Watson’s Apology

by Beryl Bainbridge

  He was speechless.

  She went on to accuse him of becoming overwhelmed with fatigue whenever she attempted to talk of things which interested her. He had a way of biting on his lip to stop himself yawning. He needn’t think she was unaware of it.

  Even as she spoke he felt a muscle twitching in his cheek.

  ‘Today I met Dr Munford coming away from the school. Consider what I felt when he complimented me on a geranium I had never set eyes on. You told him I’d grown it.’

  He was bewildered. ‘You’re mistaken,’ he said. ‘There was no talk of gardens, only of flies.’ He looked at her helplessly; he had envisaged it so differently. Uncertain how to proceed, he began to tell her about the increase of deaths in the district, of the dangers of contamination in the playground and how Munford had pushed the whole problem on to him.

  ‘Of course he has,’ she said sarcastically. ‘Who else but you would come up with a thrifty solution?’

  In spite of himself, he bit on his lip.

  ‘Stop it,’ she cried, and she jumped up from her chair and raised her fist, as though to strike him.

  He stepped back, appalled. ‘You’re mistaken,’ he said, ‘I’m not yawning. It’s simply a muscular spasm, a dependence of the platysma myoides, or what is known as the misorius Santorini.’

  She ran into the bedroom and closed the doors. I am not bitter, she told herself. Only sad. She had overestimated his faculty for understanding; he had always underestimated her capacity for feeling.

  From the beginning she had been so foolishly confident that her life would be lived, if not exactly as in those palmy days at Inchicore, then at least in some grey imitation of it. She hadn’t asked for the moon, merely for an occasional supper party, an excursion into the country – a day at the seaside. And when even these paltry treats had been denied her, she had turned for company to Mrs Tulley, though of course the drill sergeant’s wife was nothing more than a servant. With Mrs Tulley she had felt at ease, a state of mind unknown to Watson. The differences of class and experience – Mrs Tulley had lost her first husband in bizarre circumstances and been left to bring up a child – were of no importance. She herself had suffered a far greater deprivation for, in the ruination of her father, hadn’t she lost a whole way of life? With Mrs Tulley she could savour the ruthlessness of Irish humour; without her she might have gone mad. The English had no wit – speculation was labelled gossip, interest dismissed as vulgar curiosity. They hadn’t the least notion of how to enjoy themselves and were forever cleaning and polishing their furniture, wiping the soot from the windowsills, taking down the curtains and the blinds in spring as though there were devils lurking in the corners. As if anticipating the Second Coming, they waited in their scrubbed houses for the arrival of the chimney sweep, the upholsterer and the decorator; in the distance, like a storm brewing, the carts and the omnibuses rumbled across the city. Now and then, agitated by puritanical zeal and unable to come to terms with their own good fortune, they leapt out into the world and thrust second-hand clothing and left-over food on the great unwashed beyond the gates. Watson, spying some lout lying under the railway arch or sprawled in the gutter outside a public house, would give the coat off his back. Fresh from her buoyant talks with Mrs Tulley, reminiscing of roaring times in Ireland, she would taunt him with hypocrisy, of attempting to placate the desperate multitudes who swarmed up and down the Clapham Road. ‘They will get you in the end,’ she warned, ‘for all your shenanigans’, though afterwards she apologised because she could see how uncomfortable she made him.

  ‘I have always wanted a cabinet made of satin wood,’ she cried out, each time that fat-head Mandell or the Revd Mr Williams, thinking they were doing him a service, told her of Watson’s latest act of lunatic charity. She saw how they looked at her, and when they had gone she would blame him for making her appear extreme, and he would protest that she had got it wrong, that they admired her, that she was more life-like than he. ‘Why,’ he would say, ‘it is you they come to see, not me. I’m a kill-joy, a dry stick.’

