The Blood Doctor

by Barbara Vine

  ‘How did you know where it was?’

  ‘My mum used to go there. She used to take flowers to Fulham for her mum and to Kensal Green for her grandma.’

  After she’s gone there comes into my head something an authority on pre-Columbian Mexico once told me. When they conquered the country the Spanish Conquistadores destroyed almost everything the Aztecs had written or painted so that only the occasional rare codex was saved. A short time later they came to regret what they’d done and did their best to replace the lost texts by recreating them from memory and much of those recollections is what survives today.

  Maybe I’m going to have to rely on what a senile old man can remember. A strange old man who so pities another long-dead old man that he asks his daughter to put flowers on his grave. Did that pity come out of what he’d read in the lost notebook?

  34

  I’ve been invited to go back as a life peer. The call came yesterday, from a Downing Street aide. ‘The Prime Minister has asked me to ask you if you will take the Government Whip in the House of Lords.’

  I didn’t expect it. It never crossed my mind. And, of course, as is the way with anything like this, you can’t think, you can’t appreciate what’s been asked of you, you can’t consider anything. The shock stops all that. I’m silent, trying to digest it and not succeeding.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like a few days to think about it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘yes. Till the end of the week?’

  The end of the week is only three days off and he agrees, obviously enjoying my stunned response. It must be a nice job, his, to be in the business of giving people delightful, or at least amazing, surprises. I put the receiver back and sit there, collecting my scattered feelings, attempting to recover from astonishment and finally, after staring out of the window for a long time and palpating in my hands the Tenna egg, ask myself, yes or no?

  I miss the place, I want to go back. I like the freedom of not being there, having my evenings to myself and Jude and doing as I like. I’m flattered to be asked, yet I want to keep my liberty. It wouldn’t be the cross-benches any more, no more independence, but a seat on the Government benches and obedience to a whip. How I miss the library, the beautiful dining room and even the horrible bread. And I miss too playing my small part in the government of my country. But I will have to join the Labour Party. They won’t give the Government Whip to a non-party member. Yet wasn’t I always thinking about taking the Government Whip before I was banished?

  Jude comes home and I don’t tell her. Not immediately. We have a drink, or I do. She’s back on her alcohol-free regime and she’s read somewhere that what a woman eats in the first few days of a pregnancy radically affects the unborn child for life. She’s back in the land of hope and the hideous stress of waiting and not knowing, unable to keep to the neutrality of neither hoping nor fearing. As for me, I don’t know what I want any longer, I only know how base I am. Because it’s the cost I think of. That inner voice that says things to us we wouldn’t tell a soul reminds me of the £5,000 so far expended, and I answer back in the other dreadful countering voice that at least if she’s pregnant there’ll be no more immediate outlay, while if not that’s another two and a half grand gone to kingdom come. How mad we are to try to compensate for things we’ve only thought about someone. I ‘make it up’ to Jude by cooking the dinner while she puts her feet up and reads a manuscript.

  We’ve eaten and I’ve drunk more wine than I should have. Why don’t I want to tell her? Because I think she’ll try and stop me, because she won’t want me out late three nights a week? If that’s so I must be seriously considering saying yes. Well, of course I am. Jude wouldn’t try to make me do anything I didn’t want to, I ought to know that. But I must tell her tonight because to wait till tomorrow would be unforgivable. I pour myself another glass of wine and tell her, abruptly. Her reaction’s not at all what I might have expected.

  She gets up and comes up to me, she puts her arms round me and says, ‘Congratulations. What an honour!’

  ‘So you think I should accept?’

  ‘You’re not thinking of refusing, surely?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  Now that she knows she’s quite excited and keeps on talking about it. She says it’s well-deserved and she’ll like coming back herself. Taking her seat below the bar with the other life peers’ wives and husbands. That’s why the Chief Whip’s asked me to lunch on Tuesday week. Didn’t I think of that? I know her so well that I see the change in her face when she talks of nine days hence. I hear the tiny faltering in her voice no one else would notice. By then, before then, she’ll know if it’s success or failure this time. Whether the blue line’s there or not.

