by Barbara Vine
After she’s gone we take a walk round Chur, looking at all the flowers that have come out since yesterday, that the sun has brought out. I’d like to see Tenna again. It’s become part of my history, if not, thank God, part of my genes. I feel its green meadows and black conifers, alpine flowers and its red chalets, even its icy white mists, would look different to me now. The cradle of my great-great-great-great-grandmother. On a far less cosy level, the death source of George Nanther and Kenneth Kirkford. But it’s a place in my origins no less than Godby and Hatton Garden, Bloomsbury and North London, and I say to Jude that maybe we’ll come back here for a holiday, do a walking tour of Graubünden, because it has the glimmer of a feel of home.
‘With luck,’ she says, ‘we won’t be able to go anywhere on walking tours for the next few years.’
It’s like a splash of cold water in my face. With luck… With luck we’ll have a baby or two and the only holidays we’ll be able to take will be to Disneyland. If we can afford them.
Returning to Zurich in the train this afternoon I think more about Franziska’s account and what it means for me. I decide it’s improbable any of those Quendons and Hendersons knew where their forebear came from. If they knew Thomas Dornford met his wife in Amsterdam they very likely thought she was Dutch. They wouldn’t have wanted to know any more and if they had investigated and found she was a Swiss cowherd’s daughter they’d have hushed it up. But in those days discovering it would have been next to impossible and why would they bother to hunt? It was Veronica who supplied me with Barbla Maibach’s name, but she told me she knew nothing more about her. I notice now something that didn’t strike me before. Gertrude Tauber allowed, or perhaps encouraged, Barbla to keep her own surname. No doubt, she’d have resisted her husband’s distinguished family name passing to a peasant’s child.
The really significant factor in all this is that the haemophilia’s been traced back to its source: Hans Maibach, to whom it was transmitted by his mother, a Gartmann, one of the famous Bluterfamilien of Tenna, who passed it to his daughter Barbla. And she in her turn passed it on undiscernibly to her daughter Luise, Luise to Louisa, Louisa to Edith, Edith to Elizabeth and Mary, and those two, the gene still of course invisibly carried, to the present day.
33
The first thing I do when I get home is look up that letter Henry wrote in the spring of 1882. Not to Couch but to Lewis Fetter. But my memory wasn’t otherwise much at fault. Tenna isn’t mentioned by name but Versam is and the fact that it must have been Tenna is confirmed by Henry’s almost quoting Hoessli word for word when he writes, ‘Sunshine and a dry atmosphere render it a healthy place…’ The letter is headed, Safiental, Graubünden.
Paul is twenty today. We sent him a card with a cheque inside. Anything we might buy him would be wrong. Inevitably, I spend a while staring out of the window, the Henry papers in a muddle on the table and thinking about when he was born and the months preceding his birth. It’s a bit embarrassing now in retrospect to remember Sally and me telling people we were ‘making a baby’. Especially, perhaps, as we weren’t, but about to produce the result of an accident. Jude and I are making a baby now, that’s an accurate way of putting it, for no baby was ever more deliberately and calculatingly manufactured. The deed has been re-done. And, of course, the second time is never so bad as the first. I hope I’m not going to have to talk about third and fourth times. They’ve implanted four embryos – our sperm and eggs never have a problem uniting – and now once more we wait and see.
The Government Chief Whip has just phoned and asked me to have lunch with him after the Whitsun break. As someone says in The Taming of the Shrew, I wonder what it bodes? It may be that he’s been told I’m researching Henry’s life and he has something relevant to tell me. Ubiquitous Henry. I’ve been re-reading the diaries, asking myself if he had any further comments to make on Tenna, though it seems not.
