The Gate of Angels

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  11

  The Case of James Elder

  On January 16th, 1912, James Elder threw himself off the Adelphi steps into the Thames. In spite of the fog he was noticed by the skipper of a sprat-boat, who held his head above the water until a passing steamer picked him up. He was put to bed at Waterloo police station, which kept a special bunk for the purpose, and given First Aid by the Sylvester’s method until he could be transferred to the infirmary. But he had begun to talk deliriously and his condition had seemed too serious for the infirmary. Accordingly, the police had sent him round to the Blackfriars, in a stretcher packed with tins of various shapes filled with hot water, one under each arm, one in the groin. After he was admitted the constable waited to collect the tins, which were the property of the river police. He would be round in the morning to take down a statement and, if appropriate, make a charge of attempted suicide.

  At seven minutes past two in the morning, James Elder, who had been identified by personal letters in his pocket, woke up. Night Sister in the men’s ward had two post-operatives to look to. She told Daisy to keep an eye on 23, who had been admitted just before they came in. Swallowing Thames water often meant typhoid, but they wouldn’t know that for a few days. Twenty-three became half-conscious and began to mutter and call out, ‘Flo.’ Daisy went to him, sat down by the bed and told him that she was not Flo, she was a hospital nurse and he was quite safe in the Blackfriars. ‘Take my hand, Flo,’ he said. ‘I’m not Flo,’ she repeated. ‘I’m a probationer.’

  ‘Why did you bring me in here?’

  ‘You’re not well. You’ve hurt your head, and you’ve swallowed a lot of dirty water.’

  ‘I had to do that. You know why, Flo. If you don’t know, you can ask the solicitor.’

  ‘You have to keep calm now,’ said Daisy. ‘You can talk to your family in the morning.’

  ‘I haven’t any family. I haven’t any money. I don’t want to call you Nurse. I want to call you Miss. I want to call you the Eternal Woman. Are you ashamed of that?’

  ‘I’m not ashamed of anything.’ To quieten him down, and convince him that he was in hospital, she took his temperature, putting the thermometer back in its glass jar of Condy’s Fluid. The patient complained of thirst, and became agitated when told that he mustn’t, until a doctor had seen him, have anything to drink. She rubbed ice on his forehead, and held his hand when once again he cried out, ‘Flo!’

  ‘Well, tell me, what is it?’

  ‘There’s something I want to tell you.’

  ‘Well, I’m here,’ she said.

  After a year and a half she had become accustomed to the things that patients wanted to tell her, particularly on night duty. Night and darkness in the hospital were a time apart, nine and a half hours, almost, of something like freedom shared with the sleepless under the thin hissing of the lowered gas.

  ‘Swear you’re listening,’ he said.

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘I’m a suicide, aren’t I? That’s why you brought me in here. A sad case, a sad waste of brilliant promise. Yes, I took the fatal plunge. I want you to tell me something. Very earnestly, in all sincerity, I want you to tell me this: is there anything about me in the newspapers?’

  Eructations, slight vomiting of mucus mixed with water.

  ‘I don’t think they’re printed yet,’ said Daisy.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Four thirty-two.’

  ‘Just between dark and dawn.’

  ‘Not a bit of it, it’s winter. It won’t be light for a long time yet.’

  ‘When the dawn comes, will it be in the morning papers?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘When do they print them?’

  ‘Do you mean that’s all you’re thinking about?’

  ‘Yes, all I’m thinking about.’

  ‘Think about getting better,’ said Daisy. ‘If you’ve got no family, at least you must have friends.’

  ‘I haven’t any friends.’

  ‘Who’s Flo, then?’

  ‘Not a friend.’ Daisy by now had managed to get the draw-sheet off and he lay back with his head a little on one side as though listening, then started off again. ‘She might read it in the paper. When the dawn comes up like thunder she may see a headline: WAPPING CLERK ATTEMPTS FELO DE SE.’

  ‘There’s plenty of clerks in Wapping,’ said Daisy. ‘Wapping’s full of them.’

  ‘But they don’t all try to take their own lives.’

  ‘It’s not your own life,’ said Daisy. ‘How did you get that idea?’

  ‘I don’t think you’re meant to talk to me like that. Give me a drink at once. Run out and buy me a morning paper.’

  ‘I go off duty at 7 a.m.,’ said Daisy, ‘and I have to be in bed at 9 a.m. prompt.’

  ‘Where is your bed, Flo?’

