The Fall of Doctor Onslow (10 page)

Louisa watched her husband’s face and then went on in a great hurry, as though she were confessing to a grave misdeed.

‘You must not be so surprised that I know about your feelings for some of the boys. After all, I am your wife, and it is not so odd that over the years I should have guessed, discovered.’ Onslow continued to stare and say nothing. ‘Oh, dear, I wish I had never told you! I would never have done so were it not that I was almost sure. I thought it would relieve you a little of care if you only knew it was not essential to make sure everything was concealed from me.
Is
it blackmail?’

‘No,’ said Onslow at last.

‘What is it?’ She paused. ‘Or would you rather know first how I know?’

‘Yes,’ he replied, realising that by his dreadful silence he had already revealed that she was right in her suspicions, approximately right. It would be useless to pretend he thought her mad.

‘It was four or five years ago,’ said Louisa, steadily refusing to let her eyes fall to the floor. ‘I was in the drawing-room, fetching some wools from behind the screen, and you came in with a boy only for a moment. I heard a very brief exchange, but it was enough.’ In a voice rough with anxiety, Onslow had asked the boy for a kiss. After that, Louisa had kept her eyes open, and sorted out her thoughts.

Onslow said now furiously: ‘And you neither screamed nor fainted? I must be infinitely obliged to you!’ He thought he had never known what shame was till this moment.

‘No, of course not. It was a surprise, but – but it is such an unusual failing, and so small in comparison with other husbands. Loose women, and strong drink – I am not altogether ignorant of the world, you know, Dr Onslow.’

Onslow snapped a pencil in two, and threw the pieces down.

‘So I must receive not one but two blows this morning. It is insufferable. How dared you not tell me before this?’

Louisa remained calm. ‘I knew it was something about which you would not want me to know. I could hear it in your voice when you spoke to that boy. As I said, I never would have told you –’

‘Will you please say no more!’

‘May I not ask now what was in that letter?’

There was a pause. Then Onslow drew in his breath and said, less harshly but more awkwardly than he had spoken before:

‘He says I am, I must – oh, you may as well read it for yourself.’ He took the letter out of his inside pocket, and Louisa came over to take it from his hand. She went to read it on the sofa, leaving him to his thoughts.

Desperately Onslow wondered whether he ought to probe into his wife’s extraordinary mind, or whether he ought rather simply accept the new, adult, amoral person whom she had revealed herself to be – the dangerous creature who thought his failing small. It was intolerable that Louisa should be such a person, for he expected his wife to have the highest moral standards as well as to be forever childlike. Yet it was, after a fashion, comforting to think that he was not entirely alone, neither physically nor mentally alone, as Anstey-Ward would doubtless wish him to be in the obscurity to which he had condemned him.

Before Louisa had finished reading the letter, a servant came in to tell Onslow that his portmanteau was packed and the carriage would soon be at the door. Onslow, who had quite forgotten his plans for leaving immediately, stared uncomprehendingly at the man before he said:

‘Tell them to wait.’ There was no way, now, he could
make efficient decisions, as he had done before Louisa came in.

As soon as the servant was gone, Louisa folded Anstey-Ward’s letter and said:

‘He writes almost as though he had some private grudge against you, and has been longing for just such an opportunity to vent his spleen.’

‘Do you think so? I am sure you are a judge, Mrs Onslow.’

‘He is very hard. I cannot believe that he honestly means to wreck your whole life.’

‘Precisely.’

‘But I am glad that at least it is not blackmail.’

‘Are you? Would that not be preferable?’

‘No, whatever are you thinking of? To be always unsafe, always wretched – this is at least
clean
.’ Then came the question Onslow was dreading. ‘What are these documents, Dr Onslow? You did not write to this boy, did you? How can such letters have come into this man’s possession, if you did?’

After a moment he said:

‘I am very sure that the documents to which he refers are no such thing. If they were, he would have been more specific. As it is, he hopes pompously to overawe me, trusting to my guilty conscience.’

‘But you did write – incriminating letters?’

‘Louisa,’ said Onslow, turning round to face her, ‘are you indeed not very much shocked? Do you not think I am very wicked?’

She opened her eyes wide. ‘No, I think you foolish.’

‘Foolish!’ It was a word and a thing he hated. He thought of how for ten years, ever since he first gave way to temptation, he had supposed that only his own confession could make others aware. His whole reliance had been on the boyish code of silence, and even now, he could not acknowledge that his disgrace was inevitable, only because someone had discovered his private business without his permission.

‘I want to know whether you wrote letters to a boy.’

‘That is my own affair,’ he said, turning briefly back to the papers on his desk.

‘Did you tell him to burn them?’

‘Yes!’

‘And you are certain he did so?’

‘I have had enough of this inquisition. You forget yourself.’

