by Barbara Vine
‘Good,’ I say, ‘then perhaps they won’t invite us again.’
‘Do you think it’s bad for me to stay up so late now?’
I tell her I don’t see how it can be bad if it doesn’t happen often. I apologize again for being drunk, for being cross on Wednesday, for lacking the enthusiasm I ought to feel about the baby. She says she knows it’s just ‘my way’, a statement I don’t understand but am too fuddled to analyse. On our doorstep she opens her bag to get the key and pulls out a piece of paper she meant to give me last night but forgot all about. It’s the fax from John Corrie.
I’m too far gone to read it and I fall into bed, already half-asleep or, at any rate, half-conscious. At four I’m awake again with banging head, pounding heart and dry mouth. After I’ve drunk several pints of water from the kitchen tap I take an alka seltzer and four aspirins, so it’s not till late Sunday morning that I’m fit to look at the fax.
He begins, Hi, Cousin! Which puts me off from the start. This is because, says Jude, I’m a stuffy old peer and a snob. I don’t deny it but think to myself that if Corrie had had a PhD in the arts he’d have begun, ‘Hi, Coz’ and that would have been worse.
Hi, Cousin!
I definitely am your cousin, first, second or third, I’m not sure which but I expect you will. My mother was Vanessa Kirkford but I didn’t know much about ancestors, family etc. till your fax came. All I knew was that my cousin was a lord in the UK.
Mom never talked about her family except to mention there was an aristocratic branch. I knew great-grandpa Henry was an MD and something to do with the royals, but not that he worked on diseases of the blood. As to following in his footsteps, it is pure coincidence that I am involved in a similar line of study. I am the JGP Fellow here at Penn and the focus of my research is targeting Factor VIII gene therapy to the epidermis. Sort of meaningless, I guess, to the layman but pretty exciting pioneering work to us here.
I am fifty-one years old and have been married to my wife Melanie (a psychologist) for over twenty years. We have no children but she has two, Craig and Lisbet, by her first marriage. Our home is in Media, Pa. Do you ever come to the US of A? It would be good to meet with you.
Cordially,
John
I find all this deeply unsatisfying. John Corrie – older than Lachlan thought – must mean that he too is researching blood disease but not because Henry did. It seems too big a coincidence to be credible. I pour myself another glass of water – that’s the fifth I’ve drunk since I got up – and Jude comes in. She gives me a reassuring kiss on the cheek and a pat on the shoulder. Being a complete louse, I feel a hot and bitter surge of resentment. I want to go to the States, I want to talk to this new cousin, stay in his house in Media, wherever that may be, get the answers I need. But I can’t because Jude’s going to have a baby. I can’t leave her even for two nights. And actually, she’s not going to have a baby, she’s going to have a miscarriage. She always does.
Even thinking this is outrageous. I ought to want to stay with my pregnant wife. Any other man would. I’m an unnatural monster. I hug Jude and kiss her and tell her a whole string of lies about how happy I am for her and how it’s going to be fine this time. She seems to believe me, I suppose she wants to. She’s going to make coffee and then take me out for a hangover-curative walk. I go into the study and look up this Factor VIII in the medical dictionary. It takes me a long time because I don’t know where to start looking, but eventually I find it and discover that it’s a clotting factor, one of many allied substances numbered I to XII, missing from the blood of haemophiliacs.
So John Corrie’s not only researching blood disease but the same blood disease as his great-grandfather Henry. And he expects me to believe it’s coincidence?
20
The first hereditary peers’ elections take place today and tomorrow. These are for those ready to serve as Deputy Speakers and other office holders, and everyone in the House who has taken the Oath, life peers and hereditaries alike, may vote. There’s a polling station set up which is mystifying to some ancient hereditaries. Some of them have never cast a vote in their lives. Their fathers died and they inherited their titles before they were twenty-one, the then age of majority, therefore being banned from returning a member to the House of Commons. So now a polling station is as alien to them as this House would be to their tenants and they’ve no idea what to do with a ballot paper. When I consider that these timid tyros won’t just have to put a cross in a slot but choose fifteen from the candidates and number them in order of preference, I wonder not how many ballot papers will be spoilt but how many will get through at all.
