The Gate of Angels

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Only one guest could be invited at a time, and the honour went strictly in turns. One who came quite often, since several of the Fellows were fond of inviting him, was Dr Matthews, the Provost of James’s. He was a mediaevalist and palaeographer, who, as a form of relaxation, wrote ghost stories. If he had written one recently, he brought it with him in an envelope and read it aloud after dinner. He did not care to be asked to do this. But the shape of the envelope, if he had it with him, was clearly visible in his overcoat pocket. His host for the evening would speak unobtrusively to the butler. ‘Foley, I want to know whether Dr Matthews brought a large envelope with him.’ Foley was quite up to this. ‘He didn’t, sir, not tonight, sir.’ Then there would be no reading, but perhaps music. In some colleges—King’s, for example—they talked all evening, but then King’s was full of historians and philosophers, who had no need to relax. What else did they ever do? But the Fellows of Angels, by statute, were all scientists, or mathematicians.

  Fred’s own unhappy moments in college were connected with the cittern, the vielle, the zinke and so forth, which he wasn’t persuaded were ever meant, even if tuned, to be played together. It was only the knowledge that the blind Master delighted in them that kept him tinkering away at them. He was more at home with the positive organ, with a keyboard of twenty-two long and thirteen short keys, which was installed in a shadowy corner of the little chapel. Fortunately, the bellows were in poor condition, and it could not be pumped. But Dr Matthews, in any case, was not particularly fond of music. In fact, he was tone-deaf, preferring to look at old manuscripts and to examine ancient inscriptions. He had a running joke, for example, with the Master about the strangely tall and narrow gate, as old as the college itself, in the south-west wall. ‘The only opening, dear Master,—apart from your front entrance—and quite inexplicable, since the only thought in the mind of the builders seems to have been to keep visitors out.’ There was no inscription on the gate, and no entry, in the records of the college expenses, for installing it. On the other hand it was noted in the annals that it had twice been found standing open, once on the 21st of May 1423, the night of Pope Benedict’s death, and once in 1869, when the first women’s college, though not, of course, officially part of the University, was permitted to open. ‘There was no mention, on either occasion, of who opened your gate,’ said Dr Matthews, ‘nor of who shut it again.’

  ‘No-one, not even the Master, has any authority to do either,’ said the Treasurer.

  ‘But if anyone had, or even if they had not, and if it were to stand open, who or what do you imagine might come in?’

  ‘I should not like to think about that,’ said the Master.

  Dr Matthews turned to another subject—the manuscripts in the Angels’ library. Earlier on he had been looking, he said, at a mediaeval Book of Hours, fantastically illuminated by Jean Pucelle. Wherever there was a space between the lines on the page it would be filled with a long, lean, sinuous tail, belonging to a rat, a monster, or a devil. The devil’s tails were frequently curled, like a noose, round the neck of unfortunate men. ‘Ready, I fancy, to carry them off,’ said Dr Matthews, with his delightful smile. He pointed out that most of these victims were alchemists or heretical arithmeticians, and that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries all his kind hosts, at present sitting round the table, might well have been condemned to hell.

  The Fellows of St Angelicus listened to Dr Matthews with amusement. He was a great scholar, but his lifework seemed to them musty. Dr Matthews, for his part, was amused by the Angels. Science, he thought, was leading them nowhere, and quite conceivably backwards.

