I'm nearly as sorry as you are that this chapter had to be drawn out like BLOOD FROM A STONE. I had all of these little moments that would look fine in my notebook, the when typed up would seem ridiculous, forcing me to remove them. To reward you, I am finishing this story TODAY, and see that now I've promised I really have to. In my anger,
Warnings: I can't do Watson angst without some Holmes fluff. Also no little children were harmed in the making of this programme, though a teapot is smashed, and a family relative is hit. Yes, perhaps the one you are imagining.
AreYouSittingComfortably?
IT was a quiet fear, the kind that widened eyelids and stretched back over the ears. It was probably inappropriate to be scared of a woman, but this particular woman gave off such an air of busty authority that she quite terrified me for a moment. The denial of poor Hugo Watson Jr.'s existence could not have been an accident. She must have crafted her sentence carefully through her thick dyed lips specifically to smack the air.
She carried on as if my dear Watson hadn't just squeezed the blood from my arm in suppressed anger: "…And you must be the celebrated detective who has distracted my son from his lifelong career."
For a moment I thought she might attach my name to my deemed profession, but this wasn't to be the case. "That I would be-" I sighed with relief as Watson released my arm "-Mrs Watson. It is a pleasure to finally meet you."
"I don't think John agrees. He is embarrassed by us, you know. That's why he moved to London- to escape the Anglicised Scotsmen he used to call his family further north."
"Now, mother, Holmes may not yet have spotted your caustic humour for what it is yet," replied Watson with a lukewarm smile and a weakened voice. He approached his mother to kiss her cheek with the same careful footwork that I have had the occasion to notice in lion tamers and American bear hunters.
As conversation struggled out of the ditch, Mrs Watson sat down as if the room tired her, watching me very closely whilst Watson and I made small-talk with the rest of the family. It was like having a peacock at your feet- she was too grand now to ignore. I took the chair to her left.
"So, Mr Holmes, John's stories suggest a clever man."
"Sometimes I look through my past notes and think that I was." I laughed terribly- a high-pitched splutter that made Watson pause mid-sentence to look at me.
"Very good. So you're a wit then as well." She paused for her sarcasm to settle. "The stories were not fictitious."
"I'd say they were- Watson always made himself seem less useful than he was. We are in fact quite on the same plane."
"He doesn't deserve such loyalty." I looked up sharply, but she smiled at me and I understood that this was meant to be seen as a joke. I laughed only slightly better this time around.
JustImagineALineThatHasn'tBeenDeleted
David Watson got up to get some port and perhaps I followed a little too eagerly with Watson and his brother for one. My friend was still not very happy.
"She shouldn't do that- she knows I don't like it, Charlie," the poor man hissed at his brother as soon he entered the dining room. "I'm not-"
"You were always the most responsible. The doctor of the family." David Watson had a certain grace about him; in his words and his physical movement- he did everything slowly and precisely. I found it unsettling. There was another sentence on the ether I didn't quite catch that the brothers had. They flinched. "Would you like a drink, Holmes?"
He'd dropped my prefix in that debonair way of his, and there was nothing I could do about it. "Yes please, Mr Watson." He picked up three glasses at once in his chubby though almost effeminate hands, and handing me one first, then Watson, then the teacher, before turning to pour two more.
"Charles, will you fetch Robert? I'm sure he wouldn't want to miss the gentleman's clique which is forming in his absence." He did so, and Watson leaned on the high hard back of a dining chair, the glass hanging between his fingers. "Now, Holmes, I think it must get confusing there being so many Mr Watsons about. You must call me David."
This made Watson turn to me with a look of urgency. He spoke up. "David, of all people I should be the one to drop my surname-"
"-but Wat-"
"You don't have to, Holmes, it's just for convenience."
David smiled provocatively. "You hear, Holmes? You're not to call him that once you leave."
"He can call me what he likes, David, he can call me Lucifer though I know he won't do."
