by Barbara Vine
During questions Burford’s been sitting on the steps of the throne, as is his right, and just as business is about to begin he leaps up, jumps on to the Woolsack and shouts, ‘This Bill, drafted in Brussels, is treason! What we are witnessing is the abolition of Britain. Before us lies the wasteland. No Queen! No culture! No sovereignty! No freedom! Stand up for your Queen and country and vote this Bill down!’
Lord Onslow, always to the rescue and often suppressing incorrect behaviour, does his best to pull the bearded fanatic off, but he’s past sixty and Lord Burford is thirty-four. I can’t help remembering how Onslow said at the start of the Bill that he’d behave like a football hooligan to ensure that ‘whatever comes after me is much much better’. He’s put that behind him now. It takes two doorkeepers to grab Burford but by then he’s done what he came to do and quite gracefully allows himself to be escorted out by Black Rod. Of course the whole House, which is packed for the last day of the Bill, is convulsed and gasping. None of that will find its way into Hansard, which will no doubt record it as an ‘interruption’. I hear later that a reception committee of the media was awaiting Lord Burford, who is destined for a couple of days of the fame he’s never had before.
This is our last formal opportunity to debate the measure. All that will remain will be for the Bill to return with Commons amendments but no one thinks there’ll be a serious attempt to defeat the Bill again. Lady Jay is certainly treating the House as if this is farewell time, saying to hereditaries that the hour has come to say ‘thank you and goodbye’.
Barry Dreadnought has wasted no time. The woman he lives with phoned Jude this evening and gave her so many dates to choose from that she couldn’t get out of it and picked next Saturday.
‘Get it over,’ she says on the phone to me at the House.
‘I thought you were so set against it,’ I say.
I’ve never included Jude in that category of people who pass their lives teetering between ‘highs’ and ‘lows’ but she seems to be on a high at present, laughing at nothing, uttering joyful gasps and singing in the shower. Now, when she says she’s changed her mind, she wants to go, it will be ‘good for a laugh’ she giggles and adds that she doesn’t really care, she’s feeling so good this simply doesn’t affect her. ‘Shall I call Roma back and tell her we can’t?’
‘Roma?’
‘That’s her name. I know, it’s like the capital of Italy or a perfume or something – so what?’
I’m not sure I can cope with all this ebullience. I tell her that now she’s accepted we’ll go and I ring off, feeling like a mean-minded curmudgeon. Of course I’ve forgotten to ask her if she got a fax at work from John Corrie, but it’s a bit early to expect one yet. I go back into the Chamber where throughout the afternoon we’ve had a number of amendments on the composition of the interim House. It’s past five-thirty now.
This is deliberate time-wasting, to hold up the Bill as long as can be. A Labour life peer, Lord Peston, angers the opposition by comparing what’s going on to a debating society ‘beloved by sixth formers’. He believes the House should become an elected assembly and says he won’t stand for election and, rather than ‘clinging to the furniture’, is quite willing to go when the need arises. Most hereditaries aren’t in the least willing to go, including among them Lord Ferrers, who looks every inch the general and commanding officer he never was. If Wellington looked like that it’s no wonder we won the Battle of Waterloo. His amendment proposes that life peers should be elected by their fellow life peers, a democratic process that would make everyone legitimate, and he calls for a division.
‘I just want to see all the noble Lords on the Benches opposite,’ he says, ‘traipse through the Division Lobby in order not to be elected.’
So we traipse – a wonderful old word my grandfather Alexander used to use – through the Not Content lobby, lifers and hereditaries alike, and disagree to the amendment, having wasted another three hours. Instead of going back into the Chamber I leave the House, resolving to come back later and vote on the passing of the Bill. On the tube home – I deny myself the luxury of a cab this time – I take my thoughts as well as myself away from the Upper House and transfer them to John Corrie. If the reply I get from him is at all interesting why shouldn’t I go to Philadelphia and talk to him face-to-face? After all, I’m going to have to set out Henry’s theories on diseases of the blood as best I can. It won’t be possible to write his life without an exposition of his discoveries in the field of haemophilia, for instance. Do I, at this stage, even know precisely how haemophilia is inherited? To put it in layman’s terms, how the gene pattern works? John Corrie will know. Even if these diseases aren’t his speciality, as they probably aren’t, he’s an MD and he’s got a PhD in something to do with genes. He could surely explain this stuff to me much better than a book. Probably I can get a bargain flight, a package to New York which will include two nights, say, in a hotel. And from there I can do as I once did as a student and take the train, the Metroliner, down to the City of Brotherly Love.
