The Gate of Angels
PENELOPE FITZGERALD

Contents

COVER

TITLE PAGE

PREFACE BY HERMIONE LEE, ADVISORY EDITOR

INTRODUCTION

Part One

1 FRED’S THREE NOTES

2 A FEW WORDS ABOUT ST ANGELICUS

3 HOW FRED GOT THIS JOB IN THE FIRST PLACE

4 DINNER AT ST ANGELICUS

5 AT THE RECTORY

6 THE DISOBLIGERS’ SOCIETY

7 WHO IS DAISY?

Part Two

8 DAISY

9 THE BLACKFRIARS HOSPITAL

10 THE MEN’S WARD

11 THE CASE OF JAMES ELDER

12 KELLY

13 DAISY LEAVES LONDON

Part Three

14 NO MYSTERY ABOUT DAISY’S MOVEMENTS

15 A WALK IN THE COUNTRY

16 A VISIT FROM THE FAIRLYS

Part Four

17 DR MATTHEWS’ GHOST STORY

18 AN UNUSUAL COURT CASE

19 KELLY LAID TO REST

20 FRED’S ADVICE TO HIS STUDENTS

21 AT DR SAGE’S HOSPITAL

22 THE GATE OF ANGELS

OTHER WORKS

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Preface by Hermione Lee, Advisory Editor

When Penelope Fitzgerald unexpectedly won the Booker Prize with Offshore, in 1979, at the age of sixty-three, she said to her friends: ‘I knew I was an outsider.’ The people she wrote about in her novels and biographies were outsiders, too: misfits, romantic artists, hopeful failures, misunderstood lovers, orphans and oddities. She was drawn to unsettled characters who lived on the edges. She wrote about the vulnerable and the unprivileged, children, women trying to cope on their own, gentle, muddled, unsuccessful men. Her view of the world was that it divided into ‘exterminators’ and ‘exterminatees’. She would say: ‘I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost.’ She was a humorous writer with a tragic sense of life.

Outsiders in literature were close to her heart, too. She was fond of underrated, idiosyncratic writers with distinctive voices, like the novelist J. L. Carr, or Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop, or the remarkable and tragic poet Charlotte Mew. The publisher Virago’s enterprise of bringing neglected women writers back to life appealed to her, and under their imprint she championed the nineteenth-century novelist Margaret Oliphant. She enjoyed eccentrics like Stevie Smith. She liked writers, and people, who stood at an odd angle to the world. The child of an unusual, literary, middle-class English family, she inherited the Evangelical principles of her bishop grandfathers and the qualities of her Knox father and uncles: integrity, austerity, understatement, brilliance and a laconic, wry sense of humour.

She did not expect success, though she knew her own worth. Her writing career was not a usual one. She began publishing late in her life, around sixty, and in twenty years she published nine novels, three biographies and many essays and reviews. She changed publisher four times when she started publishing, before settling with Collins, and she never had an agent to look after her interests, though her publishers mostly became her friends and advocates. She was a dark horse, whose Booker Prize, with her third novel, was a surprise to everyone. But, by the end of her life, she had been short-listed for it several times, had won a number of other British prizes, was a well-known figure on the literary scene, and became famous, at eighty, with the publication of The Blue Flower and its winning, in the United States, the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Yet she always had a quiet reputation. She was a novelist with a passionate following of careful readers, not a big name. She wrote compact, subtle novels. They are funny, but they are also dark. They are eloquent and clear, but also elusive and indirect. They leave a great deal unsaid. Whether she was drawing on the experiences of her own life – working for the BBC in the Blitz, helping to make a go of a small-town Suffolk bookshop, living on a leaky barge on the Thames in the 1960s, teaching children at a stage-school – or, in her last four great novels, going back in time and sometimes out of England to historical periods which she evoked with astonishing authenticity – she created whole worlds with striking economy. Her books inhabit a small space, but seem, magically, to reach out beyond it.

After her death at eighty-three, in 2000, there might have been a danger of this extraordinary voice fading away into silence and neglect. But she has been kept from oblivion by her executors and her admirers. The posthumous publication of her stories, essays and letters is now being followed by a biography (Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee, Chatto & Windus, 2013), and by these very welcome reissues of her work. The fine writers who have done introductions to these new editions show what a distinguished following she has. I hope that many new readers will now discover, and fall in love with, the work of one of the most spellbinding English novelists of the twentieth century.

Introduction

‘Those who have only known Christminster as undergraduates often think the lives of its residents are very uneventful,’ the novelist Robert Liddell wrote in his The Last Enchantments, set in an ancient university town. Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels is a scrupulous reconstruction of the life of another ancient university town, Cambridge, at a particular moment, that omits the principal purpose of the university in search of the eventful. The education of the young hardly impinges on the action; the life of the mind hardly seems to encompass the life of the undergraduate on which almost all other university novels depend – Fraill and Cork are the lightest bit-parts, as their names suggest. Fitzgerald’s focus is on the unseen and the overlooked, and events which can transform lives take place among the effectively invisible population – visiting day-trippers, local bourgeoisie, a junior don.

Fitzgerald’s novels are all very interested in the unnarrated event that the reader will know all about, but which the characters can’t envisage. A terrible accident may happen at the end of both Human Voices and At Freddie’s, but we can’t know for certain. We have to construct that unnarrated event, like the deaths of characters in The Blue Flower, consigned to a summary epilogue. The mind wonders, and constructs the agonising particulars on a scale that only requires, it appears, an economic allusion on the part of the novel itself.

