by Barbara Vine
‘Wouldn’t she have said so before? Years before? After all, even though Victorian women were kept in the dark about what their husbands did, about most things really, she must have known what his speciality was. She must have known what his books were about.’
‘Maybe she did say so before,’ I say. ‘Maybe she said what a coincidence it was that the very disease he specialized in was in her own family. It’s likely though that knowing her own brother Lionel was healthy made her think she couldn’t pass it on. And Henry would have encouraged this belief. It wasn’t in his interest to have his wife think she might give birth to a “bleeder”. She might have refused him sex.’
Jude asks if women could do that in the nineteenth century when that promise to obey a husband was taken very seriously, but I tell her we’re talking about the last decade of that century when things were changing fast. Presumably, Henry wouldn’t have raped her. Not even he would have done that. Besides, she may have refused him for a while and that accounts for the four-year gap between Clara and Alexander.
‘But she came back to him,’ Jude says. ‘She must have regretted not keeping up her abstinence after Alexander was born.’
‘If she did she wasn’t alone. Henry regretted it too. “Regret” isn’t the word. He felt the most bitter remorse.’
Jude’s fists are clenched by now. She opens her left hand and I see she has crushed the Tenna egg into a crumpled mass. She looks at it as if she’s had no idea what she was doing.
*
We’re in bed and Jude’s asleep. Her head is on my shoulder and her right arm round my chest. At the end of August she ‘quickened’, as Edith might have said, and as her swelling belly rests against my hip I feel the twins move, what was at first the merest tiny flutter increasing now to kicks and thrusts. Tears prick my eyes. Did Henry feel his children close against him as they shifted and settled in the womb and if he did, was he moved at all? A hundred years later Edith’s embryos would have been removed and the haemophilia-free ones selected and George would never have been born.
It can’t have been anything like this that Henry hoped to attain by his study of his son’s disease. Designer babies would have been beyond his imagination. Did he intend experimenting on the child? Trying out various methods of stopping the bleeding? ‘Don’t,’ Jude would say. If he did it’s fairly certain he never carried them out. Because, almost from the first, he loved George. Late in life he learned what love was and it must have struck him with a kind of horror and terrible pain. Even his feeling for Richard Hamilton hadn’t been like this.
Why he loved this sick child when he felt nothing much for his heir and his daughters no one can tell. He hadn’t cared much for any woman and what he’d have called love would have been a powerful sexual attraction. It must have seemed to him a terrible irony that this boy he had spent years striving to bring into existence, this summit of all his hopes, was rendered quite useless for his purposes by so intangible and indefinable a thing as love. A mere emotion had destroyed all his aims and ambitions. But he was helpless against it. Circumstances had controlled him. Circumstances had won. He loved George with a passionate, consuming love so that he was unable to discipline him as he had his other children, unable to utter a cross word to him, scarcely able to separate himself even for a few hours from this beloved child.
As to the magnum opus, that would never be written. While he saw his son suffer, his unstoppable bleeds, his swollen joints, his scarcely to be endured pain, his weakness, he could no longer even turn his thoughts to haemophilia except in respect of the boy. And he had caused all this! By his deliberate long-drawn out efforts, his calculation, he had brought this suffering and this no doubt early death on the sole creature he had ever cared for. And his life’s work had become horrible to him, its details to be banished from his mind.
Remorse. This was what so cruelly upset Tony Agnew. I’ve not much doubt all of it appeared in the last essays in the vanished notebook, the outpourings of Henry Nanther’s heart as he wrote down something very different from the great work he’d planned. Why did Clara abstract it? And from where? Not one of the trunks, surely. Perhaps she found it in one of those secret desk drawers so dear to the Victorian heart. Or even lying open on his desk, abandoned by him when he was taken suddenly ill with his fatal heart attack.
Henry had expelled her from his study when she dared to ask him if haemophilia was what was wrong with her brother. Did she keep it to gloat in later years over her father’s remorse? Hardly. She wasn’t like that. We don’t know what was in the rest of the notebook. It may have contained confessions of his now regretted unkindness to the rest of his family, even a description of how he set about tracing and finding Edith, and Clara kept it to prove to herself that her father had been sorry for his treatment of her and her sisters in the end. But, no. She hated him for what he had done to her brother and perhaps to her sisters too. She kept it not for gloating but as evidence. For a future biographer? For me? She intended to tell Alexander, the heir, the ‘head of the family’ She intended to tell him and perhaps to show him, but Alexander died first.
Henry watched George slowly dying and he knew that whatever self-congratulation he may have gone in for in the past, he was powerless to help him. Truly, he had murdered his posterity in advance. Would his daughters go through this when they had sons? He’d have done better, he must sometimes have thought, to have killed Edith and then himself on their wedding night. But he hadn’t, he had carried out a monstrous pursuit in the name of science, more properly called self-glorification. And this was the result.
He didn’t last long after George’s death. His poor heart staggered on for a few months and then it finally broke. In agreement with Tony, I pity him too, I could weep for him. If I were a sentimentalist as well as melodramatic, I too would go over to Kensal Green and put flowers on his grave.
I gently shift my body from under Jude’s and the bouncing twins. My arm is numb and I’ve got what feels like a frozen shoulder. I’ll tell her in the morning what I’ve known to be true ever since I talked to Tony. I can’t write Henry’s life. Foolishly perhaps I can’t face other people knowing what my great-grandfather did. I can’t set it all down and have what I’d once have given a lot for, some Sunday newspaper offering to serialize the more sensational bits. The idea of people discussing it with me makes me. shiver. Henry has jinxed me, I should never have begun on his biography.
Bloody Henry. Poor bloody Henry.