by Barbara Vine
‘What was her name?’ I asked.
That opened the floodgates. ‘Violet,’ said Lady Farrow. ‘Violet – the same as mine. Sweetly pretty, don’t you think? And she was such a lovely woman. It was through her that Stanley and I met, I was her closest friend, so it seemed meant that we should come together.’
So they had been married only fifteen years, these two. Stanley never became an orphan, for his mother dying provided him with a mother to take her place. A wife who, by a stroke of luck and coincidence, shared her christian name.
She seemed to read my thoughts. ‘Oh, I wasn’t christened Violet. I was christened Jean. Jean Smith. But Stanley liked to think of me having his mother’s name and now it seems as if I’ve always had it. I’m much more Violet, as you might say, than Jean. The second Violet Farrow, I always say.’
Stanley seemed to approve. He smiled complacently. Lady Farrow picked up a photograph, sighed and put it down again. ‘She had a tragic life. First that dreadful deprived childhood, then a lonely youth. Caspar wouldn’t let her see her mother, you know. He was such a cruel man, so unforgiving. After all, what did he want? He had his children, he had his place in society. Everyone respected him. But she was condemned to utter loneliness…’
‘Excuse me a moment,’ I said. ‘But which one are we talking about, Olivia or Violet?’
Lady Farrow put one finger to her forehead as if pinpointing a pain there. ‘Violet. Yes, Violet. My friend. I tend to confuse them – can you understand that? Mother and daughter, both so unhappy, both victims of a man’s cruelty.’
‘Don’t upset yourself, darling.’ Stanley laid a hand over hers. ‘Let me give you some more sherry.’
‘Thank you. I will. She was only five, you know, when her mother fled. I say “fled” because, of course, Caspar drove her to the brink. And it was only necessary for someone just that little bit kinder to come along and pull her into the abyss…’ Lady Farrow continued in this way while I wondered how to stem the flow and pin her down to what I really wanted.
At last I said, ‘Lady Farrow, all this is most interesting.’
‘Violet. Call me Violet.’
‘Violet, all this is most interesting but it’s Olivia whose early life I’d really like to hear about.’ I decided to flatter her. ‘You’re unique in knowing first hand’ – more like third hand, really – ‘what that life was like. What she felt, what sort of a person she was.’
Luckily for me, Violet Farrow née Jean Smith wasn’t offended. She smiled reminiscently, shaking her head to mitigate the smile. The lights in the room were bright enough but she reached out and pressed the switch between the feet of a malachite lady holding up a lampshade with a green Greek key border. ‘There, that’s better. Now I can see you properly.’ Words always calculated to cause unease in their hearer. ‘Olivia was mistreated from the start. Some said there was a clash of temperaments but what they really meant was Caspar was a bully and Olivia wasn’t accustomed to bullying. Quite naturally in such a beautiful sheltered girl, she was used to having her own way. They say, marry in haste, repent at leisure and poor Olivia had married in haste.’
And Stanley and Violet the Second had certainly married at leisure, very likely taking twenty years or so to make up their minds – or get maternal permission. ‘Why in haste?’ I said.
‘There was nothing like that,’ said Lady Farrow, looking affronted. I nearly laughed. I’d never imagined there was, not among the upper class in 1888. It was a different matter for Jimmy Ashworth and Len Dawson. ‘Violet said Olivia wanted to be married. She was twenty-seven, you see. That was quite old to be still single. Caspar was the first man who had asked her who she felt she could stand, apart, that is, from your great-grandfather – it was your great-grandfather, wasn’t it? – that she felt she could bear near her. She told me Henry Nanther was the great love of her life.’
‘You mean Mrs Farrow told you?’
‘That’s right. Didn’t I say? Her mother told her she was deeply in love with Henry Nanther. It was a terrible disappointment when nothing came of it. He jilted her, you know. I’m sorry to have to tell you that about your great-grandfather, I really hope it doesn’t offend you. I’m sure he was a very great man and a good doctor and all that, but he jilted my – Olivia, that is.’
Stanley intervened. ‘They were never actually engaged, dear.’
