The Fall of Doctor Onslow

by Frances Vernon

  Onslow, frowning at the carriage window, dared no longer cherish the hope that the evidence against him would amount to very little. His dread was that Arthur Bright had been careless with his letters, and allowed one to find its way into Christian Anstey-Ward’s hands. The more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed. Onslow wondered what crazy impulse had driven him to abandon the discretion of years, and write letters without even making quite sure that his lover understood the importance of burning them. By doing so, unless he could save himself at the last moment, he had at last fulfilled his mother’s frequently reiterated prophecy that he would come to a bad end.

  He glanced at Louisa, and saw that she was watching him. He turned away again, but Louisa did not let her eyes fall. The desire to talk was welling up in her, irresistible as a wish to sneeze. She fidgeted, and opened her novel, knowing that Onslow would reject her, but in the end she could resist no longer, and said:

  ‘Dr Onslow – what is it draws you to boys?’

  He looked at her as though she were a pupil guilty of some unbelievable impertinence, but after a moment his eyes became less fierce, and he said stiffly:

  ‘I do not know, Louisa. I wish I did. Forgive me, but I cannot talk about it.’

  ‘No,’ said Louisa, and looked down, biting her lip to keep back words. Her hands were shaking as they clutched her book.

  It was true that he did not know, for he had always avoided thinking about his passion except in his most conscience-stricken moments, when a sense of guilt prevented him from examining the matter clearly. Now he tried to do so, but he merely succeeded in visualising his four boy lovers – three of them blended into one face, but Bright remained alone. The pleasure to be had from their beauty was as keen and as nasty as the pain to be had from a birch.

  A birch. Onslow shifted in his seat as he blamed his falling into sin on his headmaster’s duty of flogging boys. He thought if it were not for that, he would never have given way to desire, never have known he desired – but it was not that he enjoyed inflicting pain, as some did. He wanted to inflict pleasure more than anything else in the world.

  He thought once more of his lovers. When lusting, he demanded vigorous young animals, boys with a distinct flavour, he told himself, of evil – every one of his boys had been pagan Bacchus to him while he lasted. He wanted a strong musky smell and wild curling hair, eyes gleaming with knowledge, no taint of purity. To drink at the fountain of such boys was to drink the wine of wickedness, eat the delicious forbidden. It was to defy the memories of his mother and even of Dr Arnold. In this lay the sin, thought Onslow: not lust but rebellion, a form of pride. But that was no concern of Dr Anstey-Ward’s.

  At last, at nearly seven o’clock, the train drew into Salisbury. The Onslows began to talk again.

  ‘Shall we go straight to Dr Anstey-Ward?’ said Louisa, re-tying the strings of her bonnet.

  ‘No, I mean to dine first. We have eaten nothing since this morning, and I will scarcely be fit to handle him if I am nearly faint with hunger. We shall go to an hotel.’

  ‘Very well. I hope they will be able to give us a room for the night.’

  ‘If not, I do not intend to waste time searching all Salisbury. We must go straight to Dr Anstey-Ward and look for one when we come back.’

  ‘Dr Onslow, no hotel will think us respectable if we arrive at nearly midnight, and with so little luggage.’

  ‘Nonsense, Louisa. You talk as though we were a pair of travelling actors. A clergyman is always respectable,’ he said, and smiled faintly.

  17

  The Salisbury Hotel was not able to supply the Onslows with a bed for the night as well as with dinner, but it furnished them with a chaise, and they set out for Poplar House at a quarter to nine. When they arrived, it was almost dark, and they could see only the yellow gleam of lighted windows, and the square black outline of the house against a sapphire-coloured sky.

  In the drawing-room, Anstey-Ward heard the crunch of carriage wheels on the gravel outside. He got up and looked out of the window, and saw Onslow helping his wife out of the carriage. Louisa’s skirt was dragged up at the back in the process, and he had a glimpse of her legs.

  ‘It’s they,’ he said to his sister.

  ‘Arriving at this hour! I wonder they could not leave it till morning, it surely cannot be so urgent as all that.’

  On the doorstep, Onslow said to Louisa:

  ‘Can you not remember what he is like to look at? I suppose I must have met him at some point, but I cannot recall him.’

