Free The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald Page A

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.
    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.
    â€˜Air!’ said Mrs Saunders. ‘They can’t make us pay for that.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜I think I’ll go home now,’ she said. ‘You can only see so much.’
    â€˜You’re getting tired, mother.’
    â€˜No I’m not,’ said Mrs Saunders. ‘Do I ever?’
    â€˜It’s not such a sin to be tired.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜Just in the old way.’ In her umbrella, then. She put her arm round her bony little mother.
    â€˜I took it for you, Daisy, as a present for you.’
    â€˜No, you didn’t,’ said Daisy.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Do you really like it?’ Daisy asked doubtfully.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜I shouldn’t worry, with twelve hundred