by Barbara Vine
George died in July 1908. To his father it was the worst blow of his whole life. Mary writes,
It is a dreadful thing for all of us but worst for poor Papa. Mother is always so phlegmatic, though perhaps philosophical would be a kinder word. Nothing seems to upset her for long. I can’t help wondering what Papa’s reaction would have been if any of us had died. Rather different, I think. Could anyone deny that George was the only one of his children he cared a jot for? You were very seriously ill with scarlet fever in the early nineties. I was only five but I remember very well that Papa hardly came near you, claiming he was afraid of infection, though he had had the disease himself. I was with Mama when she came to tell him you were out of danger and he hardly looked up from his book.
Not very kind if Elizabeth had no prior knowledge of Henry’s callousness. He died in 1909, six months after George. ‘Of a broken heart,’ Elizabeth suggests to her sister. Mary isn’t having any of that.
Father [she never calls him Papa again] may have died of a broken heart but it was heart disease, not grief, that broke it. Whatever Mother says I believe he had a heart attack soon after George died. At any rate, she found him lying on the sofa in the study, clasping his hands to his left side and his face a most peculiar purple colour.
The next one, in the following January, killed him. The Times carried a long and sycophantic obituary and Princess Beatrice sent a wreath. Henry left most of what he possessed to his son Alexander, by then Lord Nanther. The exceptions were small legacies, providing incomes to his unmarried daughters and a life interest in Ainsworth House to his widow as well as a considerable sum in life insurance. Edith put up a gravestone to him, leaving room for her own name to be added later. It reads conventionally: ‘Henry Alexander, Baron Nanther KCB, beloved husband of Edith, born 19 February 1836, died 20 January 1909. Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.’ I think I understand my great-grandmother well enough by now to know that no irony was intended. Her husband had been a doctor so this particular Beatitude was appropriate.
Two or three terraces of cottages remain opposite the main gates of the cemetery. They and a couple of big houses are all that survive to give an idea of what Kensal Green was like when Henry was buried there. But even then the warren of streets in the hinterland was there and the rows of shops, many now run-down, their windows boarded up. You can walk the length of the Harrow Road, from Paddington to Harlesden, and, with the exception of a butcher with a queue to his door, not pass a shop you’d dream of going into, still less buy anything from. There’s a hairdresser’s with the plaster dropping off its walls, innumerable betting shops, fast-food places, hardware stores where the hardware is all plastic. The area has become depressed, almost sinister in its atmosphere; litter and chewing gum on the pavements, every building ugly or mean, every surface in the neighbourhood of the tube station savagely coated with graffiti in primary colours. People who live here would prefer to live almost anywhere else and their discontent, not to be wondered at, shows in their grim faces. The cemetery is a green haven in summer but now bare branches shiver behind the kind of high wall you’d expect to see round the grounds of a prison.
A fine drizzle is falling, only a little wetter than a mist. I know roughly where Henry’s grave is but still I need the cemetery plan I’m given to find it. This place is huge, some of the tombs as big as the cottages outside the gates and not a very different shape. Obelisks and angels surround me, weeping widows in pock-marked limestone, broken columns, and everywhere the ivy and the ilex, eternally evergreen, dark, ugly, apparently immortal, unlike the occupants of the ground beneath my feet. I think of it as harbouring bones and rotting wood, rich with larval life, and wonder what they thought they achieved by it, those Victorians. Was their aim to overcome death? If so, they conspicuously failed, for this place is his abode, where the living man feels that he intrudes, yet must make haste if he wants to come out alive.
His is not a very impressive gravestone. It stands between an obelisk very like Cleopatra’s Needle commemorating an Egyptologist and the weeping muse of an obscure poet. Ivy and brambles blanket the spaces between. Henry shares his with his widow Edith and his son George. George’s epitaph shows more feeling than the inscription the widow devised for his father. No doubt it was composed by Henry himself, for there is no mention that he had another parent. ‘George Thomas, beloved son of Lord Nanther, aged eleven. Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers?’ The quotation is from Browning, I think, and as far as I remember from a poem about the suffering of factory children. I’ll look it up. Edith’s epitaph was probably put there by Alexander during one of the short periods he lived in London. ‘Louisa Edith, Lady Nanther, widow of the above, 1861–1932, a dearly loved mother.’ No doubt the married daughters are buried with their husbands. But what of Helena? What of Clara? They lie elsewhere, neglected, unwanted women, of not much account to their family or their collateral descendants.