The technique is most powerfully present in two of the last novels with historical themes. The Gate of Angels and The Beginning of Spring take place at the same time, 1912 and 1913. Both appear to know nothing about the historical catastrophes fast approaching. When Fred says that ‘these are wonderful years in Cambridge’ and looks with cross-national admiration at the retirement photograph of Ernst Mach, the Austrian physicist, a delicate irony is at work. We know that Fred’s students and Mach’s will soon be firing at each other, but the novel does not seem to know it. Like atoms, the future here is ‘unobservable’. In exactly the same way, there seems to be no knowledge or forewarning in The Beginning of Spring, set in an Englishman’s family in Moscow in 1913, that this comfortable way of life is about to vanish forever. The novel, with an ideal sense of unknowing, has thought its way back into a fragile existence, now normally obliterated by hindsight. The Beginning of Spring takes it for granted that revolutionary groups exist, and that if the reader will not forget about the Russian Revolution, the characters cannot know about it.

With her devotion to the unobservable and the barely glimpsed, it was to be expected that Fitzgerald had some interest in the ghost story. Almost her last publication was an introduction to a Penguin collection of M. R. James’s ghost stories; almost her first fictional publication was a chillingly authentic ghost story with the real M. R. James touch, ‘The Axe’. In the Penguin introduction, she draws attention to James’s real-life disdain for science and abstract thinking in general. It was starting to impinge on his own studies of the unseen. The life of Cambridge before the Great War was divided into the investigations of M. R. James and those of the Cavendish laboratory. ‘What truly distressed him, however, was the division of King’s into the Pious and the Godless, while in the Cavendish laboratory young physicists were at work constructing new models of a world without God. It was not scientific accuracy that Monty objected to but a sense that mankind was occupying the wrong territory.’

That division of humans at work at the invisible, between scientists and those in thrall to the numinous, to ghosts and angels, drives this novel too. It contains a brilliant pastiche of an M. R. James story. At the heart of Fitzgerald’s world is a sense that pre-occupations with the invisible come down to an investment in blood and flesh, too. ‘Thought is blood,’ Skippey says at the beginning; it is not the first time the point is made in a Fitzgerald narrative, nor will it be the last. Often, M. R. James’s ghost stories culminate in a physical sensation: his antiquaries have gone for long years without feeling another’s touch, and the feel of ‘a cold kind of face pressed against my own, and moving slowly over it’ (‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’) has a horrid intimacy. The Gate of Angels recreates that moment of intimacy disrupting the touchless life of the mind, not just in the ghost story (‘Someone was hauling against me, stroke by stroke …’) but in another register, in the love story.

At the tender heart of The Gate of Angels is Fitzgerald’s most entrancing heroine, Daisy; a person who does not belong in Cambridge and who transforms it. The painful clarity of Daisy’s hard-won path out of extreme poverty through nursing, only to lose it again, is one of those moments where a novelist’s fierce personal conviction appears to be making itself felt. Only with the appearance of Hermione Lee’s biography of Fitzgerald in 2013 did it become apparent with what good reason Fitzgerald feared extreme poverty, and what experience she had of losing everything. Daisy is brought together with Fred in the most deliberately arbitrary manner; their worlds do not belong together, and their collision disrupts all hierarchies and conventions. They are placed together, thanks to Daisy’s convenient wedding ring, naked in a double bed, and their relationship proceeds from there. A nice touch; Fred’s nakedness is less alarming to Daisy than her acknowledgement of it is to him.

What brings Daisy and Fred together is a clarity of vision, interrupted in Fred’s case by a storm of emotion. Both of them have been forced to see things lucidly by economic circumstances; Fred’s watch ‘was a silver watch, belonging to his father, given to him when he took up his appointment, and yet not quite given to him either, since when he went back on vacations his father tended to borrow it back’. In his many jobs at his college ‘… assistant organist, assistant librarian, deputy steward and assistant deputy treasurer … the words assistant, deputy, and so forth didn’t mean that there was necessarily anyone above him to do the work, only that he must do it without being paid’. Daisy has no illusions; south London has stripped her of those, and she rides the tram with a hat-pin and someone else’s wedding ring, against assault. When they meet in extraordinary circumstances, they are free to see the world as it really is; that neither of them really do is witness to the transformative power of the encounter. Fred’s confusion is immediately apparent, and Daisy seems to understand more at first: ‘Fred was appalled. “Don’t you know what you are to me?” he asked. Daisy considered. “I suppose I do know, Fred. To tell you the truth, a child of six would notice it.”’ But her delusions take longer to unwind, and shock her more thoroughly.

