by Barbara Vine
So they told us. We each carry a gene of something neither of us has ever heard of. It’s called Spinal Muscular Atrophy, or in these days of acronyms SMA. Any child we might have together has a one-in-four chance of being affected by it. And SMA isn’t like having an operable heart defect or asthma or, come to that, haemophilia. It kills. If a baby was actually born alive it would be severely disabled and die before it was a year old. At best. Most foetuses abort and that accounts for Jude’s miscarriages.
Poor Jude says, ‘But that’s only twenty-five per cent. There’s still a seventy-five per cent chance of a baby not having whatever it is.’
The consultant looks at her. His face wears that expression newscasters put on when the next item they have to talk about is some famous person’s death. ‘You haven’t been in the seventy-five per cent so far, have you? Would you risk it? Would you risk trying to nurse a child twenty-four hours a day only for it to die at six months?’
‘Why do I have these miscarriages?’
He doesn’t want to say it but he has to. ‘It’s your body’s way of getting rid of disabled foetuses, Mrs Nanther.’
I am unreasonably, ridiculously angry. Why should I care if he doesn’t get it right and call her Lady Nanther? Or, come to that, Miss Cleveland? Why do I object so much to ‘getting rid of’? Getting rid of hereditary peers, getting rid of foetuses, getting rid of people. Isn’t there some other, better, way of saying it?
‘But I have a healthy son,’ I tell him.
‘Yes, we have it in your notes. You were lucky. You were married to a woman who didn’t carry the gene.’
If I’d been the grandson of one of Henry’s daughters instead of one of his sons I might have been a haemophiliac. But I’ve missed out on that and got this much worse thing. To anything but my own gratification, I had been right when I speculated as to what was wrong. Where did it come from? I don’t ask. Somehow I know he’ll give me that mutation business. ‘What’s the good news?’
‘I expect you’ve heard of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis. You’d call it “designer babies”.’
You’re at a party and you see a beautiful woman across a room. You may think even at that point – I did, I really did – that you’d like to spend the rest of your life with her. Because once you’ve looked on that face you know no other will do, not ever, not even as it grows old and other young faces are there, no other will be imprinted on you as this one is. This is your standard against which all others are compared and found wanting. You see it in likenesses as I used so often to see Jude’s in Herbert’s paintings in the Moses Room, and when you do it lifts your heart.
What you don’t see is that this woman may be the last woman you should choose for a life partner and you may be the last man she should choose – if you or she or both of you want a child. For her sake, you ought to turn and run out of the room, disappear, plead a pressing engagement elsewhere. You aren’t so much a poisoned chalice as a reagent, a substance harmless in itself but toxic when added to another relatively harmless substance.
I ask myself if it was like this for Henry. Did he see Eleanor that first time he called in Keppel Street to ask after her father, and seeing her, succumb? But there the parallel ends, for it was Edith, the second choice, the substitute, whose body held the hidden flaw. It’s as if I, unable for some reason to have Jude, made do with her sister. But this was something I could never have done. No other would have been the woman for me. And as I dwell miserably on this, I ask myself, perhaps absurdly, if these very deformities in our cells, Jude’s and mine, drew us inexorably to each other by some mysterious alchemy. Or was it nature’s way of achieving the end of two tainted lines, ensuring they breed no more?
So to the good news, except that to me it’s the worst news in the world. Not that I can say so to anyone. And I’m thrown more violently than ever before up against the block that wrecks marriages: the inability of one to confide true feelings to the other. More than that, the impossibility of continuing to love and live with my wife if I tell her that the dearest wish of her heart fills me with – well, yes, with terror. With horror but with both more and less than that, a simple revulsion from the idea of becoming maybe next year or the year after the father of triplets. It sounds ridiculous put like that, doesn’t it? The stuff of comic postcards. There’s the poor sap standing hangdog outside the delivery room and a pretty nurse in a mini-skirt and black stockings is putting three squalling babies into his arms.
The consultant’s face reminds me of that description in Hamlet: a man ‘may smile and smile and be a villain’. He’s not of course a villiain to Jude but her saviour. ‘The treatment begins with IVF,’ he says, ‘to generate and fertilize a number of eggs. Then we take one cell from each egg and check that it’s free from disorder. Three healthy embryos would then be implanted in your uterus.’
