Watson’s Apology

by Beryl Bainbridge

  Sincerely Yours, J.S. Watson.

  As far as Fraser was concerned such a letter spoke for itself and he had sent it to the Home Secretary, though he doubted it would be read, let alone have any effect.

  He felt there was nothing more he could do for Watson, except to get books sent to him, and to keep in touch by letter. He had visited him twice. They had both been locked into cages separated by a narrow corridor patrolled by warders. He would have gone regularly – prisoners were allowed a twenty-minute visit every six months – but Watson had told him not to bother. No one else had ever been to see him.

  On that first occasion Watson had complained of cracked spectacles – they had been trodden on in a fight – and on the second, and last, of his teeth. Fraser had been appalled at the thought of his former head master involved in a brawl, but Watson had explained it was an accident. He had merely got in the way and his glasses had fallen off. The springs in his teeth had broken through age.

  Neither visit had been a success. Apart from the business of his teeth, Watson had spoken offensively of a book entitled Classics for the Million, written by Henry Grey and sent to the prison library at Grey’s request. The prison chaplain had recommended it.

  ‘And did you look at it?’ asked Fraser uncomfortably.

  ‘Certainly not,’ replied Watson. ‘The man was incapable of constructing a worthwhile paragraph. It’s obviously unreadable.’

  Fraser had felt relief; a glance inside the cover would have shown Watson how wrong he was. The book had already sold sixteen thousand copies. Fraser then told Watson of the sudden death of the Bishop of Winchester, Samuel Wilberforce, who had fallen from his horse. Fraser thought Watson would be upset, but all he said was, ‘Poor old Soapy Sam, slippery to the last.’

  Fraser remembered other news he had planned to impart. Henry Bohn had sold his business for a fortune and was growing roses and collecting pictures in Twickenham. William Longman had reached his peak and passed away as President of the Alpine Club. George Denman, who had been unable to translate a simple piece of Latin, was now a High Court Judge. Serjeant Parry still hadn’t won a case … None of it seemed worth the telling.

  They said good-bye to each other through the bars. When the warder led Watson away Fraser was distressed to see that the old man was without stockings. Later he sent a letter of complaint to the prison, and money to pay for the mending of both spectacles and teeth.

  He had been too old for the treadmill, and too slow at picking oakum. Besides, his hands were soft and bled easily. They had tried him in the kitchens, washing pots, but he caused trouble. He was always in a bad humour, tetchy and glum, and it had upset the other men to have someone so morose among them. He didn’t think the work too menial, but he argued about how it should be done. He was very dogmatic, and irritatingly precise. What set him apart from the rest was not that he was an educated man and had consequently fallen further than most, but his refusal to accept that the standards of a previous life no longer applied.

  The chaplain had thought that the library might be the most suitable place for him, though it was unusual for a man to gain this privilege so soon after beginning his sentence. Having looked through the books on the shelves Watson said they were all the work of third-rate authors, and that it would be a waste of anybody’s time to read them. It was discovered that he had crossed out words and scribbled comments in the margins, and he was put on bread and water for it. He was brought low, though not in the manner expected, for he remarked that such a diet, for a short while at least, could actually be beneficial.

  Finally they settled him in the tailor’s shop, chalking out armholes for prison uniforms. They hadn’t felt he could be trusted with scissors. Surprisingly he had taken to the work. Like father, like son, he thought, remembering the baptismal entry in the church register at Crayford, and the occupation of his unknown father.

  He was convinced that finally he would be released. It was not a hope, but a belief; it was not his destiny to die in such a place.

  But the years passed, and though his body remained alive he began to be afraid for his mind. He was never required to use it and he felt it withering like some dried-up plant. He knew that he must think of some intellectual exercise, some system of nourishment, if it was not to crumble away altogether. But what exercise, what system? He was without companionship and he had neither books nor writing materials, save for that one sheet of blue paper handed to him every six months when he was allowed to write a letter. He saw nothing but the tailor’s shop, the yard and the walls of his cell. Those convicts who worked out of doors, in the vegetable gardens or in the quarry, were the best off. They soon stopped complaining of aches and blisters, and grew hardy. Exposed to the sea breezes, they slept like children. For them, time raced. For the rest, each day was a century and each night another one, and each man crawled across the terrible years like a snail along a highway.

