The Gate of Angels (13 page)

Daisy and Mrs Wrayburn understood each other at once, and, only a few minutes later, admitted to each other that they did so. Daisy would stay. The room in the attic would be hers. In her spare time she would do the work of the house.

15

Wrayburn regretted his hospitality on the night of the accident. Now he saw that he had made a second serious error in telling Fairly about the return of this never quite explained young woman. Fortunately, there was no telephone in his house, but Fairly might plague him by hanging about the place, or even by reappearing in the attics. However, all that Fred did, though admittedly he did it at once, was to send a note asking Miss Saunders if she would come out with him on her day off.

‘I suppose if she had been of a different class you would have suggested a chaperone,' he said to his wife. ‘I mean, I don't suppose Fairly would allow his own sisters—'

‘Oh, my dear, I don't know whether he has any sisters,' said Mrs Wrayburn, ‘and I am not in charge of Daisy Saunders. I am not even employing her, or not exactly. I believe I shall become rather fond of her, but I am not in charge.'

‘Who is in charge of her then?' Mrs Wrayburn only knew that Dr Sage had taken her on at his mental hospital, and her hours were half-past eight to half-past six.

 

Fred had asked Daisy whether in spite of their short acquaintance he might call her Daisy, and whether she would like to come out for a walk, a walk in the country. She said it would be the very thing. What about (Fred asked) taking the train to Whittlesford and walking from there to the mill
at Great Chishill, only they wouldn't, probably, get so far. Daisy said she was game.

In her thick boots and a flat golfing-cap, which she had found in a trunk in the Wrayburns' attics, she appeared ready for anything. She had turned up the hem of her skirt an inch all the way round. Her colour was higher than usual with excitement as they got out at the station. ‘What's this place like?' she asked.

‘I don't know. I've been here before but I've never really thought about it.' He looked at her anxiously. ‘Ought I to have done? We shall have to head south-west, you know, out of the village.'

‘Look!' she said, ‘there's a house for sale.'

‘What about it, Daisy?'

‘Let's go and see round it,' said Daisy, ‘we've plenty of time. It cheers you up having a look round an empty house.'

Fred tried to envisage this.

‘It's just like shopping,' she explained. ‘You don't have to buy anything, it's just to turn the things over.'

‘We'd have to go back to Cambridge, I expect, to get the keys,' said Fred, but the keys were only a few doors down the street, according to the card in the window: enquiries at the ironmonger's. The ironmonger began to say that he couldn't spare anyone from the shop to show them round, but lost heart and entrusted the keys to Daisy.

‘We won't be long,' she said. ‘We're going for a walk in the country.'

The house, like all houses which have stood vacant for any length of time, seemed full of bits of paper. Leaflets, notices of church-services and parish fetes, circulars, advertisements for auctions, warnings of potato blight, had continued to come and probably were still coming through the cramped letterbox, and blown with the draught about the stone floor were torn-up scraps of bills and fragments of letters in black, blue and violet ink. ‘...cannot see my way to'...‘sday without fail'...‘lean on His mercy'. ‘I could read these all day, if I
wasn't going anywhere else,' she said. ‘I don't get a lot of letters, perhaps that's why.'

‘People are rather given to sending notes in Cambridge,' said Fred. ‘Sometimes I wish they wouldn't. I suppose I get a good many letters. I hope they won't end up like this, torn up on the floor of an empty house.'

Daisy was looking through the drawers. One plate, no knife, one fork, one spoon. ‘All by himself, I suppose, you have to be sorry for him.'

‘It might have been a woman,' Fred suggested.

‘No, you'd never get a woman to live like this. She must have died before he did, or left him.'

‘You'd have thought they'd have cleared the place out properly,' said Fred, ‘whatever happened.'

‘Whoever saw a house cleared out properly?' said Daisy. ‘There's always something left.'

The kitchen had a deep stone sink partly full of green moss, although the gaunt old tap could not have dripped for months.

