The Fall of Doctor Onslow (7 page)

Christian Anstey-Ward had spent his childhood in Weymouth, where his father had a lucrative medical practice, but since 1856 his family had lived at Poplar House, outside Wilton near Salisbury. Dr Anstey-Ward had inherited both the house and a fortune amounting to about £800 a year from an uncle, who had left everything to him on condition that he add the name of Ward to his own. This had been a wholly unexpected piece of good fortune, for Dr Anstey had only once met his reclusive uncle and never imagined he would inherit anything.

Dr Anstey had saved a considerable sum during his working life and had invested it cautiously in the three-percent Consols. His total income after he inherited old Mr Ward’s estate was therefore enough to enable him to retire in comfort to Poplar House, and devote all his time to his hobbies of geology, palaeontology and natural history. His unmarried sister, Christian’s Aunt Chatty, had hoped that they would make a social move as well as a geographical one, into county society, but this had not happened. Dr Anstey-Ward was the son of a coal-merchant, and though he enjoyed having the leisure of a country gentleman, he disliked society nearly as much as his uncle had, and was therefore not much interested in social advancement for himself. But he had a certain wish to see his son enter the upper class, largely because Christian, he thought, was not well suited to any business or profession except perhaps that of an Oxford don.

‘Well, my son, it’s good to have you back,’ Dr Anstey-Ward said when Christian arrived home, early in the
evening of the day he left Charton. ‘And what do you mean to do with yourself till October?’

‘To read, mostly, Father – in preparation for Oxford.’

‘None of your friends has asked you to stop with him for a while, or perhaps go on a walking tour, or anything of that nature, eh?’ said Dr Anstey-Ward, who knew that Christian had very few friends. ‘I should have supposed you’d done enough reading at Charton.’

‘No, sir.’

‘Well, so long as you are content, Christian. Now, where can your aunt be, and Rose?’ he said, turning away.

At that moment, Christian’s aunt opened the drawing-room door, and briskly walked over to embrace him. She was tall and stout, like her brother and her niece. Christian, who took after his dead mother, was the only delicate-looking member of the family, just as he was the only one at all interested in the beauty of his surroundings, or the lack of it – the mixture of conventional modern taste and drab utilitarian objects which he saw in his father’s house was a source of pain to him.

‘Christian!’ said Chatty. ‘You are not looking as well as you ought. Charton is supposed to be so healthily situated.’

‘It is only the effects of travelling, Aunt Chatty. How are you?’

‘Very well indeed. As soon as I heard you arrive I went to fetch Rose out of that dark-room of hers, but she insists she cannot leave it even for you – those nasty wet plates or whatever they may be are in a critical condition, so she says.’ Rose was Christian’s only surviving, elder sister. He had no brothers. ‘Your father continues to encourage her – he gave her a new camera for her birthday, and I’m told it uses quick exposure, but all I can say is that quick or not, it doesn’t make Rose waste less time in the dark-room.’

‘Now, my dear Chatty, it’s no more a waste of time than other young ladies’ hobbies, dried flowers and the like,’ said Dr Anstey-Ward.

‘Other young ladies do not enter the presence of gentlemen smelling of chemicals.’

‘We can’t be squabbling about Rose when Christian has
but just come back. How did you leave Dr Onslow, my boy?’

Christian flushed. ‘In excellent health, sir.’

‘Good. Good.’

Christian knew that in spite of his having just returned home, in spite of the welcome he had received, his father and aunt were more interested in his sister than in him. He prepared to listen to further discussion of her habits, especially her photography.

Rose’s photography was a source of dissension between Dr Anstey-Ward and his sister because both were agreed that such a messy and mildly eccentric hobby would be a bar to her marriage. Her father had no wish for Rose to marry, because he did not want to be left alone with Chatty, with whom he had not much in common. For this reason, he bound his daughter to him with expensive gifts of photographic equipment, always implying when he made them that no husband would indulge her similarly. Chatty, on the other hand, did wish Rose to be married, because long ago, she had wanted to marry herself.

Christian did not perceive that his sister’s position was a difficult one; he only saw that she was the favourite.