They are at home, with their capacity for precision and clarity, in the world of Fitzgerald’s novels. Fred remarks at one point that the word of a writer of fictions is not to be trusted; but he only partakes in, and does not absorb, Fitzgerald’s style. It is a matter not just of observing emotions exactly, but of placing their drama within an exactly notated physical context. In one virtuoso passage, Mrs Wrayburn considers her life:

Every day (in addition to cups, plates and dishes) demanded toast-racks, egg-cups, egg-cosies, hot water jugs, hot milk strainers, mustard-pots manufactured of blue glass inside, metal outside, silver fruit knives (as steel in contact with fruit-juice was known to be poisonous), napkins with differently coloured rings for each person at table, vegetable dishes with handles in the shape of artichokes, gravy boats, dishcovers, fish-forks with which it was difficult to eat fish (but fish-knives were only for vulgarians), muffin-dishes which had to be filled with boiling water to keep the muffins at their correct temperature, soup-plates into which the soup was poured from an earthenware container with a lid, cut-glass blancmange dishes, knife-rests for knives, fork-rests for forks, cheese dishes with lids the shape of a piece of cheese, compotiers, ramekins, pipkins, cruets, pots.

The exactness of detail doesn’t serve to suggest lavishness, but an array of things which their owners’ devotion to the unseen and the speculative seeks to escape. For us, however, it creates a world of credibility. The particularity of Fitzgerald’s observation, her research and her invention makes even the oddest and most unexpected actions of her plot believable. Only afterwards does the reader wonder – can cows be upturned by the wind like that? Has the novelist invented a St Angelicus College? Can a period detail as perfect as the substance containing Health Plasmon which ‘may be combined with a variety of substances to make nourishing dishes without the necessity of cooking them’ be anything but the product of research rather than imagination? (‘“It looks like cornflour to me,” said Daisy.’) The world is made up of fork-rests and Plasmon and invisible particles, exactly described. Are they real? Are they speculative? The Gate of Angels is a beautifully precise exercise of the novelist’s most illusionary skill, and a witty meditation about the practice of that art in the first place.

The obvious interpretation of Fitzgerald’s remarkable career, promoted by her, is that after four novels exploring aspects of her own life, she turned to the historical novel, and constructed remote and peculiar realities. There is something in that, but another reader might contemplate the ways in which she found possibilities to explore the peculiarities of love between the unalike in historical circumstances. Only in these novels did she find a way to pursue a convincing love affair in fiction, and all these late love stories are between impossible partners, whose link is somehow broken from the start. What events lay behind this development is impossible to say, and she could clearly only explore the subject once it was removed from her immediate circumstances. What remains, in these extraordinary, impassioned and exact novels is a world where thought and body, the solid and the unseen, the highest intellect and the basest behaviours and feeling unify in ways never envisaged before. Cambridge has always been very much one of the places where such unifications take place. It took the sharp eye and long contemplation of a Penelope Fitzgerald to give it such concise expression, however.

Philip Hensher

2013

Part One

1
Fred’s Three Notes

How could the wind be so strong, so far inland, that cyclists coming into the town in the late afternoon looked more like sailors in peril? This was on the way into Cambridge, up Mill Road past the cemetery and the workhouse. On the open ground to the left the willow-trees had been blown, driven and cracked until their branches gave way and lay about the drenched grass, jerking convulsively and trailing cataracts of twigs. The cows had gone mad, tossing up the silvery weeping leaves which were suddenly, quite contrary to all their experience, everywhere within reach. Their horns were festooned with willow boughs. Not being able to see properly, they tripped and fell. Two or three of them were wallowing on their backs, idiotically, exhibiting vast pale bellies intended by nature to be always hidden. They were still munching. A scene of disorder, tree-tops on the earth, legs in the air, in a university city devoted to logic and reason.

Fairly was making the best pace he could. He did not much like being overtaken by other bicyclists. No-one likes being overtaken by other bicyclists. The difficult conditions (some were blown over) turned the Mill Road into a display of pride.

The year was 1912 so that Fairly’s bicycle, a Royal Sunbeam, must have been thirteen years old. It had Palmer tyres, which left a pattern of long lines like wires, on a wet, glass-clear road. He felt better when he overtook a man who, from the back, might have been someone he knew slightly, and turned out in fact to be someone he knew slightly, a lecturer in the Physiology of the Senses, who called out:

‘They can’t get up again, you know, poor beasts, poor brute beasts!’

He was shouting. It was like sea-bathing. Everyone in turn must swerve to avoid a hat which had blown off and was darting about, crushed and deformed, at random. A whole group went by, then one of them detached himself and was riding alongside.

‘Skippey!’

He couldn’t hear what Skippey said, so dropped back and came up on the other side, the lee side.

‘You were saying?’

‘Thought is blood,’ Skippey replied.

The first man, the acquaintance, caught up once more. They were three abreast.

His words streamed with the wind.

‘I was in error. It’s sheep that can’t get up, sheep.’

‘The relief of it!’ Fairly called back. Now that the rain had stopped for a moment the drops blew off the trees as hard as handfuls of gravel.

At Christ’s Pieces Fairly turned right, meeting the wind head-on, and made landfall at his own college, St Angelicus.

Angels was, as it is, a very small college. Jokes about the difficulty of finding it, and the troubles the inmates were put to in fitting into it, had been made at any time for the past five hundred years. The twentieth century had opened by increasing these difficulties – for example, in the case of the Fellows’ bicycle shed, crouched like a peasant shack on the inner wall, close to the Founder’s Entrance. Peasants, however, would have built this, or any other shack, out of the way of the wind and rain, whereas the bicycle shed, on three sides, was open to both. And then, who might have arrived there before you? The college tutor of Angels was, and had been since the Second Boer War, a volunteer with the East Anglian Territorial Bicycle Corps, and, largely for reasons of vanity, rode at all times his specially adapted safety machine with its leather case for signal flags, rifle rest and spare water barrel. It occupied its own space and three-eighths of the next one, so that if you were the last man in, as Fairly appeared to be this evening, there was nothing for it but to manhandle your own bicycle onto a large iron hook fixed by the porter in the upper part of the wall.