I make it home in record time. Jude says that if I’m going back to the House at nine-thirty she’ll come with me, take her seat below the bar and watch me expel myself. She’s still very much on her high and it’s taken away her appetite as it always does when it rules her. Her face is flushed and her eyes bright. While I eat she tells me she’s phoned Roma and told her we’d love to come on Saturday night. There won’t be anyone else to dinner, just the four of us. I don’t know whether to be glad about this on the grounds that friends of Dreadnought are bound to be appalling, or sorry because there won’t be any leavening of conversation (sure to be about money, the Internet and shopping) at the dinner table. Jude wants to stay on the subject, she’s as keen to go to Ainsworth House now as she was dismayed when I passed on the invitation, she thinks it will be ‘an eye-opener’ but I slip in my question when she draws breath and ask if a fax has come for me from America. It hasn’t. It’s early days, isn’t it, she says, and I shouldn’t expect anything till the end of the week.
I ask if she’d mind my going alone to New York and, knowing my generous-hearted wife as I do, I’m anticipating an unqualified, ‘Of course you must go, darling.’ What I get is rather more grudging, not to say mystifying.
‘You mean to see this Corrie? If he ever answers, I suppose. When the time comes you may not want to go.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I just think you may not,’ she says and she goes off to call us a cab, having flatly refused to get into the tube ‘at this hour’.
Jude is the best-looking peer’s wife in the House. I would say that, I daresay, but others have told me so, an ancient Tory hereditary volunteering the opinion that if there was a peeresses’ beauty contest she’d win. I’ve never dared tell Jude that. She’d be infuriated at the violation of her feminist principles. I part from her in the Peers’ Lobby and when I’m in my usual place I see she’s stationed herself no more than a couple of yards away from me. A lot of old men turn their heads and crane their ancient necks to look at her in her blue dress and pearls.
The House is packed. So were the bars and dining rooms, but everyone’s in here now. The new Lord Brewer sits rather self-consciously on the Opposition benches, hoping someone will tell him what to do. There are a number of amendments, all finally withdrawn, and then it’s time for compliments and regretful speeches. Lord Longford, who’s nearly ninety-four and has been in the House for fifty-four years, says there’s something about the culture of this place that people respond to, intellectual, moral and religious. He will vote in favour of the Bill because he shares my feeling that there must be reform, he won’t try to interfere with its passage. Lord Longford has a noble head still and the voice of an aristocrat but even he isn’t the oldest peer here. The reform measures recommended in the coming Wakeham report will probably advocate a maximum age for remaining in here and it’s more likely to be seventy-five than ninety-five. As more changes to the Bill are proposed on
ly to collapse, I sense in the atmosphere a nearing of the end, the tide of power’s withdrawing roar. These are not the last days of the Bill but its last hours. After six hundred years those who up until 1958 were the Upper House are about to be expelled by those who came forty years ago. Within an hour or so the Bill will pass to the Commons and return here only to consider a group of Commons amendments, all probably unacceptable to the diehards. For all intents and purposes, in all reality, the deed is done.
Courtesies are being exchanged now as well as gratitude and admiration expressed to Lord Weatherill whose amendment it was to retain the 92. Lord Ferrers gets up.
‘At the end of all that,’ he says, ‘we must have a House which works and, for goodness’ sake, a House which is happy and content. Happy the Houses which smile at each other. Far too often there has been a tendency for vitriol to creep in.’
