Watson’s Apology

by Beryl Bainbridge

  ‘Is the other one blind?’ Mrs Cronin demanded, wondering at the continuing thuds and bumps.

  ‘She’s a clumsy woman,’ said Mrs Gallagher. ‘Miss Anne has all the lightness. Once she wrote to a solicitor on my behalf, on account of some monies that my brother was holding back from me.’

  ‘I have two brothers surviving,’ Mrs Cronin told her. ‘They are both good to me. But for them I’d be taking in washing.’

  ‘I didn’t receive any reply,’ Mrs Gallagher said. ‘But it was civil of her to go to the trouble.’ Remembering the letter she still held, she went out into the hall.

  ‘It might be best not to disturb them,’ said Mrs Cronin anxiously, climbing the narrow stairs in pursuit. ‘Could it not wait?’

  Mrs Gallagher was inclined to agree, but she was in a quandary. If she left the letter on the landing table it could be stolen. She suspected the Customs clerk of being light-fingered, yet she couldn’t prove it. Things had gone missing before now. Equally it would be unpleasant if Miss Olivia answered the door, especially if she was in the middle of a tantrum. She’d be bound to ask why the letter hadn’t been delivered earlier.

  ‘You take it,’ she said, turning round to give the letter to Mrs Cronin.

  But her visitor, distressed by that muffled weeping, had fled back to the head of the stairs and now crouched there in the dark, her hand trembling as she clutched the banister rail. Somebody’s heart was breaking. It’s not my heart, she thought, for that is already broke.

  Mrs Gallagher was forced to knock half a dozen times before the door opened. Mrs Cronin heard a voice ask ‘Who is it?’, and then, as though the speaker had been expecting someone else, ‘Oh, it’s only Mrs Gallagher.’ Mrs Cronin pushed back her ruined bonnet and peeked through the rails. For an instant she glimpsed the head and shoulders of a woman who wore a mob-cap and whose false front of curls had in some fashion come unstuck and now hung at an angle over one eye. On her cheek was a small patch of colour, vivid enough to be noticeable in the candle light, like a dab of rouge or a birth mark.

  When the lamp was lit and the coals had caught, the letter could be seen propped on the mantelpiece. Olivia, hearing that first knock at the door, had run to the recess in the corner and flung herself across the double bed once used by Henry Boxer in Upper Sackville Street. She had continued to cry while Anne attended to the fire, gulping and sobbing in time to the pumping of the bellows. She was now quiet, apparently exhausted.

  Anne sat at the table and waited. She wanted to be quite sure that her sister slept. She wouldn’t give Olivia the satisfaction of seeing her open the letter. Nor would she tidy the room; Mother’s chair had been pitched over at the window and the carpet was scuffed up round the leg of the sofa. As to that old blue dress which had caused such trouble and which lay in a bedraggled heap on the linoleum, its torn hem shifting in the ferocious draught from the window, for all she cared it could stay there until Kingdom Come.

  It was a shabby room. The carpet was so worn that its pattern had faded altogether; there was nothing of any decorative value in sight save for a china cup and saucer displayed on the mantel-shelf, and a large oyster shell encrusted with coral which leant against it. The cup had been filled to the brim with rose petals plucked long ago in the gardens of Inchicore, until, in a gloomy fit Anne had scattered them across the floor, where they had drifted for some days, splintering underfoot, before being swept beneath the carpet. Later, restored to a more cheerful state of mind, she had assured Olivia that it was not everyone who could boast of walking on a bed of roses. Olivia had looked as severe as ever. Often she too seemed so desiccated by age that a smile might have broken her into little pieces.

  There was nowhere to hide. If Anne wanted to avoid her sister she sat at the table with her back to her, or else padded up and down the landing, fearful of encountering the emaciated clerk from the Customs Office. A balcony, fronted with ornamental railings, ran the length of the double windows, but it was condemned as unsafe. Olivia had dryly remarked that this was a blessing, for had it been otherwise, Anne, in one of her moods, might have struggled out on to it and hurled herself into the street below. Escape, for either of them, was out of the question. Even in sleep they were flung together; their mattress sagged in the middle and the slightest shift in balance sent them rolling downhill like logs to the river. Existing as they did in such dreary proximity, Anne thought it hardly surprising that they were perpetually at war.

