by Barbara Vine
She’s not exactly happy now, though, for she hovers and trembles between laughter and tears, desperate sometimes for distractions from her all-absorbing ambition, then guilty because she’s superstitiously afraid that if she stops thinking about it for a single moment her indifferent womb may go back on her and reject these foetuses through lack of her wanting them enough. It’s all madness.
*
There are just eleven days to go now and she’s fine. I think about hope again, that treacherous virtue, how it fills her body and soul, revitalizes her, makes her look ten years younger, puts a spring in her step and a light in her eyes. She’s even apologizing to me for being so ‘distant’, so ‘preoccupied’. She’s not been much of a companion, not much of a wife, these past weeks, she says, but she’ll make it up to me when she knows there’s a healthy growing baby in there, and she pats her flat stomach. I’m not to worry about selling the house, we won’t have to sell the house, she’s take a second job if she has to, be some popular millionaire author’s private copy editor or, she adds vaguely, read manuscripts for someone. I reassure her and tell her I’m not worried, I know everything’s going to be all right, but that’s not the way I’m thinking. I’m thinking she doesn’t know what it’s be like holding down one job with a baby at home, let alone taking on another. If by some wild stretch of the imagination I can believe it possible, I know I’ll be at home with the child, able to do just enough work of some kind or other to pay a nanny. But, naturally, I don’t say any of this. The days when we told each other our inmost thoughts are gone, when we were honest with each other, or as honest as people ever are. I’m even reluctant to tell her of the latest Henry developments. How can I tell a woman – my wife – who carries a faulty gene, about my discoveries of women who carry faulty genes? She knows I’ve met my cousin Lucy but she didn’t want to know more, she didn’t ask and I didn’t tell her.
I haven’t told her about Tenna and my belief that Barbla Maibach came from there. What’s the point? Whether the PGD works or not I obviously can’t go there. I understand she wants me with her. And I’ll stay as long as that’s what she wants. Damn Tenna. Bugger Tenna. I do tell David but he’s not very interested. These genealogists don’t seem to care much about personalities, birthplaces, historical oddities, only about names and dates.
Jude and I don’t make love. She’s afraid to disturb things. No one’s told her to abstain but she’s heard stories. And wishing for more with her than holding her in my arms, I’m reminded of something a woman once said to me about love. She was my girlfriend after my divorce and before I met Jude. One night she said to me that there ought to be something more for human beings who were in love, something else, not talk and being together which was friendship, nor lovemaking which was lust, but some quite other thing only discoverable when in that transcendent state. She seemed almost resentful that it didn’t exist or she couldn’t find it, she was angry – with what? God? Life? I didn’t understand at all. What we had was quite good enough for me. But I wasn’t in love. Not then. I’ve remembered what she said and I understand now, I want what she wanted and, like her, I can’t find it.
30
It’s fizzled out. Neither with a bang nor even a whimper. Jude had three embryos in there two weeks ago and now there’s nothing. They’ve vanished in blood and not even much of that. The test simply showed negative, no blue line. Is she as unhappy, as shattered, as she’s been on previous occasions? I don’t know. I can’t tell. For a whole day she was quiet and remote, a shadow of a woman, not staring or weeping or angry, but silently reading a manuscript she’d brought home with her. Unusually for her, she didn’t comment on it, say a word about its worth or otherwise, and when she reached the final page, she closed it and laid it aside.
Of course she’ll try again. When she broke her silence she said so. It was the first thing she said. I expected it, I’d have been astonished if she’d said anything else. Hope had come in, of course, hope had reared its ugly head and whispered to me that maybe she’s had enough, she’s resigned herself to being childless, she’s realized there can be more, or other things, to life than having kids. She’s had enough of lying on tables with her legs strung up, being poked at and probed. But the realist in me that counters hope told me to be my age, have a bit of sense. And when she said it I nodded and smiled and covered her hand with mine. I kissed her. I said I knew she’d succeed one day. I swear I didn’t think about having to masturbate over that magazine again but I did think about the money. Another two and a half K up the spout, was what I thought. And then she said something wonderful, but not till next day, it was so sweet and so bloody kind I could have wept.
