The Gate of Angels

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘I’m not just talking about the interferometer, you know, Fairly. I’m talking about the Fitzgerald-Lorenz contradictions.’

  Skippey’s high-pitched flow of words reassured everyone they passed. Either these were two good companions, carrying a friend who had drunk too much, or they were conducting an experiment in weights and measures which must have escaped from the bounds of the laboratories. The two of them might, it seemed, go on walking and talking indefinitely with their unusual load. To Fred’s surprise, however, Skippey had a perfectly good notion of where he was going. As they passed the Botanic Gardens he made a sharp swing to the right and in through the public entrance.

  ‘I want to see Batty. Perhaps you’ve met him—botanic morphology and homology.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I may catch him in one of the greenhouses. I want to get him to speak next week at the Disobligers’ Society. I’d like him to speak for the motion that we’d be far better off without trees.’

  Meanwhile it was nearly closing time. The gardens were almost empty. The grass had been mown for the first time that spring and near the verge of the wide lawns a large wire basket stood, full of green clippings.

  ‘In here, I think,’ said Skippey, preoccupied. Then, as Kelly was lowered into the yielding lap of the grass, he added: ‘A reasonable standard of comfort, I think.’

  20

  Fred’s Advice to his Students

  One of Fred’s problems was that he had to give a talk in about ten minutes’ time to his first-year second-term practical physics students. Pursued to the last moment by Skippey, who wished to continue their discussion, he took a taxi to St Angelicus to fetch his gown. From the Porter’s Lodge he telephoned the Botanic Gardens. He did not want to speak to the curator, he explained, it was a matter for the head gardener. Had there been, or was there a man asleep, or perhaps taken ill in the large grass basket on the south-east side of the lawns? The head gardener went away for what seemed a very long time to make his enquiries. Yes, there had been a man. They’d found him in the basket at closing time. Where was he now? They couldn’t say. He’d run for it. Had he looked ill? Not too ill to climb the fence, it seemed.

  In Fred’s room there was as usual a small pile of cards, invitations and letters. One was from Holcombe. ‘After the court rose this morning, I was, as so often, not able to find you. That is why I’m writing this. You did not notice me, I think, at the back of the public gallery, but I was there. What I had intended to say to you was a continuation, in a sense, of my last note to you, also written on the night of a Disobligers’ Meeting. In that I congratulated you, avoiding, I hope, any bitterness, on your freedom, as a Junior Fellow of St Angelicus, from any serious emotional worry. There was no point at all, I reminded you, on your getting to know any young women at all of the marriageable class. Well, I’ve seen your Miss Saunders now, and it is only too evident that, although good-looking, she is not of the marriageable class. You, I imagine, cannot, after what passed, possibly intend to see her again, but, Fairly, you’ve no idea how difficult it is for me to get hold of a woman of any kind. Here is my suggestion. I cannot afford to marry, but neither can I afford to be particular and nor, I suppose, can Miss Saunders....’

  Fred took his gown from its hook on the back of the door and walked to the Cavendish.

  There were eight undergraduates sitting where he himself had sat eight years ago, glad to be young, and pitying the light-heartedness of the middle-aged. Then, as now, J. J. Thomson was in charge at the Cavendish (although he had become Sir Joseph), then, as now, the labs were overcrowded with research students, all of them left to patch up their own apparatus by trial and error, each of them lucky if they could find a little space, even on a single table. The room at the very top of the building where Fred lectured was (now as then) icy cold because of the very narrow bore of the copper heating pipes which were supposed to avoid magnetic disturbance. Out of this squalor had come indisputable greatness. Not one of the students would have wished to be anywhere else on earth. They were at the Cavendish.

