by Barbara Vine
Did Edith also attend State Openings? If she did, was there a tiara handed down among her jewellery? I must check. It’s all in the possession of my sister Sarah and some other Nanther female descendant. Veronica? Certainly not Vanessa, the renegade runaway. The most likely thing is that Edith sold it during the twenty-three years of her widowhood. This reminds me of the robe, cause of such dissension between me and Paul that he never returned from Ladbroke Grove and is now, presumably, back in Bristol academia. If Jude has a daughter will she, one day, want the tiara? The train is pulling into Chelmsford. It’s spitting with rain and rather cold. I find a taxi with a driver willing to take me to the Manor House Conference Centre.
It’s a huge Victorian Gothic place, angry red brick, its grounds thickly planted with big conifers. Wellingtonias and Scotch pines stand black and ragged against a sky of unvaried pale grey. Inside the house it’s warm in the way no private person except Barry Dreadnought and his kind can afford to maintain the heating. A blanket of warmth meets and enfolds me as I enter and am shown to a deep sofa in the lounge where I sit and wait for John Corrie. I’ve brought him two presents: one of the copies of Henry’s Diseases of the Blood, and a folder for keeping two photographs in. It’s bound in red leather and stamped in gold with the House of Lords portcullis crest and I bought it in the shop near the Home Room on my last day. Jude took the attitude that I couldn’t give someone an empty photograph case and when I ridiculed that, pointing out that he wouldn’t want pictures of her and me, she suggested one of Edith’s photographs of Henry. Edith took hundreds, most of which were in one of the trunks, so I carefully cut one to size and slipped it inside the partition.
John Corrie’s not the least like I imagined him. He’s tall but dark, he’s got a short dark beard and he looks a lot younger than he is. He doesn’t wear glasses but maybe has lenses, for his eyes are a strange unnatural green, a colour never seen in the unenhanced iris. When he smiles he shows the usual magnificent American teeth. I hand over the presents, which he calls gifts, and he reacts with transatlantic grace, enthusing over the photograph case and wanting to know who ‘the old guy’ is. Henry’s book brings just as much gratitude, but when he opens it and looks inside, reads a phrase or two and glances at a chart, I detect the twenty-first century scientist’s superiority tempered with indulgence this nineteenth-century bumbling about in the dark is bound to arouse.
He takes me into the conference centre bar, a Stakis Hotel kind of place now filling up with biochemists or whatever they are. A television screen, hanging up in one corner, is showing the State Opening, focusing on the Leader of the House carrying the Cap of Maintenance, a kind of hat that symbolizes the hold one of the early Edwards had on Normandy and Aquitaine and now our retention of the Channel Islands. The ceremony is coming to an end, the Queen has spoken, the Chamber is emptying and the camera moves. A film star who’s also a peeress swans down a crimson corridor in long gown and pearl tiara. They are all going off to have lunch in the Cholmondeley Room.
No one but me in this bar is looking at the screen, they’re all drinking and talking genetics. I’d have bet anyone willing to take me on that John would drink sparkling water or Coke but I’m wrong and while I have red wine he has a gin and tonic. He knows very little about the family history we share and seems never to have shown any interest until this moment. Would I draw him a plan? I tell him I can do better than that as I’ve furnished myself with a photocopy of David Croft-Jones’s genealogical table. He’s delighted and pores over it while helping himself to nuts and crisps.
‘I suppose you know the story,’ I say, ‘of how your mother stole her sister’s fiancé and ran away to marry him in secret?’
He doesn’t and for a moment he looks disconcerted as if not knowing whether to take this with a smile or intense seriousness. Then he raises his eyebrows, silently asking for more. I tell him what I know. He’s never heard any of it before. ‘Mom’s been dead nearly twenty years,’ he says. ‘She and Dad died within a few months of each other in 1980. They were so devoted, one of them couldn’t go on living without the other.’
‘He was engaged to your aunt Veronica first.’ Remembering her, I grin to myself. ‘I think he made a wise choice.’
This makes him laugh. ‘And here’s this great-grandfather you’re writing about. I’m really happy to have his book. Did he write any more?’