Ballot papers, we’re told, will be invalidated if any number is used more than once, any number is missed out or the paper is illegible or ambiguous. The idea of ambiguity intrigues me and, going into the polling room with Lachlan, I speculate as to whether some will put down three ones or others number all thirty-three candidates.
Results will be available on Friday in the Printed Paper Office and the library but I shan’t bother to come in for them. Monday will be good enough for me. Or even next Wednesday when hereditaries start to vote for hereditaries, those seventy-five who are also to stay. I suddenly remember Henry’s robe.
‘D’you think I could sell my robe?’ I ask Lachlan.
‘Dunno,’ he says. ‘I’ve got one. It’s two hundred years old, falling to bits. Nobody’d buy it.’
There’s only some point in having an ancient robe if it’s been in your family all its life. A lot of kudos comes from wearing a tatty old garment. When the Queen comes to open Parliament I’ve seen young peers walk proudly into the Chamber in a moth-eaten antique, the white fur looking as if it’s been chewed by a pack of hounds.
‘They’ll all be the same in future,’ Lachlan says in his mournful tone. He’s referring to the number of ermine rows according to rank. ‘All those old robes’ll be rubbished because no one’s the right to wear ’em. Just a bunch of Life Barons in double rows of rabbit it’ll be.’
‘You’ll be elected,’ I tell him, though I’m not at all sure about this. ‘You’ll be coming to the State Opening for years yet.’
He shakes his head. It’s weeks since I saw him smile. ‘Dressing up’ll be the next thing to go. A tenner that by two thousand and two no one’ll wear robes any more.’
I take him on, though I think he’s right. Peers who haven’t got their own robes borrow them if they can or hire from Ede & Ravenscroft in Chancery Lane. Hiring costs over £100 and I’d never have been able to afford it if I hadn’t got Henry’s. If I sell mine I might get enough to pay for my flight to the United States. Then I remember I can’t go because I can’t leave Jude. That’s what she meant when she said the other day that I wouldn’t want to go. She was wrong there because I do want to. But I won’t. I’ll stay here and spend the robe money on buying her something nice and school myself into wanting this baby, this foetus that’s still securely in the womb.
And virtue is rewarded. I feel quite proud of myself for being good and never once protesting aloud. My recompense is that another fax has come from John Corrie. Contrite over the time she kept the last one before remembering to give it to me, Jude phones from work about this one. It’s just arrived and it says he’s coming over here to a conference on gene therapy. Some other research fellow has dropped out and he’s taking his place. The conference is in London, so maybe we can meet?
My usual course would have been to invite a guest in here for lunch or dinner. I’m not sure if I can do that now. I certainly won’t be able to after Prorogation, the end of the present session, which is happening next Thursday. By the State Opening on 17 November I’ll have been banished. Suddenly, ridiculously, I feel embarrassed about having to tell John Corrie that. He won’t understand. I barely understand myself. I try to explain to taxi drivers, some of whom believe that all peers are to be got rid of and replaced with a wholly elected assembly. It’s extraordinary what a large proportion of the general pub
lic seems never to have heard of life peers and believes everyone in the Upper House is male, old, rich, a landowner, of ancient lineage and set to pass on his title and estates to his eldest son. John Corrie, of course, may have heard of lords but never of a House of Lords. If I get to give him dinner it will probably be somewhere in the neighbourhood of this conference.
The Clerk of the Parliaments announces the election results this afternoon, the successful seventy-five who are to stay along with the fifteen Deputy Speakers elected last week. Earl Ferrers is in, polling 190 votes, the most of anyone, and so are the Earl of Onslow, Earl Russell and Lady Darcy de Knayth. Lachlan Hamilton’s manifesto must have had its charms or else voters were persuaded by his hard work and constant attendance, for he’s returned with a respectable 110. I congratulate him and he says he wishes I’d stood because I’d have got more votes than he.
