by Barbara Vine
The Village of Tenna as described by Hoessli lies on the south-eastern slopes of Piz Riein in the Canton [sic] Graubünden and consisted of several widely separated groups of houses scattered over the meadow slopes. Communication between these houses and the outside world must be established over broken and in many places dangerous tracts. At the time Hoessli wrote, there were no driving roads, the journey having to be made on foot, and a traveller would require four to six hours to reach Versam…
It tells me to consult the accompanying map, so I do, but it’s small, basic and not much help. I find our heavy world atlas and turn to the Switzerland page. Hoessli, a doctor practising in Thusis, was writing about the area in 1877, probably getting on for a hundred years after Thomas Dornford’s visit or Barbla Maibach’s escape, and then conditions would presumably have been worse. Why does the passage ring a bell with me? Why does the name Versam ring a bell? I don’t know, but perhaps it’s only because some friend went skiing there and sent us a postcard. The canton is Grisons and the nearest big town is Chur, and it doesn’t look very big on the map.
I must go there. That’s my immediate reaction. Look at the records, the archives. I must go there when the snows have gone. Say in late April or May. Then of course I know I can’t, it’s not possible, for Jude will either be in the early stages of pregnancy with these current implants or preparing for the next lot.
My difficulty about going to Philadelphia was solved by John Corrie coming here to me. I can’t expect the entire population of a Swiss village to pop over, bringing their archives with them. I can’t go and they can’t come, but I must go.
29
I don’t recognize Lucy when she comes into the restaurant. Of course I’ve never seen her before, though I’ve seen a photograph of her as a child, and somehow I expect the Nanther face and colouring to have taken over as she grew up. It hasn’t. She’s a plumpish little woman, blonde and very pretty, wearing a pale lilac suit with a short skirt that shows off her excellent legs.
‘Lucy,’ she says, and holds out her hand. ‘How do you do?’
The other hand has a wedding ring on it and a big diamond engagement ring. Her voice isn’t like her, but rich, low and dark. When we spoke on the phone that first time I wasn’t sure for a moment if this was a woman or a man. I tell her it’s very nice of her to agree to meet me like this and offer her a drink. She smiles, asks for white wine and studies the menu with the enthusiasm of someone fond of her food.
‘Did you know our great-great-grandfather was a solicitor? He was called Samuel Henderson and it was his daughter married Henry Nanther.’
She nods. ‘I know quite a bit about the family.’
‘From your mother?’
‘My mother never talked about her ancestors. What I know I got from Great-aunt Clara.’
For some reason I’m very surprised. Clara has had her own importance for me, deriving from that strange letter from her to Alexander which Sarah sent me, the one in which she calls her father ‘Henry Nanther’ and mentions the woman he kept in Primrose Hill. The fact that she was great-aunt to quite a few other people never seemed to have impinged on my consciousness. ‘You knew her?’
‘Not until a few years before she died.’
That explains it. When I found Lucy in David’s tree I would have remembered if Clara had ever mentioned her. But I never saw Clara after Helena died and she became too infirm to continue living alone in that big house. She had gone off – of her own free will, my father would never have coerced her or even tried to persuade her – to live in sheltered housing, her small flat with its alarm that summoned the warden, its daily help and its aids to getting about the rooms and taking baths. I feel a twinge of conscience because I’d never asked after her that I can remember, and though she’d been kind to me – I recall the teas she gave us on those occasional Sunday afternoons – I’d never expressed a desire or a duty to visit her. But I was away at university, living as students live, and I didn’t think of these things. Yet Lucy had gone to see her, must have got to know her quite well. Why?
Wine is poured and our order is taken. ‘My mother used to visit her a bit,’ Lucy says. ‘You do know who my mother was, don’t you? Diana Bell, born Craddock, the second daughter of Henry and Edith’s second daughter. Jennifer and I were at boarding school but we did see Clara. I don’t want to give the impression we often went, I don’t suppose we did above, say, four or five times. Mum took us once in the school holidays. Then Jenny and I went a couple of times without her. Clara had been in that flat of hers for years by then, she was well into her nineties, but she could still more or less look after herself and she was absolutely compos mentis. Very bright, actually. Very clever.’
