Watson’s Apology

by Beryl Bainbridge

  ‘You’ll be able to read more,’ Bush said. He hesitated, and then asked, ‘Do you still miss the school?’

  ‘Not as much as I would have supposed,’ said Watson. ‘But then, though I have always been interested in people, I have never needed them. Last month the pupils got up a collection for me. They wanted me to attend the presentation, but I wouldn’t. Fraser brought a purse round. The whole thing smacked of charity.’

  ‘Never,’ cried Mr Bush. ‘If the Committee had instigated it, you might be right. But it was the boys.’

  ‘Exactly how young Fraser saw it,’ Watson told him.

  There was a scent of nightstock in the garden. In the house next door someone was playing the piano. He had a sudden, melancholy vision of a young man standing in a drawing-room, gazing with infatuated eyes at a girl in a pink dress by a window. He said: ‘She stole money from the purse Fraser brought. A guinea almost, a bit at a time.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Bush.

  ‘Ellen Pyne goes out for her. I don’t say anything to the girl because I don’t wish to shame Anne behind her back. But the situation is terrible.’

  ‘Terrible indeed,’ agreed Mr Bush.

  ‘I should have bought her a piano.’

  ‘It hardly seems a priority now,’ murmured Mr Bush.

  On the doorstep, when he was leaving, Watson said he had been wrong to describe the taking of the money as stealing. He was ashamed to have implied that his wife was a thief. ‘I did not hide it,’ he said. ‘Nor forbid her the use of it. In marriage there can be no such thing as private money.’

  He was miserably aware that his meanness of spirit was not due to the crushing disappointment he had suffered over the loss of his school, nor to his lack of literary success, but rather to an accumulation of little wrongs done to him – a spoiled page, an intercepted letter, a burnt book. My marriage has destroyed me, he thought. I am buried under trivialities.

  He waited three weeks for an acknowledgment of his manuscript from the publishers, and when nothing came, he went to Longman’s offices and was treated offhandedly by the Secretary, who seemed not to have heard of him and curtly told him that he would doubtless receive a communication when, and if, his parcel arrived. Almost demented at the thought that his manuscript might be lost, Watson demanded a search be made, and when it was found in a cupboard, unopened, beneath at least twenty other such packages, he left without asking for a receipt.

  He took the whole incident very hard. In a flash it was apparent to him what lay ahead, and he began seriously to worry about money; he had visions of the workhouse. His savings were dwindling, and still he had not looked for a cheaper place to rent. Catching sight of himself in the mirror in the drawing-room, he saw an old man. He was old, in years, but until now had not felt it. He believed he was sliding towards a pauper’s grave.

  For a whole week he avoided Mr Bush and the Revd Mr Wallace. He was afraid he would break down in front of them. Once he found himself almost at the gates of the school, and he turned and ran headlong in the opposite direction, the dog leaping up at his side and barking. He cursed aloud, and out of the corner of his eye saw Henry Rogers, manager of the Beulah Laundry, tipping his hat to him as he passed.

  At last he went to St Andrews Church, and painfully, because it distressed him to show his feelings to an equal, begged Mr Wallace to help him get employment.

  ‘There’s a Mr Ingram,’ said Wallace, ‘who keeps a list of relief clergymen who may be called on. I will have a word with him.’

  Anne said his low spirits were due to the hot weather – he hadn’t told her of his reception at Longman’s. She too stayed indoors. She thought the air in the streets was infected, and she sat at the window with a handkerchief to her nose, fanning herself with a tattered remnant of blue silk. During the day she locked the door of the glory hole. She had forbidden Ellen Pyne to go in there. She told Watson that the girl had enough to do looking after the house, and that she preferred to clean the room herself. He was not sure he believed her; he was afraid there was a more devious explanation for her sudden attack of thoughtfulness. She had removed the oyster shell, of which she was so fond, from the mantel-shelf in the library and had taken it into the back room. ‘You have your possessions crowding you,’ she said, looking at his books and his bust of Homer. If I wake in the small hours I find it comforting to have it near me.’

