The Gate of Angels (7 page)

‘I'm not quite certain, Mrs Wrayburn,' said Fred. ‘What did she say herself?'

‘She didn't appear to be seriously hurt. But I thought she looked very pale. At any rate, she got up and dressed and said that she would go to a doctor if necessary as soon as she got back to London. She thanked us—not that we expected thanks—'

‘We did expect them,' said Mr Wrayburn. ‘I never remember expecting them more.'

‘I can't thank you enough myself,' said Fred. ‘Did she mention what part of London she was going to?'

Mrs Wrayburn shook her head, and with a smile of real kindness put a paper bag full of grapes and a pair of silver-plated grape-scissors by the bed. ‘Snip to your heart's content, Mr Fairly, and bring them back whenever it suits you. Snip! Snip!'

As they left, Mr Wrayburn lingered behind for a moment and said, ‘I learn that you are a Fellow of Angelicus. If my wife had known that she would not, of course, have made the mistake of thinking you a married man.'

The Wrayburns had notified the police. But by the time a constable arrived the horse had manoeuvred the cart to the edge of the road and was cropping the grass in the darkness, while the driver, whoever he had been, had completely disappeared. The farmer described this man as a casual, who was supposed to be going to pick up a load of old wooden sleepers at the railway station. He'd called in to collect some seed potatoes to exchange for the sleepers. The farmer couldn't say exactly what he'd intended to do with the sleepers, but they were handy things to have about the place. The man was called Saul, but that could be either his Christian name, couldn't it, or his surname. Didn't know where he came from, didn't know his cart hadn't any lights. At
the station, the staff knew nothing about any sale or exchange of old sleepers which were, of course, the property of the Great Eastern Railway. All this the police regarded as unsatisfactory. Fred's bicycle, and Daisy's, both damaged, were still by the side of the road. Daisy's had been hired that morning from Trimmer's shop in Silver Street, when she had given her name and left a sovereign deposit. She hadn't been back to the shop since, and though they always took addresses as a general rule, they couldn't find any trace of hers. Fred was asked whether he had noticed anyone else on the scene at the time of the accident. Yes, another man, bicycling just in front of Miss Saunders, but he couldn't describe him and had no idea where he'd got to. This, too, the police, although they spoke much more politely than to the farmer or to Trimmer, considered unsatisfactory. It was clearly going to be difficult to prepare a case to go before the magistrate's court.

‘But you'll have to find Miss Saunders,' said Fred. ‘Surely there can't be anything more important than that.'

The police said that they would be making every effort to trace the young woman. But this didn't satisfy Fred. He didn't want Daisy traced, he wanted her found.

 

 

 

 

8

Daisy lived in south London, where Stockwell turns into Brixton. She had always been used to there being too many people. The pavements, in fact, seemed too small to hold the houses' inhabitants, so that they spilled into the gutters and stood there offering objects for sale—matches, penny toys made of lead or tin, almanacs, patent medicines, cage-birds and so on, until darkness fell and the last prospect vanished. Then the house doors opened and somehow took them all in, along with the day's returning workers, the preachers from the gas-lit street-corners, the children, the drunks, all in and battened down at last. But south London, once you got away from the river and its warehouses, was built low, so that whenever the fog cleared, you saw an immense sky, moving at its own pace through sun and cloud, or over the net of the stars.

Daisy grew up with the smells of vinegar, gin, coal smoke, paraffin, sulphur, horse-dung from backyard stables, chloride of lime from backstreet factories, and baking bread every morning. When she was quite young they had been very poor. That was bad, but on the other hand, the great city was almost as well adapted to serve the very poor as the very rich. The stalls in the markets were strictly arranged, with all the cheapest stuff at one end. The customers accepted, without pretensions, which end they belonged to. At the cheap end you could get cow-heel, which didn't turn as quickly as most kinds of meat. The cow-heel simmered murkily at the back of the range for most of the day, until the broth, according to Mrs
Saunders, thickened of its own accord. After the long boil you took the bones out and pressed the glutinous grey mass under a plate weighed down by a flat iron on top of it. One of the glue factories down by the river came round collecting the bones, although they paid very little for used cow-heels.