‘Clara?’
She gives me a shrewd look. It’s one of those looks feminists give men they think are making groundless assumptions about women. I’m not really, I’m not that sort of man, but I recognize the look. It sits oddly on her Marilyn Monroe face but accords with her voice when she says, ‘Why not Clara? If she didn’t become anything, if she didn’t have a profession or make much of her life, that wasn’t her fault. She didn’t get the chance. She wanted to be a doctor. I don’t suppose you knew that.’
‘I did, as a matter of fact. It’s in one of your grandmother’s letters to her sister Elizabeth Kirkford.’
‘Women could,’ she says, ‘but it was difficult, it would have been quite a battle. Too much for poor Clara, I’m sure.’ She looks up as our first course comes. ‘My sister’s a doctor, she’s a paediatrician.’ That makes the second of Henry’s descendants to enter the medical profession. ‘The last time we saw Clara was the year before she died, in nineteen eight-nine. Jennifer must have been twenty-two or three and doing her training. Clara was so pleased that Jennifer was doing what she couldn’t do.’
We’ve wandered a long way from the point and I have to get her back to it. I have to concentrate my mind on this pretty girl (a term she wouldn’t like) and the food and adding information to my stock of Henry knowledge instead of what I’m doing, which is thinking about Jude in the clinic, having healthy embryos implanted. Two weeks after today we’ll know. They’ll do a pregnancy test and if it’s positive… I’m about as far from the point myself as can be and Lucy’s talking happily away, apparently oblivious of me, about her sister’s brilliance at medical school, the accolades she’s had from all sorts of people – just like Henry in fact. She’s glad, their mother lived long enough to see Jennifer’s success.
So far, on the phone or here, haemophilia hasn’t been mentioned. And now I’m face to face with her I’m shy about mentioning it. I suddenly think I haven’t handled this very well. She’s told me she’s a carrier. ‘Have you—’ I begin hesitantly, ‘have you any children?’
‘Not yet.’ She says it sharply and looks me in the eye. Suddenly her voice and her manner soften and she says, ‘Look, can I call you Martin?’
‘What else?’ I say. I’m considerably taken aback.
‘I don’t know, only you’re a lord, aren’t you?’
Lords were two a penny where I used to be every day. I never get used to other people being overawed by a peer’s title. ‘You’re my cousin. Please call me Martin.’
‘OK, Martin. You asked if I had children because of the haemophilia, didn’t you?’
I nod.
She takes a sip of her wine, rather more than a sip. ‘I haven’t. Not yet.’
‘What made you have yourself tested? Did your mother tell you?’
She laughs at that. ‘What, as part of the facts of life lesson? The home sex education? I don’t remember our ever having any of that. Mum never said a word.’
‘Did she know?’
‘She said not. When I asked her, that is. Then she refused to believe it. She simply wouldn’t have it discussed.’
I tell her that her aunt Patricia knew. She must have, in order to write that letter to Veronica.
‘Ah, yes,’ she says. ‘But did she admit to herself she m
ight be a carrier? I don’t think so. There was a sort of wishful thinking going on. I don’t know if you know there was a theory in the family that if one sister was a carrier the next one wouldn’t be, though the third one might and so on. Absolute rubbish, of course, but my grandmother Mary believed it. At least, according to Clara, she did.’
I begin to see the light. ‘You found out from Clara?’
‘That’s right. Didn’t I say? It wasn’t far from us, where she lived, only Ealing, and we were in Chiswick. Teenage kids like talking to very old people, you know, they feel closer to them than to the generation above theirs. Clara had masses of photographs and a great fund of stories about living in that house in St John’s Wood all that time ago. She remembered going to suffragette meetings and the fight to get votes for women and how angry her dad was when he found out. One day – I must have been eighteen or nineteen by then – she told me about the haemophilia. It wasn’t done spitefully or in a sensational sort of way, she hesitated quite a bit before she did, she said she’d given it a lot of thought and it had been preying on her mind.’
