The Gate of Angels (17 page)

‘I turned back to Cambridge and went to Pett's Hotel. I had a room booked there for the night for Daisy Saunders and myself. I knew she would have to come back there eventually. She hadn't any money and her cycle was smashed.'

‘Are you referring to Miss Saunders, who is at present in court as a witness?'

‘Yes, Daisy Saunders. I got gypped, though. She didn't turn up until the following morning.'

‘Why did you not report the accident immediately, in case help was needed?'

‘I wanted to keep out of it. I didn't want it to get about we were going to a hotel together. I didn't want to cock it all up for her.'

Kelly was speaking so quietly and flatly that the magistrate and his clerk were both leaning forward, their usual reproach to the indistinct. The magistrate repeated:

‘You did not wish to cock it all up for Miss Saunders. I take it that you mean you did not wish to embarrass her. What has made you decide to come forward now? Please speak plainly.'

‘I've changed my mind,' said Kelly. Then he shouted: ‘Jesus' eyes, now I do want to cock it all up for her.'

19

Mr Turner's solicitor retrieved him, and he was bound over, pending further enquiries. Kelly was detained by the police, who required him to make a signed deposition. All the others were free to go. Daisy took her bag and departed for Dr Sage's hospital. She had not looked even once at Kelly, although his eyes had been fixed on her. Neither had she spoken to Fred.

Fred went and sat for three hours in a small café in front of the magistrate's court. He ordered a cup of tea and two biscuits for five pence and thought of nothing.—Oh, but that's impossible.—It's not possible to think of nothing. Certainly it was unprofessional of Fred, who was paid by the university to use his mind, and unwise of him as a lover, but there it was, he was occupied with bitter sensations, giving way to stupefaction, then to emptiness.

The café was really only the front room of a small house. A coal fire smoked in a dispirited grate—not coal exactly, but brickettes made of coal dust and tea-leaves. There were three tables only. The manageress came through a bead curtain and asked if she should light the gas. Unless Fred wanted to read, she would keep it low. Fred recognised the note, universal as the voice of the sea, of worry about money.

‘I don't want to read,' he said. ‘Really, I don't need the gas at all.'

‘Oh, I don't want to look as though I wasn't open. In fact, I was going to ask if you'd sit by the window, to give some atmosphere, you see, if anyone's passing.'

Fred went and sat by the window. She moved his cup and
plate after him. ‘Your tea's cold now, I'm afraid. I would have drawn your attention to it before, only I was afraid you were thinking.'

‘Do you get a lot of thinkers in here?' he asked.

‘We don't get a lot of anyone. You'd think it would be a good place, opposite the court and the police station. Perhaps, though, if they see you talking—it would be better, really, if you could smile a bit. I could tell my father to come in here and sit with you at your table, only he doesn't have very good hearing.'

Fred tried to smile.

‘Didn't you fancy your biscuits?' she asked.

‘Look,' said Fred, ‘if the police keep someone in there to ask him questions and so on, then when they let him out, surely he'd cross the road and come in here?'

‘No, he wouldn't,' said the manageress's father, rattling and tottering in through the bead curtain, not seeming at all deaf. ‘He wouldn't come over here. If they're detained by the police they all get away as quick as possible.'

‘I'm waiting for someone to come out. That's what I'm sitting here for,' said Fred.

‘Will you be ordering something further, then?' asked the manageress.

‘Yes, yes, the same again.'

‘You wouldn't prefer something on toast?'

‘Yes, the same again, but on toast.'

‘You'll want some for your friend?'

‘I don't want anything for him. He's not my friend. I'm not really the sort of person you hoped for, I'm afraid.'

‘I'd looked for young people,' she said doubtfully.

‘I'm twenty-five, nearly twenty-six,' he said. She looked more doubtful still.

‘But your friend might want something on toast?'

‘I don't want to order anything for him. I don't even want to speak to him.'

