The Fall of Doctor Onslow

by Frances Vernon

  Dr Tait, who had found it necessary to curtail the excessive powers of the Sixth when he succeeded Arnold at Rugby, agreed that neither he nor his system had been flawless. He did not wish to say so, because he had no desire to unsettle Primrose more than he had been unsettled already; therefore, when the conversation began to peter out, he merely said:

  ‘Shall we join the ladies?’

  8

  The hot sun, made hotter by glass, lent a golden surface to Arthur Bright’s brown curls. He took a step away from the window and the light as Onslow handed him his leaving present: a morocco-bound copy of Catullus’s poems with an English inscription on the fly-leaf instead of the usual Latin. Onslow’s message read: To Arthur John Bright, on his leaving Charton School, with all kind wishes from his Headmaster. August 7th, 1858.

  ‘I remembered that you liked Catullus,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’

  The simple words were spoken in a way that Onslow thought voluptuous. Like Onslow, Bright had never had much to say.

  ‘Do you know, I could wish you had been a better pupil,’ Onslow said now, smiling faintly. ‘You have parts, but you never cared to use them to the full. I wish – I wish I had been able to interest you in the works of authors other than Ovid and Catullus. But like me, you prefer the Romans to the Greeks, do you not? In so far as you enjoy the classics at all.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘It is a rare thing. I could name five men whose preference is for the Greeks for every one who shares our taste.’

  Onslow stretched out a hand in the approximate direction of Bright’s head, then quickly let it drop. He wanted to say: ‘Did you burn all my letters? Promise me that you did,’ but he did not. He had never once mentioned his letters, into which he had poured all the emotion which he was too embarrassed to voice in Bright’s presence: once they were written, he thrust them from his mind. Only in his very first note, written last November, the first he had ever written to any boy, had he scribbled ‘Pray burn this’ at the end – he had trusted Bright to treat the others similarly.

  ‘So you are leaving us,’ he said aloud.

  Bright met his eyes for the first time since he entered the room, and said: ‘Yes’, without the ‘sir’.

  Onslow thought the irises of Bright’s eyes looked like two translucent, new-fallen horse-chestnuts. It was an image which had occurred to him before.

  ‘Will you ever visit us, do you think?’

  ‘I doubt it, sir. I –’

  ‘You have not been happy here?’

  ‘Happy enough, sir, um, especially this last year in the Sixth,’ said Bright. Very occasionally, he would make some remark which showed he had a regard for Onslow.

  ‘My dear boy,’ said Onslow, ‘you give me pleasure when you tell me that.’

  ‘I am glad,’ said Bright, thinking how much he had enjoyed the idea of having the Headmaster in love with him. Love of the idea had always outweighed the discomfort of the reality.

  ‘I hope you will like Trinity. I liked it very well when I was up, though perhaps not quite so much as I had liked Rugby. Of course it will be much changed in many ways since my day. We had a Rugby Debating Society, there were so many of us up from Rugby – it was very enjoyable.’

  ‘I’m sure I shall like it, sir.’

  ‘There seems to be nothing else to say,’ said Onslow, turning away. ‘Goodbye, Arthur.’

  ‘Goodbye, sir.’ Bright put out a hand, but saw against all his expectation that Onslow was unwilling to take it: suddenly it seemed that the Headmaster was treating him like an unclean thing. ‘Goodbye!’ he said loudly, and went straight to the door, outside which three other boys were waiting to take their final leave of Onslow.

  As the door shut behind him, the Headmaster gripped the back of the nearest chair, closed his eyes, and waited.

  *

  Christian Anstey-Ward had received a copy of Plato’s Repbublic as his leaving-present from Onslow, and the Headmaster’s choosing Plato took much of the pleasure out of quitting Charton for good. Christian had come to think of Plato as his private property, or at least as the shared property of himself and a few other, likeminded men whom he had never met, but whom in optimistic moments he dreamt of meeting at Oxford. The idea that Onslow secretly nursed some corrupt version of ‘Hellas’ was not only intolerable, but frightening. Onslow belonged to the coal-and money-driven world of Queen Victoria’s England, out of which nothing but sordidness could be expected to come, towards which no man of sense could have anything but a wearily cynical attitude.

