Watson’s Apology

by Beryl Bainbridge

  She hadn’t ‘taken’, as she put it, to Henry Dale, but then, as far as he could remember she had never ‘taken’ to any of his colleagues. He had translated six works for the Classical library in as many years, more than any other of Bohn’s authors, as well as notes and a preface to Pope’s edition of the Iliad, and now he and the head master of Blackheath were supposedly grappling together with the complexities of the Cyropaedia and Hellenics. It was hardly the collaboration he had expected. In November Dale’s health had broken down, and apart from a lengthy correspondence of apologies and excuses, he hadn’t contributed a word on the subject. With luck Anne and Mrs Brewer would retire early to the sitting room, and he and Henry Dale could discuss the matter. He was determined that the completion of the second volume, even if he had to do it all himself, should not be prolonged beyond the ending of the summer. He was now fifty-four years old and hadn’t yet written an original book of his own. He had reached that middle season when the crowd must be content to remain at the foot of the mountain. Of course a man’s age, he told himself, in regard to his work, was only relevant if he hadn’t long to live.

  Just then he saw a large black crow lying on the road ahead of him. Examining it, he concluded it had been struck down by the wheel of a cart. Its head was crushed. He shoved at the bird with the toe of his boot and its wing slid away from its body. Only the night before he had been working on Xenophon’s account of the death of Abradates during the retreat of the Ten Thousand. Cyrus, seeing his lifeless friend laid out on the ground attended by a weeping woman, had dismounted from his horse and, kneeling, taken Abradates’ right hand in his own, at which the hand had come away from the arm, and the arm from the shoulder. The woman, finding the body hacked to pieces by the Egyptians, had fitted it together like a puzzle.

  Standing there looking down at the dismembered bird, Watson shivered. On either side of him he could hear the rain drumming on the frozen earth and it was like a death rattle in his ears. He kicked the two black lumps into the ditch beneath the blackthorn hedge and walked on. In all that funereal landscape there was not a soul about save himself; each step he took left him feeling more uneasy. Simply being in the vicinity of his birthplace oppressed him.

  He had last visited Crayford shortly before his ordination when proof of his baptism had been required. Half fearing he was illegitimate, he had gone to St Paulinus’ church and asked to be shown the register. There was his entry for December 30th, 1804, and the names of both father and mother. On leaving the church he had cut across the fields rather than pass the house in which his mother lived.

  He had never discovered why his grandfather had taken him away. It was common enough, he knew, for parents in straitened circumstances to give up their children, but his vanity bucked at the idea that it should have happened to him. Though he had been too young to remember either occasion, his mother had twice come to Dartford to see him. On his eighth birthday she had sent him a child’s book with an inscription on the fly leaf – ‘To John Watson from his mother’. He had turned to the words again and again, and, closing his eyes, touched with his finger the loops and lines of her handwriting as if tracing the contours of her face. In his heart he had carried the image of a frail, milk-white girl too delicate to lift an infant in her arms. Then, at the burial of his grandfather, he had seen for the first and last time a tall, stout woman with a brick-red face, a button nose and a tattered bonnet in which a broken feather blew. She had chucked earth onto the coffin as though settling a score. When he was twelve years old she had given birth to his brother Alfred, and later to Abraham, and then to two other children. She had kept them all.

  Without realising it he had crossed the bridge and reached the timber yard outside the town. He had thought of his mother as living a rustic existence and was astonished at the factories and at the noise of machinery. In spite of the rain the air was filled with the stench of bleach and nitric acid. In places the creek which ran beside the High Street had overflowed, and now the bottoms of his trouser legs were spattered with mud. He spoke to no one and was hardly noticed. Arriving at the row of cottages below the church, he glanced at them briefly and pressed on up the hill to the Vicarage.

  The old woman who answered the door stared at him in alarm. She tried to shut him out, but he stuck his foot in the door and pushed past her, demanding to see the Rector. While waiting in the hall he glanced at his reflection in the looking-glass and understood her reluctance to admit him. His forehead was streaked with coal smuts and his lips caked with dried blood. He removed his hat and, placing it on the hall table, took out his stained handkerchief and attempted to clean his face. He was sickened by the sunken appearance of his cheeks and did not dare look inside his mouth.

