The obvious interpretation of Fitzgerald’s remarkable career, promoted by her, is that after four novels exploring aspects of her own life, she turned to the historical novel, and constructed remote and peculiar realities. There is something in that, but another reader might contemplate the ways in which she found possibilities to explore the peculiarities of love between the unalike in historical circumstances. Only in these novels did she find a way to pursue a convincing love affair in fiction, and all these late love stories are between impossible partners, whose link is somehow broken from the start. What events lay behind this development is impossible to say, and she could clearly only explore the subject once it was removed from her immediate circumstances. What remains, in these extraordinary, impassioned and exact novels is a world where thought and body, the solid and the unseen, the highest intellect and the basest behaviours and feeling unify in ways never envisaged before. Cambridge has always been very much one of the places where such unifications take place. It took the sharp eye and long contemplation of a Penelope Fitzgerald to give it such concise expression, however.
Philip Hensher
2013
How could the wind be so strong, so far inland, that cyclists coming into the town in the late afternoon looked more like sailors in peril? This was on the way into Cambridge, up Mill Road past the cemetery and the workhouse. On the open ground to the left the willow-trees had been blown, driven and cracked until their branches gave way and lay about the drenched grass, jerking convulsively and trailing cataracts of twigs. The cows had gone mad, tossing up the silvery weeping leaves which were suddenly, quite contrary to all their experience, everywhere within reach. Their horns were festooned with willow boughs. Not being able to see properly, they tripped and fell. Two or three of them were wallowing on their backs, idiotically, exhibiting vast pale bellies intended by nature to be always hidden. They were still munching. A scene of disorder, tree-tops on the earth, legs in the air, in a university city devoted to logic and reason.
Fairly was making the best pace he could. He did not much like being overtaken by other bicyclists. No-one likes being overtaken by other bicyclists. The difficult conditions (some were blown over) turned the Mill Road into a display of pride.
The year was 1912 so that Fairly’s bicycle, a Royal Sunbeam, must have been thirteen years old. It had Palmer tyres, which left a pattern of long lines like wires, on a wet, glass-clear road. He felt better when he overtook a man who, from the back, might have been someone he knew slightly, and turned out in fact to be someone he knew slightly, a lecturer in the Physiology of the Senses, who called out:
‘They can’t get up again, you know, poor beasts, poor brute beasts!’
He was shouting. It was like sea-bathing. Everyone in turn must swerve to avoid a hat which had blown off and was darting about, crushed and deformed, at random. A whole group went by, then one of them detached himself and was riding alongside.
‘Skippey!’
He couldn’t hear what Skippey said, so dropped back and came up on the other side, the lee side.
‘You were saying?’
‘Thought is blood,’ Skippey replied.
The first man, the acquaintance, caught up once more. They were three abreast.
His words streamed with the wind.
‘I was in error. It’s sheep that can’t get up, sheep.’
‘The relief of it!’ Fairly called back. Now that the rain had stopped for a moment the drops blew off the trees as hard as handfuls of gravel.
At Christ’s Pieces Fairly turned right, meeting the wind head-on, and made landfall at his own college, St Angelicus.
Angels was, as it is, a very small college. Jokes about the difficulty of finding it, and the troubles the inmates were put to in fitting into it, had been made at any time for the past five hundred years. The twentieth century had opened by increasing these difficulties – for example, in the case of the Fellows’ bicycle shed, crouched like a peasant shack on the inner wall, close to the Founder’s Entrance. Peasants, however, would have built this, or any other shack, out of the way of the wind and rain, whereas the bicycle shed, on three sides, was open to both. And then, who might have arrived there before you? The college tutor of Angels was, and had been since the Second Boer War, a volunteer with the East Anglian Territorial Bicycle Corps, and, largely for reasons of vanity, rode at all times his specially adapted safety machine with its leather case for signal flags, rifle rest and spare water barrel. It occupied its own space and three-eighths of the next one, so that if you were the last man in, as Fairly appeared to be this evening, there was nothing for it but to manhandle your own bicycle onto a large iron hook fixed by the porter in the upper part of the wall.
Rain streamed down Fairly’s face, gathered at the tip of his nose, and fell. The shed was not so much like a shack, perhaps, as like the dodger on a ship’s bridge, of which one could only say that it was just about drier inside it than out. One step into the dusk, though, and he was through the Founder’s Arch and then into the inner court, with its one great walnut tree. Here, cut off completely, the wind could hardly be felt. Feeling as though he had been stunned, or dreaming, and was still dreaming, he began a short diagonal walk across the grass to get to his own rooms in the north-west corner. From the larger darkness under the trees a patch of darkness detached itself. It was the Master of the College, his gown scarcely adrift in the quiet airs of the Court of Angels.
The Master was blind. Fairly hesitated. After thirteen years the Master might have been expected to know the ins and outs of his little college, and he did know them. Probably he had paused under the walnut tree to sense what the crop was likely to be. It was an old sort, a Cornet du Périgord, which flowered late.
The Master called out, scarcely raising his voice, however. ‘This grass is reserved for the Fellows of this college. Should you be walking on this grass?’
‘Yes, I should, Master.’
‘But who is it?’
‘It’s Fred Fairly.’
‘Fairly, didn’t you have an accident? An accident quite recently?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘On your bicycle, or off your bicycle?’
‘I suppose, both.’
‘I hope you weren’t unwise enough to go to hospital?’
‘I’m all right now, Master.’
‘Please take my left arm.’
This had to be done in a particular way, laying two fingers only on the forearm. It was the Master, however, who did the steering, slowly round and once again around the great tree trunk. He said quietly, ‘You’re very wet, Fairly.’
‘Yes, Master, I’m sorry about that.’
‘Now, tell me, have you made up your mind on the most important question of all?’
‘You’re talking about my religious beliefs?’
‘Good God, no!’
A rectangle of light opened