The Gate of Angels (11 page)

‘Anyone can say that,' said the elderly man. ‘You'll
probably find he's called Younger.' He sank back into shabby inattention, fidgeting with the paste-pot.

‘Well, so James Elder tried to commit suicide,' said the editor. ‘Swallowed something, did he?'

‘No, he didn't. He threw himself off the Adelphi stairs.'

‘And didn't sink. Tut! Tut!'

‘He was pulled out. I told you that,' said Daisy. Tired out, she braced herself.

‘Are you a relative?' asked the elderly man.

‘No, I'm not.'

‘Don't give up hope, my dear. If he's still in one piece, he may put it to you yet.'

The editor sat up straight. ‘The story's no use to us. There's twenty-one suicides a year off the steps, and our readers aren't interested in drowned men, only drowned women. There's no local interest.'

‘Yes, there is,' said Daisy. ‘He's in the Blackfriars. He won't eat, he's letting himself die there.'

‘Does he talk?'

‘Not much.'

The editor rocked to and fro on his chair, letting it balance for a while on only one leg. Then he said: ‘I'm Thomas Kelly.' The elderly man muttered, ‘I'm Sweedon.'

‘I am Daisy Saunders.'

‘What's your game, Daisy?'

‘I haven't got one,' she cried. ‘I've brought you a story for your paper, a better one than all that about hats and kittens, if you weren't too thick to see it.'

‘We get quite a lot of items from the Blackfriars,' said Kelly. ‘If anything happens in the hospital, say the doctors cut off a couple of legs too many, I've got someone there who gives us a word in time. I've heard nothing about James Elder, though. What I want to know is, how did you?'

‘What difference does that make?'

‘You're still sure you're not a relation?'

‘No, I don't hardly know him!'

‘What good would it do you, then, if we did print it?'

Daisy answered carefully. ‘Well, it might do him some good. He's not quite in his right mind. I think it's the only thing that interests him. And so—'

‘You're a nurse at the Blackfriars, aren't you?'

‘No, I'm not,' said Daisy. ‘Do I look like a nurse?'

‘Yes, you do, as a matter of fact,' said Kelly.

Daisy sat still, with her hands folded in her lap.

‘What I said was true. I'm not a nurse, yet, I'm a second-year probationer.'

‘It's all the same. You're nursing this joker, aren't you? You're supposed to treat the confidential details of your cases as sacred, and on no account to divulge them, except in a court of law.'

‘You aren't going to put it in about him, then,' said Daisy. ‘I've asked you straight, and you won't put it in.'

‘I never said I would or I wouldn't,' said Kelly, tapping his teeth with a pencil. ‘What are you going to do next?'

‘I'll go and see another editor,' said Daisy, getting to her feet. ‘You're ten a penny the other side of the river. There's plenty of weeklies in south London.'

‘You're in trouble,' said Kelly. ‘You weren't very sensible to come here.' She hadn't been asked, when she first came in, to take off her coat, and that was a godsend when it came to getting out of the place. On the staircase she passed the office boy coming back from the post. They could barely squeeze past each other. The boy looked at her, and asked her if she felt all right. She said that she did.

 

In 1911 the Aerated Bread Company provided a Ladies' Room on the first floor of their tea-shops. It was one of London's first acknowledgements of the fact that there were now a multitude of women workers who wanted to sit down in peace and spend the money which they had earned, if only on a piece of toast. If there wasn't time for the ABC you had to go to
a tea-and-coffee stall, and Daisy stopped at one she knew pretty well, near the car park in the next street but one. As she took out her purse to find the money, someone moved up behind her and put a penny down on the stall's counter to pay for her before she had time to do it. His penny was underneath her penny. It was the editor of the
Blackfriars, Vauxhall and Temple Gazette
. Standing there in the dingy vanity of his billycock hat and checked suit he said: ‘You're going the wrong way for Southwark.'

‘I'm not going there,' she said. ‘You know that.'

‘I'll walk along with you a bit. I'm not sure that you saw me at my best in the office.'

‘I don't know what your best is,' said Daisy. ‘Is that why you went and came after me?'

