Gentlemen and Players

by Frances Vernon

  Over some years she expressed to me a wish to die. She’d say, ‘I wish I was dead,’ or, ‘I don’t know if I can stand it any more.’ There is nothing you can say to that … you don’t dismiss it, but I didn’t feel it was something that ordinary advice or listening could really resolve. I’m sure I wasn’t as helpful as I could have been. But in reality I don’t know what I could have done.

  What would be Frances’s final novel, The Fall of Doctor Onslow – originally entitled ‘A School Story’ – was inspired by her reading of the memoirs of the writer and homosexual John Addington Symonds, wherein he exposed the commonplace incidence of homosexuality at Harrow School in the1850s, among pupils and indeed between boys and senior staff.

  MICHAEL MARTEN: Onslow was based on a true story about a headmaster at Harrow, who was effectively blackmailed or bludgeoned by the father of a pupil into leaving the school and wasn’t allowed to accept any preferment in the Church, such that when he tried to a few years later he got set back. It was a very powerful story and Frances managed to convey it very well. It seemed to me her first novels were very good but of a certain type, novels of manners and mores, but they didn’t really go further than that. Whereas I felt that Onslow had more depth.

  SHEILA VERNON: Frances’s sense of humour wasn’t commented on. But it’s there in Onslow, especially in Doctor Onslow’s wife Louisa, who is a great character, I think. Nothing’s explained to her but she knows quite a lot. When she speaks of Onslow’s devotion to his pupils and then realises what she’s said … And when Onslow says he’s ‘upset over a boy’, she does know there’s something hidden. Or when they go together to a hotel and she comments on their lack of luggage, to which he replies, ‘A clergyman is always respectable …’ Even he has a joke at himself. Frances was very succinct in her writing, including her humour.

  MICHAEL MARTEN: Gollancz, who published Westmarch, turned down the first version of Onslow. It was a huge blow to Frances, and she was reluctant to rewrite it, but she did, quite considerably. She must have finished it not long before she died. And it was almost as though she had decided it was the work she had to finish, she had no ideas beyond that – and by finishing it, I think she felt released.

  Frances died by her own hand on 11 July 1991 after what The Times obituarist would describe as her ‘long struggle with depressive illness’. Having promised her psychiatrist not to end her life using pills he’d prescribed for her depression, Frances created a ‘herbal’ concoction, which she took, and then lay down to die, apparently calmly and peacefully.

  MICHAEL MARTEN: It wasn’t sudden, it was a continual worsening. It was a cloud over her and it grew blacker. She seemed less able to escape from the blackness. When it happened I was certainly shocked. But it was not in the least unexpected. And I felt thereafter that nothing would have saved her.

  SHEILA VERNON: I go over and over thinking how we might have done things differently, and probably we should have, you can’t help wondering. But … you just have to live with it as best you can. In a way it was rather like someone with a terrible illness that couldn’t be cured, and you don’t want them to go on and on suffering.

  MICHAEL MARTEN: A few months after Frances’s death I sent ‘A School Story’ back to Gollancz in its rewritten form but they turned it down. I got in touch with her agency Blake Friedmann and asked them to suggest other publishers who might be interested. They sent me a list of about twenty, to whom I sent copies, most of whom turned it down until André Deutsch accepted it. And I think it’s the best of Frances’s novels.

  The Fall of Doctor Onslow was published finally in July 1994. Ben Preston for The Times called it ‘a searing indictment of the process of education … tersely written in a style that successfully captures Victorian restraint and its stifling sensibilities’. In the Tablet, Jill Delay reflected that ‘it is difficult to believe when reading it that the author was a child of our times and did not actually live in the middle of the last century: she recreates that world so vividly, with such understanding of its characters, such an ear for its speech, such feeling for its attitudes and taboos’. Lucasta Miller for the Independent observed that the novel’s ‘posthumous appearance is both a tragic reminder of what she might have gone on to do, and a testimony to what she did achieve’.

