The Gate of Angels

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  The bricks were very old, certainly mediaeval. It had been established by the man in charge of our little expedition, Edward Nisbet—(you will not remember him)—that between the second half of the thirteenth century and 1427 there had been a small nunnery at this unlikely spot. The nuns were Sisters of the Seven Sorrows. The dedication had been to St Salomé, the Virgin Mary’s midwife. The farm, at the time, may well have been connected with the nunnery. All four of us stayed there, sleeping two and two in the four-posters in the garrets. The farmer’s wife was pleased enough to have our custom. Selling eggs and poultry, and taking in passing guests, were the only extra money she could hope for, and how many people were likely to pass there in those days before the road was made?

  ‘I hope you young gentlemen slept sound,’ she asked us the first morning. We hastened to reassure her, except for Nisbet, who, while scrupulously polite, cared very much for accuracy.

  ‘Nothing of great importance, but you and your friends were singing and talking very late, Mrs Hinton.’

  —‘You mean me and Hinton? We’re never late retiring. We work too hard for that.’

  The rest of us, discerning a little resentment, or self-righteousness, here, said that we had heard nothing. I had slept in the same room as Nisbet, and I had certainly heard nothing.

  We had paid Hinton to have the top-soil turned over before we came so that we could start our measurements and drawings at once. We had also hired two farmworkers, who gave it as their opinion that the site looked like nothing so much as a couple of rows of piggeries. The ground plan of the convent, to tell the truth, seemed likely to turn out to be nothing very particular. The only real interest of the place lay in an account given in 1426 of a special visitation ordered by the Bishop of Ely. At that time things were in an unsatisfactory state. There were only two very old women there who still wore the habit, though both were dirty and neglected, and a third who, though also old, was said to be of immoral life. The roof was described as ‘not sufficient to keep out the rain’. The Bishop seems to have sent a second commissioner, empowered if necessary to evict the women and rehouse them in the convent of St Radegund. But the place was unimportant, and no further records survive. If the Bishop’s visitor arrived, there is no means of knowing what happened to him. By the time the road was built there had been nothing for some three hundred years to show where once the nunnery stood. The grass covered it, the cattle moved over it.

  Nisbet was no better the following night, when he actually woke me by dashing cold water in my face and told me that he could not only hear the voices but, quite distinctly, what was said.

  ‘In, in, in’, again and again, and once, ‘in with him. Under, under, under.’ The voices rose very high, higher than a woman’s, he thought. They had been terrible to him.

  The idea of some kind of joke on the part of Mrs Hinton arose, but to be rejected at once. Mrs Hinton laughed once and only once during one short stay, when one of our party tripped over the worn front doorstep of the farm kitchen and measured his length on the floor. Then she did laugh, in fact wept and wheezed with laughter. She didn’t, she said, in the usual run, see anything like that from one year’s end to the other, and it had done her good.

  ‘One must be glad to have done our hostess good,’ said Nisbet. ‘I suppose, by the way, she can’t be susceptible to rheumatism.’

  ‘I suppose the whole Fen country is agueish,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t feel a touch of it, Matthews?’—Did he? I asked.

  ‘I’m in pain,’ he answered, and now that I looked at him (it being a feature of living closely with anyone that you cease looking at them attentively) I saw that there was a leaden paleness, a darkness round his eyes and nostrils, which would normally be a symptom of the very ill.

  ‘What sort of pain?’

  ‘There is a pressure. I feel constricted.’

  ‘That’s in your mind, Nisbet.’

  ‘It’s not in my mind.’

  ‘Let us get some fresh air.’

  We went down to the diggings, although it was only just light. Nisbet at once suggested that we ought to open up the brickwork and the culverts in the ditch.

  I have already referred to the culverts as being certainly as old as the convent. The field, of course, no longer relied on them for its drainage. Still, if they were dismantled, they would have to be put back, and neither of our farmworkers seemed very confident about being able to do this. To our astonishment, they both expressed the opinion that it was a bad thing to meddle about with old drainage work, and that there was no telling what was underneath it.

  ‘But that’s exactly what we’re here for,’ I said. ‘That’s what we’re paying you for. We particularly want to know what is underneath it.’

  They said they’d known jobs like that before, which had ended with the ground caving in and collapsing altogether. Pressed, they could not give the exact details. I am sure, however, that we should not have persisted with the idea if Nisbet had not shown such a sickly eagerness and a disposition, while the rest of us were at our surveying and note-taking, to linger round the culvert.

  ‘Hang it,’ the others said. ‘He’s nosing about like a dog round a sewer.’

  He went out before we did, and came back later. Hoping to lighten the atmosphere, I asked him if he had seen anything in particular? To my surprise, he said he thought he had.

  ‘Well, what, or whom?’

  Reluctantly, he told me that it was an old woman, who had opened her mouth at him, as though gaping or gobbling. She was quite toothless. Now, forty years ago, old women without teeth were more common than not. If they were poor, they had no remedy. I asked him why he should care about that? He answered that he had been afraid she would touch him. I would have felt like laughing if he hadn’t looked as he did.

  ‘Where was she going?’ I asked.