‘Then what are these documents, Dr Onslow?’

Turning to face her again, Onslow coldly explained his belief that they were mere allegations made by Anstey-Ward’s son, and as he did so, he was forced to draw the obvious conclusion that another boy had told Christian Anstey-Ward – he had not thought of that before. Quickly he decided that Arthur Bright would never have told. Christian Anstey-Ward must therefore have discovered his previous love-affair, with a boy called Hallam, which had ended in 1856.

‘How can you be so incredibly calm?’ he asked his wife, having watched her look only mildly disturbed throughout his explanation.

‘Where would be the use of my flying into hysterics?’

‘You are a cold-hearted woman, Louisa,’ said Onslow, who had always valued Louisa because she was immune to tantrums and hysterics. ‘And you have a secretive disposition.’

‘I am not, and I have not.’ For the first time, she looked both angry and unhappy. ‘It is unjust. You have every reason to be grateful to me.’

‘I must acknowledge it. Louisa …’ He did not know what to say next. Then suddenly, emotion rushed through him like a great jet of water: Louisa had never looked more like her brother than at that moment, and Onslow was able to think of her not as amoral, but as infinitely forgiving. ‘Louisa, before God, I know what a terrible injury I have done you. Believe me, the thought that if I am ruined you must be ruined too is the worst of all, the worst punishment I shall have to suffer!’

‘Oh, Dr Onslow, don’t talk in that style!’

‘It is true.’

There was a long and awkward pause. Then Louisa said:

‘What are we going to do?’

Onslow, in obedience to his dying emotional impulse, went over to sit beside her. He took one of her hands in his and removed the letter from the other, and, gently pushing her skirt aside, he said:

‘I am going down to Wiltshire to see him, to talk to him. That is all I can do.’ The alternative was to submit in silence, but Onslow did not consider doing that for a moment. ‘I need to see whatever it is he has in his possession.’

‘Today?’

‘Yes, today.’

‘Dr Onslow, you cannot. To arrive so precipitately would be to give the impression that you know yourself to be – to be justly accused.’

He flushed. ‘Then pray what do you suggest I do?’

‘I think we ought to go together to see him. Not today, but later.’

‘No!’

‘I want to come with you.’

‘I refuse to permit it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I presume you have some notion of wheedling him into a less vengeful frame of mind, should it be necessary, and my pride will not stomach it.’ Onslow had swung back from thinking his wife an angel to thinking her a meddlesome woman and indifferent to sin.

‘Your pride,’ said Louisa. ‘Very well. I will accompany you only to – to lend you silent support.’

‘No, Louisa.’

‘But I want to come so much. George, I cannot bear to be left out, to be kept waiting here alone. Surely, in a sense, you owe it to me?’

‘No.’

Louisa got up from the sofa and said:

‘Only a moment ago you were almost beside yourself at the thought of what you called the injury you have done me. I do not think it is so great an injury in itself, but by your – your folly, you have placed yourself in a position where I too am in danger of being ruined. As you said.’

‘And so?’ said Onslow angrily.

‘I think you owe it to me to grant my wish in this matter.’

‘Why do you wish to come?’

‘To – to be a comfort to you if I can, to be a part of things. But I will own that although I have no intention of – of begging Dr Anstey-Ward to be kinder to you, I hope my presence will remind him that you have a wife whose life must needs be spoilt with yours, if he holds by his intention.’

‘I see,’ said Onslow, thinking of how most men found Louisa very charming. He was once more back to thinking of her as a perfect Christian like her brother. By failing to be horrified, by forgiving him, she had raised herself to a moral level immeasurably high above his own – he was beginning to agree that in the circumstances he, the author of her possible ruin, had no choice but to grant her wish.

Louisa, glancing at him quickly, saw that he was on the point of giving in. Turning to face the window, she sucked in her lips to control a smile. Her husband must never guess that to be in danger excited her as much as it distressed her, and that she was very sure she could prevent Anstey-Ward from abiding by his plan.

‘Very well,’ said Onslow. ‘You may come with me. But I leave today.’

‘Dr Onslow, do but consider. It will look so odd if we arrive without warning – I am thinking partly of the Anstey-Ward ladies, I remember Christian Anstey-Ward had seven elder sisters. Truly, I think you ought to send a telegraphic message. We could go down tomorrow, leaving early, if you are not willing to leave it till next week.’

‘Tomorrow is a Sunday, Louisa.’

‘Oh, so it is. Well, in that case we must wait until Monday – it would be fatal for you, a clergyman, to travel on a Sunday – it would reveal all your anxiety.’

‘Very well, very well, we shall go on Monday, together. I put myself in your hands.’

In this way, Onslow atoned for the injury he had done his wife.