But what really surprises me is the vase of flowers. The grave looks as if it’s been untended for a long time but not two-thirds of a century, nothing like that. On the mossy slab at its foot is a small stone vase, half-full of greenish-brown water, in which stands a bunch of dead rosebuds. They’re withered but still pink and their leaves aren’t shrivelled. Who can have put them there? Not my great-aunt Clara, the longest-lived of her generation. Though nearly a hundred, she died in 1990, and these flowers have been there not more than a few weeks. Another small mystery and one I’d like to solve.
On a curious and untypical impulse I go back to the gate where a man is selling flowers from a stall and buy a bunch of chrysanthemums. While I arrange them in the rainwater in the stone pot I decide I’m putting them there not for Henry or George but for Edith. I used to see her as a fortunate woman, making a better marriage than she might have expected, living in a fine house and wanting for nothing. Her husband was devoted to her and her children affectionate and, by her daughters’ accounts, she was of a placid equable temperament. She was an accomplished photographer and painted at least to her own satisfaction. But now I’m beginning to think of her as a wronged woman, duped and taken advantage of, though I don’t as yet know why.
23
True to David’s prediction Veronica has invited me to tea. I’d have liked to have Jude with me on this trip. We could have had a weekend in the Cotswolds and I could have left her behind briefly in the hotel at Stow while I went to Cheltenham. But Jude won’t. She makes several excuses where one would do, so I know she doesn’t really want to come. It’s too expensive, she says, we can’t afford holiday weekends. Besides, on the Friday she’s due to have tests done to see if she’s got some recessive gene that causes these miscarriages. It’s after she’s hinted that I may have to have a similar test that she says she’d rather stay at home, she’s been up there too often anyway to the Cheltenham Literary Festival.
And she needs the car, so I go by train. It’s twenty minutes’ walk from the station to Veronica’s and as I stroll along (because I’m early) I think about genes and wonder what this test is, telling myself in the base way we talk to our inner selves, that there can’t be much wrong with me, I’ve fathered a healthy child. Perhaps I should phone John Corrie and ask him to explain. But I’ll have the test first, to please Jude.
Instead of one of the pretty Georgian terraces that abound here, Veronica lives in a nineteen-seventyish ‘town house’ with picture windows and an integral garage. She’s been watching or listening for my arrival, for she answers the door faster than she could have done if she hadn’t been just inside it. Great care has gone into her appearance. Her hair is newly tinted, her nails freshly painted and she’s dressed in what I’d guess is the latest fashion for women some forty years younger than she, a sort of padded skirt and jumper with frayed edges. I’ll describe her clothes to Jude who’ll tell me if I’m right. David was quite correct about the sumptuous tea. Veronica has provided smoked salmon sandwiches, scones with jam and cream, flapjacks, carrot cake an
d shortbread. Now I shan’t have to eat dinner, always supposing I could get it, on the train.
While we eat, she talks family history, which must be her own bland, diluted, expurgated version of events, for no collection of human beings in any age could be quite so virtuous, conformist and dull as she makes out the Nanthers and the Kirkfords to be. Henry, as she’s told me before, she never knew. Her grandmother Edith she remembers as being particularly tolerant of what children did but not as playing with her or even having much time for her. She had other things to occupy her, which Veronica can well understand, her photography, her painting, and she’s sure Edith was ‘as happy as the day is long’. As to her appearance, Veronica believes that ‘in those days women always looked their age’. Her grandmother never went out without a hat. Her once copious blonde hair was white and thin, worn in a ‘bun’ on the back of her head. She was a churchgoer and Veronica remembers the vicar of St Mark’s coming to tea at Alma Villa.
