by Barbara Vine
‘You’re welcome any time, my Lord,’ he says. ‘Just give me a bell. Now you’ll want to go round on your own to take your photos.’
He’s astounded when I say I haven’t brought a camera and he gives me the kind of look you’d give Rip Van Winkle if you met him in the street. ‘You know your own business best. But I’m going to insist you bring your partner over to dinner in the very near future. You have got a partner?’
‘I’ve got a wife,’ I say, rapidly imagining Jude’s reaction to the idea of wasting an evening here.
Dreadnought repeats his offer and says his partner will contact my partner and fix a date. ‘That’s a promise, then.’
The place has knocked the stuffing out of me and feeling I’ve been lamentably feeble, I assert myself by insisting he stop calling me my Lord. ‘My name’s Martin.’
He’s so delighted that he calls me by my christian name no fewer than five times in the ceremony of saying goodbye. I walk home up Abbey Road and when I let myself into Alma Villa find Jude has company. David and Georgie are there with the Holy Grail and all but he are drinking champagne. Apparently, to quote Georgie, whose comments on her mother-in-law David doesn’t dispute, they’re celebrating the departure of Veronica. She’s finally gone home to Cheltenham. Jude looks enigmatic. She’s been rather mysterious lately, as if she’s harbouring some secret, though not an unpleasant one, and I’ve no idea what it can be as she’s certainly not pregnant again. She made a great point of informing me when her period arrived. Anyway, she’s back on the pill to give herself a six months’ rest. So I’m pleased to see her drinking champagne and enjoying herself, the abstinence and diet regime abandoned for the time being.
Up till now she’s avoided taking much notice of the Holy Grail and I know that’s because it’s sometimes painful for her even to look at him. But now, because he’s whingeing and squeaking in his Moses basket and Georgie has lifted him out, Jude takes him on her knee and cuddles him and talks to him. He stops crying and smiles up into her face. He’s really a very handsome baby, I must admit, with lots of dark shiny hair and dark-blue eyes. They make a beautiful picture, the two of them, a Madonna and child set-piece, for Jude is wearing a flowing blue silk garment, her hair, the same shade as his as if she were his mother and not Georgie, pulled up and knotted on the back of her head. I’m enraptured, I can’t take my eyes off her, and I’m almost persuaded that a baby would be all right, would be bearable, if I could see such a sight as this at my fireside.
However, I pull myself together and regale them with an account of my visit chez Dreadnought. Jude says there’s no way she’s going to dinner at Ainsworth House, aka Horizon View, so she hopes I didn’t make any promises. I tell David about John Corrie, the gene therapy cousin Lachlan met, and to my surprise he looks very cagey. Georgie doesn’t, though. She’s in an ebullient mood and she lets out a crow of laughter.
‘I know who he is,’ she says. ‘He’s the son of my esteemed ma-in-law’s sister who stole her fiancé.’
The most intelligent man in London says, ‘Oh, Georgie,’ rather feebly.
‘Oh, Georgie, nothing. You told me the story yourself. You never said I wasn’t to talk about it.’
‘There’s such a thing as discretion,’ says David.
Still, discretion isn’t to be allowed to prevail and the story comes out, both of them contributing. Now I know why Veronica didn’t speak of Vanessa and why, according to her dictates, the name is never to be mentioned. It’s a family quarrel that’s been going on for fifty-four years.
Veronica got engaged to an American serviceman called Steven Wentworth Corrie in 1944 when she was twenty-seven. Her sister Vanessa, five years older than she, and also in the WAAF, the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, was stationed far from where the Kirkfords lived in York. She came home on leave at the same time as Veronica, met Steven Corrie and the two of them fell in love. Instead of confessing to Veronica, Vanessa and Steven were married secretly in London and it wasn’t until Corrie had returned to the United States at the end of the Second World War that the truth came out.
‘My mother was very badly treated indeed,’ says David.
Even Georgie concedes this but adds that it served her right. ‘The amazing thing is not that he’d have been happy to have got shot of Veronica, anyone could understand that, but that he preferred a woman five years older. She was even older than him.’