  Then one morning – he had been in Parkhurst for seven years – as he was walking from the prison to the chapel, the answer came to him. It was winter and still dark. The procession of yawning men was led by a prisoner who had been blind from birth. Only the day before, a small fir tree had been planted in a little plot of earth in the centre of the yard and, scarcely altering his step, the blind man skirted it and marched confidently to the chapel doors. This same man distributed the hymn books, walking in darkness as sure-footed as a cat. If a man who had lost his sight, Watson reasoned, could develop, by way of compensation, heightened sensitivity of hearing and touch, then surely a man physically restricted should have a greater capacity for mental expansion.

  That night, lying in his hammock, he began to construct in his head a corner of the front room in his grandfather’s house at Dartford. To some extent he had always lived in the mind, and he hadn’t expected to have so little authority over his thoughts. He leapt like a frog from one figment to another. No sooner had he built the fireplace – he remembered there was an iron hook set in the stone – than he found himself going up the stairs to the room above, and before he had reached the landing he was suddenly transported to a cobbled forecourt which instantly changed into a platform at Euston railway station. He forced himself back into the house, only to find that he was in another room altogether, one of a later date, in a street in Dublin. And then he fell asleep as abruptly as if he had stepped off a cliff.

  It was the same for months, this uncontrollable jumping from one image to another, followed by that quick fall into sleep. It puzzled him. In the past he had never had any difficulty in concentrating, and he had never felt tired by reading his books.

  Then, one afternoon in the tailor’s shop, he was caught in a broad beam of sunshine which shone through the fanlight of the roof. He remembered his preoccupation, some years before, with the causes of light. He had even written to Fraser about it, though he had never considered Fraser very bright and had certainly not expected a sensible reply. If anything, he had written the letter to irritate the prison authorities; it amused him to think of the prison censor racking his brains in an effort to understand its meaning. Now, blinking under that slanted and dazzling pillar of light, he thought his problem might be solved if he pursued again the relation of surfaces to reflection.

  As soon as he was taken back to his cell he looked into the cracked oval of mirror on the wall and studied his face. He saw his features, the glass and a patch of the wall behind him. The mirror hung crookedly and he reached out to straighten it. No sooner had he done so than he realised that he had never seen, would never see, and in fact could not ever see the mirror he had just touched, any more than he could touch or would ever touch the mirror that he saw. To say that he both ‘touched’ and ‘saw’ the extension of the mirror, or of any other object in his cell, was merely to play with words. What he ‘saw’ and what he ‘touched’ had nothing but the name in common. He certainly couldn’t touch the light all around him, and wasn’t even sure that he was ‘seeing’ it, for when he shut his eyes he retained, if
only for a brief moment, an image of his face and that patch of wall behind his head. If ‘seeing’ was independent of either eye or glass, then ‘unseen’ light must be the conductor of visual shapes whether internal or external. If he was to ‘see’ he must fill his head with light. But how was he to trap the light for longer than a fraction of a second?

  He began by imagining that his mind was a black box with the merest pin-prick of light showing at the top right-hand corner. The difficulty was to rid himself of the image of the box and to focus on the light. When he had succeeded in doing so he enlarged the aperture, and now he had a prism of light into which he put a straight-backed chair. Having mastered the shape of the chair and held on to its image for perhaps half a minute, he placed the chair on a rug and the rug on a floor. The concentration required was enormous.

  Sometimes he almost gave up in despair. He was surrounded by so many ruffians, so much meanness of spirit and ugliness of expression, that it was a Herculean task to lift himself out of the darkness. Often, when he had just managed to break free, and was standing in a sunlit field or swimming on the surface of a bright river, some groan or curse from the adjoining cell distracted him and he was dropped into blackness again. At such times, peering up at the barred window he would tell himself that it was always there, that shining, illuminated world, whether he could see it or not.

  Gradually he became more successful. He was able to retain the light and to prolong his stay in the place he had put himself. He furnished a room in Dublin and filled the shelves with books. He arranged them first so that the authors were in alphabetical order – Seneca, Sismondi, Skelton – and then took them all down and replaced them in order of subject – Beekeeping, Binary Arithmetic, Biology, Birds etc. The pleasure it gave him was immense. His appetite improved and once or twice he was seen to be smiling as he bent over his bench in the tailor’s shop.

  He went back to Guernsey, where he had once been an assistant, and tried to conjure up the French master with whom he had been friendly and whose name he had forgotten; but he couldn’t remember his face. Then one summer afternoon, when he was walking along the beach below the college, he noticed a shell lying at the water’s edge. He bent down to pick it up and was instantly in the dark, in his hammock, the sweat running into his eyes though the cell was bitterly cold. He felt afraid, as if he had been exposed to some frightful danger.