‘Something riled me,' he admitted. ‘We don't often get a young woman in by herself.'

‘Have you left that poor Mr Sweedon to do the lot, then?'

‘There's not all that much to do, just the pasting up. Two to one he's gone out for a wet. I'd sack him if I wasn't a generous soul.'

‘Does that paper belong to you, then?'

‘Give her another tea,' Kelly told the stallholder.—‘No, it's owned by the printers.'

‘Then they're the generous souls,' said Daisy. ‘I don't want any more, thanks.'

They were walking together across the Blackfriars Bridge, where the din of the horse-traffic was louder than the motorbuses. ‘You're irritating me,' Kelly persisted. ‘All I asked you was what you thought of me.'

‘I'd like you to tell me something first. When I came in, why couldn't you give me a straight answer to a straight question?'

‘It's a habit I've got into,' said Kelly, ‘and I felt it would be a kindness to you to put you in your place.'

‘Well, all I thought was: I'm sorry for that man, if he's like that now, what'll he be in ten years' time?'

‘Ten years' time, I can tell you that,' Kelly said sourly. ‘I'll be dead.'

‘What makes you think that? You look well enough.'

‘I'll have to go and be shot, though, if the cousins don't stop quarrelling. I'm a Territorial.' She stared at him. ‘Didn't you know the King had a German cousin?'

‘I don't read the papers much,' said Daisy.

He had her by the elbow. A passer-by might have taken them for friends. ‘Don't hold me so tight,' said Daisy. ‘I bruise easy.' She stopped at a point where a sooty building was divided from the pavement by iron railings and a few feet of stone flags covered with bird droppings. ‘I'm going in here,' she said.

‘You can't go in there, that's a church!'

‘Well, I'm going in there.'

‘Whatever for?' he cried out. ‘If you want to get rid of me, surely there's easier ways of doing it.'

‘What's wrong with going into a church?' asked Daisy.

‘You can't believe all that,' Kelly shouted in real distress. ‘All that's made up to keep you quiet, and they collect your money on top of it. A smart girl like you, a nurse, that knows what's what, you can't believe there's a God up there keeping a list of everything you do. You can't believe there was a Jesus who went about turning loaves into fishes.' He took off his hat, put his cigarette behind his ear and followed her through the main door and the green baize doors set at a right-angle inside. The candles had been lit for evensong. ‘Nothing they do in here is of any perishing use,' said Kelly in a hoarse whisper. ‘I don't give a Friar Tuck for anything they do in here.'

‘You don't have to whisper,' said Daisy. ‘Just talk quiet.'

A sacristan came out of the vestry and opened a door in one of the pillars, an imitation, built in 1876, of the columns of San Miniato. There was a cupboard inside from which he took a broom, a dustpan and a brush, and began to sweep up the nave.

‘That's the kind of thing I mean!' Kelly cried angrily, and then turned on her. ‘You're not religious anyway. You're a liar.'

13

When Daisy got back to the hospital (she was on duty at six) she found that the screens had been taken away from No. 23 in Alexandra Ward. During the afternoon James Elder had been discharged. A middle-aged woman, giving the name of Floreen Harris, had called round, spoken to the medical officer on duty and the secretary, signed the necessary papers and taken Elder away in a cab.

The day after next, a Friday, the
Blackfriars, Vauxhall and Temple Gazette
printed a headline on its local news page: MYSTERY OF ‘MINISTERING ANGEL'. The paragraph beneath it spoke of James Elder, of no known address, at present lying at the point of death in the Blackfriars Hospital. His story had been related exclusively to the
Gazette
by a charming informant, whose interest in the unfortunate man had been evident in spite of her attempts to conceal her agitation, giving rise to the suspicion that she was a member of the nursing staff at the hospital. Throughout the interview, the paragraph continued, she had remained closely veiled.

When Daisy was sent for to Matron's office the
Gazette
was lying open on the desk, so that she could read, upside down, MYSTERY OF ‘MINISTERING ANGEL'. When Matron turned the paper round, she was able, at sickening speed, to read the rest of the paragraph.

‘Well, Saunders?'

‘I never thought he'd do that!'

