by Barbara Vine
Back to the Chamber for half an hour during which I strive to attend to a series of amendments I don’t much like and will vote against if any of them are brought to a division. I’m struggling not to fall asleep. Sleeping is all right for the over-sixties but frowned upon if you’re younger. If you happen to be seated behind a minister and you sink into a doze a doorkeeper will come and politely wake you up, reminding you that as soon as the minister gets up to speak you too will appear on television, open-mouthed and snoring.
At five to four I go downstairs to sit on the throne-like chair to the right of the fireplace and await the coming of Mrs Kimball and Mrs Forsythe, the two women who replied to my ad. I’ve a picture of what they’ll be like in my mind, Mrs Kimball small and round and white-haired, her daughter the same shape but with brown permed hair, both of them dressed by Marks and Spencer and both shy and overawed by this place. By my age I ought to know better than to do this because I’m always wrong. This time I’m more wrong than usual. The revolving doors swing open in a confident manner, the way they do when Lord Cranborne or Lady Blatch walk through, and in come two tall thin gaunt women with aggressive expressions, each clutching a briefcase. There must be a minimum of sixteen years between them and more like twenty-three, seeing they are mother and daughter, but they look much the same age, sisters perhaps.
We shake hands. Mrs Kimball is probably eighty but she’s as upright as a girl of eighteen and her hair is dyed a savage black which makes a curious contrast with her pale wrinkled face and the dark-red lipstick she wears. Her daughter is a little less wrinkled and her hair is dyed a rich shade of chestnut. Both wear raincoats, long, dark and belted, over afternoon dresses of flowered silk, one wine red and white, the other various shades of green and white. The doorkeeper takes their coats and I ask him if he wants to put their briefcases through the X-ray machine but he says, ‘Not as the ladies are your guests, my Lord,’ which leaves me with mixed feelings. Along with my gratitude for the courtesy and consideration of the staff in this place, goes a kind of shameful hope that the doorkeeper doesn’t think Mrs Kimball and Mrs Forsythe are related to me.
They are more unbending than they looked at first. And shyer. The vast cloakroom with pegs labelled for such august figures as the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales overwhelms most people and Laura and Janet (which they ask me to call them) are no exceptions. Janet Forsythe wants to know if ‘Prince Philip’ ever comes in and I have to tell her I’ve never seen him except at State Openings when he accompanies the Queen. Does he use the peg then, she wants to know, but that’s something I can’t answer. We go up the great staircase, another awesome experience for newcomers, and I point out the armorial bearings on the walls, painted there by a family of artists who hand this function down from father to son.
Their rather gaunt faces, regular features and olive skin remind me of someone but I can’t think who. Probably a photograph I’ve seen or something on television. We’re bombarded with images these days. It’s at this point, as we cross the Prince’s Chamber and I have to tell them to keep their voices down and walk quickly across the blue carpet, that Laura, stepping on to the red carpet once more, tells me she’s got her grandmother’s marriage certificate to show me. She’s so insistent I see it at once that we all sit down on one of the red-leather benches opposite the painting of the Chamber in former times when a lot of peers wore silk hats. For a moment, no more than a couple of seconds, I wonder if she’s going to give me proof that Henry married Jimmy Ashworth in a secret ceremony, thus making his marriage to Edith Henderson bigamous and his descendants’ claims to sit in this House fraudulent. But the certificate is not world-shaking at all. It merely shows that Jemima Ann Ashworth, aged twenty-eight, daughter of George Edward Ashworth of Somers Town, was married to Leonard William Dawson, aged thirty-three, porter, of Lisson Grove, Marylebone, at the Church of St Mary-le-bone, on 30 October 1883.
‘My mother was Mary Dawson. She was born the following year,’ says Laura.
And where was Henry? Transferring his affections from Eleanor to Edith, I suppose. Without the diary, which is in Alma Villa, I can’t recall when the pentagrams stop, though I know it’s sometime in 1883. Laura asks if I’d like to ‘copy down’ the details on the marriage certificate but I tell her I can do better than that and I take it round the corner to the nearest photocopier while the two of them stand behind me and watch the process. Then we go into the Peers’ Guest Dining Room.
