by Barbara Vine
‘He kept a woman in a house in Primrose Hill.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Through that letter from Clara and then the woman’s granddaughter. I’m planning to meet the granddaughter in a couple of weeks’ time. At the moment I don’t know any more than that her name was Jemima Ashworth, though she was known as Jimmy. She lived in a little house in Chalcot Road which he bought for her or more likely rented for her.’
Jude asks if Henry left any indication of Jimmy Ashworth’s existence in his diary or letters, and I tell her about the pentagrams.
‘I’m not sure if I know what pentagrams are.’
‘Sort of stars, asterisks. You take a pen or pencil and draw a diagonal going upwards, then another going downwards to make an angle of forty-five degrees, another up to cut halfway across the first one, then across, down and up, until you’ve made a five-pointed star.’ I show her on the sheet of paper we keep for shopping lists pinned to a cork board. ‘Henry has pentagrams in his diary more or less twice a week for nine years, starting in autumn 1874.’ Immediately there comes into my mind the memory of hearing about women doing this to mark the days their periods are due or actually taking place and I feel the blood mount into my face. Jude doesn’t seem to notice. It suddenly occurs to me that the date the first of those pentagrams appears coincides with Caroline Hamilton’s marriage in Aberdeen. Is it only coincidence or something more deliberate? Is Henry saying, ‘I can’t have her, that’s all over, so I may as well forget morality and get myself a mistress’?
We’ve carried the dishes into the kitchen and it’s my turn to clear up. With a dishwasher there’s not much clearing up necessary, especially if you’re lazy and put the saucepans in as I do. Jude’s looking at the calendar and has turned its pages back to February and there is Mrs Caspar Raven. Underneath the reproduced portrait is the legend saying Sargent painted it in 1894. She’d have been thirty-four or thirty-five by then and she’s a stunningly beautiful woman of the same type as Jude (a fact I point out to her) but of course not as slim as Jude is. Olivia Raven is fashionably plump with large full breasts and rounded arms and soft snowy shoulders, dressed in oyster-coloured satin, low-cut and with a collar of pearls at her white throat. Her waist is tiny, a narrow column, encircled by a lilac sash. Her hair is Jude’s, chestnut going on black, copious and wavy, piled up with a stray curly tress pendent over one shoulder. Sargent has done wonderful things with her luminous skin and her moist red lips. She looks wealthy, spoilt, cosseted and, not surprisingly, loved.
‘She could do with losing a couple of stone,’ says Jude, ‘but I suppose they liked women like that. She is lovely. Why didn’t Henry marry her?’
‘Who knows?’ I say. ‘She had a lot of money as well as looks. He wasn’t rich by the Bathos’ standards – her father was Sir John Batho – but he was good looking and a knight and a physician to the royal family.’
‘Have you got a photograph of him when he was young?’
‘There’s his wedding photograph. Is forty-eight young?’
Jude grins and says it’ll do. ‘What did Jimmy Ashworth look like?’
I’ve no idea. Will this granddaughter of hers know? At the moment I know practically nothing about this side of Henry’s life. The granddaughter isn’t called Ashworth but Kimball, Mrs Laura Kimball, so she may be Jimmy’s son’s daughter or her daughter’s daughter, and that son or daughter may have been born pre-Henry or post-Henry. In a fortnight’s time I hope to find out, while being rather afraid Mrs Kimball may by now be a very old lady indeed. The handwriting on her letter was shaky and spidery. Her daughter I spoke to on the phone said Mother was wonderful for her age, which I heard as a warning of what to expect.
I go into my study and fetch Henry’s diary and his wedding photograph, this last never framed but still in its pristine cover of embossed cream-coloured card, threaded through with white satin ribbon and with a silver curlicue design on its corners. It wasn’t in one of the chests but among Great-aunt Clara’s possessions that came to my father when she died. Jude and I sit down on the sofa and I show her the diary with its pentagrams and together we look at the photograph. The date is October 1884. They were married in Bloomsbury, Edith’s parents lived in Bloomsbury, in Keppel Street, a pleasant enough district but still a far cry from Grosvenor Square where Sir John Batho’s home was.