It’s not clear how many of these walking tours he went on. Amelia Nanther kept all the letters her son wrote home from holiday and all appear to be extant. All, as far as I know, are on the table in front of me. I say ‘as far as I know’ but the only evidence for this is contained in a letter she wrote to her sister in which she says so. ‘Henry writes such beautiful letters from these distant parts that I carefully keep every one of them.’ In some he is precise as to his whereabouts. For instance, from Lake Thun he even specifies the name of the pension at which he is staying, and from ‘Safiental, Graubünden’ that he is at the home of people called Schiele. In others he merely gives the name of the Canton. But, in almost all cases, the letters are full of descriptions of named villages, mountains and lakes. Perhaps he thought this would be of particular interest to his mother, perhaps she liked to study geography. By the time she is dead and so is Hamilton (they died, of course, on the same day within four hours of each other) Henry has only Couch and Fetter to write to and the single letter he wrote to Fetter in 1882 from abroad, or the single surviving letter, seems positively cryptic compared to those he wrote home to Godby Hall.
Why doesn’t he name the village? Perhaps because he knows Fetter will recognize it. Perhaps because Fetter expects him to go there. I don’t know but, looking at the letter, I see something I didn’t see before. After sunshine and a dry atmosphere render it a healthy place, he goes on, except, according to V and G, as you know, in one respect. When I first read it I thought V might be Dr Vickersley. I now see that V and G are Vieli and Grandidier, the medical men who first documented haemophilia in the district.
I feel a little disappointed. What was I hoping for? Something dramatic, I suppose. Of course, Henry in his position, would have read Vieli and Grandidier as well as Hoessli, for their work had appeared in 1855. There is no mystery, unless mystery is contained in Henry’s secretive manner, using initials instead of names and omitting a precise address. But this was his way, his nature. It would have been odder if he hadn’t been to Tenna, considering its importance in his particular field and the fact that he visited Switzerland many times.
I’m more inclined to ask, why didn’t he go there before? Why wait till 1882? But maybe he didn’t wait. Maybe he was only re-visiting Graubünden that year. He could have been there in the 1870s and simply not mentioned the name of the village to his mother, a woman who would have known nothing of haemophilia and cared less. Or he could even have been there while a student at the University of Vienna. Though he doesn’t say so, he could have made a trip to south-eastern Switzerland with his friend, the Romansch speaker. This being left out of letters home is easily explained by the unwillingness of a son whose father is supporting him to let his parents know that not all the money which has come his way is being spent on studies. The more I think of it the less likely it seems that Henry would have neglected a visit to so significant a place.
The post comes very late but brings something worth waiting for. A letter from, of all people, my second cousin Caroline. It’s handwritten. She includes her phone number, signs it ‘Caroline’ and there’s no mention in it of whether she’s still called Agnew, whether she’s married or has children. It’s not clear what Jennifer has told her, though she knows I’m writing our great-grandfather’s life. There’s something clipped and abrupt in her style, something ungracious. For instance, Jennifer’s told her Lucy and I had lunch and she says she’d like to make it plain she doesn’t want anything like that. She hates ‘that sort of thing’. She doesn’t know if the family knowledge she has is any use to me but she’s willing to pass it on, only she’ll come to me at home or I can go to her. Her home in Reading is only half an hour away on the train. She doesn’t want this taken as a sign she’d like to meet other family members, so no one else present, please.
I don’t want to go to Reading, but of course I will if there’s no help for it. Re-reading the letter, I have the feeling inviting her for a meal or even a cup of tea would be a mistake, and it’s with some trepidation that I pick up the phone. I expect an answering machine because I’ve made up my
mind without the least evidence that she’s single, living alone and with a full-time job. It’s a small shock when she answers.
Her voice is low and rather harsh. I must be a snob, though I try not to be, but I notice at once her ‘estuary English’. She speaks very differently from other members of my family. I must try hard not to let it grate on me, it’s not good behaviour for someone who once nearly took the Labour whip. ‘I’ll come and see you if you want,’ she says. ‘Thursday about three?’
I’m not to be given a choice and I’ve a feeling if I don’t agree I’ll be told to take it or leave it. This Thursday is the last one in May and the last before the House of Lords gets up for Whitsun, but that doesn’t affect me any more. I tell her it will be fine and how is she going to get here?
‘I don’t have a car,’ she says. ‘I’ll come on the train to Paddington.’