‘Quite a few. He was one of the leading authorities of the day. Hadn’t you heard of him?’
‘I remember Mom saying her grandpa was a doctor and attended the royal family, that’s about all.’
‘Nothing about blood diseases?’
He shakes his head. He’s found himself and me on the tree. ‘May I add my wife and my brother and his wife and their kids?’ In a very small neat hand he writes after his own name, ‘m. 1977 Melanie Strozzi,’ in the blank space beside his name, ‘Rupert Steven, b.1946, m. 1977 Lauren May Bowyer’ and under their names, ‘Clay, b. 1978 and Wilson, b. 1984’.
He himself is a childless man. I don’t seem to come across many. ‘What exactly is this research you do?’
His grin is the scientist’s smile, the not quite patronizing smile of one learned in an abstruseness he knows his audience haven’t a clue about. ‘How much do you know about haemophilia?’
I think I know a lot, but daren’t say so to him. ‘The basics, I suppose.’
‘The focus of my research is targeting Factor Eight gene therapy in haemophilia A. I’ll explain. You know what the epidermis is, the outermost compartment of the skin? Right. The epidermis is a good target because it’s highly accessible and able to secrete gene products into the bloodstream. I’ve carried out experiments with mice – I’m trying to clarify this for you – and results suggest that the epidermis can synthesize functional Factor Eight which can then enter the systemic circulation.’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘There are problems. The transgenic mouse model has limitations. But my results demonstrate that a localized area of skin alone can serve as a source of Factor Eight and support the feasibility of cutaneous gene therapy. Now I’m looking ahead to the best ways of delivering Factor Eight to the epidermis. Shall we go and grab ourselves some lunch?’
The screen’s still showing the State Opening. The one o’clock news has started and it’s the principal item. I go into the dining room with a picture of red robes and flashing diamonds still printed on my retinas. A buffet lunch is laid out. I help myself to chicken and various other cold meats and salad. John has curry and rice and chicken and spinach, all on the same plate. For a moment it looks as if he’s going to lead me to take my place at a table where twenty delegates to this conference are already sitting, but he’s only stopped to exchange pleasantries with a woman in a red trouser suit and an older man who looks important. It’s a bit like the long table in the House where I’ll never sit again.
John and I are lucky. Most people seem to want to sit with their fellows and gossip or maybe swap theories, so we have no difficulty in finding places in the embrasure of a bay window with a view of the grounds. I’m not very hungry and wonder how I’ll get through what’s on my plate but John attacks his food with enthusiasm. Ever since he told me he knew no more about Henry than that he was a doctor in attendance on the royal family, a question’s been hovering in the back of my mind. I postponed asking it while he was describing the nature of his research and now, just as I’m planning how to phrase it, he begins telling me how haemophilia is inherited, something I already know.
‘Look, I’ll write this down for you,’ he says. ‘Or better still, we’ll pick up a brochure from the US National Hemophilia Foundation on the way out. That’ll give an explanation for the layman.’ Suddenly he shows an unexpected sensitivity. ‘I’m really sorry, I guess all this talk of blood and sperm and whatever could put you off your food.’
‘It’s not that.’ I make myself take a mouthful of chicken and mayonnaise-covered roquette. ‘It’s – well, if it wasn’t being Henry Nanther’
s great-grandson, what was it drew you to researching haemophilia? I mean, he was the great haemophilia expert of his day. You’re researching his subject yet you didn’t know it was his subject?’
I’m noticing something else about him. He has about as completely an open and honest face as I’ve ever seen on anyone. He’s transparent. Now he stops eating and laughs. The answer I get stuns me. Possibilities leap out and dance up and down like floaters when you turn away from a bright light.
‘I’m a haemophiliac,’ he says.
‘It’s very different than it once was. I haven’t a severe form. The risk is internal bleeding that can lead to arthropathy – that’s joint damage – and that’s prevented by infusions of Factor Eight or Factor Nine. When I was a kid I had to be hospitalized for infusions, but in 1965 there was a medical breakthrough. Dr Judith Graham Pool discovered cryoprecipitate.’
I’m staring at him, not I hope open-mouthed.
