The Gate of Angels (8 page)

After they had seen perhaps twenty of the hundred departments, Daisy suggested taking the lift up to the Tea Gardens. The Gardens were on the roof of the building. They could do with some fresh air. Daisy said this as though both of them had just come up from the depth of the country, from green woods or potato fields.

‘Air!' said Mrs Saunders. ‘They can't make us pay for that.'

‘We haven't paid for anything yet,' said Daisy.

In these early days a bugle was to be blown every morning when Selfridge's opened, and again when it shut, as though every day spent in shopping was an epoch of history. Mrs Saunders, however, although she had talked a good deal about the promised bugle, seemed, now that she had the chance, not to care whether she heard it or not.

‘I think I'll go home now,' she said. ‘You can only see so much.'

‘You're getting tired, mother.'

‘No I'm not,' said Mrs Saunders. ‘Do I ever?'

‘It's not such a sin to be tired.'

‘It's a great mistake to admit it, though.'

After that she said very little until they had transferred once again to the tram and crossed the river back to their own country. The market streets were dark, the stalls wheeled into the side alleys and shrouded closely in oilcloth. You could smell the cramped stables, and hear now and then a horse shut up for the night, shifting from foot to foot. Under the gaslights at the street junctions the preachers, the political speakers, the Marxists, the suffragists, had given up all hope of audiences, and gone back to whatever homes they had.

‘What did you think of it, though, Daisy?' Mrs Saunders asked. ‘How long do you think it'll last? Floor after floor of stuff, I didn't hardly look at how much they were asking for it. And all laid out for everyone to stare at, it didn't seem quite decent.'

‘I know,' Daisy said. ‘They're almost asking for people to come in and help themselves to the things.'

She took the front door key out of the pocket of her skirt.

‘Well, I did take just one thing,' said Mrs Saunders.

My God, she never, Daisy thought. Still, it can't have been anything very big. She asked, ‘How did you get it back here?'

‘Just in the old way.' In her umbrella, then. She put her arm round her bony little mother.

‘I took it for you, Daisy, as a present for you.'

‘No, you didn't,' said Daisy.

‘Well, perhaps not.'

It turned out, when they got upstairs, to be a ‘rat', a roll of artificial hair over which you combed your own, to make it look luxurious enough for the present style. Unfortunately, the rat usually showed through to some extent, and this one was of a golden yellow shade.

‘Do you really like it?' Daisy asked doubtfully.

‘No, not really. I'm not so keen on it now I look at it again. It don't match my hair and it don't match yours. It reminded me of the colour I had when I was your age. We might take it back if we go that way again.'

‘I shouldn't worry, with twelve hundred assistants on top of the customers, I expect they'll find a good bit missing at the end of every day. You ought to have taken something you really wanted.'

Three days later Mrs Saunders died, while Daisy was out at work. She felt the loss through and through, and, even more keenly, the thought that she hadn't been there to take charge. She did not ask the doctor whether the outing to the West End could have brought on the heart attack because she knew he wouldn't be able to give a definite answer either way. Therefore she said nothing about it.

The herbalist, the teacher of correct music, and the taker-in of plain washing all found their way to Daisy's room, where the washstand was, and the oil stove, both curtained off. They had come, as she very well knew, to see if there was going to be
anything to spare from her mother's things. She told them that after she'd seen to the arrangements, they could come and see what there was. She wasn't going to keep anything except one photograph of her mother as a young woman. It didn't suggest that Mrs Saunders had ever had golden hair, but then the photographer, when he did the tinting, might have got that wrong.

‘Not keeping the furniture, Miss Saunders?' the herbalist asked.

‘I'm not staying here,' said Daisy.

‘But the washstand?'

‘I shan't take it with me.' He must have worked out it was behind the curtain, or else he'd been poking round and knew it had a marble top.

She notified the solicitor, who desired to express his regret. When she called round to ask him about her Aunt Ellie's house, he pointed out that on Mrs Saunders' death, the payment of £5 quarterly automatically lapsed.

