by Barbara Vine
They started taking the blood from my arm and his. Mine was ordinary but his was a much darker richer red. The nurse held the glass bottle it was flowing into up to the light and a doctor looked at it and said you could see that it carried a gene of aristocracy. A son of this man would be noble and sit in a gathering of lords, as would his grandson and his great-grandson and all his descendants for ever. But when Henry’s bottle was full his blood wouldn’t stop coming out. It overflowed, it splashed on to the floor, it began draining his body dry. He sat up, he got up and shouted at them to stop it, to staunch the flow, didn’t they know he had haemophilia? Did they want him to bleed to death? I woke up then, half-expecting to find myself in a bloody bed, as I’d been before, but I was alone in clean white sheets.
I fetched Jude home. There’s no point in her staying in bed. She’s not ill. It’s just, as she says in a voice of simulated practicality, brisk and philosophical, that she’s a perfectly healthy woman who’s four times conceived a child and four times lost it in a flood of blood. It’s ridiculous to make a fuss, the same thing’s happened to other women and they’ve had healthy babies in the end. She’s only thirty-seven, there’s heaps of time. I find this determined cheerfulness harder to take than her grief. It’s a stance which is bravely assumed in advance of her first counselling session. This is to take place at the end of the week. I want to know what a counsellor can possibly say to her that I can’t or that she doesn’t know already. Or is she just doing the politically correct thing?
‘I’d like to know what an outsider thinks,’ she says, ‘someone who doesn’t know me or you.’
I suppose it can’t do any harm. But I keep thinking of how she deceived me over the conception of this recent, lost child. That feeling went into abeyance while she was pregnant and was happy and confident but now it’s returned and I think of how she could do it again. I’d like to ask her to promise me not to try for a baby for the six months the obstetrician advises, but we’ve never asked each other for promises and this is no time to begin. Something else has happened which worries me more than anything else.
There have been articles in the papers about whether a husband or partner should be present at the birth of his child or not. For a good many years now it’s been received wisdom that he should be. I was with Sally when Paul was born. It was taken for granted by both of us that I would be, I don’t remember any discussion about it, she’d go into the maternity hospital when her labour started and I’d either go with her or she’d contact me at work – I was in publishing then – and I’d come straightaway. Now the gynaecologist who’s written these newspaper pieces says it’s a bad idea for various reasons. One is that men get distressed by the woman’s pain, another that men make inappropriate conversation and the third, the one that’s enraging the feminist lobby, that seeing the process of birth diminishes the woman’s sexual attractiveness. Her man will never feel quite the same about her again.
I can’t say I was affected like that. But by the time Paul was born Sally and I were already becoming alienated, we both realized we’d made a bad mistake. Her sexual appeal for me had practically gone by then. But it’s not far off the experience of the birth-attending man which is troubling me now. I feel a shift in Jude’s attraction for me, only ‘attraction’ is the wrong word. I’d rather say my total, utterly compelling, absolutely exclusive, almost obsessive, passion for her. That’s what it was and putting it in the past tense like that gives me physical pain. I’ve never seen her give birth, worse luck, but I’ve seen too much these past months, years, too much blood and mess, heard too much talk of hazardous wombs and dilated cervixes and menstrual anomalies, and the accumulation of it has done something to the curious mechanism of attraction. Appalling of me, isn’t it? Callous and insensitive, the worst kind of male attitude. I know all that and it makes no difference. There is no one to whom I could say this, no intimate friend. I couldn’t say a word of it to Jude, my dear love whose only offence is that she wants to be a mother, in line, it seems to her, with every other woman in the world.
I couldn’t say to anyone what this has revealed to me, that I know now why men want virgins, the untouched, the pure. In order to make them impure, sullied, bloody? Perhaps. I know why Orthodox Jews submit their women to purification rituals after childbirth. But I don’t want to learn these unpalatable things. I want my passion for my wife back, not this tender, pitying, brotherly love.