‘What have you been doing, Aunt Chatty?’ he said, as Dr Anstey-Ward left the room. It seemed he was not to listen to a long talk about Rose after all.

‘For the most part, trying my best to reduce the scandal caused by your father’s never going to church,’ she told him.

‘But you and Rose go to church every Sunday,’ said Christian, surprised.

‘Rose attends only morning service now. And despite all my training she has no reverence whatever for the Sabbath – sees no harm in messing with her camera or reading a novel after church, and of course your father never interferes. I believe he would like her to be a professed infidel.’

‘Perhaps he would,’ said Christian, hoping that his aunt would not be able to make him go to church twice on Sundays, now that he was no longer a schoolboy. It occurred to him that he could please his father by saying
that he had lost his faith, though he had not so much lost it as had a large part of it rubbed out by Onslow, and he did not want to talk about that.

‘But so far as our neighbours are concerned, Rose’s behaviour scarcely signifies: it is the religious opinions of a household’s head that are of real importance. I can subscribe to foreign missions, and help circulate tracts, but still Mr Eames will look at me askance.’ Mr Eames was the vicar. ‘Though to be sure he is always very civil.’

Listening to Chatty, Christian felt his spirits rise a little. It seemed that though he was not the chief object of affection or even of temporary interest, he had at least become accepted as an adult – someone to whom his aunt would criticise his father, and his father criticise his aunt. He wondered whether Rose, who was four years his senior, would also stop treating him as a boy. Somehow, he found it difficult to harbour a true Greek contempt for women when women did not look up to him as a man. He was very sure that the women of ‘Hellas’ bowed down before the wisdom even of boys, and he never could quite accustom himself to the fact that in the
Symposium,
the all-wise tutor of Socrates was Diotima, an undoubted female.

*

One day in mid August, when Dr Anstey-Ward was up in London showing an unusual fossil to the curator of the Natural History section of the British Museum, Christian drove into Salisbury with his aunt and sister. The two women were to call on the wife of one of the prebendaries, but Christian excused himself, and instead wandered alone down a dark little street not far from the cathedral close. There he found a bookseller’s shop which he had not noticed before, and he went in and glanced idly round the dim interior.

His eyes were caught not by a book, but by a young boy’s short veil of falling hair, framed by a shaft of light. The boy was kneeling on the floor, unpacking a crate full of second-hand volumes, and his head was bent over the
pages of one of them. His finger was tracing the words, and the trembling of his lower lip, faint as that of a leaf on a windless day, showed like his pointing finger that he was unused to reading. Yet Christian saw that he was drinking in the words with eager if puzzled concentration, scanning them with a haste which showed his fear that his employer might surprise him. He had not noticed Christian’s entrance.

The boy’s white-golden hair concealed his eyes, but his short, bare upper lip, his square yet delicate cleft chin, and his straight nose could all be seen. There was something about the curve of his lips, combined with his interest in the book, which made Christian think: this must be he. He wanted the boy to lift his head and show his eyes more than he wanted anything else in the world, but he dared say nothing to disturb him.

Instead, without distaste, he noticed the boy’s ill-fitting, dark clerk’s clothes, and the roughness and redness of his small but strongly-shaped hands, which seemed only to heighten by contrast the perfection of his appearance as a whole. He was slim and graceful, with beautifully proportioned shoulders and waist. He was too pale and cool to look like a mere cherub, in spite of his yellow hair.

At last Christian said: ‘What is it you are reading?’ in a voice which was little more than a whisper, but which seemed to him to make an immense ripple in the still air of the shop. The boy started, and scrambled to his feet, snapping the book shut with one hand and pushing the hair off his white forehead with the other. He looked Christian full in the face, seemed to swallow once or twice, and then said:

‘It’s poetry, sir.’

Christian saw that his eyes were neither blue nor grey, but of a rich hazel, long and large, set under blond brows as clear and firm as the mouldings on a coin. They were as fine as, finer than, he had dared to hope, and the boy’s slow Dorset accent was something far removed from the vulgarly whining chirrup he had dreaded might come from between those lips.