  5

  At the Rectory

  At the end of his first year as a Junior Fellow, Fred thought it only right to tell his father that he was no longer a Christian, but in such a way as to distress him as little as possible. All this sounded more like 1857 than 1907. He had heard family stories, distant echoes or reminiscences of giant battles from what seemed heroic days. Two of his uncles had quarrelled over Strauss’s Leben Jesu and struck each other and one of them had caught his head on the edge of the fender and broken his skull. The other one, Uncle Philip, had been known for the rest of his life, though never in the family, as Slayer Fairly. In his mother’s family there were some who hadn’t spoken to each other for many years, and there were women, once young, who had broken off their engagements because their betrothed had ceased to believe and who had bleached and withered into spectres of themselves behind church missionary society typewriters and the stalls of jumble sales. Fred, who was kind-hearted towards the past as well as the present, felt that he ought not to fall short, in the new century, of what had cost so dear. He ought to go home and explain to his father in person, even giving his reasons, as sons had once done on this subject where reason, not much to its credit, is powerless. So much was only decent politeness. But his father was certain to be deeply distressed. The time of day for discussing this, long enough to give pain and, if possible, to lessen it to some extent, was between five and six o’clock, when his father sat patiently in his study ready to give advice to his parishioners, who, however, always chose some other time to come. The study windows faced the front lawn, and in summer Fred and his two sisters had not been supposed to cross it, between five and six, so as not to disturb the pastoral hour. Fred, Hester and Julia did, of course, cross it, as Apaches, flat on their stomachs, close to the bitter-smelling roots of the laurel hedge where the cat left the remains of her mice. Looking, in those days, up the slight incline of the lawn Fred used to see his father at his desk, determinedly wide awake, his head a little on one side, presumably to show that he was willing and ready to listen, staring out into the late afternoon.

  The best thing would be to explain at once that as from the beginning of that summer he was an unbeliever, but his unbelief was conditional. He had no acceptable evidence that Christianity was true, but he didn’t think it impossible that at some point he might be given a satisfactory reason to believe in it. And then you’d give it another chance, his father was likely to answer.—That’s very handsome of you, Freddie. What would you consider a satisfactory answer?—Well, Father, put it another way. I want to know the truth about the way things are. I can’t take them on trust, that would be the waste of the education you’ve given me and such brains as I’ve got.—Now—the ‘now’ didn’t sound quite as Fred wanted it, but no matter—the only evidence we can get is from our own senses and from the senses of other people who have gone before us, and can communicate what they found out through writing.—Like the Gospel writers, his father would say—even if they were only a committee. Do you consider they were wasting their time? Yours too, of course.—Do what he could, Fred always found that when he talked to his father, who was not at all deaf, he raised his voice slightly, while his father countered by talking even more quietly than usual.—However, Father, he would go on. You stay close to experience, you see the resemblances between things and the continuity of one idea from another, and gradually, through many lifetimes, everything becomes explained. As soon as something’s completely described, it’s explained—like the anatomy of the human body, for instance. There’s no more to say about that, it can be described, therefore there’s no mystery in it, it’s ordinary. Well, the time will come when we shall see everything that once seemed extraordinary as ordinary.—Would you prefer that? his father would ask doubtfully. Would you, Freddie?

  All this time Fred saw himself walking up and down the study, while his father sat there with his green spectacle-case in his hand, but this walking up and down might suggest that he wasn’t sure of himself, so he sat himself down, in his imagination, in one of the not too comfortable chairs. His father, meanwhile, would in all probability go back to his question, the one that had not been answered.—You haven’t told me yet, Freddie, what you would consider a satisfactory reason for believing that Christ rose from the dead?—Fred saw himself here listening to his father’s voice, in order to judge how much his feelings had bee
n hurt. The next thing would be a knock on the door, as his mother was unable to leave anyone alone in the study for more than twenty minutes without asking them whether they would like to take a little something, perhaps barley water. The barley water was kept on the slate window-sill of the larder, in a jug covered with muslin weighed down at the edge by blue beads.

  At this point he saw that he would have to start the discussion at a different point altogether. It was absurd for him to sound as if he was lecturing his father. What he really wanted to explain, stage by stage, was how the crawler across lawns and reliable Sunday choirboy who had sung, with all his heart’s conviction,

  Teach me to live that I may dread

  The grave as little as my bed

  had become what he now was, a man with a mind cleared and perpetually being recleared (because there was a constant need for that) of any idea that could not be tested through physical experience. There were no illusions left there now. The air was pure. But it had happened gradually, and although Fred wasn’t much given to talking about himself he would have, on this occasion, to account for himself gradually. He would have to describe for his father, step by step, how he had expelled the comforting unseen presences which, in childhood, had spoken to him and said: Give me your hand. What is completely described, however, he kept reminding himself, is completely explained.

