Watson’s Apology

by Beryl Bainbridge

  ‘No, no, I’m afraid not,’ said Hutton, discomfited.

  ‘Possibly,’ suggested Watson, ‘he brought the lid of his desk up too smartly.’ Staring thoughtfully at the junior master, he began to stress the inadvisability of driving young boys too hard. ‘From the earliest time,’ he cautioned, ‘the schoolmaster has been the natural enemy of his pupil. Plato never lost an opportunity to attack the profession, and Horace, referring to the only schoolmaster he mentions by name, dubs him Flogging Orbilius. Remember Shakespeare’s Holofernes, a name of outrage cribbed from Rabelais. Remember the pedant in The Taming of the Shrew –’ He broke off and looked blankly at Hutton; he was thinking of Anne again. Without another word he turned on his heel, and ignoring Fraser, who was loitering in the front hall scraping with a pocket knife at the panel of the door, he went out into the playground. He had an idea that he would go straight home, but even as he came out of the school gates his footsteps faltered. He had intended to turn left; instead he kept straight on in the direction of the South Lambeth Road.

  As he walked he spoke to himself out loud. ‘To submit cheerfully,’ he muttered, waving his fist despairingly in the air. How could he have been so deluded as to think that Anne was happy? Her bitter remark, which, as far as he could judge, stemmed from expectations not realised, was only a natural reaction to the depressing reality of her life. He didn’t believe it mattered to her that they had never had children, though they hadn’t discussed the subject. He himself was glad to have missed fatherhood. In his experience a man’s relations with his offspring were often unsatisfactory, once the dandling days had gone. Anne was affectionate towards young boys between the ages of ten and fourteen, but he had never caught her looking tenderly at an infant. Though the issue of the boarders still rankled, perhaps he should never have agreed to leave the School House. Given time, Anne’s unfortunate quarrel with Mandell and Grey might surely have blown over.

  He was so preoccupied crossing Stockwell Lane that he was almost run down by a brewer’s cart. It was only when he branched into South Lambeth Road and the noise of traffic broke into his thoughts that he realised where he was. And then a peculiar disturbance attracted his attention.

  Opposite him on the other side of the road an old man and a boy were circling each other with fists held up. They had already come to blows; the old man’s shirt was flecked with blood and he was wiping his mouth with his sleeve. The next moment he bent down and, scooping up a length of wood from the gutter, began to hit the boy about the legs. The boy’s boots, unlaced, flapped against his naked ankles. Suddenly a brown dog trotted from the doorway of the pie shop and came to sniff at the old man’s heels. He whirled round, the stick raised above his head.

  At that instant two passing cabs, one following behind the other and both travelling in the direction of Vauxhall Bridge, blocked Watson’s view. When they had gone by, the men and the dog had disappeared. In their place stood a woman in a red dress biting on an apple. Watson peered across the street; in the heat haze the woman’s skirt seemed to quiver.

  He walked on, certain in his mind that the dog’s back had been broken. Then he thought of the two men and felt ashamed for considering the brute rather than them. What harm people did to one another! How cruel they were, he thought. How they beat and struck and thrust at one another!

  A few minutes later he found himself on the steps of Montpelier House. He hesitated before ringing the bell; he hadn’t meant to visit Williams.

  The Revd Mr Williams had been lying on the sofa enjoying a nap. He was older than Watson and he suffered from pains in the legs. Watson couldn’t help comparing his own dingy quarters in Park Road with the large sitting-room at Williams’s disposal. The previous occupants had used it as a billiard parlour. The slate-topped table, covered with a damask cloth, still stood in the middle of the room.

  Mr Williams was surprised at Watson’s bothering to return his call so quickly. ‘I remembered an appointment,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I would have waited.’

  ‘I thought it might be urgent,’ Watson said. He refused to sit down and stood instead at the bay window, looking out at the garden. The lupins drooped over the uncut grass; there were more weeds than flowers.

  ‘Old Clissold goes out of an evening,’ said Williams, ‘and snips the heads off things. There isn’t a gardener among us.’

  ‘I have been a disappointment to Mrs Watson,’ said Watson suddenly.

