The Gate of Angels (6 page)

‘That doesn't answer my question or any other question,' Holcombe cried. But the Provost of James's rose to his feet, silently communicating silence.

‘Gentlemen, I'm well aware of the freedom of discussion which is allowed, by right, to the private debating societies of this University. But I little thought that I should sit here this evening, or indeed on any evening, and hear the human soul described as a think.'

He looked deliberately round from face to face.

‘Although I may be out of order in speaking from the audience, I should like to put one more question to your chairman. It is this. Would you consider what I call the “inner eye” which opens for some of us, though not always when we want it or expect it—would you consider the inner eye as one of the sensory nerves?'

‘Not for the purposes of dissection,' said Skippey miserably.

It was the custom after the debate, which seemed to have been pretty well knocked on the head, to offer everybody the refreshments they particularly didn't want. This was agreed to be good for the mind which, whether or not it is dependent on the body, requires constant sharpening in the form of opposition, contradiction and surprise. Skippey was in despair. What could be good for Dr Matthews' mind? For the first time it struck him that there might conceivably be something childish about the proceedings of the society. The treasurer was pressing Health Biscuits on everybody. They clattered as they struck the plates.

‘I'm going back now, to smoke one more pipe, or perhaps half a pipe,' Dr Matthews said. ‘Is anyone walking my way?'

He looked directly at Fred, who was not sorry to go. Certainly, not quite my way, but glad of the excuse for a walk. He helped the Provost on with his overcoat and gown. It would have been easier (as always) for him to put them on
himself. ‘Helping' would only be an improvement if human arms, like the arms of coats, folded backwards.

‘Good-night, Mr Skippey. You must excuse me. I make it a rule to go to bed before midnight.'

The rain and the wind had both died down, leaving a ragged sky. As they started off at a sober pace towards King's Parade, the Provost remarked: ‘Your name is Fairly, isn't it? I think you were in Hall at St Angelicus, when we were discussing the mystery of your south-west door. I liked what you said about the mind being entitled, as it surely is, to a body of its own, a good deal more satisfactory than the present one.'

‘I wonder, Provost,' said Fred, ‘if anyone's quite explained to you the objects of our Society. I mean, whoever gets up to propose the motion, and of course whoever opposes it—'

‘People will go to such curious lengths,' the Provost went on, gently beating time with one hand, as though to music. ‘My sister writes that she has left instructions in her will that her little finger is to be severed before her funeral so that there will be no possibility, or let us call it likelihood, of her being buried alive.' Fred was not quite sure of the right answer.—‘That should do the trick,' he said.—‘Yes, and of course she must please herself with these matters, but it's the particularity of it, Fairly—I am right about your name, I think?—I mean, one might, I think, lose one's little finger at any time. So many things are mechanised now which weren't so formerly. They provide unexpected dangers.' He added, ‘As to being buried alive, so many things walk, you know, when they seem to be buried safely enough.'

What a strange face was his, protective and fatherly in the light, then again, as his head turned and his black-rimmed spectacles glittered, a blank. ‘By the way, who was that man, your friend, or enemy, with a beard?'

‘He's called George Holcombe.'

‘I'm afraid I can't identify him. He is a Fellow of...?'

‘He isn't a Fellow anywhere,' said Fred. ‘He's a demonstrator at the new chemistry labs.'

‘He looked disturbed, I thought.'

‘Perhaps he is disturbed.'

‘Why so?'

Fred did not like to explain, and the Provost said reflectively, ‘I always consider that the new laboratories were a mistake, but it never occurred to me that the staff were not sane.'

He fell silent and Fred began again. ‘I was just going to explain to you about the way things work at the Disobligers'—but they had arrived at the Lodge, and a butler opened the door, followed by a large tabby cat which sprang up on the Provost's shoulder, digging its claws into his gown and defending its place against all comers.

‘You're coming in, I hope, for that pipe?'

Fred said he was afraid he didn't smoke.

‘You mean, of course, that you do,' said the Provost, stroking his cat triumphantly.

When he was back in his room Fred found that the fire was still burning pretty well. He lit the Aladdin, and tore up the letter which he had started before the meeting. On a new sheet of paper he started again: ‘Dear Daisy'.