  He got up early, biked to the station, left his bike there and took the train to Blow Halt, changing at Bishop’s Leaze. The whole village, from wall to wall of its cottage gardens, blazed with flowers, early phlox and bean-flowers contending with raucous gusts of scent, early roses red and white, pot marigolds, feverfew which was grown here as a garden plant, ferocious poppies and cornflowers, peonies, sweet williams still in flower, herb of grace, Russell lupins, pinks. Nature here was certainly not at her most natural. Most of the cottagers knew where to ask for field manure, the postman and the policeman, seen working every evening in their gardens in their shirtsleeves, had their own arrangements for getting it, and every household emptied its tea-leaves three times a day on the soil, and by night the contents of the earth closets. There was nowhere in Blow to buy vegetables and it never occurred to anyone to buy any. The station grew roses and beans, and large marrows striped like a tom-cat. Even the weeds were not more luxurious than what was grown deliberately.

  At Blow Halt he was Mr Fred and had once been Master Freddie, though, once again, he couldn’t remember when the change took place. This was Ellsworthy, the station master, who had become Old Ellsworthy.

  ‘We stopped for five minutes outside Bishop’s Leaze,’ said Fred, ‘why was that, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ellsworthy. ‘I shall have to make enquiries about that.’

  ‘Couldn’t you telephone down the line?’

  ‘I could.’

  Ellsworthy walked with him to the barrier, watched by the very young porter who was lining up the milk-churns. A certain amount of milk always got spilled on the platform, giving it a faint smell of a nursery sink, drowned at the moment by the bean-flowers and the meadowsweet.

  ‘How am I going to find them at the Rectory, Ellsworthy?’

  ‘Why do you ask me, Mr Fred?’ Fred didn’t know, he hadn’t meant any harm. He knew very well, however, that the country is not a place of peace, and that it was difficult to tell what might give or have given offence, which made it a good preparation for life at a university. In this instance, it had probably been a mistake to mention the unscheduled stop at Bishop’s Leaze. ‘Why do you ask me about the Rector?’ repeated Ellsworthy, with controlled fury. ‘You can’t accuse me of being a church-goer.’

  ‘I don’t accuse you of anything,’ said Fred. Ellsworthy relented a little, and asked him how things were in London. Fred explained that he was still at Cambridge, but sometimes it was handier to go up to London King’s Cross and make the exchange there.

  ‘Yes, London’s useful for that,’ said Ellsworthy. In the field next to the station fence an old horse, once grey, now white, moved a few sedate steps away. This was a token retreat only, it was many years since the train’s approach had given warning that it might be required to pull the station fly. The fly mouldered away now, its shafts pointing upwards, in the corner shed. On the horse’s hollow back, as it came to a standstill, the elder flowers fell gently.

  There was a short cut through a wicket gate across the field to the Rectory, but Fred could see that it was jammed fast with nettles and trails of blackberry. He could also sense that Ellsworthy was waiting until he pushed the gate to tell him that it was stuck and that he’d do best to go round by the road.

  ‘I’ll go round by the road,’ he said.

  ‘I can remember when you’d have jumped that. You were quite agile as a boy. You wouldn’t have made anything of it.’

  Fred began to walk up the road, swinging his bag in his hand: Church Road. The church and Rectory were once imposingly, now unacceptably, at the top of a steep slope. It took it out of you getting up there, if you wanted the Rector to sign a certificate. Elms sheltered the field, young elders and hazels filled the drainage ditches. All that ought to be cleared away before winter, if someone could be found to do it. The Herefords chewed, every jaw moving anti-clockwise, as a tendril grows. Round them the grass stood unmoving, hazed over with a shimmering reddish tinge, ready for hay. The bushes, too, were motionless, but from the crowded stalks and the dense hedges there came a perpetual furtive humming, whining and rustling which suggested an alarming amount of activity out of sight. Twigs snapped and dropped from above, sticky threads drifted across from nowhere, there seemed to be something like an assassination, on a small scale, taking place in the tranquil heart of summer. Fred pounded steadily up the road, which had never been tarmacked and was deeply rutted with cart-tracks which the sun had dried to powder.