It’s intimidating, no doubt about it, and even more so when, as today, Baroness Thatcher is in there, presiding over a tea table of attentive men. Laura and Janet stare as if they’d hitherto doubted she had a real existence. A table for the three of us is secured and I order a pot of Indian tea with sandwiches, teacakes and pastries. According to the screen up on the wall, we’re still on amendment 32, a controversial one I don’t like, and its mover is on his feet. Laura asks if I’d like her to tell me everything she knows about her grandmother’s romance (her word) with Dr Nanther and, just as I enthusiastically agree, the white letters DIVISION come up on the screen with the on and off flashing picture of a red bell and the division bells start to clatter.
Like the hereditary who hadn’t been in for forty years but with more justification, Janet wants to know what that awful noise is. Is it a fire? I do my best to explain, tell them I’ll be back in five minutes, and as I get up the tea and sandwiches come.
Laura recovers her equilibrium, says she’ll be mother and not to worry, I’m to be just as long as I like. We used to have six minutes to get into the lobbies but, after pressure was exerted by government peers, the time was extended to eight minutes. That’s ample for me, I’m against the amendment, so I go through the Not Content lobby where I don’t even have to give my name, for I’m recognized before I reach the clerk who’s crossing us off. The Labour whip at the door grins as I go by and whispers, ‘More to come,’ which doesn’t affect me as I don’t take the Labour Party whip, though I suddenly find myself thinking of doing so for my remaining time in here. Back in the dining room, where a great exodus has taken place, it seems I’m the first to get back. Laura and Janet are contentedly eating cucumber sandwiches and already look much better-tempered.
‘Was everything all right?’ Janet asks.
Uncertain of what she means, I nod and smile and ask Laura to start on Jimmy Ashworth’s history. She produces something else from the envelope that contains the marriage certificate. It’s one of those postcards that were popular with the Victorians and Edwardians and which were the forerunners of World War Two pin-ups and today’s newspaper pictures of models. Famous Beauties of the Day, they could be called. I remember seeing one of Lily Langtry. Jimmy Ashworth (the name under the photograph is Jemima ‘Jimmy’ Ashworth) isn’t at all like Mrs Langtry, but quite a lot like Olivia Batho and thus, I suppose, Jude. It’s a perfectly proper photograph, though the satin gown she wears is cut rather low, exposing a formidable cleavage into which ropes of pearls disappear. She’s also wearing elbow-length white gloves and a corsage of lush flowers of the lily and stephanotis type. She has more pearls in her elaborately dressed dark hair and bracelets over the gloves.
‘She has a very sweet expression, don’t you think?’ Laura asks.
I agree, I can’t very well do anything else, but if I’d been honest I’d have said the sweetness is tempered by calculation and by something else. Not greed, not the ‘hardness’ one might expect, but – and I see it rather to my own dismay – despair. ‘Desperation’ might be the better word, it’s not quite as profound as despair. Jimmy Ashworth is very young in this picture, a good way off twenty-eight, and life isn’t holding out great promise for her, no matter that she’s got her photograph into the Famous Beauties series. I ask Laura how my great-grandfather met her and in her reply I detect that the whitewashing of all concerned has begun.
I can understand people putting the best possible construction, for the ears of outsiders, on the behaviour of their husbands or wives or chil
dren or even parents. It’s natural not to want to be closely associated with cheating or lying or even with failure and thriftlessness. But a grandmother? Does it really matter how one’s grandmother behaved? Is it of any account, at the end of the twentieth century, that one’s grandmother in the nineteenth was less chaste than she might have been? That she was a gold digger? A kept woman? Some people would be proud of it, seeing it as an interesting feature of their ancestry. Not Laura Kimball, who begins by telling me Henry was taken to Jimmy’s ‘apartments’ by a friend who introduced them. Could Henry have seen the Famous Beauties postcard? This was some time in 1874 when Jimmy was nineteen. I ask where the apartments were but Laura doesn’t know. All this, she explains, was told her by her own mother, whom I at once suspect of doing a good deal of doctoring of the facts on her own account. What very likely happened was that the friend had originally ‘kept’ Jimmy, had possibly taken her off the streets, and when he grew tired of her – or planned to marry? – passed her on to Henry.