‘Shall we go to Switzerland first?’
I just stare at her. Then I ask her how she knew I wanted to go.
‘David told me. Oh, on the phone, before I wasn’t pregnant any more. He said something about he supposed you’d be off to Switzerland in May when the snows were gone and would I ask you if you’d like him to go with you.’
‘God forbid.’
‘I’m sorry, I forgot to give you the message.’
‘You’ve had other things on your mind,’ I say.
So we’re going, Jude and I. When we come back we’ll do the egg and sperm thing again. The date we fix on is 5 May, a Friday, a flight to Zurich and from there the train to Chur. Jude says the alpine meadows will be in flower. She wants to see the precious stones collection in Chur Town Council Chamber. This is the first time for months I’ve seen her enthusiastic about anything, and although I know a lot of it is assumed for my sake, this makes me even more grateful. When Paul arrives unexpectedly in the evening we’re sitting surrounded by maps – I’ve been down to Daunt’s to buy them – and I’m consulting my Baedeker’s Switzerland, descendant of the one Henry took with him on his alpine travels in the 1870s.
There’s no reason, I suppose, why she shouldn’t tell him. I’d just prefer her not to. He’s such a glutton for disappointment, for failure, for striving that comes to nothing.
‘How do they do it?’ he says, meaning the mechanics of PGD.
I’ve started to ask why we have to go into that, a fatal remark that makes his lips twitch, but Jude answers him and, for once, he looks embarrassed. It’s not the extraction of her eggs that does it but the idea of his father having to produce sperm. Like all his generation, he assumes we get treatment on the NHS, or if he doesn’t he says nothing about the cost. Unlike them or many of them, he’s uninterested in money, works for it if he needs it and never asks for a loan.
‘Will you try again?’
‘When we come back from Switzerland,’ I tell him and he asks why we’re going.
No one in his world ever goes to Switzerland. They go to Central Africa or Thailand or Cuba. I can’t explain to him because I don’t exactly know myself. To see the village my great-grandmother’s great-grandmother came from seems an inadequate explanation, and anyway I don’t know if it’s the right one. Her genes have undergone a lot of dilution in nearly two hundred years. I suppose the truth is I’m expecting some world-shaking or biography-shaking revelation. I tell him vaguely it’s for Henry research and he accepts this without demur. He’s come for a drink before he meets a couple of friends at some club on Tottenham Court Road, though I’d have thought that whatever this club doesn’t offer, unlimited drink will be available. While he’s drinking a gin and tonic and Jude and I have wine, he says in that threatening manner he sometimes puts on that he may come to stay for his last few days before going back to Bristol after the Easter break. Jude and I say enthusiastically that we’d love that and he smiles in an enigmatic way.
Does any father have a happy, easy relationship with a son of his age?