  She still undressed in the front bedroom and dropped her dress and her petticoats on the floor by the window. He thought she was compelled to do this, rather as an animal was driven to stake out its territory. He had stopped putting her clothes away years ago, and now he flung his own on top of hers. It was only in those delicious, solitary moments before he drifted into sleep that he gained any advantage from the new arrangement. She was back in the morning, waddling about the room in her torn nightgown, her bare feet slapping against the oil cloth; and if she retired before him, or if he worked late, he heard her beyond the double doors, sighing in her single bed, and occasionally sobbing. He stuffed his fingers into his ears but he couldn’t blot her out.

  To his dismay, in this period of gloom he kept thinking about the intimacy they had shared when they were first married. He remembered that far-off time when he had known hate and love and not the reason for it, save that he burned and felt it so. Catching sight of her when he woke – her swollen eyes, her faded hair – he wondered at his sentimentality. Of course it worked both ways. In the shaving glass of a morning his face was so altered in appearance that he hardly recognised himself, though inside he remained the same, forty-years-old with success ahead of him.

  Some evenings Anne crouched quiet as a mouse in her chair by his desk. Other times she raved of Inchicore House, and Henry Boxer, and of a boy in a boat on a lake. Either way, Watson sat there and faced the disintegration of his life.

  Then, quite suddenly, his depression lifted. Perhaps it had had something to do with the weather after all. Whatever the reason, he felt sufficiently recovered to finish his Latin letter to the Bishop of Winchester, and to answer several advertisements for accommodation in North London. He began work on Valerius Flaccus for Bohn. Hope, that best comfort of an imperfect condition, once more bore him up.

  By the first week in October he had finished the manuscript. He thought that he had done a good job. He was so pleased with himself that on the Saturday he decided to take a morning away from his desk and go to Herne Hill. He had heard of a house there with rooms vacant. It wasn’t the area he wanted but it wouldn’t do any harm to make enquiries. He asked Anne to come with him.

  ‘Why pretend my opinion is of any importance,’ she said. ‘Leave me alone.’

  His good humour drained away. He slammed the door after him and struck savagely at the privet hedge; he no longer felt like looking at houses.

  Then he remembered Mr Hall, a tea-dealer of Brixton, who had called on him earlier in the year to ask for a recommendation for his son. At the time, coming so soon after his dismissal, Watson had hardly known to which boy he was referring. Now he would go and see Hall and offer his help. He still had influence in the district.

  When he got to the address both the boy and his father were out. He thought that the woman who opened the door looked at him oddly. It took all his strength to be civil to her.

  He was walking back along the Clapham Road when he saw a ragged procession of working men coming towards him, carrying placards. They were ill-clothed and unprotected from the rain, and as they drew nearer an omnibus overtook them, throwing up such a deluge of spray that the men, further saturated, flung down their banners in the gutter and, dispersing on the wet pavement, shook themselves like dogs. Surely, thought Watson, the day will come when the persecuted – he was not alone – would demand a place in the sun. And if it wasn’t allowed them, why, then they would take it – roaring up from man’s unconscious would come an urge towards violence, a determination to destroy. If the road had not been so busy he would have crossed it and given the men all the money he ha
d on him.

  The weather, he realised, was an important factor in war. How different it might have been for Cyrus had the clouds opened on the way to Babylon. Would the Persian king, roused by the battle hymn of Mars, have raised his glittering sword in the air and charged the Royal bodyguard if it had been raining? He suddenly noticed Henry Rogers, manager of the Beulah laundry, standing stockstill on the pavement staring at him. Abruptly he lowered his arm and walked on. The Ten Thousand, he thought, had been lucky in other respects. They hadn’t needed to find accommodation; for them, it was a simple matter of pitching tents.

  On the Sunday morning, having persuaded Anne to come to Herne Hill with him, Watson left the house earlier than usual. It was raining again and Anne complained that her boots were letting in the damp. It seemed to him that she deliberately stepped in every puddle.

