The Gate of Angels

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Fred wanted only to be alone, but he said, ‘You ought to come, Professor.’

  ‘No, Fairly, I might disgrace myself. I might ask, “How can the unobservable be indivisible?” or, indeed, divisible, for that too, I daresay, will soon be proposed.’

  ‘Well, I’ll go and see what they say. I don’t know how long it will go on.’

  ‘No matter how long, call in again immediately when you get back to college.’

  ‘Do you want me to wait for the questions?’

  Flowerdew wavered a little. ‘Not for too many.’

  There was a hint of coming weakness in his voice, just as the Cambridge autumn can be felt even before one leaf falls, when the wind from the fens turns from cold to colder. Professor Flowerdew would never change his mind, that was not possible for him. It was not that he supported J. J. Thomson’s orderly atom against Rutherford’s wild, airy and fractious one. To him, both these great intellects were pursuing nothings. Like Benedict XIII himself, he might be asked to admit defeat, but would never recognise it as legitimate, or even respectable. He might find it necessary to retreat even farther into seclusion. He might, even, have to apply for a post at Oxford, but if this should happen, Fred Fairly, his first assistant after all these years and, in a sense, his last throw, must on no account be asked to suffer. Some way must be devised so that Fairly would be able to continue at St Angelicus, unembarrassed and undistressed for the rest of his natural life.

  ‘You won’t take anything before you go?’

  Fred had forgotten that he had had nothing, on this day of disillusionment and loss, except a cup of tea and two biscuits. ‘No thank you, Professor.’

  ‘You will miss Hall, I’m afraid.’

  ‘All the same, no, thank you.’

  ‘Well, I shall see you, then. If you find I have dozed off, which is quite possible, what will you do?’

  ‘I shall worry about that when the time comes,’ said Fred, ‘I might wake you by playing something on your piano.’

  ‘Oh, but gently, gently.’

  The professor looked at him more attentively. ‘Yes, you don’t look well, that was what you said when you first came in, wasn’t it? Are you in any money trouble?’

  ‘I’m unhappy, Professor.’

  ‘Well, perhaps there is no need to wait for the questions. Come straight back.’

  When Daisy left the hospital at last she asked if she might see Dr Sage. No, he was occupied with a patient, or rather, with several of them. It was a kind of lecture; the patients lectured the doctor, all night if necessary.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I’ll write. I’ll write him a letter.’

  It was a relief of a kind, because she hated leaving Dr Sage. In London he had dosed the patients recklessly, here in Cambridge he seemed less sane than they were, but he brought with him unmistakably the promise of care and trust. He was, too, the very last link she had with the Blackfriars, where she also had once been trusted. Tomorrow, when he read the Cambridge Evening News, he would know exactly what she had done, and there would be no trouble finding another girl to do the heavy ironing.

  She rode her borrowed bicycle as far as the Wrayburns’ house. Mr Wrayburn was out. Mrs Wrayburn was sitting in front of a small fire, relaxing in the knowledge of his being out. Daisy had been trained never to stand at a door letting in draughts, so she went in and shut it behind her, standing against it to show she was on the point of going.

  ‘Goodbye, Mrs Wrayburn. I can’t stay in Cambridge any longer, not after what happened in court.’

  ‘No, Daisy, I’m afraid you can’t.’

  ‘I didn’t expect things to turn out like they have.’

  ‘I’m quite sure you didn’t.’

  ‘Who’d have thought of Kelly turning up like that?’

  ‘Who indeed?’

  Daisy sighed. ‘I’ve put the cycle and the doorkey where they’re supposed to be. I wanted to give you something, though, as a sort of memento.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think I’m likely to forget you, Daisy.’ But Daisy persevered, taking the gold ring off her left hand.

  ‘It’s got looser since I’ve been here.’

  ‘No it hasn’t, Daisy. It’s exactly the same size. You’re personifying. A weakness of the English language. You mean that you’ve got thinner. But in any case, you mustn’t give me this. It’s a wedding ring.’

  ‘I don’t think it is, Mrs Wrayburn. It was my aunt Ellie’s, and she never married.’

  Mrs Wrayburn had the grace to accept the ring. She felt exhausted. It surprised her to find that Daisy should have had an aunt.

  Daisy fetched her few things from the attic. Her box was still at the left luggage at Liverpool Street, never yet sent for. All this time she had relied on her bag, of which, like most wanderers, she had become unreasonably fond. Hairbrush, comb, stays, lavender water, pocket handkerchiefs, prayer book, faithful companions, all of them, back into the bag again. It was a ‘Jemima’, with expandable elastic sides, but, even so, it gaped.

  Out in the road, carrying the overfull Jemima, she felt she looked like someone taking kittens out to drown and changing her mind at the last moment. The rain threatened to get worse. At one point she had had a good, strong umbrella, but not now. She had lent it to one of the two cooks at Dr Sage’s, and she hated asking for anything back. It took all the good out of it.

  She crossed the road and stood by the ditch, waiting for a lift. As a child she had always dreamed of travelling, but by that she hadn’t meant spending half her time between the outskirts of Cambridge and Liverpool Street. Now, at last, with the thought of the sulphur-reeking station and its dark blue ranks of tin placards, her tears came. For hour after hour she had been waiting for a good cry, like a drunkard outside the door of the Jug-and-Bottle. She had thrown away everything. She was deadly frightened that when she got to London Kelly would find her. But she was crying not from fear, but on account of the hurt she had done to Fred.

  From here she could see the light in the Wrayburns’ front room opposite—one light only until Mr Wrayburn got back, but at the Turners’ farm, well set back from the road, every window seemed to blaze, as though they were all keeping it up for some kind of celebration. There were two or three loud shouts from the house and then a creaking and splashing. As a dream repeats itself, Daisy saw a horse and cart coming out of the Turners’ entrance. It might have been the same cart, only it was well-lit now with safety oil lamps. It crossed the road, turned right and pulled up where Daisy stood.