  CHAPTER 1

  MISS FITZWILLIAM OF LYNMORE HALL

  The doorbell rang. Miss Fitzwilliam laid down her pen but did not move from her chair. She smoothed her hair with both hands, paused, then turned round to look out of the window and into the garden. Above the garden the trees were black and the sky was white and lavender. A flock of geese, V-shaped, flew over the thinly glazed pond some five hundred yards from the house. Miss Fitzwilliam, twisting a ruby ring round and round her fourth finger, watched them pass. The hall was too far away for her to hear any noises, but in time she heard footsteps, then the butler’s cough.

  ‘Mr Pagett. Miss Pagett, Miss Susan Pagett, Miss Sophie Pagett …’

  ‘Augusta, my dear. I’ve brought the children, as you see.’

  ‘Nicholas,’ said Miss Fitzwilliam, rising.

  He kissed her hand. She let him hold it for a moment, then withdrew.

  ‘And these are your girls. You’re Sarah, aren’t you, Miss Pagett?’

  ‘How do you do, ma’am,’ said Sarah, who was sixteen years old, very small and thin, but clearly the eldest.

  ‘How do you do. Susan. Sophie,’ she said, shaking hands and smiling at each in turn.

  ‘How do you do, ma’am.’

  ‘How do you do, ma’am.’

  ‘You must learn to call me Aunt Augusta. A compromise – I don’t believe in calling a stepmother “mother”, when she isn’t. Were you all called names beginning with S deliberately?’ she added, as the girls remained silent and looked at her.

  ‘Yes, we were,’ said Susan, who was fifteen, plump and pretty. She gave Miss Fitzwilliam a smile.

  ‘How old are you?’ Miss Fitzwilliam asked the youngest.

  ‘Almost ten,’ said Sophie. She was a dark blonde and she looked as if, after passing through a very gawky phase, she would be a beauty.

  The three of them were dressed exactly alike, in mourning grey and lilac, because their brother had died less than a year before. Their front hair had been taken back from their foreheads and tied with white ribbon. Sophie’s dress differed in that it was cut off below the knees, instead of above the ankles.

  Miss Fitzwilliam turned to Nicholas Pagett, He was a handsome, portly, broad-shouldered man of forty-six, who wore a thick beard which concealed his small, slightly pouting mouth and his receding chin. The curling brown hair on his head was beginning to fall out. He had an acquiline nose, strong cheekbones, a high forehead and deep-set hazel eyes under heavy eyebrows. Because he had come into the country he had dressed himself in a tweed lounge-suit. A gold watch-chain was slung over his stomach and he wore a black armband for his son.

  ‘You must all be cold after your long drive,’ she said. ‘I have ordered some mulled wine, which I happen to dislike, but it ought to warm you. I don’t think it will do the children any harm, do you, Nicholas?’

  ‘Well, my dear, I wouldn’t really like them to touch strong drink.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ smiled Miss Fitzwilliam.

  ‘Oh, Father,’ protested Sophie, frowning up at him.

  ‘I hope you’re not pert, Sophie,’ said Miss Fitzwilliam, lifting the little girl’s chin with a hard brown finger. ‘Anyway, you shall all have it.’

  She rang the bell. After a moment’s hesitation, Nicholas and Miss Fitzwilliam shared a sofa but sat at either end of it. The girls chose upright chairs and sat opposite. The mulled wine was brought in, Miss Fitzwilliam took madeira, and they talked about the state of the roads, that day and in January in general.

  Augusta Fitzwilliam was thirty-five. Although her father had died only just before Christmas, she was not dressed in mourning but in a gold-and-white-striped blouse and a dark puce skirt, with a brown belt buckled roun
d her waist: generously cut and simple clothes which had been fashionable five or six years earlier, just after the crinoline went out. The elder girls had taken notice of her not wearing a jutting crinolette, or tight lacing. Augusta’s low-slung swelling bosom pressed freely against the fine wool of her blouse. She was very tall, dark and massive, with a heavy oval face. Her hair was thick and black and her skin swarthy. She had large almond-shaped brown eyes and thick straight eyebrows, a big nose and full wide mouth. Her chin was just beginning to double. Sipping their wine, the girls and their father thought she was a very unusual woman. Only Nicholas paid her undivided attention: the sisters gazed round about them, and Augusta noticed them do so.

