by Barbara Vine
I interrupt. ‘A girl might have been a carrier.’
‘That would have been her problem, wouldn’t it? Not mine.’ Her callousness is chilling. I try to imagine being in Georgie’s shoes and nearly shudder. ‘It took a long time. Conceiving a child, I mean. I’d almost given up and then I found I was pregnant.’ She looks at me with a mixture of defiance and triumph. ‘I didn’t worry. I felt it in my bones I wasn’t a conductor. David was born, a perfect, beautiful and absolutely normal little boy. Patricia wrote me that ridiculous letter. I don’t even know how she knew I’d had a son, let alone that he was a perfect child. I suppose her sister Diana told her. I was quite friendly with Diana then – until she let me down, that is. She was just one in a long line of treacherous women.’
I don’t know what Diana did and I don’t want to. ‘Where did this haemophilia come from?’
‘Don’t ask me. I’m not a doctor.’
I say slyly, ‘I think you know quite a lot about it, though.’
‘I used to read a lot about Queen Victoria and the Tsarevich and all those royals who had it. Where did their haemophilia come from? Not one of Queen Victoria’s ancestors had it, it started with her. It must have started with my mother.’
Because I think – wrongly – that news of hopeful breakthroughs will please her, I tell her as much as I understand of John Corrie’s research, how carriers can now be detected and embryos examined to establish whether they carry the ‘bleeder’ gene. This would mean that in a couple of generations haemophilia could be eliminated.
‘I shan’t benefit, shall I?’
‘Your cousins’ children and grandchildren might.’
She shows more interest. ‘Diana’s dead now but she had two children, you know. Both girls. I see you knew that.’ She’s disappointed, thwarted of scoring off me. ‘I can’t remember their names, something typical of the time they were born. They’ll be in their thirties now.’
‘They may be carriers.’
‘They’re not descendants of my mother’s so they can’t be.’
I don’t comment on this. It’s based on an assumption, not evidence. I thank her for the tea, leave half the sherry – I’m pretty sure she’ll finish it when I’ve gone – and fetch my coat. She tells me as she sees me off that she has no objection to my putting all of this in my book, now I’ve wormed it out of her, I’m welcome. After all, as she strangely puts it, she’s nothing to be ashamed of, she’s not a carrier.
It’s past seven. The rain has cleared and it’s turning cold. I’ve half an hour to wait for a train. I sit for a while and then I walk up and down the platform and think about haemophilia. On the back of a bill I find in my pocket I draw from memory part of David’s family tree, starting with Henry and Edith. I write in the names of their first four children, the girls Elizabeth, Mary, Helena and Clara. If the gene mutation started with Elizabeth only her descendants can be affected, as her son Kenneth was and as is her grandson John Corrie. But if Mary’s children, grandchildren and possibly great-grandchildren, or one of those people, is or are affected, the mutation can’t have occurred in Elizabeth because her sister’s descendants also have the faulty gene. So it must have occurred further back.
The train comes. I put the improvised tree back into my pocket and concentrate on gene therapy and what it would have meant to people such as Prince Leopold and Veronica’s brother Kenneth and the Tsarevich, who suffered so much pain and fear before, in the case of the first two, their disease killed them. My mind wanders to Jude and the tests she’s been having. I’m not usually the kind of person who fantasizes worst-case scenarios but it does occur to me that there may be some genetic disorder to account for all these miscarriages. Is that what they’ve been testing for?
What a strange thing it is to be like Veronica, proud of yourself for not carrying genes of disability and ashamed of yourself for carrying them. Look at me, she’s saying, I who am pure and healthy and perfect, I who have perfect children. Yet nothing could be further from her own volition or beyond her control. Both known carrier and apparent non-carrier are in a state of utter innocence and, moreover, of ignorance too. For I’ve read somewhere that all of us have in our DNA about twelve defective genes we are capable of passing on to our descendants, but the chances are we know nothing of them. They lie dormant, as they have lain in the bodies of mankind and animals for millennia. They will never show themselves unless we reproduce with someone whose DNA matches ours in some tiny particular, the reason that lies behind incest taboos and strictures in all faiths against marrying close relations.