I interrupt here and ask her about the engagement ring, expecting her to say she doesn’t remember and that children never notice things like that. But she does remember and no, her grandmother never wore any rings but her plain gold wedding band. Of course this may mean no more than that she found the wearing of rings a nuisance. Many women do. On the other hand, it may be that she resented Henry’s handing on to her the ring he bought for her sister and discarded it as soon as he was dead.
Veronica’s own mother and her aunt Mary were both very good looking, the reason no doubt for their getting husbands in an era when young men were in short supply. She seems to have forgotten – deliberately? – that her mother married eight years before the Great War started. Veronica’s childhood was idyllic, her father James Kirkford a saint, who never complained though suffering badly from arthritis in his foreshortened leg. She speaks always as if she’d been an only child. I wait until she’s finished and we’ve finished tea and I’m about to mention John Corrie when she suggests I might like to ‘see over’ the house and garden. This is the last thing I want to do but I submit with a good grace.
The place is oppressively neat but there seem to be more cupboards and chests than is usual and these, I suppose, are the repositories of all those letters and photographs and maybe David’s early scholarly efforts. We go up two flights of stairs, pausing to look at a bedroom and a bathroom and another bedroom, this one rather creepily already decorated for Galahad’s future occupancy with sailing boats on the walls and fish on the curtains. Has she mapped out a marine career for him? She tells me airily she’s sure he’ll be coming to stay quite often with his ‘gran’ and, of course, on his own. Perhaps it’s natural or a kind of life assurance that she speaks as if she were sixty instead of over eighty. The garden is depressingly neat, everything clipped or shaved, shrubs, though quite mature, retaining their labels and name tags. Do I think she has room for a swing or maybe one of those, what-are-they-called, climbing frames? I begin to see her as pathetic, which I never did before.
We go back indoors and I’m fast getting the impression she’s anticipating my departure. In the next ten minutes, at any rate. What is there left to do? He’s eaten his tea, seen over the house, heard his family history. Her smile is growing strained. Would I like to see the letters David wrote her while at boarding school? His first ‘compositions’? Photographs of herself and David and her husband? Perhaps later, I say. That makes her impatient, she’s probably got her favourite television serial coming on in half an hour. I sit tight, keep my eyes on her but not searchingly, and ask if she knows who John Corrie is.
She’s one of those people who blush when surprised and it’s not becoming. ‘I suppose he’s my nephew. Why?’
‘I do need to talk about this, Veronica. I’m sorry if it’s painful.’ The blush is fading. She looks displeased but I plunge ahead. ‘You do know your sister is dead?’
‘I heard,’ she says, though not how she heard. From Steven Corrie, the faithless fiancé? I’m going to avoid mentioning him.
‘Her son John is a scientist. He does research into gene therapy.’ Now it’s coming. ‘For haemophilia.’
The blush is back. She sits very upright, pressing her knees together. I perceive her distress in her breathing, which I can hear regularly rise and fall. I say, ‘He is himself a haemophiliac.’
‘No!’ The negative comes quick and sharp like a gunshot.
‘I’m afraid yes.’
Strange things are happening. I’m trying to read the way she’s thinking, the options her mind is dealing with. If she really doesn’t understand, if it’s new to her, she’ll ask me what haemophilia is. Something wrong with the blood, she’ll say, but she’s never known anyone… She’s silent, turning possibilities over. Then she says, ‘Where does it come from?’
I don’t want to tell her John’s theory. If I do the discussion could shut down. So instead of talking of a mutation, I say he doesn’t know, but it must somehow be through his mother. Her face shows me she knows much more than she’s told me so far. There’s a family secret here, hidden for God knows what reason, but known, I suspect, to some, though not all, of its female members. She may throw me out or at least ask me to leave if I put this question but I take the risk.
‘What did your brother Kenneth die of, Veronica?’
No answer. She’s not looking at me any more but down into her lap. Astonishingly, she says, ‘Would you like a drink? Sherry or gin or something? I’m going to have one. After all, as my husband used to say, the sun is over the yard arm.’
It has just gone half-past five. The sun passes early over the yard arm in Cheltenham. I accept sherry, hoping it’s not the sort served by Violet Farrow, and get a big schooner full of the cream variety, no doubt so that she can have a big one too. ‘Will this be in your book?’