Henry made no more diary entries after George died. If he wrote any letters none has survived. He seems to have seldom left the house. His second daughter Mary, already busy with her good works, teaching Sunday School, sewing for the church bazaar, wrote in July to her married sister Elizabeth
Kirkford:
George’s death has dreadfully affected poor Father. Mother is always so brave and strong, she has rallied, comes to matins regularly with me and has paid some calls and visits and is beginning to take up her photography again, but Father is as greatly felled by the blow as on the day it happened. We all know he has not always been the easiest of men. When I was younger I remember how I envied girls who had more affectionate, even indulgent, parents, and I know you did too, Lizzie, but if you were here now you could not but be moved by his wretchedness, his dreadful grief. Clara asked me the other day if I thought he would have been as cast down if it was one of us who had passed on. You know how awkward and tactless she is. Naturally, I told her she should not ask such a question, but I did ask it of myself privately. Father was seventy-two in February but he looks ten years more. Mother seems unperturbed. She looks after him as she always has but without, as far as I can tell, giving him any special attention…
Henry died in the following January. Only one more letter about his condition prior to his death remains but somehow I don’t think he rallied or returned to his former pursuits. He was a few weeks short of his seventy-third birthday. Most people would choose to die in their beds if they had a choice, even if this means a husband or wife waking in the morning to find a dead body beside them. Henry, it seems, had stopped going to bed. Mary is writing in October:
I wasn’t aware Mother and Father are no longer sharing a room until a noise from along the passage awakened me at three yesterday morning. It was the sound of some heavy object falling and it seemed to come from Father’s study. As you know, I moved into your room after you married and that shares a wall with the study. Uncertain how best to act, I put on my dressing gown and went to investigate. Imagine my surprise to find Father there, neither fully dressed nor in his night clothes but wearing a smoking jacket I have never seen before over trousers and shirt. He was seated at his desk, staring at the inkwell which he must somehow have knocked on to the floor. You will remember the inkwell, it is the blue glass silver-mounted one University College Hospital gave him on some occasion, perhaps his sixtieth birthday. Fortunately, there was no ink in it, it had long run dry, testimony to Father’s inability to work this past year and more. He asked me – quite gently for him! – what I was doing and I said I had heard a noise. Pick that up for me, will you? he said in the same quiet polite tone, And now go back to bed. Good night.
I said good night to him and in the morning I determined to ask Mother if he frequently spent nights in the study. For the past six months, she said in her cool unperturbed way. He can’t sleep, he doesn’t want to disturb me. How silent he must have been, all those nights, Lizzie, how still, so as not to have wakened me…
It was in the study that Edith found him dead on the morning of 21 January 1909. The time was nine-thirty a.m. She went to look for him when he hadn’t appeared either in their room to dress himself or at the breakfast table. I owe all my knowledge of Henry’s behaviour in the months prior to his death and that death itself to Mary’s letters and once again I’m thankful for the sisters’ hoarding instincts. Once her mother had told her and her sisters, Helena and Clara, Mary sent telegrams to Elizabeth in Yorkshire and to Alexander, at Harrow. Later that day she wrote to Elizabeth:
You will have heard by now that poor Father passed away last night or in the early hours of this morning. A massive heart attack was the cause, according to Dr Starkey. Well, Lizzie, a heart attack may have been the final blow but he died of grief. Perhaps Mother knows that too for she keeps saying over and over that it is a merciful release. She certainly cannot mean from bodily pain and illness, for though he had had heart trouble it had never seemed very serious.
Of course you won’t attend the funeral. None of us females will and it would be specially unwise for you in your condition…
This may mean that Elizabeth is pregnant, maybe she was, but if so she must have miscarried because Kenneth, her first child, wasn’t born till July 1910 and Henry died in January 1909. Kenneth would be Henry’s second haemophilic descendant, his mother the first of the known carriers in her generation, and perhaps another feature of the merciful release was that Henry would never know. Did he suspect in those final grief-stricken weeks of his life while his daughter was apparently pregnant? He must have.
He had written nothing for ten years. Or, rather, the attempts he made at his definitive work, his magnum opus, came to grief or he destroyed what he had done. I incline to this view, for I’ve searched for it in those trunks just as I’ve searched for the notebook – the very possibly non-existent notebook – and found nothing. The end of his life was blighted by the sickness of his younger son. In the trunks are some of George’s exercise books, which his father kept and obviously intended to be seen by a future generation. He was evidently a clever and gifted boy, accomplished at his lessons in a way no child would be today. I’ll amend that and say instead he’d been taught things no present-day child would be taught at so young an age and had proved himself equal to them. Caesar’s Invasion of Britain, which I remember struggling to make sense of at twelve, George read and understood when he was seven. A year before he died he was learning Greek. He seemed to have read all the plays of Shakespeare – in bowdlerized versions – Paradise Lost and a good deal of Browning and Tennyson. Two years before the Greek began he was learning algebra and evidently enjoying it.