‘Has age to do with love?’ asks Jude, but only I know she’s quoting Nancy Mitford.
No one answers her. Georgie’s usual attitude when anyone makes a remark or asks a question she doesn’t understand is to ignore it. Still, I’m losing my dislike for her. I suppose it’s because she’s showing herself to be so human and so vulnerable. She must have suffered a lot of humiliation while Veronica spent that month with them. ‘Anyway, it’s time you forgave poor Vanessa,’ she says to her husband. ‘It’s not your quarrel.’
‘She’s probably dead by now,’ David says. ‘She’d be all of eighty-seven.’
Georgie says airily that that’s nothing these days and naming a restaurant in Blenheim Terrace, suggests we all go there for dinner. We can take Galahad because the restaurateur is ‘child-friendly’. She belongs to the school of thought – as Sally and I did with Paul – that when a baby’s small you can take him out with you in the evenings because he must perforce remain in his carrying cot, while once he starts walking you’ve had it for the next fifteen years.
I don’t much want to go but I can see Jude does. On the way we all discuss family quarrels to David’s discomfort; Veronica’s marriage ‘on the rebound’ to his father and speculate as to how many children Vanessa would have had. I decide to write to the University of Vermont at Burlington for help in discovering the whereabouts of John Corrie.
*
We’ve had a water disaster: a pipe suddenly leaking into one of the upstairs ceilings and bringing part of it down. When I phone the plumber we always use I recall that in a debate on House of Lords reform Baroness Kennedy said she wouldn’t employ a hereditary plumber and she suspected that a great many people up and down the country shared that view. The analogy is clear. Why give a man a job to do because his ancestor had that job, was in other words a hereditary peer? When it was my turn to speak I said that was exactly what I would do and did. My father – maybe not my grandfather, who knows what Alexander did? – employed my plumber’s father and that’s why I employ him. The same might well apply to the hereditary peerage. Muffled ‘hear-hears’ greet this and someone says that’s why eldest sons sit on the steps of the throne: to learn the ropes before Dad drops off his perch.
The plumber comes. He’s much more of a scientist than his father was and he says, incredibly, that the cause of the leak was ‘spontaneous mutation’ in the pipe. While he’s working I sit at my dining-table desk and look once more at Edith’s photographs of the rooms of Ainsworth House – the authentic Victorian interiors. The plumber calls me with his usual, ‘Are you there?’ and I have to go upstairs and answer a lot of questions I can’t really answer about replacement of lead pipes with copper ones and where do the electricity cables run.
It’s a quiet sort of day, as the weather forecasters say when it’s not wet or windy, and I poodle through most of the morning, studying photographs, adding Steven Corrie’s name to the tree and John Corrie’s with a question mark after it, and in the late afternoon I go into the House. Apparently, it’s St Crispin’s Day, and Lachlan amazes me by declaiming Henry V’s speech on the eve of Agincourt. Not in the Chamber, I don’t mean that, but in the Bishops’ Bar, where everyone stops talking to listen to him until his voice grows hoarse with the smoke that pervades the place.
‘I always do that,’ he says when the applause dies away and we’ve brought our drinks to a table in the corner. ‘I sort of feel I owe it to them. Harry the King, I mean, Bedford and Exeter, Salisbury and Gloucester. They’d all have been in here. They were. In my flowing cups they’re freshly remembered.’
He has tears in his eyes. I remember he hopes to be elected among the peers chosen by their peers to remain in the interim House, so I ask if he’s got his manifesto with him. He cheers up and produces a sheet of paper rather like a CV. A code of conduct was issued for the hereditary elections and this code states that ‘each candidate may submit to the Clerk of the Parliaments up to seventy-five words in support of his candidacy’. Lachlan’s tells me he’s called Lachlan John Andrew Hamilton, he’s sixty-one and he’s the eighteenth Lord Hamilton of Luloch. He’s only had one wife – a mark of distinction in these degenerate times – Kathleen Rose Hamilton née MacKay, and they’ve six children and fifteen grandchildren. I’d no idea Lachlan was so philoprogenitive. He sits gloomily sipping whisky while I read. The manifesto goes on to state he has two engineering degrees, four honorary degrees, is the patron or chairman or president of eleven organizations, has been something or other at the United Nations and his interests are Robert Burns, Celtic languages and golf. Seventy-four words. If I were a Tory I’d vote for him and I tell him so.