  ‘No, I cannot precisely, but I have some idea that he is a cadaverous-looking man – very tall and thin, and ascetic looking.’

  ‘How very appropriate.’

  They rang the bell, and it was answered. After taking their cards through, the parlour-maid showed them into the big, ugly drawing-room, where they at last set eyes on Anstey-Ward. His far from cadaverous appearance was initially a surprise to them both, but on seeing him, they remembered having met him once before. Onslow thought that he looked for all the world like a rotund paterfamilias in a Punch cartoon as he bore down upon them smiling, with an outstretched hand.

  ‘Dr Onslow, how very glad I am to see you – and you too, of course, Mrs Onslow. How good of you to come all this way so late!’

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Onslow, taken aback, ‘but owing to the press of traffic in London we missed the train we intended to catch.’

  ‘A great nuisance, but it does not signify. Now, you must allow me to make you known to my sister, Miss Anstey-Ward.’

  Anstey-Ward beamed down at them as he indicated his sister. Onslow, responding, was displeased to see that the woman was a good deal taller than he was, like Anstey-Ward himself. He could only be glad that there was no sign of the seven young ladies whom Louisa had warned him to expect – he saw his wife looking discreetly round her as though she thought they would come out from behind the curtains.

  Chatty smiled as she shook hands with the Onslows. Though she had complained about their coming so late, she was well pleased to be entertaining such a distinguished clergyman. She said:

  ‘I have been meaning to buy your latest volume of sermons, Dr Onslow – I wish I had it with me, and then you might have signed it for me.’

  ‘I should have been delighted to do so.’

  ‘Yes, it’s a thousand pities you haven’t yet bought it, Chatty,’ said Anstey-Ward.

  Onslow supposed Anstey-Ward was being so friendly for the sake of his sister’s innocence. It was a surprisingly great relief to him to think she was ignorant.

  ‘My brother and I are hoping you will stay to supper, and discuss your business afterwards,’ said Chatty, and her brother said:

  ‘We are indeed! We shall be quite offended if you do not.’

  Chatty wondered why Anstey-Ward was being quite so affable: it was not his way to be so even with his close friends. Perhaps, she thought, he owed Onslow money.

  ‘We shall be sitting down to supper very soon now,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, how badly we have timed our visit!’ said Louisa, who, like Onslow, guessed that Chatty knew nothing of what was toward.

  ‘Not at all, ma’am,’ said Anstey-Ward, acting as much for her benefit as for Chatty’s. ‘Nothing can be easier, if you will but agree to sup with us. And then Dr Onslow and I can go to my library. Eh, Dr Onslow?’

  ‘Exactly so, Dr Anstey-Ward!’ said Onslow, and without too much difficulty, he smiled. It was beginning to seem as though this really were a social visit.

  ‘And we are also hoping,’ Chatty went on, ‘that you will agree to stop the night with us, unless perhaps you are going on to stay with friends. Do not think me inquisitive!’

  ‘Oh, what a kind invitation!’ said Louisa. ‘But –’

  ‘My dear Miss Anstey-Ward, we could not possibly put you to so much trouble,’ said Onslow.

  ‘It will be no trouble at all to either of us,’ said Anstey-Ward, even though he wished his sister were not quite so hospi
table.

  ‘But I am sure we will find an hotel in Salisbury.’ Onslow spoke in the voice of one willing to be persuaded, as Miss Anstey-Ward would like him to be.

  ‘Oh, you cannot like to set out again so late, and hotel beds are never to be relied upon. Why, when I last stayed in an hotel, it was one of the very best in Brighton, yet for all that the sheets were not aired properly. I caught a nasty chill.’

  ‘How very unpleasant!’ said Louisa.

  ‘If you do stop, you and I will have tomorrow morning, as well as tonight, Dr Onslow,’ said Anstey-Ward. For a moment, the atmosphere was spoilt. ‘Now, do pray stop with us! We shall be honoured,’ he hastened to add.

  ‘Very well, since you are so good, I think we shall be delighted to accept your invitation,’ said Onslow. ‘As Miss Anstey-Ward has said, an hotel bed is not something to be joyfully anticipated. My dear, are you agreeable?’

  ‘Certainly I am, Dr Onslow.’