Henry looks very handsome in his morning coat, tall and thin, clean-shaven then. The moustache came later. His hair is plentiful and still dark, though there may be grey which doesn’t show in the photograph. Jude says his face reminds her of the first President Bush and I can see what she means. If I didn’t know how old he was I’d guess him to be ten years younger, but I expect they touched up photographs in those days just as they do now. His bride is overdressed in quantities of white satin embroidered with pearls and her veil is held in place on an elaborate structure of blonde curls by a pearl tiara. She carries what I suppose is a Prayer Book bound in white velvet with a long ribbon marker hanging down against her crinoline and a spray of white roses somehow fastened to it. Her mouth is full-lipped, her nose retroussé, her chin rather too small but she has fine eyes, large and dark.
Henry and Edith, my great-grandparents. Blood-obsessed Henry, the haematologist, and his bride less than half his age. After the pictures are taken, after he has changed into whatever travelling costume middle-aged men wore in 1884 (I shall have to find out) and she into her ‘going away’ dress with bonnet and gloves, they are off to Rome and Naples on their honeymoon. The same destinations, incidentally, as he had planned for his honeymoon with Edith’s dead sister. Presumably, in those pre-winter sports days, Austria and Switzerland would have been too cold in February.
‘What happened to Jimmy Ashworth?’ Jude wants to know.
‘Discarded,’ I say. ‘Sadly, that’s what happened to kept women. It’s very unlikely Edith ever knew of her existence.’
‘I’m getting to dislike Henry.’
I smile and say that though he may have been charming, he wasn’t a likeable man. But he was nicer once, before the events of 1879. These were both terrible and wonderful. We’ve all heard stories of people who’ve missed a flight by getting to the airport two minutes late and an hour later the plane’s crashed, with no survivors. Something like that had happened to Henry when he was in Scotland with Hamilton for hogmanay five years before he was married.
4
No one shall be a member of the House of Lords, says the Bill, by virtue of a hereditary peerage. The holder of such a peerage shall not be disqualified by virtue of that peerage from voting at elections to the House of Commons, or being elected as a member of that House. When the Bill becomes an Act it shall come into force at the end of the Session of Parliament at which it is passed and it’s to be called the House of Lords Act, 1999. And that’s all, a very simple Bill. Getting it through, though, will be far from simple.
Some peers, and not necessarily those with peerages dating back many hundreds of years, see themselves as having a God-given right to rule. Not that they can do much ruling in there, not that any of us can. With the Government having such a huge majority in the Commons almost anything we decide on can be overturned. What we can do is delay and revise. No doubt, it’s fine to be a life peer. As yet it’s the media alone, muttering and growling about appointees and prime minister’s cronies, who feebly question their right to be where they are. That may change when the militant hereditaries sharpen their weapons. It’s still something to be a hereditary whose ancestor was a pal of Charles I or married to a mistress of Charles II, but it’s all so long ago everyone’s forgotten how it came about in the first place. We, the hereditaries whose peerages have come to us through great-grandfathers and grandfathers being ambassadors, colonial governors, field marshals, admirals, cabinet ministers and, as in my case, a royal doctor, we are the ones who fall between two stools, our peerages neither hallowed by time nor redeemed by the knowledge that we were personally chosen.
I say all
this to Paul over lunch in the Peers’ Guest Dining Room. I wouldn’t have dreamt of holding forth on the subject if he hadn’t asked me. He seems not to like what he’s heard, a reaction I’ve often noticed in him when he’s been insistent about getting information. It’s as if he expects the narrator to improve unpalatable facts for his sake. Someone – was it T. S. Eliot? – said that human beings can’t stand too much reality. Paul can’t and, as always, I wonder if it’s because Sally and I split up when he was only six and if that was the first reality he taught himself not to face.
‘I shall never call myself Lord Nanther,’ he says.
I tell him with a facetiousness he brings out in me that he may change his mind about that, he’s got a long time to wait as I’m only forty-four.