Of course, a good deal of the vitriol has come from him. He advises against voting against the Bill ‘in any great measure’ but for all that, when it comes to the final division, he doesn’t vote at all. Lady Jay has got up and begged to move that this Bill do now pass. I leave for the Content lobby, a departure for me, as my usual course is to vote Not Content, and in turning to the left and walking in the direction of the throne I fail to pass Jude below the bar, as I have always done in the past. Omens mean nothing to me, so why do I so much dislike this turning of my back on her, this walking away from her to take my place and vote for my own banishment?
The vote was won by 221 to 81. It’s all over. On the Opposition front bench Lady Miller of Hendon is in tears and Lord Kingsland holds his head back in a rictus of agony. Labour life peers aren’t cheering, just waving their order papers in triumph. I’m surprised there haven’t been more disturbances and more hooliganism during the passage of the Bill. Nothing much happened really and it passed faster than I expected. We’ve been dispossessed not with a bang but with a whimper, with tears and despair.
I say nothing about this feeling on the way home. I’d be ashamed, anyway, to voice these irrational fears. This is a bad sleep night for me and in the small hours I sit up and read. Nothing wakes Jude but even so I put the bedlamp on as dimly as I can and still see the print. But after a little while I put the book on the floor and look at her. Closed eyes can be as beautiful as eyes when they’re open, the lids as fragile as moths’ wings, the lashes lying in a dark delicate fringe on white pearly skin. Her lips are folded but not quite closed. I lay one finger an inch from them and feel the warm breath on my skin. In the dark once again, I can no longer see her, only the outline of her head and the darker mass of her hair. A surge of love for my wife doesn’t excite me at all but makes me want to hold her very tightly in my arms, only I know it can never be tightly enough. I turn over, trying to sleep, and eventually do.
The dream I have shows her to me as she was when she sat with Galahad in her arms. The child with her this time isn’t he but much older, maybe two or three years old, and he’s our child. No one speaks. The atmosphere isn’t pleasant, we’ve been quarrelling, we’ve said things that can’t be forgiven, yet I don’t know what those things were. The little boy looks at me with large reproachful eyes. Then Jude gets up and, taking him by the hand, goes to the front door and down the steps and out into the street. It’s summer and warm, the trees are in leaf and flowers are out. I stand there, holding the front door open and watching them walk down the street until they turn the corner and disappear. I know I have to follow but I’ve no shoes on and I can’t find the key or any money, and when I run down the steps barefoot I can’t get out of the front gate, it’s locked. The door slams behind me and I wake up.
It’s seven in the morning and Jude isn’t there. The dream still lingers with me and I’m absurdly frightened. I call her name and she comes at once out of the bathroom in a white towelling dressing gown. ‘I can tell you now,’ she says.
There’s only one thing it can be. A voice inside me is saying, O God, O God, O God…
‘I’m two months pregnant.’
I say stupid things, knowing as I say them they can’t be true. You had a period in September; you’re on the pill.
‘No, I’m not. I deceived you. It was bad enough me waiting to see, I couldn’t have you waiting too.’
I feel deceived, I feel I’ve been made a fool of and I don’t like it. Sally and I deceived each other all the time or tried to. No, I haven’t been spending money, I didn’t go to such-and-such with so-and-so, I wasn’t there, I wasn’t here, I didn’t hear the phone, I phoned but you didn’t answer, I never lie to you, you know that. For Jude and me things are different. Or so I thought. I thought we were open and honest with one another always.
‘Have you done a test?’ I say dully.
‘Three weeks ago.’
More deception, or am I making a ridiculous fuss? She hasn’t been unfaithful or lost a thousand pounds gambling or had liposuction. One thing, I’m only making the fuss inside and with myself. ‘You’ve seen the doctor?’ For some reason I can’t remember her obstetrician’s name.
‘When I’d done the test. I asked him if I ought to stay in bed for the whole pregnancy, I said I would if it would help but he says not.’ She looks at me almost fearfully. ‘You’re cross, aren’t you?’