‘That’s not what she said. She said there was an understanding between them. Her father and mother knew all about it and approved. Henry Nanther was looking for a house for them, he looked at several houses in Mayfair.’ That was true. And suddenly verisimilitude was given to what she was saying. It wasn’t all imagination and memory distorted by time. ‘Olivia wanted to live in Park Lane. You can’t imagine it today, can you, anyone thinking they could live in Park Lane? She’d have been near her family, you see. They were in Grosvenor Square. Violet liked to think they lived where the American Embassy now is but I don’t know if that’s true.’
I picked up a photograph of Olivia, her parents and her sister Constance, taken against the background of a sort of summer house, presumably in the Grosvenor Square garden. Did they have a private garden? Or was this the garden of the square itself?
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ she said with a sort of dismal triumph. ‘Nothing at all. He simply dropped out of the Bathos’ lives. It was the summer of eighty-three. Poor Olivia held the dates in her memory. June the fourteenth, it was a Thursday, he was invited to dine in Grosvenor Square, and he cancelled in the afternoon. No phones then, of course – well, they were just coming in. Henry Nanther, Doctor Nanther, I should say, I don’t mean to be offensive, and by then he was Sir Henry, anyway, he sent a message by hand that he couldn’t come, he was indisposed. That’s what he wrote. Olivia said that afterwards she could never see that word “indisposed” or hear anyone say it without experiencing the most dreadful pain.’
‘But she can’t have known then, Vi,’ said Stanley. ‘She can’t have had any idea he was going to let her down.’
‘She had a premonition that all wasn’t well. And she was right. She never heard another word from him. “Indisposed,” she kept saying. “Indisposed. He was indisposed to seeing me.” ’
I had given up asking Lady Farrow how she could possibly know such things, how a mother would tell a daughter such things. What I wanted most at that moment was to be home with the diary open in front of me to check if there was a pentagram on the entry for 14 June 1883.
‘Her father wanted to bring an action for breach of promise, you know. They did that then. They put notices in the papers warning other parents to be wary of men who might behave badly to their daughters.’
‘But Sir John Batho didn’t?’ I said.
‘Olivia stopped him. Her pride wouldn’t let her agree to that. “She sat,” ’ said Lady Farrow surprisingly, “ ‘like patience on a monument, smiling at grief.” That was how Violet put it. Pretty, isn’t it? She was very gifted, she wrote lovely poetry. If you’d like any of the photographs for your book, I’m sure you’re very welcome.’
‘Be our guest,’ said Stanley.
‘On the understanding we get them all back intact, of course. And Stanley has photostatted all the letters for you.’
At least I wasn’t offered samples of the poetry. I was out in the hall when the two of them dived back into the living room and began a whispered colloquy. Lady Farrow came out, fetched my coat and insisted on helping me into it.
‘Oh, by the way, I hope you didn’t take that seriously, what Stanley said about Olivia contracting a – well, a contagious disease. Of course that wasn’t what he meant, was it, dear?’
Stanley, hovering behind her, said, ‘Certainly not, dear. Certainly not.’ He astonished me by screwing up his eye in a histrionic wink.
‘He was thinking of someone else.’
It was only when I was walking down the street towards the tube station that I remembered ‘contagious’ was the Victorians’ eup
hemism for what we’d now call a sexually transmitted disease, and what less mealy-mouthed people, and indeed Stanley himself, called syphilis.
How much of that could I believe? Not all, certainly. Jude was out at a launch party for one of her authors when I got home. I went into the study, put the two photographs I’d borrowed with the rest, and found the diary for 1883, a green leather one, octavo size. Henry wrote in a typical Victorian hand, sloping, spidery, conventional, the upper loops tall, the lower loops deep. For Thursday 14 June he had written only: ‘Audience with HM 11 a.m. Feeling unwell, I cancelled my evening engagement.’ No mention of what or where the evening engagement was, not a word about the Bathos. And no pentagram either. The next one of those occurs on Monday 18 June. At that time, February, I didn’t know about Mary Dawson, I hadn’t met Laura Kimball, but I do now. Sitting where I sat two months ago, in the light of my new knowledge, I’m looking at May, the month Jimmy conceived her daughter Mary Dawson, and there are three pentagrams that month, one on the 13th (the day after Henry returned from the Lakes), one on the 17th and one on the 29th. Since Mary was born on 21 February 1884, it seems likely conception took place on 13 or 17 May. Of course, there isn’t and can never be any way of absolutely fixing this. I think fleetingly of Jude who would so love to make such calculations for herself.