‘You mean she thought her sister Mary as likely to have been a carrier as her sister Elizabeth?’
‘I shouldn’t but I’d like another glass of wine, please.’ I’ve been dilatory and I apologize. Just at that moment the waiter comes up and refills our glasses. I can see Lucy is finding this talk a bit of a strain. She plainly isn’t going to finish her main course and she sets down her knife and fork. ‘Clara said,’ she goes on, ‘that when she was a girl, while her father was alive and after his death, she tried to read some of his books. It’s sad, really, very sad, this poor woman desperate for knowledge and having the means of getting it denied her all the time. Her mother was practically illiterate, you know. All she could do was paint bad pictures and take photographs. Mary was terribly churchy, always running around doing good works in the parish, and Helena – well, Helena sewed. Apparently, the house was crammed with stuff Helena had sewn, embroidery or whatever.’ Lucy pauses, says, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t eat any more. My appetite always goes when I talk about it.’
‘The haemophilia,’ I say gently.
‘Yes. She read her father’s books, she was interested and she got to know quite a lot. She was only seventeen when her brother George died but she knew what was wrong with him, she knew it wasn’t tuberculosis.’
‘You mean George’s mother didn’t? His other sisters didn’t?’
‘Clara said no one ever talked about it. She’d seen George bleed when he hurt himself the way no one else she’d ever seen bleed. She’d seen him in bed for weeks on end just because he’d fallen over.’
I ask if she’d never tried to discuss it with other members of the family.
‘She was scared of her dad. They all were – except George. If anyone said they wanted to know something but they daren’t ask Father, George would laugh and say why not. Father was the sweetest kindest man, who’d never said a cross word to him. He was the best father in the world.’
I shake my head in astonishment. I’m reproaching myself for never talking to Clara, for never securing all this for myself.
‘Clara did eventually ask her mother,’ Lucy says. ‘She said something like, George has haemophilia, hasn’t he? Why do you all say it’s consumption? That was the word they used, consumption. Edith just said – quite nicely apparently, she never lost her temper, raised her voice, got cross – she just said she didn’t know what Clara was talking about. Women didn’t understand these things. Her father knew best. In the end, a couple of weeks before George died, she did ask her father. It must have taken a lot of courage.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He was distraught over George. He hadn’t long to live himself. She came to him in his study, knocked on the door of course. He asked her in and what she wanted. She told me all this, it was sort of printed on her memory. She asked him if she was right and George was a haemophiliac. Henry got to his feet, and said very coldly. “Never speak of this again.” He pointed to the door and said, “Now go!” ’
We’re both silent for a moment, then Lucy says, ‘George died two weeks afterwards. He was in the garden and he fell down some steps. Clara said he developed a huge sort of contusion on his head. His knee where he’d fallen was swollen like a balloon. That’s how she put it, like a balloon. He seems to have died of some sort of stroke. Henry shut himself up in his study for three days. He didn’t eat. He had a carafe of water in there. No one knew if he came out in the night or if he slept. He came out for the funeral and wept right through the service. Edith brought him home, made him go to bed and sent for the doctor. She could do anything with him, but no one else could.’
Poor Henry. Poor Henry, loving someone deeply at last. ‘I’m taking it for granted Kenneth Kirkford, Elizabeth’s son, had haemophilia.’
‘So Clara said. He had it but it was diphtheria that he died of. That enabled Elizabeth to put it about that he only had diphtheria. But Clara knew, she’d seen his swollen joints and recognized them for what they were. She told Mary and Helena. Mary wasn’t married then but she’d picked up this old wives’ tale that a second sister couldn’t carry it if a first one did. That’s the way they thought it was in the royal family, though actually it wasn’t.’
‘Then who told Mary’s daughter Patricia?’
Lucy smiles and puts up her eyebrows. ‘I don’t know everything, Martin. I don’t know that. Maybe she got it from Clara too. Clara would only have been a bit over thirty when Patricia was born. She told me she’d had a couple of chances to marry but she hadn’t because of the haemophilia. I don’t think Helena even had the chances.’
