Oxford Blood

  'It's surprising how few people do know their own blood group.' Daphne Iverstone was a helpful if unexpected ally. 'I remember working for St John's - we all thought it should be compulsory to carry it on you.'

  'Had to be in the war, of course,' grunted Andrew Iverstone. 'But I'm not sure we want any more bureaucratic rules here, do we?' It was noticeable how his wife brought out the worst in him, his normal courtesy perceptibly flagging. But he was also badly placed at the table: the preponderance of males brought about by the presence of the two unattached dons meant that he had ended sitting next to the Gobbler -scarcely a marriage of true minds; he had Eugenia Jones, still being lectured by Shipley, on his right.

  Daphne Iverstone hesitated; Jemima saw her struggling with natural reluctance to contradict her husband on anything. It was Fanny on the Gobbler's other side, who came to the rescue. She leant forward.

  'Don't be silly, Daddy. When it saves lives. Think of accidents and things like that. I learnt all about it with the Guides. You can't give someone any old blood transfusion, you know. You have to be sure of the group first.'

  Daphne Iverstone took heart.

  'And precious time is wasted while you take a test. But if you know the group—'

  'So what is your group, my dear Fanny?' Andrew Iverstone was once more sounding gallant.

  There was general laughter as Fanny hesitated. Finally she burst out laughing in her turn.

  'How awful! I've forgotten. I promise I knew once.'

  Jemima pursued the opening.

  'This is one of the things I'll be considering, of course. Should we carry cards? As servicemen did in the war. For example, let's see how many people, if any, round this table do know their blood group, A, O, B or AB. And as a matter of interest if we get enough figures, whether the pattern conforms to the national average.' She started with her new ally, Daphne Iverstone.

  'A - A positive actually. That means I'm Rhesus positive.' The nice young man next to her called Ned who was said to be a wonderful cricketer shook his head, bemused by the turn the conversation was taking. Fanny, opposite, came back gamely with A.

  'I'm sure it was A. Is A rare too?' she enquired hopefully.

  'A and O are the two most common English groups.' Daphne Iverstone sounded delighted to be able for once to put her daughter down. In so doing she did Jemima's work for her.

  'That's really one of the points of my programme. Groups like B, which used to be comparatively uncommon, under ten per cent, are becoming more common with immigration; hence the need for more blood of these rarer groups within the National Health Service.'

  Andrew Iverstone, whose ears had evidently pricked up at the sound of the word immigration, leant forward in his turn.

  'How very interesting, Miss Shore. I don't think I'd appreciated that, in spite of my special study of this kind of subject. Isn't this an example of the way British society is simply not able to cope with large influxes of alien races, whose very blood cannot mix successfully?'

  But Fanny, for one, was having none of that.

  'Oh, come on Daddy, let's go round the table,' she interrupted brightly. 'I think it's a fascinating new kind of game. Maybe we should all go off and have blood tests or something.'

  Jemima's eyes met those of Saffron across the table. This was not quite going the way they had intended. Or was it? As she hesitated, Bernardo Valliera, sitting next to Fanny, suddenly and surprisingly volunteered that his own group was O. There had been some accident playing polo as a result of which he had derived this information. Jemima, remembering from one of the maps in Mourant that virtually the whole of the South American population were group O, felt a glow of pleasure that Mourant was working out so exactly: she beamed at Bernardo.

  'Now we go round the table,' said Fanny. 'Tiggie, you next.'

  But Tiggie, unsurprisingly, did not know her blood group. All she did when asked was sink her head on Saffron's shoulder with the words: 'Ooh, horrible. I hate it when they take your blood, don't you? I hate needles. They should be like vampires. They should suck it. Sucking is lovely—'

  This time it was Saffron who effected the interruption, passing the question on to Poppy who said she had absolutely no idea, but offered the fact that she was a Pisces as being an alternative and perhaps preferable line of enquiry ... At which point Saffron interrupted even more firmly, as a dangerous babble of zodiacal chit-chat could be heard coming from Tiggie, which Poppy showed every sign of picking up.