Two very different women, I’m sure, Mary Dawson and Violet Raven. What happened to Violet is clear enough, marriage to a man below her father’s station, a happy enough life probably in a villa in then suburban Hammersmith. One child, Stanley, to whom she was a devoted and possessive mother. What would Olivia have thought of her grandson following in the footsteps of ‘the great love of her life’ and entering the House of Lords? I’ve checked him out in Dod and discovered he was for many years Leader of Hammersmith Council. As for Mary Dawson, all I know is that she was Laura Kimball’s mother. And, of course, my half great-aunt. I’m curious, so when I write to Laura asking for the postcard of Jimmy Ashworth I’ll also ask for information about Mary, though I fear it will only evoke more whitewashing.
And now I’m back again to the question of why. What is the answer? That is the question, as Henry said in his maiden speech. Why did Henry, apparently so keen on Olivia, Henry who had begun looking for a house in which to begin married life, Henry who dined regularly with the Bathos, went riding with Lady Batho and her daughters, stayed at Grassingham Hall (according to the diary) on three separate occasions, why did he coldly and callously drop her? Not jilt her perhaps, for ‘jilt’ implies an engagement, but led her to believe he wanted to marry her and, without warning, threw her over. Suddenly it occurs to me that Jimmy Ashworth’s pregnancy could be the reason. The objection to that is that if Mary wasn’t conceived until the middle of May, in those days long before testing, Jimmy couldn’t have known she was pregnant by 14 June. And conception was impossible before that because Henry was in the Lake District from the last week of April until 12 May. Could Jimmy have known it if Mary was conceived on 13 May? Just about, if she had a regular cycle. But why would the discovery of Jimmy’s pregnancy make Henry drop Olivia? It’s very unlikely Jimmy was proposing to blackmail him. The consequences of such an attempt would be ultimately worse for her than for him. It’s out of the question Henry was considering marrying her – or is it? I’m asking myself if he’d come to want a child, an heir, as early as 1883. Men of his standing and position had been known to marry their mistresses. Sometimes. Very occasionally.
She seems to have been the type he preferred, dark-haired, white-skinned, dark-eyed, voluptuous, soft-featured with a short nose and full lips. But Olivia also belonged to that type. And Olivia had a fortune of thirty thousand pounds. There’s a powerful argument against the pregnancy being responsible for Henry’s dropping Olivia. He didn’t marry Jimmy. And there’s no question but that she would have accepted if he’d asked her. A gentleman for a husband, a father for her coming child. She’d have jumped at the chance, she’d have been in seventh heaven.
So, why?
8
Back to the House of Lords Bill today. There is much talk, and more gossip, about the so-called Weatherill Amendment, an amendment to the Bill put down by Lord Weatherill, Convenor of the Cross-bench Peers. It was he who led the cross-bench negotiating team, the other members being the Earl of Carnarvon and Lord Marsh, which produced the idea of 10 per cent of the 750 hereditary peers remaining. And he put down the crucial cross-bench amendment which bears his name along with Marsh, Carnarvon and Viscount Tenby. This provides for ninety-two hereditary peers being retained in the House during the interim period between the general banishment of hereditaries and the second stage.
How will the ninety-two be chosen? By the ‘hereds’ in the different parties or by all members of a party? Lord Shepherd asked that back in March but I don’t remember that he got an answer. It was also he who suggested for the first time in this House, I believe, that the smooth passage of the Bill would depend on the way Lords behaved themselves.
I am in the Chamber from the start today because I intend to speak and it’s not considered good manners here to come in, just say a few words and rush off again. Lord Dinevor, a hereditary peer, took the oath before business began, reminding me of my own entry to this House eight years ago. Though the process has been curtailed, life peers are still introduced with pomp and ceremony, each having a supporter to precede him and another to follow him, the three wearing scarlet robes. All that happens when a hereditary’s father dies is that he comes quietly in wearing a lounge suit. Holding the New Testament, he mutters a few words before shaking hands with the Lord Chancellor.