  ‘To Guestingley, I suppose. There was nowhere else she could go.’ He repeated, ‘I was afraid she was going to touch me.’

  I forget whether I mentioned that the other two members of our party were medical students. Although that by no means proved they knew anything very much, I decided to ask them something about the effects of strain, and whether we oughtn’t to advise, or persuade, Nisbet to go home as soon as possible. Before I had the opportunity to do this, however, Nisbet told me that the night before, during which I must admit I had been sleeping soundly, he had got up and gone down to the ditch again to examine the brickwork in the bright moonlight.

  ‘Well, and was your old woman there?’

  He had seen three women, he said. They were down on hands and knees, poring at something large and dark which they had brought with them. It was the naked body of a man. The man was not dead, because there was some movement of the legs and feet. Then, by a process which Nisbet could not see, the man, whose bones must have been crushed and collapsed and his body distorted into a shape of grotesque length and thinness, was being inserted inch by inch into the culvert. He never made a sound, but the feet still moved.

  —‘And what did they say, these women?’

  —‘They said “in”, “in”, and then “under”.’

  ‘There’ll be a moon tonight,’ I said. ‘I can’t help feeling that it’s a good deal easier to observe things by day, but if you want to do this night walking again, I shall come with you.’

  He looked at me as if he couldn’t remember exactly who I was. I should have said that by this time he was eating almost nothing, whereas the rest of us, after working all day in the open air, had very large appetites. We could not, of course, ask him not to sit at table with us, but it would have been much more pleasant if he had not. Mrs Hinton’s feeling obviously was that he had paid for his board, so he ought to be given it. She put down great platefuls in front of him and took them away untouched without a word.

  We went to our rooms and to bed.

  ‘What the blazes are you doing?’ I shouted, waking up suddenly. I had gone to sleep, and Nisbet, who had not undressed, w
as just going out of the room. I put on my Norfolk jacket and followed. Once outside the house, although normally Nisbet never ran, he began to run. I caught up with him at the same wretched place. He was lying down on the ditch, still damp and full of long weeds and grasses in the height of summer.

  ‘I was waiting for you, Matthews.’

  ‘Waiting for what? Have you found anything?’

  ‘I wasn’t looking for anything. I know what’s there. My point is—have you got a sharp knife?’

  ‘What for? I daresay I could fetch one from the kitchen.’

  ‘All this should have been done in silence. You must cut my tongue out. That will be the work for you to do.’

  I was determined to get him back to the farm. His mind seemed to have given way, which was a relief rather than otherwise. At that age I was reasonably strong. Rather stronger than Nisbet, perhaps. They talk about dragging people away, but how can you do it unless you can get hold of an arm or a leg? We were wrestling, both covered with grass and dirt. Nisbet repeated again and again, with an unpleasant tone of voice, ‘In, in, sweetheart. In, in!’

  —‘This won’t do, old fellow,’ I said. His ‘in, in’ made my flesh creep. I wasn’t getting the better of him, and suddenly he reached over and stuck his right hand and half his arm in the culvert. It was a night of broken cloud and I could hardly see what I was doing. I got down and lay shoulder to shoulder with him, putting my left arm under his left armpit. Then I began to heave. It wasn’t simply a question of his being caught or being stuck in the drain tunnel. Someone was hauling against me, stroke by stroke, to get him away.

  ‘Pull together, Nisbet,’ I shouted in his ear. ‘Imagine we’re both back at school. The tug-of-war, Nisbet, think of that. Heave!’ I did not know where Nisbet had been at school, but I couldn’t think of any other appeal to make. From what I could see, he was not looking much like a schoolboy. He was doing nothing to help me. He was doing his frantic best, in fact, to get free from me. Still ‘in, in, in’. The only chance I had was when (as at last he did, lolling sideways) he fainted. Now the arm came out free, like a recoil. The hand had not gone, it was still joined at the wrist, but it was bones and tendons only. All the flesh had been dragged or sucked off to the last shreds. They had it all. I said aloud, ‘He’ll bleed to death.’ But my shouting—‘Pull together’, I suppose, and so forth,—must have been much louder than I knew and the other two fellows were running in their nightshirts down from the farm. I did not think of what they would feel when they saw poor Nisbet.

  Neither of them had dealt before with a major haemorrhage, still, once he was on the kitchen table, they were able to manage a tourniquet. I fetched the doctor myself. I have forgotten now what explanation I gave. ‘We are just on a quiet little expedition,’ I said. ‘During the summer vacation.’ The doctor said he had never, in all his experience, been called in to an accident like this, particularly as the result of a quiet little expedition.

  I do not know that you are ever likely to hear much more about this story. Certainly, Nisbet, although he recovered, was always very unwilling to talk about it. Because of his disability, he never took orders, for which he had been intended. Apart from the loss of his arm up to the elbow, there was some impairment to the brain. I believe he went to live abroad, I think in Belgium; yes, it was Belgium.