Without saying anything, Christian put out his hand for the book, which the other gave him willingly. Their fingertips met. He saw that it was a scarcely-worn copy of Mrs Browning’s
Aurora
Leigh.
His thoughts were not on the poem, though he had been meaning to read it himself, but on the fact that a boy whose appearance might have been designed with him in mind, who made the grey-eyed Greek beloved of his dreams look insipid, was flesh. His hands began to sweat with nervousness as he held the open book: then an idea came to him. He opened his mouth, about to say: ‘I’ll buy this for you, if you would like it,’ but at that moment the door was opened by a woman.

Suddenly he realised that to say such a thing would be crazy, almost wicked. He put the book quickly down on a table and dodged round the woman’s crinoline, out into the street.

It was some days before he dared go back. He lay awake at night wondering in hope and fear what the angel in the shop had thought of his behaviour and his looks, imagining he could never bring himself to try again. But the acquaintance was made in time, and on his very next visit he found out that the boy’s name was Jemmy Baker, that he was just sixteen, that he lived with his widowed mother, and that he loved poetry for its musical sounds.

It was a Sunday morning towards the end of September, and the Anstey-Wards were gathered round the breakfast-table in front of a french window, which stood wide open although the day was a little chilly. Rose, Christian and Chatty were dressed for church, but Dr Anstey-Ward, never having gone since he abandoned his practice in Weymouth, was not. His sister thought that whatever his beliefs, he ought not to flaunt them by dressing in weekday clothes on the Sabbath.

‘I shall not be here for dinner,’ Christian said, helping himself to tea. ‘If no one else is planning to use it, I would be glad to have the dog-cart.’

‘You don’t mean to say you’re going to spend the whole of Sunday with that little shop-walker in Salisbury again?’ said his aunt. ‘And miss afternoon service, I don’t doubt?’

‘Yes, I can see him for any length of time only on Sundays, you know, because his hours are very long,’ Christian replied. His tone was tranquil, soft even, because he was talking about Jemmy. He had not concealed his interest in Jemmy after his family began to ask questions about his frequent trips to Salisbury, because his interest in him was entirely chaste.

Dr Anstey-Ward’s heavy eyebrows drew together.

‘This is the fourth Sunday you have missed dining with us, Christian. I don’t like it. A piece of cold pie as a luncheon and a bite of supper are not sustaining enough for a boy of your age – and you don’t eat enough, even when you are here. It puzzles me that the tonic I prescribed has not done you more good – too much quinine perhaps.’

Christian had lost his appetite, which had never been good, since the excitement of meeting Jemmy. He said:

‘Perhaps we could dine rather later than usual? Then perhaps I could be here.’

‘I’ve no wish to keep London hours,’ said his father, a little peevishly. ‘Five o’clock is the time for a heavy meal: a later hour hinders good digestion.’

‘It is very old-fashioned, Father,’ said Rose. ‘I’ve heard that even in some of the colleges at Cambridge dinner in hall is now at six.’

‘Oh? And how do you come to know so much about Cambridge, miss?’

‘Mr Charlie Ibbotson happened to mention it.’

‘Well Christian,’ said Anstey-Ward, taking no notice of his daughter’s reply, ‘if we dine at six today – providing that your aunt finds it perfectly convenient – can you be with us?’

Very unwillingly, because he had been sure that dinner would not be postponed on his account, Christian said yes. ‘And may I take the dog-cart into Salisbury?’ The dog-cart was the Anstey-Wards’ only carriage.

‘You took it last Sunday,’ said his sister. ‘Aunt Chatty and I want it today.’

‘Very well,’ said Christian, setting down his cup. ‘Then if I’m to be in time for the cathedral service I must go now.’

The thought that Jemmy would be waiting faithfully for him in the cathedral’s limpid gloom, ready to share his hymn-book, scarcely compensated him for this disappointment. He had looked forward for days to driving Jemmy out to where they could walk along the banks of the Avon or the Bourne, as they had done only once before. It was so much easier to clasp Jemmy’s hand and tell him that he loved him out in the wild than in the cathedral close, where all he could do, somehow, was earnestly describe Plato and ‘Hellas’ and the true theory of love as they walked round and round. Jemmy had been more at ease in the country. So often he looked rather bewildered: though always pleased and flattered by the attentions of so clever and kind
a young man, whom he said, when pressed, he liked very much.