‘Three?’ I say.
‘Usually one or two won’t take hold,’ he says, with that villain’s smile. ‘If all goes well the result is a healthy child – or twins if you’re lucky.’
‘I’ll be thirty-eight in May,’ says Jude.
‘I’m not saying it wouldn’t be better if you were twenty-eight but you seem to have no trouble in conceiving and that’s very much in your favour.’
Luckily for me, I’m so sorry for Jude, I feel such an all-pervading pity and love for her, that my horror of what she’s contemplating is – temporarily, I suppose – drowned in it. And then I watch that other smiling villain, Hope, come to her rescue. She’s hoped before and it’s all been in vain, but that doesn’t deter the smiler with the knife, he’s indestructible, he knows he’s one of the cardinal virtues and he basks in his undeserved reputation. Never mind that he makes the heart sick. Never mind that every time he throws open a door his opposite number, Despair, slams it in your face. He’s back again, riding high and Jude in the saddle with him, his knife pointed at her back. But she doesn’t know that or she refuses to believe him. He’s promised her her heart’s desire and this time nothing can go wrong.
The nasty mean-mindedness of my position is that I want things to go wrong. I want the door to slam for the final time or the knife to go in. There’s not a soul I can tell. I wince when I tell myself. During the pregnancies and the miscarriages I managed more or less well to fake enthusiasm or wretchedness and sometimes I really was enthusiastic, I really was miserable. But this news – the ‘good’ news more than the ‘bad’ – I see as the ruin of our lives, hers as well as mine. It will be bad enough for her – what do I call it? Mental equilibrium? Peace of mind? Sanity? – if these implanted embryos refuse to ‘take’, it will be worse than the miscarriages. She will be wrecked.
Only a totally mercenary bastard would think about the cost and I must be one because I do. With this process there’s not a money-back guarantee. You pay for it and if it doesn’t work you try again and pay again. ‘One cycle of treatment’, as they put it, costs ₤2,500. What chance would we have to get funding out of our local health authority? None, at a guess. On the other hand it might be cheaper to throw away ₤10,000 on four cycles of treatment than to have two or three babies to bring up. Shall I have to sell this house? I lie awake in the long watches of the night wondering about things it would be better for me never to think of. Such as, how do you determine which of two people with opposing aims is the selfish one? It’s the stuff of married people’s quarrels and it’s not going to be the stuff of mine. But am I selfish in wanting my beloved wife to myself in relative comfort, with enough to live on in my family house in a quiet London square? Or is she selfish in wanting a child at all costs, at the cost of comfort, peace, a pleasant home, and, perhaps, her marriage?
Most people would be on her side. And I pretend I am because I don’t know what else to do. I don’t do anything, I’ve lost all my powers of concentration and I’m quite relieved when Lucy Skipton phones and asks if I’d mind putting off our lunch for another couple of weeks. She’s very apologetic but she has a client whose home down in Wilt
shire she has to visit on that day. If she hadn’t phoned I fear I might have forgotten all about her and our date.
I must be regaining my equilibrium because I don’t forget I’m dining with Lachlan Hamilton. The papers say the House of Lords feels empty these days, now the hereditary peers, or all but ninety-two of them, have gone. I can’t say I notice it but that may be because the day I go in they’re debating a controversial clause in a bill and the Opposition have summoned all their troops. The Local Government Bill doesn’t sound likely to make a dramatic impact but one aspect of it does just that. It’s an amendment opposing the repeal of Section 28, a provision stating that a local authority shall not ‘intentionally promote homosexuality’ to young people. The Government wants it repealed, the opposition want to keep it. The fur is flying and such words as ‘necrophilia’, ‘bestiality’ and ‘sodomy’ are being bandied about.