  Luckily the elderly don called Leek did know his blood group - O. Nessa next to him smiled, fluttered her eyelashes and said nothing; she seemed not to believe that any serious question could possibly be addressed to her. Proffy, who was rattling away, paused just long enough to pronounce: 'A, A, pure Alpha' before rattling on again. Lady St Ives, suddenly grasping the subject at discussion, plunged into it with some enthusiasm, much as Daphne Iverstone had done, based in her case on her presidency of the local Red Cross.

  She confirmed that her own blood group was O and pointed out that when in doubt in an emergency, O group blood was administered since it contained no clashing agglutinogens. Then she went on to talk about the difficulties experienced with new ethnic groups who had immigrated to the local towns, especially the east coast ports: 'We need more B blood.'

  This time Jemima did not look at Saffron. She was desperately anxious that the question should continue to run on round the table to where the object of the whole exercise sat at the head, listening to proceedings with his usual air of impartial benevolence. So that she was not much disappointed when first the don called Shipley and then Eugenia Jones passed, neither betraying any particular enthusiasm for the subject, before returning to Shipley's disquisition on classical tragedy.

  Andrew Iverstone, however, threatened to wreck the whole show. He had been frowning, first at Daphne, then as he listened to Lady St Ives' own little lecture.

  Finally, when asked the question, he said lightly: 'Oh something thoroughly British. A, I think.'

  'No, it isn't, darling!' cried Daphne Iverstone. 'B. Definitely B. B negative. I remember because when the children were born, and there was some question, there might have been difficulties.'

  'Oh Andrew,' Lady St Ives sounded quite enthusiastic. 'Maybe you will give us some of your nice B blood.'

  There was some laughter from those who realized the significance of what had just been said. Andrew Iverstone joined in.

  'Serve me right. Patriotism is not enough. You have to have the right blood too. Daphne, my dear, thank you. Your frankness may save my life in a car crash.'

  The question was passed to the Gobbler whose mouth was full and who did not attempt to answer it.

  Fanny had already answered. It was Jack's turn.

  'I don't know. But I can easily work it out having done biology at A-level. If Daddy is B and Mummy is A then I must be AB. And so must you, Fanny.'

  Again Professor Mossbanker paused just long enough in his peroration to Leek to say: 'He's quite right, quite right', before rattling on again.

  Oddly enough, nobody commented on Jack's statement, although Jemima nervously thought that someone at least might have worked out its implications as regards Saffron with his O group mother. But perhaps she overestimated the guests' interest in the subject.

  'My own group is A, A positive like Mrs Iverstone,' said Jemima quickly. 'And now Lord St Ives—'

  Her host sat back in his chair, eyes half shut, and sipped his claret in a leisurely manner as though trying to decide on the vintage, information he must however already have had at his fingertips.

  'My blood group? Oh, I'm afraid I've no idea, no idea at all,' said Lord St Ives.

  Jemima's heart sank at his answer - had all this charade been for nothing, other than to establish that Andrew Iverstone was full of 'non-British' blood which might be good for his soul but not helpful to her investigation? Then there was a discreet cough from her left shoulder.

  'Excuse me, my lord, Wyndham says your blood group is A.
He remembers from the war.' It was Binyon. Jemima saw the elderly retainer at his elbow nodding with satisfaction at having preserved this precious information for so many years.

  'So it was. If Wyndham says so. He was my batman in the war,' Lord St Ives confided to Jemima.

  'And Miss Shore,' continued Binyon loftily. 'My own group is A, like your own. Wyndham's is O. Stephen from the farm doesn't know his,' he added apologetically. 'Now I've made that five Os and five As, counting the servants, which I hope you don't think irregular, in your little experiment. Mr Andrew Iverstone is of course B as we have learnt from Mrs Iverstone and there are the ABs—'

  Someone had to say it. 'Like readers of The Times,' broke in Jack, 'I'm delighted to be an AB.'

  'Since we're brother and sister, I suppose I'm one too,' said Fanny. 'I suppose it's a family thing.'

  Brother and sister.

