Watson’s Apology

by Beryl Bainbridge

  In the night he woke from bad dreams, hoping the letter was a fragment of them, and when he stumbled through into his study and saw it lying there on his desk he covered his face with his hands and groaned aloud. In the past, if sleep eluded him he had been used to reading; during the three months remaining to him at the school he was unable to touch the books on his shelves, not even the ones he had written himself and which once had given him such pleasure to hold, for now it seemed they represented some thing and some time which was irretrievably dead and lost to him. In his blackest hours he thought of burning them.

  There had been talk in the beginning of organising a meeting at the school and getting influential parents to agitate on behalf of himself and the other masters. But when it came to it, the younger masters backed off. He didn’t blame them. If they were to get further employment they needed recommendations from the Committee.

  He corresponded with numerous people in high places, but he had always been too self-sufficient and had never troubled to ingratiate himself with anyone. He received few replies, and those, beyond expressing a distant sympathy for his plight, offered no solution to his difficulties.

  Two days before the end of term, in the middle of morning service when the choir was singing Adeste Fideles, he walked out of the school, leaving his books and his belongings behind. It was not like him to act impulsively, but then he was no longer himself. Someone had dropped a paper lantern in the snow in the yard; he crushed it into a ball and threw it over the railings. He felt he was hurling his own life away.

  Later, Grey packed his books and papers into two boxes and sent them round with the drill sergeant. Looking at the boxes, Watson was surprised how small they were, considering they contained the debris of twenty-six years.

  He was not yet desperate for money, but it was obvious that he couldn’t continue to lay out sixty pounds a year for a large house in which only he and Anne lived. They would have to find somewhere more modest – somewhere, above all, as far away from the school as possible. He wrote to Mrs Hill, the owner of 28, St Martin’s Road, and told her he would quit the premises the following June, and might, if she wished it, do so even sooner.

  In the meantime economies should be made, though it was puzzling to know in what direction. He could not in all charity cut the allowance he made to Olivia Armstrong in Dublin; since the death of her brother she was wholly reliant on him. Nor could he cancel his subscriptions to various societies and to the London Library. His survival depended more than ever on his being able to borrow books and to meet people in the literary world. He told Anne that he would sell the silver plate which the school had presented to him four years ago, but he didn’t mean it. She suggested that they get rid of the younger of the two servant girls. The boarders had left some time before and it was surely an extravagance to keep both servants. He dithered, feeling that it was unfair to dismiss one of them so hastily – and besides, he preferred Ellen Pyne to her sister Margaret. Then the accident occurred, and Margaret Pyne went of her own accord.

  Anne had been unwell that day. She had called out to him that Snap was standing on the top landing, whining and scratching at the attic doors. Mr Wallace had given him the dog some weeks before, having found it starving in a brick field. Anne said she was certain someone was trying to break in through the trapdoor in the loft. The dog’s behaviour was proof of it. He knew she wasn’t telling the truth. Only a minute before he had gone through into the room behind the library and looked out of the window; he had seen the animal down in the yard. Anne had continued to make a nuisance of herself, roaming the house and blundering into things, and complaining of a slithering noise on the roof. He had called Margaret to help her to her room – she wouldn’t allow either Ellen Pyne or himself to see to her – and some sort of scuffle had taken place at the head of the stairs. The girl had fallen awkwardly and sprained her ankle. He had fetched Dr Rugg from Stockwell Villas to attend to her. The next day, when Anne was better, she had insisted on waiting on the girl herself. She gave her a brooch as a present and two weeks extra wages when she left. So much for economy.

  Once he had removed himself physically from the school, his misery, though not his bitterness, lessened. He began to take an interest in his books again. During the day he locked himself in his library. When Anne objected, he said she must pretend he was keeping school hours. He allowed her in after five o’clock on a week day and all day on Sunday. He told himself that he locked the door in order to be left in peace, but in his heart he knew it was a precaution against his own lunacy. He was afraid he would walk to the Crescent and loiter outside the ornamental gates of the school like a beggar. In her worst moods Anne stood on the landing and beat on the panel of the door.