I have to ask the awkward question. Lucy’s sitting quietly, looking rather depressed. Her face was made for smiling, for happiness, and the sadness that’s come over it ages her. She’s suddenly much older in looks than Jude, the corners of her mouth drooping and lines furrowing her forehead. Neither of us can eat any more. We’ve ordered coffee. While we wait for it I have to ask the question.
‘What made you think you might be a carrier?’
‘Everything I’ve told you I told my sister. Not immediately. When she was nearly eighteen. I was about to take the Law Society’s exams, she was at medical school. She asked me if I understood this might mean both of us were carriers or one of us was. Just because the gene had been hiding in there for a hundred years meant nothing.’
‘If it was on the X chromosome,’ I say, ‘that Mary didn’t pass on to her daughters it would have died out. But if it was on the one she did pass on…’
‘Exactly. Jenny and I hadn’t any idea of marriage then. Of course we hadn’t, this was nineteen eighty-four, we were only young. Jenny hasn’t now. She doesn’t want marriage and she doesn’t want kids and, ironically’ – she gives me a rueful smile – ‘she’s not a carrier and I am. We were both tested as soon as it was possible. I told my husband when we were thinking of marrying. That made no difference, he said, and we went ahead. I’d made up my mind to give up the idea of children but now – well, they’re just starting to do a sorting out of embryos and…’
‘Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis,’ I say, interrupting her. ‘My wife’s having it. Today, as a matter of fact.’
‘But she can’t be a haemophilia carrier!’
‘I suppose she could be but she’s not. It’s another faulty gene she carries.’ To comfort her I say, ‘It’s worse in a way. She miscarries all the time and if our baby was born it would be – well, grossly disabled.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, and she really looks sorry.
‘I have a son by my first marriage.’ I don’t know why I bother to say this, why I always say it. Probably, it’s because of this ridiculous vanity I have that I don’t seem to be able to suppress, this absurd pride in the fact that I can produce a healthy child. I’m as bad as Georgie Croft-Jones, so pleased with herself because she’s almost uncontrollably fertile. I stop this nonsensical boasting and add, ‘I carry i
t too.’ Suddenly I long to know how Jude’s getting on, what’s happening, though nothing much can be, and no one will know anything more for another fortnight.
The coffee comes and Lucy tells me she and her husband have made one attempt to conceive a haemophilia-free child but it’s failed and they’re going to try again in a week’s time. She wants to know if the gene’s shown itself anywhere else in the family and I tell her about John Corrie. She seems strangely comforted by the fact that he’s chosen not to have children and she, as she repeats, has refused to have anything but a ‘designer baby’.
‘There’s still Caroline Agnew,’ I say, ‘Patricia’s daughter. She’s your first cousin. What’s happened to her?’
Lucy says she’s never met her. Or she may have met her when she was a baby but Caroline is ten years older and would be forty-seven by now. Jennifer had a letter from her when their mother Diana died – why Jennifer and not she, she doesn’t know. She answered the letter but heard no more.
I ask if there was any information about her in the letter. Lucy says rather dryly that if I mean, did she say whether or not she was a carrier of haemophilia, no she didn’t. It was all about her having pleasant memories of Diana and about the last time she saw her being in Clara’s flat.
‘Did your mother ever mention this?’
‘I don’t remember it. But it may have been years ago while I was away at university. We’re none of us great letter writers.’
For the past ten minutes I’ve been thinking of phoning the clinic as soon as I can get to a phone box but after I’ve said goodbye to Lucy and we’ve made one of those empty promises to keep in touch, I get in a taxi and go there instead.
There’s nothing to be done now but wait. The Long Wait, they call it at the hospital, the fourteen days between replacing the embryos and taking a pregnancy test. In our case they extend between a date in March and a date in April. There are no measures Jude can take to improve the chances of the three tiny pinhead size embryos, no vitamins to help, no supplements, though she’s supposed to avoid strenuous exercise and alcohol. She’s so desperate for this to work I think she’d happily avoid food if it would assist success. I’m desperate for it to work in order to make her happy – or keep her happy.