  Fred was a good teacher, having begun early by helping out at Sunday School. All the village children of Blow attended every Sunday afternoon. It was their parents’ only chance, in the crowded cottages, to get to bed with each other without interruption. This was well understood at the Rectory. Fred, and Mrs Fairly, and later on, Hester, knew that rain or shine, they must keep hard at it in the parish room till half past three. ‘What was the second plague of Egypt?’ ‘What was made of Shittim wood overlaid with gold?’ ‘When Balaam’s ass was endowed with speech, what was her first remark?’ It was strange to think how many village children in England, certainly in Blow, could answer these questions without hesitation.

  Fred told his class that he would conclude this afternoon with Gauss’s theorem as applied to gravitational fields. ‘The total outward normal gravitational flux over any surface enclosing a mass m is equal to 4 π m. The 4 π occurs here because we are using a non-rationalised system, and the negative sign because the gravitational field always acts towards a point mass.’

  For some reason the class found it necessary to take all this down. There was an element of sympathetic magic here. When the last one had stopped writing and the lid of the last inkwell had been shut, Fred said, ‘Just a moment. Two weeks ago I asked you to write an essay. I have your papers here, but I’m not going to give them back for the moment because I am not quite satisfied with them. “Not quite satisfied” is, of course, what we say in this university for “not at all satisfied”. You remember I asked you to write a general essay. If I was proposing a subject to you to-day it would very probably not be the same one, but as it was I asked you to devise a rational system of measuring human happiness. All of you looked startled. A physicist sitting down to answer such a question, you seemed to think, would be a freak. As a class, you had the air of wanting your money back. I, however, wanted to have the opportunity of reminding you that there is no difference whatever between scientific thought and ordinary thought. We know something about the physiology of the memory and something about the physiology of the senses, but we don’t yet understand the physiology of thought. Believe me, when we do understand it we shall find that all thinking is done in precisely the same way.

  ‘Whatever you do, gentlemen, don’t, as scientists, believe you are anything extraordinary. Don’t allow yourself for a moment to feel anything like contempt for those whose minds work differently from your own. Their minds in fact don’t work differently from your own. Don’t tell yourself that their ideas are commonplace. It’s very good for an idea to be commonplace. The important thing is that a new idea should develop out of what is already there so that it soon becomes an old acquaintance. Old acquaintances aren’t by any means always welcome, but at least one can’t be mistaken as to who or what they are.

  ‘You have come to Cambridge to study the interdependence of matter and energy. Please remember that energy and matter are in no way something distinct from yourselves. Remember, too, that scientists are not dispassionate. Your judgement and your ability to do good work will be in part dependent on your digestion, your prejudices and above all, your emotional life. You must face the fact that if another human being, whose welfare means considerably more to you than your own, behaves in a very different way from anything you had expected, then your efficiency may be impaired. When the heart is breaking, it is nothing but an absurd illusion to think you can taste the blood. Still I repeat, your efficiency may be impaired.’

  The undergraduates in their black or dark blue gowns, went murmuring out of the cold, cramped room. Two of them turned and stayed behind, intercepting Fred.

  ‘You said, Mr Fairly, that our essays were very bad.’ He was Robert Cork, Sidney Sussex, and that was Fraill, from Pembroke.

  ‘Well, they were very bad. But I’m going to find an opportunity to discuss them later on with each one of you personally.’

  Cork took a deep breath. ‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind my say
ing that I was worried by your last remarks this afternoon. Fraill, here, too, was worried. Your remarks distressed us. They seemed to go beyond the impersonal. We both feel we benefit from your teaching and to some extent we have taken you as a model for the early stages of the scientist’s life.’

  ‘What do you want a model for?’ asked Fred, but Cork only repeated: ‘We were worried,’ while Fraill boldly put in: ‘It sounded something like a personal trouble.’

  ‘Your papers were very bad, both of them,’ said Fred. ‘However, thank you.’

  21

  At Dr Sage’s Hospital

  Dr Sage’s hospital (his partner’s name, whatever it was, was never mentioned) had once been a large private house. It was a rose-pink Jacobean-style mansion with Dutch gables and odd-looking oriel windows which the Virginia creeper and wisteria partly hid. Fred asked his cab to wait. He still had another appointment that evening which couldn’t be cancelled or deferred. That meant arriving back in Cambridge by seven.