22
While I don’t believe in the coincidence, I can’t find anything to put in its place. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. I’m thinking of my last chapter – so very far off being written – and saying something like:
Only one of Henry Nanther’s descendants followed in his footsteps and became a doctor of medicine. John Wentworth Corrie, son of his granddaughter Vanessa Kirkford and her American husband Stephen Wentworth Corrie, is at the time of writing the JGP Fellow and a research geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania. By coincidence he is himself a haemophiliac, the result of a mutation in his mother’s gene, and gene therapy to haemophilia A is his particular study.
I don’t like it much. Also it reminds me that I don’t know if it’s true about John Corrie being the only descendant to have a career in medicine. I must check. For instance, what does John’s brother Rupert do? I should have asked but I was too stunned by the coincidence to think of it. Then there are Caroline, Lucy and Jennifer, granddaughters of Henry’s second daughter Mary and as much my second cousins as John and David, but I know very little about them. All I know is that they’re on David’s tree. They may all have husbands or partners, they may have children, and one of them may be a doctor of medicine, a nurse, a radiographer, the chairman of a health authority or a paramedic. Jude’s willing enough to ask the Croft-Joneses to supper (which means dinner eaten in the kitchen) and doesn’t mind their bringing the Holy Grail. This time she was more discreet and didn’t say a word about her pregnancy to Georgie, so there’ll be no hard-to-take commiseration.
I’ve had another idea that doesn’t seem to have occurred to John. Or if it did he didn’t mention it. Why was the mutation assumed to have taken place in Vanessa’s gene? Why not in that of her mother Elizabeth Kirkford, née Nanther? John would say I know very little about haemophilia but I’m learning and it seems to me from studying the brochure that a male’s condition may owe as much to an alteration in the grandmother’s genetic make-up as in the mother’s. If this were so both Vanessa and Veronica may have been carriers. Of course, the coincidence then would be even greater, for it would mean that one of Henry’s daughters had a gene mutation which made her a carrier of the very disease, the rare disease, which was the subject of his life’s work.
Galahad has become an engaging baby. He’s a constant smiler. It’s as if he’s discovered what a charming habit smiling is and how it calls forth approval, indeed from his parents ecstasy, so that he can’t do it often enough. He laughs too, a bubbling quite musical sound inspired by anything bright or shiny brought within his orbit. At nearly six months he’s sitting up and, according to Georgie, about to begin crawling. He seems not to have inherited his father’s rather sullen temperament nor his mother’s volatility but is a sunny soul, happy and placid. Veronica, gone this past month but far from forgotten, has told Georgie that placidity and ‘good’ behaviour in a baby bode ill for its intelligence. Bright people are diabolically naughty in infancy, as David was.
‘Can you imagine anything more cruel?’ says Georgie.
We can’t. We shake our heads, though we’re not surprised. Even David, who at last seems, according to Jude, to have taken to heart the biblical injunction to leave his mother and cleave unto his wife, says Veronica can be very cruel. He’s quite sure he didn’t behave badly when young, that’s another invention of hers.
‘I’m longing for you to get pregnant,’ Georgie says to Jude as if Jude wasn’t. ‘Mind you, when you do I’ll be so excited I’ll go and have another one just to keep you company.’
David
pulls a long face. ‘Don’t I get consulted?’
‘Of course you do, darling. More than consulted.’ She laughs and so does Galahad. ‘You’ll be a participant like you were last time. Don’t you remember?’
Galahad laughs so loudly that Georgie, like those people who say their pets understand every word they say, is convinced her son has a precocious knowledge of reproduction. We move on to a slight, if not total, change of subject. David has brought the latest genealogical table with him but it seems to me largely unchanged from last time. I add the Corries and ask him about the three women of whom I know no more than the names but he knows only that Lucy is married – he was invited to her wedding – and believes Jennifer isn’t. Of Caroline he knows nothing but says he’ll look her up at the Family Records Centre and I decide I may as well let him do that for me.