  Jemima looked across at Saffron, sitting on the opposite side of the table under the Lawrence portrait of the Iverstones. A family thing. She suddenly realized something, in that heightened atmosphere of relationships based on blood, an overwhelming and obvious truth, which had been hovering just outside her consciousness for so long.

  It was strange. Once this truth was apparent, not latent, it seemed so obvious to her that she was amazed that she had not seen it, or at least suspected it from the first. Unfortunately for Jemima Shore Investigator it was a truth which, far from helping to unravel the mystery of Iverstone family life, only served to entangle it further.

  As Jemima put it to Cass, when the events of the weekend had passed into history, unhappy history: 'It was the picture which gave it away. That on top of Fanny's words. And the definitive discovery that Saffron was not his parents' child. An O and an A can't produce an AB - It's in Blood Serology. I looked it up later. Their children must be either A or O: AB and B are what is called "impossible phenotypes".'

  'You certainly drew blood there, Jemima Shore Investigator. To coin a phrase,' commented Cass. 'Congratulations.'

  'But it was the picture really,' pressed on Jemima. 'The Strawberry Children: you know the one, you know the picture if not the name. All red fruit and pink ribbons. You've seen it reproduced all round the world. Miss Iverstone and her brother. He's not named for some reason: I asked Lord St Ives and they think it was because he died shortly after Lawrence painted the picture. But his name was of course Saffron.'

  'They're brother and sister,' said Cass, who was talking about the picture.

  'They're brother and sister,' repeated Jemima, who was not. 'I looked across at them at dinner and it was quite clear. They were sitting next to each other because they're engaged; there was some joke about it: apparently it's the old-fashioned thing.'

  'Saffron and Tiggie Jones!' exclaimed Cass incredulously. 'Brother and sister!'

  'Half-brother and sister, to be accurate. It has to be so. And then of all extraordinary things - almost as if she read my mind, Eugenia Jones leant forward and said to me down the table in that rather gruff voice of hers, disconcerting coming from such a little woman: "It you're really interested in statistics, I believe my blood group is B as well, I believe that of many Greeks is so." And of course that figured too. One of Saffron's parents had to be B.

  'So you sat there—'

  'I sat there in that incredible dining room - that's where the Holbein is by the way, much smaller than you'd expect but even more powerful -being handed endless food by Binyon. I sat there and I looked along at Eugenia Jones in her red velvet dress, same as she wore at the Chimneysweepers', and I knew they were both her children. It changed everything.'

  'You mean, it should have changed everything,' replied Cass sombrely. But then he was speaking after the weekend was over.

  16

  A Tragedy Must Take Place

  Up till the night of the dinner party, Jemima had never thought of Saffron as being somebody's child; only as being nobody's child, unless of course he was the lawful child of his parents, something which had now been ruled out. Suddenly he had a mother: that gipsy look, how marked it was in Eugenia! And it was Greek of course, not gipsy. Jemima had been right: Saffron did have something of the Mediterranean about him. Eugenia's classical scholarship had distracted her from the fact that she had actual modern Greek blood.

  Not only did he have a mother, he had a half-sister. Did Eugenia Jones know she was gazing in her sad abstracted way at her own son? Jemima, remembering her horror and dismay at Tiggie's impetuous announcement of her engagement, believed that she did know.

  Under the circumstances, this reaction and the look of despair which Jemima had surprised on the face of Proffy, to say nothing of the melancholy which possessed Eugenia here at Saffron Ivy, were easy to understand. All that fell into place. Eugenia's evident apathy made Jemima wonder what steps she now proposed to take. Was it possible that she was actually going to allow Tiggie to marry her own half-brother, something which was considered genetically dangerous in the modern world, and even worse in the world of classical tragedy which Eugenia Jones might otherwise be deemed to inhabit. Was classical tragedy the clue? Did she feel there was a dreadful inevitability about these events, that a tragedy must take place... ?

  But then how was Eugenia Jones to stop the match? Only by telling her daughter the truth, and that meant, in effect, telling Saffron the truth.