On quarter-days a hand-bill came through every letterbox:
Keep ahead of your landlord. Late night work not objected to
. These men would move your stuff in a barrow, which made less noise than a pony-cart. The Saunderses, mother and daughter, always circled round their home ground, never taking rooms twice in the same street. Daisy's mother wanted to stay close to her job at the Falcon Brewery. Daisy minded babies. She had no brothers or sisters of her own, but that was an advantage, otherwise she'd have got sick and tired of babies by this time, Mrs Saunders said.

It stood to reason that Daisy had had a father, but she couldn't give a connected account of him. He was down on her birth certificate as a packer and handler. What had he ever packed or handled, where was he handling now? Neither mother nor daughter wanted to know this. Then came an unexpected, indeed inconceivable change of fortune when Mrs Saunders' sister, never before referred to, left her a house, a small terrace house in Hastings. Solicitors wrote to say that they had been “directed” to tell her this, and “desired” to give her the particulars. ‘But I thought she was dead,' Mrs Saunders said, again and again.

‘Well, she is now,' said Daisy, ‘so you can count yourself right.'

‘And if she'd been alive I always thought she'd gone to live in New South Wales.'

‘Don't grieve,' said Daisy. ‘You're not as sorry as all that.'

‘If I'd been given time I'd have been sorry,' said Mrs Saunders.

The news was not quite as inconceivable as it had seemed. The solicitor wrote again, desiring to correct the impression (which no-one but himself had given) that the house be
longed, or would ever belong, to Mrs Saunders. She had been left the end of a lease, sub-let. For the next five years, only, they would receive £5 a quarter. That will make a great difference to your way of life, the solicitor told them.

Mrs Saunders continued bottle-capping at the Falcon, because it entitled her to send her daughter to the Licensed Victuallers' Free School in Latchmere Road. Daisy grew up to be tall and slender, but solid. She had substance to her. Life would get a lot of work out of her. Until it turned grey her hair, recklessly curling, would always attract attention, because of the difficulty of deciding whether it was more brown than red. It was all according to the light.

At fifteen she put her hair up, securing it with strong steel pins, and started as a clerical. That meant crossing the river, along with a hundred and fifty thousand other south Londoners, twice a day. The journey was compared at that time by sociological observers to a great war or catastrophe in a neighbouring land from which the fugitives, forbidden to look back, scurried over the river bridges by any means available to them, only checked by the fear of falling underfoot. At the tram stop there were no queues—queues were for free medical dispensaries only—and when the tram lurched round the corner, drawing up sharply, the crowd rolled onto it and with it like a dark swarm of bees. You had to attack and be among the first. But defence, too, had to be studied. Daisy went out to work like her friends, closely buttoned, hat-pinned, and corseted against unwanted approaches. She also wore on her wedding finger a broad gold ring, which had come to her from the long unsuspected aunt in Hastings. Had Aunt Ellie ever married? Inside it was an inscription—
Whatever there is to know, That we shall know one day
.

Those who did the approaching, in the stifling proximity of the tram, were inclined not to believe in the wedding-ring, and knew what else Daisy was wearing as well as she did. It was a battle with no accepted rules and when the tram began to roll
with its plunging, strong-smelling human freight, men put their hands over their ticket and money pockets while schoolboys protected their genitals and women every point of contact, fore and aft.

Daisy had been taken on at Lambert's Glazing Supplies, in Fulham. Dark and unpromising-looking as the warehouse was, it had over its entrance a large stained glass pane representing the Finding of the Lost Sheep. The sky had been cut out of a single piece of opalescent glass in which white and blue had been fused together at random, giving the effect of high summer clouds. Probably no-one in England, in the year 1909, could have produced a panel like this one; certainly Lambert's couldn't. Although almost every small house in Battersea, Clapham, Streatham and Stockwell had its bit of coloured glass over the front door, Daisy had never seen, either before or in church, anything quite like it before.

The hours at Lambert's were from eight until eight. Young Daisy arrived with the irrepressible readiness to please, as though on creation's first morning, which is one of the earth's great spectacles of wasted force. She was given a stool and a peg in an almost lightless and airless tank behind the glass-store. The columns of figures were a delight to her, particularly if some of them had gone astray. The sight of 8073 foot of glazing at one shilling and sixpence a foot, with quarter-inch lead bars, subsequently changed to five-sixteenths, and the whole estimate to be raised by 13½% gave her satisfaction, as though she had faced defiance and quelled it.