‘My mother doesn’t know. I asked her. It sounds as if she fell out with Patricia and maybe Diana too.’
An even more contentious woman than I thought. I tell him I ought to talk to Veronica again. Immediate alarm. ‘I really don’t think we could have her, Martin. Not at the moment, certainly. Not for a while.’ He lowers his voice, though Jude and Georgie are in the kitchen and only just visible on the other side of the serving hatch. His sibilant whispering makes Galahad laugh. ‘You may have noticed that she and Georgie don’t get on. My mother has an unfortunate turn of phrase sometimes. And Georgie can be rather emotional.’
‘I was thinking of going to Cheltenham to see her.’
His face clears. ‘Oh, well, why not? Good idea. She’s very hospitable, you know. Go to tea and she’ll be baking for days before you get there.’ He wants to know what I’m going to ask her. It’s plain he’s not interested in anything but avoiding Veronica’s presence in his house. He may even be planning visits to Cheltenham on his own or putting her up in a hotel next time she wants to come to London. ‘I’ll give you her phone number. And her address. You may prefer to write first. She’d like that, I think, a preliminary letter. And by the way, though I’m sure you wouldn’t, don’t mention Vanessa, will you?’
I let him remain in his state of certainty that I won’t, though of course I must, that’s one of the reasons I’m going, and I tell him I already have her address. I’ve had a letter from her. When I get there she may refuse to discuss her sister but that’s a chance I have to take. She may not even know Vanessa is dead. She may not care. I’m having all sorts of wild ideas about these sisters and their cousins and my great-aunt Elizabeth Kirkford, but I suppress them. I don’t want to waste thinking time on speculations that may all come to nothing once Veronica has talked to me. If she talks.
As far as my research goes I’m coming to the end of Henry’s life. There are gaps, of course, big ones that somehow or other have to be filled, but the course or stream of his life has only half a dozen years to run. He spoke again in the House of Lords, once in a debate on the motor car, which he called a ‘flash in the pan’, and once on the folly of proposing to give the vote to women. There was nothing new in this speech, made in 1904. Henry dilated for nearly fifteen minutes on the delicacy of women’s health compared to men’s, their regular ‘incapacity’, which kept them in his view in a permanent state of mild invalidism, their peculiar talents for home-making and domestic arts and their intuition as against man’s rational attitudes. None of this had much to do with allowing women the franchise, it was directed more at keeping them out of universities and the professions, but no one questioned its validity. Earl Ferrers’ view of women as potential legislators, given fifty-three years later, was only a slight advance on Henry’s. Several subsequent speakers congratulated the noble lord, the Lord Nanther, on his wise words which, one of them said, derived from his expert knowledge as a ‘medical man of awesome repute’. Misogynistic Henry. Though no doubt pleased with this reception by his peers, he spoke no more. Although I’ve trawled through Hansard for the remaining years of his life I can find no evidence that he ever entered the House again.
He was giving up, giving in to age. In February 1906 he became seventy and he records his birthday in his diary. ‘The years of man’s life are threescore years and ten. Today I reach my allotted span.’ For an avowed agnostic, he quotes the Bible surprisingly often, but no doubt this was a hangover from his Wesleyan youth. He was no longer in attendance on the royal family, for his service seems to have been terminated when Edward VII came to the throne in 1901. Someone else had been appointed to care for the Battenberg princes, Maurice and Leopold. In the spring of 1906 Barnabus Couch died. Henry records in the diary: ‘By rail to Edinburgh. Attended poor Couch’s funeral.’ Did he reflect while he stood in the churchyard, and watched his old friend’s coffin lowered into the grave, that now there was no one to ask him how his magnum opus proceeded? He could abandon it without shame and without excuse. As for the women who might have enquired how ‘papa’ was getting on, their opinions didn’t count. They were incapacitated invalids, relying on intuition.