  At this moment she felt her happiest hours had been spent with the boarders, not with her husband. She had sat by the fire with Claybrooke, watching him toast bread. The boy’s carroty hair, twisted into curls, had bounced on the frayed collar of his jacket. She had only to stretch out her hand to touch his cheek mottled by the flames. When he had caught his finger in the gate she had bound it up with her handkerchief. Often, confused, he had called her ‘Mother’. Watson had taken against Claybrooke because she had lent the boy some tattered children’s book she had found in the study. Claybrooke had been ill at the time with scarlet fever. When he was better Dr Munford had told her to put his possessions on the fire. Watson, on hearing what had become of his precious book, had behaved as though she was responsible for the burning of the library at Alexandria.

  Though fond of the Besant brothers, especially Frank, who was idle and broke things and sometimes cheeked her, it was Claybrooke she had loved. Today, when she had called at his lodgings only to be told he was away in Norfolk, she had felt her heart would break.

  I have not come very far, she thought. I have moved from one room with Olivia into two rooms with J.S. Watson. She had no furniture; if she died tomorrow her belongings would still fit into the trunk she had brought from Dublin. The daylight hours passed with her sitting vacantly at the window, motionless, untouched. Even those unspeakable movements accomplished in the dark had become little more than the wrigglings of fish under water. When he slipped away from her into sleep she lay stranded, looking up at the firelight leaping on the ceiling. Once only in his embrace, on her wedding night, had she felt she was not alone. I am a disappointed woman, she thought. He had never bought her a piano. She began to cry into the pillow.

  Watson, hearing those noisy sobs, covered his face with his hands. He felt as if he had committed a crime. At the same time he couldn’t help thinking it was all a storm in a tea cup. He had tormented himself for no reason. Her weeping, her disagreeableness – she had virtually accused him of stinginess – had in some way lessened the seriousness of her remark at breakfast. How mistaken he had been; it was, after all, only women’s behaviour. And yet, listening to her, the tears welled up in his own eyes.

  After a while she stopped crying, and he heard her rise from the bed and light the gas. The bed springs jangled as she lay down again. Half an hour passed. At last he went to the doors and, pushing them open a fraction, spoke to her through the gap. Uncertain whether she was even awake, he told her about Montpelier House and the empty rooms, dwelling on the spaciousness of the communal sitting-room and the size of the neglected garden. She could grow things, he said.

  She asked calmly, ‘And who lives there, besides your friend the Revd Mr Williams?’

  ‘A Miss Cockshott,’ he said. ‘Headmistress of a ladies school in Euston.’

  She enquired the age of Miss Cockshott.

  ‘Old,’ he said, hoping it was the truth. ‘And there’s Mrs Brewer from the Beulah Laundry.’

  He opened the doors wide. She was sitting up in bed, her arms bare, her hands clasping her knees. She looked refreshed, coquettish almost.

  ‘A woman from a laundry!’ she said.

  It was on the tip of his tongue to snap at her that Mrs Brewer, compared to Mrs Tulley, was a duchess. Instead he explained that she was the proprietor of the business and well-to-do. She was also fond of music. He didn’t think this was the moment to mention Henry Grey or Mandell. ‘You’d have company,’ he said,’ and it would give me time to find a suitable house to rent.’

  At this she held out her arms to him.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and holding her close murmured that he had always meant to rent a house and to buy her a piano. It was his intention to take her to Hastings. They would go the instant the school holidays commenced.

  She began to cry again. She was sorry for the cruel things she had said to him earlier – sometimes her life was so wretched she couldn’t help bein
g spiteful.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ he said, ‘my fault.’ And stumbling over the words, he added, ‘I was not taught how to love.’

  ‘I was not taught to accept second place,’ she said truthfully.

  He said awkwardly, ‘You know that I love you –’

  ‘I know it,’ she replied. ‘But often I don’t feel it. It isn’t the same for a woman.’

  She stared over his shoulder at a print on the bedroom wall. It was a view of Old London – a stretch of the Thames with some misty sailing ships in the distance. She thought the water was well done. How curious it was! She had waited, waited for him to tell her he loved her, and now that it was said it didn’t seem to make any difference. Perhaps he had left it too late. When she had a house of her own she would have a series of such prints displayed along the wall and up the stairs.