‘That’s the factor-rich component of the blood. It meant less fluid had to be transfused into the patient and by the early seventies you could get it in freeze-dried form which made it possible to infuse at home. I never had any joint damage. You could say these discoveries came just in time for me. There are a lot more clotting factor products and there’s prophylactic treatment.’
‘And your gene therapy.’
‘And my gene therapy, as you say. I use a product for mild to moderate haemophilia A called desmopressin acetate, DDAVP. There’s genetic testing too. But in my case if I’d had kids there’d not have been much point. Any daughter of a haemophiliac is a carrier, so mine would inevitably have been one. I chose not to reproduce but luckily I married a woman who already had two kids by her first marriage.’
‘But how did it come to you?’ I wish I knew the language better. I’m sure I’m using all the wrong terms and I start with a mistake I ought to know better than to make. ‘Who did you inherit it from? Was your father a haemophiliac?’
‘Wouldn’t have affected me if he was. You’ll have to study the brochure. All the daughters of a haemophiliac are carriers because they have his X chromosome but his sons won’t have the condition. They have his Y chromosome.’
‘Then your mother was the conductor?’ I’ve inadvertently used the word Henry and his contemporaries did and I correct myself. ‘Carrier, I mean?’
‘She must have been. Of course it was the result of mutation.’
I’ve read a book about haemophilia in the royal family in which the author dismissed the possibility of a mutated gene in Queen Victoria’s genetic make-up. ‘But surely that’s very rare?’
He smiles that same smile. ‘Haemophilia itself is pretty rare. That said, mutation is common. About thirty per cent of haemophiliacs have the disease because of a mutation in the mother’s gene.’
‘And that was true of your mother?’
‘Sure it was. She was asked about that when I was a baby. But she didn’t know of any family history of haemophilia. It was a mutation. Let me give you an example, in a study done of five hundred and forty-three persons with haemophilia A – that’s my kind – two hundred and ninety-six unique mutations were discovered.’
I’m looking at his additions to David’s tree. ‘And your brother?’
‘Rupe’s not a haemophiliac. He was lucky. Mom had two X chromosomes as a female, remember. He must have gotten the one that’s not carrying the mutated gene.’
By this time I’m reeling from genetics. I’ve eaten nothing, which John puts down to my squeamishness. I don’t know what I put it down to. We go and help ourselves to pudding – ‘dessert’ I ought to call it. I think I can manage crème caramel. He has that and cheesecake and chocolate mousse and a banana as well. This time I manage to eat what’s on my plate. The subject has been changed to family history and I tell him about Henry’s life, his medical training, his friendships, the Tay Bridge disaster, his attendance on Prince Leopold and his women. He seems to have no idea of historical specifics and finds the Jimmy Ashworth episode shocking by his present-day standards. The foisting of jimmy on to Len Dawson is unforgivable. He wants to know why Laura Kimball doesn’t have DNA testing to establish that she and I are related and can’t understand when I tell him it’s better for her not to suspect, to retain her belief in Jimmy’s chastity.
‘Isn’t the truth always best?’ he says.
Is it? I abandon truth for the time being, it’s too big a concept for the way I feel today. ‘Henry was fascinated by blood,’ I say. ‘It was what his life was about. Blood. Isn’t it a big coincidence that you, his great-grandson, have haemophilia and also devote your life to working on blood?’
‘Genes, not blood,’ he corrects me. We go back into the lounge where coffee comes. ‘Maybe it’s a coincidence that he was an expert on haemophilia – if expertise was possible at that period – and I’m a haemophiliac. Coincidences do happen. On the other hand, look at all the family he has who aren’t haemophiliacs or carriers.’ It’s obvious from his expression that he thinks people like me, non-scientists, authors, biographers, meaning the imaginative, the woolly-minded, are always on the watch for the sensational. If it’s not there they’ll manufacture it. If it’s insignificant they’ll enlarge it.
He’s smiling at me, handing across the table a dish of chocolate mints. Suddenly I think of Jude, maybe because she hates after-dinner mints, she says they taste like toothpaste. And I have one of those premonitions others have but I seldom do, I know they mean nothing except maybe that the omened thing won’t happen. This one tells me Jude needs me, she’s tried to get hold of me but she can’t. It’s getting on for three.