That he’d started this book is known. In the early days, the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, he notes: ‘Worked on A History and good progress was made’ and ‘Six chapters of A History completed.’ But by 1903 there are no more entries like these. We don’t even know what its full title would have been. A History of Blood Disease? A History of Haemophilia? He still saw the occasional patient and still gave the occasional lecture. His name is listed as among the contributors to the haemophilia section of that vast work A Treasury of Human Inheritance, always known in medical circles as ‘Bulloch and Fildes’ after its main instigators, though it wasn’t published until three years after his death. But his work was done and it seems that he considered his life was over.
In the year he became seventy and Couch died, Henry’s eldest daughter Elizabeth, aged twenty-one, married James Bartlett Kirkford at St Mark’s Church, Hamilton Terrace. Henry gave her away. He notes tersely on a Saturday in June: ‘Gave E. in marriage.’ Her husband took her to live in Yorkshire. Mary, Helena and Clara remained at home, Clara being still at school in St John’s Wood. Alexander, the heir, was also at school, a prep school in Arkley, prior to going to Harrow, but George, the sick boy, was never considered well enough to go to school. A tutor called Mr Beckwith came every day to instruct him in Latin and mathematics while a Mademoiselle Parent taught him French. Henry, who had been at home as little as possible in his daughters’ early years, now scarcely went out. It seems that when George wasn’t at his lessons, he spent his time with his father.
The letters exchanged between Elizabeth Kirkford and her sister Mary Nanther have been a rich source of information on family life. They wrote to each other once a month for many years, though there are gaps in the correspondence, notably during the summer of 1910 and again in 1917 and 1919. But in August 1910 Mary refers to ‘Your letter of June’ and in December 1917 to Elizabeth’s mention of ‘Vanessa’s whooping cough’ some months before, and those letters are missing. There are no letters in the collection between May and August 1910 and none between September and November 1917. Nineteen nineteen is another blank year with only one letter from each woman surviving. Of course they may just be lost. There is no reason to think that they were purposely destroyed. Those that remain for the years prior to Henry’s death give a detailed picture of family life at Ainsworth House and of Elizabeth’s marriage. James Kirkford walks with a limp. Apparently, he had one leg a fraction shorter than the other. This keeps him from serving in the Great War of 1914. ‘I never expected to be thankful for poor James’s disability but now I am,’ Elizabeth writes. ‘He of course frets about it, especially as some Beast has sent him a white feather.’ Four years before she has given birth to a son.
I suffered for two days and was awfully afraid but at last he was born and my agony was not so great as to disincline to give him a brother or sister. James wants him to have his name and I agreed but Kenneth must come first. It is fashionable but nothing he will ever be ashamed of.
&nb
sp; By then Henry had been dead a year. Throughout 1907 and the early part of 1908 Mary writes of their father’s ill-health. She calls it a ‘malaise’.
I don’t think even Papa himself knows what is wrong with him. It is a malaise that cannot be defined. He sometimes suffers a mild pain in his chest and down his left arm, which points to heart trouble, or so he says.
At Christmas 1907 she tells her sister,
We shall miss you here but all understand of course that you must spend the festive season with James’s people. We are to have no guests and to go nowhere. Poor Papa seems to have nothing to employ him – unless you count George. He spends all his waking hours with him, mostly reading aloud to him which George likes, though he has been able to read perfectly well himself since the age of four. He has been in terrible pain and sometimes in the night lets out bloodcurdling screams which wake the whole household. Papa has ice delivered here and applies fresh packs of it for hours on end. It seems nothing is too much trouble…
In February she is writing,
They play extraordinary games. The latest is to count how many times certain words appear in the plays of Shakespeare. For instance, ‘green’ and ‘milk’ in Macbeth! George enjoys it and claims to have found a secret code in one of them. He is such an intellectual child, which none of us was and Alexander certainly is not.