  There was a woman driving, wrapped up like a parcel in rugs and tarpaulin. She said nothing, so Daisy picked up her bag, wiped her face with the back of her hand, put her foot on the slippery iron pedal, sprang up and edged into the passenger seat. As the cart rocked a little and steadied, the woman said without apparent feeling of any kind, ‘I’m going to my sister’s at Chesterton. I can’t stand any more of that old Turner tonight.’

  The horse was evidently unwilling to leave its home as darkness fell. The woman beat it vigorously and it shook its head, throwing off showers of raindrops that glittered in the light of the new headlamp, then started off at a jog trot. It was a slow journey—everything on the road passed them—but not a quiet one. The cart, like a ship at sea, had a pitch as well as a roll, and there was a recurrent screech from a loose spoke on the wheel, along with the creak of the collar and traces and the blowing and rumbling like a deep inner protestation from the horse itself as its feet clocked and clapped in hollow succession on and on. The ride seemed neither short nor long. It was isolated from everyone and everything else on the road by its peaceful, noisy, familiar, monotonous discomfort.

  Daisy knew by the lamps that they must have got to the Chesterton Road, where she hoped to catch a motorbus to the station. She had been rocked almost to sleep, but now she turned to the rugs and tarpaulin beside her.

  ‘If you’d be kind enough to slow up, I can jump down. It was very good of you to stop for me. I don’t know what I’d have done
otherwise.’

  ‘You looked as if you’d lost something, that’s why I stopped for you.’

  Daisy hesitated. ‘You don’t know who I am.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said Mrs Turner.

  As the cart’s rear light drew away, still at the same slow pace, Daisy stood at the bus-stop in Chesterton Lane, with her back to the wind from the Fens, which was beginning to blow more strongly now, like the tip, but not quite the edge, of a knife. The rain had stopped. Nothing came, not the city motor-bus, nor the bus from the Bull Hotel, which circulated once every hour. Daisy took her nurse’s watch out of her coat pocket. It was well past eight. They must have stopped running. She had missed the last one. She set out to walk to the station, and now there was nothing for her to think about except the shortest way through Cambridge to Station Road. Self-reproach, as its habit is, had been waiting patiently for her mind to clear and now it took its opportunity to make, at every point, its blind entrance.

  She crossed the river and turned left down Jesus Lane. That was a mistake, she would have to go right again somewhere to get back to St Andrew’s Street. Certainly, she ought not to be going down a dimly lit path running along the foot of an ancient stone wall. It was somewhere she had never been before. Too small for a college, perhaps a prison.

  Like all the kept-out, she was looking, quite unthinkingly, for a way in. In a few more yards she came to a door as narrow as a good-sized crack, standing wide open. She felt no surprise, although you’d have expected a place like that to lock up as soon as it got dark. She was one of the few people, however, in Cambridge, who would not have been surprised.

  All of them would have looked in. She could see a vaulted passageway, not much wider than the gateway, and beyond it green grass and the branches of a tree. Faint light came from the roof of the passageway and from somewhere behind the tree. She now realised that it must, after all, be a college, but she had never been into any of the colleges and had no intention of going into this one.

  She heard a very faint cry, a human cry of distress. Without thinking twice about it she walked straight in by the passageway and found an elderly man in black clothes and a gown sitting propped against the trunk of a large tree with gently moving leaves. Daisy knelt down beside him, putting her damp bag down on the grass. He was not drunk, but, poor soul, he was blind. Pulse slow, cold sweat, but nothing worse than that. An ordinary syncope. She put her arms strongly round him and without dragging him, she lowered him, as if it was an easy thing to do, onto the ground. Almost as soon as his head came down to a level with his heart, he stirred and spoke.

  ‘The door!’

  Daisy guessed that he had felt the unexpected current of fresh air coming in through the opening. Sometimes very small things can lower the blood pressure in the arteries of the brain. She took his hand.

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’

  Men, also in gowns, were coming out of the lighted chapel opposite. Unfortunately they didn’t seem the practical type. At the sight of Daisy they were crying out in dismay and one of them in what sounded like animal terror.

  ‘Now then, this won’t help,’ she said briskly. ‘Don’t move him yet. Give nothing by the mouth. Cover him up warm and call the doctor.’

  She got up, brushing down her skirt. The patient did not want to let go of her hand, but Daisy was used to this, and gently detached it. In a weak, clear voice he said, ‘Surely it can’t be...?’

  Daisy picked up her bag and leaving the consternation behind her went out the way she had come in, pulling the tall door shut. This was much easier than you would have thought. The iron deadlock clashed tightly home.

  She must have spent five minutes in there, not much more. The slight delay, however, meant that she met Fred Fairly walking slowly back to St Angelicus.

  About the Author

  PENELOPE FITZGERALD wrote many books small in size but enormous in popular and critical acclaim over the past two decades. Over 300,000 copies of her novels are in print, and profiles of her life appeared in both The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. In 1979, her novel Offshore won Britain’s Booker Prize, and in 1998 she won the National Book Critics Circle Prize for The Blue Flower. Though Fitzgerald embarked on her literary career when she was in her 60’s, her career was praised as “the best argument... for a publishing debut made late in life” (New York Times Book Review). She told the New York Times Magazine, “In all that time, I could have written books and I didn’t. I think you can write at any time of your life.” Dinitia Smith, in her New York Times obituary of May 3, 2000, quoted Penelope Fitzgerald from 1998 as saying, “I have remained true to my deepest convictions, I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?”