‘You've waited three hours for him. I should have thought it was worth while speaking to him.'

‘I want to hit him.'

Fred realised now what it was that he had not been thinking about. The old father laughed extravagantly, steadying himself by holding onto the back of a chair. Fortunately Fred had a reasonable amount of money on him, having hoped to take out Daisy and, if necessary, Mrs Wrayburn, to luncheon. While paying for his various orders he saw Kelly coming down the steps of the police-station and felt a peculiar shock of disbelief that comes when the long awaited arrives. Kelly had his hat pulled forward instead of on the back of his head and his jacket collar turned up. It must be raining a little. When he reached the pavement he turned right and began to walk with his usual strut, which seemed to Fred to be that of a man who felt he had unlimited access to women, so that a young girl, picked up by chance and taken for the night to a cheap hotel, would be as nothing. His jacket would matter more to him, being less easy to replace.

There was nothing to discuss. Fred sprinted across the road behind a motorcycle and in front of a dray, caught up with Kelly, grasped him by the coat collar, and spun him round. This left them both in an unmanageable position, with Fred's arm round the back of his neck, locked in an embrace.

‘You're the schoolteacher,' said Kelly. He turned his head as far as he could and spat in Fred's face. ‘Shock off, schoolteacher.' Fred changed grip and hit him hard just below the ear. It was not a fair blow, but justice is sometimes what you can afford. Kelly did not behave at all as Fred expected. He stood for a moment as though doubtful whether to fall to the left or the right and then collapsed deliberately and totally as though only his jacket had been holding him together. He fell in front of a shop, a repairing tailor's, and lay there unmoving.

‘Do you need a hand, Fairly?' It was Skippey, quite unexpected at this end of Cambridge. ‘There's a man, you know, lying on the pavement quite close to you.' Passers-by, not wishing to be involved, made a detour to avoid them.

‘Yes, I knocked him over.'

‘Do you regret it?'

‘No, I don't regret it.'

‘But I think he can't stay here, Fairly.' Skippey picked up Kelly's feet, in their worn sharply pointed boots. ‘Where to?'

‘Honestly, Skippey, I don't know.'

‘Something will suggest itself as we go.'

Skippey walked in front with his back towards Kelly, holding him under the knees. In this way they successfully crossed Parker's Piece. He talked quietly but incessantly over his shoulder to Fred, who followed, supporting Kelly's head and shoulders, and looking after his hat.

‘Fairly, this whole incident is not characteristic of you.'

‘I'll tell you who he is. I'll tell you what he tried to do.'

‘Later, later. I'm glad to have come across you, as a matter of fact, because I should like to discuss a problem I've run into.'

They continued to thread their way down St Andrew's Street between people on other business.

‘I'm working,' Skippey continued, ‘as you know, on the Michelson-Morley experiments. I think the whole series could be repeated still more accurately. Minute changes of length, of course, entailing very fine measurements, which I can hardly be expected to undertake entirely by myself if I'm to perform my other duties satisfactorily. Yet I'm getting no response at all from my repeated requests for an assistant.'

They negotiated a corner, where Kelly's hat fell, and was retrieved by a schoolboy. The rain was still falling gently.

‘It's not that there are no funds available, there is always money to spare in a great university. Extensions, medical schools, they're building in all directions. They all want libraries put up, even the parasitologists, yes, Fairly, even the economists. Yes! And gold seems to rain on them from the skies. Yet I'm not satisfied that my application has ever been read, much less considered.'

‘Perhaps they don't feel much more needs doing on Michelson-Morley.'

‘Ah, Fairly! But I'm not satisfied that they offered anything like a complete proof.'

‘I don't see that a complete proof is possible,' said Fred. He couldn't believe that Kelly could remain unconscious for this length of time, unless he was very seriously hurt, and he didn't believe that either. His colour was better now than it had been in court. Perhaps, like a baby, he simply liked being carried about.

‘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

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.'