The Gate of Angels

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘Has Miss Saunders come back?’ Fred asked, his heart dilated and closed as though what he felt was fear.

  ‘Yes, I thought I made that clear.’

  ‘You didn’t make it clear, you cretin. Why didn’t you tell me at once?’

  ‘Fairly, are you out of your senses?’

  Fred recollected himself. ‘Was I speaking loudly?’

  ‘Yes, very.’

  ‘Perhaps you could tell me what Miss Saunders said.’

  ‘Your voice was threatening, Fairly.’

  ‘Perhaps you could tell me what she said, and what she’s doing here. She must have asked for me, as you very kindly took the trouble to come round to the college.’

  ‘Not at all, she hasn’t asked for you at all. Venetia, too, thought that you ought not to be approached over the matter. But I exercised my own judgement. I don’t want any further burden of housekeeping on her shoulders. Ever since we moved out of Cambridge there have been difficulties over domestic staff, though speaking for myself I don’t see that you could find an easier household to work for. All I require—’

  ‘Is Daisy staying in your house? Is she at Guestingley Road? For God’s sake, Wrayburn, if you can’t tell me anything else, tell me that.’

  Wrayburn said coldly that he believed his wife had accommodated Miss Saunders in one of the attics. ‘You can’t expect me to occupy myself with such matters.’

  ‘I don’t expect it. You came here because you didn’t want your wife to have to be responsible for her. Of course you didn’t. Of course she mustn’t be. But for God’s sake have the sense not to let Daisy slip. Don’t let her get back to London again. Lock the doors. Talk to her quietly and seriously. Knock her on the head, give her a sleeping draught.’

  ‘You’re distraught, Fairly. You gave me to understand that you had no connection with this young woman.’

  They could not expect to walk much longer by themselves round the great walnut tree. The Treasurer, side by side with the Master, was coming out from the next door. Supporting himself on the Treasurer’s arm, the Master with an agile movement, stretched down to put first one palm, then the back of his hand on the grass.

  ‘It will rain on Wednesday,’ he said. ‘Who was it wanted to know?’

  During the reverse process the Master, never losing his dignity, gently raised himself back to the upright. Fred followed Wrayburn out and caught up with him bicycling north-westward. ‘I haven’t any connection with her,’ he called out. ‘Can’t you see that’s the trouble?’

  In fact there was no mystery about Daisy’s movements. Mystery is a luxury and would have been quite beyond her means. She had come back to Cambridge because she could not think of anyone who was likely to take her on, except Dr Sage. To be more accurate, she did not know anyone who had a private hospital except Dr Sage. She had come to the Wrayburns because she had nowhere else to go. She said nothing about where she had been during the intervening days. With the fare back from London, and a shilling to the driver of the laundry van, she had come to the end of her money, but she did not intend to ask for something for nothing.

  When Mrs Wrayburn took her up to the attic she saw at once that these were supposed to be the servants’ rooms and that there were no servants sleeping in them. Here she was in the room where she had been put to bed with Fred Fairly. She undressed, hung up her skirt, and washed under the cold-water tap on the landing. The basin was surrounded with sage-green tiles, representing the story of Pélleas and Mélisande. From the attic, if she leaned out, she could just see the lighted windows of the farm from which the cart had come, and the road with a few moving lights going along it, sometimes the bright acetylene headlamps of a motor-car.

  In the morning she came downstairs and found Mrs Wrayburn in a distracted condition. ‘Daisy—may one call you that?—I must tell you that I’ve decided recently that as a matter of principle we should live more simply. Fruit, vegetables, a minimum of tea or coffee, since science has proved these to be noxious. Now, as to main dishes, this is a tin which I bought at the new Eustace Miles Emporium in King’s Parade. You can read about it on the label, it’s all printed there and it’s worth knowing for its own sake, particularly if—well, as you can see, this tin contains Health Plasmon, which may be combined with a variety of substances to make nourishing dishes without the necessity of cooking them.’

  ‘It looks like cornflour to me,’ said Daisy.

  ‘I think one might get used to it,’ said Mrs Wrayburn, trying for a decisive tone. ‘I believe in the power of the mind over the body. Yes, I do believe in that. One can get used to anything. Even men can get used to anything.’

  ‘I hope you won’t mind if I say this, Mrs Wrayburn,’ said Daisy, ‘but I don’t think your husband’s ever going to get used to this stuff, particularly if he has to have it raw. And it’s a big house you’ve got here, with a lot of work needed, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone living in.’

  ‘Ah, the empty bedrooms!’ said Mrs Wrayburn. ‘They should be full of smiling faces and strong, willing hands.’

  ‘You live a bit too far out, I think, Mrs Wrayburn. I shouldn’t think you’d get a girl to stay, and if she did there’s nowhere to go in the evening except that farm.’

  ‘No, they don’t stay for long,’ said Mrs Wrayburn. ‘No, not for long.’ She added, as though one thing followed from the other. ‘I studied for four years at Newnham. I was the Organising Secretary of the debating society. I was both the Treasurer and the Organising Secretary of the Women’s Social and Political Union.’