  If it’s not there now it surely will be next time or the next, another five grand later. That’s what I think of when I wake up in the night and Inner Voice, nasty, insidious and coldly practical, tells me I’ve got to take this life peerage because I need the money. It’s ten thousand a year expenses, twelve if I struggle, and it’s tax-free. Never mind idealism, high-mindedness, working for what I believe in. Think of the money. And if the final stage of the House of Lords reform leads to elected peers who get a salary I’ll have to stand for election. Because I need the money.

  Georgie Croft-Jones is ill. She was perfectly fit all the time she was carrying Galahad, but this time she’s sick every day and all day. A piteous phone call came from her this morning. Would we come over? She’s so lonely and bored and low, she says. I’m not surprised she’s feeling low, for the home help David has fetched in to look after her and him and Galahad is none other than his mother Veronica. Jude suggests this evening and says we’ll eat before we come. We walk over to Lauderdale Road because it’s a fine warm evening and these streets are pretty in the spring, the gardens bright with blue flowering shrubs Jude says are tea bushes.

  Veronica is in the kitchen, still in her impossibly high-heeled shoes to do her chores but makes the concession of wearing an apron over her short skirt and black and white jumper. She makes it plain when we shake hands that she expects me to kiss her; apparently we know each other well enough for that now, so I brush her scented powdery cheek with my lips.

  ‘Finished it yet?’ she says.

  I’m at a loss. ‘Finished what?’

  ‘The book you’re writing about my grandfather of course.’

  ‘I haven’t even begun it,’ I say and then I excuse myself to go and talk to Georgie, a pathetic sight in her large white four-poster, a bowl on the bedside cabinet and another on the floor. The room smells of vomit, though the window is open and the meadow-fresh air freshener spray in evidence. I’ve never seen Georgie so thin or, come to that, Galahad so fat. He’s on the bed crawling all over her. The shape of things to come, I think to myself, and picture our inviolate bed invaded and plundered by a large vigorous baby.

  Georgie knows all about the implants and exactly what stage Jude has reached. They’re talking about it and Jude’s being very frank about her hopes and fears, but I notice something new in Georgie, her marked lack of enthusiasm. Pregnancy isn’t the merry fun-ride it was the first time round. David comes in, looking equally worn out, carrying a bottle of wine and two glasses. Jude, of course, won’t have any and whatever Georgie drinks she sicks up. David and I have a glass each, nibble at small cheese biscuits which remind me of the ones they serve in the Peers’ Guest Room, and then he takes his son off to bed. Galahad yells and screams and pounds David’s head with his fists.

  In his absence, as if a child of his age could understand, Georgie plunges into an account of her symptoms, the opinions of several doctors and various peculiarities of her reproductive organs. Jude seems fascinated. I creep away and find Veronica in the living room, now divested of her apron, drinking gin and reading the Spectator.

  ‘That child needs a firm hand,’ she says, for Galahad’s screaming surely fills every corner of this not very large flat. ‘Imagine two of them here. They’ll have to get a house before
the new one comes. You and your wife have the right idea.’

  I eye her enquiringly.

  ‘Not having children. Each generation seems more trouble and expense than the last.’

  I’ve no comment to make. I decide to turn the couple of hours we’re here to my advantage. ‘I’ve recently met your cousin’s daughter Caroline.’

  She raises her eyebrows, says nothing.

  ‘Her father is still alive. Did you ever know him?’

  ‘Of course I did. I was a bridesmaid at their wedding – well, a matron of honour. I was married myself by then. Very good looking which is more than Patricia was, big gawky creature with a small head.’

  ‘Her daughter’s a bit like that.’

  ‘I haven’t seen her since she was six.’ Veronica evidently has no interest in Caroline, what has become of her, where she lives. Malicious scandalmongering is more in her line. ‘Tony,’ she says, and I have to think whom she means – of course, Anthony Agnew, Caroline’s father. ‘Tony had been drinking when he crashed that car. I know that for a fact, though it never came out. He wasn’t the one to get killed, oh no.’

  ‘He lost a leg,’ I say.