  The old woman returned and said the Rector was not well. She asked him his business.

  He told her impatiently that he was looking for Abraham Watson. His voice sounded muffled and he found it difficult to pronounce his words. Appalled, he ran his tongue over his raw and toothless gums and repeated as best he could, ‘Abraham Watson. Son of Anne Watson who died of typhoid last month.’

  At this the old woman replied, ‘He’s gone from here.’

  ‘Gone?’ he echoed. For an instant he thought she meant that death had struck a further blow.

  The woman, eyeing him curiously, said Abraham Watson had sailed on an immigrant ship to America a week before. The parish had paid for his passage.

  He enquired whether Anne Watson had a head stone yet in the graveyard.

  ‘She’s not buried here. She died in Bexley, in the workhouse. She were laid out by Eliza Maynard, who caught the fever from her. There’s a daughter married to a stone carver living by the Iron Mill in Skibbs Lane, and another in service in Greenwich …’

  But he had stopped listening. He had taken it for granted that his mother had died in her own home, surrounded by her family. Now he saw her, stripped naked by strangers, tipped into a pauper’s grave.

  He went out of the door and down the path under the dripping sycamore trees. He could hear a voice shouting after him, but he hurried on. He walked at a tremendous pace through the town, over the bridge and up the road to the station. He had left his hat behind at the vicarage and the rain beat on his unprotected head.

  Once on the platform he slumped exhausted against the fence. The pain now raging in his gums caused his eyes to water; it seemed as though every nerve in his body was exposed to the brutal air. He was persecuted by images, by visions of beds of death, each one more frightful than the last, until, as the train shrieked in the distance, he saw himself, for one clear and ghastly instant, bent over a woman who lay in pieces on a workhouse table.

  Summer 1861

  Mr Bush ran to tell his son, Fred, who was sitting at his easel in the garden sketching the Torfield, that the Watsons had arrived from London. He had seen Mrs Watson on the front porch being greeted by Mrs Merryville, not five minutes before.

  Mr Bush had been expecting the Watsons for some days. His friend, Mr Williams, had advised him that they would be coming to Hastings on Thursday, and here it was almost noon on Saturday. ‘They have hardly any luggage,’ he said, ‘apart from a quantity of books lying in boxes in the drive. There’s no sign of Mr Watson.’

  ‘Is Mrs Watson young?’ asked Fred.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Bush. ‘She is inclined to stoutness, and both hair and brows are turning grey … but her eyes would do justice to a gypsy’

  Later, in the dining-room, Fred saw her for himself. She sat alone at the window table, dressed flamboyantly in a pink dress with green satin trimmings. As it was such a warm day the doors on to the terrace were propped open; several bees had blundered in and now hummed about the ceiling. Mrs Watson remained calm; when they spun lower she flapped her napkin carelessly in the air and went on eating.

  ‘Her dress is not the right colour,’ murmured Fred.

  ‘Possibly it suits her temperament,’ Mr Bush said, pushing back his chair. ‘I shall make myself known to her.�
�� Mr Williams had pointed the head master out to him in the street but he had never before encountered Mrs Watson.

  Fred returned at once to the garden. He was forty years of age and his father was past sixty, and often he felt some mistake had been made and it was the other way round. Two greenflies had settled on his sketching pad; he squashed them with his thumb and settled down to work. By the time Mr Bush came in search of him he had completed the outlines of the spires of All Saints and St Clement’s.

  ‘Mr Watson has taken to his bed,’ announced Mr Bush. ‘He is worn out.’ He looked critically at Fred’s drawing, and continued. ‘Judging by appearances he is a very studious man. The boot boy is still toiling up the stairs with the boxes.’

  He wandered away and reaching the shade of a maple tree at the end of the garden sat down on the grass with his back to the trunk. It was exceptionally hot. Last week the temperature had reached 102° in the sun and 99° in the shadows, and he believed it was not far short of that now. All over the country people were dropping from heatstroke. He himself when young had lived in Southern Italy and could stand any amount of sunshine. It was just as well, he thought, considering the tropical conditions, that the head master was resting. In his debilitated state – Mrs Watson had hinted at other things beside overwork – he could go out like a candle.