I realised that this sudden evaluation of our friendship was just another power-play to unnerve my friend, and that he had risen to the challenge admirably. Just then Charles Watson came through with Robert Lee, Watson's brother-in-law. "John, you may of course call me Sherlock," I said in an undertone, both names sounding unnatural, rolling on my tongue like marbles.
We turned to the latest arrival. Lee was a solicitor with thick black glasses who made his profession known more in his arrogance than his typing and writing calluses, his immaculately tailored suit or his sobriety. He smiled at me and Watson, then reused his smile on David, which meant it was slightly weaker, like a recycled teabag. He shook our hands and I'm fairly sure he didn't speak to me again, except over the head of his small boy as I scooped him up and rescued him from hot water spilling as Watson dropped a teapot, to say "thank you".
I shan't bother to record all the little conversations we had with the monstrous family over lunch, but as it is of special interest to me I shall say there were thirteen instances in the dialogue that forced Watson's face to fall, four of which involved the presence or pointed absence of his brother, six were followed promptly by apologies from whatever member of the family it was to assure me that Watson hadn't in the past been some vagabond as the conversation occasionally suggested when fuelled by either David or Mrs Agatha Watson, two of which made him lift his hand to cover livid anger, and the last forced him to leave the table.
The family, as polite society always infuriatingly do, ignored him. Aside from the flash of excitement in David's eyes, and the annoyance in Jenny Watson's, there was not recognition in any one family member of my Watson's apparent plight, not even Charles, whom I looked to rather appealingly. As a result of this lack of action, it was a full ten agonizing minutes of expecting him back and pushing my food around my plate before I was able to excuse myself and find my friend.
He wasn't, as I anticipated, in the bathroom, nor in the room second from that, which in conversation he'd said had been his as a child. This didn't stop me from stepping into the room and looking around. It was, to all intents and purposes, a blank room, a guest room, with no traces of the child who once lived there. The only clue was the bookshelf. There were hundreds of books- Hardy, the Bell brothers*, George Elliot, Shakespeare after Shakespeare, the Greek Legends, Moby Dick, poetry books and then books about writing, all of which were on the shelf at eye level to a boy. The only thing that struck me was the lack of books on surgery. There were, however, three or four on General Practice, even an architectural book on the layout of the hospital.
Suddenly I felt my senses tingle and realised I had been here long enough. I needed to find my friend.
Having checked upstairs, I went downstairs, and after checking the living room I picked the lock to the French windows so that I could get onto the garden without having to go through the little alcove in the dining room. I didn't want to confront the Watsons with the notion that their banter had forced their son to leave, especially when I felt so unaccommodating towards their selfishness.
It was in the garden, bathed in orange sunlight, that I found Watson. He was in the corner closest to the door to the dining room, but out of sight from the windows, and had his back turned. His face was up against the wall. It wasn't until I had sneaked under the windows and was past the babble of conversation that I heard him crying.
Watson's tears have an alarming effect on me. I tend to drop everything and talk nonsense to try to make him stop. The two instances that I had the misfortune to witness him in such a state were on the night after I came back from my three years travelling, and once out of pain when, whilst chasing a gymnast, he was struck with a billiard cue on his wounded leg.
Those moments had really been lapses, forgivable bursts of emotion due to dreadful circumstance. Now, Watson seemed to be coming apart.
"Watson…"
"Holmes, I don't want you to see me like this." He spoke in that kind of desperate quietness one claws to before losing control. I came closer and he backed away, pushing his shoulder against the wall in an odd expression of emotion. "Please."
"Watson-" I touched his shoulder tentatively and he turned away as I feared he might. "Good God, man, there isn't anything I would judge you harshly for! You've already proved yourself to me. Tell me what happened, Watson. Tell me why you didn't want to be a surgeon as a boy, tell me what your brother did, how your family reacted… tell me why they are all in England when you said they were gone years ago. Explain the inconsistencies in your story, Watson, or I'll deduce them!"
He took a deep breath and sank down to the ground, squatting down away from the sunlight onto the cold and shady cobbles. "All right, Holmes. All right."
TO BE CONTINUED…