  In the five months since he learned about Onslow’s relations with Bright, Christian had come to resemble some of his more sophisticated contemporaries. Like them, he imagined that nothing about the world in which he was forced to live could shock him. He no longer looked always anxious, as though perpetually searching for something, and he felt that hard knocks had made him grow a hard shell inside which ‘Hellas’ could flourish better than before. Yet he feared that by thinking in this way, he had somehow betrayed ‘Hellas’. Onslow had forced him to become so cynical about external reality that one day he would become fit for nothing but that reality: his Grecian vision would die.

  The day after his last interview with the Headmaster, Christian caught the train from London down to Salisbury. Once on it, he took Onslow’s copy of the Republic out of his portmanteau, leafed through it, and read a few pages with concentration: but in the end he left it in the railway-carriage, even though he had no copy of his own and meant to buy one.

  *

  ‘Louisa,’ said Onslow, making his wife jump, ‘shall you miss this garden very much when we leave here?’

  ‘Goodness, Dr Onslow, how you startled me!’ She laid down her trowel, tilted her hat back, and looked at him. Then she got to her feet, and Onslow thought that in her huge round hat and short petticoat she looked like nothing so much as a curious toadstool, with a fragile cap and a thick, frilled stalk. She had spent most of the day entertaining parents with Onslow, but her duties had come to an end early enough to allow her half an hour in the garden before it was time for dinner. After the last parents were gone, Onslow had stayed in his study, but then thoughts of Bright drove him to seek the distraction of talking to his wife. ‘Why do you ask me such a question? You are not thinking of leaving soon, are you?’

  ‘Not precisely,’ said Onslow, though he was. Bright’s departure had made him think of it with such panicking seriousness that he thought it worthwhile to drop hints to his wife.

  ‘Shall I miss the garden – well, yes, I shall, but I shall take those plants which can be moved with me.’ Louisa’s interest was rather in individual plants than in the effect they made when combined in flowerbeds. She had always been a keen botanist, and it amused Onslow to hear her swap long Latin names with fellow enthusiasts. ‘You look fagged to death, Dr Onslow.’

  ‘I am certainly tired.’

  ‘The last day of term is always tiring – so many parents wishing to see you without notice.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And having to be unfailingly polite to them is not always the easiest thing in the world.’

  ‘Exactly so.’

  Onslow now wished he had not decided to broach the subject of leaving with Louisa, but he had been feeling very much alone. His wife’s company and sympathy had seemed better than none, even though it was impossible for her ever to understand.

  ‘Dr Onslow, why this sudden mention of leaving? Is it only that you are worn out?’

  ‘Yes, only that.’ He hesitated: the temptation to speak was still there. ‘But after all, you will own that I cannot remain a headmaster all my life.’

  ‘No, of course not. Another five years, perhaps?’ said Louisa, delighted that Onslow was consulting her as though she were an adult person. In another five years Onslow would still be under fifty: the perfect age for a new bishop.

  ‘Perhaps. Yet I believe I have already accomplished the work God sent me to do here, as well as
I can.’

  ‘Indeed, you have accomplished it very well – better than anyone else could have done, I am sure.’

  ‘No, Louisa, many others would have done far better than I.’

  ‘Stuff!’ she said.

  ‘I wish you would not use such unladylike expressions. Do you pick them up from the boys?’ As he said this, Onslow drew Louisa’s arm through his own, and studied her little hand in its brown leather gardening glove. Then he removed the glove, and caressed the bare hand because it was his legitimate property. He thought of Bright, whom he had tried to give up before the final break yesterday – but it had been as though he were a drunkard asked to abstain while there was a bottle of spirits on the table in front of him.