Henry was ‘madly in love’ with Jimmy and, of course, she with him. ‘They were made for each other,’ says Laura. ‘Dr Nanther desperately wanted to marry her, he proposed over and over, but she always said no.’
I asked why this was, considering they were in love.
‘Dr Nanther’s father was against it. He absolutely forbade his son to have anything to do with my grandmother. That was why they had to meet in secret. That was why he took that little house in the back of beyond – well, it was then – so that it wouldn’t get back to his father.’
I nod sympathetically. There is no point at all in telling her that by 1874 Henry was thirty-eight years old, hadn’t received an allowance from his father for more than a decade and, most significantly, the old mill-owner who was bedbound and paralysed through stroke two years before, had died in 1873. Henry’s reason for not marrying Jimmy Ashworth was that men of his standing didn’t marry women in her position in the 1870s. In their eyes there were three sexes in the world, men, good women and fallen women. The good woman in his life was Olivia Batho, she was up on a pedestal, while Jimmy, if she’d ever been on one, had fallen off it long ago.
If she thought she could get away with it, Laura would probably try to persuade me that relations between Jimmy and Henry were entirely chaste, a matter of Henry occasionally coming to tea with the great love of his life but never laying a finger on her. Perhaps she knows that would be too much even for me to swallow. She gives me a searching look as she admits she has no photograph of her grandmother with my great-grandfather. Henry, of course, took good care none was taken. In those days photography was a long and involved process, very different from today, and easily avoided. She tells me about the jewellery Henry gave Jimmy, some of which is in her possession. Would I like to see a photograph of her daughter wearing ‘a beautiful star brooch of real diamonds’? I say I would, though I doubt the diamonds. A man who gave his first fiancée’s engagement ring to his second wouldn’t give diamonds to a mistress.
‘They fixed up a marriage for him with a Miss Eleanor Henderson,’ Laura says. ‘He was heartbroken and many an evening him and my grandmother spent desperately thinking of ways to get him out of it, but they’d tied him up too tightly for that.’ I ask her who ‘they’ were and she says Henry’s father and Mr Henderson, who were ‘business associates’. ‘His engagement to this Eleanor was announced in the August and him and Jimmy were forced to part.’
That last bit sounds pretty accurate. As far as I can recall, the pentagrams come to an end at about that time. Janet chips in now to remind me that Jimmy got married two months later. Leonard Dawson, she says, had been her faithful swain for more years than she’d known Henry, but obliged to worship from afar.
‘They’d call him a stalker these days,’ says Laura, ‘always hanging around her, following her about, standing on the street where she lived, gazing up at her windows.’ Alarmingly, she sings a couple of appropriate lines from My Fair Lady in a cracked soprano. ‘Well, when Dr Nanther – he was Sir Henry by then – when he had to give her up and she had to give him up, she naturally turned to Len. I suppose you could say she took him on the rebound.’
‘What happened to the house?’
‘The house?’
‘In Chalcot Road, Primrose Hill. What happened to it?’
‘It was hers, wasn’t it? Her and Len stayed there, they started their married life there, my mother was born there. Then they sold it and moved to King’s Cross.’
Relief is what I feel. I don’t know why I should, why I should care. Perhaps it’s because there’s something gloomy about having to set Henry down as a complete out and out bastard, without as far as I could see a redeeming feature. But here, now, was one. When he left her he gave her the house. More probably he continued to pay the rent of it. Did he give her the husband as well? Maybe. Leonard Dawson is described as a porter on the marriage certificate. Is that a railway porter or a hospital porter? A house, a husband and a lump sum? Five hundred pounds? Henry wasn’t quite as black as I’ve been painting him.