Soon after he put his letter in the post-bag and saw it taken away, Anstey-Ward began to suffer certain qualms of conscience. He did not believe he had done the wrong thing, but he wished another man could have been called on to do the right thing: a man whose own conduct was and always had been exemplary. His was not. He could not accuse himself of sins of the flesh, because such sins had never tempted him, and he could not understand why other men did not do as nature and reason demanded – beget a few children and then withdraw into the life of the mind. But though he could neither understand nor empathise with Onslow’s passion, Anstey-Ward was forced to empathise with his hypocrisy, the way in which he shamelessly pretended to be what he was not. He had himself once been a hypocrite.

His hypocrisy consisted of having gone to church regularly, and contributed to Christian missions, and wholly hidden his unbelief, in the days when he had been obliged to earn his living. The memory of his behaviour towards one lucrative old lady made him squirm inwardly whenever he thought of it. He had tutted with her over Dr Buckland’s abandonment of belief in a universal deluge, assured her that his own researches had not led him to doubt Scripture, and let several pints of her blood over the years only to please her, though he held the outdated treatment to be both superstitious and dangerous. And when a clergyman told him that to use anaesthesia was to thwart God’s purpose, he had argued against him not from reason and humanity, but by reminding him that God put Adam to sleep before taking out his rib.

Anstey-Ward’s conscience was as active as any Christian’s. Before Onslow’s telegram arrived, he came near to persuading himself that it was wrong for him to judge the man’s conduct, no matter how badly his son’s innocence had been damaged. To force him to resign was to do his duty by the boys of Charton, but to forbid him to accept high preferment was to make a judgement from on high, where he had no right to be.

But Onslow’s cool telegram, saying merely
Mrs
Onslow
and
I
arriving
Monday
afternoon,
threw Anstey-Ward back into thinking that in spite of all he had done the right thing. It took him wholly by surprise, for it had not occurred to him that Onslow would seek to confront him, to challenge him and argue, as he could only assume was now his intention. He had supposed that a proud, reserved cleric, which he judged Onslow to be, would never acknowledge such a communication as he had made. He had expected him simply to obey its commands in silence, pretending all the while to his acquaintance that there was nothing amiss. The whole indecent business would be covered up, forgotten.

Yet even so, both before and after Onslow’s telegram came, Anstey-Ward indulged in imaginary and fantastic conversations with his adversary. In these, Onslow begged to be spared. Anstey-Ward then told him that no, he could not be spared, that indeed he ought to be held up publicly as an example of wickedness and cynical corruption amongst those whose business it was to set an example. Next he expatiated not only on the vice of hypocrisy, but on the role played by sexual irregularities in the decay of great nations such as Imperial Rome: he told Onslow that orgies and decadence would destroy England as surely as they had the great empire of antiquity, and went on to say that it was the duty of humanity to copy the beasts, who, as nature demanded, copulated only for offspring.

When he thought of the kind of conversation he and Onslow were likely to have in reality, Anstey-Ward felt suffocated with embarrassment. The idea of showing Onslow the letters was horrible, for it made the whole
situation too real, and it made him seem like a blackmailer. But he was determined not to be bullied into mildness by a man accustomed to frightening schoolboys, and he kept up his courage by thinking of how greatly Onslow had offended, how monstrously he had deceived the world, far more monstrously than he had done himself. His mind went round and round the question as he waited and waited, on July 19th, for Onslow and Louisa to arrive.

‘Whatever can be keeping them?’ said Chatty.

‘I daresay they must have missed their train,’ he replied. It was six o’clock, and they had just finished their dinner. The Onslows had been expected at four.

‘Do you suppose they will come today at all, if that is so?’

‘I don’t know, Chatty,’ said Anstey-Ward.

‘I wish I knew what urgent business you can have with Dr Onslow. And why, in that case, he is bringing his wife with him.’

‘I expect they are going on to visit friends in this neighbourhood.’

Anstey-Ward found it hard to believe Onslow would be quite so cold-blooded as that, but his wife’s coming seemed to indicate it. It did not occur to him that Louisa was no innocent, and knew the reason for her husband’s visiting him.

‘Henry, if they do come later today, I think we ought to offer them beds for the night,’ said Chatty. ‘Unless of course they are going straight on to their friends, as you suggested.’

‘For the night?’

‘It would be only civil.’

‘Very well,’ said Anstey-Ward slowly. He had told Chatty that his business with Onslow was urgent, but had dropped no hint that it was exceedingly unpleasant, and he felt that to brush her suggestion aside in disgust would be to put disagreeable notions into her woman’s head.

*

Onslow was furious at having missed the train, which he maintained had left Waterloo before the time advertised by the company. Louisa did not agree with him, but did not contradict him. She wished he were not so nervous.