Daisy looked rapidly through the cupboards: nothing there but more scraps of paper and a set of chimney sweep's brushes. One of the floorboards was loose. Probably all the joists were rotten, Fred thought. ‘There's something underneath, I expect,' said Daisy. ‘Where else had he got to keep anything? All these old men are the same. There's money there, most likely.'

But she would not let Fred lift the board, considering it unlucky. Upstairs—the stairs opened out of one of the cupboards—there was a dark garret, without furniture. No basin, he must have washed in the sink or under one pump, and used the earth closet in the yard, now boarded up, and sinking by slow degrees back into its native soil. Daisy was radiant. She had seen everything, and even knew the name of the one-time owner, having made if out from two of the torn-up envelopes.

They walked back together down the street. It would have been quite different, Fred pointed out, if he had really been looking for a house. But that would ruin it, Daisy told him. He
would be worrying about the money, the drains, the size of the rooms, there'd be no go in it. Fred sighed. Was it one of the differences between men and women, that women like to live on their imagination? It's all they can afford, most of them, said Daisy.

 

‘I don't think that ironmonger was took in,' said Daisy, as they got over the stile. ‘He knew we'd no intention of buying. He could see how the land lay.'

‘How does it lie, Daisy?'

‘Well, this is the second time we've ever met. We don't hardly know each other and we aren't anything to each other.'

Fred was appalled. ‘Don't you know what you are to me?' he asked.

Daisy considered. ‘I suppose I do know, Fred. To tell you the truth, a child of six would notice it.'

‘But that's just what I want. I want children of six to notice it, I want ironmongers to notice it.'

‘Fred, you've got a family, haven't you?'

Fred explained that his father was Rector of Blow, and also what a rector was, as distinguished from a vicar. He admitted to a mother and two sisters, and said that he wanted every one of them to notice that he was in love.

‘Fred, quite honestly, did you ever take a girl out before?'

He seemed to find this difficult, but only for a few moments. ‘I've never taken out a girl I wanted to marry before.'

‘She mayn't have known that, though,' said Daisy.

‘Why should they matter, Daisy? Why, even if they existed, should they matter? They don't exist and didn't exist. They're unobservables.'

Daisy quarrelled much less than most people with time. The past did not occupy her thoughts unless it had to, nor did the future. At the present moment she was on a country walk, and she wanted to do things right. In particular, she was prepared to be impressed by quantities of birds and flowers.
The first meadow was flooded to about an inch deep, and lay under water as though under silvery glass, with the long grasses flattened and lying together under the slight current that rippled across them. The stream was too high to cross by the little bridge, they had to skirt round the top edge of the meadow. Once they were on higher ground it was as awkward as a walk across fields usually is, the path having been made by farm carts, so that you had to choose whether to stay on the high ridge in the centre or on one of the broad muddy ruts on each side. In Fred's judgement, Daisy was entitled to the dry but higher ground, but walking there she was almost at the same height as himself. When she jumped down beside him they hardly had room to walk side by side. The only way possible was to go arm in arm.

What about the birds, what about the wild flowers? Fred felt with keen anxiety that since Daisy had mentioned them he ought to be able to produce at least some of them. The whole sweep of the pale green hedgeless fields seemed empty, except for some distant cattle which had just been turned out. The spring wheat hardly showed. It was as different as possible from the country round Blow, so much less rich, less watched, less beautiful, less sinister. Here the sky stretched to a horizon without event, almost without landmark, so that a church looked only a mile away when in fact it was four or five. In the last five years Fred had got used to these shining fields. The first long walk he had taken in this direction had been with Professor Flowerdew and a lecturer in moral philosophy from King's, who had said, as they tramped up this very same cart track, Flowerdew, I am finally convinced that the physical and the psychical are two different aspects of the same reality—Absurd! the Professor had called back over his shoulder. This field is not an aspect of anything. It is a field. My mind is not an aspect of anything, it is a mind and only differs from the field because it directs its own activity.

‘What were those birds?' Daisy asked. ‘Were they quails, Fred?'