How is it that I know instinctively taxis are not for her? I tell her to take the tube, Bakerloo Line to Baker Street and Jubilee to St John’s Wood, and that I’m very grateful and look forward to seeing her. For some reason I expect more. I expect her to tell me why she’s ‘coming up to town’ on this particular Thursday, for she evidently is. But all she says is, ‘That’s all right then,’ and puts the phone down.
Fowler says we shouldn’t use ‘intrigue’ in the sense of ‘mystify, fascinate, interest’ but choose one of those words instead, but none of them will quite do for me. I am intrigued by my cousin Caroline. I want to discover what makes her tick. Is she married? Has she ever been married? Her mother died a long time ago but what has become of her father? Of course it may be that no answers to these questions will be given me.
I get on to the Government Chief Whip’s Office and say to his diary secretary that of the dates he’s offered me I’d like Tuesday 6 June. I’ve chosen this day with care. It’s the only one I was given that’s after the date Jude will know if the implants have taken or not. By then I will know. In the unlikely event of the Chief Whip offering me some sort of job – what sort I can’t imagine but it would bring in an income – I’ll be in a better position to accept or decline it. If we have to fork out another £2,500 I’ll have to accept it. And then I do what I’ve sworn to myself I never will. I start wondering how many attempts she’ll make before she stops. Five? Ten? Twenty? Twenty would amount to fifty thousand pounds. But I must stop, it’s useless going on like this…
*
Caroline Agnew is tall and big with it, a large heavy woman who must weigh fifteen stone, and looks every day, in fact more, of her forty-seven years. Her iron-grey hair is cut very short, but not fashionably, rather as if it’s just been trimmed by a very conservative barber giving a short back and sides. No make-up, of course, nothing in the least feminine. Grey flannel trousers, a jumper, a cotton jacket and shoes in the Doc Martens mode.
I expect my offer of tea to be refused but she accepts, takes neither milk nor sugar but helps herself to a chocolate chip cookie. She hasn’t asked me how I am, nor anything about myself, but after taking a sip of tea she looks round and says she supposes this was ‘the old man’s’ house.
‘Not the one your grandmother and my grandfather grew up in, no. That was sold and this one bought in the twenties.’
She doesn’t ask questions, just makes statements. ‘You live alone in this great place.’
‘I’m married. I’ve got a son at university.’
She nods, plainly not interested. I ask her about Clara.
She doesn’t seem to have kept in touch with anyone else in the family, so why Clara?
‘She was Mum’s godmother,’ she says, ‘for what that’s worth these days. Mum used to go to her place a lot, go to tea and all that with her and the other one.’
‘Helena.’
‘Right. I never did go, not then.’
‘It was this place, the house I mean. They lived here.’
She nods indifferently. ‘Mum died in a car crash. Dad was driving. He didn’t die but he lost a leg. He’s been living with me since then. I’ve got a flat, it’s little but it’s got two bedrooms. The woman next door keeps an eye on him while I’m not there. He’s had a stroke.’
I take all this in. She’s at least managed to tell me quite a lot. I ask, though prepared to be told it’s not my business, if she works, if she has a job.
‘I have to. I’ve no one to keep me.’ She doesn’t say what the job is.
We’ve come a long way from Clara. I ask when Caroline first went to see her and why, but I can already tell she’s one of those people, unattractive, brusque, graceless, who are yet the salt of the earth, who can’t be bothered with the Davids and Georginas of this world – nor come to that with the Martins and the Judes – but take for granted the need to visit and tend the aged and infirm. For them it’s as much a necessary part of life as taking a bath or eating a meal.
‘She was all alone,’ she says. ‘She was upset when Mum died. There was no one else but me.’
‘Diana,’ I say, ‘Diana and her girls.’
‘Diana never came near her until Lucy and Jennifer went away to some fancy boarding school.’ Her tone doesn’t change when she says this, she doesn’t sound resentful. ‘Then she started going and sometimes she brought the girls. I never saw them. Diana was OK, she hadn’t any side to her. I wrote to Jennifer when her mum died. I don’t know why Jennifer and not Lucy, she was the eldest, but I reckon I liked the sound of Jennifer better.’