  Two weeks later, in reply to Watson’s letter, the Standard Library wrote expressing interest in his proposed translation of Lucretius. After a meeting with Mr Bohn at his offices in Covent Garden, he decided he would start work on it immediately the school examinations were over. Perhaps too now was the time to apply for his Oxford M.A., ad eundem gradum, to which as a Trinity M. A. he was entitled.

  Anne, when told that the holiday in Hastings would have to be postponed, said she understood. Naturally his literary career must come first. Besides, she would have plenty to occupy her rearranging their rooms in Montpelier House. Mandell was conveniently applying for a post at a school in Belgium, and she would simply ignore Henry Grey. Even before they moved in she gave instructions that the grass in the garden should be cut.

  Winter 1858

  Watson was staring out of the carriage window at London Bridge Station when he noticed a woman crying on the platform. She wore neither shoes nor stockings and was looking directly at him. In spite of the dismal contortions of her face, she seemed to be smiling. Still gazing at him, she exposed her breast and he saw she was holding an infant. Though it was February and bitterly cold, the child was almost naked. As the train began to draw away from the station he pushed down the window and hurled some coins at the woman. He tore the muffler from his neck and threw it towards the platform; it fell short and dropped onto the track. Shuddering, he pulled up the window and flung himself into his seat. He felt weak all over, as if he had suffered an intolerable shock. Tasting blood in his mouth he took out his handkerchief and spat into it. The train crawled across the bridge; below, specks of frost glinted on the mud banks of the river. Then the line sloped downwards, running between houses and factories, and slabs of wasteland on which the cattle and the pigs stood rooted, stiff as the branches of the winter trees. A pall of black smoke obliterated the sun. At last, passing a church and row of dwellings clinging to the bank of an oily canal, the train left the town and, emerging from a brick tunnel, travelled beside frozen fields and ponds, through Hither Green, Mottingham and Eltham. The sky turned blue again.

  He had spent the earlier part of the morning at a dentist’s in Oxford Street. Most of his life he had been plagued with toothache, and recently he had begun to be troubled with his stomach. Fearing his breath stank, he had sucked peppermints from morning till night. Reluctantly he had consulted Dr Munford, complaining of cramps and a foul taste in his mouth. Dr Munford, observing the advanced state of decay in his few remaining teeth had ordered him to have done with them. In his pocket, wrapped in brown paper, Watson now carried a complete set of vulcanite plates fitted with coil springs. He had been told he would be able to wear them in a matter of days when his lacerated gums had miraculously healed and he had mastered the instructions for securing the contraption in his mouth. He understood he was to hold the upper set in his right hand while placing the lower one in position, and that he must be careful not to entangle his lips in the springs. Before completing the transaction he had satisfied himself, as far as he was able, that the teeth were indeed false and had not come from some distant battlefield. He had only the haziest recollection of what had occurred in that torture chamber above a jeweller’s shop. He remembered a great thumb and forefinger prising open his lips and then a taste of metal as the forceps probed his jaw, followed by an excruciating pressure, not in the region of his mouth but somewhere at the top of his skull. He had held onto the arms of his chair to prevent himself being dragged upright. Unable to scream he stamped his feet on the sawdust littered floor. He was convinced that the bony structure of his skull would be reduced to splinters and he had shut his eyes so tightly that stars sprayed through the agonising darkness. After each monstrous extraction he lay back, limbs trembling, his mouth warm with blood. The hatred he felt for the butcher who violated him, who straddled his thighs as if riding him to an abattoir, cheeks puce with exertion as he wrenched the stumps from his head, was immense. If he had been less feeble he would have seized him by the throat and tossed him out of the window. The dentist wore a white surplice splattered with scarlet flecks and tied at the neck like a choirboy. Watson had reached out blindly and smeared his own blood on to his fingertips.

  He had intended, when it was finished, to go home; instead he found himself at the station booking-office buying a ticket to Crayford. It was a reckless thing to have done, as he now realised. His brother Abraham had given no address, and even if he was located without difficulty there would be little opportunity of speaking to him, not if he wanted to be home in time for Henry Dale. He should have gone to Crayford two weeks before when Abraham had first communicated with him. Anne had advised against it. She said there was no cause to return. It was bound to upset him – he was so sentimental about the family who had abandoned him. She told him to instruct Abraham to send back the money owed. He hoped she had chosen the wrong word and had meant to imply that he was a man of sentiment. Taking an historical view, he believed sentimentality walked but a step ahead of brutality.