‘Are you OK?’ John says. ‘You’ve turned pale. It’s all this talk.’
‘No. No, I’m fine. But it’s time I went.’
He says he’ll have them call me a taxi and he’ll pick up that brochure for me on his way. As I finish my coffee, I try to think about what he’s said but I can only think of Jude. She’s at work. I haven’t got a mobile with me, I always forget to carry it, or perhaps purposely don’t carry it because you’re supposed to keep them switched off while you’re inside the Palace of Westminster. I won’t be there again. Hooray, I’m free to carry a mobile!
I could phone from the call boxes, inside one of which John Corrie is summoning a taxi for me. He comes back, says the cab will be ten minutes. I try to phone Jude, I get through to the company but. the next step is her voicemail and all I get from that is that she’s not at her desk at present. Unable to restrain my frustration, I tell John how much I hate modern technology, am a Luddite (I’m not really), despise e-mail, don’t possess a fax, have never succeeded in penetrating the Internet further than viewing a page of a newspaper I’ve never previously heard of, and avoided like the plague the House of Lords Parliamentary Video and Data Network. John, of course, loves it all, sometimes receives twenty e-mails in a day, has already sent two to his wife this morning by means of a tiny computer he carries that’s a phone and fax as well.
The cab driver comes in, looking for me. I can’t dislike John Corrie, no one could, but we’ve nothing in common. I doubt if we’ll ever see each other again. But he congratulates me on finding him and I congratulate him on finding me and if we don’t exactly swear eternal friendship – we’re stuck with the cousinship – we faithfully promise each to come and stay with the other when I go to Philadelphia and he comes to London. Any help he can give me on blood disease he’ll be only too happy to provide and he’s thrilled to have ‘great-grandpa’s opus’.
The train’s ten minutes late. But when it comes there aren’t so many people in it as there were this morning and the seats are the old-fashioned kind, pairs facing each other with a table between. I lay the brochure on the table and open it. It’s a brightly coloured glossy booklet, the size of a newspaper’s weekend supplement, with illustrations of happy people, all young, handsome and smiling, who’ve presumably come to terms with their haemophilia through the marvels of modern medicine. I find the bit I already knew ab
out X and Y chromosomes and read on into the complications of the different types of the disease. But concentration isn’t coming easily because all the time the coincidence of Henry, the great Victorian expert (whatever John says) on the condition and his great-grandson being a haemophiliac keeps bugging me. The coincidence of Henry’s granddaughter having a mutated gene that resulted in her son being haemophiliac bothers me too. Such an. occurrence of events, given that in John’s own words the disease is rare, is something I can’t accept. And if he can accept it this is only because he’s not one of us imaginative, sensation-seeking authors but a scientist who’s not really interested in the peculiarities of human beings’ interior lives.
Once the train pulls in to Liverpool Street, having made up the ten minutes it’s lost and loudly trumpeting this victory on the public address system, my worries about Jude come back. By now it’s half-past four. I go into a phone booth, try her number and get her voicemail again. Then I try Alma Villa. First the answering machine, then Lorraine breaking in and telling me Jude’s been taken ill and gone to hospital. She doesn’t know what’s wrong but I do. Oh, I do.
Nowhere like ninety days this time. Her obstetrician’s told her it was too soon to try again. She should have given it six months. They keep her in hospital overnight but she’s not really ill, there’s been no pain – no physical pain, that is – only blood and a tiny foetus too small to see its sex, not much more than a bag of jelly. That’s her description, not the obstetrician’s. It makes me feel nauseous. I’ve drunk a lot of whisky and coffee since I got off that train but I haven’t eaten anything. There’s been too much talk of blood these past two days and I wonder how doctors can bear it, how they get on while they’re becoming used to it. I even dreamed about blood last night, sleeping alone in our bed. I was in a transfusion centre, lying on a trestle and the man lying on the next one was Henry. It didn’t surprise me seeing him there, I knew him, we were friends, and he was also what he truly was, my ancestor. A nurse came by and said how young he looked to be my great-grandfather and he said, the way some women do, that he’d not been much more than a child when he married.