  ‘Surely not,’ protested Williams, but he believed it to be true. From discussions he’d had with Mandell and from observations of his own, Mrs Watson was a neglected wife. He had always found her very much on edge. Once he had visited Watson at the School House and admired an oddly shaped shell on the mantel-shelf. Mrs Watson had flown at him and snatched it out of his hand. Later she had excused her behaviour by saying she feared it might fall into the hearth and shatter. She was sentimentally attached to it, she said; her uncle had brought it back one Christmas from the South Seas.

  ‘I have always intended to rent a house,’ said Watson, ‘and buy furniture. Mrs Watson would like a piano. I’m not often at home, as you know, and since quitting the School House she’s alone most of the time.’

  ‘Perhaps you should consider moving here,’ suggested Williams, remembering that Mrs Watson loved flowers. ‘Now that Hardy’s gone there are rooms vacant on the second floor.’

  ‘The traffic,’ objected Watson. He left the window and paced up and down beside the billiard table.

  ‘The rooms are at the back,’ Williams said.

  Watson thought it over. When he had returned to Park Road, the boarders – there being no one suitable to take care of them – had been put into lodgings and the School House partly given over to the mathematics department. Mandell and Grey had moved in with the Revd Mr Williams and Hardy. How could he inflict his wife on them, after that evening when Mandell had bled on to the carpet?

  He himself had been dining at King’s College when it happened. It appeared that Anne’s stomach disorder had flared up again; she had obviously become distraught. She had charged both Mandell and Grey with aiding and abetting him in his pursuit of Miss Lancing. She had accused Grey of letting Miss Lancing in at the side door of the school as late as five-thirty in the evening. Naturally Grey had denied it – the story was a fabrication of the wretchedly ignorant Mrs Tulley.

  Miss Lancing was the daughter of the late Colonel of a foot regiment in India. On returning to England she discovered that certain share certificates in the Stockton and Darlington Railway Company, for want of a stamp, were worthless. She was destitute. Williams had put her in touch with the school, thinking that one of the parents with female children might be persuaded to take her on as a governess. Watson had successfully placed her with a chemist’s family on the Brixton Road, and she had shown her appreciation by knitting him mittens and bringing him pot plants; she was a lover of geraniums. Exceedingly thin, she had a sallow complexion left over from her days in Bengal. Anne’s delusion – which scarcely a year before would have gratified him – that he found Miss Lancing to be anything more than a lonely and mildly irritating woman had exasperated him. According to Mandell, who was the soul of tact, Anne had accidentally knocked two glasses into the grate and he had cut his hand picking up the pieces.

  ‘Miss Cockshott and Mrs Brewer live here,’ said Williams. ‘Mrs Watson would have plenty of female company, though Miss Cockshott keeps school hours.’

  Turning from the window, Watson asked, ‘Do you go on holidays?’

  Williams was taken aback and admitted that he did. Every year he went to Hastings.

  ‘Alone?’ said Watson.

  Williams replied that usually he met up with one or two friends. There was a Mr Bush and his son Fred who were often in the town at the same time.

  ‘And Hastings is pleasant, is it?’

  ‘Very pleasant,’ said Williams. He took an envelope from his pocket. ‘I received a letter this morning from Professor Browne of King’s College.’
/>   ‘There are boarding houses, I suppose?’ persisted Watson.

  Williams told him he believed so; he himself stayed with his sister. He tried again. ‘I thought this letter might be of interest to you,’ he said. ‘Professor Browne has recently completed a translation of Aristotle’s Ethics for Bohn’s library. He wants to know whether I would be prepared to write for the series.’

  ‘And are you?’ asked Watson.

  ‘He is referring to the classical series, rather than the theological. I’m not up to it. I was thinking more of yourself. You would find it child’s play.’

  Watson shook his head. His duties at the school filled all his hours. At this moment his only concern was for Anne’s happiness. He must give her more time, not less. ‘It’s because you’re not up to it,’ he told Williams, ‘that you dismiss it so lightly. Literary endeavour of any kind, even hack work, is always laborious.’