I’m not there to hear it, of course. Not at first. This is the first time I’ve been back since they chucked me out in November. I vowed then never to return, whatever the circumstances, but I’ve come back. I need a reason to get out of the house, Alma Villa I mean, to get away from the claustrophobic atmosphere of talk of eggs and implants and multiple births. I’m ashamed of thinking this way, of course I am, but I’m weary of being ashamed, weary of the self-reproach with which I lash myself when at home. Coming here is a change. And there’s another reason for it. I have to get back to Henry but I can no longer talk to Jude about him and the mysteries in his life. She doesn’t care, she doesn’t want to know. She pretends, she puts on a show of listening but it’s as if she says to herself, I’ll give him five minutes of this – I see her looking at her watch – and then we’ll return to the important thing, to reality. Her life now is the hugely wonderful crowning achievement she sees herself approaching, the giving of birth. What does it matter if everything is subsumed in this, career, home, me, sex, love, friends, conversation, fun? The purpose of woman’s existence is to give birth, carry on the race. And now she can do it. Thanks to the wonders of medical science she can have not just one healthy baby but two or even three. No wonder she thinks of nothing else.
So when Lachlan asked me to dinner I thought, I’ll try Henry out on him. He, at least, doesn’t want babies. He’s had six. First, though, I have the embarrassment I knew I’d have of sidling in at the Peers’ Entrance, uttering a greeting in response to the doorkeeper’s cheerful, ‘Good evening, my Lord,’ and sitting humbly down on the bench at the back where visitors wait. I’m too weary of self-reproach to remind myself that I voted for it, I approved it. Anyway, I don’t have to put up with it for long, as Lachlan appears on the stroke of six-thirty.
With his walrus face and landowner’s manner, he looks the last person to vote for the repeal of Section 28 but he’s going to. His appearance is deceptive. I recall our conversation about Richard Hamilton and Lachlan’s assertion that all men are a bit ‘queer’. Now he says homosexuality is inborn. You’re ‘that way’ or you’re not and no amount of promotion or encouragement will change you. I’m not in the mood for hearing any more about genetics just at the moment and I’m pretty sure I won’t be in the Chamber where crusty ancient hereditaries (some of the élite and elected ninety-two) are blithely confusing homosexuals and paedophiles. I’m allowed to sit on the steps of the throne where I haven’t sat since I was a boy of twelve. Someone next to me I’ve never seen before – he may be a young hereditary or a peer’s eldest son – whispers that he’s gay himself and that Earl Russell has just made the best speech he’s ever heard in the House in favour of repeal. Just my luck, I say aggrievedly, not to have been here to have heard it.
But I don’t like sitting here. It embarrasses me. Like one of those gay schoolboys Government speakers say suffer from bullying under Section 28, I feel everyone is singling me out and staring. It’s a relief when Lachlan gets up and goes out at the end by the throne and I can follow him.
It’s just like old times. The Opposition have mustered their troops, peers who never come in except when heavily whipped, and here they are hastening through the Prince’s Chamber with their wives that they’ve brought in to dinner. You’d have to be an expert to know the House had been reformed at all.
Lachlan buys me a glass of red wine and himself a whisky. I can’t reciprocate, of course. I can’t pay for dinner or share the cost. I’m no longer eligible to pay for anything in here and I ought to be pleased. Another forty or fifty quid will be saved towards anti-SMA procedures. I seriously think for a moment of telling Lachlan all about it but as quickly dismiss the idea. Instead I revert to Henry.
‘So what do you think? I mean, about the coincidence?’
He always speaks slowly and with steady precision, in the Chamber and out of it. ‘How common an affliction is haemophilia?’
I don’t know the answer. ‘The only figures I’ve got are for the United States.’ They’re the ones John Corrie gave me. ‘About fifteen thousand people out of whatever their population is – two hundred and fifty million? – are haemophiliacs.’
‘A rare disease then.’
‘The incidence has been much higher in communities largely cut off from the rest of the world, such as alpine valleys in Switzerland. And it seems to be more common among Teutonic people and Jewish people. There used to be a theory, which could be false, that haemophiliacs and carriers were more fertile than others.’
I tell him about Henry’s youngest child George, his mysterious illness, the references to his ill-health in his sisters’ letters, Alternative Henry’s cryptic allusions to it, the family’s conspiracy of silence. Why? Why?
‘He was a medico at University College Hospital? Could the lady he married have been his patient?’
‘Women don’t really have haemophilia,’ I say. ‘They have bleeding disorders but I can’t imagine a Victorian woman going to a doctor with something like that, a problem she’d just cope with at home. Besides, Henry didn’t meet the Hendersons by that route. He got to know them because he came to Samuel Henderson’s aid when he was attacked in the street.’