Henry’s love for his son must have been increased and enhanced by his intellectual brilliance. That enemy of mine, Hope, that ugly woman in the painting who sits on top of the world with a towel round her head, would have invaded Henry’s dreams and made him believe that with the best care and watchfulness George stood a chance of growing up, of fulfilling his potential, of entering some demanding profession. It might even be that in the next few years a cure would be found. Not by him, alas, it was too late for that, but by some up-and-coming physician who had the advantages of modern science at his disposal. These were the kind of hopes the Tsarina had, Princess Beatrice had. They were doomed to the bitterest of all disappointments.
His mother’s photographs show George as a good-looking boy too, if you let yourself see past the sickness and the suffering. He’d have grown up a handsomer man than Alexander. And how could a father not love a son who described him to his sisters as ‘sweetest and kindest’, as ‘the best father in the world’?
Henry’s funeral took place at St Mark’s, Hamilton Terrace, and he was buried at Kensal Green beside George. Thinking of that makes me wonder once again who it is that puts flowers – now, still, when all his nearest are dead and gone – on the grave that holds the bones of father and son.
31
Everyone makes sneering remarks about cuckoo clocks and chocolate whenever Switzerland’s mentioned. They forget, or don’t know, what a beautiful country it is. Quite as beautiful, I’m sure, as Cuba or Thailand, and the cosy image is misplaced as well. How can a place be cosy when it has some of the grandest mountains in Europe?
Another truism is that all its trains run on time. So they do but that’s hardly a fault, and they run at the same times on Saturdays and Sundays as on weekdays. Ours is a double-decker that travels along the southern shore of the Walensee. Thickly wooded hills, some crowned with castles, rise from the flat plain, and after the Bad Ragaz the high mountains begin. We arrive in Chur exactly when we’re supposed to and have a taxi to our hotel in the centre of the town. They’ve given us a white bedroom with a polished wood floor, painted furniture and a four-poster bed hung with tie-on cream cotton curtains. Fat white duvets are piled on the bed, the window is wide open and it’s all very fresh and bright and quiet.
There’s a narrow street outside the window and a clothes shop opposite whose name makes Jude laugh. It’s called La Donna Cinderella. We walk back to the station in the late afternoon sunshine and check on the train we’ll take tomorrow and the bus which meets it. Dinner is at a big hotel, the Duc de Rohan, very elegant with eighteenth-century French furniture and
good food. It starts to pour with rain and we have a taxi back to our hotel. We make love and it’s good, in spite of the double foolproof protection, and afterwards Jude says, in the calmest most cheerful tone imaginable, would I have a vasectomy after we’ve got our baby?
At the moment I can’t think of anything I’d like more. I wish I could have one now. But naturally I say none of this, only that of course I will, and she’s happy. She puts her arms round me and says I do understand, don’t I, but she’d never feel at ease if she thought she’d a chance of conceiving another – and there she pauses a bit before she goes on to say, ‘one of those faulty ones, sick ones, I lost’.
I suppose I realize for the first time how she’s felt about this. She’s so beautiful, so physically nearly perfect, and yet her body makes disabled foetuses, maybe deformed foetuses. I understand now how she could turn against lovemaking, against the act that produces these abortions. She says she’s ashamed of her own body and I tell her I love her body, I love her. I tell her with perfect truth that I’ve never loved her so much.
But I wake in the night, too hot under the huge puffy duvet, and as I throw half of it off me, I start thinking about Elizabeth Kirkford and Patricia Agnew and Diana Bell and Veronica and I wonder if they felt that way, if in each pregnancy they feared producing a son whose blood behaved with monstrous unnaturalness. When daughters came instead, did they fear they were only passing on to the next generation the burden of terror and anxiety they carried? And what of the women of Tenna, all these Ursulas and Annas and, indeed, Barblas? It’s hard to say how much they knew, but in A Treasury of Human Inheritance a certain Dr Thormann, writing in 1837, refers to ‘this great family of bleeders’ in Tenna. Women must have seen their sisters, their cousins, their neighbours, give birth to children who suffered severe and often fatal haemorrhages and felt about their physical selves as Jude feels.