  One morning in January young Fraser called at St Martin’s Road. He was now a solicitor in his father’s firm in Dean Street, Soho. He was also a member of that shameful Proprietory Board which had ousted Watson from his post, though he had spoken out against the manoeuvre. He was anxious to be of assistance; he thought Watson had been harshly treated. He found his former head master in a better state than he had expected. Watson spoke enthusiastically of his History of the Papacy, and said he was translating a collection of the songs of Béranger. Towards the end of the year, when his history was finished – it covered the whole period from St Peter to the Reformation – he had another commission from Bohn. He was also contemplating an essay on the relationship between Church and State.

  Fraser enquired whether he had given up all hopes of returning to the school.

  ‘It is out of my hands,’ replied Watson.

  ‘It could be,’ said Fraser, ‘that we can apply different tactics.’ He hesitated to ask, but he wondered if Mr Watson had enough funds set by to make a proposition to the Board. In the financial position in which the school found itself, the Board might be persuaded to let it out of their control. He said he would be willing to put up money himself.

  Watson was elated at the idea, and immediately suggested they should send the Board a copy of the letter he was writing to the Bishop of Winchester. He had composed it some years before but had never sent it because he was not yet satisfied with its construction. Only recently he had added to it a passage from Lucian, in which Jupiter lamented to the Cynic Menippus, the time when, far from being thought of as old-fashioned and decrepit, he was looked up to by all, and sacrifices had been so general that one could not see for the smoke.

  ‘Jupiter,’ he explained, making a small circle with the thumb and forefinger of one hand and closing it with the palm of his other, ‘showed Menippus how prayers came up to him through holes with covers to them. In this way foolish petitions could be shut off and he need only listen to the reasonable ones.’ The letter was in Latin, and he believed that the Board, as well as the Bishop, couldn’t fail to grasp the aptness of its classical references.

  Fraser, beyond admiring its style, could think of no useful purpose that the letter would serve in this instance – the Board was mainly made up of shopkeepers and brewers – and instead drafted a letter to the Proprietors which read as follows:

  Having fully reviewed the state of finances at the school, it is proposed that the Board should relieve themselves of all existing and future liabilities by allowing the school to pass into other hands. I am prepared to negotiate for the lease of the premises, for the sum at which it was valued in the late Report of the Committee to the Proprietors, and to relieve the Proprietors of all liabilities from next Christmas.

  When Watson had signed it, Fraser cautioned him not to raise his hopes too high, warning him that further disappointment might be in store.

  ‘I am not a fool,’ Watson assured him. ‘I was never one for optimism and am even less so now. Once a man’s spirit has been broken it is not easy to renovate it.’

  The negotiations came to nothing. The Committee thought that the amount offered wasn’t large enough. They didn’t absolutely repudiate the idea in principle, but considered that the terms were not good
enough to accept.

  Watson believed it was he they were against. However much he offered they would in the end turn it down. Fraser was inclined to agree. Still, now that the idea of taking over the school had entered his head, Watson would not give it up without a struggle.

  In May he met by appointment in the offices of Bisson, the Scholastical Agent near Oxford Street, a gentleman of means from Liverpool called John Brindley. They had corresponded through the Agent, with a view to Mr Brindley’s taking over the lease of the school and putting Watson in as head master.

  Mr Brindley smelled of spirits. He had fallen into schools by accident, having inherited two in the north of England at the death of an uncle. He was not against making a further investment.

  ‘Have you any fixed ideas on education in general?’ asked Watson.

  Mr Brindley confessed he hadn’t, beyond the ordinary ones concerning the importance of the new sciences.

  ‘And have you any knowledge of the classics?’

  ‘Not a great deal,’ admitted Mr Brindley cheerfully.

  Mr Bisson intervened and questioned Mr Brindley on the returns he was making on his other investment, and the amount of control he exercised in his establishments.