He takes the manifesto back without a word on the subject but says he hasn’t forgotten my interest in ‘that Dr Corrie chap’. He’s asked his wife who’s got a far better memory than he has. Kathleen Hamilton remembers John Corrie perfectly and that he’s the JGP Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, an MD and a PhD. I make up my mind to write to him as soon as I get home.
But I’m not going home yet. Like Adam and Eve, doubtless, after the fall but before the expulsion, I’m going to make a little tour of my soon-to-be-lost domain. Because, once I’d made up my mind not to stand for election – on the grounds that whatever I may feel I know that no one should play a part in the government of his country because his father and his grandfather played that part – because of this I also decided I shan’t haunt the place once I’ve no legitimate right here. Not for me a seat in the gallery or on the steps of the throne, wistfully waiting for some life peer or one of the precarious ninety-two to offer me a drink. If I come back it must be as someone’s lunch or dinner guest and even those invitations I shall seldom accept.
The Committee Corridor isn’t exactly a place steeped in history, so I don’t bother with going upstairs. Instead, I hang my pass round my neck – necessary when entering ‘the other place’ – and stroll along the marble and between the statuary to the Central Lobby. The Commons are sitting and I think of going in, up into the Peers’ Gallery, where we’re always welcomed. But it’s just gone seven and if they’re going to divide the Commons usually do so at seven, and as I hesitate I hear the division bell and see the green bell-shape come up on the screens. So it’s back to the Peers’ Lobby where everything is slow and quiet now. Dinner guests are coming in and parties are gathering on the red-leather seats in the corners. There’s no one in the Moses Room and its doors are unlocked. I walk in and stand looking at Herbert’s huge paintings. Moses bringing the tablets of the law down the mountain and the ‘Judgement of Daniel’. I’ve always liked these two, especially the animals in them, the gazelle and the lynx on a lead, wearing an embroidered coat like a little dog. Herbert was one of those painters who have a recurring woman in their pictures, a model or wife, I suppose, and his looks a lot like Jude, a slender creature with a beautiful classical face and shiny dark hair. She’s always got a child or children with her as I expect young women did on Mount Sinai or in ancient Babylon.
I walk past the Earl Marshal’s room that’s now a retreat for women peers and the staircase where the public go up into the gallery, and make my way along the Not Content lobby and out on to the blue carpet of the Prince’s Chamber. The blue carpet is sacred, or rather the room it covers is, because it’s the ante-chamber of the Chamber itself. No one may smoke here and the public, passing through, may not linger or speak above a whisper, though peers themselves talk as much and as loudly as they please. On each side there’s a fireplace where once, no doubt, coal fires burned. They’re gas now. A high fender with a leather-padded top guards each fireplace and on a chair nearby on the temporal side (why not the Government side? I don’t know) sits the Labour whip when a two- or three-line whip is on and peers must be prevented, if possible, from going home. High above, all round the walls are portraits of James IV of Scotland and his Tudor Queen, their son James V and Mary Queen of Scots.
Pugin and Barry arranged things so that, if all the doors were open, the Lord Chancellor on the Woolsack could look through and see straight ahead of him the Speaker of the House of Commons on the Speaker’s Chair. I don’t suppose anyone’s ever put this to the test. Certainly it’s true that when you come out of the Robing Room and walk down along the Royal Gallery you come face to face with a huge, grossly flattering statue of Queen Victoria, flanked by figures representing Justice and Mercy, which dominates the Prince’s Chamber. The woman who employed Henry as her doctor didn’t look much like this white marble nymph.
I enter the library where it’s quiet, smoky, gorgeous with gilt and leather and dark glowing colours. Peers are asleep in armchairs, newsprint sheets over their faces, or sitting at tables poring over papers. Outside the windows it’s a wet grey dusk, the river black and glittering, St Thomas’s drowning in mist. The Millennium Wheel that we’re supposed to call the London Eye is still lying on its side above the water level, awaiting its elevation to some monstrous height. If I sat down here between the river and the books I think I might follow Lachlan’s example and the tears in my eyes begin to flow. I didn’t know till now, this moment, how much I mind.