  She looked at the sink, loaded down with all that was necessary when a husband had his daily meals in the house. Like most of her friends, she had prayed not to marry a clergyman, a general practitioner, or a university lecturer without a fellowship. All these (unlike the Army or the Bar) were professions that meant luncheon at home, so that every day (in addition to cups, plates and dishes) demanded toast-racks, egg-cups, egg-cosies, hot water jugs, hot milk strainers, tea-strainers, coffee-strainers, bone egg-spoons, sugar-tongs, 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. All of these were not too much (on a clean cloth, too, with the centre fold forming a straight line the whole length of the table) for Mr Wrayburn to expect—Mrs Wrayburn did not think it unreasonable, and nor did Daisy—and most of them were in the sink at the moment, waiting, in mute reproach, to be washed and dried.

  Daisy and Mrs Wrayburn understood each other at once, and, only a few minutes later, admitted to each other that they did so. Daisy would stay. The room in the attic would be hers. In her spare time she would do the work of the house.

  15

  A Walk in the Country

  Wrayburn regretted his hospitality on the night of the accident. Now he saw that he had made a second serious error in telling Fairly about the return of this never quite explained young woman. Fortunately, there was no telephone in his house, but Fairly might plague him by hanging about the place, or even by reappearing in the attics. However, all that Fred did, though admittedly he did it at once, was to send a note asking Miss Saunders if she would come out with him on her day off.

  ‘I suppose if she had been of a different class you would have suggested a chaperone,’ he said to his wife. ‘I mean, I don’t suppose Fairly would allow his own sisters—’

  ‘Oh, my dear, I don’t know whether he has any sisters,’ said Mrs Wraybu
rn, ‘and I am not in charge of Daisy Saunders. I am not even employing her, or not exactly. I believe I shall become rather fond of her, but I am not in charge.’

  ‘Who is in charge of her then?’ Mrs Wrayburn only knew that Dr Sage had taken her on at his mental hospital, and her hours were half-past eight to half-past six.

  Fred had asked Daisy whether in spite of their short acquaintance he might call her Daisy, and whether she would like to come out for a walk, a walk in the country. She said it would be the very thing. What about (Fred asked) taking the train to Whittlesford and walking from there to the mill at Great Chishill, only they wouldn’t, probably, get so far. Daisy said she was game.

  In her thick boots and a flat golfing-cap, which she had found in a trunk in the Wrayburns’ attics, she appeared ready for anything. She had turned up the hem of her skirt an inch all the way round. Her colour was higher than usual with excitement as they got out at the station. ‘What’s this place like?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve been here before but I’ve never really thought about it.’ He looked at her anxiously. ‘Ought I to have done? We shall have to head south-west, you know, out of the village.’

  ‘Look!’ she said, ‘there’s a house for sale.’

  ‘What about it, Daisy?’

  ‘Let’s go and see round it,’ said Daisy, ‘we’ve plenty of time. It cheers you up having a look round an empty house.’

  Fred tried to envisage this.

  ‘It’s just like shopping,’ she explained. ‘You don’t have to buy anything, it’s just to turn the things over.’

  ‘We’d have to go back to Cambridge, I expect, to get the keys,’ said Fred, but the keys were only a few doors down the street, according to the card in the window: enquiries at the ironmonger’s. The ironmonger began to say that he couldn’t spare anyone from the shop to show them round, but lost heart and entrusted the keys to Daisy.

  ‘We won’t be long,’ she said. ‘We’re going for a walk in the country.’

  The house, like all houses which have stood vacant for any length of time, seemed full of bits of paper. Leaflets, notices of church-services and parish fetes, circulars, advertisements for auctions, warnings of potato blight, had continued to come and probably were still coming through the cramped letterbox, and blown with the draught about the stone floor were torn-up scraps of bills and fragments of letters in black, blue and violet ink. ‘...cannot see my way to’...‘sday without fail’...‘lean on His mercy’. ‘I could read these all day, if I wasn’t going anywhere else,’ she said. ‘I don’t get a lot of letters, perhaps that’s why.’

  ‘People are rather given to sending notes in Cambridge,’ said Fred. ‘Sometimes I wish they wouldn’t. I suppose I get a good many letters. I hope they won’t end up like this, torn up on the floor of an empty house.’

  Daisy was looking through the drawers. One plate, no knife, one fork, one spoon. ‘All by himself, I suppose, you have to be sorry for him.’

  ‘It might have been a woman,’ Fred suggested.

  ‘No, you’d never get a woman to live like this. She must have died before he did, or left him.’

  ‘You’d have thought they’d have cleared the place out properly,’ said Fred, ‘whatever happened.’

  ‘Whoever saw a house cleared out properly?’ said Daisy. ‘There’s always something left.’

  The kitchen had a deep stone sink partly full of green moss, although the gaunt old tap could not have dripped for months.

  Daisy looked rapidly through the cupboards: nothing there but more scraps of paper and a set of chimney sweep’s brushes. One of the floorboards was loose. Probably all the joists were rotten, Fred thought. ‘There’s something underneath, I expect,’ said Daisy. ‘Where else had he got to keep anything? All these old men are the same. There’s money there, most likely.’