  He had been delighted at Mrs Watson’s conversation; she was obviously a woman of character. After he had introduced himself she had asked him to sit with her. He had answered that he would wait until Mr Watson came down. To which she had replied, ‘Then you will be standing there for some time, Mr Bush. We will not see the head master for a day or so.’ The Revd Mr Williams had given an entirely false impression of her. He had implied that she was severe and often moody.

  In the late afternoon, striding along the Parade, Mr Bush met Mrs Watson coming up the steps at the side of the bandstand. She had changed into a blue dress with yellow facings and wore a bonnet the colour of a buttercup. She seemed glad to see him and agreed to accompany him along the Promenade. As she walked she waved her hand in time to the military music blaring behind them; the blue satin reticule which hung from her wrist swung back and forth.

  ‘How peaceful it is,’ she said, stopping and leaning against the railings. ‘How calm.’ Indoors she had looked her age; now, in the sunlight, shading her eyes from the glare as she gazed out over the bright sea, the years fell away from her.

  He apologised for staring at her too intently. He said that an artist was never on holiday.

  ‘I don’t object,’ she said. ‘In my younger days in Dublin I mixed almost exclusively in artistic circles. My father was a connoisseur as well as a patron of art.’

  ‘I am glad to hear it,’ he said. He was an old man, carelessly dressed, and in the heat his white hair was sticking to his forehead, but when she spoke to him he found himself drawing in his breath to minimise the portly curve of his stomach.

  ‘Lord Ffrench and my father sat for the same painter in Upper Sackville Street. We lived at a large house at the top end. I have his portrait at home with me to this day.’

  ‘I study faces,’ confided Mr Bush, ‘in much the same manner as Mr Watson studies books.’

  ‘Ah, no,’ she said quickly. ‘You are looking outwards, observing life. Mr Watson looks inwards. The people he studies are invariably dead.’

  Mr Bush could not have put it better himself. He asked how Mr Watson was.

  ‘He is reading,’ she replied, and added with a pleasant smile, ‘not an unusual occupation for him.’

  Mr Bush admitted he had given up on books; he had to think of his eyes. But he was full of admiration for those who persisted. Only last week Mr Williams and he had discussed the head master’s literary endeavours. He waited for Mrs Watson to respond to this but she looked steadily out to sea. He gathered that she wasn’t altogether aware of his connection with Williams, nor had she known, until he told her, that he lived round the corner from the school in St Martin’s Road.

  ‘What a coincidence,’ she cried out, clapping her hands excitedly. ‘We are practically neighbours.’ She said she hoped that when they returned to Stockwell she might be allowed to see some of his work. He protested that he was not a first-rate artist, or even second-rate. She would be disappointed. ‘All I possess,’ he told her, ‘is a facility for catching a likeness.’ He could tell that she instantly believed him and felt a little morose as a result.

  That evening she didn’t come down to supper. The next morning Mr Bush got up early and walked with Fred to Hallington Church, a distance of four miles. Fred made a poor sketch of the church, and Mr Bush a better job of scratching his initials on the back of a tombstone. Fred was afraid they would be caught in this act of desecration, and hid in the lane. On the way back they bathed in the sea off the White Rock, and when at last they returned to the boarding house the dining-room was deserted.

  However, at supper, there was Mrs Watson seated at the window table with the head master. He had a book in front of him, propped up against the salt-cellar, and he wore his napkin tucked into his collar. Though extremely pale he didn’t look in the least ill, and when he shook Mr Bush by the hand his grip was so vigorous that Mr Bush openly winced. All the same he had a melancholy air about him, as if he had received bad news and was only now getting over the worst of the shock.

  ‘I trust the journey was not too tiring,’ said Mr Bush, making small talk. He rubbed his crushed fingers into life against the hollow of his back. ‘I hope it didn’t take you too long to get here.’

  ‘Eight years, or thereabouts,’ put in Mrs Watson, with a mysterious smile.

