Oxford Blood (13 page)

Jemima beamed back.
New Scottish World
had been a very early series, and an embarrassing memory as it had pleased neither new nor old Scottish worlds, due to her handling the subject of colour with insufficient directness from which she had learned a valuable lesson. At least it lived on in the memory of Suella May Mackintosh, now a formidable hospital Sister. In a matter of minutes she had secured the privilege of a short uninterrupted interview with Saffron.

The patient himself regarded these negotiations with a sardonic air. 'And you think I'm privileged, Jemima Shore,' was what he said eventually. 'Would you like some champagne? Faithful Cousin Jack brought it. I bought it and he brought it.'

Why not, thought Jemima, if only to expunge the taste of Kerry Barber's exquisite sherry. She had never got as far as a drink at the Mossbankers', and in any case Ribena had been the only visible liquid refreshment.

‘I
hear I have to congratulate you,' she said as she sipped a glass of vintage Bollinger (just as well the rich Saffron had paid for it and not the poor-but-honest Jack) out of a plastic hospital toothglass. 'Tiggie told me, in the process of telling her mother.'

'I'm going to settle down.' Was it her imagination or did Saffron sound slightly defiant, compared to Tiggie who had sounded plainly ecstatic at the thought of her purple future? Jemima also noticed that Saffron did not even bother to enquire how his prospective mother-in-law had taken the news. Furthermore: 'We're going to settle down' - that was Tiggie's version. 'I'm going to settle down' - that was Saffron's.

'This last attack decided it,' said Saffron.

Jemima leant forward impulsively and squeezed the hand free of the tubes, lying docilely on the light hospital blanket. 'I'm sorry, Saffer, I wasn't much of a protector, was I?'

'Not much you could do against a bloody boat hook, was there?'

'So you remember? In which case—'

'Oh Christ no—' wearily '—the police asked me all that till our darling Scots Sister drove them away. They're after Pember and Copley of course, except they can't prove it. She's great, isn't she, our Sister? Took particular pleasure in turfing out dreadful Cousin Andrew by the way, who insisted on dropping by out of hours in the hopes of finding me moribund, and thus transforming him at one sweep into being The Heir. I'm sure Sister Mackintosh recognized him. Spoke in her broadest Scots accent, and when Cousin Daphne had the cheek to ask her what island she came from, replied: "Glasgow, madam, and what island might you be coming from yourself?'"

His vitality flagged: 'No, I remember nothing. Nothing at all. Dinner, the end of dinner. Cousin Andrew's ghastly speech: ghastly but I have to admit quite witty. Conversation with Cousin Daphne, who definitely was not witty: unless you think the suggestion that Jack is sowing his wild oats in the SDP is in itself a form of wit. She sometimes hints after a drink or two that I might do worse than marry Fanny thus keeping everything in the family; I've put paid to that one at least. Fanny is a good girl, but I would rather marry Mrs Thatcher. Dancing to the
Liebestod
in a carefree way, possibly with Tiggie, possibly with Fanny, or was it Poppy? I can't even remember that. Then nothing more. Not even going down to the river. Or with whom. Apparently it's quite usual with a blow on the head. I may remember later.'

Jemima thought again of
Gotterdammerung.
Would some woodbird's song suddenly awake this Siegfried to a full memory of what had gone before? In which case would he recall the actual identity of the person who had made the murderous attack on him with a Boat hook?

'And Tiggie? Your marriage - are you very much in love?' As she spoke, Jemima realized the question sounded perfectly pathetic.

'Rather an adorable idea, don't you think?' Saffron had become frivolous again although his eyelids with their long black lashes had begun to quiver as though with exhaustion. "We get on, you know. We think alike. We want the same kind of life. As to love, I'm not sure I'm into love. But then nor is Tiggie. So that's all right. We'll probably live at Saffron Ivy when I've finished here. If they let me finish. And have children. That's the whole point. I don't want to be an aged parent like Ma and Pa.'