  Their most recent quarrel had started because earlier she had asked Olivia if she might light the lamp – she had been trying to read – and Olivia had said she couldn’t. It wasn’t Olivia’s refusal that had enraged her, but her own cowardice in seeking permission. She had told herself that if she was not careful she would soon become one of those people who had served their purpose. After all, it had been her wages that had kept the wolf from the door when Olivia had limped home, apparently consumptive, from the Knoxes in Dungannon, and again, three years later, when she had been sent packing, this time with a mysterious inflammation of the joints, from the Magee household at Blackrock. As to the frugal allowance sent to them each quarter by their brother Edwin, why that was intended for them both and Olivia had no God-given right to decide on how it should be used. And then to make matters worse, she had suddenly noticed exactly what dress it was that Olivia clumsily sewed as she crouched on Mother’s chair at the window. It was a dress Anne had worn eight years before, in summer-time, when in the habit of visiting Mrs Curran. She had told Olivia that she was wasting her energies, mending a dress that would never be used again. In the darkening room the silk had shimmered like water. Olivia had retorted that it was her energies that were being dissipated and that, unlike Anne, she couldn’t bear to be idle.

  If the day had been brighter or the fire banked more cheerfully in the grate, Anne might have let the matter rest there – the satisfaction to be gained from upsetting Olivia’s feelings wasn’t often worth the injury to her own. But she had found herself trembling, both from the cold and from the consequences of those lost afternoons at Mrs Curran’s. She drew Olivia’s attention to the weather, the threat of snow in the air, the unsuitability of the mildewed garment upon which so much time was being uselessly squandered. She debated whether Olivia’s notoriously weak constitution could stand such frenzied activity with a needle and thread, and had implied that it would be less expensive, all things considered, if Olivia lay flat and conserved herself. More than once she spat out the word ‘stupid’.

  ‘It may be,’ she had said cruelly, ‘that I shall go to England. We have never got on.’ Going even further she suggested that, left alone, Olivia might have to seek cheaper accommodation on the second floor. Olivia had a dread, architecturally speaking, of moving up in the world. She feared she would end her days in some attic, listening to the sound of rainwater dripping into buckets as the life drained out of her.

  For a time, addressing the pattern of leaves and flowers above the picture rail, Anne had felt justified in ranting as she did. If Olivia hadn’t interfered with the lighting of the lamp she would have been harmlessly immersed in her book. Then, in the middle of stressing that only the previous month various malfunctions of Olivia’s ailing body had cost them several shillings in patent medicines, she became uneasy. Olivia, save for a firmer set to her naturally determined jaw, gave no outward indication that she listened. And yet Anne had known her indifference was a sham. Inwardly Olivia was weeping.

  Anne had sat imprisoned in her chair, hardly able to breathe. She felt it was disgusting to live in such a way, neither intimidated nor wholly in control. At last, she had defiantly shouted her intention of lighting the lamp. Still, she remained at the table for quite five minutes until the room grew completely dark. The fire appeared to have gone out. Finally she stood, and approaching Olivia, tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Please,’ she had said.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ Olivia moaned.

  ‘Please,’ Anne said again, but she hadn’t been able to think of
the right words.

  ‘I will not be bullied,’ Olivia had cried. Then, of course, she had dragged up Blackrock and County Cork, as though there was some similarity in what had happened in either place. The injustice of it had struck Anne like a blow. The incident concerning the Ferguson child had been an isolated one, and she detested being reminded of it. When she had hit him he had heaved that small involuntary sigh, his lashes already beaded with tears, his mouth foolishly grinning. There were those in her profession who regarded brutality as commonplace. At Miss Pyke’s Academy she had seen a young girl boxed about the ears until she fell down in a faint, and another time she had seen a child punched so savagely in the face that her nose had burst like a plum. Both occasions had sickened her, not least because she had kept silent. It wasn’t as if she had disliked the boy in Cork. She had never told his father that it was he who had cracked the glass in the summer-house, or that he had let the pig out of its pen and into the vegetable garden. They had gone fishing together on the lake, sitting at opposite ends of a little, motionless boat.