‘Who gets it, then?' Daisy asked. The solicitor said that she would do well to consider her future carefully. Daisy told him that she had always wanted and still wanted, now that she didn't have her mother to consider, to be a hospital nurse.

‘There are two ways of entering nursing,' he said, ‘either you go in as an ordinary probationer—most probationers, I believe are from the domestic service class—or you go in to train as a lady nurse, paying a premium, and of course wearing quite a different uniform, and not being required to undertake any distasteful work. You would, I imagine, have very little contact with the lady nurses.'

He charged nothing for this advice, perhaps as a compensation for the loss of the rent from the Hastings house.

9

The matron at Blackfriars interviewed applicants only between two and four o'clock on Fridays. When Daisy had rung the bell and been admitted through the outer and inner doors, she braced herself to measure up to the other applicants. She was wearing a navy-blue coat and skirt and a navy-blue straw hat painted over with a patent lacquer so that it would keep its shape even in quite heavy rain. Two pins with plain glass heads secured it. The sleeves of her costume were rather short. She had had to turn them up a bit to hide the wear on the cuffs. Some inked them in, but Daisy never. On the inner door there was a painted notice which read ‘This hospital turns away more than a thousand applications a year from persons desiring to train as nurses. Every year perhaps 4 or 5 are accepted.'—Words of challenge, welcome to the free spirit. Because or in spite of them, every chair in the waiting-room was occupied. Daisy stood with her back to the wall, looking at the stiffly sitting girls. All wore navy-blue costumes, all the sleeves were unnaturally short, all wore straw hats with the exception of one dark, foreign-looking woman, perhaps Spanish, perhaps from Gibraltar, older than the others. You couldn't apply over the age of thirty-eight; perhaps she was thirty-seven. She asked Daisy if she had come far. Daisy said she was used to walking. The others looked away, as though, if they listened, conscience might drive them to offer her a seat.

‘The next one will soon be out,' said the dark woman. ‘She is not taking long today.'

‘Have you been here before, then?' Daisy asked, but that
was not an acceptable question, and there was no answer. The white-painted brass-locked door of the matron's office opened and a girl came out, crossed the room with head bowed, and said something (but nothing that anyone could hear) to the receptionist. All the applicants stirred a little. Either she had had a cold, or she was in tears. The porter was called; the receptionist told him to get a cab. A lady applicant, perhaps.

Daisy was the last to be called. She looked with respect at the woman sitting on the other side of the desk. You had to struggle, perhaps fight and bleed, to get to a position like that. Matron was short, pale and pale-haired, as straight as though suspended from a hook.

‘You may sit down.'

She repeated from the application paper in front of her Daisy's name and address.

‘You are nearly eighteen. Are you a single woman or a widow? If you are a widow, have you children? If children, how are they provided for?'

‘I'm single.'

‘And have you anyone dependent on you for support?'

‘Not now.'

‘You may call me Matron.'

‘Not now, Matron.'

‘But recently?'

‘There was my mother. She died in March.'

‘And that left you free to apply to enter the nursing profession, which of course would entail your living away from home.'

‘I suppose it did.'

‘So that her death has been release for you.'

‘No, I won't say that, and I don't say that. It wasn't a release for her either.'

The matron appeared not to listen to this, but fixed her attention on the papers on her desk. ‘Your birth certificate. You're too young, but the Governors have changed their policy about that to some extent. Vaccination certificate.
Height?' Daisy said she thought five foot six, without heels. ‘It's not a matter of thinking,' the matron said. ‘Educated at the Victuallers' School, certificate of good conduct and application. Did you study Latin? Do you understand what I mean by enemata?'

Daisy did not, but said she was prepared to learn.

‘I don't expect the girls who come to us to know anything. Now, are you strong and healthy, and have you always been so? Let me explain, in order to save time, that several of the applications today mentioned, apparently only as an afterthought, that they had rheumatic fever as children, which meant that if they were accepted here they might collapse and become a nuisance and an expense at any given moment.'