She was earning twelve shillings a week. Mrs Saunders lost her job at the brewery. There was something wrong with her, a pain, not always in the same place. She had the time now to think about it. They had moved into two nice airy rooms on the top floor of a house where the handwritten cards, in every window except theirs, offered useful services. Plain Washing Taken In (this was on the ground floor, where the boiler was), Music Correctly Taught, Herbal Remedies. ‘You don't want to try those,' said Daisy. But Mrs Saunders had already been
to pass the time of day with the herbalist. She was able to report that he had nothing but doses of groundsel, for bringing it on, and penny royal, in plain envelopes, for bringing it off. Nothing for a woman of her age.

After less than a year, Daisy handed in her notice at Lambert's, and started a new job, still in clerical, at Sedley's Cartons. That, too, did not last many months. Had there been anything wrong with her work? No, said Daisy, unmoved, they couldn't fault her there. Mrs Saunders sighed. ‘Well, you told me Mr Lambert couldn't keep his hands to himself. Didn't he take any notice of poor Ellie's wedding-ring?' ‘Lord, mother, that's only for the tram,' said Daisy. ‘It's just for travelling. I take it off at work. Lambert knows I'm fifteen, and he knows I'm not married. We won't talk about Lambert any more.'

‘What about Mr Sedley?'

‘He's worse,' said Daisy. ‘He's carny.'

‘Carny' was a word which nobody in London south of the river used lightly. Nobody, either, would have thought of Daisy as difficult, or hard to suit, or even particular. She was, on the contrary, generous, and described as the kind of girl who'd give you the teeth out of her head, if she could get them loose. It was only that she didn't want decisions made for her by old Mr Lambert, still less by young Sedley.

There were a lot of people out of work now, more than she ever remembered. She made out she was a school-leaver, and got a recommendation from Father Haggett at the Anglo-Catholic Mission church of St James the Less. He felt for his parishioners, and was ready to sign anything, within reason, to help them to earn. With this she got a washing-up job, but at seven shillings a week only, with threepence held back in case of breakages.

Daisy loved her mother, who was the only relative she had, but she supposed it might be said that she killed her. In the spring of 1909 the Selfridge Department Store opened in Oxford Street. A circular was printed—everyone saw it,
because it was posted up in every window. Daisy read it in the Women's Penny Reading Room at the back of the church hall. ‘We wish it to be clearly understood that our invitation to the opening of Selfridge's, is to the whole British public and to visitors from overseas—that no cards of admission are required—that all are welcome—and that the pleasures of shopping as well as those of sight-seeing begin from the Opening Hour. Everything is NEW except the splendid old time-tried principles that must govern it—integrity, sincerity, liberality in dealing and courteous service.'

The magnificent building, with its columned frontage and pillared vistas, had gone up, said the circular, within a year, employing fifteen hundred men during this sad time of depression. There were lifts, worked by electricity. ‘I'll take you to have a look at it if you like,' Daisy told her mother. ‘It'll be my half-day.' Mrs Saunders had been up to the West End often enough, but never into a large store. The notion of going there under the wing of her tall, good-looking daughter drove her nearly crazy with joy, but she did not drop her defences.

‘I don't mind, if you happen to be going that way,' she said.

They took a tram to Victoria, and then the open-top motor-bus, nipping up the stairs like larks ascendant to get the two front seats on the left-hand side where they would see most, defying the dark greyish clouds to break. Oxford Street was almost at a standstill, blocked with horses and motors. They got out at Ruscoe's, the humble draper's next to the new great store, at No. 424. A red carpet covered the pavement, in homage to Selfridge's customers. Even the humble ones who wanted to go into Ruscoe's trod at least on the edge of this carpet. Inside the main door, blazing with light, Gordon Selfridge himself patrolled in a frock coat, exchanged, when darkness fell, for full evening dress. Mrs Saunders regally nodded to him. With Daisy to take her arm, she felt subservient to none. In fact, what was joyous to her was not the thought of the hundred departments, freely compared in the store's advertisements to the bazaars of the farthest orient,
or the twelve hundred assistants, but the chance of showing them that, to a woman like herself, they were not so much.