  That also meant telling Lord and Lady St Ives the truth, or rather Lady St Ives, if one accepted Nurse Elsie's story of her ignorance. And there was a further consideration: how was such a secret to be kept? How, for example, was Cousin Andrew Iverstone to be kept in ignorance of news which left him, and Jack after him, heir to the Marquessate of St Ives with all that implied? It might be that Eugenia Jones, seeing her son in a position of vast wealth and privilege, had hesitated to deprive him of it. In that case she had indeed found herself between Scylla and Charybdis, the mythological rock and the whirlpool dreaded by ancient mariners.

  On the one hand she sacrificed her daughter, like a Greek maiden to the Minotaur; on the other hand she dispossessed her son ... there was doubtless still some further mythological comparison amid the plethora evoked in her mind. It was at this point that Jemima became aware that Binyon, impeccably coated in a tailcoat and striped trousers, was offering her asparagus, with the air of one who had been doing so for some time.

  'Our own asparagus,' he said confidentially; for Binyon, as Jemima had observed, seldom missed even the slightest opportunity for conversation with those he served. 'In case you're wondering, Miss Shore.'

  'Wondering? Yes, I was.' Jemima helped herself with an automatic smile in the direction of the butler, now in full butlerian fig. But that hardly seemed the right thing to say to Binyon, who accepted her remark with a discreet, a very discreet but still perceptible, air of surprise.

  She corrected herself. 'I meant, I was hoping.'

  Binyon passed on to Daphne Iverstone; he now looked, with equal discretion, satisfied.

  It struck Jemima that throughout her stay so far Binyon had treated her not only as an honoured guest, but also as an ally - an ally from their shared television world. So that in a subtle way he was both anxious for her behaviour to be correct and gratified when it was.

  Then this was forgotten as the full implications of her discovery - or rather her intuitive flash concerning Tiggie and Saffron, flooded over her.

  Poor little Tiggie, how wan she was, how woebegone, how unlike the odiously affected but high-spirited creature who had seduced Cy Fredericks, engaged the admiring attention of Cass Brinsley and driven Jemima mad at Oxford. Did she have some inkling that her glorious destiny was about to be snatched from her? Jemima recalled her words at the Mossbankers' house: 'I'm going to be Lady Saffron. And I'm going to be really really rich ...' She remembered also those other revealing snatches from Saffron about Tiggie: 'We think alike. We want the same kind of life.'

  It was as though Saffron, in all the atmosphere of hereditary claims in which he had been brought up, had felt himself clai
med by his own family, and mistaking one thing for the other had been impelled to bond Tiggie to him.

  Who knew? The question reverberated in her mind as she gazed across at the Strawberry children opposite with their dark eyes and high cheekbones, so similar to those of Eugenia Jones. Then there came another more startling thought, distracting her sufficiently to take another enormous helping of the home-grown asparagus, so that Daphne Iverstone, did she wish for more, was left lamenting. Jemima was assuming all along that her own intuitive discovery meant the end of the projected marriage. What on earth had led her to that conclusion? For one thing, she had no proof, only surmise; for another, even if proof were advanced - an admission of the truth by Eugenia Jones for example - was she, Jemima Shore, about to play God, an avenging god at that, as Cass had pointed out right at the beginning a propos Nurse Elsie's revelations? 'Justice is for Almighty God' - Sister Imelda's words. Jemima had entered the fray out of curiosity, not to right a wrong. She had stayed to investigate - and protect Saffron.

  In any case was it really so terrible for half-brother and sister to marry? Stranger things must have happened in the history of the aristocracy, to say nothing of the history of the average country villages. Memories of delving into the history of birth control before her programme The Pill: For or Against came back to her: there had been long ages, almost to the present day, when the absence of effective birth control of any sort must have led to such embarrassing problems on more than one occasion.

  Jones. Who was Jones? Tiggie was older than Saffron, a fact on which the gossip columns had not failed to comment, when printing rumours of the impending engagement. If the mysterious Jones was the father of Tiggie, who then was Saffron's father? She gazed down the table at that great progenitor, Professor Mossbanker. Was that possible? Ironically, enough, Proffy s blood group - A, which fitted - now became as interesting to her as the blood group of Lord St Ives had formerly been.