In the crawling, cheap parliamentary train, which they had been obliged to take instead of the express, they both read books: Louisa a French novel and Onslow Horace’s
Satires.
But when the old gentleman who had been sharing their carriage got out at Basingstoke, they gradually ceased to concentrate on their reading matter, and began to think and worry. They might have talked, but Onslow at least did not wish to, and Louisa could see it.

She thought how fortunate she was in that her husband did not humiliate her and disgrace his cloth by running after other women – she had reminded herself of this several times since she discovered his strange passion for boys. Louisa wondered whether there were many other men who shared his taste, for she could not know. No book she had ever been allowed to read described the love of men for boys. No one had ever mentioned it to her, and told her what to think, and thus she had drawn her own conclusion that it was eccentric and uncomfortable, rather than immoral. Only certain words of St Paul’s, and Onslow’s hushed anxious voice in the drawing-room five years ago, had told her that here was something wrong – but quite why it was so very wrong, she did not understand.

Louisa failed to imagine sodomy. She imagined embraces only one degree removed from those indulged in openly by men who loved each other, like Onslow and Primrose, who enfolded each other warmly on meeting and parting – she saw cuddles and kisses, and pattings of the virile member. Thus she thought Anstey-Ward utterly unreasonable, and was sure that she would be able to make him see reason, if Onslow was unsuccessful. Unlike her husband, she did not try to make herself believe that the ‘documents’ would turn out to be mere unsubstantiated libel: her confidence was entirely rooted in the fact that Anstey-Ward was making himself ridiculous, and as she did not doubt, could be brought by subtle means to see it.

Onslow, frowning at the carriage window, dared no longer cherish the hope that the evidence against him would amount to very little. His dread was that Arthur Bright had been careless with his letters, and allowed one to find its way into Christian Anstey-Ward’s hands. The more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed. Onslow wondered what crazy impulse had driven him to abandon the discretion of years, and write letters without even making quite sure that his lover understood the importance of burning them. By doing so, unless he could save himself at the last moment, he had at last fulfilled his mother’s frequently reiterated prophecy that he would come to a bad end.

He glanced at Louisa, and saw that she was watching him. He turned away again, but Louisa did not let her eyes fall. The desire to talk was welling up in her, irresistible as a wish to sneeze. She fidgeted, and opened her novel, knowing that Onslow would reject her, but in the end she could resist no longer, and said:

‘Dr Onslow – what is it draws you to boys?’

He looked at her as though she were a pupil guilty of some unbelievable impertinence, but after a moment his eyes became less fierce, and he said stiffly:

‘I do not know, Louisa. I wish I did. Forgive me, but I cannot talk about it.’

‘No,’ said Louisa, and looked down, biting her lip to keep back words. Her hands were shaking as they clutched her book.

It was true that he did not know, for he had always avoided thinking about his passion except in his most conscience-stricken moments, when a sense of guilt prevented him from examining the matter clearly. Now he tried to do so, but he merely succeeded in visualising his four boy lovers – three of them blended into one face, but Bright remained alone. The pleasure to be had from their beauty was as keen and as nasty as the pain to be had from a birch.

A birch. Onslow shifted in his seat as he blamed his falling into sin on his headmaster’s duty of flogging boys.
He thought if it were not for that, he would never have given way to desire, never have known he desired – but it was not that he enjoyed inflicting pain, as some did. He wanted to inflict pleasure more than anything else in the world.

He thought once more of his lovers. When lusting, he demanded vigorous young animals, boys with a distinct flavour, he told himself, of evil – every one of his boys had been pagan Bacchus to him while he lasted. He wanted a strong musky smell and wild curling hair, eyes gleaming with knowledge, no taint of purity. To drink at the fountain of such boys was to drink the wine of wickedness, eat the delicious forbidden. It was to defy the memories of his mother and even of Dr Arnold. In this lay the sin, thought Onslow: not lust but rebellion, a form of pride. But that was no concern of Dr Anstey-Ward’s.

At last, at nearly seven o’clock, the train drew into Salisbury. The Onslows began to talk again.

‘Shall we go straight to Dr Anstey-Ward?’ said Louisa, re-tying the strings of her bonnet.

‘No, I mean to dine first. We have eaten nothing since this morning, and I will scarcely be fit to handle him if I am nearly faint with hunger. We shall go to an hotel.’

‘Very well. I hope they will be able to give us a room for the night.’

‘If not, I do not intend to waste time searching all Salisbury. We must go straight to Dr Anstey-Ward and look for one when we come back.’

‘Dr Onslow, no hotel will think us respectable if we arrive at nearly midnight, and with so little luggage.’

‘Nonsense, Louisa. You talk as though we were a pair of travelling actors. A clergyman is always respectable,’ he said, and smiled faintly.