‘Titles will go,’ he says. ‘That’ll be the logical next step. You’ll get what happens in Europe where lots of people are counts or whatever but everyone else has forgotten it and only snobs call them by their titles.’
‘You may be right.’
‘Yes, well, I’m right in two senses. I’m right when I say you shouldn’t have a voice in here just because your great-grandfather wrote out a few prescriptions for a royal highness and it’s right that this year will see an end to it.’
‘You have a harsh way of putting it.’
Paul smiles rather grimly. He has a harsh way of putting most things, he enjoys reproof, even mild reproof, and seems to flourish on it. He loves being told off. I dare say I’m quite wrong in saying his skin is as thick as a rhinoceros’s, psychologists would tell me that’s only a carapace over his sensitivity, to which I’d reply that he could fool me. Paul is nearly nineteen and clever, a student at the University of Bristol, and with his armoured outside, quick grasp, it seems to me, of everything he turns his mind to and readiness for the fray, he’ll make an ideal politician one day. By then, to get into the House of Commons, he won’t even have to renounce a peerage.
I order coffee and ask him how his mother is. All right, he says, or so he supposes. Sally has been living for the past year in a self-supporting community in the Outer Hebrides and Paul says he never writes letters, only e-mails, which, he says, puts her outside his remit. No one, anyway, could expect him to travel to a remote Scottish island in April even if he could afford the train fare. We asked him to Alma Villa for the Easter holiday, it is after all his home, but he prefers staying in a friend’s flat in Ladbroke Grove, something I understand perfectly.
‘Can I have pudding?’ he says, like a little boy.
It moves me, just as it does on the rare, the very rare, occasions when he calls me dad. I want to hug him the way I did before Sally left and took him away, but that of course is out of the question now and for ever. The sweet trolley comes round and he has profiteroles in chocolate sauce. Paul is taller than I am and much better looking. I notice the other diners, peers and their wives and women peers and husbands, stealing glances at him. There’s a former prime minister sitting at a table under the portrait of Henry VII. He’s spotted Paul, recognized him and favoured him with a wave and a nod. Thank God Paul smiles back and dips his head. I suspect it’s ironic but no one else does.
The time is approaching a quarter past two and things are speeding up because the House sits at two-thirty. Everything is run with exquisite precision in here, the organization superb and nothing neglected or forgotten; coffee served in plenty of time for peers to drink it, pay their bills – or pay them tomorrow or next week – and amble off towards the Peers’ Lobby and the Chamber. No rush, no urgency and no unpunctuality. Maria has passed our table, given me the smile that indicates nothing could be further from her thoughts than expecting me to pay before next week, and Farouk has removed Paul’s plate. We get up.
Last time I brought Paul in here he was sixteen, shyer and less confident than he is now. The doorkeepers called him ‘the Honourable Paul Nanther’, gave him the book to sign and showed him to the steps of the throne, where peers’ eldest sons sit by right.
In one way I’d like Paul to come into the Chamber. I’d be proud of him sitting on that step, which is really a padded seat, his back against that towering structure, such a bright gold it hurts the eyes to look at it for long, beneath that spiritual oddity the Cloth of Estate and below the hallowed chair where only the reigning monarch may be seated. After half an hour, after question time; I’d catch his eye and we’d go out together. On the other hand, I’d be afraid he might do something, misbehave himself in some way. Not shout, not make some inflammatory statement so that he had to be bundled out, but put his head in his hands or favour the House with that look he’s bestowing on me now as we walk down the corridor towards the Prince’s Chamber, supercilious, critical, slightly incredulous. It tells me he’s rejecting the steps of the throne this time. It’s very likely his last chance but he won’t care about that.
‘I’d better go, Dad,’ he says, and of course my heart goes out to him. I want him to stay. That I’ve got an appointment at four with two people I really want to see alone weighs nothing with me. I ask him if he’s sure he doesn’t want to come into the Chamber.
‘Not much point, is there?’ he says in a sulky way. ‘I soon shan’t be able to,’ he complains, as if I’m personally responsible for the reform bill.