‘I've always been strong and healthy,' said Daisy and beneath her put-on clothes she felt her physical self-respect extend and stretch itself, like a cat in the sun.

‘And your sight and hearing are perfect?'

‘Yes, I think so. I've never thought about them.'

‘You notice that I wear reading-glasses myself. I need them now, but as a probationer I did not need them. Have you any physical defects?'

‘What kind of defects?' Daisy asked, a little troubled.

‘Any that I can't see at a cursory glance. You may be subject to very heavy periods. You may be marked and scarred. Your spine may be crooked.... Have you any tendency to pulmonary complaints?' She looked up sharply. ‘Do you understand what I mean by “pulmonary”?'

‘Yes, it means to do with the lungs.'

‘Pertaining to the lungs. A sickly nurse is of no use to the profession. One might call her an enemy of the profession. Above all, though, we don't want a weakly habit of constant complaint. As a rough guide, remember that while the average man is ill for four days a year, a grown woman must expect to spend one fourth of her life in actual pain.'

Daisy felt a rush of admiration. So far she herself had done nothing like her fair share.

‘The next thing I am going to ask you is: have you read, and do you clearly understand, the Regulations of this hospital? I find that reading and understanding are not the same thing. Copies are handed out in the waiting-room, but although the applicants have plenty of time before their interview to go through them, they often turn out, in fact, not to have grasped them at all.'

Nobody had given Daisy a copy of the Regulations, perhaps they had run out, but to say this would get the receptionist into trouble. She made a guess.

‘I'm not afraid of getting up early.'

‘Or of doing the rough work in the wards? Or of taking only one week's holiday during your first year's probation?'

‘No, I ain't.'

‘What did you say?'

‘No, I'm not, Matron.'

‘You can obtain another copy of the Regulations on your way out. Meanwhile, I shall require copies of your references and in particular one from your last employer.' Daisy hesitated. ‘If you haven't brought them with you in writing, you may re-present yourself with them next Friday.'

And the tiny matron nodded dismissal to the tall, strong, juicy, courageous, not quite confident young woman, who clearly had something wrong with her references. Daisy stopped in the hospital's wide porch and changed her good boots for her old ones, then began to walk, keeping her hopes low, through the bright cold afternoon streets. Presently the dark-skinned woman who had been in the waiting-room caught up with her. She must have been hanging about, waiting to say, as she now did, ‘Miss, you remember me. I didn't answer your question, but I will answer it now. You asked me if I had applied at the hospital before. I have applied, but each time they would not accept me. I can't fill in the form where it says “single or widow”. What can I write? You see, I am single, but I have a child.'

‘Let down, were you?' asked Daisy. ‘I should fill that in, if I were you.'

The woman looked at her mournfully, and said that to be young was to be without care. ‘I live just near here. Perhaps you would like to step in and take a cup of tea.'

‘No thank you, I better hadn't.'

‘Why not, it won't take a moment.'

‘No, I'd better be on my way.'

‘You would come in if I was married.'

‘You shouldn't have told me about it if you thought I'd object,' said Daisy, smiling. ‘There was no call.'

They stopped in front of a small finishing laundry, where the shirts were brought in rough-ironed from a bigger place, to have the collars done. ‘I am known here as Mrs Martinez.'

‘Why not?' said Daisy.

Mrs Martinez walked across the laundry with only a nod to the woman in charge. Out of a wicker washing-basket on the counter she lifted a child of about two years old who had been sitting in it playing with a handful of dolly-pegs. You'd never get an English child to sit quiet like that.

‘My word, is that yours?' said Daisy. ‘What a love. I'd have thought it would have been a bit older.'

‘I am more than thirty-five years of age,' said Mrs Martinez, ‘but unfortunately it seems that I am still fertile.'

‘So I see,' said Daisy. ‘You ought to know better by this time.' She held out her arms and took the baby, preventing it with a gentle movement from pulling out her hatpins. ‘You don't want to let things upset you.'