‘You could say she pipped Dr Nanther – that is, Sir Henry, I should say – to the post. He didn’t get married to that Eleanor till eighteen eighty-four. She’d have been your great-grandma.’
I let it pass. Pointless to engage in long explanations. Eleanor might have been my great-grandmother if she hadn’t met a horrible death and if Henry had married her, but she did and he didn’t. He married her sister. I say nothing to Laura and Janet about this. A waiter comes with the tray of pastries and they help themselves. The screen clears and gives the result of the division: Contents, 66, Not Contents, 82. So we defeated the amendment. Laura begins to talk about her mother, born in 1884, the idyllic childhood she had gambolling on Primrose Hill, being taken for walks by her nurse in Regent’s Park.
All this time I’ve been asking myself who they remind me of but I still haven’t come up with the answer. Laura hasn’t told me when in 1884 her mother was born and I’m not going to ask. I can easily find out for myself from the records. Len Dawson and his wife, it appears, had five more children, all happy, successful and well off, according to Laura. Janet says they were a long-lived family and she’s proud to tell me her mother’s aunt Elizabeth, Jimmy’s daughter born in 1891 (the same year, incidentally, as Clara Nanther) lived on till well into the nineteen eighties.
Tea is over and we walk back the way we came. I ask if I may borrow the Famous Beauties postcard as an illustration for my biography when the time comes and Laura grudgingly agrees. ‘You wouldn’t want the postcard yet, would you?’ Janet asks.
‘Probably not for two or three years,’ I tell her, and then wonder if that’s a tactful thing to say to someone who can’t have been born later than 1923.
Janet evidently feels the same. She says quickly that the picture will be quite safe with her and she’ll see that I get it when the time comes. She also tells me about a genealogical table she’s made, which shows how philoprogenitive Mary Dawson was. Twelve children were born to her between 1903 and 1918.
‘They all grew up healthy and all had children,’ Laura says proudly.
We approach the Prince’s Chamber and Janet wants to know what that woman’s doing sitting on a chair in front of the fireplace. I explain that she’s a Labour whip and that she’s there to make sure her ‘flock’ vote, and to catch back benchers if they try to escape and go home. Neither of them believes me, though it’s true.
‘Why do they have to stay?’ Laura asks.
‘They have to vote and make sure the Government wins.’
‘Couldn’t they get out some other way?’
‘They often do,’ I say, and Laura and Janet are still wondering if I’m having them on when I take my raincoat off its peg and accompany them out into the street. I’m going home too and as I’m seeing them into Westminster tube station, thanking them and saying goodbye, Laura says, ‘Thank you very much for tea, my Lord,’ which embarrasses me and I think I go red in the face.
The curtains are undrawn, and behind the windows chandeliers glisten and flowers in vases shimmer, their colours bleached by the many and varied lights, their leaves shining. I walk up Chalcot Road, wide and straight. It bisects this area, dividing it almost evenly down the centre. A little way along there’s a pub called the Princess of Wales, but it was named for Alexandra, wife of Edward VII, not Diana. This persuades me that it and these houses would have been put up in the sixties during the nineteenth century, for Edward married Alexandra in 1863, but I shall have to check.
It’s not a beautiful street. It’s too wide and the houses were built in long dull terraces, all much the same. One of them would have been occupied by Jimmy and later by Jimmy and Len Dawson, but I’ve no way of knowing which. The Dawsons seem to have moved away after a couple of years and gone to live in the less salubrious district of King’s Cross. Why? Surely because Henry was unwilling to pay the rent for more than two years.
I retrace my steps, back to Rothwell Street, the main road and the hill. It’s a fine night, mild and clear enough to walk home. I take one of the paths, then St Edmund’s Terrace and I’m in St John’s Wood. While I walk I’m thinking about the illusions people like to keep about a respectable family past, and about pentagrams in a diary, and then, suddenly, I know who Laura Kimball and her daughter remind me of.