  Was it any wonder that she had lost her temper with Olivia? How dare her sister mention Cork in the same breath as Blackrock. Just thinking of it incensed her so much that she rose from the table and went to the recess, half inclined to start up the argument all over again. For two pins she would shake Olivia until an apology rattled in her throat. But Olivia was lying on her back with her mouth open, a pathetic sight and dead to the world. When Anne pulled the coverlet over her she grasped at it with both fists and muttered incoherently, but she didn’t waken.

  Anne returned to the table and looked at the envelope on the mantelpiece. She was afraid to open it. When she had received Mr Watson’s first letter she had told herself that she must be on her guard. The present was so drab and the future so bleak that it would be natural for her to confuse gratitude with love. At all costs she would keep her imagination in check. She knew it was useless to try to stop love except in its very early stages – if she had stepped back from Mr Roche in time she would have avoided unhappiness. Even so, it was already too late. It wasn’t in her nature to be guarded and her imagination had always run away with her. Mr Watson’s melancholy allusion to Marlborough Street had brought the past about her ears, and instantly she had been affected. In those far-off, sunny days how simple it had been to deceive, to seem remote and unaffected in public. Through that crowded drawing-room in Marlborough Street she had walked as though there were nobody in the world but herself. She had always gone there on foot and the hem of her gown had trailed brick dust up the stairs.

  How ridiculous it was, how sad, that while she had eyes only for Mr Roche, some unknown boy, standing at the perimeter of that sun-filled room, had been gazing in her direction, willing her to look at him.

  Olivia had thought the conversation too free at Mrs Curran’s, and the company too mixed. She had spoken, as usual, out of ignorance, for she had never gone there, which was just as well because otherwise she might have noticed Anne’s moonstruck expression when looking at Mr Roche, and would have lost no time in pointing out that he was barely eighteen whereas Anne herself was galloping towards thirty. She would have approached Anne’s feelings for the young man with the subtlety of a ferret entering a rabbit hole and, having flushed them to the surface, ripped them to pieces.

  Mr Watson had not referred to Mr Roche in his correspondence, nor to Mrs Strafford or to those pushy Hannahan girls with their salmon-pink cheeks. Neither had he explained how he had come to be at Mrs Curran’s. To be truthful, save for that first introductory note, his letters had proved something of a disappointment. Though frank about prospects and income, and touchingly quaint in describing members of his family as dwelling in the valleys of life (she had replied that she had once held a situation in Switzerland and henceforth thought of his brothers as labouring in the fields at the foot of snow-capped mountains), he had failed to bring himself to life. She had no clear picture of the man behind the words; and it wasn’t surprising, for she was convinced that most of his words had been borrowed from a handbook on an approved method of letter writing. No matter – she would use him to free herself. She had nothing to lose – the roof had fallen in on her and it was unlikely that anyone, after him, would come along to sift the wreckage and see if she still lived. If she had to cheat, she would do so. She had never been to Switzerland, but in inventing her past she was constructing her future. A single blunder, she warned herself, could ruin her chances. And yet, perversely, when it actually came to putting her thoughts on paper, she had thrown caution out of the window. She had written to him as if she had known him for years, telling him of the poverty of her existence and the vexations she endured, day after dreadful day, through being forced to live, cheek by jowl, among people who were inferior to her in intellect and imagination. She had hinted at humiliations and spoke of the immense gulf that separated her from the other occupants of the lodging house. Do not think that I am merely vain. I am what I am, and if I am clever, which I judge myself to be, it is because I have had an education – though there are some who would consider that a disadvantage in a woman.