  ‘Well, he was asking for it, wasn’t he? Of course he was one of those who had a good war.’ I’ve never actually heard anyone say that before, only read it. ‘Major Agnew, which he never would have been otherwise. He was a car salesman but he lost his job after the accident.’ She takes a big swig of her gin and I wonder if I should take to it. It seems to preserve people wonderfully. ‘Patricia’s father conducted the service at their wedding, and her mother was there too, my aunt Mary. My own mother was dead by then. Aunt Mary was a funny old bat, a religious maniac.’ She preens herself, passing a red-nailed hand across her golden cap of hair. ‘Women aged so quickly in those days. Bobbing and crossing herself at the wedding she was, on her knees when everyone else was up singing hymns.’

  ‘I’m going to meet Anthony Agnew,’ I say, though it’s only this minute that I’ve thought of doing that. ‘I’m going to have a talk with him.’

  ‘Whatever for?’ Veronica sounds quite annoyed.

  ‘I think he may have something to tell me about Henry Nanther.’

  ‘Why on earth? He died years before Tony was born.’

  I am saved from answering by David’s coming into the room with the wine bottle. Galahad is still crying. ‘That’s right, darling,’ says Veronica. ‘Shut the door on him and let him get on with it. It’s the only way.’

  It’s extraordinary the smug satisfaction people like her derive from being unkind to babies. I ask her about her aunt Clara. Was she at that wedding?

  ‘She may have been. I don’t remember. She certainly wasn’t asked to mine and nor was Helena. We’d quite enough family, Roger and I, without asking those two funny old things.’

  ‘I gather Clara wanted to be a doctor.’

  Veronica laughs. ‘Then want must have been her master. Goodness me, women didn’t do that in those days.’

  ‘Do you know if she was particularly interested in her father’s work? Maybe even in her father himself? Would she have taken away some of his – writings, after she was dead?’

  ‘Are you asking me? I haven’t the faintest idea. Would you get me another gin, David? It will help me to sleep if the child keeps up that racket.’

  The racket is still going on when we leave. David says he’s not sure if fetching his mother over was the best thing, but what was he to do? Jude promises to ask Lorraine if she will help out temporarily until Georgie gets better, something that everyone says will happen when the pregnancy’s three months old.

  Next morning I phone Caroline. She’s there to answer, as I suppose she mostly is, but she doesn’t sound pleased to hear from me. ‘Meet my dad?’ she says, and then, as if their home is in Tasmania or the Urals, ‘You’d have to come all the way out here. He couldn’t come to you.’

  ‘When?’

  She’s taken aback by this simple direct question. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Monday?’

  ‘Monday’s the spring bank holiday,’ she says.

  ‘Would that matter? Are you going out somewhere?’

  ‘We don’t go out unless it’s to the doctor’s or the hospital. I go to work mornings.’

  Her father is old, she tells me again. He’s had a stroke and he’s only got one leg and he ought not to be upset. But at last she gives in and I make a date for Monday afternoon. Jude has her own hospital appointment on Tuesday and of course I’ll go with her. Meanwhile, now, today, I have to phone the aide and tell him – what? Yes or no? It’s almost certainly yes, isn’t it?

  I really want more time, but of course I can’t expect that. I said by the end of the week and it’s Friday now. How much easier writing Henry’s biography would be, how much better in every respect, if I had quiet and peace and leisure to do it in. If I could take time to find precisely the right word and phrase, the original metaphor, if I could stare at the page for long minutes, for half an hour, then get up and walk around the house, thinking. But I shan’t be able to do these things if I say yes today, I shall restrict myself to three or at most four hours in the mornings, and if the House sits, not on Fridays at all. And the galloping of tiny feet and yells from tiny lungs may be around too…

  But I need the money. I need the seventy odd pounds a day four or five times a week. It sounds pathetic, doesn’t it, when you consider some people’s salaries. I push all this out of my mind, it’s still only eleven in the morning. I think about Tony Agnew, the ex-major who had a good war from which he came out intact, and a bad peace when he lost a leg. What sort of a man is this one-time soldier and vendor of cars who feels so sorry for a dead man he never knew that he gets his daughter to put flowers on that man’s grave? And why do it then and not years before when he might have done it himself? I’d like to have some idea, some workable theory, before I get to Reading on Monday afternoon. But everything that presents itself to me is not like Henry. Confident Henry. Tyrannical Henry. Henry, who deserted one woman after another in order to marry a third he happened to like the look of, and when she died married her sister. Henry, who refused to discuss her brother’s condition with his grown-up daughter and who would have been so adamant in his refusal to let her study medicine that she knew it would be useless to ask him. But, on the other hand, Henry whose wife was the only person who ‘could do anything with him’ and whose son described him as the kindest sweetest father in the world. Paradoxical Henry. Henry the enigma.