  ‘Our mutual friend Mr Williams has often spoken of you,’ continued Mr Bush. ‘When you feel stronger we shall have plenty to discuss.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Mr Watson.

  Mr Bush said he understood that the head master played chess.

  ‘I do,’ he replied, brightening up. ‘I do indeed.’

  Mr Bush moved on towards his table by the hall door. On the way he was greeted enthusiastically by the Misses Cowper, who had spent the day at the Fishponds watching the tropical fish under glass, and more discreetly by Mr and Mrs Kenny.

  ‘The heat,’ cried out the younger Miss Cowper, fanning herself with a spoon. ‘I thought we should melt.’

  Mr Kenny, a retired solicitor from Guildford, had caught the sun. In contrast to his blazing face, his bald head, which had been protected by his straw hat, looked as if it had been white-washed. He told Mr Bush that there was to be a fireworks display in the town square that evening. He had seen a notice nailed to a tree outside the Post Office.

  ‘There will be a dreadful crush,’ said Mrs Kenny. ‘And possibly pickpockets.’ She began to remonstrate with the servant girl, who, maddened by the flies which buzzed above the gravy dish on the dumb waiter, was slicing the air with a carving knife. Taking the implement from her hand, Mr Bush wiped the girl’s perspiring face with her apron and sent her back to the kitchen.

  Seated at last, he put on his spectacles and looked at the cardboard menu which leant against a vase of cut roses in the centre of the table. There was roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

  ‘There is certainly nothing convalescent about his appetite,’ he remarked to Fred, glancing out of the corner of his eye at the munching Mr Watson.

  The Revd Mr Williams had told him, ten days before, that the head master had written no fewer than three books this year and that all of them had been unfavourably reviewed. Their brutal reception, however upsetting to him in other ways, had evidently not put him off his food.

  ‘Socrates,’ said Fred. ‘Snub nose, prominent eyes under shaggy brows, large full mouth. Bearded, and later, bald.’

  ‘Mr Watson has plenty of hair,’ objected Mr Bush.

  ‘It’s early days,’ said Fred, and remained silent for the rest of the meal.

  As soon as the pudding was cleared away Mr Watson left the room. He was mopping his face with his handkerchief and still readin
g as he went out into the hall. A short time afterwards Mrs Watson followed him.

  Mr Bush played a game of cribbage in the sitting-room with the elder Miss Cowper. Now and then small explosions were heard outside the French windows, and the distant sound of cheering. The garden was lit intermittently with flashes of light; coloured stars burst above the trees and trailed downwards. Through the open doors Mr Bush caught a glimpse of his son Fred standing on the flickering lawn, his head tilted to watch the fireworks.

  Mr Bush had understood from the Revd Mr Williams that the head master was reserved; he hadn’t expected that it would be an easy matter to get on with him. But over their very first game of chess Mr Watson confided to him that there was something about the sea air that was doing wonders for his spirits.

  ‘Normally,’ he said, ‘I prefer to be on my own, but here it seems natural to be friendly.’ It appeared he hadn’t had a holiday in fifteen years, and since arriving in Hastings all desire to open his books had left him. Before the week was out he was talking to Mr Bush as though he had known him for a decade.

  In company with Mrs Watson they walked along the shore and over the rocks to St Leonard’s and back again, climbed the West Hill, explored the ruins of the castle together. Fred scrambled behind them, clutching his sketchbook and complaining of fatigue. They visited the Martello Towers, the Town Hall and the fish market – where Mr Watson bought Mrs Watson a lobster and Fred was persuaded to run home with it before it went off in the sun.

  In the evenings, sometimes accompanied by Mr and Mrs Kenny, they sauntered along the Parade, followed at a courteous distance by a young man dressed in Cavalier Spanish fashion, strumming on a guitar and singing. He never asked for money and none of them could decide whether he was doing it for a living or because he was mad. Once Mr Watson left some coins on the wall by the promenade – the young man had dogged them that far – but when they returned the money was still there and the troubadour had leapt down on to the beach and was singing to himself in the starlight. Mr Watson explained that the guitar was a modern extension of the ancient Greek cithara, though the cithara had a shallower sound chest. He had always been interested, he said, in musical instruments.