  Louisa watched his exploring hand, and curled her fingers. Onslow thought that if Bright could be compared to a bottle of brandy, Louisa could be compared to one of her own plants – one of the less unusual and more colourful plants. She was Primrose’s sister, and she did not repel him. It was not always necessary to think of her as his own little sister by adoption. He liked the fact that she was so small, and rather too slim for a woman. The softness of her body was as pleasant and inessential as a rose.

  Onslow’s sudden idea of retiring, retreating, escaping from what he loved, began to fade.

  ‘No, I do not think there is any need for me to go just yet,’ he said, thinking that now Bright was gone, with Louisa’s help, he would resist temptation. He tipped his wife’s chin up, pushed off her hat, and dryly kissed her lips.

  9

  Christian Anstey-Ward had spent his childhood in Weymouth, where his father had a lucrative medical practice, but since 1856 his family had lived at Poplar House, outside Wilton near Salisbury. Dr Anstey-Ward had inherited both the house and a fortune amounting to about £800 a year from an uncle, who had left everything to him on condition that he add the name of Ward to his own. This had been a wholly unexpected piece of good fortune, for Dr Anstey had only once met his reclusive uncle and never imagined he would inherit anything.

  Dr Anstey had saved a considerable sum during his working life and had invested it cautiously in the three-percent Consols. His total income after he inherited old Mr Ward’s estate was therefore enough to enable him to retire in comfort to Poplar House, and devote all his time to his hobbies of geology, palaeontology and natural history. His unmarried sister, Christian’s Aunt Chatty, had hoped that they would make a social move as well as a geographical one, into county society, but this had not happened. Dr Anstey-Ward was the son of a coal-merchant, and though he enjoyed having the leisure of a country gentleman, he disliked society nearly as much as his uncle had, and was therefore not much interested in social advancement for himself. But he had a certain wish to see his son enter the upper class, largely because Christian, he thought, was not well suited to any business or profession except perhaps that of an Oxford don.

  ‘Well, my son, it’s good to have you back,’ Dr Anstey-Ward said when Christian arrived home, early in the evening of the day he left Charton. ‘And what do you mean to do with yourself till October?’

  ‘To read, mostly, Father – in preparation for Oxford.’

  ‘None of your friends has asked you to stop with him for a while, or perhaps go on a walking tour, or anything of that nature, eh?’ said Dr Anstey-Ward, who knew that Christian had very few friends. ‘I should have supposed you’d done enough reading at Charton.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Well, so long as you are content, Christian. Now, where can your aunt be, and Rose?’ he said, turning away.

  At that moment, Christian’s aunt opened the drawing-room door, and briskly walked over to embrace him. She was tall and stout, like her brother and her niece. Christian, who took after his dead mother, was the only delicate-looking member of the family, just as he was the only one at all interested in the beauty of his surroundings, or the lack of it – the mixture of conventional modern taste and drab utilitarian objects which he saw in his father’s house was a source of pain to him.

  ‘Christian!’ said Chatty. ‘You are not looking as well as you ought. Charton is supposed to be so healthily situated.’

  ‘It is only the effects of travelling, Aunt Chatty. How are you?’

  ‘Very well indeed. As soon as I heard you arrive I went to fetch Rose out of that dark-room of hers, but she insists she cannot leave it even for you – those nasty wet plates or whatever they may be are in a critical condition, so she says.’ Rose was Christian’s only surviving, elder sister. He had no brothers. ‘Your father continues to encourage her – he gave her a new camera for her birthday, and I’m told it uses quick exposure, but all I can say is that quick or not, it doesn’t make Rose waste less time in the dark-room.’

  ‘Now, my dear Chatty, it’s no more a waste of time than other young ladies’ hobbies, dried flowers and the like,’ said Dr Anstey-Ward.

  ‘Other young ladies do not enter the presence of gentlemen smelling of chemicals.’

  ‘We can’t be squabbling about Rose when Christian has but just come back. How did you leave Dr Onslow, my boy?’

  Christian flushed. ‘In excellent health, sir.’

  ‘Good. Good.’

  Christian knew that in spite of his having just returned home, in spite of the welcome he had received, his father and aunt were more interested in his sister than in him. He prepared to listen to further discussion of her habits, especially her photography.