‘Did Clara talk about the family?’
‘A bit. She’d nothing else to talk about really. Can I have another biscuit?’
‘Of course.’ I pour her a second cup of tea and one for myself and take a deep breath. Here it comes now. ‘Did she talk to you about the haemophilia?’
I expect her to say, ‘The what?’ But she’s unfazed, takes the question for granted. ‘She did a bit. She wanted to know if I knew. But Mum had told me when I was still a kid.’ For the first time she smiles. She laughs, a sound of repeated exhalations without humour. ‘She said I must tell my husband before I got married. I said I wouldn’t get married. Of course I wouldn’t. Who’d marry a person like me?’
How do you answer that? You don’t. You can’t. And I can’t now ask her if that knowledge stopped her marrying. I might if I were a doctor or an analyst but I’m only a distant cousin and biographer. ‘So you told Clara you already knew?’
She nods. It seems to be of no importance to her. She’d decided never to marry, no one would want her, so it hardly mattered. Born in 1953, she might have decided to have a child outside marriage but she evidently hadn’t. I’m stuck now, I don’t know what to ask, when she says, ‘Some of Clara’s stuff came to me when she died. Theo didn’t want it, they said, so I took it.’ She considers this. ‘Was that your dad?’
I nod. ‘Stuff?’
‘A couple of suitcases and a box with her clothes and some medical books and a lot of old photos.’
So that’s what a life comes to after it’s been lived for nearly a hundred years, a few clothes and books and photographs.
‘What sort of medical books?’
‘Not her dad’s. They were old but not that old. There was one about haemophilia and Queen Victoria and a medical dictionary. I don’t remember the others. I gave them to the church sale. Yes, and there were a couple of notebooks with black covers.’
My heart jumps. It isn’t possible, is it, that the missing notebook, the other one Henry wrote his essays in, the book that should naturally follow on from the one in my possession, that it should have turned up in these circumstances? I daren’t quite ask. I hedge. ‘They were Henry Nanther’s? Our great-grandfather’s?’
‘I reckon. I never read them. The writing was too small.’
I go into the study and take the one I have off the dining table. She nods. ‘I sent that one to Theo’s widow.’ It’s my mother she means. My father had died soon after Clara. ‘It was no use to me,’ she says. ‘I was going to send back the other one but it got mislaid and when I found it m
y dad was reading it. He had to use a magnifying glass but I let him get on with it. He doesn’t have much to amuse him. Well, interest him, I suppose. He’s eighty and he’s not a well man.’
‘It didn’t come back to my mother.’
‘No. I couldn’t find it. Dad may have put it out for the recycling, this is only a few months ago. I’m sure it’s not in the flat. Is it important?’
My jumping heart has sunk. I shrug. ‘It could be. Too late now.’
She looks at her watch. ‘I’d better go. My hospital appointment’s at five and it’s half-four now. I could forward you the photos if you like.’
Why am I convinced of something I certainly wasn’t before, that Henry confided things to that notebook that he told no one and wrote down nowhere else? I find I’m shaking my head, which she takes as saying no to her offer. Why, I wonder, did Clara take the notebooks? Because medicine interested her so much while it meant nothing to the others? Or was there something in it she liked reading and re-reading because it reminded her of her father? But she hadn’t much liked him, surely. I say in a rather pathetic feeble sort of voice, ‘Do you think your father would remember what he read?’
‘Not very likely. He’s got very forgetful of late. I put flowers on the grave because he nagged me to do it, he made my life a misery, and then when I said I had he’d forgotten he ever asked me.’
‘Flowers on whose grave?’
‘Great-grandfather Henry’s.’
I’m finding this bizarre. ‘Your father?’ I say, bewildered. ‘He couldn’t have known Henry. He was only his – what? Grandson-in-law born after he was dead?’
‘I know,’ she says with her usual indifference. ‘He said he felt sorry for him.’