The Blood Doctor

by Barbara Vine

  To my surprise she begins talking about her morning at work. The fact that it’s a public holiday makes no difference to her because she’s employed five mornings a week in an old people’s home. The anecdote she tells is concerned with what someone said to someone else about a grave in a cemetery. It could be my cue to ask Tony Agnew about the flowers he wanted put on Henry’s but I can’t get a word in edgeways. It will have to wait. Tony – he asks me to call him this – laughs dutifully, though it was remarkably unfunny, and I take my chance to ask if we can talk about the notebook.

  ‘The notebook?’

  He’s looking at me uncomprehendingly and for a split second I feel a kind of impatient rage. If he’s forgotten its existence I may as well get out of here, go back to the station and home. But he hasn’t, though I can see, as one sometimes notices in very old people, that it’s just slipped out of his mind and he has to make an effort of will to find it and bring it back again. The struggle is made, he sighs and says, ‘You mean Lord Nanther’s book he wrote all those things in?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I take a biscuit. I’m suddenly very hungry, though the biscuits are the kind very young children like, crumbly sandwiches with red jam inside. Caroline is watching me, perhaps expecting praise for the morsel I’ve put in my mouth as if she’d made it herself. ‘Very nice,’ I mumble.

  ‘He wants to know about it, Dad,’ she says. ‘That’s why he’s here.’

  ‘What happened to it?’ I ask.

  Frustration and perplexity mingle in his expression. ‘I don’t know. I’ve been trying to remember but I can’t. I don’t know. I put it with some papers, newspapers. I mean I put it down on this table. On something.’ He screws up his eyes in an effort to remember. I am beginning to see Caroline wasn’t exaggerating. The first impression one gets of this old man is deceptive. He struggles hard to appear well, fit, in control, but after a time he fails. His voice has become fretful. ‘On some magazines,’ he says. ‘That’s where I put it. Then my – my daughter gave me the daily paper. I looked at it, I think, I put it down…’

  ‘Dad, we’ve been through all this.’ She isn’t in the least impatient. ‘You put it down on the book that was on the magazines and I put the lot out for the recycling. I never even saw the notebook, it was hidden by the paper.’

  ‘If you say so, darling girl.’

  ‘Papers are so thick these days, aren’t they?’ she says conversationally. ‘There are so many bits to them.’

  It’s irretrievably lost, I know it is. I can picture it, see it in the recycling box, nestling there and concealed between section one of the Daily Telegraph – I am certain Tony, like Veronica, would be a Telegraph reader – and Woman’s Own, with the sport section and Travel and Appointments all piled on top. And I see it standing on the forecourt of these flats and the dustmen, or whatever they call them these days, lifting it with a grunt at its weight, tipping the lot into one of those trucks they have with latticework sides. The notebook slides out and slips in among newspapers and magazines and biscuit packaging and cornflake packets and e-mail print-outs. It all goes off to recycling heaven where good papers go these days when they die. To be resurrected as dove-grey envelopes with ‘Made from reconstituted paper’ stamped on their flaps.

  ‘Well, it’s too late now,’ I say.

  Tony shakes his head sadly. ‘I’m frightfully sorry. I’m not safe to be let out alone.’

  He’s not safe to be left in alone. Of course I don’t say this. I make the best of things. I have no choice. It’s not exactly Mill’s housemaid putting the only manuscript of Carlyle’s French Revolution in the fire, is it? Just an old man’s jottings, only the key to a mysterious volte-face of character not otherwise to be resolved.

  ‘You read it?’ I say.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Tony looks troubled. ‘I rather wish I hadn’t.

  You’d think I could forget, wouldn’t you, when I forget everything else?’

  ‘Now, Dad,’ says Caroline, ‘you don’t forget everything, you know you don’t.’

  ‘Thank goodness you’re my memory, darling girl.’

  I ask him what was in the book that’s so unforgettable, so apparently painful. ‘I know about remorse,’ he says. ‘I know all about it.’ He’s silent.