7

If Holcombe had walked in at that moment, and asked ‘Who is this Daisy, does she belong to the marriageable classes?', Fred couldn't have answered him. He knew her name and how he had come to meet her. He didn't know either who she was, or her address, and therefore he had no immediate way of sending her this letter or any other. He must, presumably, have written it for the pleasure of seeing her name on the paper.

Three weeks ago, three weeks before the Disobligers' meeting, he had been bicycling along the Guestingley Road, this time in twilight just turning into darkness.

Towards the outskirts Cambridge ceased to hold its own as a market town. Patches of field and common appeared, and, along the road, largish houses. It was getting on for dinner time. Lights appeared on the ground floors and at the same time at the top of the house, where the beds were being turned down, and the children put to bed. He saw one or two of them looking out of the windows from behind their safety bars, then the curtains were drawn, cheaper ones in the nurseries, so that the nightlight shone through, showing their colours, blue, green, brown, red. There was a good deal of traffic on the road, a number of motor cars, some farm carts. After the crossing it thinned out. Fred was able to go ahead fast. There were only two cyclists in front of him, two red tail-lamps, not together. One of them a woman, a young woman probably, the shape of one anyway, in a raincoat probably made of American cloth, which glistened in what light there was. Fred,
of course, knew the road, but he was paying attention. The brick wall to the left disappeared and became a large dark gap. The gap, Fred remembered, was a farmyard gate and the farm was one of several that obstinately remained, confounding with its clatter and its fierce thin stench the respectable houses on either side of it. Fred was just on the tail of the two bikes ahead of him, possibly rather closer than he should have been, when without warning a horse and cart came lumbering almost at a canter out of the opening. It had no lights and the driver was not holding the reins but either drunk, dead or asleep, lolling over the dashboard. There was a kind of shriek or scream which might have been from the horse, since even old horses make strange noises in a state of terror, then a sound like a vast heap of glass splintering as the world, for Fred jamming on the brakes, went absurdly out of the horizontal and hit him a decisive blow, as black as pitch, on the side of the head.

When Fred came to he felt terribly thirsty. Surely if it was half-time, they'd come and give him a bit of lemon. Something was buoying him up, preventing him from feeling the pain which he knew was waiting for him. He was in bed, on a yielding mattress, which showed that wherever he was it couldn't be in college. The room seemed to breathe. Something, anyway, was breathing. It was quietly lit, but enough to throw, on a wall papered with unknown flowers, the shadows of an unknown washstand with its jug and basin. Over him there was a white quilt and a white counterpane. It was very like a nursery. On top of the white counterpane six inches away from him, he could see the left hand of a young woman, large and clean with a broad gold ring on the fourth finger. He put out his hand and touched it. The gold was smooth, the skin felt rough.

Her face was turned away, but he could see a quantity of hair, a wealth of hair his mother would call it—brownish, or between red and brown, done up at the moment any old how. Her eyes were shut.

‘My God, what luck,' he thought.

His mind cleared suddenly. He sat up and waited for a moment to see whether he was going to be sick, for that would not do, one couldn't make an apology, combined with an introduction, after such a beginning. Keeping as still as possible, he said: ‘I owe you an explanation. My name is Frederick Fairly. I'm a lecturer in practical physics and a Junior Fellow of, of—' He would remember the name, surely, in a moment. ‘I think I have had an accident. I think you, too, have had an accident. I think you must be the young lady who was riding just in front of me.' But that was an unjustified inference. Quite possibly she lived in this house, and this was her bed.

Without moving or opening her eyes whose long light brown lashes remained closed as though it was not likely to be worth while the trouble to look at anyone, she answered: ‘I'm Daisy Saunders. Where's my cycle?'

‘I don't know where it is, Mrs Saunders.'

‘I'm not...' she said. ‘I don't...I'm not...it's not mine.'

‘Do you want me to go and look for it?'

She whispered, ‘Yes.'

‘I don't know where my bike is either, or my clothes.'