‘I don’t know. Probably. Does it matter?’
‘What d’you mean, does it matter?’
‘I mean, is it important now that so many family members are dead?’
‘I suppose,’ she says grudgingly, ‘it might be a relief to talk about it. Perhaps you didn’t realize, I’ve had no one, but no one at all, I could tell. David wouldn’t have been interested.’ Out comes another nautical metaphor. ‘It’s pull up the ladder, Jack, I’m all right with him. I suppose it’s understandable. He would have known Galahad couldn’t be affected. Oh dear, I do feel such a fool every time I have to use that absurd name.’ She’s been stalling but she knows it’s no use. Now she’s speaking in a small young voice like that happy child she once was. ‘What do you want to know?’
I try to match her tone in diffidence. ‘I asked – well, about your brother.’
‘I was only two when he died. I don’t remember him. I only know I did have a brother.’ For some reason she looks guilty. ‘It was diphtheria he died of but he’d always been ill. Once he fell over and bled from grazed knees for two days. That got better but the joints inside didn’t. Arthropathy is what they call what he had.’
‘If you can’t remember him how do you know?’
‘My mother told me. Not till I was going to get married.’ She lifts her head and looks at me. In ten minutes she’s aged and become a very old woman. ‘I was engaged to this John’s father. Did you know that?’ I nod. ‘I suppose Georgina saw fit to pass that on. He jilted me for my sister. When I first got engaged my mother told me there was haemophilia in the family. Men got it, women conducted it, that’s what she said. If I got married I might have a son with haemophilia like Kenneth and she was going to tell Steven. It was her duty, she said, to tell Steven. If I’d known the suffering she’d endured with Kenneth I wouldn’t even want to get married.
‘It was a great shock. Imagine it, a young girl, happy and carefree. I was in the WAAF and loved every minute of it. I was in love with Steven.’ She’s in the swing of it now. She wants to talk, let it all come out. ‘Imagine being told a thing like that. It made me hate my mother. I made her promise not to tell Steven and she said she wouldn’t so long as I promised to te
ll him myself. Well, I never did. I never got the chance. My sister stole him. I don’t know how she did but I suspect witchcraft. Oh, yes, you needn’t look like that, she had some strange beliefs, the stars ruling our lives, horoscopes and all that. It was funny, though, wasn’t it? It’s just struck me, the irony if that’s the word. Maybe if he’d married me his children would have been all right. David is, couldn’t be healthier. But Steven married my sister and God punished him. They were both punished. Vanessa never knew, our mother never told her, she didn’t get the chance. How old is this John?’
‘Over fifty, I think.’
She says brutally, ‘Why is he still alive?’
‘They can do a lot for haemophilia these days.’ I press on. ‘Was that what your cousin Patricia meant when she wrote congratulating you on David’s being all right? It wasn’t about Down’s Syndrome at all, it was about haemophilia?’
She nods, says sharply, ‘I’m not one of these conductors.’
The fact that she’s had one son without the faulty gene proves nothing. I don’t say this aloud. ‘But you thought you might be. Was that why you waited so long to have a child?’ I realize this is a rather over-the-top question. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be impertinent.’
‘Bit late for that, isn’t it?’ She sniffs. ‘My mother had frightened me. She died a year after I got married. I didn’t grieve. I just thought, now she can’t tell anyone.’
‘Tell anyone what? That there was haemophilia in the family?’
She shrugs. A yes or a no? ‘I wanted a child. Why shouldn’t I? It was my right. When I got married to David’s father, to Roger that is, I told my mother I’d told him. I’d done it and she wasn’t to mention the subject. We’d agreed not to have children, though the fact was we’d agreed to no such thing. I never had told him, I dared not. Then my mother died and I felt I’d been let off the hook. But I wanted a child.’ She leans towards me. ‘My grandmother had had four girls before she had a son and my mother had two girls to one boy, my aunt Mary had two girls. And if it’s the man determines the sex of a child it would be all right because Roger had four sisters. I reasoned I’d have a girl.’