  Louisa had been looking at the drawing-room table, and Onslow, following her gaze, saw that on it there rested a pile of tracts referring in large letters to Christ as the Lamb and the Redeemer. He concluded that Miss Anstey-Ward was a narrow Evangelical, as his mother had been, and that Anstey-Ward was so too – he wished he had not been swept into accepting the invitation to stay.

  Anstey-Ward thought that unless Onslow insisted on talking about what had brought him down to Wiltshire tonight, he would avoid mentioning it until the morning, just before Onslow was about to leave the house. He felt that having been so welcoming, he could not turn round and talk about what was vile the moment the women left them alone, and then show Onslow to bed as though all were as it should be. The comedy must continue.

  Thinking this, he smiled at Louisa, whose smallness moved him. With her great eyes, slender figure and broad cheekbones, she reminded him very much of his late wife, Renée, so much so that he wondered whether they could be related. He doubted it, for Renée had been the child of a ne’er-do-well writer, while as he knew, Mrs Onslow came from one of the foremost clerical families in England, and was a bishop’s daughter. But despite the unlikelihood of their being kinswomen, he found himself thinking of Louisa as a kind of connection, someone for whom he was to some extent responsible.

  ‘Now, you’ll be wanting to take off your hats and coats,’ he said, and Onslow noticed that both his voice and his choice of words were slightly vulgar.

  The Onslows were shown upstairs to a cold bedroom, and then, having tidied themselves, they came down again. On entering the drawing-room for the second time, Louisa noticed a series of photographs on one wall, and indicating one of them she said:

  ‘Is that not your son, Dr Anstey-Ward?’

  ‘Yes, that’s Christian – taken by his sister, who is staying with our cousins in London just at present. She’s a fine photographer.’

  ‘I am sorry we shall not meet her,’ said Onslow. ‘How well I remember your son, sir!’ In fact, he could only just remember the boy when his photograph was pointed out to him. It showed Christian staring into space, trying to look inspired and soulful. Onslow supposed he was no doubt wishing to live up to his clothes: he was wearing the turned-down collar and loose necktie favoured by those with bohemian pretensions, and banned at Charton. Looking in the photograph’s direction, he said:

  ‘And is he now enjoying Cambridge?’

  ‘He’s at Oxford,’ said Anstey-Ward, ‘and liking it very well.’

  ‘I am sure he must do well, he was an excellent pupil.’ Onslow could remember nothing about Christian’s schoolwork, but he did remember that the boy had spent two years under him in the Sixth, having risen into his form at a fairly early age. He remembered his tense, anxious face at the front of the class.

  ‘Was he?’ said Chatty. ‘I’ve always found him sadly shatterbrained. Bookish, of course, but shatterbrained.’

  ‘Oh, no. A naturally bookish boy, as you say, and a very fair scholar,’ said Onslow. ‘I wonder why I was so sure he had gone to Cambridge, not Oxford? My memory is not what it was!’

  There was a slight pause, and Louisa was on the point of making a remark, but Chatty spoke first.

  ‘What admirable changes you have wrought at Charton, Dr Onslow! I am sure my brother has often said that the school now is not at all what it was in his day.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have sent Christian had I not thought it very different,’ said Anstey-Ward calmly.

  ‘You were at Charton yourself, sir?’ said Onslow, a little surprised.

  ‘For a year only, when I was sixteen. Under Dr Thorneycroft.’

  ‘Dr Thorneycroft was a wicked old tyrant, was he not, Henry?’ said Chatty. ‘Has he not that reputation, Dr Onslow?’

  Onslow smiled. ‘Madam, it would scarcely become me to agree with you about my distinguished predecessor. Shall I say he was not a very effective tyrant?’

  ‘I think that if I had been born a man I would have liked to become a schoolmaster. You, for instance, have done so much, and for so many!’ she said.

  ‘Indeed he has,’ said Anstey-Ward. ‘Mrs Onslow, won’t you come a little nearer the fire? And you too, sir. Very cold for the time of year, ain’t it?’

  ‘It certainly is,’ said Chatty. ‘But I shall have a fire kindled in your bedroom, Mrs Onslow, so you need not fear to freeze tonight.’