  She was not a fool. Reading between the lines it was obvious that a wife, or ‘consort’ as he chose to put it, was a necessity to a man in his position. Three-hundred-a-year was hardly a fortune but with careful management should be sufficient to live comfortably on, and afford the rental of a good-sized house, large enough to accommodate boarders and so increase income. Perhaps space could be found for a schoolroom of sorts. She herself might advertise for pupils: she could teach a little French and geography. At the back, in the small garden, she would plant lobelias, hyacinths and foxgloves – it was a pity roses were the wrong colour – and she would supervise the laying of a path made out of stepping stones, just wide enough for two, down which they would hop in summertime, as if leaping from one ice-floe to another, when the tea things had been cleared away. Some people thought of foxgloves as weeds, but she had a fondness for them. Country folk called them Virgin’s Finger. What harm did it do to daydream? In that dappled hour between late afternoon and dusk, the head master would thrust his hand in hers and marvel at the sky-blue flowers grown entirely by her own efforts. I am one of those few who think it a torment to be idle. I am well used to making provision for myself and am capable of much energy.

  The more freely she wrote, though she was sensible enough to omit any reference to either houses or gardens, the more cautiously Mr Watson replied. Then, on Wednesday, without comment, he had enclosed a snowdrop in the fold of his letter. The following day she sent him a snippet of scarlet ribbon filched from Olivia’s work-box.

  Sometimes she wondered whether she hadn’t conjured him up out of thin air, out of that fatal imagination of which she so often boasted. Mr Watson had twice written that he intended coming to Dublin expressly to visit her, yet she hardly believed him. Surely it was impossible. Where would they meet? In the Botanic Garden – it was shut at this time of the year. In the Phoenix Park – in the snow, in her darned stockings and her boots that let in the wet? She couldn’t bear to receive him here, in one room at the wrong end of Great Britain Street, with a gale whipping through the windows, and Olivia, whom she had never mentioned, simpering on the sofa, a duster tied about her head because of earache, gabbling of torch-lit suppers and six horses with long tails in the stables of Inchicore House.

  Besides, if they met out of doors, how would they know each other? She would be forced to act like a low woman, eyeing each man as he approached, and he could pass her by without a glance. He might take her for somebody’s mother. The average age of a student of the College was nineteen years or thereabouts, and a woman aged faster than a man, particularly if life had been cruel to her. J.S. Watson would stride impatiently round and round the oblong of the artificial lake, waiting hopelessly for a young woman who had once worn a blue silk dress, while she, unrecognised, the deer bounding ahead of her through the white park, would flee in her sodden boots towards the bustl
e of the Chapelizod Road. I have an independence of mind and a sensitivity of temperament that have not always worked in my favour. The lift of an eyebrow, the droop of a mouth, plainly indicating lack of imagination, can plunge me into the depths of despair.

  If he did come to Dublin and she was forced to meet him, what would she wear? She had two pairs of stockings, one top coat patched on the shoulder, a grey dress that had seen brighter days and a bonnet with frayed ribbons. She wondered for the umpteenth time whether she should risk going to see her Aunt Lawson. Surely, it was her aunt’s duty to advise her. But then, there had been those other occasions on which advice had been sought, and ignored. And if she unburdened herself prematurely and it all came to nothing, she would look a fool.

  At that moment Olivia whimpered and sat upright in the bed. Her hair was mussed up and her cap hung askew. It seemed to Anne that she looked no different from the way she had looked as a girl, when, seated on a straw-plaited stool she had tugged the curling rags from her hair and wept with self-inflicted pain. The simplest of tasks had always been beyond her. As she watched, Olivia closed her eyes and fell back again. Already asleep, she plucked at the neck band of her dress as though she was choking.

  What will become of her, thought Anne. She is incapable of looking after herself. Then, almost immediately, she thought, whatever will become of me? She took the letter from the mantelpiece and tore open the envelope. A length of dark blue ribbon spilled on to the tablecloth.