In my mind I’ve been condemning Veronica for assuming she isn’t a haemophilia carrier on the strength of having had one son with normal blood. But there’s no difference between this attitude of hers and mine when I tell myself Jude’s miscarriages are nothing to do with me, my genes are all right, Paul proves it. I’m behaving like Veronica, congratulating myself on my purity without any foundation for doing so. I too have one son, an only child, just as Vanessa had one son – until she had a second one. Veronica and I act as if we created ourselves in the image of God instead of being the result of thousands of years of mixing and selecting and rejecting and surviving.
24
Christmas is past. Paul decided to come and spend it with us and things went rather well, due perhaps to his bringing his nice new girlfriend with him. I realized I’d never talked to him about what I do, apart from what I did in the House of Lords, and realized too that if I had, this might have saved our relationship. So I told him about the Nanthers and the haemophilia; he was interested and, for once, not scathing. It helped a lot that Sam, the girlfriend, is a medical student and fascinated by gene therapy and its potential. They both know a man who’s a haemophiliac and is now HIV positive through being given a transfusion of infected blood.
To my surprise Jude talked about her own tests, and was completely open and frank about them. She gets the results next week. Everything shuts down over Christmas and the New Year, especially this one, the start of a new millennium, so she’s had to wait a long while. Mine are due to be done about the same time. At least I know she’s taken to heart the sternly delivered advice not to attempt to conceive again yet. Her attraction for me, once so overwhelming, is back. There were an awful few days – or nights – when a kind of panic seized me that with her, in bed, in the dark perhaps, I’d have to fantasize, run in front of my unseeing eyes some self-involving video, as at the end of our relationship I did with Sally. But there was no dark, the lights were on as they mostly are for us, and her beauty and her essential Jude-ness worked their magic, and I think it was the same as it always was. I think so.
*
David Croft-Jones is furious with me for mentioning John Corrie to his mother. I ‘undertook’, he says, not to do this. I remind him that when he asked for an undertaking I didn’t answer him and then I add that whatever his mother may have said to him since, she was perfectly happy to talk about it once she’d got over her initial awkwardness. Georgie is saying something in the background – no doubt about Veronica’s general unreasonableness – and David is mollified. He wants to hear my version and can he come round? I can’t very well say no. Of course it turns out that Veronica has let something out about haemophilia in the family, but been cryptic and secretive and now he wants to hear the truth of it. He’s seriously worried. It was the first he’s heard of it, it’s ‘devastated’ him, and Georgie wants to know if any more children they might have could be haemophiliacs.
‘Absolutely not,’ tell him. ‘It’s not even known if your mother has the gene and if she has she didn’t pass it on to you. It’s died out in your branch.’
‘So you say,’ he says rather rudely. ‘I shall check it out. I shall ask my GP. All this has been a shock.’ He talks about our family’s inheritance as if it were a small animal, a hamster maybe, that has escaped and is lurking somewhere. ‘Where is it now, this haemophilia? Is it hidden in someone’s blood? What’s happened to it?’
It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell him to ask his GP. After all, he doesn’t believe me. But I don’t. I answer quite mildly that it may not have begun with a mutation in his grandmother’s genes but earlier and his great-aunt and mine, Mary Craddock, may have also carried it. Therefore, so may either of her daughters, Patricia and Diana, and hence her granddaughters, Caroline, Lucy and Jennifer. Always precise and didactic in these matters, he says in rather a peevish tone that ‘those girls’ are his second cousins just as they are mine. He and his mother were invited to Lucy’s wedding in 1997. Diana wrote to them, urging them to come on the grounds that though they’d never met the bride they were family and families should ‘stick together’.
‘Then you’ll have her address.’