  Lynmore Hall was a high, plain, grey house, built in the middle of the previous century, set in its park on top of a hill. In the 1820s, certain rooms had been redecorated with a great deal of gilt and satin, but most of the house was furnished as it had been when it was built. Some of the furniture had come from an older house on the site and was as much as three hundred years old, mixed in with the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century pieces. The house was in grave disrepair and very draughty, although many of the windows had been bricked up in the days of window-tax and had never been restored. The estate was situated some ten miles from Congleton and had belonged to the Fitzwilliams for six hundred years.

  Sarah, Susan and Sophie lived with their father in a very comfortable, spacious, modern brick villa at Alderley Edge, a distant suburb of Manchester, and before that they had lived in the city. They had never journeyed so far from Manchester as this.

  ‘Which of them most resembles their mother?’ said Augusta to Nicholas. Susan looked up.

  ‘I rather think Susan does,’ he replied.

  ‘I’m the very image of her,’ said Susan.

  ‘Are you, indeed?’

  Susan was of medium height and had a well-rounded figure for a girl of her age. Her hair was plain brown, fine and straight and fairly thick. She had a round face, a clear complexion, and very pink cheeks. Susan’s features were good: she had large wide-set, wide-open brown eyes, a small delicate nose and a real rosebud mouth. From her father she had inherited very thick, level, dark eyebrows and, had she not had those, her face would have been that of a woman in a fashion plate.

  ‘Luncheon is served, Miss Augusta.’

  Luncheon was an enormous meal, with all the dishes in the room at once, as had been the custom at the beginning of the century. There was a broth, herrings with mustard sauce, a brace of pheasants, a saddle of mutton, a round of beef, carrots, leeks, potatoes and onions, a steak and kidney pie, a marmalade roll, pears in red wine, some pastries, Scotch woodcock and angels on horseback.

  ‘I have always had a large meal in the middle of the day. I hope none of you will restrain yourselves and think of your figures. I never do.’

  Nicholas thought of how, had the children not been there, he would have squeezed her hand and told her that this was very obvious, and then kissed her. He and his daughters ate very little. Nicholas knew that all the food would be reheated, rehashed and served again to Augusta alone, because he knew she had inherited from her father a mortgaged estate and debts amounting to seventeen thousand pounds.

  For some time Nicholas and Augusta discussed the plans for the new house which he intended to build at Lynmore. He had told her that, with his own firm to rebuild Lynmore Hall, it would cost him little more to do so than it would to put her house in order. Economies were to be made on furnishings, and several of the rooms were to be filled with pieces which were not new, but belonged to this house or to Alderley Edge. Nicholas had allowed Augusta to tease him frequently about how the new Lynmore Hall was to be very solid, very different from the artisans’ dwellings which he had put up at Stockport, on which his fortunes were founded: although they knew that he had had such success with those first houses because they were well-built, comfortable cottages.

  The tease continued at luncheon and the girls were interested to hear it, as they were not in the rest of the conversation, for they had been shown the architect’s and decorator’s drawings before their future stepmother, who would not stir from Lynmore and had never seen the villa at Alderley Edge.

  When she had finished her puddings and savouries, Augusta looked down the table: ‘If you have warm clothes on you might like to go outside. I suppose your father will want you to stay in the garden, but it’s quite large.’ The girls wondered whether they were to leave the table then, but did not move.

  ‘Run along, girls,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘If you don’t care for outdoors, you can go back to the drawing room,’ said Augusta.

  ‘Thank you,’ murmured Sarah.

  ‘I think I may take a short walk,’ said Susan, shyly, rising.

  Sophie was last to leave the room.

  ‘And now we can go to the library,’ said Augusta.

  ‘Well, my dear, what do you think of them?’

  ‘Satisfactory as schoolroom girls go, I suppose,’ she replied. ‘What else can I say yet? If Sarah is just sixteen, it will be over a year before I have to concern myself greatly with her, by which time I’ll know what to say about her.’

  ‘I see. Well, you were kind to them, I’ll admit’.

  ‘My dear, what good would it do me to offend my stepdaughters? Do they have influence over you, I wonder?’

  He did not know what to say and so said nothing at all.

  ‘You’re lucky in them really, you know,’ she continued. ‘As far as I can see they’re all well-behaved, and only Sarah is plain. They’ll do you credit when the time comes.’

  ‘I’m very fond of my girls, I must say.’