  ‘He means Mum,’ says Caroline as if I’m a particularly slow child. ‘He means Mum and the accident. He blames himself, don’t you, Dad?’

  ‘Who else can I blame, my sweet? It was my fault. I killed her, as sure as if I’d put arsenic in her tea.’

  She shrugs. She’s been through all this before. Many times, probably. Maybe she agrees with him. She was twenty-two at the time, so it’s unlikely she was with them in the car. But she knows the facts. There must have been an inquest, even a prosecution, in spite of what Veronica says. Perhaps he had been drinking or he fell asleep at the wheel. To my dismay I see a tear come into each of his eyes and begin a slow trickling progress down his cheeks. She gets up and wipes them away with a tissue she pulls out of a box on the table and says as if he’s deaf or otherwise insensible, ‘He cries. You don’t want to take any notice. Old people do, I see it all the time in the home, especially the ones that have had strokes. I suppose it’s what they mean by second childhood.’

  She’s one of the most insensitive people I’ve come across for a long time – no, Veronica is worse – but Tony doesn’t seem to mind. He smiles waterily. He even thanks her. I’m so disconcerted by all this I wonder if I should go on, and if she’d stayed there, sitting between us, perhaps I wouldn’t have. But something I hadn’t anticipated and wouldn’t have dared hope for happens. The doorbell rings and Caroline goes to answer it. ‘I won’t be a minute,’ she says, and this is true but not, as is often the case with this ambiguous remark, in the way she means. Whoever is at the door is invited in and because Tony and I are in occupation of the living room, taken elsewhere. The kitchen? Her bedroom? I don’t know, but I hear doors shutting and I offer to pour Tony another cup of tea. Remorse, I’m thinking, why remorse? Whose remorse?

  He accepts the tea, smiles again. ‘Tell me about the notebook,’ I say, trying not to let urgency sound in my voice. ‘Tell me what you read.’

  ‘They were sort of articles, pieces like you read in a – well, like in the paper. No, not quite like that.’ He wrinkles his forehead, striving to find the words. ‘Like a confession. But a confession he was making to himself. I felt bad reading them. I felt no one was meant to read them.’

  ‘His daughter Clara read them. She got hold of the notebook after he was dead and kept it all those years.’

  ‘Oh, yes, Clara,’ he says, and he’s deflected. Very willingly deflected, I think. ‘I remember her. Nice old girl. Very clever too, used to be always reading highbrow stuff. She forgave me, not like some of that lot. Vindictive they were. She said no one ought to be blamed for what they didn’t mean to do.’

  I have to get him back to the notebook, tempting as it is to ask who was vindictive. Diana? Veronica? ‘Did Henry Nanther blame himself for what he didn’t mean to do?’

  It’s an inspired guess, for Tony wants to reply and with some vigour. ‘He blamed himself all right, that was the point, that was all over those pieces, in practically every line, but he did mean to do it. That was the bad part, the awful part. He meant to do everything.’

  ‘But do what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He looks downcast. ‘Maybe I’m just not bright enough. I never was all that bright, dear boy. Good soldier, says he modestly, but that’s about it. There was a lot in those bits your great-grandfather wrote down I just didn’t understand. Couldn’t follow, if you get my meaning. What came through was – well, like I said, remorse. I can remember one bit he repeated a few times. It went something like this, “I blighted my posterity in advance.” I remember it because I had to look up some of the words in the dictionary. Not that it made me understand what he was saying.’

  At this point I start hearing voices from the next room and then someone crying
. A door opens and closes, a tap is running in kitchen or bathroom. Tony says, ‘That woman at the door Caroline let in, she lives next door, her husband beats her. She always comes here, telling Caroline her troubles but will she go to the police? Will she heck.’

  Can it be the neighbour who sometimes looks after him? The crying continues and a radio is put on in the next room, presumably to deaden the sound of sobbing. I ask Tony what else he can remember. Of course the notebook has slipped from his mind and thinking I’m talking about the domestic violence next door, he launches into a rambling description of the damage done to his unfortunate neighbour. ‘Henry Nanther’s notebook,’ I say to him.

