Wales and they both went to Paddington and bought first-class tickets for Cardiff. If the Attorney General went on to Cardiff while he was turfed off at Swindon it would be quite wrong, but that is exactly the same as what is happening to hereditary peers. All peers have a Writ of Summons, their equivalent of a first-class ticket, and therefore none of them should be thrown off halfway through their journey. After Lord Onslow, another wit always worth listening to, has said he’s supposed to be doing his duty to the nation and he’s not a corner shop in Scunthorpe (a place he often mentions with unholy glee), and Lord Pearson has pointed out that the very word ‘peer’ means ‘equal’, we vote and the motion is rejected by an enormous majority.
It’s nearly five, so I slip away and take the tube up to St John’s Wood, noting of course that the Jubilee Line still isn’t open to Westminster and I still have to change. By the time it’s open I’ll never need to go on it. The day is damp and grey, but still light. The clocks will go back in ten days’ time. But the leaves are still on the plane trees of Hamilton Terrace, still a tired-looking dark green, flapping with a leathery slapping sound in the wind. In the front garden of Ainsworth House or Horizon View two big clear plastic bags cover the palm trees against the frost which has been threatened but never comes. The outer gate in the wall has already been unlocked for me. I go up the steps under the red-and-blue glass canopy and at the unsuitable door, more like the barred and studded entrance to a medieval fortress after the drawbridge has been crossed, I pause and ring the bell.
Luckily, Edith took a good many photographs of the exterior of her house as well as the interior. The door was painted panelled wood then with an etched glass pane in the centre of the upper half. And I’m sure her doorbell worked from an iron pull and rang rather than what this one does, twittering like a nest full of fledglings. Barry Dreadnought answers it himself and almost immediately. He’s a fat man but muscular and tough-looking, his face the kind that would be all right on a woman; as things are, the little nose, fleshy mouth and short upper lip give him a sinister air. His hair, though receding from a massive forehead, is rather long, dark brown and curly. He’s wearing jeans, belted in below his belly, and a bright-red polo shirt with a designer logo on the breast pocket. I realize that I, in my House of Lords uniform of dark grey suit, white shirt and discreet tie, must appear outrageously formal in his eyes. Maybe I’ll be expected to dress like him after the Bill of Banishment has gone through. Maybe I’ll want to.
He apologizes all over again for the mislaying of his letter, only this time it’s not the filing cabinet it’s fallen behind but the back of a drawer in his assistant’s desk. This assistant doesn’t seem to be in the house and nor does a wife, child or indeed anyone else at all. I am alone with Barry Dreadnought and if I wasn’t six inches taller than he and probably about five years younger, I wouldn’t much like it. His name isn’t exactly a misnomer. I daresay he isn’t afraid of anything much, but he instils fear into a companion. I couldn’t claim to dread nought in his company. If I were a woman I’d think him not the kind of person I’d like to meet in an alley on a dark night.
And the house, now I’m inside it, isn’t at all what I expected. It isn’t what Jude would call a friendly house, though it’s warm enough, far too warm for my taste. It was fairly new when bought by Henry, probably hadn’t been built more than twenty years, and the eighteen sixties weren’t good years for architecture. The rooms are large but still too small for the height of the ceilings. Dreadnought, or the interior designers he employed, have aimed at Victoriana seen through twenty-first century eyes rather than how it actually might have been, or that’s how it looks to me. And, worse, it’s almost a parody of eighteen sixties décor so that you feel those designers were laughing up their sleeves at him. Everything is too ornate; too bright and crude, even the ceiling mouldings picked out in pink and green and gilding. The drawing-room carpet is Stuart tartan, as if they’d had Balmoral in mind. There are wax fruit and stuffed tropical birds under glass domes, lengths of densely embroidered fabric hanging over cupboard doors, pelmets (I don’t know what else to call them) suspended from mantelpieces, busts of Roman emperors and busts of soulful maidens, masses of Venetian glass and more occasional tables than most people have teacups.
‘Pretty well in period,’ says Dreadnought. ‘Don’t you agree?’
I nod non-committally. If I told him what I really think he’d throw me out. Then he calls me ‘my Lord’, which would silence me if the décor hadn’t already done so.
‘This way, my Lord,’ he says, showing me to the kitchen, which I don’t much want to see, it being as different from how Edith’s cook’s kitchen would have been as laminated plastic is from cast iron. Only it isn’t laminated plastic. All the surfaces are highly polished pink granite. Burnished copper pans hang from the ceiling along with a couple of what look like hams. These are plastic, as Dreadnought explains after asking me to guess whether they’re real or not. I haven’t guessed. I’ve said I couldn’t give an opinion from this distance, but he rejoins with a smirk that that’s tantamount to saying they’re real.
‘No one ever guesses right,’ he says triumphantly. ‘The only way you could tell would be if you tried cutting them with a knife.’ He smiles craftily. ‘And I’d like to catch anyone doing that.’
Again I’m thankful for Edith’s photographic talents. Every room in this house has been photographed. I’m half wishing I’d brought her pictures with me, though showing them to Dreadnought would have been almost cruel, they’re so unlike what he’s achieved.
‘I’ll lead the way, shall I, my Lord?’ he says, and we go upstairs.
There is someone in the house, after all. It’s the dark-skinned woman I saw at the window of Henry’s study. She’s cleaning one of the bedrooms, or at any rate she’s dusting it, as there’s no vacuum cleaner in sight. When she sees Dreadnought she stands still with her head bowed. He knows what she expects from him and she gets it.
‘Run along now, scoot,’ he says. ‘Chop, chop.’
She does actually run. Dreadnought watche
s her departure with some satisfaction. We go into what Dreadnought calls the master bedroom. It’s at the front. In fact, it covers all the front and is obviously the old principal bedroom and another knocked into one. Here all Henry’s children were born. Whether Edith had difficult or easy labours isn’t recorded, nor is the number she failed to carry to term or were born dead, if any. One thing is for sure, they weren’t delivered in this vast fourposter, festooned in striped satin and pale pink lace. Dreadnought has an erotic picture of nymphs and satyrs on the inside of its tester but at least there are no mirrors on the ceiling. He is obviously awaiting admiration but all I can manage is to mutter, ‘Very nice.’
Who slept where I’ve no way of knowing. There seem to have been ten bedrooms if you include the servants’ rooms on the second floor, but one of the ten became Henry’s study and under the Dreadnought administration (or before) four turned into bathrooms. One of these bathrooms has peacocks on its window blinds and a bunch of green plastic bananas suspended over the handbasin. The study, which is really what I’ve wanted to see, overlooks the garden full of elaborate topiary-work animals at the back and the street at the front, for it covers the entire right-hand end of the first floor. It’s still a study – Barry Dreadnought’s. He has filled it with computers, printers, screens, photocopiers and other technological marvels so that it’s impossible to imagine it as it appears in Edith’s photograph. Where now is all that mahogany and brown velvet, ormolu and chinoiserie, leather and gilt inlay, pen holders and inkwells, the turkey carpet, the bearskin rug, the books and the crystal skull? Gone with the wind. Disappeared into other people’s homes, antique shops in Church Street and junk shops in Kensal Green, ground up in the mills of refuse disposal trucks.
Barry Dreadnought is describing to me – or I think he is – the vast quantities of software and CDs he possesses for doing almost everything possible ‘on line’. I haven’t heard of any of it but I nod and say it sounds very interesting, a comment my mother taught me to make when shown a work of art one can’t in honesty admire. Do I want to go on up to the top floor? I shake my head and say, I hope politely, that I’ve seen all I came to see.