  You will ask, what of the excavations? They were never taken in hand again, although there was necessarily some digging when the road was built. I made it my business at that time to find out whether anything worth noticing had been turned up. Yes, an ancient male skeleton, a curiosity, and rather a horrible one. It appeared to have been crushed and rolled up and then stretched or elongated. It was difficult to see how such a thing could have been carried out, particularly if it was done before the man was dead. There were a few rags offlesh, rather like the leather tongues of shoes; cured, you see, by the damp. To historians, much the most interesting items were some scraps of parchment which had been thrust or stuffed at some point, in a quite unseemly way, into the corpse. The few letters (there were no complete words) which could be deciphered made it almost certain that these scraps were part of a quoniam igitur—a writ of eviction issued by the Bishop, following on a second visit and inspection. You must remember that although there are more than ten thousand mediaeval writs of significavit in the Public Record Office, there was, up to that time, not a single example of a quoniam igitur. You will understand, therefore, the historians’ excitement. But it must be said that historians, in my experience, are excitable people.

  And now you will want me to return to my analogy. However, it is not quite that, after all. We set out to discuss the whereabouts of an unfortunate carter and of the third bicyclist, who had also disappeared. They were not found on the road, or by the road, the police assure us of that. But tell me, should we not also look under the road? I do not mean that the carter and the bicyclist have been the victims of any human violence. Buried, however, beneath the tarmac, where the ancient brick culvert runs, I believe, they are. Peace to what remains of them! We talk of ‘vanishing into thin air’. They, however, have been swallowed by gross earth and fen water. There are places, not always impressive, or even noticeable in themselves, which cannot be disturbed. Something so loathsome or so cruel has once happened there, that any disturbance will demand a repetition—we may call it a reparation in human blood. When, and how often? Well, it is not for us to know the times and the places. Let each of us lay a hand on his heart and consider whether he has been, at some time or another, in a place which appears not to have settled down peacefully, but seems, on the contrary, to be waiting to be laid to rest. The carter and the bicyclist are gone. Let us say that it’s happened. I have been asked, not once, but often, do I believe these things? Well, I can only say that I am prepared to consider the evidence, and accept it if I am satisfied.

  Dr Matthews’ story was written. Where and to whom should it be read aloud? This was the second part of his usual exorcism of whatever lay on his mind. It was his habit to wait until October, for the Feast of All Souls and All Saints, when the past year’s dead are invited to return from their uncanny kingdom to their old places, and to sit at their own table. He often read aloud at this season to the Burrowers, a society for mediaeval palaeographers. But he did not feel like waiting for their next meeting.

  ‘A singular impatience,’ he said to himself. Crossing the Protector’s Court at St James’s with his manuscript in his pocket, he met the Junior Dean.

  ‘Ah, Hartley!’ Hartley could scarcely refuse to spare his Provost half an hour. The two of them went back to Dr Matthews’ house. When the reading was over—Dr Matthews read deliberately, imitating each voice in turn—he paused, and looked searchingly through his round glasses.

  ‘I enjoyed that very much, Provost,’ said the Junior Dean. There was silence, which couldn’t be what was required, so he added, ‘There was a certain symbolism in it, I thought, and perhaps a hint of sex.’

  ‘I hope there is nothing of the kind. I never make alterations in my stories, once written, and I shan’t alter this one. Still, as I say, there is, I hope, nothing of the kind. Sex is tiresome enough in novels. In a ghost story, I should have no patience with it.’

  ‘Surely if one doesn’t find sex tiresome in life, it won’t be tiresome in fiction,’ said the Junior Dean.

  ‘I do find it tiresome in life,’ Dr Matthews replied. ‘Or rather, I find other people’s concern with it tiresome. One is told about it and told and told!’

  The Junior Dean did not think he had repeated the story to anyone. It circulated, however, and with it the rumour that the Provost of St James’s believed there was someone—perhaps two people—buried quite recently underneath the Guestingley Road, just a few miles before you come to Dr Sage’s lunatic asylum. After a while, the tale elaborated itself with the addition that the police were considering an application to close the road while they made a preliminary search—that, of course, would mean a considerable detour fo
r horse and motor traffic. The police, who had taken no action on the Guestingley Road incident, because they couldn’t see how to proceed, were well aware that the Provost, though cranky, carried weight, and was known often to go up to London, where he was consulted by influential people. Perhaps he was not very likely on these occasions to talk about the disappearing carter, but they decided in any case to put an end to a troublesome business. A summons was served on George Turner, farmer, for having provided a carter or driver, with whom he had a master and servant relationship, with an unsafe vehicle not showing front lights or rear lights, as specified by the Roadway Lighting Act of 1904 and also holding him responsible as an employer for the wrongs committed by his employee who, on February 26th, 1912, drove the above-mentioned cart without reasonable care and foresight, causing injuries to Frederick Aylmer Fairly and Daisy Saunders and damage to their machines. The magistrate’s clerk wrote to Turner to ask him whether he proposed to appear in court, or whether he would be represented by a solicitor. Turner sent a message to say: both. The police gave up hope that the whole thing would be not much more than a formality. They summoned Fred, Daisy and Mrs Wrayburn as witnesses.

  ‘They won’t need you dear,’ said Mrs Wrayburn to her husband. ‘There is nothing for you to worry about.’