Rain streamed down Fairly’s face, gathered at the tip of his nose, and fell. The shed was not so much like a shack, perhaps, as like the dodger on a ship’s bridge, of which one could only say that it was just about drier inside it than out. One step into the dusk, though, and he was through the Founder’s Arch and then into the inner court, with its one great walnut tree. Here, cut off completely, the wind could hardly be felt. Feeling as though he had been stunned, or dreaming, and was still dreaming, he began a short diagonal walk across the grass to get to his own rooms in the north-west corner. From the larger darkness under the trees a patch of darkness detached itself. It was the Master of the College, his gown scarcely adrift in the quiet airs of the Court of Angels.

The Master was blind. Fairly hesitated. After thirteen years the Master might have been expected to know the ins and outs of his little college, and he did know them. Probably he had paused under the walnut tree to sense what the crop was likely to be. It was an old sort, a Cornet du Périgord, which flowered late.

The Master called out, scarcely raising his voice, however. ‘This grass is reserved for the Fellows of this college. Should you be walking on this grass?’

‘Yes, I should, Master.’

‘But who is it?’

‘It’s Fred Fairly.’

‘Fairly, didn’t you have an accident? An accident quite recently?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘On your bicycle, or off your bicycle?’

‘I suppose, both.’

‘I hope you weren’t unwise enough to go to hospital?’

‘I’m all right now, Master.’

‘Please take my left arm.’

This had to be done in a particular way, laying two fingers only on the forearm. It was the Master, however, who did the steering, slowly round and once again around the great tree trunk. He said quietly, ‘You’re very wet, Fairly.’

‘Yes, Master, I’m sorry about that.’

‘Now, tell me, have you made up your mind on the most important question of all?’

‘You’re talking about my religious beliefs?’

‘Good God, no!’

A rectangle of light opened in a wall and the Senior Tutor came out and took affectionate charge of the Master, who did not need it in the least.

‘Senior Tutor, just one or two points. In the first place, Fairly is very wet, for some reason. Where does he keep?’

‘I think, in the north-west corner.’

‘And then, Senior Tutor, there are kittens somewhere on our premises, very young ones. I heard them distinctly. As with all mammals, their first sounds are angry, the pleading note comes later.’

‘Possibly in the kitchens,’ the Senior Tutor said. ‘I shall speak to the Steward.’

As on Mount Athos, no female animals capable of reproduction were allowed on the college premises, though the starlings couldn’t altogether be regulated. There were no women bedmakers or cleaners of any age. These were very ancient regulations. Fairly continued on his diagonal. When he reached the bottom of his staircase he took off his Burberry, hung it on the ancient newel post and gave it one or two sharp blows to shake off the damp. Then he went up to the top floor, where he kept. On the way up he passed Beazley, the gyp. Beazley was short, like all the college servants, who were selected, probably, with this in mind. Fred had an arrangement with this man, which they had arrived at five years earlier when he had been appointed as a Junior Fellow, that Beazley wasn’t to ask whether his fire needed making up, because he was perfectly well able to make it up for himself, that he never wanted to order anything up from the kitchens, and that he didn’t want to be told that his messages, brought up from the porter’s lodge, were urgent.

‘These are urgent, Mr Fairly,’ said Beazley, catching up with him and handing him three envelopes, two of them clean and one of them not quite.

There was no gas laid on in the college and Fred turned on the Aladdin lamp, which threw a circle of inner radiance, as calm as it was bright. The fire was banked up like a furnace, dividing the room into areas of dismaying heat and cold. Up here the wind could be heard once again, battering at the panes for admission, while the roof-slates braced themselves against a fall. The college had never been thoroughly heated or dried out since its foundation, but Fred, who had been brought up in a rectory, one of the draughtiest places on earth, saw no reason to complain. He hung up his boots, his socks, his sock-suspenders, his cap, like offerings to the fire-God, on the solid brass fender. They steamed, and his long-jointed feet also steamed. Being too late for dinner in Hall, he took a knife and a cottage loaf out of a cupboard and began to make himself toast. He knew how fortunate he was to have got a Junior Fellowship at Angels.

The first note was from the Master. The writing sloped a good deal downwards, but it was clear enough. ‘I have to apologise to you for saying, or implying, just now in the court, something that was not true. I asked you who you were, but I, of course, knew who you were. I know the voices of everyone in the college. I also know their steps, even on the grass – particularly on the grass. Normally you cross the court directly from the SSW to the NNE, but this evening you did not do this. You must have walked a little up the gravel path, and that confused me. My remark, I am afraid, reflected something of my annoyance at that confusion.’ The Master was fond of sending these notes in the interest of truth, or rather with the intention of going to bed every night in the knowledge that he had neither said or written anything untruthful which he had not corrected. For the Master, it was a very short note. And Fred had learned to live among these people and indeed (as with the cold in his room) already found it difficult to imagine anything else.