The tour wasn’t, after all, a good idea. I wander down the corridor towards the Salisbury Room with no clear purpose in mind. No one’s using either of the phones on the oval table, so I sit down, pick up the receiver and ask for international directory enquiries. It’s more to distract me, lift me out of this sentimental journey, than for any pressing reason that I ask for the number of the University of Pennsylvania. The time on the eastern seaboard of the United States will be two-fifteen, a very suitable hour to call. I’ll have to pay for the call, we only get free calls from here to places in the United Kingdom. I ask the voice that answers for a fax number. She wants to know which department but of course I don’t know. Genetics? Biochemistry?
‘John Corrie,’ I say. ‘Dr Corrie.’
‘Professor Corrie,’ she corrects me and I write down his fax number, firmly rejecting an e-mail address I’ve no idea how to use.
In the Salisbury Room, sentimentality forgotten, I sit in one of the hideously uncomfortable leather armchairs, glossy as mirrors and slippery as oil, and write on House of Lords headed paper:
Dear Professor Corrie,
I believe you are my second cousin, the son of my father’s cousin, Vanessa Kirkford Corrie. What I know of you comes via my friend Lord Hamilton, whom you met recently in Vermont.
I am currently undertaking research for a biography of my great-grandfather and yours, Henry Alexander, 1st Lord Nanther. I understand you are working on a research project concerned with gene therapy and would be most interested to know more about this. It seems that you are the only descendant of Henry Nanther to follow to any extent in his footsteps. You must forgive me if you don’t see your own work in this light. He was, for his time, an expert in diseases of the blood, as you possibly know, and a royal doctor with a particular brief to attend the haemophiliacs of the royal family.
I would be grateful if you could confirm that you are indeed my second cousin and also furnish me with some details about yourself, your personal and professional history.
Best wishes,
Martin Nanther
I write Jude’s publishing company’s fax number at the foot of the page. I’m a bit ashamed to say I don’t know where the fax machines are in here. One of the doorkeepers soon tells me and the fax goes straight through without a hitch or even a single recall. Considering I want this information only for the last chapter of a biography I haven’t even begun to write, and considering it makes little difference to the final work whether it�
�s there or not, I’ve been very expeditious about this. Is it because I expect to discover something unlooked-for, surprising? I’ve no reason to. Maybe I’m excited to have found a new cousin. Odd if I am. The last one to turn up, David Croft-Jones, hasn’t exactly illuminated my life. Then what is it?
I go downstairs and pick up my coat, reflecting that my name will be above this peg for only about ten more working days. Yet what else is there in this House to identify me and keep the memory of Nanthers green? A few speeches in Hansard no one will read. It’s quite dark outside now and the pavements are wet and shining. The doorkeeper at the desk says, ‘Goodnight, my Lord.’ I’m going to have a cab home, I can’t face the tube. The policeman at the pavement edge presses the switch that sets the orange lantern flashing at the gate, the signal to taxi drivers that there’s a fare waiting. Richard Coeur de Lion sits astride his stone horse, eyeing the Victoria Tower or maybe the Holy City of Jerusalem. I always tell guests who are coming in for the first time to make for the entrance by the equestrian statue of Richard I. I shan’t do that any more, that’s over.
But in the cab that’s taking me along the Mall and past Buckingham Palace I put all this maudlin harking back behind me once more, and ask myself what it is I think I’m going to get from John Corrie. Something, I decide, something I don’t expect. There’s no reason behind this, it’s a gut feeling, my intuition, which Jude once told me during a quarrel that I don’t possess. I want it to be world-shaking, I want it to be my breakthrough.
19
The Earl of Burford is the son and heir to the 14th Duke of St Albans, a direct descendant of Charles II by Nell Gwynn. He’s a young man with fair hair and a beard. The story goes that when Nell had her baby she took him onto a bridge over a river, held him over the parapet and threatened to drop him unless the King promised to make him a duke.