  ‘My dear fellow,’ objected Williams. ‘Apart from the translation it’s just a question of a preface and a few footnotes. And it pays well.’ He was convinced that the Standard Library, started by Bohn out of pique – his rival, Bogue, had made a success of the European Library – would jump at employing Watson. His prodigious energy, his attention to detail, the pace at which he drove himself, would make him an asset to any publisher. Should he, he wondered, mention that Dale of Blackheath was translating Thucydides for the same series?

  ‘I work nine hours a day,’ Watson reminded him. ‘I don’t think I could give of my best.’ All the same, by the time he had walked twice round the billiard table he had already composed a letter in his head to Bohn. He noticed that the grass was fading as the sun left the garden. A black cat was picking its way across the darkening wall; poised for a moment on a loose brick, it arched its back. Suddenly sensing that the surface of the wall was unsteady, the cat leapt sideways and streaked away through the nettles.

  The platform of my own life is shifting, thought Watson. I must save myself. Abruptly he began to tell Williams the story of the dog in South Lambeth Road.

  When he had finished Williams said, ‘Poor brute. I suppose it has crept into a dark corner to die.’

  ‘But what is it thinking?’ asked Watson.

  ‘Thinking!’ said Williams. ‘Why, it is incapable of thought.’ He was baffled by the discussion. Such a fuss over the death of a dog! He hadn’t known that Watson was so fond of animals. Last year the head master had accompanied him on the St Andrew’s Sunday school treat – they had picnicked in a wood beside a cornfield. In the afternoon a farm dog had come racing along the boundary of the field in pursuit of a rabbit. Unless his memory deceived him, Watson had fairly danced on the spot and hollered as loudly as anyone. He was now rambling on about his belief in the reasoning power of animals. He had read Leibniz and Livy on the subject and was persuaded by them. He himself had first-hand experience of such reasoning. Riding along a country lane in Maidstone he had come across two mongrel bitches lying in the dust. One of them had a broken leg, and the other had crawled under the injured limb to support its weight.

  ‘Possibly for warmth,’ said Williams.

  ‘It was a summer day,’ cried Watson, ‘a day like today.’

  Shortly afterwards he said he must go home. In a blundering sort of way he apologised for the random and rather personal nature of the conversation. Williams imagined he was thinking of his earlier reference to Mrs Watson.

  Hurrying along South Lambeth Road Watson took no notice of the spot where the two men had fought; he had already forgotten the incident.

  ‘Hastings,’ he said aloud, ‘Hastings’, and ran full tilt into Henry Rogers, manager of the Beulah Laundry. Rogers apologised to him, and Watson said the fault was his; he had been preoccupied. Afterwards he was annoyed with himself for being so fulsome.

  As she let herself into the hall Anne heard her husband come out of the top room; he’d obviously been listening for her. He appeared on the first landing, and though, as usual, the gas was turned economically low, she could see that his face was pale. He had never before arrived home and found her absent, not even when the school had caught fire and smoke had seeped through the green baize door. He was frowning; a stranger might have thought he was angry.

  ‘I was anxious,’ Watson said. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Mrs Iselin asked me to tea,’ Anne said. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ She climbed slowly towards him and, having reached the landing, fled past him and up the stairs as if she had left a pot on the boil. When he had followed her into the sitting-room she was standing with her back to him at the grate, both hands clutching the mantel-shelf.

  ‘It’s gone eight o’clock,’ he said.

  ‘It’s so warm out,’ she murmured, and went through into the bedroom to take off her cape and bonnet. ‘I left you a note,’ she called.

  ‘There was no note,’ he said.

  ‘It’s on the mantelpiece,’ she told him. And sure enough, now that he knew where to look he saw a scrap of paper tucked under the oyster shell.

  He wanted to know whether he should go downstairs and tell Mrs Chapman to bring up the supper. He had eaten an hour before, standing at the window with his plate in his hand, watching the corner for a sight of her.

  Anne didn’t answer. She came and sat in the armchair by the fireplace and shut her eyes. He stood behind the chair, putting his hand on her shoulder. Immediately she shrugged him away, though it was possible she was settling into a more comfortable position.

