The Gate

The Gate By A.L. Lester The road unfolded in front of the car as it ate up the miles in the night. Way above he could see the high arch of the night sky, as distant and cold and passionless as an afterlife he didn’t believe in. Arthur was dead. Finally gone. After all these weeks, dragging from hour to hour, fighting for every last breath, he’d finally let go. Matty didn’t know what to do with himself, so he drove. Not to anything or from anything, just an instinctive urge to keep moving. Before long he’d have to turn the car round and go back, back to the farmhouse—back to Arthur’s cooling body, life drained and dignity returned. Not quite yet though. Six weeks ago, he’d finally come back from France to find his brother sick. There had been no warning of it in Arthur’s letters. Just the usual cheerful news about the neighbours and the cousins and the titbits about the grass in the top field starting to grow, , now spring looked like it was coming in and they were thinking about sharing a couple of pigs this year with next door and what did he think? Nothing about the illness that must have been eating him alive from the inside even then, to be so thin when he had opened the door to Matty. Matty almost hadn’t recognised him. He was stooped like an old man and his skin was dry and yellow, stretched thinly over his face. Then he’d met Matty’s eyes and Matty had drawn breath and stepped forward to put his arms around him. “What’s wrong?” he’d asked. Arthur had stepped back out of his grasp and held the door wide and not answered until they were both seated at the kitchen table with a mug of strong tea. “Doctor can’t tell me,” he’d replied, brief and to the point as always. “Says it’s a cancer, most likely, but she can’t find anything to see.” And he’d poured a second cup of tea and that had been that. But in the night, Matty had heard him pacing the floor of his room, talking in a low and urgent voice. The lamp light crept under the door as Matty paused outside, wondering. When he knocked and asked in a low voice if everything was all right, Arthur stood in the half-open doorway, blocking his view into the room, although over his shoulder, Matty could see the disordered sheets and crumpled pillows that spoke of disturbed sleep and troubled dreams, plus piles of the ubiquitous books. Arthur had always been one for books. All through their childhood, he hoarded them like the dragons in his stories hoarded jewels, coming home triumphant from a trip to the library with yet another new volume. Later, when Father and the Rector helped him make the break from the farm and get a place at university with a scholarship, academia fed his appetite like dry twigs to a blaze. The house was full of them—Father had quite a library of his own, even before Arthur began to add his share. Now, after Matty’s four-year absence, there were even more. The shelves were overflowing. Small books, big books, leather bound, and cloth bound. Hard covers and paper covers. Rough edged and smooth. Wedged in on top of each other, higgeldy piggeldy, balanced in stacks on every available flat surface all through the house. Arthur was writing things down, too—loose leaves of paper scattered around, notes stuffed into the middle of abandoned volumes in longhand and shorthand notation. Matty asked if Arthur still wrote columns—he’d made a reasonable income with articles and stories for various papers and magazines in addition to overseeing the running of the farm—and Arthur gave him half an answer, purposefully vague. The help on the farm had been down to one older man and a couple of boys in the last couple of years, and it was hard to find the time. He found it difficult to concentrate since he’d become ill. But when Matty pressed him to say when he’d first noticed his health had begun to decline, he couldn’t really tell him. Matty bumped into Dr Marks in the village one day and she expressed the hope that Arthur was taking care of himself. She couldn’t tell Matty very much about what ailed his brother; she thought it was probably a condition of the liver, but because Arthur was reluctant to be referred to a specialist, it was difficult to say. She was pleased Matty was home to look after him a little, they didn’t see much of Arthur around the village these days and they were both missed. So Matty took himself home and tried to make things easier for Arthur. It was coming up to hay time and Matty worked long hours in the fields with the men to get it cut and stacked before the weather broke. He came home at twilight, itching and sore with exertion, but happy to be tired in a way that was easy to sleep off. The familiar rhythms of the farm settled into his blood again after four years of mud and bombs and gas and hurry-up-and-wait. Mrs Beelock still tended the kitchen and the poultry, her son helped outside, and Gaffer Tom worked at the hedging and ditching. Jimmy and Rob both came home to their jobs as farmhands and that made it easier. Jim had his wife and family in the village; but Rob went back to sleeping in the loft over the far end of the ancient beam and cruck barn like he’d always done. It was a small farm, but the years of war meant they had to work it hard and with efficiency, as the rest of the country had been worked to feed the army in Europe and the cities on the home front. His father had a small private income before the war, which meant they had the luxury of schooling and a touch of life outside of the small farming community they belonged to. He and Arthur had that now, and Arthur had his writing. Matty was home and, although their father died before the flames of war began to consume the world, it still felt right be back. Arthur, though. Arthur was an enigma to him now. He’d always been the brother Matty looked up to. He was ten years older—almost too old to be called up in 1914 and anyway, reserved to work on the farm. He’d left for Oxford when Matty was eight and seemed even more god-like when he’d returned in the summers between classes. Matty had left school and worked with Father, content with the country life and his round of friends and family. Arthur had gone to work on a London paper for a while, but then come home and helped as well as working as a writer. After Father died, they’d continued in the same vein until Matty joined up. Now Arthur was changed. Not in the way so many men were changed now, still able to hear the sounds of the guns and smell the stench of the mud. He was quieter, yes, but he was almost frenzied in his search through his books, focused on his work but unable or unwilling to tell Matty what it was he sought. He was thin and stooped and his yellowed skin had the texture of crepe. He got weaker by the day after Matty returned, until two weeks ago he’d been unable to rise from his bed. He began wandering in his mind, agitated and upset, sending Matty again and again to make sure the gates and doors were shut, and the lamps extinguished downstairs. He wanted Matty to promise to burn his papers and books once he was dead. Matty baulked at promising any such thing, despite Arthur’s insistence. The end came quite suddenly—Matty was sitting in the faded red brocade chair by the bed, reading aloud in the afternoon sunlight, the familiar fall and rise of Dickens rolling from his tongue without really registering in his mind. Arthur was lying on his side with his eyes sometimes open and sometimes shut, the cotton pillowcase stark white under his yellowed cheek. His breathing was shallow but calm. “Matty,” he said. “Matty, I need you to get rid of the books. Keep the gates shut and get rid of the books. Promise me.” His eyes were huge in his thin face. “Why, Arthur? What’s so bad about the books?” “I don’t want you knowing,” he replied. “I don’t want you to have to go through this. I can’t stop it now, I left the gate open too long and it’s got its claws into me and I can’t get free. Once I’m gone, it won’t have a way in. Keep the gates shut and it won’t have a way in. Burn the books, please.” He let his eyes fall shut again, exhausted. Matty took his hand and sat and watched the sun move across the red flocked wallpaper their mother had chosen twenty years ago, dust motes dancing in the golden light. Arthur’s breath became shallower and shallower as the sunlight became thicker and darker and golden like honey dripping off a spoon. As the twilight fell, the shallow breathing whispered away and everything that made Arthur himself left. Matty sat and held his hand a little longer as the soft evening wrapped itself around them. Then he straightened Arthur’s limbs and closed his eyes and tidied him under the sheet. He went downstairs and out of the front door, closing it carefully behind him. And he got into the small car he’d bought a couple of weeks earlier, an indulgence he’d been embarrassed to reveal to his brother, and he cranked the starter and opened the yard gate—and closed it behind him—and here he was, driving on the new macadam road up over the hills, head and heart quite empty.