  ‘Oh, how kind of you. What an agreeable luxury, a bedroom fire in July!’

  ‘Tell me more of how your son goes on at Oxford, Dr Anstey-Ward,’ said Onslow, then added: ‘Were you yourself there, is that perhaps why you chose it for him rather than Cambridge?’ He doubted very much that Anstey-Ward had been educated at Oxford.

  ‘No indeed. I studied medicine in Edinburgh, not being a classical scholar by any manner of means. Christian takes after his mother’s family, being literary.’

  ‘Am I right in remembering that it was his ambition to be a poet, Dr Anstey-Ward?’ said Louisa.

  ‘Quite right, ma’am. I can see you take a great interest in all your husband’s pupils!’

  Louisa gave him a pretty smile, and he felt a desire to pat her little hand as it rested on the arm of her chair.

  ‘I try, Dr Anstey-Ward – but nothing exceeds Dr Onslow’s own interest in his pupils,’ she said.

  At that moment the parlourmaid came in, and announced that supper was served.

  18

  Anstey-Ward softly shut the heavy door of the library, and then he and Onslow were alone together at last. Onslow, breathing rapidly, felt two profound longings. The first was for a stiff brandy, and the second was for Anstey-Ward not to raise the subject of the ‘documents’. All through supper, as he chatted politely, he had been impatient to have done with the charade – but now the moment had come, he felt quite differently. Like Anstey-Ward, he wanted to put important business off till the morning, till the daylight. He did not want to feel the lash of his power till then. And it seemed somehow impossible, or at least unsuitable, to abandon the friendly manner they had both maintained for so long. Onslow now felt he could not bear to acknowledge its falsity.

  He was much surprised when brandy was offered him, for he had been certain that Anstey-Ward, as a rigid Evangelical, would not offer spirits to a clergyman.

  ‘Or, if you prefer it, a little hot gin?’ said Anstey-Ward. ‘A very wholesome liquor in my opinion, when it is of good quality – none of your Old Tom three parts vitriol!’

  ‘Thank you, no, brandy is just what I like.’

  Anstey-Ward poured two brandies, while Onslow read the spines of the books in front of him in a tall glass-fronted case. Anstey-Ward’s amiable remark about gin cheered him, for he was sure the man would not, having made it, propose to show him the ‘documents’. He did not notice that Anstey-Ward’s voice was very nervous; he could only think of the man as confident, secure.

  When he was handed his glass, Onslow drank as much as he could without giving Anstey-Ward the impression that he was firstly, unclerical, and secondly, afraid. As he drank, he continued to look
at the books, not at his host. Their authors’ names were for the most part wholly unfamiliar to him: Buffon, Cuvier, Agassiz, Lamarck, St Hilaire. He recognised only those of the English scientists Lyell, Sedgwick and Buckland, and was surprised, for it was unusual for an Evangelical to have intellectual interests of any kind. Evangelicals tended to hold that too much speculation about either religion or the world could only subvert the stern but emotional faith in which salvation lay. It was a creed which Onslow profoundly despised, for to him, intellect was the buttress of faith except when it was second-rate.

  ‘I see you are looking at my books, Dr Onslow,’ said Anstey-Ward, so accustomed to his part of affable host that even had he planned to abandon it he would have felt pompous and cruel in doing so. ‘Are you yourself interested in the natural sciences?’

  ‘Not so much as I dare say I ought to be. I believe the last scientific work I read was Dr Whewell’s On the Plurality of Worlds.’ It was almost the only scientific book he had ever read, and he had chosen to read it because it had been recommended to him as a work which demolished various materialistic speculations about the universe, and reasserted old ideas of the unity of the truth and the supernatural origins of the human mind and spirit.

  ‘“A book meant to show that throughout all infinity, There’s nothing so grand as the Master of Trinity”,’ quoted Anstey-Ward, placing the stopper on the brandy decanter. ‘Did you admire it, Dr Onslow?’

  ‘Indeed I did.’

  ‘Now there I differ from you. I don’t believe natural theology has any place in the modern world, and it seemed to me Dr Whewell’s book was almost more a work of natural theology than of science.’

  ‘You believe,’ said Onslow, ‘that the study of nature can and ought to be divorced from the study of its creator, its designer?’