  He asked her again whether she wanted anything to eat.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not hungry.’

  She had taken off her skirt and was in her petticoats. It was something she had always done. She said that in Ireland no one in their right mind would loll about indoors in their best things. He had protested that he had never found it to be the case, but then, as she had quickly pointed out, he had not mixed in society; his time in Dublin had been spent in the company of tradespeople and students. ‘There is no one to see me,’ she had pronounced carelessly. It dismayed him. He fretted lest Mrs Chapman, bringing up hot water or coals, would think her slovenly.

  A moment later he too went into the bedroom. It was separated from the main room by double doors. On winter nights he liked to push back the doors and fall asleep watching the firelight playing on the ceiling. Anne herself preferred to lie in total darkness.

  She heard him opening the wardrobe; he had got into the habit of picking up her clothes after her. Sometimes, if she forgot to place her hair pins tidily in the dish on the dressing-table, she found in the morning that he had swept them away altogether. Soon he would start brushing the dust from the hem of her skirt. She had always felt that his thoughtfulness contained an element of reproach. There wasn’t a stitch on her back that hadn’t been paid for by him. Her skirt and her jacket, her day dresses and her cape had been made by a dressmaker recommended by Mrs Iselin. ‘She is becoming almost a fixture,’ Watson had remarked, catching Mrs Iselin, two afternoons in a row, poring over patterns in the sitting-room. He hadn’t said it in front of her, but the way he had loped up and down, twitching the curtains straight and bending to snatch imaginary pieces of thread from the carpet, had fooled nobody. The next day one of Mrs Iselin’s children had conveniently fallen sick and she had sent word round to say that she wouldn’t be available for some time. She had never called again.

  ‘I spoke to Iselin after prayers this morning,’ said Watson, coming back into the room with the clothes brush in his hand. ‘And again in the corridor. He didn’t mention you’d been asked for tea.’

  ‘I expect it slipped his mind,’ she said. ‘You men have so much to occupy you.’

  ‘Anne,’ he cried, ‘Anne.’

  She was forced to open her eyes; it wasn’t like him to plead.

  ‘Anne,’ he repeated, though no other words followed. He sat down at the table and then jumped up and came back to the fireplace. There was a button missing from his coat. At last he said, ‘What’s wrong, Anne?’ />
  ‘Wrong?’ she said sullenly. ‘What should be wrong?’

  ‘I feel it,’ he said. ‘And your remark this morning … all day I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve been unable to concentrate on my work.’

  She shrugged her shoulders in disbelief.

  ‘It’s true,’ he persisted. ‘Why, today Munford came and I found myself listing the books for the examinations. He knows them as well as I do. They are always the same –’

  ‘I am alone all day,’ she interrupted. ‘What do you know of my life?’

  ‘I too am alone,’ he protested, and at this, outraged, she shouted at him, ‘Nonsense, fiddlesticks. By your own admission you spoke to Munford and to Iselin and to Williams –’

  ‘Williams,’ he said. He couldn’t think how she knew.

  ‘And Grey never leaves your side. There are any amount of people creeping around you, bringing you gifts, asking your advice –’

  ‘Gifts?’ he said.

  ‘Day after day I sit here and see no one. I have no servants to instruct, no household to run –’

  ‘It was you who insisted we leave the School House,’ he said, growing irritable now that she was heaping it all on to him. She reminded him that they hadn’t received a penny of profit from the boarders. He had never stopped complaining at having to dip his hand into his own pocket to provide paraffin oil.

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘Yes, it’s true.’

  She explained that the boredom she felt arose not from an inevitable withering of love but from her inability to affect him. He simply never took her into account.

  He was so taken aback at her pessimistic view of marriage that he scarcely heard the rest of the sentence.

  ‘You never ask my opinion of anything,’ she said. ‘Unless it’s to do with inkwells or text-books or some dreary altercation you’ve had with Grey. And then it’s no more to you than giving your gloves away to a beggar.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

  ‘You never feel the cold,’ she retorted. ‘You don’t need your gloves.’