  Rose’s photography was a source of dissension between Dr Anstey-Ward and his sister because both were agreed that such a messy and mildly eccentric hobby would be a bar to her marriage. Her father had no wish for Rose to marry, because he did not want to be left alone with Chatty, with whom he had not much in common. For this reason, he bound his daughter to him with expensive gifts of photographic equipment, always implying when he made them that no husband would indulge her similarly. Chatty, on the other hand, did wish Rose to be married, because long ago, she had wanted to marry herself.

  Christian did not perceive that his sister’s position was a difficult one; he only saw that she was the favourite.

  ‘What have you been doing, Aunt Chatty?’ he said, as Dr Anstey-Ward left the room. It seemed he was not to listen to a long talk about Rose after all.

  ‘For the most part, trying my best to reduce the scandal caused by your father’s never going to church,’ she told him.

  ‘But you and Rose go to church every Sunday,’ said Christian, surprised.

  ‘Rose attends only morning service now. And despite all my training she has no reverence whatever for the Sabbath – sees no harm in messing with her camera or reading a novel after church, and of course your father never interferes. I believe he would like her to be a professed infidel.’

  ‘Perhaps he would,’ said Christian, hoping that his aunt would not be able to make him go to church twice on Sundays, now that he was no longer a schoolboy. It occurred to him that he could please his father by saying that he had lost his faith, though he had not so much lost it as had a large part of it rubbed out by Onslow, and he did not want to talk about that.

  ‘But so far as our neighbours are concerned, Rose’s behaviour scarcely signifies: it is the religious opinions of a household’s head that are of real importance. I can subscribe to foreign missions, and help circulate tracts, but still Mr Eames will look at me askance.’ Mr Eames was the vicar. ‘Though to be sure he is always very civil.’

  Listening to Chatty, Christian felt his spirits rise a little. It seemed that though he was not the chief object of affection or even of temporary interest, he had at least become accepted as an adult – someone to whom his aunt would criticise his father, and his father criticise his aunt. He wondered whether Rose, who was four years his senior, would also stop treating him as a boy. Somehow, he found it difficult to harbour a true Greek contempt for women when women did not look up to him as a man. He was very sure that the women of ‘Hellas’ bowed down before the wisdom even of boys, and he ne
ver could quite accustom himself to the fact that in the Symposium, the all-wise tutor of Socrates was Diotima, an undoubted female.

  *

  One day in mid August, when Dr Anstey-Ward was up in London showing an unusual fossil to the curator of the Natural History section of the British Museum, Christian drove into Salisbury with his aunt and sister. The two women were to call on the wife of one of the prebendaries, but Christian excused himself, and instead wandered alone down a dark little street not far from the cathedral close. There he found a bookseller’s shop which he had not noticed before, and he went in and glanced idly round the dim interior.

  His eyes were caught not by a book, but by a young boy’s short veil of falling hair, framed by a shaft of light. The boy was kneeling on the floor, unpacking a crate full of second-hand volumes, and his head was bent over the pages of one of them. His finger was tracing the words, and the trembling of his lower lip, faint as that of a leaf on a windless day, showed like his pointing finger that he was unused to reading. Yet Christian saw that he was drinking in the words with eager if puzzled concentration, scanning them with a haste which showed his fear that his employer might surprise him. He had not noticed Christian’s entrance.

  The boy’s white-golden hair concealed his eyes, but his short, bare upper lip, his square yet delicate cleft chin, and his straight nose could all be seen. There was something about the curve of his lips, combined with his interest in the book, which made Christian think: this must be he. He wanted the boy to lift his head and show his eyes more than he wanted anything else in the world, but he dared say nothing to disturb him.

  Instead, without distaste, he noticed the boy’s ill-fitting, dark clerk’s clothes, and the roughness and redness of his small but strongly-shaped hands, which seemed only to heighten by contrast the perfection of his appearance as a whole. He was slim and graceful, with beautifully proportioned shoulders and waist. He was too pale and cool to look like a mere cherub, in spite of his yellow hair.