‘No, I won’t. I must have lost it.’ Then he adds, surprisingly, ‘I could have her traced for you. If that’s what you want.’
Could he really? Perhaps he’s more important in the Home Office than I thought or perhaps any of them can do this sort of thing. Of course I readily accept.
‘It would be useful to me too,’ he says. ‘She may have a child by now that I could put in my tree.’
‘Did you go to the wedding?’
‘What wedding?’
‘Lucy’s.’
‘Good God, no. All they asked us for was to get a present. I never believed all that family rubbish.’ He’s his mother’s son.
‘And Diana’s dead now?’
‘She died last year. My mother told me.’
I ask him how his mother knew, seeing she isn’t in touch with either Lucy or Jennifer or their cousin Caroline. He says she saw the announcement in the death columns of the Daily Telegraph, of which she’s apparently an avid reader.
Whether he went to his GP I didn’t ask and he volunteered no information but he traced Lucy Skipton much more quickly than I’d expected. I phoned her and she’s agreed to meet me. Time was but is no longer when I could have taken her to lunch in the House of Lords. She’s a solicitor with a firm near the Law Courts, so I suggest a restaurant in a street just off Aldwych. I wonder if she knows she’s in the same profession as her great-great-grandfather and, incidentally, as my father. How astounded, how disbelieving, Samuel Henderson would have been if he’d known one of his female descendants was following in his footsteps. More shades of Earl Ferrers’ speech with its diatribe against possible judges ‘drawn from the serried ranks of the ladies’ and women eating their way like acid into the professions.
Our date is a fortnight away. I haven’t told her much, only that I’m writing Henry’s biography, but she didn’t need any more. She knows quite a bit about Henry from being an inveterate reader of biographies of eminent Victorians, in many of which he’s mentioned. Lucy is thirty-six, about a year younger than Jude. I’m looking forward to our meeting in a way I didn’t look forward to seeing John Corrie or renewing my acquaintance with Veronica. In fact, I’m impatient about it because she’s told me something on the phone I didn’t expect.
‘I’m a carrier.’
‘You’re a carrier of haemophilia?’
‘That’s right. There’s no secret about it. My mother told me and my sister we might be and I was tested before I got married.’
They haven’t told Jude the results of her test, though it appears they have them. They’ve asked her to wait until the results of mine are known. She sees this as sinister and frightening, though to me it seems just like mysterious medical behaviour, the kind of way people who seem to have no empathy and no understanding of natural anxiety inevitably go on. It may even be that they want to confront us both with broad smiles to tell us there’s absolutely nothing wrong with either of us. Everyone likes being the bearer of good news.
‘It could take weeks,’ she says.
‘Look at it this way. If there was something that was wrong with you they wouldn’t need to test me. They’re testing me in case the fault lies with me.’ If I hadn’t had those thoughts on pride in one’s personal DNA I might have added that it doesn’t because I’ve already got a healthy son. That’s something I’ve learned not to say.
We decide to share a bottle of champagne without having anything special to celebrate. Its aftermath, a dry mouth and faint ache behind the eyes wakes me up in the small hours. Having been indoctrinated as a child with the theory that anything that doesn’t come from the main tap is toxic, I make my way down to the kitchen for real water and sit there at the table drinking my second glass and thinking about what Lucy told me.
It means that Diana Bell was a carrier and therefore her mother Mary Craddock must have been a carrier, since we know her sister Elizabeth Kirkford also was and Mary’s husband Matthew Craddock can’t have been a haemophiliac. So where did it come from? First of all, is it absolutely out of the question that Henry was a haemophiliac? It’s an explanation that covers almost everything. It would account for his devoting his life to a study of the disease in search of a cure. All his daughters would have been carriers and it’s likely that they were. Helena and Clara never had children but we know Clara had resolved never to marry and the reason may have been because she suspected she had the gene – or ‘the blood’, as she’d have put it.
