Oxford Blood (20 page)

'Oxford Bloody Marxist!' said Jack which for him sounded quite rude.

'We're anarchists now, Saffer,' Poppy Delaware interrupted sternly. 'Don't you remember that night after the Talking Heads concert? 'We got out our manifesto.' Poppy looked ravishing in a loose but extremely well-cut white linen dinner jacket, wing collar and narrow black tie; the only thing which was visibly anarchistic about her was her wildly streaky hair, in which silver and orange were only a few of the colours visible. Jemima knew that it was despicably sexist on her part but she could not summon up enormous interest in Poppy's political views; on the other hand, she would like to know where she got the dinner jacket.

'Anarchists, OK, yah. Well, what are you going to do next, Jemima?'

Saffron was not to be deterred.

'Now for something totally different. I'm working on a programme about blood as a matter of fact. No, not noble blood this time. Everybody's blood.'

She was conscious of the presence upstairs of that invaluable text-book,
Blood Group Serology,
5th edition, procured by Cherry, together with Mourant's
Blood Relations.
What had the maid thought when she unpacked them? (They were placed conspicuously on her dressing table next to her make-up instead of beside her bed with the other books, as though of a vaguely pharmaceutical nature.) Jemima launched into her theme. Blood transfusions
...
The need for more and different kinds of blood in the National Health Service
...
blood groupings
..
. ethnic frequencies . . . types of formerly rare blood becoming more frequently needed in a society in which immigrants play an increasing part
...
to say nothing of the whole new problem of AIDS.

Once again Saffron played up admirably. He referred to his own recent blood transfusions at Oxford and even managed to make the announcement of his own comparatively rare AB group sound like a characteristic boast.

'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.