  ‘Well then.’ She lit a little black cigar from a silver box hanging from her chatelaine.

  ‘I hope you’ll stop doing that, Augusta.’

  ‘I shan’t, Nicholas. It’s one of my greatest pleasures in life.’

  ‘You do it in public?’

  ‘Very rarely. Come now, Nicholas, are you beginning to doubt that I shall make you a good wife?’

  ‘Augusta! My dear.’ He sat down beside her and squeezed one of her hands between his own. He looked her in the eyes then wagged a finger at her. ‘You’re a temptress, my dear.’

  After a moment she kissed him, and they held warm damp hands. Nicholas began one of his favourite flirtations, reminding Augusta of the time, five years before, when he had bought three mines on Sir Clement Fitzwilliam’s property and how, a year after that, in August 1868 when her father had had a stroke, she had come to his offices in Manchester and tried to buy back the now renovated and profitable mines, with the very sum which he, Nicholas, had paid for them when they were in disrepair. He did not mean to remind her of the fact that some of the Fitzwilliam property was already in his hands, but of how proud and angry she had once been, how she had hated him then, and how her fine black eyes had snapped, as well as her coarse tongue.

  It made Augusta laugh, and she started to talk again about the new house.

  *

  In the drawing room the girls were sitting round the fire. Sophie was poking it.

  ‘Don’t do that, Sophie,’ said Susan. ‘What would you do if you knocked a burning log out?’

  ‘I won’t.’

  After a while Sophie grew bored, laid down the poker and started fiddling with her hair, which was thick and coarse, the colour of demerara sugar. She had slightly slanting, large, greenish hazel eyes under thin arched eyebrows, a very small, pink, delicately shaped mouth, and a little straight nose. Her complexion was creamy and, had she had no colour in her cheeks, might have been sallow. Her face was still round and full, her cheekbones undefined, but she was beginning to develop a pointed chin.

  Sophie had been the first to learn that Augusta was to marry their father. One day before Christmas, when she was in a temper, her nurse had told her that she was to have a Papist stepmother who, when she was naughty, would give her to the nuns: women in black robes who lived in icy cloisters and would make her b
ecome a Catholic and live there forever. Sophie had gone immediately to tell her sisters of this marriage, and had then asked Susan whether it were true about the nuns (a quiver coming into her voice although she had announced the news proudly). Susan had reassured her, but Sophie had still been undecided about whether Augusta would be cold and ugly and dressed in black with a crucifix round her neck, or beautiful, dressed all day in satin and diamonds. She also wondered whether Lynmore Hall would be almost a monastery or almost a palace; and she did not see why it should not be a palace, for, although she knew that aristocrats could be penniless, she had heard that they could live on credit and have everything anyone could ever want, without ever paying for it.

  Sarah sat quite still, thinking of the year after next when she would be taken to London and brought before the Queen by her new stepmother. First, the new mansion had to be built. She would be interested to see what her father put in place of this house, which she thought very ugly; she could not remember much about the plans she had been shown.

  Sarah’s hair was beautiful, dark, wildly curling and very thick. Her face was plain: sallow and heart-shaped, her features ill defined, as though they had been moulded in wax, except for her eyes. She had small black eyes like stones, set deep under jutting, hairless eyebrows. Her cheekbones were wide but not very high, her chin and forehead receded and her flat nose and thin, pale mouth scarcely interrupted the round slope of her profile. She took her appearance from her maternal grandfather, but in the nursery she had been called a changeling, which she had discovered later to be a goblin, or fairy, child. Sarah nearly always wore a little curious half-smile which, even when she met a man other than her father, was not a simper: Susan could simper.

  Sarah had never believed that her father would not marry again, although she had not thought he would choose a woman so different from their mother. When she had considered a stepmother she had imagined a rather timid, very young, fair and pretty woman, called Grace or Patience, whom he would marry when she, Sarah, was out of the schoolroom. The girls’ mother had been pretty, fair-skinned and called Charity, but she had not been timid or very young. The picture of this stepmother was still in Sarah’s mind. Nonetheless, she could see Augusta taking her to London and presenting her at Court: a tiny, erect girl with a queer and fascinating face, the eldest Miss Pagett of Lynmore Hall.