The flaw in this theory lies with Henry himself. In the mid nineteenth century, a hundred years before the discovery of Factor VIII supplements, a haemophilia sufferer could hardly have lived the life Henry lived, walking the twenty miles from Versam to a village high in the Alps, intervening to save a man who was being assaulted, pursuing rigorous studies, taking hiking holidays. By the time he was thirty he’d have been crippled by arthropathy through bleeding into the joints. The third piece of evidence against his being a haemophiliac is Jimmy Ashworth. All his daughters, in or out of wedlock, would have carried the gene. If Mary Dawson had done so, surely one of her male descendants would have been a haemophiliac. But Laura Kimball was adamant that they all ‘grew up healthy’.
So Henry can be dismissed as the source. In which case it must have been his wife, Edith Henderson. The more I look at her as a candidate the more reasonable it sounds. If she carried the gene all her daughters might have carried it or only two or three out of the four. There would have been a fifty-fifty chance of any son of hers having the disease. Alexander did not. Did George? So we’ve come close to proving Edith was the carrier.
I go into the study and trawl through the diaries and Alternative Henry and Mary’s letters. Once you know George may have been a haemophiliac, there’s plenty of evidence that he was. In the family group, photographed by Edith, he has the patient stoical look of the ‘bleeder’. Henry writes of his screaming in pain, Mary of his being confined to bed as the result of a fall and of her father applying ice packs, presumably to his joints, a known though ineffective remedy. The conspiracy of silence on the subject becomes evident when you know what to look for. All the references are oblique or veiled. Was the reason that Henry didn’t want the world to know that he, the great haemophilia doctor, had a son with the disease, and a disease which he, despite his knowledge, couldn’t remedy? It sounds only too like him. This would be why it was put about that George suffered from tuberculosis.
If Edith was the carrier, where did she inherit the gene from? If her father Samuel Henderson was a haemophiliac his daughter would inevitably carry it. But if this was so he’d scarcely have been able to practise as a solicitor well into his fifties. And when he was attacked in the street the blow to his head would have resulted in bleeding that might have been fatal. And Henry, in his essay on courage and altruism, would hardly have presented the haemophilia hypothesis as to what would have happened if poor Mr Henderson had been a ‘bleeder’. It’s far more likely the carrier was his wife, Louisa Henderson née Quendon. Her son Lionel was very evidently not a haemophiliac but that doesn’t mean his mother wasn’t a carrier, for her chances of passing on the gene to a son were fifty-fifty. Her daughter Edith was a carrier and so, possibly, was her daughter Eleanor. I go to the larger of the correspondence files and find th
e letter Eleanor wrote to her sister from Manaton.
She has had a fall while out walking. ‘The bruises on my left side and leg,’ she writes, ‘are a sight to behold, but luckily no one but me does behold them!’ On another occasion Henry notes in the diary that Mrs Henderson had a private consultation with him about this daughter. Is it too far-fetched to guess that she was confiding to him her worries about Eleanor’s heavy periods? Maybe. I need more evidence. But it is known now, and perhaps was even then, that some haemophilia carriers bruise very readily and bleed heavily in menstruation. It may be that both Edith and Eleanor carried the gene.
So was it a mutation in the cells of Louisa Henderson? My head is spinning by this time. I can’t think any more and it’s four-thirty in the morning. I fetch another glass of water and go back to bed, kissing the sleeping Jude on her upturned cheek and falling asleep at once.
25
The news from the hospital has blown our lives to pieces. Nothing else is significant. It’s as if everything has fled: our day-to-day existence in this house, Jude’s job, Henry, my lost much-regretted seat in the Lords, my son, our friends, even – temporarily, I hope – our love.
When something like this happens to you, you become only a body, hardly a thinking being, and that body diseased and flawed. It harbours an unseen but outrageous deformity. They told us, using that tired old formula: do you want the bad news first or the good? The way you answer defines you as a pessimist or an optimist on the lines of whether you say the bottle is half-full or half-empty. We both chose the bad news.