'Saffron—' Jemima paused. If he was putting the whole strange matter of the blood groups behind him, who was she to raise it? And yet it was Saffron who had sent her the book on medical jurisprudence. Was this decision to marry and settle down a bold declaration that he was the one true heir to the St Ives title, no matter what a crazy midwife might mutter?

'But there is one other thing, Jemima.' Saffron smiled engagingly. 'I thought you might find out who I am. If I'm not who I think I am, if you get my meaning. Very secretly. Just between you and me. Check out that odd blood group thing. You're still my sleuth, remember.'

'I can't handle it,' he went on. 'No, not the violence exactly. Not knowing who I am is worse. It was after the - the dread revelation of Nurse E., that I bashed up that foul mantelpiece in the Martyrs. I had to take it out of someone, or something.'

'An innocent victim?' queried Jemima.

'You should have seen it,' said Saffron sternly. 'That mantelpiece was definitely not innocent. Look, you're coming to Saffron Ivy. We'll have a big engagement weekend, ask everyone, including Tiggie's mother and Proffy as her escort. He's insisting on coming: he loves high life. Then you might do some sleuthing there. All the same I'm quite sure I am
me.
That's why I'm going to marry Tiggie and have as many children as the Mossbankers.'

At least Tiggie and Saffron were united in their aim, thought Jemima: a Mossbanker-size family. But she ought to refuse to have anything more to do with Saffron and his identity. Why not let the matter rest? Get on with the programme and treat Saffron purely as a Golden Kid
...
Yes, she definitely ought to do that. It was absolutely against her better judgement that five minutes after leaving Saffron, she found herself seeking out Sister Suella May Mackintosh.

'Sister,' began Jemima Shore Investigator. 'Now that I've happily bumped into you again after all these years, I wonder if you can help me over something to do with a new programme. It's a little matter of blood groups: how would I get certain information? Just quite privately, you understand.'

11

Who He is Not

For one whose life had been spent in a world of blood, or at any rate test tubes thereof, Professor Mavis Ho looked remarkably fresh and trim. In the tiny over-heated office off the main buildings of the Kensington Hospital into which she escorted Jemima there were flowering plants. Professor Ho herself wore a flowered dress and white court shoes with a slight platform sole: with her white handbag, square, clean and authoritative on her desk, she bore a certain resemblance to a member of the Royal family, a resemblance encouraged by her pleasantly gracious smile; except since she was Chinese, perhaps Professor Ho should be compared to an Empress Dowager rather than a Queen Mother.

'It may sound a strange mission,' concluded Jemima, as she drew to the end of her story: a carefully edited version of events. She supplied no proper names, nicknaming Saffron Moses for good Biblical reasons; she merely related the theory of the baby swap and the facts of the blood groups. Then she explained how 'Moses', now twenty, had stumbled on the old story by chance, with obviously distressing consequences. 'It may sound strange, but as Moses-in-the-twentieth-century-bulrushes' put it to me, he does want to find out who he is.'

Professor Ho considered for a moment, neatly coiffed head on one side. How calm she was, what a sense she projected of internal serenity, sitting in her little hot beehive with its uncomfortably glaring plate-glass window; beneath them the various denizens of the Kensington - a teaching hospital - scurried about, much as the undergraduates had scurried in Oxford. Except that the hospital surroundings, built in an amalgam of styles at an amalgam of dates, ranged from the dreary-but-functional to the plainly-temporary-but-long-standing. Here were no colonnades, no Hawksmoor facades, no green quadrangles, no ancient somnolent carp, above all no dreaming spires or at least only one, above
the Victorian arch of the most antique part of the building. All the same Jemima thought that Professor Ho was far closer to the image of the sage dispensing wisdom from some inner fount, than either of the two university professors - Mossbanker and Eugenia Jones respectively -
Jemima had recently encountered.