The second note was from Skippey, who must have dropped it in to the lodge on his way back to his own college, Jesus. It read, ‘Dear Old Fellow, I don’t think you heard me just now on Mill Road. Thorpe has let us down to-night on the Disobligers’ Society. He says he is ill. He calls it influenza, and we call it letting us down. It’s lucky that you’ve recovered from your accident, because we want you to speak for us in the debate to-night. We want you to speak against the motion. The motion is “that the soul doesn’t exist, has never existed, and that it isn’t desirable that it should exist”. Charles Reding is going to propose the motion. The point is that he’s a theologian, and a pious fellow, and so on, and so of course he’ll have to say that there’s nothing we can be sure of except the body, and that thought is blood, and so on, and then you, Fred, as a rank unbeliever, will have to stick up for the soul. Afterwards, wine and biscuits. And, Fred –’ Beazley was still hanging about. Fred asked him: ‘Did the Master want an answer to his note?’

‘He didn’t ask for one, Sir.’

I’m a disappointment to Beazley, Fred thought. Steaming socks, making toast, though a lot better, mind you, than he makes it himself – where’s the dash, where’s the display? Although after the first glance he must have given up all hope of making any substantial amount of money out of looking after me – still, there he is, and I like him, oughtn’t I to entertain him a little?

‘It seems as if I’ve got to go out and make a speech, Beazley. It was raining, and I’m just drying out. Do I look untidy?’

‘Yes, very untidy, Mr Fairly.’

Beazley went out, quite well pleased, shutting the four-inch oak door, which deadened the sound of his steps as they descended the winding stairs.

Fred looked at his watch. It was a silver watch, belonging to his father, given to him when he took up his appointment, and yet not quite given to him either, since when he went back on vacations his father tended to borrow it back. It came to him that he didn’t at all want to go out again to-night, that he had a letter of his own to write which must go off – must – but on the other hand he ought not to disoblige the Disobligers’ Society. This was because he had once done Skippey a good turn, something to do with money, a temporary loan, and you are always under an obligation to anyone you’ve helped once. But his mind had not warmed up at the same rate as his body, and he was not able to think, still less to put in order, what he could possibly say in defence of the soul.

The third note, in the envelope that was not so clean, consisted of a couple of pages torn out of a note-book. It was from an acquaintance. Fred couldn’t remember where he had first met Holcombe, or why, having met him but not ever much wanting to see him again, they now considered themselves acquaintances. It was on a subject they had been talking about a couple of days ago. Holcombe must have thought of something else he wanted to say, gone to the lodge, found that Fred had signed out, and immediately started writing, since it would have been as dangerous for him not to express himself as to block his digestive system.

‘… Long tramps, Fairly, over our beloved Fenland, speaking together of intellectual problems and those only, descending at last after say fifteen miles for whisky and a warm at some friendly Cambridge hearth! That is a man’s recreation. Now, if one were to marry – well, look at it in this way – a wife has a legal right to be in the same house and even the same room as oneself! From the point of view of the temptations of the flesh that may be convenient enough, but what if she were to want to talk? Your own position is so much simpler. You don’t have to make up your mind. At the age of twenty-five years, it is made up for you. If you stay at St Angelicus you can’t marry. If you leave, you may get another appointment, but not, you can be pretty certain, another Junior Fellowship. You are choiceless. In fact, you must be careful that your powers of choice don’t fall into disuse. I think of rust, I think of springs becoming weaker. You may find you can’t remember how to choose at all. And yet the prospect of an alternative is absolutely necessary to human will and human action. Still, let us be honest, there seems no point, as far as I can see, in your ever getting to know any young women at all –’

At this point Holcombe had run out of space. When Fred next met him, he would start straight away from where his letter had broken off, as though between words spoken and words written there was no dividing line.

Out of a carved oak locker on the opposite side of the fire from the coal-scuttle, but distinct from the bread-cupboard (and breathing out a different smell of mould when opened), Fred took a few sheets of the college paper. He shook his fountain pen to see how much ink was left in it, and wrote: ‘Dear Miss Saunders’.

2
A Few Words about St Angelicus

ST Angelicus had two great distinctions. One it shared with St Andrew’s University. That was that it had no real existence at all, because its foundation had been confirmed by a pope, Benedict XIII, who after many years of ferocious argument had been declared not to be the Pope at all. Two years after he had been legally elected in 1394 he was told that he was dethroned. By every law of God and man, however, no-one on earth had the right to do this. Kings and emperors can be dislodged, but not legally elected Popes. Benedict, too, was an Aragonese, and one of the most obstinate of an obstinate nation. In 1415 he retreated to a castle built on a jagged rock 64 metres high and linked to the mainland of Castellon by a strip of sand, covered at high tide by the sea. Here, in Peñiscola, he continued to hold audience in the vast halls, furnished with books and the rags of tapestries which he had brought with him. No matter, he was now ninety years old, and must die soon. He did not die, and refused to give way an inch. To settle everyone’s conscience, it was agreed by the Kings of Europe to arrange for him to be poisoned. Benedict had always lived temperately and had only one weakness left, a fondness for quince preserves, which were made for him by the nuns in a convent on the mainland. After enquiry, a Benedictine was found who was an expert at introducing poison into sweets. An attendant was bribed to take these sweets to the Pope’s study. But the old man vomited so hideously that his stomach was cleared. The attendant was arrested, the Benedictine was found guilty and burned alive, and the Pope died five years later, with dignity. He was buried in his home town of Ilueca. During the war of the Spanish succession his body was dug up by French soldiers on the rampage, who cut off the head and threw it away. Rescued from a ditch by an honest labourer, it was preserved as an object of veneration. The Senior Tutor of Angels had in fact made the journey to Aragon to see it, together with Dr Matthews, the Provost of James’s, a very well-known antiquarian. A silver reliquary had been opened for them by special arrangement, and they had been allowed a sight of Benedict XIII’s skull. Both of them had noticed that the right eye was still visible, hanging at the back of the socket in the form of a kind of dark jelly.