  At the reception desk he said: ‘I should like to speak to Miss Saunders. She is one of the nurses here.’

  ‘There’s none of them called that, sir.’

  At the same time Dr Sage himself, coming, with a welcome touch of wildness, out of his private office, shouted: ‘Here I am, if you want me! There’s nothing wrong, you know, with my patients here! Wrong in fact doesn’t describe any of them. I can easily imagine a society in which they would be quite normal. Not so easy to imagine one in which they would be happy.’

  ‘This gentleman is enquiring for a Nurse Saunders, Doctor. But we haven’t a nurse of that name.’

  ‘Saunders is here, but she’s not a nurse,’ said Dr Sage sharply. ‘She is a ward-maid. You ought to have known that. Don’t, in your ignorance, amuse yourself by turning away my callers. You are the receptionist. Receive!’ He disappeared out of the front door. A porter was sent for to take Fred to the service entrance.

  ‘You can’t go in there until they come out,’ he explained.

  ‘When do they get off work?’

  ‘Half-six, sir.’

  The service entrance was the old back door of the house. Out of the high window above it came gusts of disinfectant, gravy, custard and Monkey Brand soap. Round the corner of the building Fred could see a green lawn where Dr Sage, calm now, was pacing gravely to and fro, to and fro, with a gesticulating patient.

  Women began to come out in twos and threes, carrying the bags they had brought with them for their allowance of hospital scraps. The lights went on. How much of the day have I spent waiting? Fred asked himself. Then at last Daisy appeared, wearing her coat, but not her hat. He was taken off guard.

  ‘Well, you’ve caught me out,’ she said flatly. ‘Dr Sage didn’t give me a nurse’s place. Of course he didn’t. I never even got my certificate. He’s still at the Blackfriars three days a week. He knows what happened to me. I didn’t have any explaining to do. That was a relief. He said he’d take me on for the ironing. We have a lot of incontinents here. We use more linen than most.’

  ‘That’s not what I want to ask you about, Daisy.’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d come out here,’ she said.

  ‘I shall always come where you are. How could you not know that? But, Daisy—’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘It’s all horrible. Pett’s Hotel is horrible. You can take rooms there by the hour.’

  ‘Well, that’s handy for some,’ said Daisy.

  ‘Don’t talk like that,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I never went there. I was going to, but as it turned out, I didn’t.’

  ‘But Daisy—he’s horrible as well. Kelly is horrible.’

  ‘Perhaps he wouldn’t do for Cambridge, but it takes all sorts.’

  ‘Not that sort, in heaven’s name, how could you go to Cambridge or anywhere else with one of that sort?’

  ‘If you want to know, I’ll tell you. I felt down. I told you how I lost my place. I didn’t count on meeting Kelly at Liverpool Street. I didn’t count on meeting anyone. But when he was there, even though he was dressed flash and I didn’t like him, still he was better than no-one.’

  ‘But do you love him, Daisy?’

  ‘Lord, no.’

  Fred had a suffocating feeling that there were laws or regulations governing his situation so that only a certain number of questions would be allowed. Also, that he was already asking the wrong ones.

  ‘Why did you say in court that you didn’t know who he was?’

  He wanted to get her away from the back door. They were standing under a gas standard which dimly lit up the path. She looked very pale and not, perhaps, even pretty. Why had she said she didn’t know who Kelly was? That, indeed, was what Fred most needed to be told. It was just within the bounds of the possible that she had pretended not to know this man with the idea of sparing his own feelings. If that was so, the whole towering structure of his misery would disintegrate, leaving only what was precious behind. Say it, Daisy, say it, say it. But he dared not ask her.

  ‘Of course I don’t tell lies unless I’ve got to,’ she said. ‘Any more than you run to catch a tram unless you’ve got to.’

  Say it, say it.

  ‘I was afraid he might turn up here,’ she said, almost as though making conversation. ‘I don’t see as he’d want to go back to London. Unless the police kept him, I don’t know where he can have got to.’