‘No, I'm afraid not, I'm afraid they were fieldfares.'

‘That's a pity,' said Daisy. ‘I should like to have seen a quail.'

About flowers, Fred knew much less, leaving them, on the whole, to his sisters. He had hoped for early primroses, but there were none. Daisy, however, found in the grass by one side of the path, a number of tiny, whitish-and-greenish, insignificant looking flowers, not the same as each other, which he thought must be mouse-ears or chickweeds.

‘This one's different, though,' she said. ‘That's a throatwort. You have to be careful, though, if you're thinking of making a medicine out of it. It could make things worse.'

She had taken off her gloves and was holding the miserable little plant delicately in her strong fingers.

‘Look, five petals. You can count them.'

‘They've all got five petals,' said Fred. ‘I should never have known the difference.' He looked at it with respect. ‘Is that really called throatwort?'

‘No, of course it isn't,' said Daisy. ‘I don't know what it is. I don't know what any of them are. I only said it to keep things going.'

She could see that he was troubled. ‘You must always tell me the truth. I'm lost if I can't depend on you,' he said.

They walked on.

‘They did depend on me at the Blackfriars. I am a good nurse. That's not just vanity. Matron said I was the sort of nurse she wanted. Particularly with the post-operationals, and if she said that, she meant it, you can bet your Jimmy Skinner.'

‘Why did you leave London, then? Did you get tired of it?'

‘I wouldn't ever get tired of it,' she said. ‘But there's a rule, you know, that you mustn't discuss the patients' cases, not outside the hospital, that is.'

‘And you did?'

‘Yes, I did.'

‘Why, Daisy?'

‘I thought I'd help him to get what he wanted. I thought really it would help to save his life.'

‘And it did?'

‘No, it didn't.'

‘Did he die?'

‘No, but his life didn't need saving.'

A little later they sat down for a rest, which neither of them particularly needed, in the graveyard of a flint and pebble church. Although there was an old pumping mill a hundred yards away, a number of the tombstones belonged to men, women and children drowned in the floods. The sun at last could be felt as warmth and Daisy took off the golfing cap, into which she had stuck her white-flowered plant. The cap smelt of camphor.

‘I think the sun's bringing it out worse. It was in one of the clothes chests upstairs and Mrs Wrayburn said I could borrow it.'

‘I can't imagine Mrs Wrayburn playing golf,' said Fred. ‘There's no reason why she shouldn't, but I just can't picture it.'

‘She told me it belonged to her brother. She kept it when he went to Rangoon.'

‘My sisters love me,' Fred told her. ‘Or anyway the younger one does. But I don't believe that if I went to Rangoon either of them would keep any of my things a day longer than necessary.'

‘Perhaps she wishes she was a child again,' Daisy suggested. ‘She might feel she'd taken a wrong turning in life.'

‘Don't put it on again,' said Fred.

They would never get to Great Chishill, but they agreed that they didn't expect to. Daisy admitted that she was thirsty. Without landmarks, the broad fields deceived and Fred felt that he was risking his whole reputation by saying that a double line of willows ahead of them, raised a few feet, was a side road and that they would find a public house there, The Fenny Inn. They walked on, and it was a road, and there was The Fenny Inn, looking as though it had been fished out
of the marshy water, rather than built with hands, but still, indisputably, a public house.

‘Have you ever been in there?' Daisy asked.

‘No, I've only passed by it, but if you don't like it we'll walk out of it immediately.'

‘Where would we go to?'

‘I don't know, but if you don't like it we'll walk out of it immediately.'

Evidently he meant it and Daisy perceived at that moment that what he was offering her was the best of himself, keeping nothing back, the best, then, that one human being can offer to another.

They went into the unwelcoming bar, lit by one window, high up and hazy with damp. Pike and eels might have swum past it, the whole room might have been beneath the fens.

‘I've never been anywhere nicer,' said Daisy.

‘Are you sure?'

‘No, but I was afraid we were going to walk out immediately.'