‘It was a recognisably human glance, in my opinion,’ the Provost had said. ‘There seemed a spark. Yes, some kind of communication. If we could have seen the whole skeleton, I fancy it would have had its hand over its heart.’ The Chaplain of Angels said later that it had been a mistake for the Senior Tutor to go out to Spain with the Provost, who wrote ghost stories in his spare time, and read them aloud, and who was nothing but an old woman when it came to bones and graveyards. ‘And what the two of them must have suffered! You know that in Spain they put pieces of potato in the omelettes. And. then, to go on mule-back!’

‘I think they took a local train from Zaragoza,’ someone corrected him.

‘A Spanish train! Worse, much worse,’ said the Chaplain.

The second distinction of Angels was its size. It was the smallest college in Cambridge, and had never shown any signs of wanting to extend or expand in any direction. It had been built, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, on a plan as unlike a monastery as possible. Although everything was in miniature, it resembled a fortress, a toy fortress, but a toy of enormous strength, with walls 3¹/₂ feet thick, built without rubble. There were no cloisters, no infirmary, no hospice, no welcome (to be honest), to those, strangers or not, arriving from outside, no house apart for the Master, who crowded in on an upper floor along with the Fellows, an arrangement which had caused him to be known in the old days as Master Higgledy-Piggledy. As time went by, more openings in the roof were grudgingly allowed for chimneys, and fireplaces were built in the rooms, and one cold water tap on each landing. As to the students, in 1415 none of the colleges had anywhere for them to sleep, and St Angelicus, in 1912, still hadn’t. There were no hostels for them either. They had to find their own lodgings, and six o’clock in the evening took the last of them away, like roosting birds, their chatter fading into the distance, after which they were forgotten till the next morning. There was no room in the court for their bicycles, which had to remain stacked outside the Great Gate. Over the gate the heraldic arms, weathered almost flat with the wall, showed two angels asleep, waiting for the Day of Judgement when Benedict XIII will be shown at last to be indisputably right, and all the proceedings of the Catholic Church since 1396 will be annihilated and trodden into the dust, for all of them have been made on false authority. The motto, Estoy in mis trece, not altogether suitable for a place of learning, was one of Benedict’s few recorded remarks. It is translated as ‘I have not changed my mind’, but ‘nothing doing’ might be nearer.

The college, then, had learned the art of living in a small space. There were the cellars, of course, and these extended beyond the college buildings themselves, some way underneath Butts Green. 1911 had been a good year for hock and champagne, and Angels had laid in considerable supplies, and were debating whether to burrow even further and to construct another vault. But, above ground, there were only the Master, the college servants and six Fellows. In other colleges the Fellows for the past thirty years had been allowed to marry and live out, but in the statutes of St Angelicus this was forbidden. The number of problems which, in consequence, did not need discussing resulted in a great saving of time, but labour, too, had to be saved. The Junior Fellowship which Fred had been granted meant combining the jobs of assistant organist, assistant librarian, deputy steward, and assistant deputy treasurer. The words assistant, deputy, and so forth didn’t mean that there was necessarily anyone above him to do the work, only that he must do it without being paid.

3
How Fred Got this Job in the First Place

FRED had taken the science tripos, and at a gathering for those who had been awarded a First Class degree he had met Professor Flowerdew. There had been music and refreshments in the open air, ruined by a downpour, as often happens in Cambridge, where the rainfall is believed to be low and risks are taken again and again. Everyone had taken refuge in the Cavendish, where Professor Flowerdew, who did not like parties (still less when they were called gatherings) had been all the time. He was just retreating from the physics laboratory, and with one melancholy sideways movement of his head he invited Fred upstairs to his office. This (like most of the rooms, after all) was dark, and reached by a dingy corridor. The walls were covered with photographs, and more photographs were pinned onto the desks. Fred sniffed the air. It was his ambition to have, one of these days, an office in the Cavendish.

Flowerdew sat down at the desk, leaving the stool near the microscope, and said to Fred, ‘What do you know about me?’

‘I’ve only just finished my first degree,’ Fred replied. ‘Truly, I don’t know anything.’

‘Well, I know something about you. Yes, something. I know you’re a bright fellow. I know you come from a rectory family. They say that at the Cavendish we have to make do with apparatus knocked up out of cardboard and string. But if you come from a rectory you’ll be used to economies.’

‘It’s a great thing you’ve even heard of me at all,’ said Fred.

‘And what next?’

‘I had thought of asking Professor Wilson whether I could work with him. I mean in some capacity. I could help with the photographic plates, perhaps. He was my tutor for advanced practical physics.’