  ‘He means interference,’ said Watson, and he rose from his chair and walked about the room. He did not see how he could do business with such a man; his voice was so nasal it was hard to understand a word he uttered.

  Mr Brindley wanted to know the reasons for Watson’s leaving the school in Stockwell. Watson said irritably that he had already explained the circumstances in his letters.

  ‘I had some difficulty in reading them through to the end,’ replied Brindley. ‘The handwriting was very cramped, and there was all that underlining of words.’

  ‘I am the victim of Philistines,’ Watson said. ‘Men who put their pockets before traditions or scholarship.’ It was obvious to the Agent that he thought the man from Liverpool was of the same breed. He was pressing his fist to his temple agitatedly. ‘Think of it,’ he cried. ‘They thought nothing of dismissing seven masters only six months before the University examinations. What sort of men would do that, do you think?’

  At that moment he was distracted by the presence of a large fly which had flown out from behind the window blind and was buzzing above his head. Seizing his hat from the table he proceeded to swipe the air with it. ‘I would have been willing,’ he continued breathlessly, ‘to have taken a drop in salary, had I been asked. I would have been willing –’ here he began to pursue the fly about the room, slicing his hat ferociously from side to side – ‘to have worked for a period of time, if absolutely necessary, for no reimbursement whatsoever.’ Exasperated, he flung his hat at the ceiling.

  Arriving home, he wrote to Mr Bisson complaining that Mr Brindley was not a desirable person to be on a scholastical list. Was there anyone else more suitable to his requirements? Mr Bisson never replied.

  In August the weather became very hot. Anne suffered a great deal from headaches, brought on, she claimed, by the thunderstorms. They were still living at St Martin’s Road. He had meant to look for somewhere else but he had been too busy working on the second volume of his book. It was now finished, and had been for a week, but he was loath to let it go. He was convinced Longmans must take it. They had published his life of Warburton and of Porson, and though the Porson had sunk like a stone, the Warburton had been respectfully reviewed in all the leading journals. According to the Athenaeum he had drawn the character of his hero with a ‘firm, if not a very tender, hand’. They had debated whether Warburton deserved the ‘zeal, labour and ability of such an author as Mr Watson’. The book had even proved to be something of a commercial success, and he had no reason to suppose that his History of the Papacy would not do even better.

  At last he took the manuscript, loosely wrapped in brown paper, to Turner’s the trunkmaker on the Clapham Road.

  The shop was next door to the Post Office, and over the years he had got into the habit of giving Turner a few coppers to dispatch his parcels for him. The Post Office was usually crowded, and he detested waiting. Having instructed Turner as to the exact amount of string and sealing wax needed to make a secure job of his package, he decided to call on Mr Bush. It would be in the nature of a celebration – it was not every day he sent off a book to the publishers.

  As he turned into Lansdowne Road a funeral cortège approached from the direction of the Crescent, and he halted and removed his hat. When the procession had gone by, he saw Anne on the opposite pavement. He was not surprised: she could sense a funeral a mile off. No sooner did a hearse appear in the street than she ran from the house as if tugged on strings. She was not wearing her bonnet. Hands piously clasped on her protruding stomach, she bobbed along in the wake of death. The dog ran ahead of her.

  Watson called out to her, and she stopped, her face losing its rapt expression and becoming sullen. She turned and made her way back to the house, keeping a few yards in front of him. He did not dare escape up the road to Mr Bush and was forced to follow her indoors.

  ‘I have sent off my manuscript,’ he told her. ‘Now, I’ll have time to look for somewhere to live.’

  She said nothing. Possibly he should never have mentioned his book – he did not want to set off that painful process of hope and dread.

  ‘You will have to come with me,’ he said. ‘It will be your choice as well as mine.’

  ‘You won’t want me to,’ she replied. ‘Not when it comes to it.’

  He went up to his study. Any discussion with Anne as to where they might go, or what sort of accommodation they should look for, usually ended in a quarrel. She insisted that she liked Stockwell; once she had foolishly said it was where her friends were, and though he hadn’t twitched an eyelid, let alone corrected such a preposterous statement, she had burst into tears and flung a glass at him.