  When they reached the house she refused to go inside. She said she didn’t care for the look of it. The curtains were grubby, she argued, and there were several cats sitting in the window. In all the time they had lived at St Martin’s Road he had never known her to take down the curtains to be washed, not unless prompted. But he said nothing. He knew she was frightened of change, of leaving her home.

  They attended morning service at St Emmanuel’s. It wasn’t their usual church but already it was eleven o’clock. Afterwards they walked home past St Andrew’s. The Revd Mr Wallace caught up with them in the road and asked Watson if he could have a private word. He took his friend by the arm and led him a few paces further on. Anne was left sheltering under her umbrella, leaning against a wall and eyeing them suspiciously.

  ‘Word has got through to me, as it will,’ said Mr Wallace, ‘that perhaps you were not quite yourself in Kent.’

  ‘Not myself?’ said Watson.

  ‘Not altogether yourself.’

  ‘In Kent?’ Watson said.

  ‘At St Martin’s Church. In September.’

  ‘Oh, there,’ said Watson. ‘What do you mean, not myself?’

  ‘I understand,’ said Mr Wallace, ‘that you were unable to preach the sermon.’

  ‘Not unable,’ protested Watson. ‘Unasked. He insisted on doing it himself.’

  ‘The Revd Mr Baugh apparently thought you were somewhat unemphatic when reading the Lessons.’

  ‘I should hope so,’ said Watson. ‘I detest emphatic scripture readings. The congregation fixes on the reader rather than the words.’

  Mr Wallace apologised for having brought up the subject. ‘You do see that I had to,’ he said. ‘After all, it was through my recommendation that you were used.’

  ‘I may have been thinking of something else,’ admitted Watson. ‘I had Hercules on my mind.’

  Anne was convinced that Wallace had been talking about her. ‘I don’t know why you pretend,’ she said. ‘You know he has never liked me.’

  ‘He has never had any reason to like you,’ protested Watson. ‘You have invariably given him the cold shoulder.’

  ‘Then he did say something,’ she cried. ‘What is it? I demand you tell me!’

  ‘You’re not in a position to demand,’ he said.

  They walked on in silence, until, taking pity on her, he told her that Wallace had merely discussed his visit to Chelsfield the month before, when he had been employed as relief clergyman.

  ‘You wouldn’t allow me to come,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘You yourself,’ he reminded her, ‘said two train fares would be a needless extravagance.’

  At dinner time he refused to open the wine cupboard; it was Ellen Pyne’s afternoon off and he didn’t want Anne sitting too long at the table and delaying the girl. He liked Ellen. When she had first come to the house he had caught her in the library, reading; it was a harmless enough book on agriculture. He had talked to her and formed the opinion that she was a bright girl. When told that Xenophon could be read, in translation, for his guidance on the subject of household economy, she had asked to see the appropriate passages – this was in marked contrast to Anne, who, given the same information some years before, had struck him on the ear with a bound edition of the Memorabilia. After that he had shown Ellen Pyne the correct way to turn pages, and allowed her to borrow whatever book she wanted. She treated her mistress with patience and kindness, and he was certain she had never divulged to anyone that Anne had pitched Margaret Pyne down the stairs.

  Later, when they had withdrawn to the library, he relented over the wine, and giving Ellen the keys told her to bring it up with the dessert.

  Immediately Ellen left the house Anne said she wanted more to drink.

  ‘No,’ he told her. ‘You’ve had enough.’

  ‘I want more,’ she repeated.

  He stacked the port-wine decanter and the pudding plates on to a tray and took it downstairs. She followed him into the dining-room and watched him locking the wine away in the cupboard. He took the tray to the basement, and when he came back she was standing there with a knife in her hand, attempting to prise open the cupboard door. He said nothing to her and went upstairs.

  Presently she came into the study and said, ‘I can’t continue.’

  ‘Continue what?’ he asked.

  ‘My life,’ she said.

  He thought this was a preparation for one of her scenes, but mercifully she left him and, crossing the landing, went into the dressing-room. He heard her opening the wardrobe door; some minutes later she hurried downstairs.