‘I don't quite follow you. You don't deny that you gave
information about a patient—one for whom you had a special responsibility, but that is not the point at issue—you gave information about him to a newspaper. Now you tell me that you didn't expect it to be printed.'

‘I did at first. Then I didn't. I went to the office. I wasn't closely veiled, I hadn't a veil on at all.'

‘Why did you go there, Saunders?'

‘I thought it would be of benefit to the patient if he could see something about himself in the paper.'

‘You thought you were carrying out the doctor's orders?'

‘No, Matron.'

‘Did he give you special instructions of this kind?'

‘No, Matron, he didn't.'

‘You have been trained at this hospital for nearly two years to think, but not to think that you know best. You were doing, from all reports, very well. However, your training has failed. Why was that?'

It was made clear that she must leave by Monday week. This was a concession, because it was known that Daisy had no home to go to. Kate Smith and some of the eighteen other second-year probationers—but not all of them, some were cautious—bought a leaving present for her. There was not much time, and they had to settle for a travelling salt-and-pepper set, said to be new china, and decorated with a view of the coronation of George V. Daisy was grateful. Disgrace contaminates, even though it makes everyone else feel a little safer.

When she went to hand back her uniform and apron to stores, she was told that someone from the kitchens wanted to see her before she left.

It was a dark little woman, bundled into a sacking apron. ‘You remember me. I am Mrs Martinez. They don't let me be a nurse. I took employment here in the kitchens.'

‘How is the baby, Mrs Martinez?'

‘Always asking for you.' This seemed unlikely. ‘I still have your two shilling. I didn't ask you for it because I was poor. I
asked because you never forget anyone who borrows money from you and I don't want you to forget me.'

‘I'd sooner everyone forgot me,' said Daisy, kissing Mrs Martinez, who asked where she was going.

‘I'm going to Cambridge. It's not much of a chance, but I can't think of anything else to do. Dr Sage has a private hospital quite near Cambridge. He's there when he's not here, that's Wednesday and Saturdays. I got his address from Admissions. I am going to take a day return to Cambridge and ask if he'll see me.'

‘Oh, but he is very mad,' said Mrs Martinez. ‘One day he flung the beef-tea.'

‘You go back to the kitchen, my dear. Don't get caught on this floor.'

‘You know best,' said Mrs Martinez.

 

The best way to go to Cambridge was from King's Cross. Daisy went from Liverpool Street, which worked out cheaper. She had hardly ever been out of London. She and her mother never went to see the house at Hastings—all that was left to the solicitor, although if she'd been nineteen then, as she very nearly was now, she would have acted different. Twice she'd been on a school outing to the seaside. Once, at Southend, they'd stayed late, and gone out on the water in boats with Japanese lanterns. The lights and the colours, brilliant yellow and red, were reflected in the dark slap and wash of the sea. The Boys' Brigade played from the shore. The music travelled across the water as though it was going to settle there.

As she went to buy her ticket in soot-blackened Liverpool Street station she thought, suppose it happens again. The old trick, the old game. Never look back. Someone touched her, and a hand covered her half-crown with another half-crown. ‘Lord, it can't be Kelly again,' she said, still not turning round. ‘You've fooled yourself this time. I'm going out of town.'

‘I know you are,' said Kelly. ‘You're going to Cambridge. I told you I had someone in the kitchens at the Blackfriars who tipped me the wink.'

‘I don't think you mentioned the kitchens,' said Daisy. She took her ticket and turned away. ‘I suppose there's someone who wants to earn a bit extra there, like all the rest of us.'

‘I'm coming with you to Cambridge,' said Kelly, walking after her, heel and toe, like a music-hall comic. ‘Do you know the town well?'

‘I don't know it at all,' said Daisy.

‘Well, I'll watch out and see as you come to no harm.'

‘That's the reason, is it?'

Liverpool Street was still lit by gas, and in the greenish light Kelly looked seedy and worn at the edges—how old was he?—but he felt the obligation to be jaunty still.

‘No, I'm coming because I'm eaten up with remorse at putting you out of a job. I didn't write that piece, by the way, Sweedon did.'