Proffy manifestly lived in chaos: his rooms at Rochester had demonstrated that before ever she set foot in Chillington Road. Eugenia Jones' personal life seemed to bear the marks of a kind of personal chaos: what with a disappearing husband, in Jamie Grand's smart phrase 'the ideal husband, one who was never there when she was wanted'; then there was the wanton daughter who had singularly failed to live up to the heroic name of Antigone, but had emerged from her academic background with her sights determinedly set on a rich husband.

Jemima did not think she was merely carried away by Professor Ho's mandarin appearance. That was as incidental to her personality as Sister Suella May Mackintosh's colour was to hers. Thus Professor Ho incarnated the intelligent balanced English lady of a certain age, while Sister Mackintosh stood for the fiercely bossy - but golden-hearted -Scottish nurse. (It was perhaps no coincidence that contact with one lady had led Jemima, through a trail of experts, to the other.)

‘I
wonder, Miss Shore, if you quite appreciate the situation with regard to your Moses - I take it he's not in fact Jewish by the way? So far as you know that is.' Jemima shook her head. Professor Ho continued in her measured manner: 'You see, you will not be able to tell him who he is. You may be able to tell him who he is not.'

Jemima sighed. 'He's torn, our Moses. He's not a fool, in spite of behaving in a very foolish manner. Most of the time. On the one hand he was curious enough to latch on to the question of the blood groupings -to get some book out of the college library, Glaister I think it's called as I told you, and to ask me to take the matter a little further. On the other hand . . .'

'It would be a great shock to a young person,' finished Professor Ho kindly, 'to find out that he was in effect an adopted child - which is what Moses may turn out to be - having believed himself to be the biological child of his parents for twenty years.'

'I think Moses wants some kind of certainty about his identity. I don't think, oddly enough, that he plans to make any kind of use of this certainty, given he can achieve it.'

'Not so odd, perhaps. If by doing so he robs himself of a great deal of family money.' Professor Ho's tone remained amiable.

'Especially when he has been brought up to enjoy an extravagant lifestyle. At least that is the impression you gave me.'

Jemima had a vision of Saffron, last seen lying in hospital offering vintage champagne; or Saffron the Oxford Blood, gyrating to the music of the
Liebestod,
at the Chimneysweepers' Dinner, tickets £50 a head. 'An extravagant lifestyle covers the situation.'

'The interesting thing about your Moses is that he does not let the matter lie.'

Jemima hesitated.
'
I
have the impression that it's to do with his inheritance, his true inheritance,' she said after a while. 'He's been brought up in this way, with such an emphasis on what he has inherited, or is about to inherit. Now the
whole thing is cast in doubt, I
s there anything hereditary about blood? Your kind of blood.'

Professor Ho smiled, looking more like a Chinese Queen Mother than ever.

'In one sense blood is the most hereditary thing there is - my kind of blood, as you put it. Blood groupings. I take it you don't mean my ethnic Chinese blood. It's all to do with blood corpuscles and agglutinogens as you discovered from Glaister. You can have no agglutinogens present in the blood: that's called O. Or you can have A agglutinogens present, or B, or both A and B. As I've explained to you, everyone takes a bit from both parents. That is why your young man - and you assure me his grouping is definitely AB - falls into a comparatively rare category.'

'It's AB. That at least is certain.' Jemima had established this in conversation with Sister Mackintosh, in connection with a so far totally imaginary programme on the subject of blood donors and the National Health Service. The question of Saffron's blood group had been raised ostensibly in order to demonstrate a point she was trying to make.

'You see, to form AB, he must have one parent who is A and another parent who is B,' pursued Professor Ho. 'Now A is the most common category among white British people - O being the second most common. Forty-six per cent of the white British population are A, whereas forty-four per cent are O group. But B is relatively uncommon -eight per cent I think. I'd have to check it in Mourant.' She tapped one of the pile of text-books which jostled with the flowers on her desk, then could not resist opening it. 'Yes, eight point six per cent.'