She was at the main gates now. There was a porter’s lodge on the left, an ornate doll’s house in tessellated brick, a relic of the Victorian hospital, and-on the right-the doctor’s car park. Already a third of the marked plots were occupied by the Daimlers and the Rolls. It had stopped raining and the dawn had given way to the gray normality of a January day. The lights were full on in the hospital. It lay before her like a great ship at anchor, brightly lit, latent with activity and power. To the left stretched the low glass-fronted buildings of the new out-patient department Already a thin stream of patients was making its dispirited way to the entrance.
Miss Beale drew up alongside the inquiry hatch of the lodge, wound down the car window, and announced herself. The porter, ponderous and uniformed in self-importance, deigned to come out to present himself.
“You’ll be the General Nursing Council, Miss,” he stated grandiloquently. “What a pity you decided to come in this gate. The Nurse Training School is in Nightingale House, only 100 yards or so from the Winchester Road entrance. We always use the back entrance for Nightingale House.”
He spoke with reproachful resignation, as if deploring a singular lack of judgment which would cost him dear in extra work. “But presumably I can get to the school this way?” Miss Beale had no stomach for a return to the confusion of the High Street or intention of circling the hospital grounds in search of an elusive back entrance.
“Well you can, Miss.” The porter’s tone implied that only the willfully obstinate would try, and he settled himself against the car door as if to deliver confidential and complicated directions. They proved, however, remarkably simple. Nightingale House was in the hospital grounds at the rear of the new out-patient department.