  Sometimes she still begged him to comfort her, and when he tried to do so she screamed out that she didn’t want his pity. Sometimes she told him to leave her alone, and when he did just that she rounded on him and accused him of treating her worse than the dog. Often she asked him what it was he wanted, as though his expectations were somehow beyond human understanding, when, God knows, all that he had ever hoped for was a modest income and a quiet life. She thought she was acting out of love; that was the cruellest part of it. In spite of all her insults, her tricks, her friendship with the scandal-mongering Mrs Tulley, she believed she doted on him. If he didn’t unlock the library on the stroke of five o’clock she took a hammer to the door. It wasn’t her irrational behaviour which was upsetting – indeed, she had hardly behaved any differently in all the time he had known her – it was the increased frequency of her fits of ‘illness’ which disturbed him. He did nothing about it, and was afraid that his passiveness was deliberate and malicious.

  Now that his manuscript was gone from his desk he didn’t know how to occupy himself. He tried to concentrate on Béranger, but his mind wandered. There was some controversy over whether the coquettish Lisette of the later songs was in fact the Mademoiselle Judith, whom, it was said, Béranger had loved as a pure and tender friend. Watson thought they were one and the same. He didn’t think there was a woman alive capable of pure and tender friendship, though she might give an imitation of it.

  They had tea, as always, at six o’clock. Afterwards he said he would take Snap for a walk. Anne decided she would come too, and later he told her that he had changed his mind and was feeling somewhat tired. He went to bed before her. She was downstairs for a while, and just as he was falling asleep he heard her moving about in the library, opening the drawers of his desk. In the middle of the night she urinated in the bed.

  At breakfast he told Ellen Pyne that the dog had upset the slop pail. He instructed her to take the mattress down into the yard and let it dry out in the sun. He had to help her; she couldn’t shift it past the bend in the basement stairs. He thought of Mrs Parr humiliating poor, dead Porson, and felt enorm
ous sympathy for him, though he had none for Anne.

  He never uttered a word of rebuke to her; it wasn’t necessary. She was pitifully embarrassed and wrote him a note which she slipped under the door, begging him for forgiveness and telling him that she was moving one of the beds from the attic into the dressing-room behind the library. She added a pathetic postscript, to the effect that when it was less hot she wouldn’t need to drink such quantities of barley water.

  The dressing-room contained some of his books and papers, and she herself cleared them out, after five o’clock, and stacked them neatly under his desk. She called her new retreat the ‘glory hole’, a name once used by her father for a room in the house in Upper Sackville Street. He had kept his guns in it and his saddle.

  As Watson told Mr Bush later that evening, as they drank champagne under a chinese lantern in the painter’s little back garden – Bush had insisted on celebrating the sending off of the manuscript – she had never recovered from losing her position in life. It had warped her. ‘I understand it,’ he said. ‘Not to have one’s expectations realised is a dreadful thing.’

  ‘Not everyone takes it quite so badly,’ objected Mr Bush.

  ‘I have done her a great wrong,’ Watson said. ‘In the beginning I didn’t do so badly – better than Porson, for instance, who forgot to go home on his wedding-night. But I haven’t done so well since. Mrs Watson is a difficult woman – but who knows, a different husband might have made her easier to live with.’

  ‘Or worse,’ said Mr Bush, though he didn’t think it likely. His being an artist, and therefore outside rigid society, put him in a privileged position. Watson could confide in him and speak his mind – he knew the poor man would have found it impossible to talk of his wife in such terms to Anderson or Wallace.

  ‘She has taken herself off into the dressing-room to sleep,’ Watson said. He didn’t say why, though in the past they had discussed both his marriage and Anne’s ‘illness’. There were some things best left unspoken. Besides, Bush disliked Anne, and sometimes Watson felt guilty at giving him so much domestic information. He had never allowed him to say a harsh word about her. He himself might criticise Anne till the cows came home, but he wouldn’t stand for it in others.