Suddenly I remember who Samuel’s attacker was. Jimmy Ashworth Dawson’s brother-in-law, someone Henry very likely paid to do the deed or else we’re up against another coincidence. But it’s time to go in for dinner where the talk buzzes with Section 28 and people keep coming up to our table to greet me, to ask how I’m getting on, some to say what a shame I can’t vote, they need me. The debate has been going on for more than four hours and they’re still slogging it out.
Lachlan’s been looking at some of the notes I’ve made. ‘He engages himself to Henderson’s elder daughter, the girl who bruises easily? You mention that here. Significant, is it?’
‘I don’t know. Some haemophilia carriers – they’re called symptomatic carriers – have mild bleeding problems, excessive bruising, nosebleeds, that sort of thing. The family seems to be aware of Eleanor’s propensity to bruising. If Henry knew of it he might have suspected she was a carrier. But on the other hand, she could have had a far commoner disorder like Von Willebrand’s disease or epistaxis. That he happened by chance to fall in love with a girl who was a haemophilia carrier would have struck him, as it does us, as too huge a coincidence to be viable.’
‘He didn’t marry her, did he?’
‘He would have done. She was murdered.’
There’s to be no more talk of this because a Tory pal of Lachlan’s comes to the table and sits down in the third chair, after only the most perfunctory request to ask if he may. The rest of the meal passes against a background of Lachlan and the pal arguing, not particularly amicably, as to whether homosexuals are born or made. ‘Did you hear the one,’ says the pal, ‘about the queer who went to a psychiatrist and said his mother made him a homosexual? The psychiatrist said, if I get her the wool will she make me one too?’
Nobody laughs. I think of Richard Hamilton and Henry and wonder. Can there be a gene of homosexuality, carried on one of a woman’s X chromosomes? If there is the
y haven’t found it yet. It’s nine o’clock and I see on the monitor that the minister Lord Whitty is on his feet.
Lachlan says, ‘Would you mind if we went back?’
I suppose I can get used to the steps of the throne. The discomfort ought to distract me from the humiliation and perhaps it will. As soon as I’ve sat down Lady Young, whose amendment this is, gets up, speaks for a few moments and says she’s going to divide the House. I hear what the Deputy Speaker says with new ears. I’ve never noticed what a resonant piece of prose it is.
‘The Contents will go to the right by the throne and the Not Contents to the left by the bar.’
There are hundreds of Opposition peers filing towards the Content lobby. The LibDems are going with the Government but fifteen Labour peers aren’t. It’s strange and rather unpleasant to watch it and not be one with it. Foreign nationals think us very odd not to have electronic voting, but to stroll, often laughing and talking, down a passage and give our names to a clerk, who if he knows you will have crossed it off before you pass. The name of Nanther will have been struck off the list three months ago. Lachlan comes to talk to me, then sits on the step beside me. The Government – I nearly said ‘we’ – have lost by forty-five votes.
‘We tried,’ says Lachlan at his gloomiest.
I leave alone, not needing him to show me the way. The policeman at the gate asks if I need a taxi, my Lord, but I shake my head. I’m going to walk, not all the way, but a good part of it, and maybe get onto the tube at Baker Street. The evening is dark and damp but the sky is clear. Having only just finished building the new Westminster tube station, they’re digging up Parliament Square. No one seems to know why. There aren’t many people about on foot and the Pinochet protesters who station themselves here in the daytime, the ones who want the old General extradited and the ones who want to send him home, have all gone for the night. I think about Henry, the reason for my walking.
It’s a curious conclusion I’m coming to. Surely it’s beyond doubt that my great-grandfather arranged that assault on Samuel Henderson, paying his Victorian hit man to attack Samuel so that he could rush to the rescue and thus create a pretext for meeting the Henderson family. It wasn’t Samuel himself or his wife or his son Henry wanted to meet but one of his daughters. He had seen Eleanor in the street and fallen in love with her, just as I saw Jude across a room at a party. Conspiring to assault a man seems a complicated, not to say criminal, way of getting to know a woman. Perhaps he simply couldn’t think of any other or he was closer to the Dawson–Brewer family than appears and one of them had suggested it to him.