  He had been sitting at his desk for over an hour when he imagined he heard a knock at the front door. The dog, though it pricked up its ears, remained comatose on the hearthrug. He went to the window and peered into the street, but he couldn’t see anyone. He sat down again and tried to concentrate on the book he was reading. Then he wondered whether the noise had been caused by Anne – sometimes she fell over things. He was worried she might have hurt herself, and he ran downstairs into the dining-room. She was slumped at the table; though the wine cupboard was still locked she had a glass and an empty bottle in front of her. The room reeked of spirits. He was so angry he flung the glass on the carpet. When he had gained control of his voice he ordered her to her room.

  ‘Go to your room,’ she mimicked, still sitting there, and louder: ‘Go to the glory hole, you naughty girl.’

  He tried to pull her from the chair but she clung on to the edge of the table.

  ‘You’re incapable,’ he cried. ‘You are always incapable.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Yes, I am.’

  He could not understand how he had got himself into such a position of useless superiority. She had never been astute enough to marshal her arguments correctly and had always muddied the issue with imagined slights and false evidence. Often, simply to test her, he had admitted that he was guilty of making her unhappy, but she had always missed the point and followed a red herring. He knew he was a clever man, a thinking man, and yet neither his cleverness nor his ability to reason affected his situation with Anne. If he had been in conflict with Williams or Grey or the priggish Anderson, he would have put his case, judged himself in the right and forgotten the whole business within the hour. With Anne he could never resolve anything. In spite of reason, against all logic, he felt he was in the wrong. It was not something an ordinary man could live with and remain sane. The fact that he had held on to his sanity confirmed his belief that he was extraordinary.

  It was growing dark; he moved away from her to light the gas, and as he reached up he thought he saw a face at the window. Startled, he went and stood beside the curtains, staring out at the gloomy little garden.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Anne.

  At that moment the door bell rang, followed by a rattling at the letter box.

  ‘Don’t answer it,’ she cried. ‘If you do you will be overpowered.’ She was cowering on her chair; he couldn’t tell whether her fear was real or assumed.

  ‘Go upstairs,’ he hissed. He did not want Anderson or Wallace to see her in this condition. The bell rang again; reluctantly he went into
the hall and opened the door. It was Mrs Tulley.

  He called through to Anne. She ran from the dining-room and, seizing Mrs Tulley by the arm, told her she was frightened.

  ‘Frightened of what?’ asked the Irishwoman.

  ‘It would be so easy for a man to climb the back wall and break into the house,’ Anne said. ‘The dog is worse than useless. It hardly ever barks.’

  She took Mrs Tulley into the drawing-room. The fire was almost out and she did not bother to light the lamp.

  Mrs Tulley wasn’t asked to sit down. Watson hovered in the doorway, unable to leave the two women alone together; in her present state Anne might say anything. Once she looked over her shoulder and gave him a small, cruel smile. He was obliged to stand there and listen to the inane chatter of the drill sergeant’s wife. It was typical of his existence, he thought, that while men of intellect had been discouraged from visiting the house, he was forced to make conversation with an illiterate and bigoted woman from the bogs of Connemara.

  When at last Mrs Tulley had gone, he rushed into the drawing-room and, taking out his keys, unlocked the cupboard door and flung it open.

  ‘There,’ he said, ‘there!’ And pointing a trembling finger at the decanter he told Anne to take what she wanted. ‘Drink yourself to death,’ he shouted; and afraid he might do her an injury if he stayed in the same room, he swept past her and up the stairs.

  He was shaking with rage at Mrs Tulley’s insolent reference to Messrs. Johnson and Son – the idea of a woman like that putting in a good word for him! He had never forgotten Anne telling him that Mrs Tulley had been a crony of Mrs Gallagher’s all those years ago in Dublin. She had often come to the house in Great Britain Street, being in a demented state after the death of her first husband. Anne and she had never met then, but Anne thought it a grand coincidence. He thought it insufferable that Mrs Tulley had been there right from the beginnings of their life together.