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes. He’d done something a long time ago. I don’t know what. Caroline would have known, she’s got her mother’s brains, but she never had time to read it. He’d fixed something, done it on purpose, for medical reasons, he said. Well, what he said was, “for the future of medical science”. I remember that phrase. It’s stuck in my mind. But it wasn’t that upset me so much. It was the poor old chap’s remorse and something he said about – well, above love.’

  ‘Love?’

  ‘My God, I wish I’d never put the damn thing down on those magazines, books, whatever they were. I’ve kicked myself a good many times for that. How did I know you’d turn up and be so keen on seeing what was in it?’

  ‘Love,’ I say. ‘What did he say about love?’

  He’s going to cry again, but I can’t help that. ‘He said – he said he’d never known what real love was. He thought he had, he mentioned some chap, I can’t recall the name, some chap who drowned, but that was nothing, he said, to what he felt now, what it was to love someone more than yourself, to wish you could die in their place. He’d never felt like that before, he said, not even over the drowned chap.’ The tears are flowing and the old voice is breaking. ‘And the bad thing was, the awful thing was, that it was him had made sure the one he loved would die while he would go on living… Oh, God, the poor chap, the poor chap…’

  And now because the radio’s been turned off the flat is full of the sound of weeping and sobbing, in here and in the other room. It’s as if the whole world is in tears. I produce tissues for poor old Tony and mop up his face for him. There’s no doubt I have to give up, I can’t ask him any more, I can’t subject him to cruel and unusual punishment. I feel like crying myself. What I do is find a bit of paper in the briefcase I’ve brought with me and make myself write down the things he’s said, or the salient things. Gradually he stops crying, says he’s a fool. What must I think of him? The sounds from the next room have stopped, the front door opens and closes and Caroline comes back.

  ‘You’ve been upsetting him,’ she says like a nanny to the bully of the family. ‘I knew that would happen once my back was turned.’

  But Tony’s no longer upset. He’s probably forgotten what distressed him in the first place and wants to know what brought the neighbour to the door this time.

  ‘He’s blacked her eye. I wanted to call an ambulance but she’ll never let me do anything. She says he really loves her and he’s promised not to do it again. That’s a really nasty eye she’s got.’

  I don’t suppose I shall ever see either of them again. I’m sitting in the train, looking at the notes I made, but I already know the answers to everything. I know what Henry did and why he did it, I think I knew that as soon as Tony talked about blighting his posterity in advance.

  Yet, although I know and have known for the past hour, the full impact of it is only now hitting me as I revert in my mind to the events and the people in his life I feel I now know so well: Richard Hamilton, ‘the chap who drowned’, his mother, the women, Jimmy, Olivia, Eleanor, Edith. Queen Victoria and the royal family, his triumphs, his discoveries, his children. The calculated wickedness. Switzerland and the artless innocent walking tours in the Alps. Blood, blood, all that blood.

  The train comes into Paddington and I go to join the inevitable taxi queue, thinking of Henry. Monstrous Henry.

  36

  I returned to the House nearly two months ago, at the end of July before it rose for the summer recess. No one was invited to watch my entry as Lord Nanther of Lilestone. As a hereditary peer made a life peer I was permitted to take my seat without formal introduction, but Jude was there and, strangely enough, Paul. He asked to come, invited himself. Apparently, he doesn’t object to appointed peers, only to hereditary ones, and he’d prefer what he calls ‘elected lords’ above all. He sat where I thought he’d never sit again, on the steps of the throne, and had quite abandoned that expression of supercilious boredom he wore when last there.

  Lilestone because, as a life peer, I’m obliged to have a territory. Godby no longer belongs to the family, which wouldn’t matter, but I don’t like the idea of using it while other people live at Godby Hall. I thought of Alma. But the Battle of Alma, after which the square was named, was the first in the Crimean War, and Garter will only let you call yourself after a battle if you took part in it (like Montgomery of Alamein and Alexander of Tunis) or, better still for some sinister reason, sacked the place. So I’ve taken Lilestone, the manor of which St John’s Wood was once a part and which remains only in the name of the estate in Lisson Grove. I’ve had my lunch with the Chief Whip, I’ve joined the Party and taken my place on the Government benches, in the second row from the back.