I’ve done a deal with Julian Brewer over the sale of my robe. He’s beaten me down to £50, pointing out like someone dropping in to the Oxfam shop that there’s a moth hole in one shoulder and one of the rows of ermine looks as if some rodent’s been nibbling it. Brewer pays me in cash and I walk home via Bond Street where I buy Jude another kind of robe, a dark-blue satin dressing gown, that defeats my purpose entirely as it costs me five times what Brewer gave me for mine.
When I get home Lorraine’s still there, vacuuming the living room. She’s tidied up the study, in spite of being asked not to touch any of the papers on the dining table. I untidy them again and when the droning of the vacuum cleaner stops I dial the phone number John Corrie has given me. It’s two-thirty here, so nine-thirty in the morning in Philadelphia. After three rings I get his answering machine. I leave a message to call me, which he does at ten in the evening. I’ve given Jude the dressing gown and had three hours of the pleasure of seeing her in it, curled up on the sofa.
It’s ‘Hi, Cousin’ again, which I’m churlish to mind. He has the Ivy League voice, the US equivalent of our public school and Oxbridge. In my mind’s eye I can see him, tallish, thin, with a boy’s face still, very short hair, no eyebrows, glasses, a buttoned-down collar, an Armani jacket and blue jeans. He’s probably not like that at all. The conference starts on Monday 15 November and he’s arriving the day before, the Sunday. When I ask him where it is he says, ‘It’s in London, Chelmsford.’
I tell him I’ll come to Chelmsford, to the Conference Centre that’s not in the town but outside in a place called Writtle, and as I do I reflect that while I’m in the train the State Opening of Parliament will be going on and for the first time in fifteen years (for I usually went when my father was alive) I won’t be there.
Jude’s had a bleed. Very slight and now apparently over. But they took her into hospital and kept her overnight. Not for one moment – and I congratulate myself on this – was I glad, not once did I hope that this pregnancy would go the way of the last and the one before that and the one before that. If nothing else could have put me firmly on her side, her fear did, her panic and grief, as she held me and hung on screaming, like a child in a war zone. Then, waiting for the ambulance I’d called, she grew utterly calm, willing herself, she told me afterwards, to keep the baby, telling herself that if she wanted this hard enough it would work and all would be well.
Since then a scan’s been done with satisfactory results and she’s been given something that’s supposed to help prevent miscarriages, and told to rest and carry on taking the tablets. Only she won’t, because she’s afraid of the thalidomide effect. When she was in her teens her parents had a neighbour who’d taken thalidomide and whose daughter was born without hands. While she tells me this, something she’s never told me before, she’s shaking and shivering and her teeth are chattering. In the middle of all this Paul comes.
‘You’re always asking me,’ he says, ‘so I’ve taken you up on your offer and come for the weekend.’
I’m sure the offer didn’t stipulate a day’s or even an hour’s notice. This means I can’t complain. Jude is lying on the sofa, looking beautiful in the blue satin dressing gown, and he sits next to her and, rather oddly, holds her hand. He doesn’t ask what’s wrong but seems to assume it’s the flu. I get lunch for us all and hunt through the permafrost depths of the freezer for something for dinner, as Jude can’t go out and for once, it appears, Paul is staying in. He wants to talk about the end of the hereditary peers and how did I feel about being in there on my last day. I give him a copy of Hansard but have to tell him I wasn’t there but here, at home, looking after Jude.
Having moved, it seems, into the hereditaries’ camp, he asks me how I could bear to stay away on those grounds. ‘Just because your wife had flu?’
I expect Jude thinks she’s standing up for me, I know she does, but I wish she’d kept quiet. ‘I didn’t have flu, I had a threatened miscarriage.’
He says nothing but flushes a deep dark red.
‘Paul,’ says Jude, ‘we want to have a child. I don’t think my life will be worth living if I can’t, it’s as desperate as that. Can’t you try to understand?’
He’s been holding her hand again but he lets it go and something in his face tells me he’ll never want to hold it again, never want to kiss her again. He turns to me. ‘I really came here because there’s something you’ve got that I want. Great-great-grandad’s robe. Now you’ve been demoted I thought I could have it. You won’t need it again.’
Jude catches my eye, though her face doesn’t change. ‘What do you want it for?’