Just as Christian pushed his chair back, his father did the same.

‘That boy is not a suitable friend for you, Christian,’ Anstey-Ward said.

‘So I have been saying this age past!’ said Chatty. ‘A boy who is not even a clerk, merely a shop-walker – it’s the most eccentric, provoking thing I ever heard of. When I think of the money it cost to send you to Charton –’

‘Is that what you mean, sir?’ said Christian, looking from his aunt’s ruddy face to his father’s. ‘That Jemmy and I belong to different classes of society?’

Anstey-Ward looked steadily at him.

‘I fancy a close friendship with a boy so far beneath you socially can one way and another do you little good, though I don’t deny he seems an amiable lad. Your aunt is right, Christian, it is very eccentric.’ He added: ‘That doesn’t, to be sure, make it wrong, but surely there are equally likeable young men of your own age and rank to be found.’

‘Jemmy Baker has a – purity of mind which it seems to me it is impossible to find among the upper classes, certainly if most Charton boys are representative – and their masters too,’ said Christian, looking out of the window. ‘I am glad you acknowledge that there can be no real harm in my being friends with Jemmy.’

‘That is not precisely what I said, my boy,’ said Anstey-Ward. ‘But I do acknowledge that I had rather you had a taste for low company, so long as it were not morally low, than were a mere tuft-hunter.’

‘Thank you, Father,’ said Christian. He excused himself to his aunt and sister, and then left the room.

*

After breakfast, in his library, Anstey-Ward took a large bag of fossils from his last collecting trip out of the cupboard, and began to label and catalogue them. He already possessed a vast collection, which he housed in
specially made drawers, and sometimes he thought he ought to refrain from adding further specimens unless they were truly exceptional – but the idea was not attractive. Gathering and ordering fossils was a great pleasure to him, a pleasure that not even Rose could understand. There was also the consideration that his days were rather empty, and must be filled with constructive activity.

Though he had a rigid schedule to which he kept conscientiously, Anstey-Ward was not an effective worker. With his grizzled hair, shrewd eyes and portly figure, he looked to be extremely solid, but his was in fact a grasshopper mind. He had achieved little by his scientific researches because, like his son, he found it difficult to concentrate for a long time on any one thing, and would constantly skip from one area of research to another, usually giving his attention directly to the large question rather than adding his mite to the small factual details which ran down and accumulated in the hour-glass of theory – or failed to do so. He did not even confine himself to the wide fields of palaeontology and geology, but had at various times been chiefly interested in mesmerism, in phrenology, and in the attempt to produce primitive forms of life out of inorganic matter by the use of electricity.

Just at present, Anstey-Ward was attempting to concentrate on something small and specialised. He was interested in theories of the transmutation of species, and it was his aim to discover a fossil which would be hard evidence in favour of an idea which he had found deeply intriguing, but only a shade less unlikely than that of a multitude of separate creations in each succeeding geological period. But so far, he had searched in vain for an obviously transitional form of life, and he was beginning to consider making a study of the mating habits of snails.

As he worked at his labelling, Anstey-Ward found himself thinking about Christian, of whom he considered himself to be very fond, yet with whom he could never have a thoroughly comfortable conversation. In his mind there was a picture of the boy he hoped to see in a year’s time, after Oxford had begun to do its work: a boy cured
of shyness, of weak lungs, of eccentricity, and of vagueness about his future. He did not doubt that Christian would be happier at Oxford than he had been at Charton, and he believed that happiness could work wonders. The boy might even develop an interest in science, and be able to argue with his father in a friendly way – Anstey-Ward, though moderately reclusive, loved to argue with both friends and enemies, and he rarely had the chance to do either.

And, thought Anstey-Ward, fingering an ammonite, Christian’s odd friendship with the little bookseller’s assistant would certainly come to an end.