  The superintending night nurse, patrolling the wards, approached in time to hear 23 repeating plaintively, ‘Where is her bed? And who will get me a morning paper? On whom will that duty fall?’

  ‘You need a clean draw-sheet, Saunders.’

  ‘Yes, Sister.’

  They went back down the ward and at the duty desk the Sister asked, ‘Delirious?’

  ‘Yes, I think so, Sister. He’s excitable, anyway.’

  ‘Temperature 98.2, thirst, vomiting, delirious, restless, that’s all that needs to go in the book. If he’s excitable, probably not a typhoid state. You may make yourself a cup of cocoatina.’

  Only at night were the nurses allowed into the ward kitchen. Like the wards, it was painted dark green up to shoulder height, and above that, cream, with kettles the size of cauldrons. All this was commonplace, but the ward kitchen belonged to the midnight hours, when those who should be sleepers were workers, and the human mind and body sank to their lowest point.

  When a constable called round in the morning Matron absolutely refused to let him see James Elder in Alexandra Ward until further notice. This was her usual policy, and the police were used to it. To the constable’s alarm, he was sent to Matron’s office, to be told that the hospital had been given no address and no satisfactory identification for this patient. The constable offered a report from the station, stating that Elder’s underclothes and his letters, all of which were bills, suggested that he was a gentleman.

  ‘Are the motives of gentlemen who jump off Blackfriars Bridge very different from those who are not gentlemen?’ asked Matron sharply.

  ‘I can’t say,’ said the constable, ‘they’re always at it, Matron, as you know. The Respiration’s always on standby. We use the old method, Sylvester’s method.’ The matron frowned. At this point Dr Sage, without invitation, and apparently with time on his hands, joined the conference. ‘Constable,’ he said, with intense feeling, ‘you’ve been sent here by your superiors to linger at the bedside of an unfortunate who has attempted what, in this country, is still legally a crime. If, in fact, he had not attempted but succeeded, if this man had drowned himself, would you have proceeded to drag the oozing cadaver into the magistrate’s court, and asked for a committal? Would these have been your instructions?’ The constable said that the matron hadn’t so far given him permission to linger by the bedside at all, but the station would like to be notified if Elder was discharged.

  ‘That is in our hands,’ said Dr Sage, holding both his hands aloft, as if to prove they were there. The constable left, saying that in his experience most of these cases made a good recovery if they were kept quiet and given beef-tea.

  By the next day, James Elder did not remember saying he lived in Wapping. The envelopes in his pockets had a name, but no address. No friends or connections appeared. There was nothing about him in the newspapers, at any rate nothing was seen by anyone in the hospital who had time to look at them. Matron took the Morning Post, the doctors glanced, so they said, at The Times, the juniors read the Daily Mail and in the hospital kitchen there were copies of Tit-Bits and the Police Gazette and the local, which came out three times a wee
k. Newspapers were not allowed in the wards.

  Dr Sage put 23 on milk and soda, with alcohol and ammonia as a stimulant, and steel drops to guard against anaemia. ‘We’ll soon see the last of you,’ he said in the voice which comforted many. But James Elder refused to eat or drink anything at all, and since his stomach had been empty when he was admitted, he did poorly.—Talk to him, find a good moment, make him see it’s all for his own good, persuade him.—Daisy was put on the job: have a go at him, Saunders. Strong, reassuring, smiling, never gives up. He knew her voice, his memory seemed to prick up its ears. You were the one on duty, you were the one that was going to fetch my paper.—Daisy had been instructed to offer a glass of the warm milk, which she did, though inwardly feeling that no-one could gain anyone’s confidence with warm milk, on which the skin was just forming. At once she became an enemy who had withheld the newspaper or destroyed it or who was too crass to understand the printed word. ‘It said GALLANT SUICIDE ATTEMPT. Didn’t you learn to read in Board School?’

  ‘We’re all of us a bit slow in here,’ said Daisy. ‘You’re sick of us nurses, you need some visitors. We could wire them, you know, from the telegraph office.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘There was somebody you knew called Flo. Was that Flora, or was she Florence?’

  ‘Bitch.’

  ‘I’m not getting anywhere with my 23,’ Daisy told Kate.

  ‘Have you got a smash on him?’

  ‘I’ve got a smash on the whole ward,’ said Daisy. ‘It’s one of my six half-days on Wednesday. If any of them have the brass to die while I’m out, I’ll make them sorry they ever were born.’