‘C.T.R. Wilson. A very good, very patient Scotsman. Could you read what he wrote on the blackboard?’

‘Usually not. He used to write it with one hand and wipe it off at the same time with the other. But if I had the chance to study his methods –’

‘You want to assist him with the construction of his third cloud chamber. You want to photograph the alleged tracks of ionising particles.’

Fred turned red. ‘These are wonderful years in Cambridge.’

‘You are attracted towards atomic research?’

‘I’ve seen Ernest Rutherford walking into the Cavendish,’ Fred cried. ‘I heard his lectures. It all hangs together. If it works it must be true.’

‘Well, well,’ said Professor Flowerdew. ‘I expect it will hang together for a considerable time, perhaps sixty or seventy years. The belief that Nature, or an invisible god, created the world and assigned everything for a purpose, lasted very much longer than that and worked reasonably well. But we’ve given all that up, because we’ve got no evidence that God or Nature exists.’

‘None at all,’ said Fred. ‘That has to be left to faith. After all, you can only reason from what you can observe.’

‘Quite so,’ said Professor Flowerdew. ‘But atoms are unobservables.’ He pointed to one of the photographs on the wall.

‘Who is that?’ he asked.

Fred floundered, looking at the bearded, enigmatic faces, one of which had been circled in red ink. There were distant men in frock coats and top-hats, standing outside a building he did not recognise.

‘That is Ernst Mach, a photograph taken in Vienna on the occasion of his retirement from the University Chair of physics. I used to be in correspondence with him, now I no longer am. It was from his lectures and his Science of Mechanics that I came to understand the folly of basing any kind of scientific research on unobservables. Mach, don’t forget, is a very deeply respected physicist. He has established, among many other things, the relationship between the speed of objects and the local speed of sound. But in respect of the atom, Mach said to the world, don’t commit yourself to it! An atom is not a reality, it is just a provisional idea, so how can we say that it is situated in space? We ought to feel suspicious of it when we find that it has been given characteristics which absolutely contradict those which have been observed in any other body. There is a continuity of scientific thought, you know. The continuity is now being thrown out of the window. Let us hope we shall remember where it is when, at long last, we find that we can’t do without it.’

He looked compassionately at Fred. ‘You’re hungry. But it’s of no use going down now, the Science Faculty will have eaten everything. The organic chemists will have cleared the sandwiches. Let me tell you what is going to happen, over the coming centuries, to atomic research.

‘There will be many apparent results, some useful, some spectacular, some, very possibly, unpleasant. But since the whole basis of the present research is unsound, cracks will appear in the structure one by one. The physicists will begin by constructing models of the atom, in fact there are some very nice ones in the Cavendish at the moment. Then they’ll find that the models won’t do, because they would only work if atoms really existed, so they’ll replace them by mathematical terms which can be stretched to fit. As a result, they’ll find that since they’re dealing with what they can’t observe, they can’t measure it, and so we shall hear that all that can be said is that the position is probably this and the energy is probably that. The energy will be beyond their comprehension, so they’ll be driven to the theory that it comes and goes more or less at random. Now their hypotheses will be at the beginning of collapse and they will have to pull out more and more bright notions to paper over the cracks and to cram into unsightly corners. There will be elementary particles which are too strange to have anything but curious names, and anti-matter which ought to be there, but isn’t. By the end of the century they will have to admit that the laws they are supposed to have discovered seem to act in a profoundly disorderly way. What is a disorderly law, Fairly?’

‘It sounds like chaos,’ said Fred.

‘The chaos will be in their minds only. It, too, will not be observable.’

‘What do you think is to be done?’

‘Admit the wrong direction, and go back to what can be known through the senses. If they don’t depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips.’

Professor Flowerdew had, he said, been fortunate. The university during the last ten years or so had been surprisingly ready to create – by Grace, to use their own terms – posts, and even professorships, which would last only for as long as was thought necessary. There were, for instance, travelling bachelorships ‘for the encouragement of investigation into foreign countries’, established by the Special Board for Military Studies – scholarships in other words for spies. As a kind of counterweight some of the appointments had no apparent practical use whatsoever. Herbert Flowerdew had been offered a temporary Professorship in Observable Experimental Physics.

Fred was shocked by the word ‘fortunate’. He felt that luck and chance should have no place in science, and above all at the Cavendish.

‘The Cavendish is becoming very crowded,’ said Flowerdew. ‘There is a pot-house atmosphere. I have arranged to have a small laboratory of my own in the Department of Mechanical Philosophy.’ His own experiments were in the principles of equivalence and reciprocity. He couldn’t, then, be altogether cracked.

But was it, Fred broke out in distress, that he had no interest in the work of Wilson, and Rutherford, and Planck, and Niels Bohr, whose almost inaudible lectures Fred had also heard that year?

‘Not at all. I follow all that they printed with great interest, both through the German and the English journals. I am impressed with their results. I admire their great talents. But when I think of their future I hear the sadness of old men and those whom the gods have deserted.’

Flowerdew needed an assistant at £100 a year, which he would pay himself, to instruct his students in physics and take them off his hands generally. He could guarantee this assistant, too, a Junior Fellowship at St Angelicus. There was a vacancy in the college, not through death, but through a lecturer in Propellant Explosives being unexpectedly recalled to Germany. In explaining this Flowerdew made it quite clear that the Junior Fellow would also have to lend a hand with the library, the catering and the accounts, act as assistant organist, and keep the collection of fifteenth-century musical instruments in repair and, as far as possible, tuned. Here Fred jibbed.

