Free The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald Page B

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.
    â€˜Not keeping the furniture, Miss Saunders?’ the herbalist asked.
    â€˜I’m not staying here,’ said Daisy.
    â€˜But the washstand?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 Blackfriars Hospital
    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