  After that he was careful to remain in his room in Dublin, although he couldn’t avoid going to the window. He was drawn there, and spent hours watching the people in the street below. There was a particular woman wearing a blue dress who came out of the house opposite at the same time each day and loitered on the corner as if waiting for someone. She stood with one gloved hand tapping the column of the street lamp. He tried to keep away from the window, resolutely sitting down at his desk to read, but after no more than a minute he found himself back at the window, his book forgotten.

  He decided he would go out and speak to her. He changed his clothes and brushed his hair. On the stairs he passed a cat licking its paws in a pool of sunlight. Even before he had crossed the street the woman turned to look at him; it was as though she already knew him.

  He began to court her. She was taller than him and blushed easily, and when he looked up at her rosy profile, in particular at the chaste curve of her mouth, he thought he had never been so happy. Every day they walked to the cathedral and strolled about the square. With her at his side he noticed everything – the green fruit on the apple woman’s barrow, a lame pigeon strutting lopsided in the shadows of the lime trees, the drunken man snoring beside the fountain. In the evenings they walked to the river. Nothing altered, not even the position of the sun. The crippled pigeon hopped in a circle round a rotten plum, and the same drunken man, a bottle between his knees, sat with his back to the water.

  She was always silent, and he believed she was thinking intensely about him. He made up his mind to invite her to his room. If she had refused he would have taken her anyway, but she came of her own free will. When he leant forward to kiss her she blushed more than ever. He had imagined a delicious continuance of time during which he would gradually bring her to accept more intimate embraces, but no sooner had he taken her in his arms than she clung to him, trembling violently. Her lips burned. The room melted away and he lay on a headland with the sound of the sea in his ears, that fiercely burning mouth pressed to his heart.

  He tried to begin again, banishing her into the street and going out to meet her for the first time, but it was of no use. She had always known him. He was love-sick and he tried to tell her what she meant to him, but at the simplest endearment, the slightest contact, her body prepared itself for surrender, and afterwards, in that drowsy state following on physical pleasure, she lay beside him as if dead.

  Outside the circle of his arms she was restless and uneasy. She was incapable of reading a book. He introduced a friend into the room, a student from Trinity College, but she behaved as though he wasn’t there, and pushing between them perched herself on his knee and wrapped her arms so tightly about his neck that he could scarcely breathe. He attempted to play draughts with her; she laid her hand suggestively on his arm and sighed, and when he pretended not to notice she swept the pieces to the floor. She never spoke to him of her own accord, never said she cared for him, not unless he put the words into her mouth.

  And now he looked oddly, critically at her. Her nose was too big and her eyes not light enough. Often there was a sour smell in the creases of her skin. She knew he had changed towards her. He watched her eyes fill with tears which spilled down her crimson cheeks. He tried to comfort her, holding her close and caressing her, but her lips sucked at his neck and her body trembled so much that he actually heard her teeth rattling. He pushed her down on all fours and entered her from behind, and he thought, I am an animal, an animal, I am mating a bitch, and he looked down at the speckled marks on her back and flung himself off her in revulsion.

  Then they both cried, she no doubt because he had hurt her, and he because it had all gone, all that enchantment and forgetfulness of self, and there was nothing of love left in him. He despised her. She had never cried before.

  Rather than meet her again he took to walking all night about his cell, and if she slipped into his mind, rather than abuse her he would push her out of the window or down the stairs.

  He asked to see the Governor and said that he needed intellectual stimulation. He would like to translate some work of a scholarly nature. His arrogance had left him now, and he said he would take it as a privilege if permission could be given. The Governor replied that a decision was not up to him but to the Directors of Convict Prisons.

  Watson wrote to Fraser and asked him to visit. He knew that nothing would be done unless he had someone on his side. When he was first put in prison he had wanted a Greek Testament and it had taken two years to get it, and even then it was not given to him directly but placed in the library. He had thought that unfair. The prison was full of Jews, all of whom were supplied with Hebrew Bibles, though most of them could scarcely read their own names, let alone Hebrew. Fraser had paid for the Greek Testament.

  As soon as he was locked into the cage in the visitors’ room, he called out to Fraser, ‘I must have books.’

  ‘What sort of books?’ asked Fraser.

  Watson told him that he was anxious to do some translating. He seemed very excited and beat on the bars of the cage. ‘I have been thinking of it for some time,’ he said.

  ‘What books in particular?’ asked Fraser.

  ‘I should like to begin with Seneca. No doubt you have forgotten, but his letters and essays are eminently suitable to a man in my position.’

  ‘I haven’t altogether forgotten,’ Fraser said. He had to shout to make himself heard. There was a woman sitting next to him with a child at her feet. It was bawling and drumming its heels on the floor.