  Having arrived at a course of action, you should go over it in your mind only once and then prevent yourself from thinking about it until the moment comes. Fred had already decided to speak separately to his mother and to his sisters, Hester aged twenty (he was sure about that) and Julia, who must be sixteen, as she seemed to have stopped learning anything. Separately, because they were scarcely ever in the same room or of the same opinion. There was a kind of agreement to disagree which, however, produced a perfectly orderly life, from day to day, in the Fairly household.

  The Rectory had been built in 1830 with a solid dignity which, for the last twenty years or so, had been letting in the water everywhere. The front gate, however, was quite new, and had been designed by the Christian Arts and Crafts Guild of Coventry. It was made of pickled oak, carved and inlaid with copper medallions and what looked like small glazed saucers. The raised lettering read The Rectory, and below that, Welcome, Enter, Have no Fear, Simplicity and Quiet Dwell Here. These two lines, perhaps fortunately, were in a decorative celtic alphabet which was almost impossible to read. The gate had been a gift to the Rector’s predecessor who had been artistic, and it was almost the only part of the house in perfect working order.

  Rain-faded notices were pinned to the gate concerning a flower show in aid of the Zenana Mission and the Men’s Bible Hour, which was cancelled. Fred, who had grasped the curiously-wrought bronze handle, let the latch drop and went round to the back. This was the domain of gooseberry bushes, on which the white washing was spread out to dry, and the rhubarb which had shot up its coarse green leaves high above the old zinc bucket which was supposed to blanch it. Under the lean-to stood a vast mangle, the remains of a bee-hive, a lawn-tennis court marker, which was unlikely ever to mark again, two broken hymn-boards and an ancient bier which had been banished by the parochial church council from the vestry. Why were all these things not got rid of? Fred reproached himself. Nothing was got rid of at the Rectory. It was left to decay at its own pace. While nature rioted outside with her greenstuff, it was perpetual autumn there.

  A dog barked inside the house. There were two dogs, Sandford and Merton. Sandford, who would have know
n Fred’s footstep even if he had been returning from the dead, ran out, still barking. Two or three rooks sailed up from the elms, made a circuit through the blue air and sank back into the rookery. They, too, knew Sandford’s bark. After him out came Julia, wildly energetic, pigtailed and damp with heat. Her embrace, dear Julia, was more like a collision.

  ‘Freddy, Freddy, Freddy!’

  ‘Julia.’

  ‘Why didn’t you telegraph? I knew they were all cold hearts in Cambridge.’

  ‘I wrote,’ said Fred, half suffocated. ‘I wrote a letter to Father. Here I am like Odysseus, with only an old dog to recognise me.’

  ‘We’re in the morning room,’ shouted Julia, dragging him through a glassed-in passage, a kind of conservatory which conserved nothing. Sandford was not allowed further than this, and retreated in misery to a soap-box where Merton was already curled up, comatose. Julia led the way into the empty kitchen. The clock ticked, the oven was cold.

  ‘Is there anything to eat?’ Fred asked.

  ‘There’s some rook pie and sago pudding left over for to-night. They’re very nasty, but you remember that we’re poor and have to eat nasty things.’

  ‘Where’s Mrs Burden?’

  ‘She’s in the morning room. We’re all in the morning room.’

  ‘It’s the afternoon, Julia.’

  ‘We started at six o’clock. You’ll see how it is, we can’t move everything now.’

  They were all of them round the table, his mother, Hester, Mrs Burden who came up from the village to cook and do the rough. All three of them were sewing, Mrs Burden at the treadle sewing machine. There were yards of material everywhere, violet, green, and white, the white looking as if they’d been cutting up pillow-cases. All of them got up. Drapery fluttered from their laps. Julia went down on hands and knees on a length of purple cotton.