  Two and a half days later James Elder had still taken nothing by the mouth. He was a screen case, and of great entertainment value to the other patients, who all assumed that because he could not be seen, he would not be able to hear what they said. To all of them, except the dying, food was of paramount interest. The doctor would have to get some kind of food into No. 23 one way or another, frontways, or backways.

  Dr Sage, reckless prescriber as he was, was implacably opposed to forced feeding. ‘They tell me it’s legal to do it to lunatics and to women who want to have the vote. What about it, Sister, what about it, eh, Nurse? A fortnight in the third division, hunger strike, steel gag, choke up chicken? You’ll tell me that’s got nothing to do with respectable hospital practice. Well, they’ve thought up all sorts of dodges. In the children’s wards I’ve found them rubbing the little brutes with castor oil in the hope that some of it will sink in and nourish them. But I say a man, a woman, a child, a lunatic, has the right to decide whether to go on living or not. And in all the short chapter, that’s to say in all the long chequered story of medical science, show me one man, one woman, one child, one lunatic that doesn’t know whether he’s hungry or not.’

  Matron’s opinion, given only to her deputy, was that it was fortunate Dr Sage couldn’t be on duty twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four.

  Both of them knew that Dr Sage, who had trained as an alienist, was a partner in a mental home somewhere in the country. Believing, as he did, that what is said by children and by the mentally disturbed should be considered just as seriously as any other evidence, he needed a place well away from London to make his own painstaking notes without, so to speak, appearing in character.

  ‘I’m surprised, though, that he’s a supporter of women’s suffrage,’ said the deputy matron.

  ‘He isn’t. He doesn’t think anyone should have the vote at all.’

  12

  Kelly

  On Wednesday, her half-day, Daisy, in her cloth coat and large tam o’shanter, walked down to the river. She had known the many voices, not all of them friendly, of the river, ever since she was a child, and missed them now she no longer crossed it twice a day. She allowed herself two minutes only, just enough to watch a barge go past, then went to the Borough Library. The Library was connected with the public wash-house by the municipal fumigation rooms, where books could be disinfected after an outbreak of disease and old clothes could be boiled before redistribution to the needy. The three long low buildings, lettered in white on their grey and red brick, were a powerful image of compulsory cleanliness, inner and outer.

  In the crowded reading-room of the library, dozing in the hot metallic breath of the radiator, an old man who seemed almost grown into his seat bent over a pile of the Blackfriars, Vauxhall and Temple Gazette.

  ‘Pardon me, but could I just have a look at those locals,’ said Daisy. ‘I’ll give them back to you in a moment.’

  ‘They won’t let me sit here if I ain’t reading,’ he complained.

  ‘If they say anything to you I’ll tell them to stow it,’ she said, already halfway through the first copy.

  ‘That ain’t the way to talk to them, they’ve got power over you.’

  ‘It’s the way I talk to them,’ said Daisy.

  There were only three pages of news in the paper. The last issue led off with the Local Government Board’s Campaign for the installation of water-closets in city housing, then local weddings, the Oddfellows’ annual dinner and glee-singing, and a story (with a photograph) about a kitten which was blown across the room after an explosion, but landed safely in a lady’s hat, which had providentially been left on the ground. The story and photograph were said to have been sent to them by a reader.

  As a seeker of jobs, Daisy was very well used to small newspaper offices, although she hadn’t been in one since she went to put in a paragraph after her mother’s death. She had got accustomed to making her way upstairs, across threadbare lino, and through a narrow passage left between piles of old copies waiting for the waste-paper collectors. She opened a frosted glass door and said at once: ‘Don’t ask me if I want to put in an advertisement. I want to see the editor.’

  There were two men in the room, one much older than the other, and an office-boy, who was just taking his coat off the hook. They glanced up as the door opened, and saw that she was good-looking, but not a lady. There was no need for them to get up or to stop smoking. The younger man pushed out a chair for her with his stretched-out foot.

  ‘Sit down, dear, and turn off the hot tap.’

  ‘It’s easy for you to talk like that,’ said Daisy, sitting down. ‘It’s not so easy for me. There’s something I want to ask you. I ain’t got much time.’

  The office-boy put on his cap. Like his employers, he was already wearing his coat in the miserably cold office. Collecting a pile of envelopes, he left. So small was the room that his going made a considerable difference, and there was silence for a moment. Daisy began again: ‘I want you to print a paragraph, a news paragraph, about a man who tried to commit suicide a few days ago, but he was rescued and brought back to life.’ The truth was that she had scarcely considered at all what she was going to say. ‘He says his name is James Elder.’

  ‘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 o
n 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?’