  All this is pleasurable – I remind myself daily of my nostalgia for the place during my banishment – and I’ve even better things to console me, yet life has its downside. What I’ve discovered about Henry hangs over me like a heavy cloud. I feel as I used to when I was younger and had read of some dreadful cruelty or seen some appalling photograph and it lingered in the back of my mind to return, somehow magnified and darkened, at times when I was alone in the day or wakeful at night. So it is now with Henry’s act. I’ve so far told no one about it. Perhaps I feel – foolishly, no doubt – that it’s unwise to tell such a terrible thing to a pregnant woman, that henceforward her life should be serene and untroubled. As I’m sure it is. As for me, it’s wonderful to see her so happy, so full of joy now she’s carrying two babies. And, strangely, after all my dread of renewed fatherhood, the twins’ coming is also consoling. When I experience Henry’s act of violence resurfacing before I sleep or in a dream, I remind myself of the two children I shall see grow up healthy and beautiful. Jude is nearly five months pregnant now, everything is fine, and all my dismay is gone. They will be born next January, and somehow I know they’ll be born safely.

  We can afford to stay in this house, we shall manage. I look back and ask myself how I dared complain, even in my heart, about the £5,000 the twins cost to conceive. Jude will go back to work after they’re born, I shall have my expenses, stand for election if there’s ever a question of election, we’ll have a nanny and I shall try my hand at journalism while I’m baby-tending in the mornings. I’ll do all the reviewing I can get hold of. For I’ve published my last biography and my life of Henry Nanther will never be written. I’ve known that for months now, faced it perhaps in the hope that abandoning his biography and trying to put all my research behind me will exorcise the images and the infamy. It hasn’t happened that way.

  Having told myself sparing Jude because she’s pregnant is positively Victorian and something Henry might have done – hypocritical Henry – I’ve nevertheless considered telling it all to Paul first. If he’d listen, and I think he would. There were other possibilities: Lachlan, for instance, but I feel sensitive about anyone outside the family knowing; David, except that I don’t think he’d much care, and I haven’t the nerve to tell John Corrie, even in a letter, he’s a bit too closely affected even if he is a scientist.

  My relationship with my son has undergone many changes for the better in these past months. He says that as an only child himself, he wants a big family one day, but because he can’t seriously begin that yet, two little sisters will do very we’ll for a start. I could hardly believe my ears when he said tha
t perhaps we’ll let him baby-sit sometimes or look after them in the daytime. I never dreamed he had these aspirations. But perhaps I never bothered to find out. Anyway, we’re moving towards a new closeness – Jude and he are already there – and I seriously thought of making him the recipient of – well, Henry’s retrospective confidence.

  He’s in London this weekend and it’s likely he’ll look in. This evening perhaps. I’m half expecting him and waiting, not in our living room, but in my study where all the Henry memorabilia is spread or stacked on the dining table in front of me. And in the middle of it, on its stand, the red painted egg I was given when I went to Tenna. Jude has gone round to the Croft-Joneses, in the car because I don’t care for her walking home after dark, even in these safe streets. Georgie is over her pregnancy sickness, and is as mountainous as she was last time. If it’s a girl they’ve given up the idea of Yseult and intend to call her Brangaene, after Isolde’s attendant in the opera.

  I’ve also set a tray on the table with a bottle of whisky on it, a jug of water and two glasses, though I don’t feel like drinking anything myself. Not for the first time since I talked to Tony Agnew I find myself holding the egg in my left hand, palpating it like worry beads, though I’ve no memory of how it got there. If I keep on with this, I’ll wear all the red paint off.

  Even if he does come perhaps I won’t tell Paul. Perhaps I won’t tell anyone, ever.