I ought to say I’m not and I love her. I love the prospect of our son or daughter. But I can’t. Memories of the dream keep intruding and how mysterious she’s been lately and how excitable and ‘high’. ‘You should have told me a month ago.’ I say it like a sulky child.
‘Can’t you understand I didn’t want to disappoint you again?’
Could there be a less appropriate word? At the moment I mind more about the deception than the pregnancy but I know that will change and I’ll be back watching her and worrying and counting the days and the weeks. What was the longest time measured in days she carried a child? Ninety days, a hundred? And when and if the hundred’s past this time shall I be happy or dismayed?
It’s Saturday night and we’re at Ainsworth House, having pre-dinner drinks. The pre-dinner period has been going on since half-past seven when we arrived and it’s now nearly nine-thirty. Roma has only left for the kitchen within the past ten minutes ‘to do something about food’. The Dreadnoughts are the kind of people for whom the eating part of inviting guests for dinner is the least important. Every kind of alcoholic drink I’ve ever heard of is on offer from the bar in the drawing room, disguised on my previous visit as sideboard or cabinet in reproduction early Victorian mahogany. We are shown all over the house again, drinks in hand. I’m aware of something unusual to me in a private house. Background music is playing and it follows us as we move from room to room. It’s the kind of music that gets played in hotel lounges, always the same tunes, ‘La Vie en Rose’, ‘Never on Sunday’, ‘Un Homme et une Femme’. The conversation is on the subjects I feared it would be but I’d no conception of how much shopping people can do and how much they casually spend. Barry’s record is £30,000 in one evening at Harrods but Roma has come very close with a credit card bill for only £2,000 less after an afternoon’s wandering down Bond Street. Like Imelda Marcos, her passion is for shoes and she buys them at Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik.
As we were walking here I warned Jude not to tell Barry and Roma about the baby. ‘Would I?’ she says.
There are all sorts of things I could say, such as, ‘You did last time’ or ‘You told Georgie last time,’ but I don’t because last time isn’t to be mentioned. She’s even said that we’re to behave as if last time didn’t happen and nor did the time before that or the time before that. We have to forget ‘old unhappy far-off things’ and act as if this is the first time she’s conceived.
I’ve apologized profoundly for ungracious behaviour, for making a fuss about not being told. I’ve been forgiven. And she hasn’t said a word to these two. No doubt she’s sensed that she’s dealing with a very different pair from David and Georgie. Barry and Roma have no children either separately or together. Child
ren are what other people have, though they don’t understand why. Roma is a painfully thin blonde with a strained stretched face and long bony legs, famous name shoes on her long bony feet. Her jewellery is breathtaking, huge diamonds encrusting rings, earrings, a necklace and a bracelet. They flash under the matching chandelier and make small spots of light dance up and down the walls.
Jude is drinking sparkling water. She’s worried about that champagne we had the other day with the Croft-Joneses and the wine she drank at the restaurant afterwards. Will the baby be harmed? Why was she so criminally foolhardy as to drink when even then she knew she was pregnant? I remind her (I’ve told her before) about all the whisky my mother drank when she was pregnant with me and all the cigarettes she smoked, and about Sally’s fondness for beer and the occasional joint, but she’s not reassured. She just thinks my mother and my first wife were criminally foolhardy too, but their excuse is that they knew no better. Anyway, she’s indulging copiously in fizzy water now which may account for her glum expression, though Dreadnought’s conversation about buying a car on the Internet is as likely to be responsible.
At last, at a quarter to ten Roma comes back and says, ‘Madame est servie,’ in a phony French accent. The food is quite good because it’s obviously all been bought from Harrods food hall – part of the ₤30,000 expenditure? – and heated up in the microwave. Somehow I feel that this is more successful than Roma’s cooking would be. I drink too much, not because I’ve a tendency to alcoholism or Barry’s wine is specially nice, but because I’m bored. Drinking doesn’t alleviate boredom but it gives you something else to think about, such as how not to fall off your chair and how to keep your speech from slurring. On the way home, which doesn’t happen, which we’re quite unable to make happen, before half-past midnight, Jude tells me, but very gently and kindly, that I’m drunk.