His head was bandaged. What about his vest, shirt, stiff collar, socks, sock-suspenders, trousers? ‘No, I'm sorry to say I seem to have nothing at all. Otherwise I could manage to get up, I think.'

‘Don't worry about your clothes. I've seen hundreds like you before.'

She's drifting, he thought. She can't know what she's saying. Doing the least sensible thing, he got out of bed. Accustomed by now to the dim light, he saw that it was a nursery, or perhaps had once been one. There was a large rocking-horse by the window, with some dark heap draped over its back which might be his trousers. Round the top of the walls ran a frieze of bluebirds in flight. The night-light was burning in a kind of metal case, a bird-cage. It's like a play, he
thought. Perhaps I'm reborn. But at home he never remembered sleeping in a nursery. The girls were all in there, and although he was the oldest, he'd grown up in the box-room. ‘Get back into bed, and don't move again' said the young woman. ‘That's orders.'

‘I'm afraid you may be losing grip, Mrs Saunders.'

‘I'm not Mrs Saunders.'

Fred got back into the bed. There was a faint, delicious scent of Pears soap. The pain was worst on his right side, the right of his head, and the right shoulder, not his right leg, that seemed much as usual.

‘Couldn't you find your things?'

‘I don't know.'

She lifted her head a little and let it fall again.

‘It's just my luck to be stuck in bed with a lazy fellow.'

Fred felt deeply shocked. In all his life he had never been called lazy before.

‘Where's the fellow I was riding with? What happened to him?' she asked.

‘I don't know what's happened to him. I don't care what's happened to him. Why are we talking about him?'

Perhaps he raised his voice a little. The door opened, and a stronger light intruded, first in a segment, then expanding across the bluebirds and the whiteness of the walls and ceiling. A head looked halfway round the door, and Fred heard a man's clear high voice, the true voice of scholarly Cambridge.

‘Venetia, there are two total strangers in the nursery. One is a man, who has lost his clothes. The other is a woman, who, I think, has also lost her clothes...' Then, coming a little further into the room. ‘This is my house, as it happens. You mustn't think me unwelcoming. My name is Wrayburn.'

It was clear that he had never been allowed to worry. That was not his work, worrying was done for him. Behind him, in fact, and into the room, came an exuberant charitable Mrs Wrayburn, fringed and tasselled like a squaw, although in pince-nez.

‘Oh, my dears. I left you to sleep in peace till the doctor came.'

‘They are ill?' asked Mr Wrayburn doubtfully.

‘The farmer's son brought them both in. Strong arms, you know. But of course, I didn't want you to be disturbed.'

‘I
have
been disturbed,' said Mr Wrayburn. ‘I heard voices upstairs. Why didn't they take them into the farm?'

‘Mrs Wrayburn?' said Fred.

‘Ah, he can speak!'

‘He was speaking much louder just now, and tramping about,' said Mr Wrayburn.

‘It's Mr Fairly, isn't it? I found a visiting card in the top pocket of your jacket. And your wife.'

‘I'm not Mrs Fairly,' said Daisy.

‘Well, but your wedding ring, my dear. And you were together in a heap on the road. You were brought in here together in a heap, you know.'

‘I'm not his wife.'

Mr Wrayburn summoned his good manners.

‘I hope you're quite comfortable, all the same,' he said.

 

Fred was moved to a nursing home in Bridge Street, or at least found himself there, with his own toothbrush and dressing-gown, sent for him from St Angelicus. That was after he'd become unconscious for the second time, said the untiring Mrs Wrayburn, making kindly enquiries in a velvet hat stitched with Assisi work. Unaccountably, Mr Wrayburn had come with her. Fred wanted to know where Miss Saunders was—‘You seem more certain of her name than she was herself,' said Mr Wrayburn.

‘Are you criticising her?' Fred asked. He was determined to get up and leave this place, which he couldn't afford anyway.

‘Criticising her? Of course he isn't!' Mrs Wrayburn cried. ‘Why should a young woman, or any woman, have to account for her comings and goings? Why should she know her name if she doesn't want to? All that we have the right to ask is, do the
higher elements in her nature predominate? Are her feet on the path that leads to joy? Is she in harmony with the new century?'