‘I just want it.’ Like a child who asks for something to eat he’s never asked for before and won’t say why.
‘I’ve sold it,’ I say. ‘I sold it to a life peer. It was rather shabby.’
He’s furious. His face goes even redder. ‘And what you’ve done is rather shabby. It wasn’t even yours to sell, it belongs to the family. One day it would have belonged to my son and his son.’
This is the first mention I’ve ever heard of his dream children. It’s useless to defend myself or the sale, particularly as I’m now feeling I shouldn’t have done it, I should have told him first. Jude, who never intervenes in our scraps, now does so and tells him she thought he was a Marxist who despised what she calls ‘the trappings of the aristocracy’.
Strife usually raises his mood to a point of cheerfulness but not this time. He looks the way he did when he was five and told he couldn’t have another slice of chocolate cake. He announces that he’s going over to see his pals in Ladbroke Grove and may be back tonight or may not. I wonder aloud to Jude if the time will ever come when my son and I will be able to be together like civilized beings, talk to each other, maybe smile at each other’s jokes, and not walk out in a rage halfway through a discussion.
‘When he’s thirty,’ she says. ‘You’ll have another son by then. Or a daughter. Let’s hope you’ll have better luck next time. After all, your marriage isn’t going to come to grief like your first one did.’
Of course I take her hand and kiss her, I kneel down by the side of the sofa and hug her, but I haven’t liked her talking about our marriage ending, even though she said it was impossible. I suppose I’m superstitious, though I always deny that I am. And all sorts of fears and resentments come creeping in as I kneel there. Does she blame me for Sally’s leaving me and leaving Paul? Does she really think having another child at my age, against my will, a child I can’t afford and don’t want, will heal the breach between Paul and me? Or am I supposed to write Paul off as a failure? The child she has will be the one I really always wanted. Is she that obtuse?
21
I’m sitting in the train going to Chelmsford. It’s not, of course, a first-class carriage but one of the new ones (not very new now to judge by the state of the upholstery) in which the seats face the backs of the seats in front, as in an aircraft. If one were fat it would be very uncomfortable. As it is, the seat back ahead seems unpleasantly close to one’s face and liable to smash one’s nose if the train had to stop suddenly. The view from the window is dr
eary in the extreme, Essex conurbations, grey fields and trunk roads.
If I were in the Heathrow Express I could watch the State Opening on television. As it is, I’m obliged to see it in imagination and memory. I run it before my eyes. The Queen wearing her crown and regalia will enter the crowded Royal Gallery at 11.27 precisely. If she’s late it’s said they stop Big Ben and start it again so that she does walk through at the right time, but she’s never late. She always wears white satin and pearls and a white fur robe. The Duke of Edinburgh is with her and other royals, the Leader of the House in her robes and the Captain of the Gentlemen-at-Arms in uniform and a procession of other dignitaries. The Queen may never enter the House of Commons, so after she’s taken her seat on the throne she says, ‘My Lords, pray be seated,’ whereupon the Lord Great Chamberlain raises his white wand as a signal to Black Rod who then goes to knock on the door of the Commons Chamber, a door that’s been slammed in his face, and summons members to ‘attend her Majesty immediately in the House of Peers’. The Commons pour out, led by the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, and some of them talk and laugh and make a lot of noise as they pound across the Peers’ Lobby and into the Chamber below the bar. The whole assembly of peers in red and white Parliament robes and peeresses in long gowns and tiaras are seated there, gazing at the Queen as she begins to deliver her speech.
Except in memory or on television I shall never see it again. Henry went every year for eight years, from 1897 to 1904, but wearing his new robe that was made for him only for four years in that time. Years passed when Queen Victoria never opened Parliament and when she was absent and a commission of lords presided, no robes were worn. But after the Queen’s death Edward VII opened every Parliament until his death nine years later. The new King loved colourful ceremony and there was gorgeous pageantry at his first State Opening, peers being told to arrive fully robed and in their finest carriages. For his part, he made a dramatic entrance through the East Door, resplendent in red velvet state robes and cape of white ermine, carrying a white plumed helmet. He made his speech from the throne, a custom his mother had given up forty years before.