I took the oath on a day when two life peers had already been introduced and ministers and whips, banished to the back to make room for the procession, were scurrying on to the front benches. I doubt if anyone would have noticed I’d come in at all if it hadn’t been in Hansard next day: ‘Lord Nanther sat first in Parliament after the death of his father and took the Oath.’ I must check up on what Hansard said when Henry came in on 19 June 1896. Or was there a special ceremony in those days before the Life Peerages Act? I must find out.
When I sit in here, two benches behind Labour Party veterans, I try to look with fresh eyes at the adornment of this chamber, attempting to recollect how it was for me when I first came in and how it must have been for Henry. The paintings don’t impress me and never did. We do have one Dyce in here, above the throne, but it’s not so striking as his frescoes, representations of generosity, mercy, religion, that make the royal Robing Room so beautiful. Standing high up in gilded niches are black figures in chain mail with dust lying on their shoulders – can no cleaning device reach so high? – but they look more like characters from The Lord of the Rings than the archbishops, earls and barons they are, all of them present at Runnymede when King John issued Magna Carta in 1215. Below them and all round the Chamber, under the filigree railing of the gallery, are the armorial bearings of the sovereigns since Edward III and of the Lord Chancellors of England from 1377. Concealed lighting touches them and makes them glow as if they are lit from within. Sometimes I count the colours in the stained-glass windows. Once I thought only red, blue and yellow were there but since then I’ve discovered emerald green and dove grey and brown and gold.
I go out for tea at four and come back in again to hear the discussion on the position of Scottish peers in the House. I am speaking on an amendment whose effect will be to put off the date at which the Bill becomes law until the report of the Royal Commission has been considered by the House and I stand up when Baroness Blatch sits down. My speech lasts no more than three minutes. All I’m saying is that it seems wrong to abolish the voting rights of hereditary peers before we know what kind of chamber will replace them.
Before I go to the Home Room for dinner I phone Jude to tell her I don’t know when I’ll be back. The debate may go on through the night. I have to leave a message on our answering machine because she’s not in. I sit for a while at the table where the phone is
at the end of the Not Content lobby and think about Jude, my wife, who has become distant from me these past weeks. I know why it is but don’t know what to do about it. So many things now I feel I can’t say to her, so many subjects have to be avoided, or I feel they do, and this embarrasses both of us because she knows very well how I try and fail.
If Lord Weatherill’s amendment comes to anything, will I be allowed to stay? Will I want to? Perhaps. No one knows yet – or, if they do, I’ve heard nothing – how the hereditaries who are to stay will be chosen. Voted for by their own peers would be the best way. But where and how? I suppose there’s no reason why a polling station shouldn’t be set up in the House. If that happens there will be many hereditary peers who have never been in one before. Being a peer and doing one’s duty means a lot of work. I think now that if I wasn’t who and what I am and if I had the choice no one ever does have of becoming a life peer or a knight, I’d choose the knighthood. And if I were a woman I’d choose a DBE. No work outside their jobs for knights and dames. The minimum of vilification in the media. And very little wrestling with nagging consciences, I suppose.
Henry was knighted by Queen Victoria in the spring of 1883 in what I imagine were the Birthday Honours. If they had them then. That’s something else I must check. He was forty-seven years old, Physician-in-Ordinary to the Queen, Professor of Pathological Anatomy at University College Hospital and due to publish another book. I’ve tried to read Haemorrhagic Disposition in Families but its complex tables of inheritance and lists of family relationships are almost too much for me. Still, I haven’t given up, only paused. I’m going to make myself read, say, five pages a day till I finish it. One item I have managed to digest and that’s Henry’s conclusion that claims of males being carriers of haemophilia are invalid. Where there seemed to be cases, for instance, where a haemophiliac man fathers a haemophiliac son, this is not a direct transmission from the father but comes through the mother who was herself a carrier. It’s something that used to happen occasionally in communities where access and egress are difficult and inbreeding is common. This seems to be the first and perhaps the only new discovery Henry made in his chosen field. Still, it’s rather a negative conclusion to reach and unlikely to lead to fame or further honours.