  Jude’s working at home today. She’s in the living room with a manuscript she doesn’t want to read but has to. I shall take her out somewhere for lunch and then, when we get back, I’ll phone that aide. I’ll tell him no. I’ll refuse the offered peerage and then I can write my book in peace and hope that this one, for once, will sell. But while I’m thinking in this way, while I’m making up my mind, Jude comes in, flushed in the face, her eyes very bright, and says she’s just done a pregnancy test. She shouldn’t, they told her to wait till next week, but she’s done it.

  ‘It’s positive,’ she says. ‘The blue line was dazzling.’

  I kiss her and hold her. I tell her it’s the most wonderful day of my life because this time I know things are going to be fine. This is a designer baby and, in spite of last time, that sort don’t abort themselves. They’ve no defects, they’re perfect, they live serenely inside there and when they come out they’re – well, designer. They’re the Versaces and the Diors of the baby world and they prove it by costing a lot more than your ordinary off-the-peg infant.

  I pick up the phone and dial the magic number, the witching number, and when he comes on ask him to tell the Prime Minister I shall be happy to accept. I shall go back and be thankful.

  35

  He’s a tall thin old man. If he’s shrunk he must have been very tall indeed to start with but I don’t think he’s shrunk. He’s very upright and the only evidence that he has an artificial leg is in a limp which isn’t always
noticeable. It’s a funny thing but a man may be very good looking with a daughter who’s exactly like him yet ugly. We have different standards of beauty for the sexes. Caroline’s rugged face looks good on Tony Agnew, it still looks good, although he’s eighty and can’t have had an easy life. He has answered the door himself, perhaps to show me he’s far from decrepit. Caroline’s there, of course she is, and she’s hovering, in attendance perhaps to see that I ask no questions too painful for her father to answer.

  Why did she want to give me the impression he was a broken old man, scarcely in his right mind? Needing the neighbour to keep an eye on him. Needing her. To justify her existence perhaps. To show me she’s given up her life to a worthy cause. ‘Yes, all right,’ she’d said at last when I’d asked her what time to come. ‘Monday afternoon about three. He’ll be awake by then. He’ll have taken his second lot of tablets. There’s a bus from the station passes this place.’

  I didn’t ask about cabs, I knew there’d be some. She’d been at the window when I got there, watching for me, noting the taxi. There’s something disconcerting about meeting a watcher’s eyes, that watcher known to you, your cousin, and see her turn away without a smile, let alone a wave. Now she wears a resigned expression. It’s out of her hands and she’s powerless to do anything about it. I wish she’d go away and leave us alone, I and this intelligent-looking old man in his tweed suit and waistcoat, but I know there’s no hope of that. Not even when he asks her, very sweetly, if she’ll make us a cup of tea, please, darling girl. She’ll be back and soon.

  Meanwhile, he’s talking about his mother-in-law, Mary Craddock, born Nanther. She always called herself ‘the Honourable’, he recalls. Even in the parish magazine her name appeared as the Hon. Mrs Craddock. She was fanatical about her faith, went to church every day, she could always find Morning Service or Holy Communion somewhere, if not in her husband’s parish. This devotion turned her daughter, his wife, against religion and their wedding was the last time she went to church. He speaks of his wife in a lower tone, almost with reverence. His voice is plummy, very much the army officer’s and, probably, the twenties prep school, and it’s quite different from Caroline’s. She comes back with a tray on which china and spoons have been ungracefully piled, goes out again, returns with another on which are milk in a carton and biscuits in a packet. The sugar, however, is in a bowl but the kind that looks as if it’s made for some other purpose, perhaps for mixing cake ingredients.