  But she would not let Fred lift the board, considering it unlucky. Upstairs—the stairs opened out of one of the cupboards—there was a dark garret, without furniture. No basin, he must have washed in the sink or under one pump, and used the earth closet in the yard, now boarded up, and sinking by slow degrees back into its native soil. Daisy was radiant. She had seen everything, and even knew the name of the one-time owner, having made if out from two of the torn-up envelopes.

  They walked back together down the street. It would have been quite different, Fred pointed out, if he had really been looking for a house. But that would ruin it, Daisy told him. He would be worrying about the money, the drains, the size of the rooms, there’d be no go in it. Fred sighed. Was it one of the differences between men and women, that women like to live on their imagination? It’s all they can afford, most of them, said Daisy.

  ‘I don’t think that ironmonger was took in,’ said Daisy, as they got over the stile. ‘He knew we’d no intention of buying. He could see how the land lay.’

  ‘How does it lie, Daisy?’

  ‘Well, this is the second time we’ve ever met. We don’t hardly know each other and we aren’t anything to each other.’

  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 that’s just what I want. I want children of six to notice it, I want ironmongers to notice it.’

  ‘Fred, you’ve got a family, haven’t you?’

  Fred explained that his father was Rector of Blow, and also what a rector was, as distinguished from a vicar. He admitted to a mother and two sisters, and said that he wanted every one of them to notice that he was in love.

  ‘Fred, quite honestly, did you ever take a girl out before?’

  He seemed to find this difficult, but only for a few moments. ‘I’ve never taken out a girl I wanted to marry before.’

  ‘She mayn’t have known that, though,’ said Daisy.

  ‘Why should they matter, Daisy? Why, even if they existed, should they matter? They don’t exist and didn’t exist. They’re unobservables.’

  Daisy quarrelled much less than most people with time. The past did not occupy her thoughts unless it had to, nor did the future. At the present moment she was on a country walk, and she wanted to do things right. In particular, she was prepared to be impressed by quantities of birds and flowers. The first meadow was flooded to about an inch deep, and lay under water as though under silvery glass, with the long grasses flattened and lying together under the slight current that rippled across them. The stream was too high to cross by the little bridge, they had to skirt round the top edge of the meadow. Once they were on higher ground it was as awkward as a walk across fields usually is, the path having been made by farm carts, so that you had to choose whether to stay on the high ridge in the centre or on one of the broad muddy ruts on each side. In Fred’s judgement, Daisy was entitled to the dry but higher ground, but walking there she was almost at the same height as himself. When she jumped down beside him they hardly had room to walk side by side. The only way possible was to go arm in arm.

  What about the birds, what about the wild flowers? Fred felt with keen anxiety that since Daisy had mentioned them he ought to be able to produce at least some of them. The whole sweep of the pale green hedgeless fields seemed empty, except for some distant cattle which had just been turned out. The spring wheat hardly showed. It was as different as possible from the country round Blow, so much less rich, less watched, less beautiful, less sinister. Here the sky stretched to a horizon without event, almost without landmark, so that a church looked only a mile away when in fact it was four or five. In the last five years Fred had got used to these shining fields. The first long walk he had taken in this direction had been with Professor Flowerdew and a lecturer in moral philosophy from King’s, who had said, as they tramped up this very same cart track, Flowerdew, I am finally convinced that the physical and the psychical are two different aspects of the same reality—Absurd! the Professor had called back over his shoulder. This fie
ld is not an aspect of anything. It is a field. My mind is not an aspect of anything, it is a mind and only differs from the field because it directs its own activity.

  ‘What were those birds?’ Daisy asked. ‘Were they quails, Fred?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not, I’m afraid they were fieldfares.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ said Daisy. ‘I should like to have seen a quail.’

  About flowers, Fred knew much less, leaving them, on the whole, to his sisters. He had hoped for early primroses, but there were none. Daisy, however, found in the grass by one side of the path, a number of tiny, whitish-and-greenish, insignificant looking flowers, not the same as each other, which he thought must be mouse-ears or chickweeds.

  ‘This one’s different, though,’ she said. ‘That’s a throatwort. You have to be careful, though, if you’re thinking of making a medicine out of it. It could make things worse.’

  She had taken off her gloves and was holding the miserable little plant delicately in her strong fingers.

  ‘Look, five petals. You can count them.’

  ‘They’ve all got five petals,’ said Fred. ‘I should never have known the difference.’ He looked at it with respect. ‘Is that really called throatwort?’

  ‘No, of course it isn’t,’ said Daisy. ‘I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what any of them are. I only said it to keep things going.’

  She could see that he was troubled. ‘You must always tell me the truth. I’m lost if I can’t depend on you,’ he said.

  They walked on.

  ‘They did depend on me at the Blackfriars. I am a good nurse. That’s not just vanity. Matron said I was the sort of nurse she wanted. Particularly with the post-operationals, and if she said that, she meant it, you can bet your Jimmy Skinner.’

  ‘Why did you leave London, then? Did you get tired of it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t ever get tired of it,’ she said. ‘But there’s a rule, you know, that you mustn’t discuss the patients’ cases, not outside the hospital, that is.’