  ‘My God, you don’t care where he’s got to, do you?’

  She murmured something which he couldn’t hear, except for the word ‘better’. He said bitterly: ‘Don’t put yourself to any trouble. If you are worried about him, I can set your mind at rest. He is, or was, until a short time ago, in a rubbish bin at the Botanic Gardens.’

  Daisy looked frightened.

  ‘I had to knock him down, Daisy.’

  ‘You mean you knocked him out?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Kelly’s older than you, quite a bit. His hair’s dyed. You must have noticed that if you got close to him. He has to pretend to be young in his line of business. His job’s nothing to be proud of, but then he didn’t have your advantages. You think of that the next time you come across a poor sod like Kelly.’

  They looked at each other in despair, and now there seemed to be another law or regulation by which they were obliged to say to each other what they did not mean and to attack what they wished to defend. Out of the dusk the hospital porter cleared his throat.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, it isn’t the doctor who wants to lock up, he wants to keep the whole place open, night and day, but the Board says we’ve got to.’

  Daisy said: ‘Don’t come here again, Fred. I’m not going to be here. You won’t find me here.’

  ‘But is that true, Daisy? Is it the truth?’

  He knew that it was. Daisy went back through the kitchen entrance and shut the door behind her.

  22

  The Gate of Angels

  That was at seven. At half-past Fred, as had been arranged, called in on Professor Flowerdew. He apologised for not being quite himself.

  ‘Not at all, my dear Fairly. I know what has been happening to you. You’ve been giving evidence, haven’t you, in, of all things, the police court. The Provost of James’s asked me in, an hour or so ago, for a glass of sherry. Although he dines here fairly often, I think I’m the only member of the Faculty of Natural Sciences with whom he is on sherry-drinking terms. And that is only because he believes, quite wrongly, that I am opposed to experimental research. He told me, in any case, about your distressing experiences this morning.’

  ‘Do you mean that Dr Matthews was in court?’

  ‘He went to watch the proceedings, it seems—why, I can’t think.’

  ‘I didn’t see him,’ said Fred.

  Dr Matthews, Holcombe, how many more? He hadn’t noticed them and if he had, they would have meant nothing to him. His mind would not have had room for them.

  ‘A most distinguished scholar,’ the Professor w
ent mildly on, ‘but they say that he hears rapping and tapping behind the panelling of the Provost’s house. Well, a man, of course, has a right to hear rapping and tapping in his own college. Anyway, he spoke to me of unpleasant characters making an appearance in court—a seedy young man, a rather difficult farmer, a pretty, but dishonest young woman.’

  ‘I don’t think you should take everything Dr Matthews says on trust,’ said Fred with an effort. ‘He’s a writer of fiction, as of course you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Professor Flowerdew doubtfully. ‘He must find it very confusing.’

  Fred had come, as part of his absolute duties, to collect his professor and take him to an Evening Discourse given (to mark its importance) in the east room of the Old Schools. The subject, in its way, was a delicate one. It was to be an explanation of how Ernest Rutherford, still in Manchester, had come to find himself in disagreement with his old master, J. J. Thomson, as to the structure of the atom and as to what—if anyone could see it—it would look like. Rutherford himself had not been able to come, but he had sent down from Manchester his personal assistant, Hans Geiger, and, as demonstrator, a very young research student called Marsden.

  ‘I shan’t go to hear them,’ said Professor Flowerdew, ‘but I shall be grateful if you could take very complete notes, which I do not think will be distributed in a typed or printed form at the lecture. Rutherford has proposed a nuclear atom. In that, there is nothing at all remarkable. Newton proposed it himself, although it was one of the occasions when he neglected his own principles. Rutherford, however, claims to be able to show that it exists, that this unobservable, consisting of unobservables, depending on exchanges of energy of which he can only say that he has no idea when or why they may take place, exists, and that we must take it to be the indivisible unit of matter.’