‘I can’t do that. All I could ever do was to help out at home with the hymns. I’ve never even seen a fifteenth-century instrument.’

‘Let us forget them for the moment. Don’t answer me now. Think it over.’

By ‘don’t answer me now’ Flowerdew had meant, ‘don’t accept straight away because you’re a scholarship boy from a rectory with nothing to live on.’ Fred was struck by this, and by other things which the Professor was not doing. He was not, like the great ones of Cambridge, keeping a princely look-out for young followers. He wasn’t asking Fred to agree with him, either, about the unsoundness of atomic physics; not that. Clearly he was a lonely man, but he had made nothing of his loneliness, either. And there was a lack, not of self-confidence, but of self-assurance, in all this, that Fred liked. He was not vain himself, and only the humble can value humility. It appealed to him, too, that Flowerdew stood as one against many, not because he knew too little, but because he understood too much. ‘Stood’ was not the right word, though. He was no more likely to make a stand than Fred’s own father, gazing out of the window at the Rectory.

Without seeing Flowerdew again, Fred went home to the Rectory, where he was asked by the neighbours (called in to celebrate his First Class in physics) what he expected to do next, and, by the Rural Dean, whether he was going to blow them all up. Then Fred went with two of his friends for a walking holiday in Austria. For the first time in his life he felt he had no obligation to anyone. They went to the Salzburg Alps. At Bruckmann’s Hotel, by candlelight, the two waitresses and the daughter of the house appeared at the door of the three-bed commercial travellers’ room which they had taken for cheapness’ sake. Fred was the only one not asleep. The situation struck him as like a folk tale. He woke his two friends, and went down with the daughter, who had the keys, to fetch two bottles of wine from the dining-room. More she dare not take. When they got back upstairs the others were all sitting stiffly on the edge of the beds, not undressed, not even speaking, as though waiting for permission to begin. Fred found it hard not to laugh, then they all laughed. The wine was Grüner Weltliner, tasting violently of pepper. They blew out the candles and opened the shutters, to let the stars shine in. The room smelled of the just extinguished candlewicks, of the peppery wine, of strong young women’s flesh and of starch, because the maids had been doing the ironing.

Next morning they went on and up the mountain to the haymeadows, past the first rocky slopes where the wild raspberries were almost over, through ice-cold shadow into the sunlight of the upper slopes and almost to the edge of the glacier. They sat down, and the elder of Fred’s two friends, who was a chemical engineer, told them that he was going back to Bruckmann’s, as he had fallen in love with one of the waitresses. They had their valises with them. He picked up his, took his stick and walked away down the path, the stones slipping away beneath his boots. The remaining friend said that he was doing all he could to get to Manchester, in the hope of training with Rutherford. Fred must come too, everything of importance was happening in Manchester.

‘No, I’m going back to Cambridge. Herbert Flowerdew has offered me a post as his assistant.’

The friend burst into tears. He had been working far too hard and for too long. He regarded Fred as lost. ‘You never said anything about this before.’

‘I’ve only just decided to accept.’

‘Come to Manchester.’

‘I’ve decided to accept.’

4
Dinner at St Angelicus

WHEN James I said that a man should pray at King’s, dine at Trinity, and study at Jesus, he added (on one occasion at least) ‘and he should sleep in peace at Angels’. This did not mean that you got a poor dinner at St Angelicus – quite the contrary, – only that room could hardly have been found at the table for the King’s bodyguard and followers. Adapting to the allotted space was, and continued to be, a matter of practice. At other colleges, sherry was served in the combination room, dinner in Hall, brandy in some other sanctuary. At Angels there was the Hall only. Gas-lighting had never been introduced, or even suggested. The candles burned in ancient holders which grasped them in twisted silver rings that held them absolutely straight. Yet that was hardly necessary, since Angels was the only Hall in Cambridge which was not a meeting place of cold draughts. The college silver, acquired at intervals over four hundred years, was largely Spanish, mostly bought from needy church treasuries. Possibly not all of it had been designed as tableware. There were silver objects whose use was not known – a set of instruments, for example, which appeared to be tooth-pullers, and another like a horse comb. Of what use could this have been in the iglesia mayor of Morella? However, they glittered on the table every night, and were put back into drawers in the silver pantry. There was an endearing carelessness about it all. Round the table (not the High Table, because there was only one), the company, sitting close together, looked like friendly conspirators. They drank manzanilla imported for them from Sanlúcar, until the butler came in. ‘The Master is on his way.’ Everyone got to their feet. With his chair drawn back for him to exactly the right distance, the Master needed no guidance, and none was offered. The Chaplain pronounced a grace which was used on domestic occasions by Benedict XIII himself, followed by the menacing Spanish words – El Juicio Final descubrirá las secretas de la Historia. All the chairs trundled back, and those who had dropped their napkins disappeared for a moment, recovering them. The manzanilla continued with the soup, and changed to champagne for the fish course only. After that it was claret at St Angelicus. At the end the guests were always offered preserved fruits, of the kind which failed to poison their Founder.

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 mediævalist 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 mediæval 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 been 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.

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