  ‘What a dreadful day,’ Mrs Brewer had wailed, on learning that the head master had lost both a mother and an elder brother.

  ‘There were some years between the two deaths,’ Anne had retorted. ‘And J.S. Watson can hardly be said to have known either of the persons concerned.’

  Dear John Watson, Abraham had written, One pound, four shillings and sixpence is in my keeping, being monies left over from quarterly payment and no longer expected. My mother caught typhoid fever on the first day of January and perished of it on the 20th day. She wrote you a letter that you have had January last. Alfred died five years ago of a fall against the furnace door. He lingered some days, peeling like an onion …

  He had replied to Abraham, explaining that his was the only letter he had received and begging him to make use of the modest sum intended for their mother. He didn’t feel he was depriving Anne of anything. The allowance he made to her sister, Olivia, far exceeded the miserly amount once set aside for his mother. He was sorry, he wrote, to hear of Alfred’s sufferings, even so long after the event.

  Having questioned the two servants and the housekeeper at Montpelier House, he was satisfied they knew nothing of the letter his mother was supposed to have dispatched. He drew a blank at the Post Office, the School House and at Park Road. Perhaps, as Anne suggested, there had never been a letter in the first place. Was it likely, seeing she was dying, that his mother could have written to him? Still, he was tormented by thoughts of what such a letter might have contained. When he confided his feelings to Anne, she told him to turn his back on the past. He felt that the manoeuvre was useless; as he grew older, whichever way he twisted, the past ran to meet him. He said he wished he had been there when his mother had died, and she reminded him that typhoid was catching and urged him to live in the present, as she herself did. Memories, she said, were often treacherous and inaccurate. He was impressed by her good sense. Half an hour later he overheard her telling Mrs Brewer, that, following the crash of the Bank at Dublin, Lord Ffrench had repeatedly called on her father, begging for forgiveness. But for Lord Ffrench’s intervention, she said, the bailiffs would have carted away the furnitur
e.

  Looking out at the fields he was shocked to discover that the train was proceeding so slowly that a piebald pony under a crow-laden tree remained for several seconds within the frame of the carriage window. For once, if there had been other passengers in the compartment, he would have engaged them in conversation. Racked with anxiety about the time, he sank into a stupor. All he could think of was that he would be late home for Henry Dale. Not until a cemetery flickered past, gaudy with daffodils and sloping down to a narrow lane along which a pot-bellied man drove a bedraggled cow, did he pull himself together. Swinging his boots from off the footwarmer on the carriage floor, he released the window and stuck his head out into the icy wind. On the horizon the grey line of the marshes slid into the enormous sky. The Old Powder House, raised on stilts above the water, stood like a hump-backed beast come down to drink.

  As he got out at Crayford it began to rain. From the station fence he could see the road winding to the river and the little iron bridge. Beyond, the town sprawled up to the church and the cottage where his mother had died. Before he left the platform he prudently asked the time of the next train back to London, and found he had less than an hour in which to look for his brother.

  Within minutes of setting off his shoulders were drenched. Even if transport had been available to take him down the hill, he couldn’t have afforded it; he had given his money away to the beggar woman at London Bridge.

  He walked between hedgerows to the river, thinking of the supper party arranged for that evening. It was imperative that Anne shouldn’t feel left out. When she thought she was ignored she was apt to pour herself another glass of port wine and become truculent. If he remonstrated with her, she called him hidebound – why, in Dublin a man wasn’t considered a man until he had drunk so much that he fell insensible beneath the table. In her father’s day at Inchicore House, they had strapped the militia man from Ballyraheen on to the back of his mare and whipped it up the front stairs. Such behaviour it seemed was only permissible in Irishmen. On the rare occasions the Revd Mr Williams imbibed too much and burst into maudlin song during supper, Anne stalked from the room in a huff.