I walk downstairs with him and outside the Peers’ Entrance renew our invitation to come and stay at Alma Villa whenever he likes. Thanks, he says, but he’s fine where he is and spoils a perfectly reasonable form of refusal by adding that he doesn’t suppose Jude and I want anyone else around. I’ve noticed that lately he’s begun talking about us as if we were still on our honeymoon or a couple of teenage lovers who’ve just moved in together. The last I see of him he’s standing in front of the lavishly robed statue of George V on the far side of the street, giving it I suppose one of his incredulous looks. But he has his back to me and I can’t see his face.
I call in at the Printed Paper office, pick up yesterday’s Hansard and go into the Chamber during the first starred question, seating myself behind Lord Quirk and in front of Lord Northbourne. I’m not very interested in the question so I discreetly read the record of yesterday’s proceedings. You may read in here so long as it’s not a book or a newspaper, which are severely frowned on and may be confiscated. Hansard is all right. In 1877 a Treasury grant had been made to the Hansard firm enabling them to employ four reporters and report more fully than had been the case when the volumes were mostly compiled from newspaper reports. Henry was introduced in 1896 but it wasn’t for another thirteen years that Hansard became the Official Report and its text ‘full’. By then Henry was dead. Still, the relevant ‘Parliamentary Debates’ are quite adequate to show me the few times he spoke after his maiden speech. I look up and picture him somewhere on the spiritual side when the Tories were in power, proud of himself perhaps but a little uneasy too because the peers on either side of him are of ancient lineage and his peerage is of first creation. Is it only the English or only Europeans who rate blood (genes now, Henry, DNA) more highly than achievement?
When I’d decided to write Henry’s biography I advertised in The Times, the Spectator, the Author and a good many other places, for descendants of people who’d known him, who possessed letters from him or letters and documents in which he was mentioned. The advertisement I put in The Times is still going and may still, I’m hoping, summon up further information. Of course I’ve had dozens of responses. It’s been largely a matter of sifting through them for what’s useful and what isn’t. Among the people who replied were the two women who are coming in this afternoon. They didn’t sound likely readers of The Times but the younger one explained she was told about it by her son.
I’ll have to go back into the Chamber sometime, but not yet. The Salisbury Room beckons and I make my way quietly down there and sink into one of the slippery leather chairs. These chairs, especially the low black ones, seem designed to keep an occupant from falling asleep, their backs being too short for comfort and their seats too lon
g. A bearded Lord Salisbury, or a bust of him, looks through me towards the river and St Thomas’s Hospital, and that reminds me that no one’s allowed to die in the House. It’s supposed to be something to do with the Queen’s coroner having to preside at the inquest on anyone dying in a royal palace and that being too difficult or too expensive or, as my son might say, whatever. Anyone who does die is carted off by ambulance to St Thomas’s and pronounced dead on arrival.
I read my Hansard and then I read my Guardian as devotedly as if I sat on the Government benches. The Guardian reminds its readers of the Salisbury Convention – appropriate for this room – which postulates that any intention a political party presents in its manifesto shall be taken as the will of the people if that party is voted into government. Somehow, I don’t think that rule is going to cut much ice with the opposition when it comes to the sitting and voting rights of hereditary peers, though the Government plainly set out that it intended to abolish their parliamentary right.
I think back over the records of my forebears. Henry did his bare duty, made a maiden speech, came in sometimes, occasionally spoke, and Alexander seldom attended. Of course he was only fourteen when he inherited but, though living in England for a while after coming out of the army in 1918, he seems to have shown his face in here only once before he went off to the South of France, and only a couple of times in the thirties. He must have found it trying, not being permitted to smoke in the Chamber. My father was dutiful. It’s an advantage to be a lawyer in Parliament and he made an eloquent maiden speech presenting the humane case for the abolition of the death penalty. Afterwards he came in regularly once a week, though he never said any more, apart from occasionally intervening with a supplementary at question time. I’ve attended regularly, but I doubt if I’ve contributed anything memorable or that my absence, after the Bill becomes the Act, will be much noticed.
